It's not quite true that Stephen Granade's Common Ground goes somewhere that no IF has gone before, because most of what it does has been done in one form or another. Notably, Photopia pioneered the changing-perspectives aspect and, to some extent, the conversation system, Muse and a few others have made the plot turn on relationships more than on any tangible goal, and--well, this is a no-spoiler review, but there are other creative but not precisely novel elements. What's interesting about Common Ground is that the various elements get put together in an interesting way--and that the characters are well enough drawn that we care, at least somewhat, about each one by the end.
There are four chapters in Common Ground, though the last chapter is something of an epilogue: the heart of the game (work?) is the first three chapters, each of which adopts the perspective of a different character. The characters are Jeanie, a teenage girl who's as teenaged as they come, her stepfather Frank and her mother Debbie, and the three main chapters are all set in approximately the same time frame. Some of the events are actually depicted twice, though not all of them, and you get somewhat different takes on the relevant people and events in each segment. The point actually isn't to adapt a Rashomon-style trick to IF, wherein incompatible stories are told and the truth lies somewhere between them, if anywhere; figuring out the truth is less the objective here than understanding the characters and why they do what they do. The result is susceptible to a variety of interpretations, in a few respects--the player's sympathies may rest with one of the characters, or all, or none, depending on what he or she makes of the various exchanges. That aspect of Common Ground is particularly skillfully done, in fact: playing the various characters gives a more nuanced look at the situation than playing the character might, and an honest look at the story more than likely leaves the player neither canonizing nor demonizing any of the characters outright, which is as it should be.
A somewhat less successful aspect of Common Ground is the conversation system. Granted, no one has come up with a successful IF conversation system as such, but this one--"talk" says something preordained, and continuing to type "talk" steers the character through the conversation whether or not the player understands what's going on--isn't really any more interactive than a cut scene, in that the player's only power over what's going on is to walk away or do something else. In a way, that's significant in this particular story--Jeanie in particular can make statements by refusing to say anything--but as a conversation system, it's more than a little clumsy. It's especially frustrating here because the characters are fairly well developed--there are plenty of things to ask them about-- and the "talk" straitjacket makes the game feel more like reading a script than it should be.
I shouldn't exaggerate the straitjacket aspect, though, because there's another aspect of Common Ground that works quite well: when you're done playing Jeanie and you're seeing her through the eyes of the other characters, you'll find that Jeanie does most of what you chose to have her do when you were playing her. That is, the game records the decisions you made and plays them back at you later. The same is true, though less so, with Frank. Obviously, there are some complexities that aren't acknowledged, but on the whole this works quite well and allows for substantial replayability; better still, playing one character differently elicits some revealing reactions from the other two. It's an impressive technical feat--it was done on a reduced scale in Infocom's Sorcerer and Sam Barlow's The City, but this is much more thoroughly implemented, and the various choices available do more for the story (in that both the characters and the perceptions of them can change in a variety of ways). If there's a fly in the ointment, it's that the game doesn't really try to ensure that you did what the other characters saw you do, beyond certain limitations--you can't go wandering around the house, but you have the discretion to avoid certain conversations, whether or not you had those conversations from the other side. Still, on the whole, it's a successful gimmick.
Common Ground stands or falls on the character depictions, though, and those depend to some extent on the player's reactions. The characters initially seem a bit cliched--the angry teenager, the solicitous parent, and to a lesser extent the left-out and unappreciated stepfather--and while there's more to each of them than the cliches, that's not necessarily immediately obvious. Moreover, depending on what the player does with each character, the cliches might actually get reinforced; there's enough freedom to allow for that--particularly so with Jeanie and Frank (Debbie is a much less developed character). The details that the author introduces to portray both the characters themselves and the others' take on them are nicely done, as in this example from Jeanie's perspective:
As you come down the stairs, Frank looks up at you. "Goin' out tonight too, huh?" Is his speech slurred again?
Or this, from Frank's perspective:
talk to jeanie "I hated school, too. Couldn't wait to graduate." "Yeah? Why'd you even bother? Not like you need a diploma to do factory work." Should of known better than to even try to talk to her.
Both snippets are revealing, both about the characters and about their assumptions and prejudices, but a player too ready to categorize might not pick up on the subtleties. The point is that while there's much more to these characters than cliches, a given player might not realize that--and if the player doesn't respond to the characters, he or she's unlikely to enjoy Common Ground. In other words, the player should feel some sympathies toward all of the three main characters, and arguably a player who doesn't hasn't really given the story a fair shake, since nothing is as simple as it first appears.
Common Ground is an unusual piece of IF, on the whole. There are no puzzles to speak of, and no real objective--the point is to explore the characters and see how they interact. While the result isn't successful on every level, it's certainly a worthy experiment, implemented well, and it's worth checking out.