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Remember Groundhog Day? It’s that 1993 film about Bill Murray’s character, Phil, who keeps reliving the same day, February 2nd, in the Pennsylvania town of Punxsutawney, where on that day, the groundhog Punxsutawney Phil will predict when winter’s going to end. [...] It’s an awful lot like the way we tend to play video games these days. Faced with challenges in a game, we have the quicksave and quickload buttons close at hand, ready to revert to an earlier point in the game to try again. If you get to replay a section of a story over and over again, any challenge inherent in the original situation quickly morphs into a matter of trial and error. Like Phil in Groundhog Day, we get to try out every interaction, every conversation option the world allows us. More importantly, in a typical collapsing together of character and player, Phil – like us – retains (meta)knowledge of everything he did earlier. [...]
Despite writing more or less in-depth about many of the digital works of Belgian studio Tale of Tales – see my posts on The Endless Forest, The Graveyard, and FATALE – I had been avoiding writing about what is arguably their best work to date: The Path. In any case, it is the one I felt the most personal connection with, and I’ve tried to express why that is in a retrospective piece I wrote for Gaming Daily. So if you’re interested in why a game about Little Red Riding Hood, disobedience, violence, sexuality, and trauma made me feel empathetic with some typically feminine psychological experiences, read on: [...]
What a chimera of a book this is. It has one foot in plain old fantasy, with quite a few battles, some spell-slinging, and a hero on a quest. The other foot is deep in myth. When I first read this book, around seven years ago, I didn’t quite get it. I was already quite familiar with Planescape, the Dungeons & Dragons setting that forms the backdrop for this novel. However, in the novel, I found little of the vast vistas and wide-eyed wonder that typified the setting for me. Instead, the book’s narrative is almost completely confined to a labyrinth, which offers only a few passing glimpses of all the imaginative places that make up the Planescape multiverse. However, upon a second reading and some brief reflection, I think I now see what Denning tried to do here. [...]
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