Repeat the Ending: Where Do Personal Games Go?
With help from Lacunova
Where do you go if you want to make games that explore your own vulnerability?
The answer used to be Itch. But even when the site wasn't under attack by right-wing groups, Itch wasn't a great one. If people looking for cheap thrills or titillation discover your games about trauma, it will always feel like you're crashing their party.
This makes one wonder: is there ever a time in video game history when you could make something personal and vulnerable without feeling unwelcome?
Repeat the Ending by Drew Cook asks this question in the context of interactive fiction (IF) history.
Released for Spring Thing 2023, the game purports to be a "critical edition" of a fictitious 1996 game that was poorly received by the IF community. Players can read in-text annotations from three fictional scholars offering different perspectives on the work as they go through the game. They may also reference other paratexts, such as contemporary reviews and introductions, in the Reader's Guide.
In one such introduction, Pauline Searcy speaks highly of the game's historical importance despite its obscurity. It was one of many steps that helped define today's IF. Today's IF community evolved from hardcore Infocom fan communities that wanted to preserve the spirit of text adventures through competitions like IFComp. The 1996 edition of Repeat the Ending and Joe Mason's In the End (1996) are among the earliest examples of puzzle-less text adventure games. However, their technical flaws and lack of community interest doomed them to obscurity. Adam Cadre's Photopia (1998) changed everything, or at least showed players that they wanted more narrative-driven games. Later, Porpentine's Howling Dogs (2012) expanded the definition of IF to include choice games that explore queer trauma. This ended the implied dominance of parser games (i.e. games where you input text) as the only type of game that could be called IF.
Repeat the Ending is thus an interesting piece of art history for scholars like Searcy, but it says nothing about why people resonate with this work (or don't), why people make IF in the first place, or why the game feels so vulnerable and personal. Are these thoughts and feelings not important to IF history? Should history be reduced to an academic exercise for video game historians? I feel that we would miss something important if this article only charted the game's historical lineage.
So, let us reintroduce Repeat the Ending not as a historical precursor or even a metafiction work but as an IF game about disability and substance addiction.
The story follows D who learns that his estranged mother is dying in the hospital. He plans to visit her, but he has other tasks that interrupt him like grabbing his medication from the pharmacy and dealing with the local abusive gay couple in his trailer park. Thankfully, he can also diagnose and siphon entropy from objects and people into other things to solve problems. This turns all his chores into a puzzle adventure game: which superpower should he use to defuse the tension between the gay couple this time? While the reframing is pretty novel, it also transforms basic tasks like getting dressed into an elaborate puzzle.
As the player fumbles about in this space, they'll repeatedly encounter what the game considers "fail states." These aren't your typical game overs where D abuses his power by sparking an explosion in his car or summoning his favorite anime character who kills him. The player can also type "WIN" and D will speedrun through the game: he will immediately meet his mother, feel empty inside, and return to living the same life. Without any obstacles, "winning" the game feels unsatisfying. But since fail states earn points and the true ending requires a high point total, players are incentivized to find as many fail states as possible.
D's misanthropy is evident in the game design, though he can't help it. No matter how hard the player tries to find a better life for him by testing the limits of the IF simulation, he feels stuck in his dying hometown. "Escaping this narrative is important," he explains, "but we can't shirk our duties as a son."
This has led critics to question Drew Cook's mental state. Of the three fictional critics in the critical edition, A.H. Montague is the harshest. He doesn't believe the game deserves its reputation, and he dedicates his commentary to unraveling issues like classism and misogyny found in the game.
Montague is clearly a caricature of critics who use leftist rhetoric to sound more objective when criticizing the game's flaws. However, the other two critics, fawning as they may be, also seem enchanted by the game as outsider art. In their own way, all three are unable to see the game as anything but "confessional art", a claim that Drew Cook has denied many times in interviews. Their approach invites speculation that portrays him as exotic and strange.
Their commentary on Cook's psyche intrudes on the text and gameplay. Even if players choose to ignore it, they may find themselves stuck on a puzzle unless they read an annotation that explicitly details the moves they should make to advance in the game. Any vulnerable detail the game reveals about the character is pounced upon by critics as evidence that their analysis of Cook is correct.
