Well that’s just the perfect response to shatter my hand wringing self pity. It came from the Internet you say? Perhaps the Internet can alleviate all my self respect issues! Imma post an emotional video to YouTube!
8 Likes
wow wow wow! thanks so much for fully engaging with the entire text of Repeat the Ending.
I’m blown away.
10 Likes
The Roads Not Taken by manomanora
Played: 4/16/23
Playtime: 30min, 3 cycles
This one was an interesting experiment: implementing a parser interface into the historically link-select driven Twine. The presentation was very attractive, the clean font, blue on black graphics were unique and sharp. It was also quite well written. The story conveys a coming of age ceremony in some unspecific post apocalyptic future, maybe not even with humans. You are pretty limited to surveying the ceremony’s location, minimally attending (or not) the instructions given to you, remembering things, then making a choice about your future. The descriptive text is clean, conveying a lot without being showy or distracting. You have good latitude to engage or ignore details, depending on your mood.
As a proof of concept, I would call it a success, but as a polished for play feature, a few burrs to buff off. There was a hint mode, which I think turned interesting nouns bold but don’t think the feature actually toggled so I still don’t know if I was playing in HINT mode or not. Despite being told I could use N/S/E/W navigation, only one direction seemed to be implemented. This was consistent with the scenario setup, but an odd thing to advise when invariably I got “cannot go that way” responses.
Again, not sure if HINT mode is to blame, or a legit design choice, but I found if I typed bolded text, I almost always got something interesting. Begging the question, “This is different from link-select how? More work?” Now it wasn’t ONLY that. I found non-bolded nouns that had interesting descriptions too. And a lot that were “can’t do that.” Occasionally, I needed to enter a hidden noun or verb to make progress. It wasn’t awful, the text gave enough info to trial and error, but it seemed inconsistent. HELP also sometimes provided additional guidance, and sometimes didn’t.
I think the thing that grieved me the most though, was the scrolling. The game warns you of this artifact, but knowing Broccoli tastes bad doesn’t change the eating experience. (Yes, I am not content to tick off cat lovers, I must resurrect earlier Quixotic battles as well!) The text window frequently is too small to contain all the text you add to it through command responses. It does not scroll however, you have to do that. If you are really unlucky, there aren’t even any visual cues that your command had an effect, so you may not KNOW to scroll. It added a good bit of friction to the experience, bouncing between text box and scroll window. Auto-scroll is easily the top priorty UI To Do. Being told you can type “scroll down” feels like a bit of salt rubbing, when the code could have just invoked that function for you!
All that summed up to a UI that never quite disappeared into the background, and perhaps colored my responses to the text. Which itself was crisp and clean and friction free (a bigger compliment than it sounds). You get a lot of background, character, setting, and then you are told to make your choice. I think I did 3 cycles, and all of them were bad endings! I might have done more, but the game did not allow UNDO, and provided no FF feature to arrive at the decision point again.
As much as I belabored the UI above, I think my net takeway was positive. Certainly, the text itself was seamless and propulsive. It was the ending, and interpolating the message behind it, that pushed at me the hardest here. At my most generous (and discounting a dramatically DIRE ending), it seems to resonate with the title in the sense that given a single impactful, no-return choice, we are doomed forever to an unanswerable “what else should I have done?” That is an interesting statement, but only works if you don’t take ALL paths. Which I didn’t. Good job me!
If I had though, then I would have to grapple with the author’s statement on the universe of outcomes. The alternatives are either that all choices are in fact bad, or that there are good ones but you have no way of predicting which they are. These are unconvincing artistic statements to me in general, and the text did not try to convince me otherwise. I already rebel at the assertion that any one choice can be so life-defining. (Well, barring that dire ending. I do get that.) These assertions run aground against my fundamental belief that life is long and varied, and all but the worst decisions redeemable, mitigable or minimizable over time. Especially decisions whose consequences are so arbitrary, meaning agency and intent are effectively nullified. While acknowledging the world is not ours to control, I can’t help but feel our responses to that world ARE. At least to some extent. TRNT, I respectfully disagree!
