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In the gloom of America's deserts, August 31, 2010by Victor Gijsbers (The Netherlands) About half-way through playing Sand-dancer (as I was following the rabbit) it occurred to me that this game might well be Aaron Reed's homage to Andrew Plotkin's Shade, centring as it does on a combination of fighting hostile elements and surreal/supernatural occurrences. This idea that was then dramatically vindicated by later events in the story, as one of Shade's central events suddenly turned up in this story as well. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Remove vote | Add a comment
Comments on this reviewPrevious | << 1 >> | Next Felix Larsson, September 1, 2010 - Reply Culturally embedded works and culturally specific references are common enough in literature. I perfectly agree there is no need to ban them in IF—with one proviso: they should respect the gist of Article 16 in Graham Nelson’s Bill of Player’s Right and not be essential to solving what puzzles there may be in a game. Victor Gijsbers, September 1, 2010 - Reply I'm not even sure about that: everything would be fine as long as I could solve the puzzle with a little bit of Googling and it was clear _what_ I had to Google. The difference between IF and static literature here is that you can always go on reading a book. Thus: "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton." Maybe you don't know what a mew is, and maybe you don't know where West Brompton is -- but that doesn't stop you from reading the third sentence of Beckett's Murphy. In IF, it might stop you from proceeding. But if I know that it is my ignorance of what a mew is that is keeping me from proceeding, I can look it up. Felix Larsson, September 1, 2010 - Reply Right, you’ve got a point. As a player one may be (or perhaps even should be) prepared to go through some trouble acquiring the knowledge one needs to solve a puzzle (or simply enjoy the game or the story). This, is trivially so with regard to vocabulary etc. (I had no idea what an ascot was till last year.) Indeed, I suppose it would be possible to write a good game with off-parser information search as the central ploy. (A bit like you're supposed to take some time off the parser to force the cryptogram in Christminster.) There are all sorts of issues here. Sometimes you just don’t belong to the game’s intended audience—and an author, of course, is free to target any group s/he likes (however specific). And there is, I suspect, a totally blurred line between culturally specific knowledge and knowledge that just isn’t universal. The more I think about it, the more this issue seems to dissolve into considerations about good writing, narration and puzzle design in general. |