If i knew Save the Date existed I would've probably gotten a lot more interpretative material out of my previous flowchart blog post. The entire meta narrative here is pretty fun; the writing is good enough to make Felicia seem like a real character, and unlike The Stanley Parable, not every choice is immediately available to you at the beginning of the game.
Saving. Normally a pretty innocuous act, meant to, in some ways, remove you from the simulation of the game and take you back into real life, doesn't really get messed with a lot in mainstream games. There always has to be this concrete barrier between you and your life and your worries and the game, the characters' lives, and their worries.
Going through Save the Date, the choices it offers are kind of a personality test, judging how one makes decisions in games. The player might just want to see an ending where Felicia and the Character don't die. The player might just want to see all the different kinds of ways Felicia can die. The player might just be having fun and enjoying the dialogue.
Avoiding the question of whether this characterization of choice-making is valid, let's just examine the first category. There are several times in Save the Date when Felicia asks you why you're doing all this, whether you're lying to her about being a wizard or a psychic or from the future or just telling her the truth about being in a video game. I usually picked the one along the lines of "I don't want you to die."
Of course, if that was really me, then I would've just picked the "actually let's not go to dinner" option at the very beginning of the game; you both survive, the game goes into detail about how she's happy and living, and the game ends. In fact, after getting far enough to talk about the entire structure of what's going on with Felicia on the hill (also kind of just spoiling Groundhog Day and Final Fantasy), the character of that ending changes slightly. You get a few extra lines; Felicia's happy, and the entire thing is bittersweet.
....
OK the problem with writing about games that talk about themselves is that you can start a blog post with a few ideas and then play as a break and then everything you wrote is already addressed in the game. Maybe this is my ending to Save the Date. A mediocre blog post that doesn't even really address anything new because the actual developer's already thought about all of these things and put them in the game.
At any rate, Save the Date pushes back on a lot of implicit assumptions the player has when going into a game. When first introduced to the idea of what a game even really was, the whole "simulation allowing for safety in exploring avenues of interaction and decision making" seemed to really mean "you're free to try things until you get it right! You'll get a shiny reward at the end as well. Nothing you do here will matter/affect you in real life." Which of course looking back on it now is a dumb reading but it's good to kind of expunge the dumb readings by writing them out and rejecting them specifically.
Mattie Brice's article on what agreement means between the player and the developer comes to mind as well. Sometimes agreement can just be a bit of encouragement and some slight in-game foreshadowing about how things might not go the way you want them to go. Sometimes it's a frank admission in the form of an M rating or content warnings, and sometimes it gets built up. You start off in Save the Date, you go to a restaurant, a silly death happens, and it's funny. You go somewhere else and you slowly see everything is a silly death waiting to happen. You get a bit farther, and the deaths start becoming not quite silly, but arbitrary. Getting hit by a car, dying in a gas explosion, etc. Yet the player keeps playing.
Sometimes I wonder about the whole agreement on context thing in the first place. Aren't you already agreeing to context by playing the way that you're playing? Then again, why do people purposefully buy movie tickets to things they won't enjoy? It's not solely about interacting with the media, it's about the interactions with others who also feel the same way about it. Some people are going to watch the last movie of the new Star Wars trilogy and enjoy the whole thing; others are going to get a ticket, watch the thing, and then immediately complain about how it was a waste of time; and others will go in, go out, and be like "finally I can stop worrying about Star Wars for the rest of my life!" Brady Haran and CGPGrey likened watching the last Star Wars movie to summiting Everest.
Anyways, I watched Felicia die 38 times in 11 different ways before I got here.
(official end)
OK but actually wait a second the whole including a section of the game where you talk about the game basically to the game (Through Felicia) might narrow the scope of things. The character writing, how the developer actually doles everything out about this one fictional person, is really cool as well. Sometimes people wonder about how much they might learn from a person if they just ask different questions. It's a fun time. That got me to wondering: am I a good NPC in other peoples' lives? That's fun. That's a fun thing to think about.
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