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Should You Get...
Dinner Date
You are- NOT Julian, but Julian's subconscious, expressing his inner thoughts and feelings
and prompting him to twitch and fidget in response to key presses while he waits for
his date, the lovely Meiko, to join him for dinner.
THAT IS THE GAME.
There is only one story with only one outcome. Julian spends all night waiting for his date,
expresses a torrent of insecurity and resentment towards his life and his job, reveals himself
to be something of a jerk, and ultimately drinks himself into oblivion when he is finally
unable to convince himself Meiko is just late and realizes she has stood him up.
THAT IS THE STORY.
You cannot influence how it turns out, what Julian does or says, or make any kind of choice
or input other than to, again, prompt him to twitch and fidget- take a bite to eat,
glance at the clock, etc.
When I heard of this game quite some time back, I was interested. A game about waiting
for someone to show up for dinner? They made a game about that? Surely they must do something
fascinating and original with that concept! I enjoy games that explore new ideas of what
a game can be, and I've been rewarded to find games that managed to go outside the norm
in really compelling and rewarding ways.
THIS IS NOT ONE OF THOSE GAMES.
Games are about interactivity, choices, experiences . Dear Esther has only one story, but it's
a good one, and your progress through it is done at your own pace. You have time to linger,
to stop and think, to feel dread or a sense of mystery, time to soak in the environment,
to wonder where this is going. Dinner Date is twenty fully-voiced minutes that fully
convey just how boring and annoying the mind of a neurotic waiting for someone to show
up to dinner really would be.
The Stanley Parable lets you make choices and explore the meaning of choice and narrative
in a game. And like Dear Esther, you aren't confined to a chair in a tiny apartment- you
can move around, explore the world, take the left door or the right. Again, there may be
only one path through the game at a given moment, but you're walking it at your own
pace, you're still making choices, interacting. And the game is continually responding to
you in meaningful ways, reflecting your actions, acknowledging you and drawing you into it's
world. In Dinner Date, you can press a key and... tap your finger impatiently.
What intrigued me about this game is the ordinariness of the setting and concept. Not every game
has to give you a fantasy world or magic powers. As much as I love those things, I'm interested
in the idea of a game that explores "everyday" settings and stories and doesn't rely on fantastical
elements to move the gameplay or the story along.
Gone Home is a great example of what I'm talking about. In that game, you explore an ordinary
family's home, looking through their belongings and piecing together the story behind their
absence. I have never seen a game take such seemingly ordinary, everyday things and make
such a compelling experience out of them, telling an interesting story in a relatively
mundane setting and doing an incredible job of it.
Dinner Date, however, does not.
Everything else aside, the story Dinner Date is telling just... isn't a very good one.
It would be a bad book and a terrible film. It is nothing more than listening to Julian
complain and feel sorry for himself, rambling on about his disatisfaction with his life
and his job. And for that matter, he's kind of a jerk.
This could be the BEGINNING of a story- what does Julian do the next day? How does he resolve
his feelings? How does he deal with work? What happens when he meets Meiko next? How
does Julian grow and change; what choices does he make? There's a story THERE- but not
here. I... get the impression Dinner Date is one of those stories where the author expects
us to think that suffering, pain, and alienation are deep, meaningful, and artistic in their
own right.
If the game had let you make SOME kind of choice, interact with the world in SOME way,
there might have been some hope for Dinner Date. Something as simple as being able to
get up out of your seat and walk around the room would be HUGE. It would let you, the
player, OWN Julian's decisions and problems, guide the story in some direction. Will you
hold out hope that Meiko will show up? Will you stop waiting, put away the dishes, and
go do something else? What if your role as his subconscious had been to influence him
to make the right choices, having no direct control, but guiding him along? That would
be a fascinating game, one that could take this same setup and tell a good story.
But the game doesn't give you a choice, it doesn't let you move, or interact. As Julian's
subconscious, all you can do is watch helplessly as the game force feeds you the story in a
stream-of-consciousness monologue. Everything you know about what is going on this night,
about Julian's fears and anxieties you know because the game TELLS you. No discovery,
no choice, no action, no input. It doesn't draw you into the character or his problems
or let you affect them in any way. BY DESIGN the game puts you at arms length from Julian
and his world.
Dinner Date is, at best a short film masquerading as a game. It completely misunderstands everything
about how a game tells a story and draws a player in and squanders the seed of a compelling
concept.