Iron ChIF: Pilot Episode (Audience Commentary)

[Dissolved]

@AmandaB

Alabaster is all riffing off of Snow White, and there are serious lessons about the evils and depredations of female vanity there (but not about trusting a gang of strange men, oddly). Whether or not those lessons surface in the various parts of Alabaster, they’re there in the source material. I played Alabaster too long ago to remember it well. I wrote a game-- Fairest– riffing off of many fairy tales, and mine certainly employed a heavy-handed moral lesson, because I wanted it to be a fairy tale in and of itself.

Surely you can riff off the broad category of fairy tales in general, then, without being a fairy tale in the heavy-handed moral sense?

I wouldn’t say Alabaster has the same moral lessons as Snow White due to the perspective flip and due to being morally greyer? Having played it more recently, I wouldn’t say you couldn’t extract moral lessons if you wanted, but it’d feel interpretive to me and would likely be something like “you ought to think through the consequences of your solutions to problems before implementing them”.

@improvmonster

this might also be a good time to mention dialog’s linguistic trait predicates, an extensive collection of predicates that take into account an object’s gender and number and markedly simplify pronoun usage.

we’ve already seen (the $Obj) and (The $Obj). there are many others, such as (a $Obj), (An $Obj). some mark possession such as (its $Obj) (expands to ‘its’ ‘their’ or ‘your’), some mark verbs - (is $Obj) will become ‘is’ ‘are’ ‘are’.

so something like:

(That $Obj) (has $Obj) (its $Obj) faults.

will turn into anything from:
‘THAT couch HAS ITS faults’ to ‘THESE lobsters HAVE THEIR faults’ simply based on what $Obj is bound to.

So kind of like TADS message parameters?