So all that said, I do think the trail this game blazes, of adding parser capability to Twine, is a pretty cool one. I could see future efforts leveraging the expanded interface to good effect. It is this game authorship achievement that I find most compelling here, and that is where I land on Spice Girl.
Spice Girl: Sporty Spice
Vibe: Social Sci-Fi
Polish: Rough
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I’d fix the auto scroll first, then scrub the UI in general for friction. I think there is an interesting mix in here, of combined parser/click input, worth playing around to refine.
TheRoadsNotTakenTranscript.txt (1.3 KB)
5 Likes
Thank you JJ for the review! I was really looking forward your take on my silly little experiment.
And for the transcript!!! 
This was on by default. If you saw bolded words parsed in the text, then it was on. There was an extra setting to make those bolded words more obvious by choosing a different colour.
That’s been on the top of my list to fix, but haven’t found the right way of fixing it just yet (I think I need to change the page formatting altogether first). And I hear you on getting a quick return to last choice for the Endings.
I’m pretty sure quite a bit of the friction you had with commands had to do with me having to cut stuff for time [I pretty much entered the festival on a whim 
] and me trying to make a gameplay that I am really bad at as a player (I think it showed a bit in the possible command used).
I’m glad you still enjoyed it
Zig-a-zig ah 
EDIT: I’ve just sent a new version to Brian (should be online on itch now in the meantime), the scrolling has been fixed! (
it should work as intended) and the going back to the last passage choice too!
8 Likes
The Mamertine by K Vella
Played: 4/18/23
Playtime: 45min, died same way 4 times, caught in same unwinnable state 4 times
Here’s something I knew nothing about before Thing23: Mamertine. For weeks, when I read it in the list, I rhymed it with “Hammer Time,” and mentally included the distinctive musical sting. I am still enamored of that reading, tbh. According to the Internet WHICH NEVER LIES, Mamertine is variously ancient Roman mercenaries or an ancient Roman prison that housed the Apostles Peter and Paul. Seems this work is referencing the latter. One of the few descriptive blurbs on the work suggests escaping a cult which is a really subversive connection, if intentional.
The work itself has a tremendously attractive facade - the graphical interface design is slick, functional and appealing (standard taste disclaimers apply). The moody background music, effective. It implements a click-based parser of sorts, providing a stripped down menu of standard parser verbs, and highlights potentially relevant matching nouns when selected. You are effectively building parser commands with your mouse. It is a not unsuccessful choice! You deliberately trade command speed for guaranteed valid entries. My personal preferences may lean the other way, but this was as slick an implementation as I could hope for. “Why is this a back garden?” I asked myself. “Seems pretty polished.”
The narrative may have been a first clue: it was pretty bare bones. Hinted backstory of betraying a master landing you here, environs to navigate that presented more mystery than coherent story, an NPC much more concerned with their immediate surroundings than any background or table setting. Now this artifact is far from unique in IF, particularly in puzzle driven IF. Here though, the puzzles encountered were minimal and straightforward (at least partially an artifact of an interface that inevitably allows for exhaustive permutations if all else fails), so not the star. It kind of left the piece without compelling plot, story, character or puzzles. What is left?
And then I got to the game play. It opens with timed text, deliberately dragging the introduction. While I have seen timed text used effectively in support of artistic choices, without a compelling justification its use can easily become tedious. The game play itself harkens back to an earlier time, where death arbitrarily follows seeming benign choices. Where you can blunder into locations without crucial items and get locked into an (unacknowledged) unwinnable state. And I’m not sure you can achieve anything OTHER than that. I couldn’t. I made a good faith effort to restart and explore all location branches and that’s all I could find - death or purgatory. Maybe I wrote off the puzzle complexity too soon. Certainly there might be more business with the only NPC that could help me, but no clues guided me nor paths suggested themself. Not ruling out that I somehow missed a path (I didn’t actually map it out), but I did plumb my memory hard before throwing up my hands.
Which is where the lack of HINT/HELP systems became important. None exists here. I guess I am more forgiving of this omission in a Back Garden entry, but without that tool I kind of had to give up.
