Losing your Grip (discussion) (LONG)
Daniel Shiovitz
This post doesn't contain a lot of explicit spoilers but I'm planning
on rambling about the whole game, so don't read on if you haven't
finished it yet.
Anyway. So I figure (hope) enough people have finished this to make a
discussion worthwhile by now, because there's some points I'd like to
thrash out. I don't really have a good organized way to present them,
though, so I'm just going to put them down as they come; bear with me.
Programming stuff:
- Frankie asks, "Which sphere do you mean, the pile of spheres, or
the light sphere?"
I'm not quite sure if I like this or not. I think it's an "I like
it, but let me get used to it" sort of thing. I'm also not sure if
this would be better if it was a personalized message for each actor,
just like the "I don't know anything about that." message is
personalized for each actor. The way it is now makes it feel vaguely
like it's just a retooled parser message and not real dialogue,
because every NPC does it in exactly the same way. On the other
hand, how many different ways can you ask for disambiguation?
- >ASK FRANKIE ABOUT DSADSADF
There is no reply.
>DSADSADF
I don't know the word "dsadsadf".
This one I'm not so sure about. It seems to me that you should be
consistent, one way or the other. One way to maintain consistency
would be "Frankie says, 'I don't know the word "dsadsadf"', but
you easily get into stupid situations that way.
- >NAME THE DOG "Rex"
Cool. (IIRC this has been done before (Zork 0?) but I haven't played
whichever game it was done before in.) (Though doesn't this make
Marie's question later on about which do you prefer, cats or dogs, a
little odd? More about that later.)
- There are various other neat gizmos and stuff in the game,
primarily in fit 2-school and 4-rational, but I don't have
anything special to say about them. Mostly a case of "You don't
notice it unless it screws up"
Puzzles:
- There were quite an assortment here. We had solidly story-based
puzzles (ie, getting the syringe or the dragonfire), puzzles that
were purposeless with regard to the story but got my
crossword-solving blood up (ie, all the puzzles in fit 4-rational
or the machines in fit 2-school (to a lesser extent)), and
regrettably a few puzzles put in just to annoy the player (getting
the novocaine* in fit 2-hospital) (though this sort of
classification is rather rough; it's possible that with more
solutions, this puzzle would become more intuitive).
* Spelling due to a survey of ifMUDders. It's their fault if it's
wrong.
- Special notice goes to the orange crystal puzzle. Can anyone tell
me what the heck was going on there? I got the solution, but only
by accident. Later trials gave me a vague idea of what was up, but
I still don't really understand it.
Plot:
- Good news: _Grip_ is good about providing multiple solutions to
problems, in some places (especially in fit 3, when you're grabbed
by the grey man and again when you're hanging on the cliff, but
also stuff like the different ways to interact with the head at the very
beginning.)
Bad news: It doesn't seem to matter which solution you choose.
Whether I kick the head or dig it out, I still go through the
same personality do-wop with it (er... speaking of which, the head
_is_ daddy dearest, isn't it? This is one of the things I'm not
clear on) Whether I climb up the cage, let myself fall, or open
the cage to let the faeries out, I'm still too afraid to cross the
bridge.
- The division of the game into separate fits that we go through in
linear order was a good idea, breaking a sizable game up into
managable chunks. But that's a pretty standard technique. What was
especially nice in _Grip_ was having the interludes in between the
fits. This worked _very_ nicely in the lead-in between fit 3 and fit
4 (calling, for the moment, the bit with Jefrey and Marie fit 4
and not an interlude).
Story:
- Hmm. When I started up _Grip_ and got to the big marble building,
I confess my first thought was "Oh no, not _another_ game about an
amnesiac wandering through an archetypal setting which is actually
Their Own Mind." But it got better. Still, I think fit 1 is
clearly the weakest part of the game; this is especially
unfortunate since, at least IMO, the purpose of the starting area
of a game should be to draw the reader in and encourage them to
continue, not to shut them out. This weakness seems to me to stem
from two basic problems: first, the aforementioned (fairly common*)
archetypal in-your-head setting, and second, the extreme
difficulty of the puzzles. Well. Not all that extreme, I guess,
but it does seem to be hard for new players to score any points
straightaway, which is always a discouragement to someone just
starting.
