Player Comments on The Climate Lobby

I feel compelled to leave a comment on this story because I see one of the other reviewers stated the dialogue was stilted and unbelievable. But I hate to say it, having been in meetings with elected government officials for the purpose of discovering common ground, this storygame really isn't far off the mark at all.

I only read one branch, where I met with an MP, had an encouraging meeting but also learned of a lot of obstacles, and then hosted a town-hall-style meeting. And indeed, the meeting with the MP did remind me very much of my own experiences: the discussion starts off well, she gets interrupted by an incoming phone call, she delegates to the aide that is always present, the meeting ends with positive feelings but no concrete solutions. Everybody speaks like a policy wonk -- because that is exactly what everybody in the room happens to be -- and attention to changes in body language can be key.

This reminds me of a meeting I attended in Albany, NY, back in May.

On the other hand, none of this makes for fun storytelling; when we talk of "escapism," it is precisely this type of modern adult-speak we are trying to escape. The only people who would find this interesting are those who have experienced similar situations, or who aspire to become involved in public affairs. These types of meetings (with government officials who are always busy and ever pragmatic, in nondescript conference rooms buried deep in some concrete-and-steel office building) can be soul-crushing to many people -- about as fun as filing a tax return on a year when you owe money.

The only way to make the story entertaining would be to make the stakes more personal, and less about the issue and the perceived success of the meeting.

This is a good first try at a storygame, and I have to applaud your bravery in choosing this subject since it's not one of the more popular themes. Sometimes though bravery and foolishness go arm in arm, and here you have let your passion about the topic cramp your writing skills.

This story is written for someone with your same interest and knowledge level; for all the other readers it might come across as boring and overfilled with technical terms instead. The paragraphs are short and seem very impersonal and matter-of-fact, making it easy to go over them quickly without really reading. The concept of choosing a campaign strategy is interesting and there are a number of choices, but the style remains the problem.

The main porpuse here was to educate, but I doubt any kid or uninformed adult would be drawn into the story enough to be educated by it. You have to put more care and less haste into writing it and see it as an actual storygame, not just a piece of news dressed up as one. Edutainment means education through entertainment, and that's one of the most effective ways to learn; if you want to put your message across, focus on writing a compelling story around it. 4/8

SPOILER WARNING: Play the game before reading this review.

Congratulations on completing your first storygame! Personally, I think this is a great launching point. You’re working with something you know about, and you explain it in a literate manner. It’s definitely better than what we see from a lot of first-timers.That being said there are a few issues which I’ll outline below. So without further ado, on to the review! (P.S. I apologize for any typos or run-on sentences, I have a concussion at the moment)

Concept: The overall concept of this is pretty good. As it says in the description, you play as an environmental activist asking an official to do something about issues you care about. You work and cooperate with your partner to try and get your ideas through the complicated and annoying U.S. lawmaking system. As an edutainment game, I assume it is meant for younger audiences. It does give a lot of insight into the attitudes and processes involved. As far as explaining to a younger audience goes it does fall short, but I will go over that in a later section. In the end it is clearly a well thought-out concept.

Plot: The Climate Lobby has a very simple plot, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing for an Edutainment game. There is a goal and stakes that the protagonist cares about, as well as plenty of conflict. It meets the basic requirements and other than that there is little to say about it really.

