Re: Losing your Grip (discussion) (LONG)

[dbs@mozzarella.cs.wisc.edu (Daniel Shiovitz)]

[Magnus' newsfeed is down with a broken ankle (more or less), so I'm
posting this for him]

> Programming stuff:
>   - Frankie asks, "Which sphere do you mean, the pile of spheres, or
>     the light sphere?"
> 
>   I'm not quite sure if I like this or not. I think it's an "I like
>   it, but let me get used to it" sort of thing. I'm also not sure if
>   this would be better if it was a personalized message for each actor,
>   just like the "I don't know anything about that." message is
>   personalized for each actor. The way it is now makes it feel vaguely
>   like it's just a retooled parser message and not real dialogue,
>   because every NPC does it in exactly the same way. On the other
>   hand, how many different ways can you ask for disambiguation?

You may remember that we had a longish debate about this last
autumn. Several people said that they'd prefer the NPC to ask the
disambiguation questions, rather than the parser. It's nice to see
this idea implemented in practice.

I must say that I rather like it, though I'm inclined to agree with
you that it sounds a bit too much like a retooled parser message. In
this particular case it's not too disturbing, but I can imagine cases
where it could kill mimesis rather effectively (I didn't find any 
such
cases in this game, though).

Perhaps it would be better to get a reply that sounds more like real
dialogue. In some cases, where the ambiguity doesn't matter too much,
the NPC might just leap to a conclusion (for example, if there were
five identical light spheres, Frankie wouldn't have to ask you which
of them you meant).
 
>   - >ASK FRANKIE ABOUT DSADSADF
>      There is no reply.
> 
>     >DSADSADF
>      I don't know the word "dsadsadf".
> 
>     This one I'm not so sure about. It seems to me that you should be
>     consistent, one way or the other. One way to maintain consistency
>     would be "Frankie says, 'I don't know the word "dsadsadf"', but
>     you easily get into stupid situations that way.

That would be a bit of a show-stopper to me, because it would make
Frankie sound like an I-F parser :-). The best thing would probably
just be to have Frankie say "Sorry, I didn't understand that," or
something like that. I'd imagine most Inform NPC's have an appropriate
response for the "not understood" case in their Life routines...

>   - >NAME THE DOG "Rex"
> 
>   Cool. (IIRC this has been done before (Zork 0?) but I haven't played
>   whichever game it was done before in.) 

At first, I found this a bit silly, like a gimmick, but after a while
I realized that being able to name the dog makes me care more about
it. This rather simple "gimmick" actually increases my involvement in
the game a lot...

>     (er... speaking of which, the head
>     _is_ daddy dearest, isn't it? This is one of the things I'm not
>     clear on) 

An alternative interpretation is that the head is Terry himself: he's
blaming himself for screwing his life up. And I think that the fact
that it doesn't matter what you do to the buried man (kill him, try 
to
help him, or just stand and watch) is a very deliberate point.

> Story:
>   - Hmm. When I started up _Grip_ and got to the big marble building,
>     I confess my first thought was "Oh no, not _another_ game about an
>     amnesiac wandering through an archetypal setting which is actually
>     Their Own Mind." But it got better. Still, I think fit 1 is
>     clearly the weakest part of the game; this is especially
>     unfortunate since, at least IMO, the purpose of the starting area
>     of a game should be to draw the reader in and encourage them to
>     continue, not to shut them out. 


I found that the first Fit drew me in rather effectively, perhaps just
because it's very well done, or perhaps because I didn't react in the
same way as you did - I didn't think "Oh no, not another one of
those". I don't know why. Perhaps it's because it's archetypcial
rather than stereotypical, or perhaps because the plot is rather
obviously not "You're an amnesiac, try to find out who you are". OK,
the introduction mentions amnesia, but to me this is much more like
the "the real world doesn't matter" feeling of a dream than the
typical "regain your memories" puzzle of much IF.

Or perhaps it helped that I haven't played "Babel" yet :-).


But apart from this, I can agree that some of the other fits would
perhaps be a better introduction, except for two facts:

1) It wouldn't fit in the story. There's clearly a progression here,
from the abstract to the concrete, and so on.

2) At least some of the other fits would risk turning people off even
more. Imagine if it had started with the "school" fit - the
originality police would immediately denounce it as Yet Another
College Game (tm). Similarly, the faery fit could be dismissed as
fantasy. Of course, neither of these fits *are* the standard college
or fantasy fare, far from it, but that's not immediately apparent.


Some points in your interpretation:

>      (fit 1) The grey man first appears, staring at Terry and then
>              vanishing. The relation of Terry's dad and the grey man
>              is, I'm positive, central to understand the relation of
>              Terry's dad and Terry, but I admit it totally eludes me.
>              In fit 3, the grey man claims to be a messenger from
>              Terry's dad, sent to punish Terry, but Terry has a rather
>              twisted subconscious and this may not necessarily be the
>              case. Sort of.

I have a feeling that the grey man is really Terry himself again. Or,
rather, one aspect of him - his superego, perhaps, or the destructive
side of him, or whatever.

>      (fit 3) The grey man (presumably) destroys the faerie palace and
>              imprisons the faeries. Not very nice, but then, neither
>              were the faeries.

(...)

>              - the grey man is not just taking his wrath out on Terry,
>                but also on the faeries. I'm fairly unsure what this
>                means, since the faeries seem to be anti-Terry or at
>                best neutral about him, not his friends.

Again, an alternative interpretation:

Faeries and other supernatural creatures are often interpreted as
symbols for the unconscious, especially for the primitive, irrational
parts of it. The faery fit is about Terry's relations to his own
creative aspects. Whether the grey man is an aspect of Terry himself,
or of his father, or something else, destroying the faeries means
destroying - or suppressing - a part of Terry's mind, a part that he's
trying to regain.

To me it seems like the main theme of the story is Terry's attempts
to get to grips with his own past, and regain parts of his personality that have
been suppressed for a long time. Straightening out his relationship with
his father is an important part of this; I'm not sure that it's the whole story.

> (This was not intended to be a review so much as a request for
> discussion. If it were a review, I would have made much more of an
> effort to point out the numerous things I liked about the game,
> instead of just the ones that perplexed me.

If you do decide to write a review, I'd be more than happy to publish
it in SPAG #14 (hint, hint).

Cheers,

Magnus


-- 
Magnus Olsson (mol@df.lth.se, zebulon@pobox.com)
------    http://www.pobox.com/~zebulon   ------
     Not officially connected to LU or LTH.