Critical Introduction
Killing Time at Lightspeed, made by Gritfish, is a piece of interactive fiction where the player is placed in the role of Jay, a person leaving his friends behind while taking a journey at lightspeed to faraway planet Gliese 667C. For Jay and the player, the trip takes about half an hour, but due to relativity, thirty years or so will pass from his their friend's perspective. To spend the time, the player is given access to their social media feed "FriendPage" through which they can keep up with what's happening over that thirty years. Unfortunately, there's a catch. Every time the player refreshes the feed, a year passes for everyone else. Through these brief windows, the player can interact with friends that are slowly drifting away from them, into the future.
The entirety of the game's narrative is told through this social media feed, or by the accompanying news feed. Throughout the game, this non-traditional structure is taken full advantage of, not only as a piece of meta-commentary, but also to create a much stronger emotional response in the player. Killing Time at Lightspeed cleverly uses its social media based structure to inspire empathy for the characters as well as a vehicle for the player to exercise agency on pieces of the narrative. By the end of the story, however, Killing Time at Lightspeed exploits their empathy and subverts their agency to give the player a powerful feeling of isolation and impotence that would be impossible in a differently structured story.
While this essay is based on the enhanced edition, the original version of the game can be played here for free.
Ashwin Datta
