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From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: "Of Forms Unknown" and allegorical gunk
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Date: Fri, 6 Dec 1996 20:27:52 GMT
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In my comments, I wrote:

> [Of Forms Unknown]
> Perhaps I am jaundiced, because I know exactly what I was intending with
> _So Far_ (and "Weather"), so I know what went into them. Unfortunately,
> not much seems to have gone into "Forms", in spite of an apparently
> allegorical cast to the ending. But this wasn't backed up by anything in
> the game. Did I miss anything? I can only judge from what I saw, so I must
> judge it not very good. 

And other people have said similar things. So, aside from being smug 
that my game worked (and being bitter because I have no social life), 
what can I say about this topic?

(I'm really talking about _So Far_ and "Weather" in this post, not "OFK" 
specifically. It's just a good segue.)

Well, first, I tried to make the individual scenes interesting. People 
aren't going to go all the way through, much less look for hidden levels 
of meaning, if the game isn't cool on the literal level. The scene with 
the kid in the metal world got to people. I'm happy with that; it has 
nothing to do with what I intended when I designed it.

I did, however, try to keep The Theme stitched into every single scene of
_So Far_. This is the tricky part, and not necessarily obvious on the
surface, but I think it's what led to a game that produced such a
gratifying amount of discussion and analysis in the newsgroup. It's also
maybe what people felt was missing from "OFK". (Yeah, so I lied.)

What I did was, from the beginning, have The Theme in mind. (No, I'm not 
going to say what it was -- but yes, I'm going into more detail now than 
I have before.) From before the beginning, really. The genesis of _So 
Far_ was a single actual event. I wanted to get that experience into a 
game, so I came up with a scene -- the ending scene of the game -- that 
felt the same to me as the event.

Now of course this scene by itself doesn't convey jack to anyone else. It 
feels right to me *because* it reminds me of how I actually felt in the 
real situation. So I have to put in more information. 

So my sneaky trick is, I'm not going to actually tell the player what the
metaphors mean. Instead, I'm going to make a whole bunch of *apparently 
unrelated* scenes, all of which express parts of the same experience. Not 
even necessarily the same parts. Events leading up to the "final scene", 
events after it, particular thoughts I had at the time. Sometimes they 
show up as puzzles, sometimes as solutions, sometimes as background 
scenery.

But the point is, there's still an underlying coherence. It's not
something I *designed*, but I'm trusting that it's really in there,
because all these pieces ultimately come from the same part of my life.

Of course, really I'm simplifying the situation. There was not only the 
central event of _So Far_, but the Theme per se, which was an image that 
I came away from the event with; both wound up stuck into the game, in 
different ways. And there are other hidden levels as well. I wrote a lot 
of background to the home world of _So Far_'s protagonist; only a couple 
of details made it into the game. (I meant to put in more, but these 
things have a life of their own.) Some things came straight from my 
subconscious, and only later explained to me what they meant -- the 
teeming silent crowds, for example.

And since real life never resolves nicely into anything, the ending of 
_So Far_ isn't all that neat and clean either.

There. That's how I did it. Pretty much the same applies to "A Change 
in the Weather", except that that was simpler.

This is not the only way to write a "deep" game. I'm half-convinced that 
it's a dead end, in fact, because I can only use this technique to write 
about myself! I have no idea how to write about protagonists who are not 
me -- much less other characters. Future works will probably be 
experiments in different directions entirely.

--Z



-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."
