Released in 1995, just as the adventure game genre was falling off a cliff, I Have No Mouth Et Cetera captures the industry in its final nihilistic burn-it-to-the-ground moment, where game developers were flailing around and trying every crazy idea to win back their audience from Myst. A lot of fascinating experiments emerged from this period, including this adaptation of a Harlan Ellison short story.

The plot starts out similar: fuelled by Cold War hysteria, the human race engineered its own coffin. 109 years in the future, a godlike supercomputer called AM now controls the earth, having utterly destroyed the human superpowers that thought it would protect them.

AM has kept the last five humans alive for more than a century, torturing them in all sorts of physical and psychological ways. But at last it has grown bored, and has engaged the captive humans in one final game: they must survive a scenario constructed from their own minds, mortared by their own repressed traumas.

Gorrister is a suicidal loner who resents women. Ellen relives a violent rape whenever she sees the color yellow. Benny is a perennially hapless loser who has been altered to look like a gorilla. Ted is a paranoid lunatic who is “so twitchy he could make poison ivy nervous.” Nimdok is a Nazi scientist who assisted Dr Mengele in the Holocaust.

Using a point and click interface you explore each of these characters’ minds. Whether you can “win” is unclear, even at the end. AM has complete control over all of these characters, and there’s no reason that it should tell the characters the truth about their past lives or current predicament.

At its best, IHNMAIMS is a fascinating and memorable experience, and it’s often at its best. It removes most of the comical aspects of Ellison’s story (like the “we have canned food but no can opener” gag), and adds far more depth of character. The story was about five interchangable nobodies surviving a maniac computer. The game centers its focus on the characters, and explores their pain. Rather than a telescope looking outwards, it’s an MRI looking inwards.

Unfortunately, the adventure game genre died for good reasons, and IHNMAIMS showcases many of them.

Pixel hunts. “Puzzles” that amount to trying random combinations of items and actions. A lack of direction that means you cannot solve the game in any logical way. The game conjurs a dreamlike atmosphere, which helps the narrative but kills any sense of gameplay. Most of IHNMAIMS consists of wandering around in a daze, clicking on things.

Here’s a good example: you try to cross a bridge, but it requires a passcode. Only Nimdok knows the passcode, meaning there’s an 80% chance you’ll have selected a character that cannot get past that point. You’re stuck. There’s no way to figure out the passcode on your own. You either made the correct choice previously in the game (without knowing it), or you haven’t.

The interface is unintuitive. There’s ample opportunities to “strand” yourself, with no way forward and no way back (again, you won’t know this in advance, so your save is now probably useless), and the puzzles are usually completely unclear as to whether you’ve solved them or not. That’s my criticism of IHNMAIMS: there’s never any goddamn feedback when you do something. Are you going the right way? The wrong way?

Grognards spit upon The 7th Guest as not being a true adventure game, but in a way, it got something right. The puzzles were self contained, and had rules that you could follow. You’d beat one, and move on to the next one. Sometimes those puzzles were hard, but you could always understand them. You weren’t wandering around trying to guess what the developers wanted you to do.

So you have a fascinating layer of content, but it’s stuck inside a frequently clunky and frustrating adventure game. Unfortunately, stories improve games far more than games improve stories, and IHNMAIMS is exhibit A in the prosecution’s case.

One of the cool things about hell* is that you’re allowed to break stuff without guilt. Smash the furniture. Write on the walls in your own excrement. Hell is the worst place possible, so anything at all you do there would change it for the better (Like a maximally random jigsaw puzzle could be partially solved by lying on top of it and having a seizure). It’s fun to break stuff, and it’d be a shame to wait until the afterlife to start. Thankfully, I have an incantation that flings the gates of hell wide open:

“Here’s my views on sex and gender.”

Any discussion about sex and gender immediately becomes the worst conversation in the whole world. They all share this status, somehow. Everyone has an opinion, everyone brings emotional baggage to the subject, and nobody ever changes their mind. It is the most shrill, unpleasant, fact-averse topic of discussion on the internet.

That said, if we’re not afraid of breaking thngs…

For complicated reasons, humans have evolved into dimorphic sexes: male and female. Although this is biologically instantiated in our chromosomes, our sex has various outwards signs (bone structure, facial hair, sex organs, etc), which we call a gender.

Why do we need such thing as a gender? Because primitive humans had no way of telling whether someone has XX or XY chromosomes (nor can the average person today) so we needed fairly obvious outwards signs. And it works. Usually you can tell what someone’s sex is without even being aware of what chromosomes are. Diamonds are strictly defined as octahedronal lattices of carbon atoms, but a jeweller doesn’t need to fire up an electron microscope to tell whether something’s a diamond. A diamond leaves outward signs of its own nature.

Sex is the reality, gender is the signal.

But in the case of humans, sometimes the signs don’t match the reality. Sometimes accidents of nature (androgen insensitivity, sexual aphallia) or social choices (Ru Paul’s Drag Race) will leave a male displaying signs of femininity, or vice versa. What do we do in these cases, where the signs don’t match the reality?

Let’s break away from diamonds, and consider ships.

