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• 1 2018-11-16T05:41:59-08:00 And Then Bad Things Happen 3 plain 2018-11-16T14:31:04-08:00 Killing Time at Lightspeed spends a lot of time early on in the game utilizing its structure of social media to engage and invest the player's emotions. This means that the events of the end of the game hit that much harder when they do come. Throughout the game, a conflict grows between a group fighting for the rights of AIs and a group that doesn't see them as people. This culminates in one of the last major events of the game: a massive series riot in the city center that the player's friends live in. These riots are devastating to the characters, and because of how the game uses its narrative structure, to the player as well. First of all, as shown earlier, the game goes to great lengths to make the player actually care about characters around them, so it hurts to see them in harm's way. This is furthered by the suddenness of the riots. Because the player sees posts at one year intervals, the posts the player sees go from business as usual to desperate panic and fear at brutal speed. The abrupt tone shift causes the moment to feel especially impactful. Furthermore, Killing Time at Lightspeed uses the fact that social media is the player's only window into events to further the tension of the moment. This is due primarily to information being hard to come by during the riots. People are posting panicked messages to each other, but these do little to explain the events to the player. All the player can do is read increasingly desperate posts, knowing that replies will come to late, culminating in the disappearance of one of the main characters. All this comes together to create an intense feeling of fear and confusion in the player, along with a growing sense of impotence that turns into the games emotional conclusion at the end of the story.
  
  Ashwin Datta