I wrote a while back that Emily Short's Galatea had "moved the goalposts" with respect to conversation in IF, and while I think that was true--and that subsequent Emily efforts did the same--much of the focus has been on the format: the blending of ASK/TELL with menus and such. Emily's experiments with format are worth noting, but the content of the conversations bears notice as well--the games not only make it possible to have interesting conversations, they actually have interesting conversations, and Best of Three, the latest effort, is, in my view, no exception.

The premise is both simple and too complex to explain concisely: you encounter an old flame of the unrequited variety, first by chance in the street and then less by chance in a coffeeshop, and repartee of various sorts ensues--you discuss the past and present, literature, music, and embark on various abstract philosophical digressions as well. The format is the same blend of ASK/TELL and menus that appeared in Pytho's Mask: you have a variety of lines to try on any one topic, but you can also heave a topic entirely and choose to discuss, say, hockey with >TOPIC HOCKEY or >T HOCKEY, and if you have anything to say about hockey, you'll have some menu options. There are some recent innovations as well--if you've tried some topics that don't turn up anything and you want to go back to the last menu, UNTOPIC sends you back there, and THINK ABOUT doesn't produce any spoken output but occasionally yields something you might want to talk about. The effect, as should be obvious, is to afford flexibility both macro and micro--you have the ability to ditch an apparently unfruitful topic and start a new one, but also the ability to say a variety of approaches to discussing any one topic. If there's a drawback, it's that you can get a conversation that veers wildly from topic to topic with no apparent discomfort from the NPC, and Best of Three particularly suffers in this regard--in fact, the menu options that Best of Three prompts the player with often seem to represent major non sequiturs. Still, considering the state of NPC interaction before Emily Short made her contribution, veery conversations seem a venial sin.

Most of the negative reaction to Best of Three has focused on the main NPC; people find him an insufferable twit or some variant, or just find talking with him boring. There, I suppose, the player's MMV, but there are also moments where the NPC acknowledges the limits and shallowness of his understanding (particularly with regard to music), which aren't really consistent with a simple portrayal of a self-centered know-it-all. Moreover, I feel compelled to point out that there aren't many NPCs in the annals of IF that were sufficiently developed for the player to actually dislike. There have been annoying NPCs, to be sure, but the aversion to this one doesn't characterize him as annoying--he's pompous, self-centered, supercilious, or other such things, and creating a character that elicits those reactions is not simple. I'm reminded of an NPC that got a similar reaction from one reviewer, namely Bob of Brent van Fossen's She's Got a Thing for a Spring, the mountain-cabin dweller with responses for anything; Andrew Plotkin noted that he wanted to throw a brick at Bob's head. As Bob was pretty much the pre-Short NPC gold standard, it's not a bad precedent. For my part, I didn't dislike him, exactly--a few responses struck me as irritatingly self-justifying, and some of his opinions seemed a little sweeping, but listening to him wasn't a chore. (This may be because I went to school with the author and hence know not a few people that resemble Grant--and, perhaps inevitably, have had not a few conversations that resemble this one--and by personal taste I don't mind hanging around with someone with too many opinions who's too apt to drop literary references.) His patter is also leavened by a few measures of wit--not one-liners as much as amusing phrasings, comic exaggerations, and such--and I suspect I have a hard time really disliking people I find witty. One example, from the prologue, after the NPC concludes that the PC has made him lose his pen: "The karmic repercussions will be severe. Expect to live your next life as a dung beetle." Afterwards, after the NPC takes the PC's pen and then returns it: "All week my conscience has been haunted by the vision of you crouched in a garret writing with a lumpy Bic." I can see why people might find this pompous, but I took it more as mock-pompous, and I'm fairly sure it was intended that way. (The wit is not, of course, limited to the NPC's lines. One of my favorite bits was this: "His whole body scrunches tighter in on itself, as though he were an anemone and you a five-year-old with a pointy stick." Not particularly funny without "pointy," hilarious with it.) Er, what's that? Write about the game, not about my personal tastes? Oh, okay. As Best of Three consists entirely of conversation, the conversation needs to be compelling for the game to work--and while it's difficult to write a conversation that every player would find compelling, Best of Three gives it a pretty good try. As noted, the PC and the NPC have a shared past to explore, but they also have individual (and highly unusual) family lives to explain, and all of the conversations tie together reasonably well, despite the veering mentioned earlier. For example: at one point, the NPC mentions his dislike of Dostoevsky, and when the PC presses him on why, he grumbles about how "everyone's emotions run over like a vat of boiling borscht poured into a thimble," both an amusing image and (implicitly) a comment on an event in the PC's and NPC's past. (There's also a dash of self-reference a moment later, when the NPC complains about a lack of "narrative momentum, just people sitting around spewing out ideas," which could certainly be said of Best of Three.) At another point, the NPC remarks of a teacher that made a melodramatic display that "in a peculiar way you have to admire someone who is willing to risk a little ridicule," again a veiled reference to past episodes. (In this case, a negative reference, as the PC doesn't appear to have been willing to risk such ridicule.) And there's another occasion where the PC refers to the lack of communication in her family and describes a dancing-around-the-subject process that mirrors in some respects the game itself. The conversation is not, in short, aimless, even though it covers a lot of ground.

It should also be noted that the nature of the conversation is far from fixed--the PC can handle the interaction in more than one way--so if the player doesn't care for the NPC and isn't interested in playing along, why, there's no need. True, such an approach doesn't reach what the game seems to consider an optimal ending, but you can't have everything. I don't want to exaggerate this feature--to an extent, different approaches to the conversation tend to lead to the same elements in a different order, or most of the same elements with perhaps a few missing--but there is the option to take an unsympathetic view of the whole thing.

As implied in the Dostoevsky comment, however, Best of Three needs more narrative pace to genuinely work as a game-it's more a series of conversational vignettes, some more illuminating than others, that eventually lead around to where you want to go, and the whole thing ends pretty abruptly thereafter. The obvious contrast is with Galatea, where the NPC's psychology, and the difficulty of getting her to open up, gave the story a trajectory of sorts; here, getting the NPC to open up is, shall we say, not a problem. The problem that arose in Galatea (from the author's perspective, anyway) is that seasoned IFers tended to regard the game as a puzzle--get the Right Ending and Hear the Roar of the Crowd--which, it's safe to say, wasn't quite the idea. Best of Three certainly avoids that pitfall, but as a consequence it also forfeits some of the involvement the player had with the story in Galatea. It's also true, of course, that there were more conversational options in Galatea, and it was less obvious that you'd run out of things to say on a given topic, as there was no menu system. The challenge, though, is to maintain a storyline that goes somewhere-in Best of Three, the fluidity with which the subject changes means that there's not much of a feeling that any given topic is inaccessible at any moment--while avoiding the feeling of goal-orientedness that has long reduced NPCs to locked doors. If Emily isn't there yet, she's a whole lot closer than anyone else.

For myself, I enjoyed Best of Three, and it's probably not quite fair to say that its reach exceeds its grasp--it doesn't purport to be anything more than a complex, meandering conversation, and on that level it works fine. It may not be the apotheosis of NPC interaction in IF, but it's not a bad effort, and it got an 8 from me in this year's competition.