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About the Story"Zarf? you think to yourself. Could it be? The one and only Zarf? Xyzzy Award winner? IF Competition winner? The mighty Inscruitable One?Gosh. What it must be like to be Zarf... You begin to crawl forward, the tunnel floor oozing and pliable under your knees and palms. The secret door bangs shut and disappears. The tunnel begins to shiver, and from up ahead a roar like a waterfall issues from the darkness." [--blurb from Competition Aught-Zero] Game Details
Language: English (en)
Current Version: 2 License: Freeware Development System: Inform 6 Baf's Guide ID: 911
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Awards
Winner, Best Game; Nominee, Best Story; Winner, Best NPCs; Nominee, Best Individual Puzzle; Nominee, Best Individual NPC; Nominee, Best Individual PC - 2000 XYZZY Awards
3rd Place - 6th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2000)
Editorial Reviews
Baf's Guide

-- Duncan Stevens
>VERBOSE -- Paul O'Brian's Interactive Fiction Page
I was the perfect audience for this game, or near-perfect anyway. I've seen and enjoyed Being John Malkovich, the film by Spike Jonze. I've hung around the IF scene for a long time. I've played every Plotkin game, even Inhumane. I've also played every Infocom game, which turns out to be helpful as well. Even with all that, I'm not sure I caught every reference (especially given the prodigious list of such references provided by the author in the endnotes), but I think I caught a lot of them. Consequently, I'm not sure how somebody who doesn't fulfill some or all of the above criteria would react to BAP, but I can tell you this: I thought it was a delight.
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SPAG
[...] it turned out that the author very carefully both stuck to and deviated from the movie, in exactly the right way so that he could work economical fragments of humor by referencing the movie, and yet deliver jokes all his own.
-- Sean T Barrett
I found the execution of the idea hilarious (and I'm beginning to think I may have to go rent the movie if it's -anything- like this) and particularly with the bits and pieces that let you see the world in different ways (again, more under "NPCs"). To be perfectly honest, I didn't get the optimal ending, and I was in too much of a hurry to try replaying and fixing this, but for some reason that didn't faze me; perhaps just because what I'd experienced up to that point was... cool.
-- Tina Sikorski
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SynTax
Being Andrew Plotkin is meant to be a humorous game but I failed to appreciate it or to understand most of what it was about.
-- Dorothy Millard
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Member Reviews
| Average Rating: ![]() Number of Reviews: 4 Write a review |
Most Helpful Member Reviews


I have never seen Being John Malkovich, but this game is loosely based on it. In this game, you gain access to Andrew Plotkin (a.k.a. Zarf), author of games such as Shade, So Far, Spider and Web, and a million others. You play several characters, including Zarf and a couple of young lovebirds.
The game is relatively short, taking less than an hour. The humor is mostly absurd humor, with numerous references to Zarf's fiction. I had only played a few games at the time; it is probably worth it to work through a lot of Plotkin's games (like So Far and A Change in the Weather) before playing this game, or afterwards. Unfortunately, these games are extremely hard, so if you're not a puzzle fiend, consider a walkthrough.
Great writing, mostly good puzzles, and a fun setting. I recommend it for everyone.

Being Andrew Plotkin probably makes a good deal more sense if you've watched Being John Malkovich; so if you haven't seen it, you may well enjoy the game a lot less than I did. I'd definitely recommend watching the film first, if possible, since a fair bit of the amusement I got from the game came from remembering similar scenes in the film. I don't think playing the game first will make you enjoy the film any less, though; and I don't think it counts as a spoiler to note that it's certainly not a direct transplant from screen to, er, screen — and the ending is quite different.
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Recommended Lists
Being Andrew Plotkin appears in the following Recommended Lists:Games about interactive fiction itself by MathBrush
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Comedy that works by Emily Short
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Polls
The following polls include votes for Being Andrew Plotkin:Outstanding individual puzzles by Jeremy Freese
I'm interested in examples of excellent individual puzzles in IF. In other words: not 'Spider and Web' so much as 'getting out of the chair' in 'Spider and Web'
PC's personality integrated with the story by JasonMel
I would like to be able to recommend to someone many examples of interactive fiction in which the player character is far from a cipher or an everyman or everywoman, but is instead a character with a definite personality within a game...
This Is Who We Are by Sam Kabo Ashwell
A considerable number of games exist largely as the commentary of the IF community (or some subset of it) upon the medium and the community itself. These works are likely to be befuddling to outsiders, but provide windows onto blah blah...
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