Critics feel compelled to dissect Cook in order to legitimize Repeat the Ending as part of IF history. Its outlier status only holds if personal details are presented as the artistic confessions of an unwell mind. As D narrates, "People see weakness and then they get inside you, tear you all apart."
But rather than letting the critics decide how Repeat the Ending should be presented, Cook added new scenes and expanded existing ones, exerting his own authorial agency over the work. To the chagrin of the critics, the critical edition is an entirely different work from the 1996 edition.
These revisions emphasize the importance of taking things at your own pace and not being deterred by what others are saying. I agree with Cook that this game is not confessional art at all. On the contrary, they ask the reader to imagine what it would be like to live as D.
In one scene, D is standing in line behind a woman who is trying to get drugs from the pharmacist by searching for a nonexistent prescription. He tries to empathize with her because he has been in her position before, but he can only express his empathy through self-deprecation:
Addicts live in a magical world. To be an addict is to believe in magic. Belief that things aren't as bad as they look. Or belief that one can stop whenever one wants to. Or belief that if you had my problems, you'd use, drink, whatever, too. And so forth. You used to spout that bullshit all the time, didn't you?
From my own reading, the way we play the game mirrors how D understands addiction. When players use entropy magic in the game, they feel like they have control over the game's narrative. The situation surely can’t be that bad when one has access to superpowers. Besides, anyone with these powers would want to alter the inevitable. Perhaps, we could change how D might meet his dying mother for example. But no matter how many points we accumulate, there's just no way to stop death.
When we buy into the illusion of player agency in IF, we too are living in the same magical world that people who suffer from substance abuse live in. It's easy to assume that typing "clean the room" would be the ideal way to find a key item. But when Repeat the Ending forces players to navigate its magic system and grapple with the parser system, they must suspend their identity and reckon what it means to be D to progress in the game.
Although critics can point out the friction in the game design, they don't ask why it was necessary. I believe it's intended to dispel the fantasy that we could be D but better. Instead of the more open-ended exploration parser games tend to employ, we are forced to follow the linear path Drew Cook set out. The puzzles, the "fail states", the entropy magic system, and even the critical commentary are things D deals with every day. He just wants to untangle his feelings toward his mother and the world around him, but there are mental and physical obstacles stopping him (and by extension, the player) from completing his goals. Every move the player might make is constrained by what D can and cannot do. His superpowers even come with caveats that complicate certain puzzles. As the player learns how to interact with the world, they may learn that D has something to say about his body, his life, and his worldview. However, the text does not explicitly outline this message: it is up to the player to decide if this work should be classified as "outsider art" or meaningful and personal art that struggles to express something beyond how we typically discuss games. The latter would require players to abandon the vocabulary of academics and Steam reviews for a more appropriate way to discuss D's perspective on life. There isn't a space that allows for that kind of discussion yet, but we have to try.
We cannot understand everything about Repeat the Ending. Literary criticism clarifies as much as it obscures. Even my own writing distorts the game by amplifying certain aspects over others.
It's a risk we cannot avoid, but doesn't that apply to all forms of understanding? I have my own preconceived notions of what it means to be disabled, and playing the game has dispelled some of my old myths and created new ones. This admission that I don't know everything isn't becoming of a critic, but it's part of how I grow as a person.
Despite its small but ardent following, Repeat the Ending doesn't have a home. Although it ranks 49th on the 2023 Top 50 Interactive Fiction of All Time list, this article will be the first write-up it has received. There aren't even any comments on its Itch page. The world is indifferent, if not hostile, to works like it.
There is no place for it in the history books. I don't think the way we write criticism is going to let titles like it be anything more than a curiosity. If anything, outsider art exists because our expectations of art are not at all inclusive.
I strive for a world in which games that explore vulnerabilities and traumas are seen as part of our cultural understanding. I don't know what that looks like, but it means I have to keep on advocating for their importance. I know I'll stumble over my words and succumb to the same flaws I've criticized in the fictional critics. Yet, I hope these words carve out a space for people to write about these personal games.
We don't need excuses like historical significance to justify the existence of games. If we can confront our own vulnerability, we can show why these games are important.
