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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: [CONTENT] Puzzle fairness
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Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2002 09:53:45 GMT
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(minor spoiler for Dinner With Andre)


D. Jacob Wildstrom <wild_dj@mit.edu> wrote:
>What I think was a lot less fair was
>a similar puzzle at the beginning of "My Dinner With Andre" wherein,
>while your date is in the bathroom, you have to steal money from him
>to cover the tab (all your cards are expired, as I recall). Of course,
>my straightforward solution to that is to wait until he returns and
>explain the predicament.

I think there are about five different things going on here:

*  Is the action one that a player is at all likely to think of?
*  Is the action something that seems reasonable for someone to do?
*  Is the action (something that seems) reasonable for this PC to do?
*  Is the action reasonable for the PC to do in this genre?
*  Does a player lose immersion by performing the action?

Opening a window and trespassing on someone else's property
is certainly something many players will think of, although
whether they will pursue it may depend on their reaction to
the next few items in the list. If it's something the player
thinks of doing but seems out of character, though, immersion
may well be broken.

The fourth one is really redundant--the genre informs the character,
really--but I wanted to be explicit because that's what comes into
play in Dinner With Andre. If you accept that it's a farce (and I
don't remember if it was clear that it was a farce at that stage of
the game, then the solution isn't out of character at all. It may
still break immersion, though, if you as player are stopping and
thinking in a meta- way, "oh, it's a farce, hah ha" while figuring
it out.

SeanB