In the end, the star here was the pseudo-parser implementation, including the graphical flourishes. Those were pretty successful I thought! As a showcase of what the platform is capable of, it makes its case pretty well.
Apropo of nothing: CAIN’T TOUCH THIS! (doo-do-do-doot. yeeeah, yeah)
Spice Girl: Sporty Spice
Vibe: Maze
Polish: Both Gleaming and Rough
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If the engine were mine, I would focus on adding Hint/Help capabilities. That tool is crucial for a fully usable IF authoring system, as it is the surest tool to get players past brick walls, authorial or personal. If the GAME were mine, I would take a hard look at unwinnable state handling and engineer those out as best I could - or at least put the poor player out of their misery. And maybe also provide a walk through, pending the hint system release.
7 Likes
Thanks for the review! Yes, the game is kind of heavy on style and short on substance as it was hastily expanded from a test bed/tech demo for the VIBAE engine which I have been developing rather than being an intentional piece of IF. It is probably still quite buggy as well although it doesn’t sound like you came across any glaring bugs apart from dying more than once which shouldn’t be possible in a single playthrough.
spoilers
On the death screen you should see a link ‘try again?’ which should lead you to via another passage back in time to the Elephant Room. From here it should not be possible to take the wrong turn and die again, but if that did happen it is definately not intentional. I can’t say that this scenario has been thoroughly playtested so it could be possible.
Regarding being stuck, i assume you made it to the Shrine Room and got no further? My playtester did end up stuck here. Bad design on my part really. If I had not run out of time to work on it I would have implimented some way of pushing the player forward though this section. As it is there is a very (perhaps excessively!?) cryptic clue in the dead end corridor beyond the Shrine Room. The carving on the wall (two snakes in circle eating each other’s tails with an eye in the middle) is imploring you to look again (at the statue).
Regards the arbitrary death from seemingly benign choices (choosing the wrong direction) I admit is a bit of a meme rather than a solid bit of game design. In many of Steve Jackson’s Fighting Fantasy gamebooks from my childhood (I’m old!) you can die without warning from choosing the wrong path and generally if there is a choice between right and left you should pick the right hand path. In The Mamertine the directions are merely reversed. By today’s game design standards this is probably unacceptably cruel to the player but it is there anyway as a sort of homage to those gamebooks. You do get a hint if you examine the poster in the Elephant Room though - ‘by sinister turn one shall pass…’
I agree that there should have been more hints. I guess one way to do this with the engine as it stands is via the Journal mechanic. When there is a new unread journal entry the Journal button should be flashing. Admittedly this might be easily overlooked by a player.
5 Likes
Mirror by Ondrej Odokienko and friends
Played: 4/18/23
Playtime: 30 min, all 4
An IF anthology! I LOVE that idea! (Notwithstanding from a certain remove Spring Thing itself is a functioning anthology.) This seems to be an umbrella release of 4 new-to-authoring student projects. Packaging together is a great move, as they are too slight to stand on their own, but that compactness is a strength in anthology format. Particularly since the common “use mirror somehow” prompt gives a unifying theme that still elicits maximum individual creativity.
In that spirit, I am changing my approach here, each substory will get a “Marketing Blurb” “Great” “Learning” and “Notable” reading.
Mirror by Mihi:
Blurb: “You’ve won the lottery, plan a trip! Wait…”
Great: Really liked the prioritized tasks/choices after the lottery - fun in specificity.
Learning: Choices that immediately reconverge are not choices! Easy to code, not too fun to play.
Notable: Leans more into the fiction than interactive, with legit narrative twist!
Mirror by Liliane:
Blurb: “If a mirror is a portal, it is a fragile, unforgiving one.”
Great: Smoothly surfing the ST23 zeitgeist of “find all the endings, and make them WILD”
Learning: A score of ‘endings found out of total’ is a tried and true way to keep player engagment.
Notable: Loved the embrace of arbitrary, bonkers end states
Mirror by Filter James:
Blurb: “If this is your house, why is everything…off?”
Great: Embraces classic IF find/unlock/explore tropes, but at breakneck speed.
Learning: Arbitrary puzzles and deaths work when pace is fast, would be contentious in longer works.
