Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Path: news.duke.edu!newsgate.duke.edu!solaris.cc.vt.edu!news.vt.edu!netnews.com!feed2.onemain.com!feed1.onemain.com!newsswitch.lcs.mit.edu!world!buzzard
From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: The Gostak
Message-ID: <Gn28zG.Eov@world.std.com>
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 18:35:39 GMT
References: <MPG.1662731b5270fd039896f0@News.CIS.DFN.DE> <Gn1EML.Axw@world.std.com> <9tbaa7$m51$2@news.panix.com>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Lines: 27
Xref: news.duke.edu rec.games.int-fiction:66734

Andrew Plotkin  <erkyrath@eblong.com> wrote:
>Sean Barrett <buzzard@world.std.com> wrote:
>> interactivity/player-agency/storytelling, and a very strange
>> thing happens in gostak: the player ends up working on solving
>> puzzles that aren't even visible to the player-character.
>
>A theme that I whanged on very heavily in _Spider and Web_, to be
>sure. See also _All Roads_, and other examples that it's too early in
>the morning for me to think of. :)

Well, see, I even started to mention Spider and Web in
that post, but the more I started to write about it,
the more it became obvious it wasn't the same thing at
all, so I didn't bother.

In Spider & Web, for most of the game, the player is trying
to solve the *exact* same problem as the player character.
The player is approaching the problem with significantly
less information, and in some cases is trying to solve the
same "current" problem of finding an acceptable deception,
and in some cases is having to solve some problem that the
PC already solved in the past.

In Gostak, the significant puzzle confronting the player
doesn't exist in the PC's world at all; it is a meta-puzzle.

SeanB
