violet

Violet
by Jeremy Freese

Writer's block can be such a drag. The player character of Violet is so far behind on his PhD thesis that his girlfriend, the "Violet" of the title, has threatened to leave him unless he starts writing today, so he has come to his office for a day of work. To give himself further motivation, or perhaps because he is clinically insane, he imagines that Violet is in the office with him, urging him on. This imaginary Violet provides the narration of the game; the player interacts with her.

Violet is a good game, and I hated it. It is well-written, thoroughly implemented, and highly imaginative, with well-observed characters; lots of people will like it, but I didn't. In particular, lots of people will fall in love with the imaginary Violet, a quirky, outgoing, artsy, slightly nerdy chick, who bubbles over with fanciful comments and pet-names ("vegemite", "dundeecake" and hundreds of others), but I hated her. I found her patter quickly tiresome, and nearly died of whimsy before the game was out.

Whimsy is wit for people who aren't funny. Between The Mighty Boosh, Wes Anderson, Garden State, Josie Long, Daniel Kitson and Russell Howard, it seems to be comedy flavour of the moment; IF itself also has a long tradition of whimsy, with Zork, Curses and so on. I recognise that a lot of people like this brand of humour, without necessarily recognising it as humour myself. As is typical for the genre, Violet's "humour" depends on randomness (it's "Zombie Day" on campus), cutesiness (to win, the player must type commands like >JIGGLE HEAD and >SCRUNCH BROW) and an overabundance of improbable detail (such as the dozens of songs on the "platypod", itself a tiresome bit of whimsy). There's a logic to the best comic incongruities, but it's absent here: any old zany will do. Crucially, and unlike the Python branch of comedy, none of this random detail is funny in itself*: what matters is attitude and quantity. Whimsy is always "gentle" or "endearing" or "irresistible" rather than funny; it does not aim to provoke laughter, but to induce a kind of numb and receptive atmosphere, a warm sticky pool of mildly silly. More than any other kind of comedy, it creates cliques. Once upon a time, people "didn't get" the vanguard of comedy because it was too challenging; now, people don't get it because there's nothing to get.

Also not untypically for the genre, Violet has a few suggestions of darkness. To solve puzzles and progress in the game, the PC must destroy lots of sentimental little items that Violet made for him. This might have had an emotional impact if any of his reasons for doing so were remotely plausible, or the puzzles anything other than contrived and stupid. For such a cutting-edge piece of work, the puzzles are all old-fashioned cockle-warmers: this is the kind of game where you have to retrieve some weeks-old bubblegum from the wastepaper basket to chew on so that you can put it in your ears so that, in conjunction with the headphones, you can block out the sound of etc.

There is also some not-too-subtle hinting that the narration is not entirely reliable, and that there will be some gruesome "twist" ending where it is revealed that the PC has broken up with Violet, or worse, killed her, and that the game is his sick and implausible way of dealing with the events. I'm glad that these hints were red herrings and the author didn't go for such a cheap stunt, though considerably less glad that some reviewers were excited at the prospect. Do we really need another game where the protagonist has dreamt up a fantasy world to deal with some trauma? Of course, it's still possible, even given the game's happy ending, that the narration is not as it seems. More than likely, the PC destroyed his girlfriend's stuff in a rage after their argument the previous night, and then concocted this unlikely "romantic" story.

Like a lot of contemporary romantic tales, Violet doesn't seem aware that it is depicting an unhealthy relationship. We have one partner committing callous acts of emotional extortion, and another so obsessed with her that he brings an idealised internalised copy everywhere with him. It's all bound to end in tears.

Rating: 4

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