--- /dev/null
+---
+postid: 015
+title: I have no mouth, and I must scream
+author: Lucian Mogoșanu
+date: December 22, 2013
+tags: gaming, books
+---
+
+<p style="text-align: right"><em>I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly
+rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes
+used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into
+legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move.
+Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is
+being beamed from within.</em></p>
+<p style="text-align: right"><em>[...]</em></p>
+<p style="text-align: right"><em>I have no mouth. And I must scream.</em></p>
+
+"I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" is the name of a short story written by
+Harlan Ellison in 1966, the same Harlan Ellison who wrote Star Trek's "City on
+the Edge of Forever" among others. It is also the name of a computer game
+touching on the same subject as the book, in which Ellison himself participated
+as a designer. I bet you've heard of him before. Well, I've been completely
+oblivious until recently, despite the fact that I'm quite a Star Trek guy and a
+science fiction fan in general.
+
+<span class="imgleft"><a href="/images/2013/12/ihnmaims-001.jpg">
+<img class="thumb"
+src="/images/2013/12/ihnmaims-001-thumb.jpg" title="Yellow."/></a></span>
+The game was launched about thirty years after the story, which, I argue,
+doesn't make the book look more outdated nor the game less interesting.
+Similarly to [Gabriel Knight][1], I had heard of IHNMAIMS a while ago but never
+got around to playing it until it became available on more modern distribution
+channels[^1]. This also made me interested in Ellison's original work, which I
+read and enjoyed and which has now led me to write this piece.
+
+"I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" introduces a universe which can be
+described in one plain word: brutal. Not unlike other settings of the last half
+of the 20th century, it involves such things as "supercomputers": Asimov did
+it, Adams did it; heck, Clarke created a similar supercomputer one year later.
+Only few writers placed their fictional computers in settings such desolate as
+the one devised by Ellison.
+
+<span class="imgright"><a href="/images/2013/12/ihnmaims-002.jpg">
+<img class="thumb"
+src="/images/2013/12/ihnmaims-002-thumb.jpg"
+title="Gorrister, a dead man breathing"/></a></span>
+The AM supercomputer, created by the Americans or the Russians or the Chinese,
+it doesn't really matter by whom, becomes sentient at some point in time, it
+doesn't really matter when. Since humans are bad and wage wars, mkay? the newly
+born sentient being decides that it, or he, or whatever, is better off hating
+humans and wipes out all of them, with the notable exception of five persons.
+The brutalness of it lies in the fact that said persons are made immortal for
+the sole purpose of fueling AM's hate towards the human race through torture
+and all kinds of sick games. And that pretty much sums up the cold, barren
+universe of IHNMAIMS.
+
+While Ellison's story is written from Ted's (one of the captive people)
+perspective, the game attempts to cover all points of view and thus has no more
+and no less than five playable characters. More importantly, the original story
+deliberately keeps the characters' backgrounds mostly ambiguous, focusing on
+their immediate traits, some of them twisted by AM to its own liking. By
+contrast, the game's story focuses on who the five people were in the past,
+thus giving birth to five distinct scenarios which are quite different from
+what Harlan Ellison describes in his short story.
+
+This doesn't make the game any less brutal, however: Gorrister keeps his heart
+in his pocket; Ted's slightly paranoid; Benny is made by AM into an ape-like
+being that's unable to eat; Ellen is constantly thirsty and terrified by the
+colour yellow. The story doesn't give the player any hope that any of it could
+end well, although in truth there is more than one way to end the game.
+
+<span class="imgleft"><a href="/images/2013/12/ihnmaims-003.jpg">
+<img class="thumb"
+src="/images/2013/12/ihnmaims-003-thumb.jpg"
+title="Not your typical cyberpunk landscape"/></a></span>
+The mechanics are similar to those of SCUMM games like Day of The Tentacle and
+are based on an engine called [SAGA][2], made by the same Dreamers Guild who
+developed the actual game. The main innovation here is a so-called "spiritual
+barometer", which is raised when the player makes "good" choices and lowered
+when "bad" choices are made, and has a direct impact on the way the game (or a
+given scenario) ends. This adds to the game's replayability, but it doesn't
+make the game fully replayable, since it's a lot easier to end the game badly
+by making "bad" decisions than to get a good outcome from the first try. This
+makes the whole trial-and-error process more fun and challenging, though.
+
+The acting isn't particularly bad; it's not particularly good either. The
+puzzles range from okay to illogical, which I suppose holds true for a large
+part of the adventure games released in the '90s. All in all, IHNMAIMS is a
+good way to waste a weekend and nothing more. Nothing extraordinary about it,
+which doesn't mean it's not worth a try.
+
+As for Ellison's story, I suppose its style must have been considered quite
+shocking at the time. The "shocking" elements however pale in comparison to
+most Hollywood "science fiction" crap we see nowadays, so I guess you'll have
+to stick with appreciating the author's pretty good artistry and nothing more.
+
+<span><a href="/images/2013/12/ihnmaims-004.jpg"><img class="thumb"
+src="/images/2013/12/ihnmaims-004-thumb.jpg"
+title="The guy with the really weird name"/></a></span>
+<span><a href="/images/2013/12/ihnmaims-005.jpg"><img class="thumb"
+src="/images/2013/12/ihnmaims-005-thumb.jpg"
+title="Standard ending, pretty much the same as the book."/></a></span>
+<span><a href="/images/2013/12/ihnmaims-006.jpg"><img class="thumb"
+src="/images/2013/12/ihnmaims-006-thumb.jpg"
+title=""/></a></span>
+
+[^1]: Read: Steam and Linux.
+
+[1]: http://thetarpit.org/posts/y00/005-gabriel-knight-sins-of-the-fathers.html
+[2]: http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/SAGA
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