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• 1 2018-11-16T05:41:59-08:00 Impotence and Isolation 9 plain 818019 2018-11-19T03:34:32-08:00 Despite the high tension moments of the riots, Killing Time at Lightspeed utilizes a slower, quiet ending in order to really drive home the emotions of isolation and impotence it had been starting to  show during the riots by exploiting the game's social media structure. This is done is through the subversion of agency and interactivity. Killing Time at Lightspeed  uses its social media structure to give the player agency at the beginning of the story. The player gets asked for advice on numerous occasions, and it feels like the player is able to affect their friends for the better. However, as the game closes, it becomes clear that although the player can affect what people say, they have no control over the broader picture. As John Walker says in his review of the game, "the most smart aspect is its recognition of your passivity in the role of a visual novel player, and making that the most crucial part of the story is telling" (par. 10). No matter how they approach talking to Alice, she quits social media. No matter what the player does during the riots, their friends still end up in trouble. Even the commend button, likely the first way a player interacts with the posts, does literally nothing over the course of the story.  This feeling of impotence is only made stronger past the riots as the player's friends slowly start drifting away from each other and from FriendPage. The player receives fewer and fewer messages as people slowly migrate to a social media platform that the player has no access to. This continues until finally everyone is gone, and the game leaves the player alone, reflecting on their inability to stop their friends and time itself from drifting away from them, with just the bots for company.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Ashwin Datta