The initial direction of Bliss is stock fantasy--indeed, with orcs, evil wizards, dragons, and dungeons involved right at the outset, the game fairly screams "stock fantasy." But the real story in Bliss is not at all stock fantasy-- the initial premise and the way it's developed doesn't so much tell a story as it takes a measure of the player. Does the player object to simplistically violent solutions to problems because they're in a fantasy setting? Or does the player gleefully hurt others whenever it serves his own ends, as long as the setting is fantasy? Bliss poses these questions and more.

The author's notes indicate that the point of the game is to "ask which is better: the real world or the fantasy world?" With all due respect, I'm not sure that's really what the game asks; no one would contend that the PC's fantasy world is "better," though it's certainly more comfortable for the PC. That is, even the most sympathetic would be hard pressed to see the PC's retreat into his fantasy world as good, or "better" than his maintaining a grip on reality, given what ensues because of it. The player can understand why the PC does it, but hardly condone it. (I hope so, anyway.) To my mind, the more interesting questions are about fantasy itself, as suggested above--does fantasy violence desensitize those who view it, read about it, experience it through IF to real violence? It's much debated these days in the wake of Littleton and such, and generally the arguments produce considerably more heat than light; few can even agree on whether fantasy violence produces violent behavior in any given individual, as opposed to society as a whole. Bliss doesn't purport to address these questions as such, but in giving us a PC whose fantasy life enables him to commit violent acts that, it seems, he would not have been able to commit otherwise (his horror when he discovers what he has done suggests as much, anyway), the author raises some problematic issues.

The nature of the masterfully done bait-and-switch in Bliss suggests one answer. Most players, somewhere in the course through the game, probably begin wondering about what's going on--perhaps it's the discontinuities, the brief flashes into the real world, but for me it was the bizarre monotony of the killing. It struck me as strange and disturbing that every single problem the PC has is resolved by killing someone; the ethics of fantasy, so to speak, don't generally allow for randomized killing. Disposing of the guards was one thing, but killing the imp and the bear because they happened to be in the way-that rang false to me; likewise, killing a dragon while it's asleep made me wonder. That, in turn, suggests to me that fantasy does have rules, and indiscriminate killing definitely breaks those rules, meaning that the deadening moral effect of imaginary violence might not be quite so clearcut (and the enabling aspect of this particular PC's fantasy might be the product of a warped fantasy life, one that doesn't abide by the normal rules).

Equally intriguing is the problem of complicity posed by Bliss: the marriage of the player's and PC's goals (the player is perfectly willing to help the PC escape from the prison and kill the evil wizard) suddenly breaks apart when the fantasy veil falls away. When the player surveys the wreckage, there should be a sense of participation in the evil--a sense that the player's participation made the carnage possible, and that a more responsible player would have averted the tragedy. In this particular case, of course, the complicity analysis doesn't stand up to scrutiny very well, since there were no alternate paths; the choices were enabling wholesale murder or simply stopping the story. Still, pulling the player up short in this way offers a wealth of possibilities--we may one day see IF in which that discovery of complicity permits and encourages the player to try again, find a better path.

The "unreliable narrator" aspect of Bliss is worth exploring as well. Does it make a difference if the narrator is unreliable to himself as well as to the reader? No, except that the complicity aspect diminishes if the narrator is deliberately deceiving the reader, and complicity can be a valuable feeling (particularly in settings like this, where desensitization is a real issue). To be sure, I may be responsible for violent acts even if I'm told they're all right, and it's still possible for the IF player to feel complicit on the same basis. But Bliss, and perhaps variants thereof that give the player a bit more freedom. pose a starker moral problem, in that the PC had no idea what he was doing and the player failed to intervene to set things right. The technique of setting up an "unreliable narrator", and the fun of experiencing it, endures whether the narrator is deliberately or unwittingly deceiving the reader/player, but the moral shock value is different--and if Bliss doesn't have moral shock value, it's not worth the download time.

The ending of Bliss allows for a variety of interpretations-is the house episode a fantasy? A memory? Clearly, it helps explain how the PC got to be where he is, but its placement in the story raises some questions about whether the story itself is reliable. (Being locked in one's room by one's father is just as credible a fantasized version of the asylum as the orcs-dragons-wizards fantasy, after all.) If we're not meant to think that (and the ending explanation about how the child fantasy life led to commitment in the asylum suggests as much), the alternative is rather disturbing: the story as it stands seems to suggest that a fantasy life as a means of escape from an unpleasant or painful childhood can lead directly to, well, the PC in Bliss. (The movie Heavenly Creatures tells a similar, though somewhat more complicated, story.) That seems extreme, on its face--but fantasy life takes such a beating in this game that it's hard to see what else to conclude.

Though it may not do what the author set out to do, there's much that is thought-provoking in Bliss, and it deserves a spot somewhere in the hallowed halls of IF theory.