Amishville by Jacob Amman (2002)

The Little Ugly, Evil Guy On My Shoulder’s Verdict:

I don’t have much use for the Amish generally speaking. Do they not realize we fought a goddamn war just so we wouldn’t be called English anymore? That said, I do love the idea of rumspringa. You live a sheltered, desolate, and extended childhood only to suddenly be unleashed on the world, free to finally discover all the good things in life for yourself. Imagine getting to experience sex, cocaine, Alien, Predator, and Alien vs Predator for the first time on the SAME DAY. It’s enough to make me almost wish I was Amish…almost.

The Little Nice, Handsome Guy On My Shoulder’s Verdict:

Their ways are different from ours, but we should respect and celebrate those differences rather than mock them in our text adventures. I wonder what Amish text adventures have to say about US.

My Verdict:

Terrible games deserve terrible parodies which in turn deserve terrible reviews. So goeth the eternal cycle of one room joke games.

Game Information

Game Type: Inform

Author Info: Jakob Ammann was a Swiss Anabaptist leader born in 1644 who probably didn’t actually write this game. Still, anyone who’d name their only son Baltz is OK with me.

Download Link: http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/amish.z5

Other Games By This Author: None known.

One thing I regret about my old reviews is how hard I tended to come down on the one room joke games that were once inexplicably commonplace on the IF Archive. I didn’t like those games then and I don’t like them now, but the difference is I don’t think I’d call any text adventure clutter or suggest it has no valid reason to exist today. There’s nothing actually wrong with putting out a game just for laughs. If you put in the time and made a thing, you have every right to share it with the world. What kind of monster do you have to be to hate creativity and humor, anyway? I refuse to be that monster any longer. When I reflect back on my school days, it’s not the girls, the learning, or the minor achievements that I look back on most fondly. Instead, it’s the memories of those times I made someone laugh that shine brightest in my mind’s eye and are the least tinged by regret. Humor is something wonderful and beautiful, a superpower anyone can use. If you’re truly creating a game because you want to make people laugh, that’s awesome and actually kind of noble. This life of pestilence and sorrow doesn’t deserve you.

With all this in mind, I briefly considered replacing my usual rating system with a new rating system just for joke games which would be based on the number of laughs I incurred while playing each said game. I abandoned this idea when I realized every one room joke game I’ve ever played would receive the same rating of zero laughs under this new regime. At least with my old rating system no game actually gets a simple rating worse than a 1! Sadly, it’s been my general experience that joke IF games tend not to be particularly funny. I don’t think it has to be that way; there’s nothing inherent in the format of the one room joke game that forces it to suck. Of course you’re not going to make the next A Mind Forever Voyaging, but you could theoretically at least take a clever idea and do something funny with it. For some reason, that seems to happen only very rarely if at all in practice. No matter. I’ll still defend the one room joke game’s right to exist to my dying breath. If a joke game makes just one person laugh, even if it is just the author, surely that is enough to make the whole endeavor worthwhile to some degree no matter what the nattering nabobs of IF criticism have to say. Of course, “worthwhile” doesn’t mean “worth playing” and as one of those aforementioned nabobs I’m going to have to say a number of unpleasant things about joke games in this and future reviews. I just want it to be clear that it isn’t personal and I’m not condemning a whole subgenre of IF or advocating that any games be purged from the Internet just because I didn’t like them. With that out of the way, let’s talk about the game!

Amishville is a one room joke game and it isn’t funny. It probably has a better reason for not being funny than most of its compatriots, and that’s because it’s a parody of Amissville, a “game” that was relentlessly overhyped on the IF newsgroups in the early 2000s but was essentially as I understand it an in-joke that became an Internet performance art piece. There was even a pseudo-company behind the game called Santoonie Corporation which gave the project a veneer of corporate respectability until people began to realize most Santoonie employees had adopted the names of Confederate generals as pseudonyms. You could think of Santoonie as the original Proud Boys of interactive fiction if the Proud Boys were as well known for vaporware as they are for racism. The groundbreaking title we were promised on the newsgroups never quite materialized and Santoonie Corporation never became the new Infocom, but you can still find multiple Amissville-themed titles and parodies on the IF Archive if you dare to look for them. What they all have in common is that they are all pretty bad. In the case of the parodies at least, the lack of quality is obviously intentional. Would a quality Amissville parody even make any sense at all given the history involved? Jacob Ammon or whoever did this game had to underperform just to meet society’s expectations. There’s a harsh cruelty to that. Even if you don’t like the game (and trust me, you do not like the game), it’s not hard to sympathize with Ammon. The position he found himself in was truly unenviable.

Amishville takes the one room joke game concept to startling extremes. A brief introduction establishes your character as an Amish man who is currently just outside of his barn. Unfortunately, there’s no more story to uncover after that. Almost every valid input the parser recognizes reveals the joke and ends the game. I appreciated still being allowed to enter verbose mode the way I always do, but verbose and brief were the only commands I found that worked and didn’t end the game. The design of the game gives it a certain aura of mystery; it’s certainly possible there is hidden content that just isn’t very easy to find, but I can’t say I found anything interesting despite numerous attempts. As for the joke, it takes the single fact most people know about the Amish and uses that as the punchline. It’s obvious enough that there’s a good chance you will already have a pretty good idea what the joke is going to be before actually playing the game. It’s so predictable that it’s almost reassuring. No matter how topsy-turvy your life may be, you can still play Amishville and realize you have a basic handle on the way the world works at least when it comes to the type of jokes people who know little of the Amish tend to tell about the Amish.

Taken just as a parody, Amishville shows a little promise, but it remains very undeveloped. It mocks the strange Preface, Prologue, Introduction opening of the fragment of Amissville that was publicly released and is written in a loose, active style that somewhat resembles but doesn’t quite capture the spirit of the original game. The moment that brought me closest to laughter was the line, “But your adventurous spirit continues to drive your heart to the dangers and perils that spawn from adventure and wearing buttons.” If nothing else, this line gives every Amish scholar the chance to point out that many groups of Amish people do in fact wear clothes with buttons. A brief moment of sunshine in their otherwise dreary lives. Even if you do enjoy the writing, that doesn’t change the fact that game is essentially just an introduction with no interactive elements whatsoever. I’m afraid I can’t quite bring myself to recommend it. I give it ZERO LAUGHS!

Simple Rating: 1/10

Complicated Rating: 6/50

Story: 1/10

Writing: 3/10

Playability: 1/10

Puzzle Quality: 1/10 (What if the WHOLE GAME is the puzzle?)

Parser Responsiveness: 0/10

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