Notable: Mixes narrative and puzzle play! Always a winner!
Mirror by Dr. John:
Blurb: “Where are you? WHO are you? And why is IXI so interested?”
Great: This had the tenor of an abstract puzzle, compounded by intriguingly enigmatic players.
Learning: If it was an abstract puzzle, a ‘reset’ capability is key to giving the player deductive agency.
Notable: If it wasn’t an abstract puzzle (I didn’t solve it), the fact that it MIMICS one so well is actually kind of funny. The kind of gag well suited to short anthology.
Spice Girl: A whole band!
Vibe: Anthology
Polish: Distressed
Is this TADS? No. Get on that teach!
Gimme the Wheel! If this were mine, I’d take the extra step to wrap these 4 shorts into a single Twine interface. Maybe as simple as introduction/table of contents. Maybe a much cheesier Crypt Keeper type host and intro, replete with groan-inducing puns. Honestly? Definitely the latter.
10 Likes
Yes, this is where. I tried every available verb on the snake, and thought I did the same to the statue, but maybe in wrong order?
Insta-death is not necessarily a deal breaker, especially when you are explicitly referencing the Good Old Days. :] The perceived unwinnable state is more vexing. The fact that it was not the game, just me, is in its favor (for the NOT MEs of the world I guess).
4 Likes
Blockquote Yes, this is where. I tried every available verb on the snake, and thought I did the same to the statue, but maybe in wrong order?
The first time you examine the statue you should get an extended description of it. The second time you examine it you should be able to see that it contains something that wasn’t there upon the first examination. Having this object allows you to progress beyond the corridor.
4 Likes
Write or Reflect? by Andrew Schultz
Played: 4/18/23
Playtime: 45min, did not finish
Man do I love how omnivorous this author is in subject matter, narrative interests, puzzle creation and platform engagement. If you’d told me ahead of time this was his next project my response would have been, “Are you kidding?? Where did THAT come from??” <pause, thinking> “Ok yeah, I see that.”
As is a my wont, a quick digression about ME. I have a long history with coding, starting from any number of BASICs, Pascal, Fortran, Intel and Motorola assembly, to C, C++, verilog, vhdl, Java, Javascript, BASH and Cshell, Tcl/Tk, TADS of course, and on… I am deeply unafraid of new languages which I condescendingly characterize as “where does the semicolon go?” Various programming languages come easier or harder, depending on how their syntax and operators align to my own thought patterns and algorithm organization. One language has long towered above all others as just GETTING ME. I speak of course of PERL, God’s Own scripting language.
As a Perl zealot, there is a special contempt for non-Perl scripting languages. Ruby, inessential. AWK, aimed at alien intellects.
Python. Sterile, pale, uncanny valley of scripting languages.
As a veteran of the Scripting Language Wars, arguably on the losing side (but the right side of history!), I have so many feels when I see Python. Boy do they surge when I need to fire it up, or worse, DOWNLOAD ADDONS TO A LANGUAGE I WOULD AS SOON PURGE FROM MY DISTRO.
Anyway, all that is inessential to this review, but was essential to my mental health.
WOR is a clever math puzzle, overlaid with a writer’s block simulator. You are given progressively more interesting rules about balancing writing and reflection, and asked to derive the variations (under the guise of ‘finishing a chapter’). Each correct variation you enter is accompanied by amusing mini-narratives about staying on task. Or not. I quickly got immersed, at first using fingers to brute force enumerate possibilities, then pencil and paper trying to math them out. This is my kinda fun! It did pull me down a rabbit hole of abstract thought, so much so that the choice to engage this right before bed was revealed to be a deep miscalculation. I found myself spinning on the same thoughts a little too frequently, blunt as my mental auger was. Reluctantly, I put it down. As I near the end of the ST game list, I think I’m going to leave it down so as not to halt my momentum. For sure though, this is the first I pick up, once complete. Holding my nose and wincing if need be.
There was either a few bugs, or a joke that went over my head. I got “New ideas form. They should be more specific, but I forgot to fill them in! This is a bug that I should fill in, in wor1[or 2].txt.” quite a few times. (Quick post mortem 4/24 - finished, was closer than I thought when bailed first time!)
