Re: [Bookclub] Nothing past the puzzles in John's Fire Witch

[lpsmith@rice.edu (Lucian Paul Smith)]

Nick Montfort (nickmontfort@my-deja.com) wrote:

: There are a lot of stock elements in this game: colored cards and the
: need to sleep as in Planetfall ... very Adventure-esque cave
: descriptions ... a setup similar to that in Zork, with an above-ground
: house leading to a larger, secret underground area ...  

I've noticed something about the IF community that relates to this:  we
seem to love stock elements that are used with a 'twist' to them.

Just look at the XYZZY's:  The 'best puzzle' was a *maze*.  'Best
setting'?  An underground cave-crawl!  And the same theme has been
repeated in past XYZZY's, as well:  My own 'Edifice' won 'best puzzles'
with prominently-featured hunger and thirst daemons.  'A Bear's Night Out'
won 'best setting' for its depiction of ... the author's suburban house.
IF stock elements (if not outright cliches), every one of 'em.  Next year,
I expect a dragon to win 'best NPC'.

What is it that resonates with us with stock elements done well?  I'm not
sure, though it could have something to do with expectations.  If you
expect good and get great, you're fairly impressed.  If you expect bad and
get great, you're bowled over, even if the objective 'quality' of the work
was the same in both cases.

I liked the use of the sleep puzzle in JFW, because it took the standard
fare, and used it to do something new.  The point, we discover, was not a
misguided effort to infuse the game with 'reality' a la Planetfall, but
instead to impart to the player a vital piece of information--clued, even,
by the journal entries.  I probably would have liked it better had not
'Enchanter' done something similar already, but it was still unique enough
to appreciate.  It's also nice that once utilized, the sleep-daemon goes
away, not forcing me to endure tired descriptions (heh) over and over.

: the assemblage of items
: (every ordinary object in the game, essentially) that were supposed to
: symbolize the sins was not very interesting. Did it *mean* anything that
: John (and his landlord, etc.) had commited deadly sins? The puzzle might
: hold up well if compared to something in a Scott Adams game, but
: compared to the treatment of the seven deadly sins in art, including
: popular art like the movie Seven, it pales.

I could point out something here about apples and oranges ;-) but instead
I'm going to focus on 'interesting'.

What was 'interesting' to me about this puzzle was, essentially, the
foreshadowing.  By the time you encounter this puzzle, it is quite likely
that you have read the relevant descriptions of the objects you'll need
(well, barring the last, naturally).  So when I got to the puzzle, I
thought, "Hmm, let's see, sloth---wait a minute, haven't I seen 'sloth'
before?" and then I went back up to the apartment, poked around, saw the
pile of junk and thought, "Aha!  That's it!"  even before I re-read its
description confirming my suspicion.

Also of note about this puzzle is that unlike a game that, say, gives you
a hammer in scene 1 and a loose nail in scene 3, you haven't been
wandering around the game until this point searching room descriptions for
loose nails (there's a satisfaction that comes from this type of puzzle,
but it's a different type of satisfaction).  A puzzle like this is a good
example (to my mind) of a puzzle that benefits from inventory limits.  It
works best when you've discarded the junk as worthless, then come upon
this situation, re-think your position, and go back and get the junk.  If
you had had a rucksack, you could have just searched your inventory,
thought, "Ah, here we go.  Knew it had to have *some* use," and moved
on.  Geography is important here, of course, since this wouldn't work in a
sprawling game like Curses.  But I liked it here.

And you'll see that at this point all I've talked about is the puzzle
aspect--obviously, this is something that interests me, and that I
resonate with.  Even though this is all post-analysis, it was still
interesting to me at the time as I worked through it, even though I wasn't
thinking consciously about inventory limits and game geography.

It's obvious that this sort of thing doesn't interest you at
all.  Alexlit, anyone? ;-)

: In Losing Your Grip, the puzzles and
: situations presented do, at their best, lead the interactor to think
: about how that work of interactive fiction relates to life and to human
: nature. This is similarly the case with Trinity, A Mind Forever
: Voyaging, Mindwheel, and many more recent IF works which readers of rgif
: know quite well. 

[spoilers for Trinity below...]














Here, you see:  other people have mentioned killing the skink in Trinity
as an example of a thought-provoking action.  "Can you justify," they say,
"killing an innocent animal in the interest of you continuing the
game?"  This thought, I must confess, never even shadowed my mind when I
played it.  This could have something to do with my trouble with the
syntax--I kept trying >KILL SKINK WITH AXE and the like, which didn't
work, and I got more and more frustrated until I finally read the hints
and discovered the wording was simply >KILL SKINK.  Aaargh!  Any moral
quandry was drowned in frustration by that point.  But in general, I tend
to think of IF more in terms of puzzle-ness than literary-ness.  Even in
Varicella, my foes were puzzles to be solved (to my mind) more than bad
people to thwart.  Not that they weren't also the latter, mind you, just
that I tended to be more concerned with their puzzle-nature than their
buddha-nature.  Or something.  *Afterwards* I thought about the moral
aspects of the game (as I did with Trinity), but not, for the most part,
during.

There certainly aren't any moral quandries in John's Fire Witch.  But I
never missed them.  

-Lucian