This interests me a lot! In my AMFV pieces (sorry to keep bringing them up), I referred to the “destabilizing effects of agency.” One of the reasons I think games are their own art form (i.e., not literature) is that the player seems to take on a secondary authorial role. I think the game studies people have some approaches to this, but I haven’t gotten up to speed yet. In the “transcripts” provided with RTE, the game is written by an “author,” but the “player” decides which content the reader of the transcript will experience.
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To add another example to this conversation:
I always thought that the player character in the Zork games (like a lot of early IF) was a featureless vessel for the player to identify with, devoid of characteristics like gender. Spellbreaker, for example, goes to some trouble to avoid ever referring to the player character or their “shadow” with gendered pronouns. The player is free to imagine their avatar as male or female or neither as suits their whims.
It was pointed out to me recently that this isn’t actually true. There’s a particular failure message you can get in Zork III that makes it clear the player character is a “he”. This is information that was entirely available to me when I played Zork III; I just happened to not end up in that failure state, so I never saw it.
In this scenario, what are your thoughts on a player like me thinking of the adventurer as a woman, never having seen that one message?
The intent later (in Spellbreaker) was clearly to leave the protagonist ungendered; maybe that was the intent in Zork too, and Blank and/or Lebling just slipped up and used a male pronoun in this one message. Or maybe that intent was only established in the later games. How much does canon dictate here?
(Bonus question: what if a later Zork game stated outright that only men are allowed to be adventurers and explore the GUE? How does that change the situation?)
EDIT: Or for a more concrete bonus question, if Beyond Zork goes back and states explicitly that the protagonist of Spellbreaker was male after that game went to great lengths to leave it ambiguous, what does that mean?
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Oh! Huh! 
I’m guessing this paradox isn’t in play when the author happens to include these plot elements in the sequel, independent of audience feedback? Like, these elements were going to be brought up anyway?
I mean, AMFV is a pretty major piece of IF, there is a lot that can be examined in it, and your pieces are something you can reference as useful and knowledgeable examples for the conversation, so no problem!
This reminds me a lot of Freeman’s Mind, where someone wrote an entire story with an excellent character by using the structure available in Half-Life gameplay.
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I should also mention, I have no formal training in literary analysis and haven’t taken a class on it since high school. I may be bringing up ideas that are already well-known and well-settled in the field. But I do think it’s interesting that a bit of the text can be “hidden” so much more in IF than in a book. Most readers of a book at least glance at every word, but plenty of Zork III players might never fail that specific puzzle in that specific way to prompt the message in question.
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I think that’s a really productive line of inquiry! In your example, a player can have a complete, comprehensive experience with the games without ever encountering information about the protagonist’s gender. I think that player’s interpretation of gender in the Zork saga is completely valid. That’s their experience.
I also think it’s entirely reasonable to resist a characterization of the protagonist as male. A player might find the Adventurer’s gender at odds with the rest of the text. I’d be very open to such an interpretation, personally (also, see below).
My concern as a person who knows about the Zork III message is that I want to hold Infocom accountable for their limited conception of “anyone” in a situation where the protagonist can supposedly be anyone. That’s down to Infocom, though, not the player.
For the past couple of months, I’ve been trying to build a case for considering the Zork and Enchanter trilogies as a standalone story separate from Beyond Zork, Zork Zero, Nemesis, and the like. So I’m completely comfortable deciding which games are part of my framework and which aren’t. Readers were not open to it at first, but people seem to be warming up to it!
As a side note, isn’t Beyond Zork the place where the Enchanter is referred to as male? BZ doesn’t play a role in my analysis of the Enchanter games. Unless I’ve forgotten something, that just leaves Zork III to deal with.
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I’ve never actually played any of the later official Zork games (just the original trilogy, the Enchanter trilogy, and various fan-made games) so I’m afraid I can’t say on that front. But if one of the later games does straight-up say the Enchanter is male, after Spellbreaker tried to leave it ambiguous, that serves as a perfect example for my hypothetical.
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Yep, that’s exactly what happened.
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George Lucas is a spectacularly unreliable source for interpreting Star Wars. I think he’s a pretty good indicator of why authorial intent doesn’t ultimately matter. He monkeyed with the original trilogy several times, changing details seemingly at whim. To interpret them at all, you first have to pick a version to interpret.
Then there’s the prequel trilogy. Oh boy! He claims he had this stuff all planned out, but contradicted himself about the details in interviews over the years. When he was finally able to actually produce these movies, he undermined a lot of the themes of the original trilogy and made certain characters and concepts less compelling than they originally were. It does the original trilogy a disservice to consider the prequels when interpreting them. Which isn’t to say the prequels can’t be enjoyed on their own, they just aren’t cut from the same cloth as the originals (even though the same mind dreamed them up).
The Disney installments weren’t even made by the same people as the earlier films, so why should the intent of those creators have any effect whatsoever on what I think of the original trilogy? It’s fine for other creators to play in the sandbox Lucas created. I can enjoy those movies. But they don’t change what I think of the original trilogy at all.
I’m also not a stickler for continuity so long as the movie is entertaining (X-Men franchise, I’m looking at you), and tend to avoid conversations about what fans think is “canon.”
