Let's Play: Jigsaw

Yay, progress! Shorter post since I’m on mobile:

Did we ever clear up the cloud leopard thing? Was this like one of our Turkish ICBM sites or something?

Re 1983 being closest to the brink, Nelson didn’t know how right he was - the Petrov Incident I mentioned upthread was that year, though it didn’t become public until 98.

Gotta be the Suez Crisis with that date.

I’m of the too-much-is-never-enough school, and I think sooner rather than later would better fit Drew’s Golmac schedule so I vote against delay!

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1956, Suez Canal?

Do the let’s play parallel, no problem for me.

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No idea, honestly. The snow leopard doesn’t actually do anything—a bit of experimentation reveals it appears at random in the maze, once and only once, and then disappears again. You just have to sketch it quickly when it does. So it’s probably meant to be an indication of where we are in the world.

But I’m not sure where in Central Asia would be launching an American missile over western Canada.

Oh, duh. I typed it out correctly and then mentally categorized it as 1965 instead.

For the moon, if this is about the moon landings, 1972 would specifically be Apollo 16 or 17, the last two missions. I wonder what’s more turning-point-y about those than 11 or 13?

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I’m for letting the two let’s plays overlap. I feel like it will be a synergistic energy, not interfering; people who start reading one and can’t wait for the next episode can look at the other thread. I think it could boost each other’s viewership. I know I was much more interested in this thread because I had enjoyed the Cragne Manor thread.

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Oh right, forgot that bit! I guess our English protagonist, unfamiliar with polar fauna, confused a lynx for a snow leopard?

(Of course if we were confused about that, I’m not sure how we would know for sure that bit of tundra over there is Canada. And now I think about it I’m not sure what flight path goes from Alaska to what’s presumably the USSR via Canada - seriously, look at a map projection with the North Pole at the center - so I’m going to stick with Turkey, which does have snow leopards and American ICBMs)

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It’s a bit confusing. An Soviet ICBM would fit better. Maybe he could delurk one more time?

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My current plan is to save up all my questions for Graham until the end. I don’t know if he’s still reading the thread or if he wants to comment on his process from 28 years ago, but there are a lot of points it would be fascinating to hear an author commentary on.

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The vinyl record is currently winning the vote, so we’re headed to—

Chapter Eight - Wish You Were Here

Abbey Road
A quiet London street with low brick walls and a zebra crossing: from time to time people stroll by in Sixties clothes. A tiled road-name spells out “Abbey Road”.

Not far from where you stand, a window of one of the buildings is slightly ajar.

Black leans against a wall beside the window, obviously waiting for something.

Black looks embarrassed for a moment, then whispers brief thanks for sorting out the snowscape debacle.

“Think nothing of it,” you are about to say, but the matter seems to be closed.

[Your score has just gone up by one point.]

Oh, I’m learning something new here! I didn’t realize Black’s dialogue changes depending on what other pieces you’ve completed—here is the dialogue I was expecting.

“Feeling better?” Black asks breezily. “Any hangover?”

You stammer some kind of hopeless excuse for your shameful behaviour on the dance floor, though it’s obvious that Black is amused rather than offended.

This indicates that Black is dealing with these things in the same order that we are—so the nuclear missile came between Paris and here.

The more important question, though, is: what’s going on here? Is Black going to assassinate the Beatles to prevent the British Invasion?

“I expect you’re wondering what we’re doing here,” Black says coyly.

Yes, actually!

> black, yes

“So am I, really. But Grad Kaldecki was a big fan of - Well, you’ll see.”

Let’s see for ourselves!

> look through window
Inside, four dissheveled young men with brushed-forward hair and no ties are picking away at their instruments - guitars and drums - and having a frustratingly uncreative time of it, for once. They are clearly beginning to annoy each other.

Black consults an elegant pocket watch. “August ‘67, I make it.”

Presumably the Beatles, though the title of this section is Pink Floyd, right? I don’t know much about classic rock. Were they working on something especially important in August? Sgt Pepper’s was May, according to Google.

“No time for that now!”

Black begins vigorously humming the tune of an old 70s classic, Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here”.

Ah, so Black’s evil plan is to give Pink Floys to the Beatles?

Black continues to hum in the most persistent way.

We can’t do that! That’s plagiarism!

> black, stop
“Shh! They might hear.”

That’s the point!

Black’s humming is annoyingly loud now.

Uh oh…

“Hey, quiet you folk!” says someone inside the building in a Merseyside accent. “Something’s… coming through to me…”

Black, what are you doing?!

Violence is not the answer, but maybe it’s necessary to preserve the course of history:

> hit black
Black looks simply too heart-melting there.

“How does that go again?” the voice continues.

Agh!

“Got it!” And the Beatles begin rehearsing their new hit single, sure to be number 1 by next month.

