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book review: Meanwhile
Jan. 9th, 2012 11:45 pmMeanwhile by Jason Shiga is a choose-your-own-adventure graphic novel.
Right there, a couple of you just added it to your to-read list and a few more of you just stopped reading this post entirely, so, for the rest of you, do you want to read this comic? Answer: I'm not sure.
It's a super-clever concept and slick execution - there are little path-lines to follow between panels, which sometimes wander onto other pages via tabs, and criss-cross or parallel other paths-of-panels in interesting and tantalizing ways.
However, the experience of reading it felt much more like solving a puzzle than reading a book, and that may or may not be something you want. I'm often reading in short bursts between doing other things, and there's no easy way to stick a bookmark in it and come back later to a saved place. Reading casually, I also often couldn't remember which choices I'd picked last time, so I kept finding myself retracing the same paths without figuring out how to break into the more interesting storylines going on around me. Apparently Shiga has now developed it as an iPhone app with the help of (interactive fiction big name) Andrew Plotkin, and I think if you really wanted to solve it seriously, you'd have to play it the way I learned to play text adventures, taking notes and mapping connections. You'd want to stick in little sticky-note labels all over the place to keep track of things.
As it turned out, I just didn't have the time or patience to solve it properly, and ended up just turning through all the pages and putting together mentally how some of the key plotlines could go.
( SPOILERS for some particular things )
Maybe that says more about me than about the book, but, enh, I am pretty at peace with myself as primarily a reader who is looking for a good time and to not have to work too hard. I don't really watch TV, so I think a lot of times when I pick up a book I'm looking for that kind of entertainment. And I just don't think that's a bad thing - I really like thinking and talking about books, but I liked thinking and talking about TV too back when I used to watch it more. Whereas, with text adventures, my experience has been that I'm really mostly only into doing them jointly with a friend, and am not inclined to sit down and do the experimenting-and-note-taking sort of work to solve them on my own. I don't think Meanwhile would work socially - you can't read a panel of a comic to someone else sitting next to you the same way you can read the next line of a text adventure.
I eventually played through Myst mostly from a walkthrough because I was curious about it but could never solve the first damn puzzle, and I enjoyed it, I thought it was plenty interesting even without the frustration-of-getting-stuck part of the experience. I think a walkthrough for Meanwhile, or set of walkthroughs, showing you how to get to a couple of the most dramatic endings, would be fun and worthwhile. If you're interested in comics from like a Scott McCloud perspective, there's plenty of interesting stuff going on here in terms of art and layout choices even without the puzzle-challenge - which I guess I have mostly failed to talk about here, but I think it would be like a ten-page paper if I tried and this is already a long review.
So to return to the key question: you want to read Meanwhile if you like doing text adventures solo or if you're interested in comics as a medium and what people can do/are doing with it. If what you really like is character, narrative, or pretty art, this is not your book.
Right there, a couple of you just added it to your to-read list and a few more of you just stopped reading this post entirely, so, for the rest of you, do you want to read this comic? Answer: I'm not sure.
It's a super-clever concept and slick execution - there are little path-lines to follow between panels, which sometimes wander onto other pages via tabs, and criss-cross or parallel other paths-of-panels in interesting and tantalizing ways.
However, the experience of reading it felt much more like solving a puzzle than reading a book, and that may or may not be something you want. I'm often reading in short bursts between doing other things, and there's no easy way to stick a bookmark in it and come back later to a saved place. Reading casually, I also often couldn't remember which choices I'd picked last time, so I kept finding myself retracing the same paths without figuring out how to break into the more interesting storylines going on around me. Apparently Shiga has now developed it as an iPhone app with the help of (interactive fiction big name) Andrew Plotkin, and I think if you really wanted to solve it seriously, you'd have to play it the way I learned to play text adventures, taking notes and mapping connections. You'd want to stick in little sticky-note labels all over the place to keep track of things.
As it turned out, I just didn't have the time or patience to solve it properly, and ended up just turning through all the pages and putting together mentally how some of the key plotlines could go.
( SPOILERS for some particular things )
Maybe that says more about me than about the book, but, enh, I am pretty at peace with myself as primarily a reader who is looking for a good time and to not have to work too hard. I don't really watch TV, so I think a lot of times when I pick up a book I'm looking for that kind of entertainment. And I just don't think that's a bad thing - I really like thinking and talking about books, but I liked thinking and talking about TV too back when I used to watch it more. Whereas, with text adventures, my experience has been that I'm really mostly only into doing them jointly with a friend, and am not inclined to sit down and do the experimenting-and-note-taking sort of work to solve them on my own. I don't think Meanwhile would work socially - you can't read a panel of a comic to someone else sitting next to you the same way you can read the next line of a text adventure.
I eventually played through Myst mostly from a walkthrough because I was curious about it but could never solve the first damn puzzle, and I enjoyed it, I thought it was plenty interesting even without the frustration-of-getting-stuck part of the experience. I think a walkthrough for Meanwhile, or set of walkthroughs, showing you how to get to a couple of the most dramatic endings, would be fun and worthwhile. If you're interested in comics from like a Scott McCloud perspective, there's plenty of interesting stuff going on here in terms of art and layout choices even without the puzzle-challenge - which I guess I have mostly failed to talk about here, but I think it would be like a ten-page paper if I tried and this is already a long review.
So to return to the key question: you want to read Meanwhile if you like doing text adventures solo or if you're interested in comics as a medium and what people can do/are doing with it. If what you really like is character, narrative, or pretty art, this is not your book.
