Re: [ANNOUNCE] New Inform Game - The Awakening

[gentry@my-dejanews.com]

In article <6pn9hm$idk$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
  tanstaafl@my-dejanews.com wrote:
>
> >>snip<<
> > >
> > >Additionally, I found myself not wanting to hit RETURN after "look in
> > >mirror"... :)
> >
> > I was vaguely curious how much of this game was purposely reffing
> > other games and how much was coincidence. For instance, this is kind of
> > similar to Babel. And the beginning scenes are *very* reminiscent of
> > Losing Your Grip.
>
>   Actually, no. The mirror scene is pretty much directly taken from the
> Lovecraft story "The Outsider" in which the protaganist has returned from the
> dead but doesn't realize it until they see themselves in a mirror. (And which
> they initially think is an archway leading to another room until they touch
> it.)  As for the opening scenes; they were not a deliberate reference to
> "Grip". I *did* recognize the similarity but nothing else I could come up
> with seemed to fit the game as well.
>

Given the fact that mud [birth, rebirth], rain [baptism, redemption], mirrors
[self-discovery, self-delusion] and so forth are archetypal images that have
been used in hundreds of movies and books and so forth since humans first
started telling stories, it's really inevitable that these comparisons are
going to be made. Lovecraft decorated his stories with archtypal images of
horror and alienness, while "Grip" was about hardly anything *but*
archetypes. The beginnings of "Awakening" and "Grip", I think, are not really
derivative -- they simply belong to a certain class of images -- like the
beginning of "The Crow," or the prison-break scene in "Shawshank Redemption,"
or even the prison-break scene in "Raising Arizona" (especially with the head
sticking out of the mud).

Same goes for the "Babel" comparison. Watch the ending of "Angel Heart" -- no
mirror, specifically, but it's the same thing. A familiar image. It's not like
we all didn't see it coming.

It doesn't matter how hard you try -- you will never write anything truly new.
The trick is to write an old thing well enough to make it *unique*.


--
--M.

-----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==-----
http://www.dejanews.com/rg_mkgrp.xp   Create Your Own Free Member Forum