- Another good news/bad news thing about _Grip_ is its thematic
consistency. Internally, all the fits feel very tight. The school
is a deserted school in every room, the faerie forest is
definitely a magical forest that has dragons and talking trees, and
yet also manages to pull off being the forest I hung around in
when I was six (eight? whatever). However, once you start
wandering between fits, it's not so strong. I almost hate to
mention it, but one of the things _So Far_ did amazingly well was
to have cross-scene consistency as well as interscene consistency,
or at least that's how it felt to me. The castles-and-mold area
really resonated thematically with the area with the silent
people, even though they were totally different settings, and this
let both areas survive in the same game. If you don't have that
sort of strong tie, then a game runs a strong risk of being just a
bunch of separate places stuck together.
This is not to say that the areas in _Grip_ are totally
disconnected; far from it. The most obvious example of a
cross-area connection is the dog (which I'm going to call "Rex",
because that's my Nethack dog's name). Not only does Rex appear in
all the fits, but there's also the tie that Rex physically
connects the fits by bringing your possessions along. Furthermore,
Rex provides an, um, _temporal_ connection by aging as the game
progresses, up to dying in the final climax (I don't suppose
it's possible to prevent this? Doubt it.) Also, there are the
funky pyramids and spheres and things that appear in both the
first and second fits, though, like Rex, they change from one fit
to the next.
But it seems to me games like this need a major link, not just
relatively small ones, and as far as I can tell the thing that's
intended to be that link is Terry's relationship with his father,
and that doesn't altogether work for me. It works well intrascene, in
fits 1-3, but on the whole, as an overriding skeleton for the
game, it doesn't work for me.
- It's entirely possible I'm missing something major here. The main
reason for this post (yeah, finally yetting to it with the last
point) is to see if someone can explain to me what's up with Terry
and his dad. If this fit directly into the classic model that I'd
assumed it did, the moral of the story would be something like
"ok, your dad was a bastard but you can't let it be an excuse for
fucking up your own life; you have to deal with it and move on"
And, to a certain extent, this is born out by the story. The
interactions with Terry and his dad that I can think of are the
following:
(fit 1) The head, buried in mud, which blames Terry for having
put it there. (assuming this is really the dad)
(fit 1) Rex was given to Terry by his dad.
(fit 1) The grey man first appears, staring at Terry and then
vanishing. The relation of Terry's dad and the grey man
is, I'm positive, central to understand the relation of
Terry's dad and Terry, but I admit it totally eludes me.
In fit 3, the grey man claims to be a messenger from
Terry's dad, sent to punish Terry, but Terry has a rather
twisted subconscious and this may not necessarily be the
case. Sort of.
(fit 1) The voice from the sphere, revealed in fit 3 to be the
voice of Terry's dad with cancer, which sends an
avalanche at Terry (to which he reacts by killing
himself).
(fit 2) We find out that Terry's dad forced him into trying to be
a doctor against his wishes.
(fit 2) The grey man says something for the first time, blaming
Terry for, essentially, selfishness and denial of the
outside world, either by disregarding his friends (fit
2-school) or generic needy people (fit 2-hospital).
(fit 3) Terry's mother dies. Terry is locked in his room for some
misdemeanor, but sneaks out the window. Later pursued by
his father.
(fit 3) In order to get the blood necessary to dip the laurel (a
victory wreath?), Terry has to trick his dad into cutting
himself with the knife. There is possibly a slight
attempt to suggest vulnerability on the dad's part
through his fear of blood, but it didn't work for me,
since the dad was so recently such an asshole.
(fit 3) The grey man (presumably) destroys the faerie palace and
imprisons the faeries. Not very nice, but then, neither
were the faeries.
(fit 3) Final confrontation with the grey man. A few points:
- note that the confrontations have been escalating:
first just a stare (fit 1), then the grab and the
lecture (fit 2), and here we have the attempt at
murder.
- the grey man is not just taking his wrath out on Terry,
but also on the faeries. I'm fairly unsure what this
means, since the faeries seem to be anti-Terry or at
best neutral about him, not his friends.
- I guess the grey man is _not_ intended to be identical
to Terry's father, else why would he speak of being
sent by Terry's dad and not himself? Furthermore,
Terry's dad appears later on, not dead yet, so by
destroying the grey man you don't destroy Terry's dad..
so who did you destroy?
(fit 4) As far as I remember, in a fairly inexplicable twist,
Terry's dad is absent for the entire fit. Slightly more
on this later.
(fit 5) Obviously, this is the big confrontation scene. Terry's
dad kills Rex, then there are three possible outcomes (as
far as I know)
- you get killed by him, and "lose"
- you kill him, and go straight to the end scene.
- you avoid getting killed by him but don't kill him, and
go to see your dad in his hospital bed before going to
the end scene.
