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Reviewed: The Reprover
Will Wright is famous for drawing a distinction between games and toys. A game has goals it points you toward; a toy is simply a collection of affordances and restrictions that, if you like, you can impose a set of goals upon. A baseball by itself is just a toy, but as soon as you’ve got a score going, you’ve got a game. So — François Coulon’s The Reprover is a toy, and so is hard to really describe completely, because in many ways what you get from it depends on what you wanted in the first place.
First of all, though, it’s a story. The central conceit is the reprover itself — a profession where one simply stands over a client’s shoulders and tell him no over and over again, to provide some extra measure of self-control. One of the characters in the story is a reprover himself; the others grapple with this concept, too.
There’s definitely a sequence to the story though I couldn’t really recount it to you in full, even after playing with The Reprover for a bit. It comes in bits and pieces; wherever you are in the story, there are three images and a video clip on the right side of the screen. The video is of a live-action actor speaking as one of the characters in the story; the images, beautifully illustrated, each reflect a bit of the story-chunk you’re in. You can navigate through the story by clicking an image; each is accompanied by a bit of text. By clicking the same image twice, you jump to another chunk of the story.
These links between chunks are thematic, not chronological — and while there was clearly some effort made to give you clues as to when each thing happened, I felt lost at sea through most of it. I hate that feeling. I think you can see that in my own work — I feel very strongly that you can’t make a hypertext a complete free-for-all. There has to be some structure.
Then again, it’s a toy, right? It feels playful. Every time you mouse over a bit of text, it alters itself a little, adding an aside or a sarcastic parenthetical. There’s also a neat little 3d interface to the story where each of the images you navigate becomes a face of a icosahedron. You can spin it around, much like the virtual Earth you can toy with in the Wii’s news and weather applications. It’s fun and pretty… but it still doesn’t give you much to guide you through the story, per se. One thing it could have do but doesn’t would be to show you where you haven’t been yet. That way you would at least have the sense of having exhausted the story’s possibilities — which is one way, if a bit rudimentary, of acheiving closure.
I’m not sure how I feel about The Reprover ultimately. The images are pretty and text is entertaining — but I kept wanting it to mean something on the whole, and I never got that. But maybe that kind of desire is an obsolete one? I can see the arguments both ways.
A postscript: I didn’t read this before I wrote this, but it almost exactly echoes my thoughts… which kind of shows you how original my own thinking is.
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