There is no denying that Adam Cadre's Photopia is a well-written, engaging work of fiction. (Well, okay, somebody probably will deny it. But it won't be me.) It tells a powerful story in well-crafted prose heavily seasoned with implicit allusions to other works, notably Russell Banks's "The Sweet Hereafter" (and Atom Egoyan's film thereof), and Carl Sagan's "Contact." (The power of the story, incidentally, derives in part from figuring out its nature and structure, and hence I won't go too much into detail here.) It skillfully uses multiple narrators to tell its tale, and carries themes and images throughout that help give the story life. In short, it's an excellent work of fiction.

SPAG reviews works of _interactive_ fiction, however, and the interactivity quotient in Photopia is slight enough that it would arguably work just as well as a short story. Graham Nelson wrote several years ago of linearity in game design, noting that the player comes to feel that "the author has tied him to a chair in order to shout the plot at him," and Photopia suffers in that regard. No one would complain of having the plot shouted at him in a short story; the nature of story-based non-interactive fiction is that the author dictates and the reader absorbs. But the genius of good IF is that the player shapes the development of the story, even if the author has a certain end in mind; choices that the player makes affect the text recited at him in a material way. Admittedly, many games throw in the towel with rudimentary or nonsensical plots that serve as excuses to cobble together puzzles--the victory of the crossword over the narrative, in Graham's terms. Photopia represents the opposite, and less explored, extreme, with no puzzles to speak of--and though there is more to chew on here than past "puzzleless IF" efforts such as "In the End," the result, for me, was just as unsatisfying.

It should be noted that the game does not simply ignore idiosyncrasies in the way you play the game; many choices are accounted for. Notably, one choice regarding whether you bring along a certain object or leave it behind is particularly clever and well-written. But the result is that the game achieves precisely the same result-- your "choice" affects the beginning of one paragraph. (The minimal changes in the text highlight the noninteractivity; it's almost as if the author were seeking out ways to keep the player from changing the course of the story. There is an obvious purpose to that in this particular work, but it puts a major crimp in the interactive aspect.) The difference may seem to boil down to quantity rather than quality--the amount of text that the player's decisions affect--but quantity matters: it can mean the difference between the player feeling like he has actually experienced the events described and feeling like he has watched a lot of text scroll by. Adding to this effect is the sheer amount of stuff that often happens between inputs--or, in other words, the amount and type of unforeseeable events that your actions produce; again, it's as if an existing work of fiction were translated to the IF medium. Photopia's invention of plastic geography--the player in some instances may travel in any direction, but the direction chosen will always lead to a certain location--makes the world seem larger than it is, and while it does that very effectively, it once again lessens the player's impact on the story.

Another experiment that the author attempts ends up cutting off the player from the story even more, namely the conversation trees: rather than ASK/TELL, the player types TALK TO [character] and is given a short list of topics (1. TELL PRESIDENT CLINTON ABOUT IRAQ, 2. ASK PRESIDENT CLINTON ABOUT IMPEACHMENT, or 0 to say nothing). This is, of course, a matter of taste, but I found the conversation trees the least successful part of Photopia, because they completely destroy what illusion remains of interactivity. In one sequence, your character explains the basics of solar radiaton, planetary accretion, gallium production, and other astrophysical phenomenae; it is _very_ hard, unless the player has ample background in astronomy, to avoid the feeling that you are watching a conversation unfold, not participating in it. I don't think it's impossible to give the character more knowledge than the player is likely to have, and then have the player act on that knowledge. But that requires more development of the character than Photopia affords: the player's involvement with the character is so brief that there is no time to warm to the part before the character starts rambling about the inverse square law. It is undeniable that the scene plays an important part in the story; it is also arguable that identifying the explainer of astrophysics as "you" heightens the emotional impact. But that scene and others like it give Photopia the sense that the "interactive" element is only a thin veneer over the "fiction" part.

It is possible that more extensive conversation trees, encompassing a broader variety of topics relevant to the conversation might help; perhaps future games will answer the question. Having severely limited conversation topics is not essentially different from ASK/TELL with only a few subjects available, admittedly. But most games that implement ASK/TELL do not put words in the player-character's mouth to the extent that Photopia does, and leaving to the player's imagination how he or she would have phrased a question keeps the admittedly clunky interface from breaking mimesis excessively. In other words, the presumed advantage of conversation trees, that they give the character more natural speech (one question in Photopia spawned by TALK TO is ASK ALLEY ABOUT HOW I SOUND LIKE HER DAD, which no parser could handle, rather than something like ASK ALLEY ABOUT DAD), assumes that the player actually imagines the character grunting out curt questions. But it ain't necessarily so; it certainly ain't for me.

Finally, though Photopia in many ways does what it does brilliantly, it doesn't do it for very long; one has to be a very, very slow reader to play a game this short from beginning to end longer than 20 or 25 minutes. Of course, the player can replay, but he or she will shortly discover that, as noted, the course of the story alters hardly a whit, no matter what the player does. This is, of course, a personal reaction: I can hardly say categorically that the brevity of Photopia waters down the emotional force when the game clearly had considerable emotional impact on many. (On the other hand, the two other people I have prompted to play it were likewise underwhelmed--and I did not tell them my own thoughts on the game until afterwards.) It is possible that the story's major twist would be more effective if there were more preceding it, more time for the player to get to know the characters. (I also thought the game overplayed its emotional hand a bit--exaggerated a certain character's traits--but that can be, and has been, argued.)

Technically, Photopia is outstanding--the abovementioned textual changes, even if brief, are woven in seamlessly to preserve the story. A variety of changes in text color didn't work for me when I tried the colored version on WinFrotz, but clearly the colors worked fine for others. The conversation trees, whatever their merits, work just as they are supposed to; the experiment with plastic geography works brilliantly from a technical standpoint. Many other small things indicate that the game was exhaustively coded, never a bad thing--for example, examining a certain NPC while playing different roles yields a variety of perspectives. There are many other little things that are done well--transitions between scenes are particularly well done; the first sentence of each section of the story recalls the last sentence of the previous one, often in illuminating ways. But Photopia stands or falls on the player's reaction to the story, and my reaction, for whatever reason, was tepid enough that I gave it a 7 in the competition.