(fit 5) (assuming you picked the third option) Your dad is lying
in a hospital bed, dying. He starts to apologize, then
abruptly disclaims responsibility for his actions. You
notice strings protruding from his wrists. If you examine
the strings, it turns out that the controller on the
other end of the strings is you; if you don't examine
them, your father apologizes before he fades out. From a
writing standpoint, this is incredibly clever the way
this last action can totally change the meaning of the
scene; but what does it mean in the big picture? I'm not
sure. Also, note the symmetry here: at the beginning the
head is saying "after all, you put me here". At the end,
the person on the other end of the strings is you. Are we
intended to take this as confirmation that _Terry_ is
the real villain here? Surely not! What little facts we
see about the dad suggest that he's not a nice guy, but
this closing scene seems to deny him culpability for his
actions.
I'm not sure what to make of all this. If someone else could, that
would be good, because if this part sags then the whole game does.
- Finally, fit 4. This fit feels odd for two reasons. First, because
it doesn't seem to fit in with the rest of the game. As mentioned
before, it's the only one in which neither Terry's dad nor the grey man
appear. It also feels a little weird because I wasn't sure who
Jefrey and Marie's questions are directed to, me-the-player or Terry?
If Terry, many of the answers seem obvious: Terry has a dog and
not a cat, so which do you think he prefers? If me, where's the
relevance. And speaking of Jefrey and Marie, who _are_ these people?
What are they doing here? Why don't they appear again (or do they,
in another guise? Are they your _parents_? Surely not..) Why, when
you give answers that let Marie "win", do you end up following
Jefrey's path, and visa-versa? This whole fit really feels out of
place in the game, and I'm not sure what the relevance of anything in
it is.
Ok, that's all I have to say. Everyone start talking now.
(This was not intended to be a review so much as a request for
discussion. If it were a review, I would have made much more of an
effort to point out the numerous things I liked about the game,
instead of just the ones that perplexed me. But even though it's not a
review, I'm definitely going to close by recommending that everyone
play it. It's a good game, even if it does confuse the heck out of
me. (Of course, no one who hasn't played it will read this, but oh
well.))
--
(Dan Shiovitz) (d...@cs.wisc.edu) (look, I have a new e-mail address)
(http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~dbs) (and a new web page also)
(the content, of course, is the same)
Jerry Kimbrough
On 2 Feb 1998 07:42:27 GMT, d...@mozzarella.cs.wisc.edu (Daniel
Shiovitz) wrote:
<snip>
> - It's entirely possible I'm missing something major here. The main
> reason for this post (yeah, finally yetting to it with the last
> point) is to see if someone can explain to me what's up with Terry
> and his dad. If this fit directly into the classic model that I'd
> assumed it did, the moral of the story would be something like
> "ok, your dad was a bastard but you can't let it be an excuse for
> fucking up your own life; you have to deal with it and move on"
> And, to a certain extent, this is born out by the story. The
> interactions with Terry and his dad that I can think of are the
> following:
> (fit 1) The head, buried in mud, which blames Terry for having
> put it there. (assuming this is really the dad)
I don't think it's him. The game notes that the head had a mustache;
I read through (I believe) all of the descriptions of Terry's father,
and I saw no mention of a mustache. I assumed at first that the head
was Frankie, for some reason. I'm still not sure who it is.
> (fit 1) Rex was given to Terry by his dad.
Wasn't Rex *supposed* to be given to Terry, but his dad never got
around to it or something? I thought that the description of the
appearance of Rex was something akin to "He looks like the Welsh Corgi
that your dad always promised you."
> (fit 1) The grey man first appears, staring at Terry and then
> vanishing. The relation of Terry's dad and the grey man
> is, I'm positive, central to understand the relation of
> Terry's dad and Terry, but I admit it totally eludes me.
> In fit 3, the grey man claims to be a messenger from
> Terry's dad, sent to punish Terry, but Terry has a rather
> twisted subconscious and this may not necessarily be the
> case. Sort of.
This is going to sound idiotic, but I think that the grey man is a
manifestation of Terry's subconscious; Terry *believes* that his
father was a bastard, until the "strings" scene. More on that later.
> (fit 5) (assuming you picked the third option) Your dad is lying
> in a hospital bed, dying. He starts to apologize, then
> abruptly disclaims responsibility for his actions. You
> notice strings protruding from his wrists. If you examine
> the strings, it turns out that the controller on the
> other end of the strings is you; if you don't examine
> them, your father apologizes before he fades out. From a
> writing standpoint, this is incredibly clever the way
> this last action can totally change the meaning of the
> scene; but what does it mean in the big picture? I'm not
> sure. Also, note the symmetry here: at the beginning the
> head is saying "after all, you put me here". At the end,
> the person on the other end of the strings is you. Are we
> intended to take this as confirmation that _Terry_ is
> the real villain here? Surely not! What little facts we
> see about the dad suggest that he's not a nice guy, but
> this closing scene seems to deny him culpability for his
> actions.
