Was there supposed to be a link?

I found Shade here:

http://www.ifiction.org/games/play.phpz?cat=46&game=297&mode=html

I played it. Creepy. The lesson made me think of the movie Wargames.

ED

It's one of the assigned readings for Wed. (link on the syllabus).

Is anyone else being driven absolutely insane by Shade? I'm obsessed but still continue to get stuck in a loop. Unicursal labyrinth perhaps???????!?!?!?!?!?

I am very interested to hear (and see) people's reaction to Shade. I had the fortune of playing the game (the story? the text?) late in the evening, in a mostly darkened house, by myself. I think the setting added to the overall surreality of the experience.

I actually managed to play (again, that doesn't seem like the right word) Shade through to a conclusion. I don't know if there are any others.

I know one thing that would frustrate players not initiated to the likes of Shade or Zork or Adventure is the lack of or lack of perception of real-time. "Typically, the early adventure games were driven by user events only, and time was measured by counting the number of user moves. If the user did nothing, time stood still" (Aarseth 105). I'm not sure if I knew that myself in an overt way while playing Shade, but I did know that I needed to keep doing something and eventually something would happen.

If your puppet seems stuck, Melissa, just keep bumping around the labyrinth. Eventually, something will change. Interestingly, one of the possible actions in Shade is inaction -- you can "wait" and "time passes." The to-do list is also key since it is pretty much the only thing in the game that comes close to directions (or an algorithm).

ED

P.S. Matt, sorry about not paying attention to my syllabus. :)

P.P.S. I'm interested in the culture that springs up around adventure games, particularly the exchange of clues, hints, spoilers, walk-throughs, cheats, and ultimately frustration a game that spawns all the earlier stuff. Not to draw too much of a connection between ergodic and non-ergodic texts, but learning too much about a game seems like knowing the plot and ending of a story before reading the book. How does that change the adventure game? If you know of the one way to "win," how does that change the interactivity of the text? Does it limit exploration? Does it fix the text? (This is most noticeable with games like Adventure that have points, scores, treasures, and levels of winning.)

Ed, yeah, I finished Shade too. But Melissa's right... it's particularly unicursal for its format. Everything really has to be done in an order, and you have to finish everything on one level of the game in order to move out of that level. I found it pretty engaging and surreal, but frustrating at the same time. And I sent the link to a friend, who apparently got so pissed off that she kept ordering her avatar to die. "He wouldn't wake up," she complained, "and he wouldn't die, and it was obviously a dream, but I couldn't get out of it." And she's not usually immune to fiction... something about the format made her less able to suspend disbelief.

The hint culture is interesting... I was talking to Beth about it a little recently, about how people would share their maps in ADVENT so others could avoid the blind wandering. To some degree, at least in the early cultures, I think it's a weird question of cost and benefit... people took it on themselves to decide what parts of the game were too hard, maybe unfairly hard, hard enough that they interfered with gameplay (such as the Pirate's Maze... although really it's pretty simple for a maze of that type). Then they would circulate descriptions of how to avoid the onerous part in order to get on to the puzzle-solving. But of course hints were available for puzzles too, and eventually even the puzzles that were not all that hard.

Counter to the culture of hints and walkthroughs, there *was* a culture that thought it was ignoble to use the cheats for anything but the really boring stuff. It was an important formative experience to bang your head on the keyboard until it bled trying to figure out how to get the Babel Fish in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game (a notoriously tough puzzle), and it just didn't count if you cheated. Nevertheless, people kept trading in hints, and some walkthroughs for today's games are essentially novelizations, telling you every move you ought to make.

And that's something that doesn't seem to happen in non-cyber literature... the impatience factor, the desire to get to the end. I remember when I played Monkey Island 2 (hi Marc!), it took me two years. For the subsequent ones, I wasn't twelve so I was better at it, but I would also get impatient and look up a hint or two... *even though* I really enjoyed the experience of playing, *even though* I actually wanted the game to last. What game literature can offer that passive literature can't, that sense of discovery and relief when you solve a puzzle, can become addictive, perhaps.