Goat Game

I also played Goat Game after hearing about it at NarraScope last month.

I think there's one aspect of the "company loyalist" ending that the game perhaps didn't explore enough. It's possible that the point of that ending wouldn't be loyalty to the company, or moving up in one's career, but staying focused on the problem that the protagonist originally wanted to solve. In the game, that problem was enabling Zoe and others like her to stand for the first time. Maybe reaching a breakthrough in an area like that, which does improve people's lives, sometimes requires one to ignore some other causes. I think the ending could have been better if the protagonist defended their decision to stick with the company so they could keep working toward their goal, perhaps in a conversation with Gail or Aaron after the award ceremony, or perhaps during the confrontation with the protesters.

The fact that the protagonist's work is disability-related adds some resonance for me which I'm guessing the author didn't expect. No, I don't work in biotech; I work on software accessibility, particularly for blind people (I'm legally blind myself). From mid-2017 to late 2020 I worked on the Windows accessibility team at Microsoft. I didn't experience anything while there that could be considered traumatic, but I was always ambivalent about working at Microsoft, or any big tech company for that matter. I kept telling myself that, in addition to the undeniable financial benefits, it was worthwhile for me to stay because of the good I was doing for blind people. My reasons for eventually leaving were complicated, but when I did leave, I felt that I had accomplished a lot of what I had come to the team to do, and it was the right time to move on.

So, back to Goat Game, one possibility that didn't seem to be considered was for the protagonist to leave the lab after making their breakthrough, possibly even forfeiting some of the financial or career benefits of that achievement in the process. I guess it would have been hard to work that into the structure of the game, though.

While playing the game, as soon as I learned about Zoe and the way she motivated the protagonist's work, I wanted to get to something like the "company loyalist" ending. (It took me several runs to notice that one could skip the trip underground with Gail and Aaron after the first run.) But when I got to the ending, I found it unsatisfying because the story didn't seem to acknowledge the legitimate motivation that the protagonist could have had for making that choice, nor give them a chance to defend it.

I hope I'm not completely missing the point here.