“Piece of cake!” says Black complacently, gently closing the window and then (in a mysterious fashion) vanishing clean away.

What have you done?!

You shake your head, confused. But at least the crowd outside are singing along to Herbie von Karajan and the Comets’ immortal “Hug Me Do”, and even if you do prefer Robert Dylan’s late string quartets it must be time now to go out, sing along and toast a brand new millennium.

*** You have wrecked the course of history ***

Herbert von Karajan was a famous conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, and Bob Dylan is (of course) a famous counterculture musician, so it sounds like music genres have gotten well and truly mixed up.

So we need some way to silence Black. Any ideas?

13.txt (6.4 KB)

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As I mentioned, this is one that I know the answer to, so I’m going to leave the puzzle-solving entirely to you. There are no animals or jigsaw pieces here: the only goal is to foil Black’s plans.

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What about a kiss?

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> x black
Black looks remarkably cool and self-possessed, exactly the way you haven’t felt for quite some time.

BENEDICK: Peace! I will stop your mouth!

> kiss black
Yes: there’s no other way to silence Black, after all. After a fairly lengthy clinch, you hear the band strike up “I Am The Walrus”. They are back to creativity. The decade is back on track. Hesitantly, you let go.

Black is dumb-founded, and will not meet your eyes. “Everything I do, you just -” but what is there to say? And so Black turns and (in a most mysterious fashion) vanishes clean away.

So much for the Sixties, the age of free love.

[Your score has just gone up by one point.]

While Jigsaw bills itself as “An Interactive History”, it’s also written as a bit of a romance: the story of these two characters’ paths crossing again and again as they try to leave their mark on history.

And while it’s not the first interactive romance*, it incorporates one element that is, as far as I know, groundbreaking. It’s the first interactive romance that does its best to never specify the genders of the people involved. This was an especially impressive feat back in 1995, when the definite “they” hadn’t yet caught on**. Nowhere in the game does the author ever use a third-person pronoun for either Black or White.

Commentators over the years have pointed out a few slips: since Graham Nelson is (to the best of my knowledge) a man who’s attracted to women, there are some places where the game inadvertently assumes White is male and Black female. For example, the British military didn’t have any female officers during the Russian Revolution. But the description of the uniform explicitly says it’s not a very good disguise, and cross-dressing is far from the weirdest thing White has done in this game, so I don’t really see that as an issue.

What do you think: is the effect successful? Does the omission of Black’s gender stand out in the writing? And have you been imagining them as male or female (or neither)? Personally, my mental image has vacillated back and forth, with their clothes usually standing out more than their looks.

Regardless, this is an effect that I haven’t seen attempted much in the decades since—more often, IF with a romantic or sexual element will either cast you in the role of a specific character, or have you explicitly choose the characters’ genders in the game (Infocom used both of these). And I find it very interesting to see how it’s held up now, especially with gender-neutral writing becoming more popular again.

Anyway!

The time window opens a couple turns later, and we can finally return to the Land. I’ve made a save there, so I can explore it properly in our next update (now that it’s almost entirely clear), and then returned to the Monument to see the footnote. (“The air is hot as a bakery” there now—this is definitely a change!)

[ Footnote a2: ]

By August 1967 the Beatles were lurching wildly from one project to the next, hardly collaborating, always arguing. They were just about to improvise a film - to become “Magical Mystery Tour”, but (pretending they could cope without a manager) it would not be a happy experience. Their company, Apple Corps, was in trouble.

A good deal of their music was dross by this stage, but still… “I am the walrus, they are the eggmen.”

Transcript and save, as always:
13b.txt (4.6 KB)
tmpland2.sav (2.4 KB)

And for you completionists out there:

a2

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The footnotes get their own post, because it felt like I was writing too much in that one already.

* Infocom dipped its toes in both romance and sex comedy, though without a ton of success. There were also a variety of amateur games that could be considered early AIF, and many other games that touch on PC romance without delving into it. Trying to avoid specifying the player character’s gender was fairly common in these, since it was generally imaged to be a self-insert of the player—I need to search to find the names, but I remember one early game in Jason Dyer’s All the Adventures project that lets you marry a prince, princess, or both at the end, and one of the Phoenix mainframe games has a victorious player free a cursed prince and princess, saying one of them proposes marriage but not specifying which.

** As opposed to the “generic singular they”, which has a long and illustrious pedigree predating singular “you” by a large margin. The real change in recent years is extending its use to specific, definite referents, either to avoid specifying their gender or because they prefer it over more gendered terms (as I do). But it seems the pushback against this new usage isn’t succeeding any more than the pushback against singular “you” did centuries ago.

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No new pieces this time, so our options are the same as before (though I’ll also be exploring the Land a bit more). Cast your votes here!

