The Ghost and the Golem
Mar. 14th, 2025 10:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraThe Ghost and the Golem, Benjamin Rosenbaum, interactive "choose your own adventure" style text game. On the Nebula ballot for Game Writing and I have high hopes of seeing it on the Hugo ballot as well.
Rosenbaum wrote my favorite book of 2021 so of course I was excited about this, but then I put off playing it for a long time because of anxiety. Some technological anxiety (was I going to need some special software to obtain or play it? no, it turned out to be a thing I could buy for my phone from the Google Play apps store) and some anxiety that I have only recently managed to name *as* anxiety around interacting with what I am tentatively thinking of as "anisotropic media" or "directional media", encompassing both dramatized forms like TV and movies and games like this one with a one-way flow forward through the game and no way to flip back a few pages to check something or refresh my memory of something. This is an anxiety both around not having attention/emotional control (what if there's a boring part but I can't speed up? what if something is unpleasantly tense but I can't look ahead to check in on what to expect?) and attention/memory (what if my mind keeps wandering and it's hard to follow? what if I lose track of key stuff? my memory is not what it used to be, and in fact I did make one choice in one of my plays of the game that I definitely would not have made if I had recalled who that name referred to, although in fact there is a character list (and a glossary for the Yiddish) that I could have gone and checked and I just didn't for whatever reason), and no doubt seems absurd to most people in our very drama-normative culture (my mom, at least, finds it baffling that one of the reasons I don't watch much TV is that I find watching TV "hard"), but it is anxiety I actually have, and I have decided I get to, you know, name and look at those, if I want to. And it became easier to actually sit down and play once I had figured out what I was nervous about.
In the end my worries turned out to be pretty much unfounded - it did not feel at all unmanageable to play, and was in fact extremely fun and engaging, especially once I got to the end of my first playthrough and was like "oh, okay, now I've seen one way things can go, and I can just do this again as many times as I want to see what other outcomes I can get". There is a list of possible achievements, which hint at possible outcomes, and if you go online you can also find a list that includes all the "hidden" achievements where some of the most interesting stuff is. :) I really like having an idea of the range of potential outcomes - in two and a half playthroughs I have unlocked 21 out of 68, or 410 out of a possible 1000 points, and I have ideas in mind for two more approaches I'd like to try after this one. A lot of the choices you get to make have to do with your feelings about things or your approach to solving problems, affecting a list of stats about your talents and your nature, which I think then affect what options you see later in the game or whether you succeed or fail in some of your later plot attempts. So in my three playthroughs so far I've tried to be somewhat different people with different priorities - pushing a little further away, each time, from my own natural impulses, playing characters who are less and less "like me". Like, the first playthrough, I think I was thinking "what is the best thing to do in this situation", and on subsequent playthroughs I've been more able to get into the mindset of "but what would this character do in this situation that might make for a good story (or get me more of those various achievements/outcomes)" even if it feels like a "bad idea" that "I"/my proxy in this world "shouldn't" do. (This is a tension I find interesting in narrative games, the space between player and character - there's a Lovecraftian text adventure I played with my friend D that forced an action I found abhorrent that was both upsetting to play at the time and remains by far the most memorable moment of any text adventure we ever played - which honestly seems like something that Rosenbaum might well have found interesting about the medium as well, and something that I hope awards voters find interesting about this game.) Subsequent playthroughs have definitely been a lot faster than the first one, because some of the events repeat verbatim (so I can, like, skim through that meal description) and some Rosenbaum is probably altering in subtle ways but I can't remember the exact wording from before enough to catch, so might as well skim until I get to something really different. (I have caught some of the differences though and they are neat!)
Anyways if you are interested in what it's actually about, it's set in the Pale of Settlement in 1881 (so if you loved Forbidden Book and would like to spend more time running around that world, this is perfect for you) and there is maybe going to be a pogrom and there is the question of an arranged marriage (so far I've been playing female-presenting nonbinary characters, because there are a whole bunch of neat options about ways the character can be trans and/or nonbinary and/or intersex, although for one of those two other playthroughs I have in mind I want to try Being A Dude which I think might be really different) and as you might guess from the title there is possibly a dybbuk and/or a golem. I might make another post sometime in the future about some of my different outcomes (and which I was or wasn't ever able to achieve) but I'll keep this one spoiler-free. Highly recommended if any of this sounds interesting to you at all.