Spice Girl: Sporty Spice
Vibe: Fun Math
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No. It is THAT LANGUAGE THAT SHALL NOT BE NAMED.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine? Re-implement in Perl. Obviously.
10 Likes
Stygian Dreams by Giorgos Menelaou
Played: 4/19/23
Playtime: 45min, finished
Maybe I should have done some preview reading at the start of the Thing. Just 12 days, not even two weeks, ago I jokingly said
5 Years? It was TWELVE DAYS!! Now I’m playing an AI-assist generated IF! Even the DARPA Grand Challenge took 2 years before self-driving cars completed the course.
The implementation is a hybrid click-select/parser set in Greek Myth. In practice I found that to be… pretty ok. It even seemed to handle my mischievous “click on link near top of page, after subsequent commands.” In practice the link acted as a ‘canned’ command for the parser, but did not preclude full parser input. My usual complaints with hopping input devices were kind of addressed here, at least addressed enough, and it was kind of… convenient.
The presentation was attractive, nicely evoking classical mythic art. That’s got me a little conflicted, tbh. Chokepoint Capitalism (ref. Cory Doctorow, 2023) has already transferred huge swaths of revenue from artists to rent takers/platform monopolists. Voice artists are under siege from AI audio, visual artists from AI artwork, now the extremely rarefied sector of IF?? We’re hardly a pot of gold waiting to be raided here! With that charged background I take no delight in saying: the art was pretty attractive and evocative. That’s how they getcha.
I take significantly more delight in saying the IF work shared a lot of shortfalls that beset pre-Beta human-created IF. I wish I could have transcripted it, but I understood the online interpreter to be required. There were lots of typos (a “fairly plan->plain corridor,” “later” instead of “latter” among others). There were many unimplemented nouns, including many samples of the evergreen “You are by the side of a river…” “>X RIVER” “You see nothing like that here.” There were issues with state awareness. After freeing Narcissus, the room description still had him mesmerized, but trying to X him yielded “not here.” There was some overwrought prose: a cave mouth described with fangs instead of stalactites.
Wait.
Did we feed the corpus of IF art to a machine, and it decided THESE THINGS WERE FUNDAMENTALLY PART OF THE FORM?? WHAT DOES THAT GO@^#$%#MN MACHINE THINK OF US EXACTLY???
Before I get too paranoid, I am going to attribute human agency to some key elements of SD. For one, the overarching plot is very much aligned with modern, revisionist Myth interpretations. From Broadway to video games there has been an impulse to infuse these classic stories with modern sensibilities and twists and by and large I’m for it. Why not? Cultural currency. We got a Winnie the Pooh horror movie, can’t wait to see the same thing done with Micky !@#$%^ Mouse. SD is very much in the former vein. (Not so much the latter, but I would also watch the crap out of an Achilles Slasher movie. “Andromeda, he’s not dead! Get him in the heel Andromeda, the heel!”) Don’t know that I was clamoring for a redemption arc for Narcissus but why not? On the other hand, its more generous take on Phaedra was nice. Cause man could that have gone a different way.
I think my favorite dear-god-I-have-to-believe-this-was-a-human moment came in an error statement. Instead of “You can’t do X with Y,” or “I don’t understand that,” I got “That’s -not- Greek to me.” I guffawed aloud at that, not the least of which because the piece is pretty straight drama otherwise. I swear to god if you tell me a machine produced that line I’m going to go full Kaczynski. (Minus the postal terrorism of course, Jeezuz.)
In sum, I found this to be a promising work. It suffered a lot of the issues that plague pre-release hand crafted IF, but none fatal. Its premise was neat and well executed. The story was contained and linear, but I understand that also to be a work in progress. Look forward to seeing where it goes from here.
Just keep the machine out of comedy for me.
