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Message: 5406

Author: soa1000

Date: 06/01/2006

Subject: Re: Daniel's replies and comments adressed to many people

 

In manicminerandjetsetwilly@yahoogroups.com, Daniel wrote:

Personally, I am not particularly in favour of this idea, because I
believe in the separation of the creator's side and the user's side
of JSW games. In other words, while technical room numbers are
important for designers, I don't think they should have any
importance for players, the more so that they may be haphazard -
e.g. you start in room #67 – it's really room #1 for you, but it's
#67 from the technical point of view, then you move to room #2 for
you, which is #17 technically, then to "your" room #3 which is #86
technically, etc. – it's confusing and doesn't have any meaning.

As a keen dadaist, I find the idea of seemingly nonsensical numbers
attached to every room deeply compelling. I've always been keen on
things which seem to short-circuit logical thinking and invite free
interpretation. The aborted JSW Apocalypse featured a lot of
nonsensical room titles like "Smoking/No Tuxedo" and "In The Year 33"
which were drawn from mistranslations, surrealist paintings, rock
lyrics and spontaneous gibberish

It's a shame Apocalypse isn't going ahead really. It was quite an
innovative concept at least amongst known games - two games in one,
which you could move between via a central screen where you're Willy
whilst walking right, and Technician Ted whilst walking left. The
Willy half was abstract chaos. The Ted half of the game had you
exploring a pyramid, and was the fractionally more complete half of
the game. And all that stuff about completing a trilogy with Time Hole
and Soul Miner? Hah! The trilogy concept didn't extend beyond the
readme file, wherein JSW himself interrupts the scene-setting
paragraph to complain that all I ever do is drop him into poorly
thought-out sci-fi concepts and he will have no part of it

What I would be more interested in would be a patch to substitute
the clock (which is useless anyway and which Leslie Marwick already
eliminated in "Spaceman Willy" back in 1985!) with a counter of
rooms visited so far (possibly against the total number of rooms) –
like there was in JSWII.

Well the clock does do *something* - the game ends at 1 AM, though
until the emergence of JSW128 games I think this was an entirely
academic concern - I don't suppose anyone was able to spend that long
just wandering around 64 rooms

I absolutely think that creating a MM/JSW glossary is a great and
very needed idea, Andrew! A structured, "officialised" terminology
shared by all members of MM/JSW community would certainly raise the
profile of MM/JSW and contribute to its becoming a truly academic or
scientific discipline :-) .

Oh please lord no, academic art is never a good thing. Have you ever
seen academic painting of the 19th century? Ugly and sterile stuff

"JSW
universe"

One of these days I'm going to sit down and work out how, if at all,
the released JSW games can be worked into a single, cohesive narrative

7. To Soa1000:

I think I never thanked you "publicly" for sending me your wonderful
archive of the Club messages. Thanks A LOT! I will start using it
some time this year, hopefully, when I get down to preparing the
Chronology of JSW/MM-for-the-Spectrum development history :-) .

You're welcome

 

 

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