Kit Riemer’s well researched, slightly unhinged Computerfriend
The Queer Games Bundle is a collection of nearly 600 items by LGBTQ+ creators and teams, nearly 400 of which are independent video games, all sold for just $60. I’m talking with creators from the bundle about their games and their making habits. Visit the bundle and consider buying it.
Computerfriend is both the title and main character (?) of Kit Riemer’s clever interactive fiction, which uses Twine but augments it with interfaces and other mechanisms. Computerfriend is an AI therapist whose limitations and self-esteem quickly come into play in delightful, funny, scary ways.
How long have you been making games? What tools do you like to use?
About four years — In college in 2016, I was working on a hybrid poetry project (called Consciousness Hologram) that was eventually written as a series of HTML webpages, and a friend recommended I use the program Twine to turn it into a text-based game. The end product was a lot more fun than a poetry manuscript, and I began fooling around with Twine in more depth, eventually writing a sequel that I submitted to IFComp, an interactive fiction competition that introduced me to a whole world of weirdos like me. I tried to learn Godot and used RPGMaker for a bit but realized Twine is really the only thing I want to use. It’s extremely simple and allows me to utilize the minimal HTML/CSS skills I have.
What themes or genres do you like to explore?
I write primarily sci fi. It’s really easy & interesting to play with prediction as a form of metaphor in science fiction, it allows me to explore the subjects that haunt my IRL life: transhumanism, illness/body horror, mental illness, alternate realities, ecological destruction, the erosion of social structures, politics, etc.
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of making games?
When I’ve published a game, the best feeling in the world is someone getting in touch and telling me they feel reflected in it. It’s wonderful to be a fan of something and share that joy with someone else who’s equally passionate, but it’s a completely different feeling to have actually labored and obsessed and created something and then to have it be useful to others. I don’t have a great deal of useful skills so I’ve got to take that feeling where I can get it. My least favorite thing is probably programming… I’m lucky to have made a number of brilliant friends who have helped me solve coding issues way above my paygrade. I’m long overdue to hunker down and actually learn how to do it myself, I’ve just been putting it off…
“I wrote without having any audience in mind. I made a game that is tailor-made for one person: myself.”
Is there a game that has affected you recently?
As far as interactive fiction goes, I loved Kaemi Velatet’s Manifest No and Dawn Sueoka’s Phenomena (which were entered in the same festival as Computerfriend). I don’t actually play a lot of video games. IF is creatively inspiring but a lot of work, like reading a novel, and games that are pure fun (like shooters) don’t tend to inspire me; they’re just a time suck. The most recent non-IF game I played that actually had something interesting to say was Cruelty Squad.
Computerfriend is really grounded in therapeutic concepts. Was there a lot of research?
Yeah, the initial planning stage involved a ton of research. I would familiarize myself with the basics of whatever therapy (CBT, EMDR, Gestalt) and watch some videos of practicing therapists, then just extrapolate their methods into something stupid and ridiculous. A friend gave me a book called Emotional Flooding by Paul Olsen, which was really helpful too, and I contacted another friend who’d actually undergone EMDR and he provided some useful feedback (most of which I didn’t have the skills to utilize in that section, unfortunately).
I enjoyed Computerfriend’s long stories that grew weirder and weirder. How did you decide what to include?
My technique for everything I write, whether it’s a short story or a hybrid poetics piece or a game or a novel, is basically the same. I collect ideas (sentences, thoughts, concepts, metaphors) in Google docs with different themes. I occasionally read through them, and eventually a story begins to emerge, and I migrate all the relevant data from the “ideas” doc into a new one, which is the blueprint for the story/game/whatever. So, half of the vignettes in Computerfriend were just things that popped into my head over the last couple years, and the other half were things that popped into my head as I was actually programming & writing the game. Like, I’d need to write a section that occurred after a certain section of therapy & only initialized if the player had told Computerfriend that they lived with their parents (vs. with a roommate, partner, or alone). I’d either mine the blueprint document for something fitting or just write it off the cuff.
“It’s wonderful to be a fan of something and share that joy with someone else who’s equally passionate, but it’s a completely different feeling to have actually labored and obsessed and created something and then to have it be useful to others.”
The “letter you don’t send to a loved one” was really moving. Can you describe your vision for the main character who’s interacting with Computerfriend?
When writing Computerfriend, I knowingly broke the cardinal rule of artistic creation: I wrote without having any audience in mind. I made a game that is tailor-made for one person: myself. I was genuinely shocked (but delighted) to find that other people nevertheless could relate to it, often because they’d experienced the same things that had inspired the game: chronic physical & mental illness, joblessness, the sensation that my relationships with my loved ones were inevitably eroding and that it was my fault. A couple of reviewers noted that they didn’t relate to the player character and would’ve liked to have been given different options of what to say and do; this has been the case for other games I’ve made, too. It’s good feedback but I don’t plan to change the way I write personal creative projects. If I were hired to write a game for a wider audience, I would definitely approach the creation of the player character with more intention.
Setting the game in 1999 is really interesting. What do you like about 1999?
Most of the stories I write are set in the far future, but I loved the idea of writing something in a near-past where the world went wrong in different ways. I grew up in the ’90s and inevitably have intense nostalgia for VCRs, cassettes, floppy discs, ball mice, beige CRT monitors and trackball mice, Geocities & the oldnet, weirdo late-night TV… 1999 is such a fascinating time in human history because it was during this information age explosion where people around the world were experiencing each others’ innovation in real-time via the Internet, yet it was so socially regressive and culturally conservative in many ways too (I guess you could say the same about 2022). For just a moment before it was gobbled up by advertisers and stuffed with spam and vitriol, the internet felt like a place of infinite possibilities.
Most importantly . . . How does the card trick game work?? Did you make that up?
For inspiration (and also personal enjoyment), I spent a lot of time bouncing around this tool called The Old Net, which lets you access archived versions of websites from the 90s/early 2000s but also search the early web for whatever topic you want. I stole & recreated both the “games” in Computerfriend from an archived version of internetmagictricks.com; they’re genuine artifacts from 2002. I just find that stuff so fun (remember Peter Answers?). I suppose that sort of thing has been replaced by r/blackmagicfuckery, that “green needle/brainstorm” audio, the dress that is simultaneously gold & blue…