  • USAF plane (1954)
  • Cabbage fields (1941)
  • Moon (1972)
  • Canal (1956)

0 voters

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That’s a really cool bit of reactivity! But it makes sense to prioritize - Black is really the most important throughline to all these shenanigans and making them seem less like a robot has a significant payoff.

Would be a little late for that - the Ed Sullivan Show gig was early ‘64…

This would be Magical Mystery Tour. It’s got some good songs and helped cement the more psychedelic post Sgt. Pepper’s sound but it’s not an especially significant part of the discography - though maybe the idea is that’d be a good time to incept them into a different sub-genre.

This is kinda strange! I know nothing of music theory, but the melody from Wish You Were Here is quite lovely and a bit of a departure from Pink Floyd’s typical acid-rock sound of this (er, that) period, so just that by itself doesn’t seem like it would change history. On the other hand, it is a melancholy paean to a former band mate, so maybe the idea is that this becoming a major hit for them causes the Beatles to work harder to stay together, and their ongoing dominance of pop music through the decades is the turning point?

Seems right - as a result, modern music is divided between people rushing to riff off the Beatles at the expense of other genres, and people who’ve quit rock since idiosyncratic voices aren’t tolerated (surely a post Blonde on Blonde Dylan fleeing to classical music in disgust would revert to Robert Zimmerman, though?)

Ha, now that’s a puzzle solution!

I’d known this about the game going in, but I have to say, it’s come off successfully to me! FWIW while I’m a straight guy I picture both Black and White as men though I couldn’t tell you why.

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*Most of Infocom’s biggest games had male protagonists, you just had to dig for it (as in the Zork Cycle).

In those piggish old days, “self insert” generally meant, well, whatever had the most privilege. It’s still kind of like that, now that I think about it. For context, Jigsaw was released just eight years after we found out that the star of the Enchanter trilogy was male (in Beyond Zork).

I liked Nelson’s decision to leave it open in Jigsaw and found its implementation convincing, as I had the impression that the choice was made thoughtfully. At least, that’s my recollection. I played it long ago (1996, perhaps).

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Right, but if I’m remembering correctly, Spellbreaker goes to similar lengths to avoid using any third-person pronouns; the Guildmaster’s gender is only mentioned in a separate, later game. Similarly the Zork protagonist is never gendered in the original three games, only when they appear as “the adventurer” in Enchanter, and that could very well be a different adventurer.

It would have been far easier to use “he” and “him” in various places if they’d wanted to do that (like when describing your past self during time travel in Sorcerer). So I think they deserve some credit for not going that route.

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The adventurer is gendered in Zork III. Infocom was no worse than average, but I wouldn’t give them special credit, either. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that Meretzky was more committed than others (Though the browsie for Planetfall has a kind of ‘boys club’ moment).

push button
You experience a brief period of disorientation. When your vision returns, you find yourself in the middle of some kind of ceremony, with a strange flat-headed man wearing royal vestments about to break a bottle on the bars of an iron cage containing magnificent jewels. He appears somewhat pleased by your presence. He speaks very loudly, nearly deafening the poor civil servant whose duty it is to see that his wishes are carried out. “Aha! A thief! Didn’t I tell you that we needed more security! But, no! You all said my idea to build the museum under two miles of mountain and surrounded by five hundred feet of steel was impractical! Now, what to do with this … intruder? I have it! We’ll build a tremendous fortress on the highest mountain peak, with one narrow ladder stretching thousands of feet to the pinnacle. There he will stay for the rest of his life!” His brow-beaten assistant hesitates. “Don’t you think, Your Lordship, that your plan is a bit, well, a bit much?” Flathead gives it a second’s thought. “No, not really.” he says, and you are led away. A few years later, your prison is finished. You are taken there, and spend the rest of your life in misery.

** You have died **

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I always pictured both as men. Black always reminded me of David Tennant’s Doctor. I was surprised when the game considered me attracted to him; I thought we were just “buds”.

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Huh, I’d never noticed that before. That’s unfortunate; it’s quite likely I’m giving them more credit than they really deserve, but the gender-neutral writing in the Enchanter trilogy is something I particularly remembered. (And is the reason why Scroll Thief has an awkward passage asking you to specify your gender at the start—I thought it would be cool to have an Enchanter-y part where you summon an adventurer, and also a Spellbreaker-y part with a “shadow”, where the adventurer uses the opposite pronouns to the player and the shadow uses the same to emphasize the connection to you…but it never really worked.)

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Something that Maher and others mention is that Infocom didn’t really have a process for maintaining continuity. I think both Meretzky and Moriarty were surprised that nobody had a record of what had been said or done in the Zork universe. So some writers might have been cautious, while others might have made a mess of things.

I’ll stop derailing your thread now. :slight_smile:

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