Spice Girl: Posh Spice
Vibe: Greek Mythology
Polish: Rough
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I would institute a world wide pause on AI while we enlist our best thinkers to really plumb what it means for humanity to offload increasing amounts of cultural, technical and legal authority to inauditable, evolutionary systems. And for once, create guard rails and policies that keep technology in service of us, rather than letting clumsy, flawed systems run roughshod over the social order to keep enriching fewer and fewer. I mean, after I submitted this for a grade of course.
9 Likes
Hi JJ McC, I am really greatful for your kind and thorough review. I haven’t checked the forum for over a week, but I continuously share all the comments with my studens who really appreciate them. Liliane, motivated by her debut here, is actually going to try interactive author reading on a stand-up competition next month. As to Dr.John, I don’t know if I am allowed to post spoilers here, but I have no problem in passing the password to YOU. A really cool thing, this SPRING THING. Thanks again.
8 Likes
Kudos to you for introducing IF to a new generation, and so glad they found the experience exciting and motivating!
Lol, nuff said. <wink and secret handshake>.
2 Likes
Thanks much for the review … this was unfortunately a bit rushed and I thought I caught the bugs you mentioned.
The basic idea is that the auxiliary files wor1 and wor2 contain the game text, which gets shuffled quasi-randomly. So I thought I counted everything so all ideas were in place, but I didn’t quite.
Then I had tests but they overlooked things somehow.
If I find these holes, I’d like to give you credit!
Do you remember the chapter you were on when the bugs happened?
5 Likes
Turns out, the game output was still in my terminal window buffer! Attached as transcript. The wor1 error happened in Chapter 2. The wor2 errors happened end of Chapter 4, and Chapter 6. Because I CRUSHED Chapter 5.
jjmcc_wor23.txt (30.8 KB)
3 Likes
Wow, thanks, this is gold – and it’s great motivation to get some changes tested so I can get a new update up there, preferably before the weekend!
I had a PM that touched on some other things worth fixing, and between testing the fixes for regressions and just finding what’s going on in my data files, I’ll need to shift gears a bit but they should be interesting challenges.
3 Likes
Perl conversion won’t be THAT challenging… 
2 Likes
- an oyster feeling some sand in its mouth
2 Likes
Secret of the Black Walrus by spaceflounder
Played: 4/19/23
Playtime: 25min
A lifetime ago, I began my fascination with the pulp magazines of the 30s and 40s, and to a lesser extent the dime novels and serials of the 00’s and 10’s (the last ones). Of course Sherlock Holmes played in that space, he practically loomed over it. There are a lot of qualified charms to those stories that still appeal to me. Not the least of which is the purple prose that was a hallmark of so much of it, at least until John D MacDonald and his peers entered the scene.
In a handful of reviews, I have complained about what I called ‘poetic verse.’ I have NOT called it Purple Prose. This is deliberate on my part. While the majority of the world may not see a difference between the two I very much do, no doubt due to my formative fascination with pre-war low culture. My personal distinction between Overwrought Poetry and Purple Prose is that I really like the latter in an only semi-ironic way, while the former pushes me away. What’s the difference? I couldn’t really articulate a grammatical definition, but in application it seems to be one of stakes. If you scale a mountain to leap for the heart of a universal truth… and then fall short it is heartbreaking and hubris-revealing. If you bend over with dramatic flourish to brush lint off your shoes and stumble, that’s kind of funny. The contrast of high language and low stakes is near irresistible.
Secret of the Black Walrus feeds that beast. It apes the tropes and the vibe of Victorian mystery stories in creating an Asian super sleuth, then aiming her squarely at a locked room murder. The language does a lot to settle us in with bangers like:
"the freshest in our bloodthirsty city’s contemptible compendium of heinous crime."
"Bixby had a mind like a lightless cellar."
among others. If anything, I wanted MORE of that! No, it’s not realistic dialogue. Yes it goes out of its way to make its point. That IS the point! That overwrought energy is as much a hallmark of the genre as the Deerstalker hat. I fist pumped in delight whenever it showed up, and was sad when too many screens went by without. Shout out to the pastiche language of the thing in general. Even when too restrained for my taste it ably carried the vibe of its inspiration.