Some ships belong to England, some belong to Spain. To help differentiate them, they fly a flag of the nation that owns them. If you see a ship flying the Union Jack, you assume it belongs to England.

But suppose an English ship takes down the Union Jack, and runs a Spanish flag up the mizzenmast (ie, dressing in drag). What’s changed, exactly? Has it now become a Spanish ship? No. It might confuse other ships into thinking so, but absolutely nothing at the level of reality has changed. It’s still an English ship.

Suppose Queen Elizabeth sells the ship to King Philip (ie, transgenderism). Has it become a Spanish ship?

You can make an argument for or against. It is now subject to Spanish maritime law and can journey into Spain-controlled waters. But there’s a sense in which it’s still not a Spanish ship, and will never be a Spanish ship.

Up until now, I’ve assumed that English ships and Spanish ships are exactly equal, beyond the property of who owns them. That’s not the case for the human sexes. Men tend to be larger and stronger. Women carry more body fat. What if English ships have shallower drafts and narrower hulls, making them better for navigating rivers? And what if Spanish ships have wider beams and more ballast, making them better for navigating oceans? Has Queen Elizabeth selling a ship to King Philip changed anything about the nature of the ship? No, it hasn’t.

Presumeably, if Christopher Columbus asks for a Spanish ship, he doesn’t give a shit what flag is flying on its mast, or what piece of paper belongs to what person. All he wants is a ship that can cross an ocean! If King Philip gives him a purchased English ship, he’s not going to be happy, regardless of who insists it’s now a Spanish ship.

Sadly, I think this is the case for a lot of transgendered folk. Their bodies bear obvious signs of who they were. Women are not normally six feet tall, with hands big enough to palm a basketball. Men are not normally. They can think they’ve changed their gender, and society might decree that they’ve changed their gender, but ultimately, the signs are still in conflict with reality.

The only option is to haul the, hack away and refurbish the hull, so that it kind of looks like a Spanish ship (transsexualism). We cannot do this very convincingly for humans.

*Though it depends on which hell you are formulating. The Bible conceives hell as. Some of these places are dark and cold, others are burning hot. The Islamic hell is more explicitly the latter. “The person who will receive the least punishment among the people of Hell on the Day Resurrection will be a man, a smoldering ember will be placed under the arch of his foot. His brains will boil because of it.” Pure Land Buddhism has many hells you can end up in, the most fearsome of which is Avici. It lasts for trillions of years, and has iron snakes, iron dogs, and iron walls. You can die there but will always be reborn inside. And presumeably you must take a pill, to prove to it that you are cool.

Notorious rip of Wolfenstein 3D with a family-friendly Christian theme. Instead of shooting Nazis, you’re feeding animals. Hitler is a monkey.

If the creators had been more self aware, they would have made it exactly five minutes long, because that’s the point where everyone stops playing. You fire up the game, laugh at its kitschness, and then get bored and play the actual Wolfenstein 3D. It has episodes? And boss fights? What were they thinking? Who the hell cares? It’s like rubbernecking a crash. Fun for a few seconds, but these guys assume you want to spent your whole damned day gawking at a t-boned car.

The game actually plays okay. It has the same mechanics Wolfenstein 3D, and it’s about as enjoyable as Blake Stone or any of the other Wolfenstein 3D clones that were littering the market. You’re not chewing your face off while playing it.

But it exposes the problem at the heart of 99% of “ironic” clone games – it’s a setting brutally forced upon a gameplay concept that it has nothing to do with. The Wolfenstein 3D engine was designed for violent first person shooters. You can’t turn it into a religious family friendly game by giving the main character a food pellet gun instead of a pistol. The mismatch between concept and game is stark, and ultimately impossible to ignore. It’s like one of Richard Cheese’s “death metal lounge music” songs, except it was made in seriousness.

The graphics are okay for 1992, not so much for 1994. In a touching nod to the rising grunge genre, the music blows. The slingshot makes an irritating *BOING* sound that drove me to muting my audio. I don’t understand why all the animals have hitscan attacks. I keep dying from across the room for no apparent reason. Goat spit is apparently fatal. Wolfenstein 3D had an overdose of mazes, and this game does too.

There’s little scrolls you pick up that force you to answer Bible trivia questions, the game’s only nod to the dismal “edutainment” genre. Remember the days when you could play the most mindless games possible, but so long as you had to answer a question every now and then your parents thought you were learning?

Despite some endearing qualities, the game’s nonsensical premise deep-sixes it. It’s the same logic that gave us “well, Miley Cyrus is cooler than a bird, so if we make a Flappy Bird clone with Miley Cyrus, it will make the game cooler!” Except Miley Cyrus has zero natural context in the world of Flappy Bird, so congratulations, you’ve made a contradictory clusterfuck. Games and their concepts need to match.

I call this a “joke game” even though it’s not. Everything’s ultimately a joke, just some people are just one level deeper than the others. A marriage of form and concept might be possible: I’m thinking of a game where Noah massacres helpless animals with high-powered automatic weapons, or maybe where BJ Blazkowicz gives snacks to Nazis. Either concept would make as much sense as Super Noah’s Ark 3D.