Re: *Let's discuss ethnocentric puzzles**

[annej2@aol.com (Anne J2)]

Hey!  Philosophical discourse!  I thrive on this stuff...

I never really thought of any of what I've played as culturally-biased,
which just goes to show how much I take for granted as a member (or
whatever the term is) of Western culture.  I do agree with Kvan when he
says that "IF, like ordinary literature, will NEVER be free of cultural
bias."  But I'm not sure that I agree with him in saying that IF shouldn't
be culturally unbiased.  Much non-IF has its impact in its combination of
cultural portraits with universal issues- so while I'm fascinated by the
cultural snapshots of life in the 1920s that F. Scott Fitzgerald gives his
readers, I also sympathize with the characters that he creates because
they struggle through much the same stuff I'm dealing with- the same stuff
we all deal with.  

With IF, though, it gets a little hairy.  A cultural bias can add much to
the flavor of a game- but what happens when you run up against a puzzle
that requires knowledge that you don't have and that is inaccessible
elsewhere in the game?  You quit the game in disgust, that's what happens,
and then you look in the dictionary, the encyclopedia, the Big Book of
Useless Information, and whatever else you've got on the bookshelf.  And
if you can't find it there, you resign yourself to stuckdom (or is that
"stuckhood"?) and post a plea for spoilers and hints and suchlike.

I think that one of the most important parts of any IF game is its
reference works- that is, stuff in which you can look up the knowledge you
need to win the game.  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.
And one of the things I most enjoyed about "Curses" was the extensive
library of reference works I collected (okay, really only TWO works)- if
you weren't familiar with classical history or mythology, as I'm not, you
could look everything up and deduce what you had to do.  In "Jigsaw", if
you weren't familiar with the course of history, you could at least read
the footnotes and find some sort of clue as to what happened (with the
exception of the Berlin thing- I'm still not sure what I did to solve the
crisis in that area).  And one of my favorite games, "Cosmoserve", let you
find out various facts about plumbing and personal problems by allowing
you access to your journal, your essay, and (if it came to that) your Aunt
Edna.

I think my point here (yes, I have one) is that "culturally-biased" games
don't have to be.  Authors should be able to look at a problem and ask
himself, "Does this require specialized knowledge, or knowledge that's
culture-specific?"  If the answer is "yes", then a note or a prompt or a
book or something like that is in order.  And in cases where an author is
too close to his own work to see that the sources of certain allusions
might not be readily apparent to his players, well, that's what
playtesters are for.

Enough rambling.  I'm off to tackle another game.

Anne :-)