Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Path: news.duke.edu!newsgate.duke.edu!nntp-out.monmouth.com!newspeer.monmouth.com!feed2.onemain.com!feed1.onemain.com!uunet!dca.uu.net!ash.uu.net!world!buzzard
From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Failsafe [SPOILER]
Message-ID: <G937KJ.EtI@world.std.com>
Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2001 03:12:19 GMT
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Lines: 44
Xref: news.duke.edu rec.games.int-fiction:61430

spoiler space























The XYZZY nomination for Failsafe is "the alien, in Failsafe".
I find it slightly disturbing about the danger of this being
a spoiler, although hopefully people who haven't played it will
assume it refers to some other character in the game.

Which gets right to the heart of the oddity of this nomination:
In Failsafe, the character in question (assuming I'm understanding
this correctly, because I never got far enough in it to have
this revelation, and I'm inferring from the various semi-spilers
that have gone through the newsgroup) is, in many ways, the
player character in a piece of IF written in the third person.
Now, you could argue that this is why it is so clever, because
in *implementation* it is the player character, but in player
perception, it is an NPC being communicated with. So by the
inclusion of some sneaky apparent context, the player perception
is shifted.  But then why is LASH getting a nomination for
its player character, when the LASH documentation makes the
exact same contextual move?

SeanB
