The price we pay (for milk)
Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag o- O. I have my own strained relationship with the letter. Let us not speak more of it. Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk is the cruelest video game I have ever played. Since I have not played many games, this might not mean much, but I do think others would also find it painful. Good pain. Meaningful feeling pain. But pain none the less. You play a voice within the internal dialogue of a girl suffering from intrusive thoughts, hallucinations and derealization. Her father killed himself some time ago. Her mother is cold and uncaring. The medication barely works. Milk. She has to buy milk. If you can get her that far without incident, without breakdown, you'd already be the most helpful thought she's had in a long while. One step at a time. Fifty-one and one backwards. Your job would be easy if it weren't so difficult. MIABOMIABOM is a linear game if you're a good person. "Hahaha You can't do that. I won't let you hide your own strange hang-ups behind the phrase “good person”. Try again." *Sigh* Fine. MIABOMIABOM is a linear game if you find it as hard to be cruel to digital people as to real people. A friend of mine insisted that this is an affliction all writers develop but it might also be the result of early life exposure to blogs and fan-fiction normalizing the idea that characters are expressing the thoughts and ideas of real people, leading me to treat them as such. I could imagine it being both. I could imagine it being cognitive fallout of something entirely different. MIABOMIABOM gives you the option to mock and belittle the person whose head you inhabit from the very beginning, even before you had any chance to know or grow attached to her. There are people capable of picking callous dialogue options in visual novels for fun or to see what happens without feeling terrible. I know that they are not all evil, but I cannot claim to understand them. “…and?” And I cannot claim that this isn't a euphemism for still thinking they're somewhat evil. Happy? My first play through was as kind as the options allow one to be. That means that my first play through was not kind enough. With every loneliness-dripping textbox I wanted to crawl into the screen to shout better motivation, more empathetic thoughts, the neurotransmitter equivalent of a fucking hug into her head, but MIABOMIABOM does not have a button for that. These are the most helpful thoughts the main character can bring herself to think, and she has to pretend being in a visual novel to even get that far. We bought milk. I poured myself a drink. I knew I would need it for what was to come. "And you felt bad about numbing yourself to her pain." Yes. I did. "You're pathetic. It's a game." And I’d rather feel too much with a piece of art than too little. "How poetic. But you hurt her anyway, didn't you?" Yes. MIABOMIABOM is a nonlinear game if you are an empathetic person. That's what makes it so cruel. I spent almost half an hour staring at the screen before I could bring myself to make her think something hurtful, and that's not a defense, it's a statement of fact. Moreover it’s probably a personal failing. You don’t come to this sort of game to win. If winning under these circumstances meant anything, anything at all, the reward wouldn’t be milk. You come to feel, and it’s too late to turn back now. I made a person hewn from lines of code and monitor-flickers engage in psychological self-harm that day and repetition didn’t make it any easier. When they say you don’t know a person until you saw them at their lowest, they’re right. Or at least they’re less wrong than normal. There’s a reason why the cruel options exist, and it isn’t to cater to some sadists who want to mock a mentally ill girl. Those people aren’t playing. The cruel options are there because they’re always there. They are what seeps out of the dark sludge enveloping her mind when you aren’t helping. When the pills aren’t helping. When nothing is helping. It’s the kind options that are the anomaly. MIABOMIABOM’s protagonist doesn’t usually manage to buy milk. She tells you as much. The player who emerges bag in hand and closes the program, never to return, has followed her through a spectacularly good day, the kind that comes around once in a blue moon, and left as though that solved anything. As though there would stop being bad days just because she made it through this one. To play MIABOMIABOM only picking the good options is to avert one’s gaze from the pain. You know she wouldn’t always be thinking this. You’re pretending because it’s easier. Because you know what it feels like to think the bad thoughts. You know how they beckon sometimes. How they scrape. You owe this girl to listen to what her demons sound like. To understand and empathize. You owe her to come along even on a bad day, because you can leave her mind. She can’t. Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk is a visual novel that pits understanding and helping against each other. It does this to hurt you, and it does it well. But the pain isn’t meaningless or at least doesn’t have to be. The pain is there whether you learn something from it or not. When you next find yourself with inken sludge encroaching upon your mental periphery, think how much it would hurt an outside observer to see you give in to it. Being cruel to yourself is always the easiest after all, so think what sort of monster it would take to pick that option without hesitation. It won’t always help. Thinking the good thoughts is difficult, thinking them exclusively is impossible. Don’t set the bar too high to reach, yet still… There’s no use crying over spilled milk. Sometimes it’s enough to have a friend who’ll listen without pretending they don’t inhabit this reality. Sometimes it’s enough not to look away.