Re: Legend's lessons for IF


27 Mar 1995 22:07:39 -0500

In article <3l752n$e6a@life.ai.mit.edu>, David Baggett <dmb@ai.mit.edu> wrote:
}In article <95085.041835MBS110@psuvm.psu.edu>,
}Mark "Mark" Sachs <MBS110@psuvm.psu.edu> wrote:
}
}[another insightful Legend message]
}
}more sense once you've played the other UU games. You could write a
}five-page spoiler file just on all the cross-contuity in the Unnkulian
}series. (Maybe I should have made an annotated version of the game?)

Yeah-- make those DOS-heads suffer

}Or the resolution may be understated for your taste. But there is a very
}specific and unambiguous climax and resolution. In fact, I was worried
}that the whole JC thing would be so obvious that it would seem hackneyed.

Calling him JC was something of a tip-off...

}I left other things open intentionally. What the Watchmaker ends up doing
}with the information you give her is another story entirely. You're
}supposed to be left with a simultaneous feeling of hope and dread here.

}And there is a definite story behind the bartender and Reb Glaz, but you
}have to ask the right people the right questions to find out what. This
}sumberged subplot tells you a great deal not only about the bartender, but
}also how Mare found out how to make JC in the first place. We'll proabably
}see more of the bartender in a future Unnkulian game.

Hmmm.. back to the game to start asking some questions. I have to
admit that I was playing it to win, rather than explore.

}One problem that (I believe) Mike Kinyon had with Legend when he tested it
}last year, and that other people commented on recently, was that he felt
}that he played only a tiny role in the outcome --- that his actions were
}largely irrelevant. I can see why this might be disturbing, but it really
}couldn't have been any other way. The story is not about you, ultimately.
}You're just a witness; the real protagonist is JC. You're at best an
}accidental hero. Your individual role must be tiny in such a gigantic
}conflict.

I think that's the biggest flaw in the game. I took a lot of actions
which basically seemed completely disconnected with the flow of the
game, and had no purpose. The game only moved forward in long tracts
of text with no player interaction. I, as Gavin, was incidental to
the story, but needed to take almost arbitrary actions to move it
forward. I couldn't even deliver the prune seeds to Grandma. I was
persona non grata throughout the solar system, yet no one was apparently
after me. I guess I don't like playing Captain Dunsel to JC's M5 (to
slip in a Star Trek Reference)

}It does disappoint me that people are having trouble sympathizing with JC.
}The climax is, again, deliberately understated, but I guess I went too far.
}I didn't think that such a monumental event needed any sledgehammer over
}the head explication. And I didn't want the story to have the kind of
}nice, neat wrap-up we always find in TV mini-series. In my mind, that's
}not the way the story ends. A lot more things clearly *begin* at the end
}of Legend than end. I think that if you witnessed the things that Gavin
}did, you'd feel no sense of closure --- instead you'd feel as though an
}epoch had just begun, messily --- chaotically.

No closure, certainly. But I think I'd just end up feeling confused,
rather than having any grand sense of an epoch beginning.