intfiction.org

I dunno, man. That's kind of like busting out a diagram to explain a joke ("as of the second line, tension is established due to the danger of the woman's position on the precipice, but this is both escalated and relieved suddenly as the listener realizes that there are two, both potentially applicable, definitions of the term ..."). Once you're there, the joke's already killed.

Just listen to the music with a different perspective. The passing of years may have already given you all you need.

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Games, Fonts, and Font-Toys For Gamers - http://www.cumberlandgames.com

Mind you, Apollo 18 is far from their best album. I recommend any revisitation begin with 'Flood'.

Paul.

Of course, your mileage may vary. Your mileage may vary so much.

Ha! The vagaries of taste, etc. It's not that A18 is bad album or anything.

BTW thinking about how to structure my Fingertips entry has actually led me to value the one-move puzzle and I am now considering a couple of ideas that occurred for how to insert a couple such puzzles into my WIP — they are easy to insert and it just so happens they solve a problem I was having with narrative tone in one section.

The interfertility of imaginations is one of the best things in the universe.

P.

That's awesome

I've been wanting an excuse to do a one-move game for a while now, so I welcome my Fingertips project. The thing I'm wrestling with (and I'm busy working on some production projects right now so this is all in my head and a mostly-empty project folder) is whether I should try to keep the whole thing feeling very "Fingertips" with very very brief responses, so that each play-through is almost instantaneous ... or really bust out with longer, more character-exploratory nonsense, so that each play-through provides some meatier reading.

Ultimately, the game will kind of decide for me, as I structure it, but that's something I'm mulling over while it's inchoate. The situation and characters I have in mind are sufficiently odd to support the longer-form approach, but I think it may be truer to the inspiration to keep things brief and inexplicable.

And I find myself thinking that to do an entire game of multiple Fingertips might be interesting ... a single game-file containing a dozen or more one-move games, where as you complete one you're transported to another instead of back to the same situation. A kind of surreal textual Warioware, if you will ... inkeeping with the random-access idea of mixing the fingertips by shuffling the entire album.

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Games, Fonts, and Font-Toys For Gamers - http://www.cumberlandgames.com

Totally! Great idea, that could go into some very interesting directions. Some similarities with what I thought of, but in my case teleporting from one situation to a whole different situation was already part of my game, so it would be very easy to add a couple of one-move interludes between teleports -- for narrative spacing. Little breathers, if you will, because outside of those bounds the game is pretty unforgiving and never stops.

Paul.

I had a feeling it might be something like that. Reading why they put the fingertips in helped a lot, but I guess I'll just sit back and evaluate the longer bits on my own. I've had books I hated as a kid that I like now, so I guess it's sort of the same thing.

On the other hand, it's good I'm not missing anything silly. I would love to contribute for one of the fingertips, just to have my name on something--and because a 1-verb, 1-move puzzle would force me to concentrate. So even if I don't fully appreciate the music, I'll help.

As for explanation ruining jokes, I largely agree for immediate impact, but with a longer incubation period, the explanation peels off and the funny bits remain.

At the risk of killing something, the songs are not just silly, but silly in a way that calls into question what is our motivation for even writing songs (sometimes quite philosophically -- those are my favourites, like Everybody Wants a Rock).

The text adventure I have played that felt most like a TMBG song was Pick Up The Phone Booth and Die.

Paul.

Hopefully you won't be able to say that for long!

-Kevin

Cool. That makes sense. I mean, it was one of my guesses that they were just trying to twist things, and I was listening to a lot of protest stuff at the time, so yeah--big shift. Hope I don't need spoiler tags for this

And from what I can see, the album was specifically meant



Also, after a bit of thinking, I realized I didn't need to like or relate to all the songs--just the one I'd hopefully be writing for. Still, you can probably guess where I've been poking around on YouTube lately.