Alright, before we get this one going I'm going to ask you to have a look at Christine Love's Digital: A Love Story. It's an adventure set inside of the BBS systems of the early Internet. The user interface is the game: you just have to use the internet assuming you were in 1988. It's clever as hell and well-written to boot. Highly recommended, and it won't cost you any money.
So here in the future Love's new web 2.0 soap opera, don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story, appeared and I was all up on it. It's absolutely because of Digital that I so much as gave this game a glance. I was talking about it on the Colony Drop IRC channel with some of the guys and we found that every time someone asked "what are you guys talking about" we'd just have to say "this VN" or "this really wappy game we're playing". On Twitter I took to calling it "don't take it personally..." and in this post I'll either use that or dtip or conveniently avoid the title altogether. So the title is too long, is what I'm saying. I'll be spoiling a little bit here, but no more than is necessary.
In dtip you're a middle-aged, self-described fuckup who somehow got into teaching (we never learn a lot of this character: he's mostly treated as outside the scope of the story) at a private high school in 2027, where an iPad equivalent is ubiquitous. Rather than attempt to stop in-class texting (losing battle!), the school secretly gives the player full access to all of the students' public and private messages on their future Facebook equivalent.
What you do for most of the story is simply eavesdrop on your students. Of course, your students are so forthcoming and live their lives so publicly that it's impossible not to know everything that happens to them. In a typical chapter (there are seven, mostly disconnected from each other), you deal with one of the kids' relationship issues. After all the mini-crises are through-- including your character's own-- the game quietly ends.
I'll say it straight up: though it's probably this way on purpose, the interface is a little troublesome. It works just like a nomal visual novel, but there's a notification button up in the corner of the screen which, just like Facebook, is constantly telling you that there's something new to look at on the kids' social networking accounts. This is novel at the start, but the absolutely relentless notifications-- multiple updates at almost every other box of text-- break up the other conversations that are taking place right in front of you. Again, this is probably a statement, but as you're all but obligated to read this stuff (the game will stop if you neglect to read some vital piece of information) it remains annoying.
Clicking back and forth to read the whole story (the kids' conversations are almost always important background info) gets really annoying, and I wish this was handled more gracefully. I was thinking you could have a tiny HUD with the characters' faces up top that you moused over to simply display their updates, for example. Replaying or using skip mode is a little annoying, because it doesn't quite skip everything: you still have to, for example, click through a 4chan thread every chapter. Maybe a “go to choice” option would have been better?
(As an almost-separate side note I'd like to mention something about visual novel interfaces as a result of my running through this and Higurashi: if they're books-- and they basically are, just with pictures-- why can I not flip through them directly in both directions, the way I can flip through a book? Why do I make the bookmarks (in the case of Higurashi a scant ten, nowhere near enough for a proper index) myself, without knowing where the important points will be? dtip does good auto-save bookmarks but they aren't quite enough. Searchable! Indexed! C'mon, visual novels!)
Speaking of 4chan (lovingly replicated here), boy did Love let the inner wap loose on this one. Your character himself is a particular type of shoujo manga dreamboat (the game doesn't exactly encourage you but clearly wants you to hook up with the student who tries to seduce you), you get to read impassioned Sailor Moon discussions, two of your kids are all-out /a/ otaku who use “bro” almost as much as I do with my bros, and obviously there's the look of the whole thing.
Even through the interface, I honestly enjoyed most of this game. My love of stuff like Marimite and Kimi ni Todoke made me realize a long time ago that I really don't mind watching the small problems of nice kids every once in a while. It's not my bread and butter (did you know that the Kaiji anime just started up again? Get on it!), but it makes me smile.
I gotta rag on the final chapter, though. Without giving too much away, the title of the story proves to apply to you, Mr. Player, with a big reveal followed by a tremendously preachy final speech from a character we've hardly seen, concerning the generation gap, social networking, and the death of privacy. The whole story preceding delivers this lecture more subtly with many clever meta-winks through its various modes of communication. Once it got to this point, though, I just felt like Deadpool was beating me over the head with the lifebar and he wouldn't stop. Pool pool.
So as the player character walks off from a semester of teaching, stripped of the illusion of power and feeling kind of useless in the grand scheme, they give him his only shot at happiness: except it's with that high school girl we mentioned before. One of the weird feelings about this game is that despite the game's initial efforts to make you think otherwise, there's never much of a consequence to your actions, which given the preach you get at the end is probably intentional.
For example, I was fully expecting some kind of dire consequence when I gave the game a second run to see what would happen to my character if he immediately gave in to the schoolgirl. But this game doesn't do bad ends. Rather than getting party-vanned, as this game's students would say, our hero gets his only truly happy ending (the words are even spoken onscreen) this way! The character in question turns out to only have any kind of presence in the story if you hook up with her, and unfortunately there isn't a lot to her beyond “I am wholly dedicated to the cause of getting with my English teacher”. This isn't even the most questionable thing you can get away with in the game, but I'll leave that to you, player.
So I guess the moral of this game is “ah, fuck it.”
Am I right? lolololololololololol