I read through this scene very carefully and decided that Terry was
seemingly making "peace" with his father; the strings being held by
Terry didn't signify that Terry was "controlling" his father, per se,
but that he was controlling his *memories of his father; that his
father was a bastard who forced him into things and beat him.
To be more clear; Terry went through his life believing that his
father was a asshole who beat him, chased him, and pushed him to
things he didn't want. Perhaps his father pushed him into things, but
at certain points in the game he shows a type of kindness. For
example, if you wait around in your house before cutting your dad, he
hits you, then looks shocked and mortified and apologizes.
> - Finally, fit 4. This fit feels odd for two reasons. First, because
> it doesn't seem to fit in with the rest of the game. As mentioned
> before, it's the only one in which neither Terry's dad nor the grey man
> appear. It also feels a little weird because I wasn't sure who
> Jefrey and Marie's questions are directed to, me-the-player or Terry?
> If Terry, many of the answers seem obvious: Terry has a dog and
> not a cat, so which do you think he prefers? If me, where's the
> relevance. And speaking of Jefrey and Marie, who _are_ these people?
> What are they doing here? Why don't they appear again (or do they,
> in another guise? Are they your _parents_? Surely not..) Why, when
> you give answers that let Marie "win", do you end up following
> Jefrey's path, and visa-versa? This whole fit really feels out of
> place in the game, and I'm not sure what the relevance of anything in
> it is.
I didn't see any point in this fit, either. I can understand the doll
scene (which I still can't figure out, BTW), but the "crystal" fit
seems to be a simple puzzle-romp.
In the finale, Terry has a choice of rejecting his father and
destroying all memories of him; of letting his old memories of his
father remain; or of remembering his father as he really was.
Then again, I'm probably wrong.
Daniel Shiovitz
[Magnus' newsfeed is down with a broken ankle (more or less), so I'm
posting this for him]
> Programming stuff:
> - Frankie asks, "Which sphere do you mean, the pile of spheres, or
> the light sphere?"
>
> I'm not quite sure if I like this or not. I think it's an "I like
> it, but let me get used to it" sort of thing. I'm also not sure if
> this would be better if it was a personalized message for each actor,
> just like the "I don't know anything about that." message is
> personalized for each actor. The way it is now makes it feel vaguely
> like it's just a retooled parser message and not real dialogue,
> because every NPC does it in exactly the same way. On the other
> hand, how many different ways can you ask for disambiguation?
You may remember that we had a longish debate about this last
autumn. Several people said that they'd prefer the NPC to ask the
disambiguation questions, rather than the parser. It's nice to see
this idea implemented in practice.
I must say that I rather like it, though I'm inclined to agree with
you that it sounds a bit too much like a retooled parser message. In
this particular case it's not too disturbing, but I can imagine cases
where it could kill mimesis rather effectively (I didn't find any
such
cases in this game, though).
Perhaps it would be better to get a reply that sounds more like real
dialogue. In some cases, where the ambiguity doesn't matter too much,
the NPC might just leap to a conclusion (for example, if there were
five identical light spheres, Frankie wouldn't have to ask you which
of them you meant).
> - >ASK FRANKIE ABOUT DSADSADF
> There is no reply.
>
> >DSADSADF
> I don't know the word "dsadsadf".
>
> This one I'm not so sure about. It seems to me that you should be
> consistent, one way or the other. One way to maintain consistency
> would be "Frankie says, 'I don't know the word "dsadsadf"', but
> you easily get into stupid situations that way.
That would be a bit of a show-stopper to me, because it would make
Frankie sound like an I-F parser :-). The best thing would probably
just be to have Frankie say "Sorry, I didn't understand that," or
something like that. I'd imagine most Inform NPC's have an appropriate
response for the "not understood" case in their Life routines...
> - >NAME THE DOG "Rex"
>
> Cool. (IIRC this has been done before (Zork 0?) but I haven't played
> whichever game it was done before in.)
At first, I found this a bit silly, like a gimmick, but after a while
I realized that being able to name the dog makes me care more about
it. This rather simple "gimmick" actually increases my involvement in
the game a lot...
