Having paid my dues talking about code yesterday, and as our competitors shift from the initial burst of brainstorming to the labor of building out their ideas, I’m going to retreat back to my comfort zone and take stock of what these games are shaping up to be about. We’ve gotten a fair bit of detail on mechanics and some solid hints about premise, but my favorite pieces of IF tend to have something to say – I don’t mean anything so stolid as a message or, heavens forfend, a moral, but the games I like best engage with themes, they connect their plots to their gameplay, they’re more than the sum of their parts.
On the challenger’s side of Keyboard Stadium, there are so many ingredients being flung around that the task feels like it hinges on identifying which are keystones are which are ornamental. Is Pacian weaving a fairy tale for us? I’m not convinced – as @AmandaB says, there are rules for such things, and the mere presence of a fairy isn’t determinative (otherwise Tinkerbell, who we’ve seen flitting about the thread, would make Peter Pan a fairy tale, and that can’t be right). With that said, we do seem to have two stock fantasy characters in Trala and Lind, but what jumps out to me from the few bits of description we’re given is how much they foreground relationships – and specifically, frustrated relationships. The fairy wants to be Trala’s Sancho Panza, but she barely notices us at all, while Lind keeps stubbornly avoiding falling head-over-feet for us, whether because of his eyesight or some other defect. Meanwhile, the fairy is literally tied to the stranger, who wears a disguise that works on the others but not on you.
Everything here has to do with perception, in other words – there’s no mutuality of focus, each character is a node on an interconnected, tangled web (I sure am using a lot of spider words here, huh?) that loops fruitlessly around on itself. It makes for an apt backdrop for a story where a communication device that’s notably uncommunicative, at least at first, will play a leading role. Is this a comedy, where all these illusions and misunderstandings will fall away in a climax where everyone sees each other as they are, with treasure recovered, marriages promised, and obstacles left laughingly in the past? Or a drama, where failures of perception are tragic flaws that earn punishment? Or some genre more recondite than those offered by this hoary dichotomy? We’ve got the pieces in place to understand what Pacian’s getting at, but I think we won’t fully know how they all connect until we see the climax.
Meanwhile, chez our Iron ChIF, we’ve gotten our first non-mechanical bits in this except from the opening. “Lone survivor of a spaceship crash seeks rescue” is one of the very classic IF plots, of course, but there’s some interesting texture even in these few sentences. For one thing, we’ve got a title – Endymion, who’s the lover of Selene, the moon goddess, in Greek myth; he’s best known for falling into an eternal, deathless sleep, for reasons that vary according to which particular version of the myth you’re reading (“Endymion” is also the name of one of the sequels to the classic sci-fi novel Hyperion, which is a sort of retelling of the Canterbury Tales in space, but I uh never got through the first one, much less the follow-ups, so if that’s one of the intended reference points I’m in the dark!)
We’re also on Europa, which has a mythological namesake too – the eponymous Phoenician princess was carried away by Zeus in the form of a bull, giving birth to King Minos of Crete and giving her name to the continent upon which she alit. You might recognize her from Titian’s Rape of Europa – “rape” in the ancient context was more about kidnapping than sexual assault – a painting that might be most famous for not being stolen, inasmuch as it was easily the most valuable thing in the Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum on the night when thieves made off with Rembrandts and Vermeers but left it behind.
But it’s probably the geophysical aspects of Europa that are most relevant for present purposes; it’s got a liquid-water ocean underneath a surface shell of ice, so has long been one of the solar system’s leading candidates for extraterrestrial life, though admittedly the plankton-y stuff most scientists have in mind probably wouldn’t have much in the way of human-comprehensible language! But per Draconis’ initial musings, those are exactly the kinds of aliens whose writing we’re expecting to come across – human-like ones who are ultimately understandable to us. Europa is frozen, Endymion is a symbol of sleep… perhaps there are aliens cryogenically suspended, and finding them will be our lonely castaway’s deliverance? If so, that would likewise be a standard sci-fi plot, but one that resonates with the other parts of the design: the journey from solitude to community, from ignorance to communication, would create a mirror between the narrative and the player’s eventual mastery of the alien tongue.
Plenty to chew on, and who knows whether this is all just idle musing? Even getting a marginally functional game up and running in the limited time our competitors have available is a challenge, all the more so given that they’re both going for nonstandard gameplay systems! So pulling together a playable, novel experience would definitely count as a success regardless. But I think both @Draconis and @Pacian have ambitions higher than that – and as far as I’m concerned, the harmonious combination of gameplay with story is the special sauce that makes a dish truly memorable.