EDIT: I’m also a very casual Star Wars fan, don’t kill me.
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Just to clear the air, I understood that you were commenting in earnest and didn’t mean to imply otherwise. I just felt like I and some of the other people in this thread were talking past each other on a fairly fundamental level and that didn’t seem likely to change.
I feel like it’s kind of like how high schools still teach (a slightly updated variation on) the Bohr model of the atom—it’s dated but it’s simpler to grasp.
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First of all, ugh… that’s an ugly typo. That’s what I get for doing this on my phone. Secondly, thank for responding and taking me at face value.
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(awkwardly mumbling)
So obviously I’m just making airplane passes through this thread, but I feel like Pinkunz was originally trying to make a specific point, and felt like an established example was necessary to say “This can happen; I’m not making stuff up, and would like to take this scenario seriously, because it surely could happen elsewhere, in stories I’m not aware of yet”, and I think that a lot of effort was made to specifically disqualify Star Wars as a valid example, which disregarded the scenario he was originally trying to outline by proxy.
Yes, Star Wars is not perfect, and has had a chaotic development process, and it also probably did not match the scenario he was originally trying to outline, but that does not mean the scenario does not ever happen, and the original scenario—even hypothetical, if absolutely necessary—could still foster useful and/or insightful answers, as we will certainly encounter real examples of stories where this happens.
However, citing examples that people don’t readily know also runs the risk of derailing the scenario, because people might focus too much on “I don’t know what that is, so I’m not qualified to weigh in”, when the abstract scenario was what the focus was meant to be discussed.
Pinkunz can correct me if I’m wrong.
Anyways…
(crouches behind couch)
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I literally remember thinking “I’m going to regret this” when using Star Wars among other examples, but I was drawing a blank and my order was up, so I just hit send and have been trying to make it work since. Yeah, you’re pretty spot on.
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Y’all are in no danger of me going any deeper on Star Wars. I am simply not enough of an expert and don’t even know that I have an interpretation! Fun movies, though.
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Yay!
Happens to me a lot, personally.
If I try to bring up a scenario to see how the logic pans out, I’m usually met with “That doesn’t happen”, even when it does, and it’s just not something people see often.
So I try to use a known example, but then the conversation turns into how the example does not match the scenario I brought up, which quickly loops back to “That doesn’t happen”, and it makes it really hard to gain any understanding of how/why something works.
Anyway, this felt familiar, so I thought it was worth bringing up.
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I’ve probably also read this thread all out of order and skimmed through bits of it, I wasn’t trying to pile on anyone or beat a dead horse.
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RE authorial intent: authors do not always know exactly what they’re doing. I wrote a whole game that I later realized was largely informed by an essay I read, but I didn’t realize that while I was writing the game! My mother wrote mystery novels, and after my aunt read one of them, she said, “You named your serial killer after the kid who bullied you when we were kids!” and my mother had no idea while writing the book that she hadn’t just made the name up! So there are a million ways in which “authorial intent” is obscure even to the author. There’s no escaping the fact that art is always in the eye of the beholder. The author can intend all they want, but if the audience sees unintended connections to their own experiences, that’s always going to be valid.
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Yes exactly!! This is what I wrote in my Thematic Puzzles talk notes:
- All narratives have a theme of some sort, because they’re written by people, and we’ll put messages into any old thing, intentionally or not.
- Note that there can be - and often is - a difference between what the narrative is stating vs what the author intended to say.
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Canon should not be taken too seriously. It is rare for any significant body of fiction to avoid inconsistencies. Star Wars and Star Trek are overflowing with them. Comic books (and by extension their tv and movie offshoots) unashamedly revel in them: Just add another universe!
It’s bad enough with a single author, but if multiple authors are involved…that way lies madness.
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Real life has this problem too. Like, there are between two and three distinct Defenestrations of Prague, depending on how you count, which feels like the author not being able to make up their mind.
It’s not unlike how there are like four or five different versions of how Boba Fett got out of the Sarlacc, now that I think about it (I remember at one point Wookiepedia treated them all as canon, even though they were clearly different authors trying to get him out of his Return of the Jedi predicament. But the effect was that he kept escaping from the Sarlacc, then like tripping and falling back in, necessitating the next escape. Clumsy!)
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I’m now also thinking about the effect of different audiences on a piece of art. The ancient comedy Lysistrata is about the women of Greece getting frustrated with the ongoing wars, and resolving to not let their husbands have any sex until they vote to stop the war.
This is still funny to modern audiences—but the stereotypes behind this humor are totally different! To Aristophanes’s original audience, the stereotype was that men are rational beings not swayed by their emotions, and women are irrational and emotion-driven and thus always horny.
So the joke of the play is that the lustful, eternally-horny women have finally gotten frustrated enough to put politics above their own wants, and the men suddenly realize they’re not as good at ignoring their lusts and desires as they think. This is the core of the play, and it’s something that does not come across at all to most modern readers. The entire point of the comedy is lost.
When we’re talking about things like the protagonist’s gender in Zork, the MIT computer science department where the game was born was an extremely male-dominated environment. I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea that women would play the game wasn’t at all considered during the original writing. By the time of Spellbreaker, on the other hand, Infocom had become somewhat more egalitarian.
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