Re: *Let's discuss ethnocentric puzzles**

[mol@marvin.df.lth.se (Magnus Olsson)]

In article <4aite8$h1i@newsbf02.news.aol.com>, Anne J2 <annej2@aol.com> wrote:
>I agree that "Fire Witch" might've fallen down on
>the job here- I remember thinking to myself, "Yeah, but what if you hadn't
>had the seven deadly sins drilled into your brain in Catholic school, like
>I did?"  A catechism in which you could look up the sins, or even being
>able to ask the devil about the seven deadly sins, would have been most
>helpful, and it wouldn't necessarily have made playing the game any easier
>in any of the vital ways.  The author was perhaps remiss in omitting this
>help; as I recall, there is no outright listing of the seven deadly sins
>in the Bible- one would need access to the type of religion textbook I had
>in grammar school, so doing one's homework wouldn't necessarily yield any
>useful results.

I don't think John was remiss in not including an explicit source for
the seven deadly sins in his game. 

Granted, the puzzle *is* ethnocentric. The concept of seven deadly
sins is not only an exclusively Christian one (at least if you want
the same seven sins as in the game :-)), it's also, as far as I remember,
a Western Christian (i.e. Catholic) concept. I think it was "invented" in
medieval times (which explains why it isn't in the Bible).

However, all good dictionaries should explain which the seven sins
are.  I had heard of them, of course, but I didn't remember which they
were, so I grabbed the nearest dictionary and looked under "deadly
sin" (or rather "dodssynd", since it was a Swedish dictionary :-)). 

Of course, if you don't have access to a dictionary from a Western country,
then you're out of luck. But isn't this a general problem? Anybody who
hasn't got a Western background and who tries to read Western fiction
must run into problems like this. Westerners run into similar problems
when trying to read, say, the Chinese classics, of course. We can't
really expect our authors to explain _everything_ in the cultural
background, can we? In fact, it would considerably lower the charm of
a game like "Firewitch" if every cultural reference was explained for
the benefit of potential foreign readers.

Now, the baseball puzzle in Zork is IMHO far mor evil, because it's
not enough to recognize the references to baseball (I did), but you
have to be conditioned to the game. Games like baseball (and tennis,
and especially cricket) are almost incomprehensible if all you have is
a general idea of the game, and perhaps a few dictionaries where you
can look up the rules. 


Magnus