Writing Program Five

Playing Game Hints
1

We played Writing Program Five™ at the SF Bay Area IF Meetup on Saturday, but it seemed like we may have missed something.

We found the CP/M console, which made it seem as if it should be possible to edit the pages, but we couldn’t find anything to do with it except delete files, create empty ones, and view them. (Seems like RUN END.ASM and TYPE END.ASM do the same thing?)

Did we miss something? The game’s description says, “The story has already been written. But you can change it.” Can we change anything?

We even tried running ed!

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I looked at the page source. There’s a HISTORY page that I think is orphaned, or at least can’t figure out how to get to. Other than that, either we’ve seen everything or the remaining content is pretty well hidden.

But I’d be curious to hear from the author sometime.

3

If you delete pages, you are changing it. If you re-run the story via TYPE Page2, you will have introduced more broken parts. It’s changed.

One of the narratives in the story is of being trapped within a program that has full control, and where you can cannot change things. You are, yourself, trapped in the same story. The only way to stop is to close the browser tab.

If you start playing, you are already overdetermined. The story has been written. And you can change things. But the only way to “win” is to never start playing.

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