Captain Graybeard’s Plunder by Julian Mortimer Smith
To my great surprise, this game is not an unofficial sequel to Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder; indeed, it is in no way in the possibly emerging genre of Verdeterre-likes. Rather, it is the story of a pirate who has lost his ship in a fight long ago, and who now dreams of revenge. More or less literally: instead of exacting revenge, which would be impossible anyway, he studies his cherished works of classic literature (all of them written long after the age of pirating initially described, but no matter) in order to compose a literary revenge – a story in which his fantastic ship and crew and hand easily achieve victory.
This is charming, short, and perhaps that’s where I should leave this. Or perhaps I should just praise the game’s obvious love of literature and leave it there. But something bothers me about the game, and of course I can’t resist the temptation to try putting that into words.
Initially, what I felt put off by was the moralistic tone of the ending. Yes, yes, reading is a nice and safe pleasure, it doesn’t incite to violence – that was already clear to me, no need to spell it out. I don’t like explicitly spelled out morals in general, but it seems doubly out of place in a game that explicitly engages with – and indeed quotes – such a transcendent work of art as Moby Dick.
But then I realised that there was something much more bothersome going on. Captain Graybeard’s Plunder tells the story of a man who uses works of great literature in order to construct wish-fulfilment fantasies. For him, literature is just escapism. It doesn’t make him reflect on his own life and times; at no point, for instance, does he wonder whether his own lust for vengeance is anything like Ahab’s lust for vengeance. Indeed, he uses the books he owns in a purely utilitarian way, skipping over the ‘nonsense’, looking for the passages he needs. This guy isn’t reading literature at all! He is using it only as a means to his own psychological end. And then we get the saccharine moral at the end.
Possibly this is precisely the point that Smith wants to make. But one feels rather that there is a fundamental mismatch between the love of literature that is being sold, and the frame story in which this selling is to take place.