Characters: We have three main characters in this one- You, Bob, and MP Dihn (or however it was spelled). The protagonist is your typical “blank slate” in most aspects, but is meant to have a vested interest in the environment and related issues. THe main question I have when reading about him is: Why? Why does he care? Obviously it’s a common cause, but what drove this citizen to go to their government about it? Usually for someone to take something that level, it has to be a very specific issue that the person is incredibly passionate about. It may be more effective if you include a bit of backstory on the character. You don’t need a massive exposition dump or anything, just enough to let the reader know what exactly they’re supposed to be fighting for.
As for Bob, his lack of personality is less excusable than the protagonists. Side characters are not supposed to be blank slates. We know that he is more experienced than you are as the story often offers for you to “throw to” him, but there isn’t much meat to the character. And easy way to fix this would be to ask the same questions of him that we should of the protagonist. What is his place in this? Why does he care? Even if we never go into an explicit description of him, a lot can be told about a character through their dialogue and actions. Maybe you can include a few conversations with Bob, or have the way he moves when arguing his case say something significant about his character.
Last is our goal/antagonist, the politician you are petitioning. I say antagonist mostly because she is the source of conflict. She has a lot more personality than Bob- actively dismissing you at times and being very resistant to you initially. In my opinion, she is the most well-written character in the story. That being said, you could make better use of her. Have the characters learn something about her interests and goals before talking to her. Have them monitor their words to appeal to this specific character. Perhaps have them choose her for some reason other than “well nobody’s talked to her yet. That’s how politics work after all, right?

Themes: Themes are rather tricky with this one. As it’s more education-focused than a traditional story, there is ironically not as much deep learning to be done for the protagonist. The closest I could guess would be the difficulty of getting things done in a complicated system. This is another thing that would be more clear if we knew more about our characters and their stakes in the story.

Structure: It’s a fairly straightforward game- plenty of choices, quite a few dead ends (or “deaths” where the characters don’t actually die) and a few epilogues if you manage to make it all the way through. Pretty much every page has multiple links, so bonus points for that! Overall there was nothing too complicated about the structure, but nothing wrong with it either.

Grammar/Spelling: This is where the main issue comes into play. The sentence structure is a bit awkward. Most paragraphs consist on only two or three information-packed sentences, often strung together in ways that make sense but only after you read them twice. This, however, is not the issue I want to discuss here. This story falls into the same trap as a lot of the fanfiction stories here do: The vocabulary. Every time we see our antagonist, she is referred to as MP. What’s an MP? What does “throw to” mean? What’s a beurette? These terms show that you know about the subject in question, but to a child audience (and even many adults, a lot of us aren’t from the U.S.) they are very confusing without any explanation offered. It’s fine to include references to the profession and use words that would formally be used, but you need to explain them to your audience. My advice would be to read through it and pretend you have no idea how the government works. What do you need to change so that it makes sense?

Overall Rating: ?- Wonderful job on your first game! There were quite a few issues, vocabulary chief among them, but you have proven that you can write a CYOA. I’d recommend giving this one a few edits, and I can’t wait to see what you come up with in the future ^_^

I got to the grand epilogue, and that sounds like a world I want to live in. I see some of the other comments about the dryness. I get that. Pretty legit. Happy I stuck it through to get to the grand epilogue, it closes well.

It was nice to feel like I solved climate change, and the girlpower subplot was decent to see. I also thought the writing was fine enough, with the jargon revealing the research that went into this. However, I think it's lacking in terms of information given to the reader at the start - who is this MP? Who am I? What's going on? The single-sentence answers to these questions provided weren't really sufficient, and so it made the story hard, but not in the good way.

What a load of crap.

This was pretty boring, couldn't you at least write an actual story?

If I was your teacher or whatever, I'd probably give you an A, but I'm just some obscure dude on an obscure writing site.

With all that thought out, I think it would be cool if you decided to stick around and write some storygames. Just throw in dragons, crackheads, and robots and you could have the potential to write a great storygame.

Aside from scattered punctuation errors (with possessives and dialogue mostly) and unwieldy sentences here and there, the writing was passable in the technical sense, but the problem is there was almost no story here. What few nods toward plot and character there were were crushed between walls of stifling exposition and people reciting paragraphs of dull, unrealistic dialogue at each other in a dead-eyed monotone.

If this was for a school project, I'm sure you got an A. But as a story that would interest people enough to read it for its own sake, it would need a lot of work.

Not bad for a first game. Grammar needs some touching up, but the story was decent. You picked a really interesting topic to edutain everyone on, and did it in a creative way, so kudos to you.

I don't know if anyone else has this issue, but the fraction in my review is showing up as a question mark for some reason. I'm guessing it's a formatting problem since I wrote it in google docs and copy/pasted it. It was a 5/8.