Rosenbaum wrote my favorite book of 2021 so of course I was excited about this, but then I put off playing it for a long time because of anxiety. Some technological anxiety (was I going to need some special software to obtain or play it? no, it turned out to be a thing I could buy for my phone from the Google Play apps store) and some anxiety that I have only recently managed to name *as* anxiety around interacting with what I am tentatively thinking of as "anisotropic media" or "directional media", encompassing both dramatized forms like TV and movies and games like this one with a one-way flow forward through the game and no way to flip back a few pages to check something or refresh my memory of something. This is an anxiety both around not having attention/emotional control (what if there's a boring part but I can't speed up? what if something is unpleasantly tense but I can't look ahead to check in on what to expect?) and attention/memory (what if my mind keeps wandering and it's hard to follow? what if I lose track of key stuff? my memory is not what it used to be, and in fact I did make one choice in one of my plays of the game that I definitely would not have made if I had recalled who that name referred to, although in fact there is a character list (and a glossary for the Yiddish) that I could have gone and checked and I just didn't for whatever reason), and no doubt seems absurd to most people in our very drama-normative culture (my mom, at least, finds it baffling that one of the reasons I don't watch much TV is that I find watching TV "hard"), but it is anxiety I actually have, and I have decided I get to, you know, name and look at those, if I want to. And it became easier to actually sit down and play once I had figured out what I was nervous about.
In the end my worries turned out to be pretty much unfounded - it did not feel at all unmanageable to play, and was in fact extremely fun and engaging, especially once I got to the end of my first playthrough and was like "oh, okay, now I've seen one way things can go, and I can just do this again as many times as I want to see what other outcomes I can get". There is a list of possible achievements, which hint at possible outcomes, and if you go online you can also find a list that includes all the "hidden" achievements where some of the most interesting stuff is. :) I really like having an idea of the range of potential outcomes - in two and a half playthroughs I have unlocked 21 out of 68, or 410 out of a possible 1000 points, and I have ideas in mind for two more approaches I'd like to try after this one. A lot of the choices you get to make have to do with your feelings about things or your approach to solving problems, affecting a list of stats about your talents and your nature, which I think then affect what options you see later in the game or whether you succeed or fail in some of your later plot attempts. So in my three playthroughs so far I've tried to be somewhat different people with different priorities - pushing a little further away, each time, from my own natural impulses, playing characters who are less and less "like me". Like, the first playthrough, I think I was thinking "what is the best thing to do in this situation", and on subsequent playthroughs I've been more able to get into the mindset of "but what would this character do in this situation that might make for a good story (or get me more of those various achievements/outcomes)" even if it feels like a "bad idea" that "I"/my proxy in this world "shouldn't" do. (This is a tension I find interesting in narrative games, the space between player and character - there's a Lovecraftian text adventure I played with my friend D that forced an action I found abhorrent that was both upsetting to play at the time and remains by far the most memorable moment of any text adventure we ever played - which honestly seems like something that Rosenbaum might well have found interesting about the medium as well, and something that I hope awards voters find interesting about this game.) Subsequent playthroughs have definitely been a lot faster than the first one, because some of the events repeat verbatim (so I can, like, skim through that meal description) and some Rosenbaum is probably altering in subtle ways but I can't remember the exact wording from before enough to catch, so might as well skim until I get to something really different. (I have caught some of the differences though and they are neat!)
Anyways if you are interested in what it's actually about, it's set in the Pale of Settlement in 1881 (so if you loved Forbidden Book and would like to spend more time running around that world, this is perfect for you) and there is maybe going to be a pogrom and there is the question of an arranged marriage (so far I've been playing female-presenting nonbinary characters, because there are a whole bunch of neat options about ways the character can be trans and/or nonbinary and/or intersex, although for one of those two other playthroughs I have in mind I want to try Being A Dude which I think might be really different) and as you might guess from the title there is possibly a dybbuk and/or a golem. I might make another post sometime in the future about some of my different outcomes (and which I was or wasn't ever able to achieve) but I'll keep this one spoiler-free. Highly recommended if any of this sounds interesting to you at all.
