December 3, 2014 | Filed under: External Sources, Recent Posts and tagged with: Moving Pixels, PopMatters, Unrest
I played and reviewed Unrest, one of the cut paragraphs from that review turned into this post about the dramatic irony Unrest creates in the space between player knowledge and character knowledge.
This is an extremely simplified version of the original post. For reasons I’m not going to get into this was post was supposed to be a short replacement piece for this week. However, during the actual writing of it I ended up realizing it was turning into another lengthy monstrosity. I was using more than the single example presented in the published piece and using the subtle variations between the different situations to explore Unrest’s use of the dramatic irony.
Bhagwan, the priest, is offered protection for his family if he pays some of Jaydeep’s militiamen. However, in one of Asha’s chapters a merchant offers to poison the militia to make it easier to get her resistance to the palace, rendering that protection money, and the moral dilemma in order to earn the money, moot.
Tanya, the peasant girl, can suggest to a neighbor whose son is sick to sneak into the city and seek out medicine from the priests. As Bhagwan you will meet this man in the streets who, like all the others, is claiming great need of the medicine. His story is no more plausible than any other, but the framing is changed because we know him. We know where he came from, what his situation is, more than the few snippets of it he tells us in conversation.
Chintra, the Naga ambassador, can be killed if you choose poorly in the opening chapter. From there on his apprentice becomes ambassador to Bhimra and a member of the ruling council. She is a rather weak voice defending the emigrated Naga and I couldn’t help but feel I gave some rather poor parting advice that contributed to it.
All of these are variants on the dramatic irony I chose to highlight in the post itself. They offer something not just because we can see the chain of events that lead to them, but through the fact that we are directly responsible of the situation at hand and now determining the consequences through another character’s eyes.
Though Unrest is fluid enough that each of these situations may not even come to pass in your playthrough. There are so many different paths, both large and small that the characters can take. I feel that maybe the piece belies the complexity and depth offered by the game through the simplification through metonymy of the example. Still if the main point was that the meta choice can be made through the understanding of the themes, I think I made it well.
We try so hard to merge the player and the character we might forget what could be offered in the space between them.