> (er... speaking of which, the head
> _is_ daddy dearest, isn't it? This is one of the things I'm not
> clear on)
An alternative interpretation is that the head is Terry himself: he's
blaming himself for screwing his life up. And I think that the fact
that it doesn't matter what you do to the buried man (kill him, try
to
help him, or just stand and watch) is a very deliberate point.
> Story:
> - Hmm. When I started up _Grip_ and got to the big marble building,
> I confess my first thought was "Oh no, not _another_ game about an
> amnesiac wandering through an archetypal setting which is actually
> Their Own Mind." But it got better. Still, I think fit 1 is
> clearly the weakest part of the game; this is especially
> unfortunate since, at least IMO, the purpose of the starting area
> of a game should be to draw the reader in and encourage them to
> continue, not to shut them out.
I found that the first Fit drew me in rather effectively, perhaps just
because it's very well done, or perhaps because I didn't react in the
same way as you did - I didn't think "Oh no, not another one of
those". I don't know why. Perhaps it's because it's archetypcial
rather than stereotypical, or perhaps because the plot is rather
obviously not "You're an amnesiac, try to find out who you are". OK,
the introduction mentions amnesia, but to me this is much more like
the "the real world doesn't matter" feeling of a dream than the
typical "regain your memories" puzzle of much IF.
Or perhaps it helped that I haven't played "Babel" yet :-).
But apart from this, I can agree that some of the other fits would
perhaps be a better introduction, except for two facts:
1) It wouldn't fit in the story. There's clearly a progression here,
from the abstract to the concrete, and so on.
2) At least some of the other fits would risk turning people off even
more. Imagine if it had started with the "school" fit - the
originality police would immediately denounce it as Yet Another
College Game (tm). Similarly, the faery fit could be dismissed as
fantasy. Of course, neither of these fits *are* the standard college
or fantasy fare, far from it, but that's not immediately apparent.
Some points in your interpretation:
> (fit 1) The grey man first appears, staring at Terry and then
> vanishing. The relation of Terry's dad and the grey man
> is, I'm positive, central to understand the relation of
> Terry's dad and Terry, but I admit it totally eludes me.
> In fit 3, the grey man claims to be a messenger from
> Terry's dad, sent to punish Terry, but Terry has a rather
> twisted subconscious and this may not necessarily be the
> case. Sort of.
I have a feeling that the grey man is really Terry himself again. Or,
rather, one aspect of him - his superego, perhaps, or the destructive
side of him, or whatever.
> (fit 3) The grey man (presumably) destroys the faerie palace and
> imprisons the faeries. Not very nice, but then, neither
> were the faeries.
(...)
> - the grey man is not just taking his wrath out on Terry,
> but also on the faeries. I'm fairly unsure what this
> means, since the faeries seem to be anti-Terry or at
> best neutral about him, not his friends.
Again, an alternative interpretation:
Faeries and other supernatural creatures are often interpreted as
symbols for the unconscious, especially for the primitive, irrational
parts of it. The faery fit is about Terry's relations to his own
creative aspects. Whether the grey man is an aspect of Terry himself,
or of his father, or something else, destroying the faeries means
destroying - or suppressing - a part of Terry's mind, a part that he's
trying to regain.
To me it seems like the main theme of the story is Terry's attempts
to get to grips with his own past, and regain parts of his personality that have
been suppressed for a long time. Straightening out his relationship with
his father is an important part of this; I'm not sure that it's the whole story.
> (This was not intended to be a review so much as a request for
> discussion. If it were a review, I would have made much more of an
> effort to point out the numerous things I liked about the game,
> instead of just the ones that perplexed me.
If you do decide to write a review, I'd be more than happy to publish
it in SPAG #14 (hint, hint).
Cheers,
Magnus
--
Magnus Olsson (m...@df.lth.se, zeb...@pobox.com)
------ http://www.pobox.com/~zebulon ------
Not officially connected to LU or LTH.
Torbj|rn Andersson
On behalf of Magnus Olsson, d...@mozzarella.cs.wisc.edu (Daniel
Shiovitz) wrote:
> > - >NAME THE DOG "Rex"
> >
> > Cool. (IIRC this has been done before (Zork 0?) but I haven't played
> > whichever game it was done before in.)
>
> At first, I found this a bit silly, like a gimmick, but after a while
> I realized that being able to name the dog makes me care more about
> it. This rather simple "gimmick" actually increases my involvement in
> the game a lot...
I agree, though at the same time it's a bit annoying that the game
keeps refering to Rover (as I named the dog) as "it" when I'm thinking
"he". Hmm... in fact, I'm going to put that in my next Grip
bug/feedback report, even though I'm not sure what could reasonably be
done about it.
Torbjörn