The mystery itself is nicely fit to its conceit, plenty of a->b clue following and twists and peril. It’s not particularly revolutionary but is a nice representation. Mysteries are tough in IF, particularly when your protagonist is a superhuman detective and the player is very much not. Walrus takes the tack of letting you point the protag in an investigative direction, but then letting her do the heavy deductive lifting. Nothing wrong with that, but in providing limited options that can be exhaustively selected it can take on the feel of a wind up toy. Yes, I periodically give it a twist, but all the motive energy is its own doing. I’m not saying I know a better way to do it, I’m saying these kinds of characters are uniquely challenging in IF (see also Lady Thalia).
I wish that those were my only lingering impressions of the work, but there is another heavier impression I carry. Pre-war pulps were deeply racist. There is an entire sub-genre called “Yellow Peril.” When I first engaged these stories, fandom approached this artifact as “awful of course, and kind of quaint in its ignorant hate.” That take itself has not aged well, and my (and society’s) tolerance has shifted significantly. There is an impulse when doing pastiches of pulp stories to underline the racism, as a way to show you are not blind to the faults of the form. This comment comes not from a place of condescending judgement, but of lived experience. I wrote some pulp pastiches decades ago that have aged REALLY BADLY. (I took it even further than Walrus. In a pre-post-satire world I thought the perfect takedown was to exaggerate for satirical effect, to drive home how awful it was. When all I was doing was creating more of it in the world. What was I even doing wading into that anyway? Was my big insight “Hey guys. Hey guys. Racism is BAD ACTUALLY.”??)
Thankfully, Walrus didn’t follow me down that ruinous path, but it did belligerently embrace the ‘don’t forget the racism’ impulse. At this point in my life, I am pretty convinced that just starkly OBSERVING racism (or sexism or sexual abuse or any number of awful things), without having anything to say ABOUT them weighs a work down. Especially when looking back from a different (and hopefully better) cultural context. If the narrative is a light lark meant to thrill or amuse, it is particularly defeating. I think there are defter ways make the protagonist uncomfortable that don’t unintentionally make the reader uncomfortable. Some complain about “woke culture” ahistorical racial diversity and acceptance in fiction like say Bridgerton. Those snowflake whiners somehow don’t care that the practical effect of what they champion is that wish fulfillment fantasy becomes only pleasant to the historically privileged. What are they defending here, the ongoing right to exclude people from WISH FULFILLMENT FANTASY??? If you’re not making historical documentary or pointed polemic, let everyone play! I am swayed by the idea that realistic racism has no place in a light, high society romance.
I am kinda done with “historically accurate racism” in pulpy detective adventures is what I’m saying. Didn’t mean to take this all out on you Walrus, but you stirred up some Stuff for me. I guess its good to know I can get spirited over things other than cats, broccoli and python.
Spice Girl: Ginger Spice
Vibe: Victorian Whodunit
Polish: Smooth
Is this TADS? No.
Gimme the Wheel! If it were mine, I would cut out most or all of the racial stuff, and replace it with MOAR PURPLE PROSE!!!1!!1!!
7 Likes
Thank you for your very kind review! I have a lot of thoughts about this (as I’m certain most of the readers here do) about discrimination in the subject matter.
Let me first say I agree with what you say: there’s a time and a place to discuss real-world problems, and Black Walrus is a silly fantasy mystery game.
I see your point and I largely agree. Most of us are allergic to heavy-handedness, even if we wholeheartedly agree with the point being made. That said, I think it can be very hard for authors to write about a real-world setting without also ending up with some of the baggage. I tried very hard to make Black Walrus fun and respectful at the same time. After the attempt, I’ll say this: it’s a tightrope walk, for sure.
Part of my reason for writing Black Walrus came from reading pulps from the era and thinking about a detective character who was the exact opposite of this. What if a character from that genre turned out to be the hero? I thought this would make a pretty interesting twist; not only does she have a baffling mystery to solve, but she deals with the challenges of being an ethnic minority—and a woman—in Victorian London.
My hope here is that this silly little game spurs some respectful discourse about the real people from this era nobody talks about. There really was a Chinatown in eastern London, before WWII when it was bombed to bits. A lot of the details of that story of have been lost, and that is a tragedy.
6 Likes