Shade discussion

Contains spoilers for both Andrew Plotkin's Shade and Adam Cadre's Ready, Okay!

The following texts have not been altered, except that the formatting is entirely my fault, and that service provider advertisments have been removed for brevity.

Since several people have mentioned not understanding the ending of "Shade", here's my take on it.

First of all, note that "Shade" has three meanings in this game: the windowshade in the apartment, shade in the abstract as relief from sunlight, and a shade in the sense of a spirit of the dead.

That last meaning is quite telling. At first, I thought that the PC was delirious from exposure to the desert sun. On reflection, I think the PC is already dead before the game begins.

Consider the windowshade for a moment. As the title implies, it's a very important furnishing. Opening it and seeing the desert outside is the climax of the first part of the game. The windowshade is thus the thing that conceals the truth. (By contrast, the mirror restores the illusion, as is consistent with its use by conjurors and the like. But once the truth is known, illusions cannot last long. But I digress.) Now remember the response when you try to open the windowshade before the proper time: "You have no desire to look night in the face". You don't want to face death, so you've constructed this "shade" that conceals the truth. (The taxi, in turn, seems to me a Charon-substitute, come to carry you to your final destination. That's why the PC fears it so when it finally arrives.)

Now consider the news reports. Three people went missing. You're one of them. You encounter one other in the ending. Or is it that simple? The tiny figure's comment suggests that the three of you swap roles every so often, as part of the game you play with each other.

I'd like to make the loopy suggestion that, in fact, you swap roles at least once over the course of the game. You look at the mirror and see the room in its pristine state. Everything is then restored, because you've traded places with the person on the other side of the mirror. That's why that world is a very shallow one, which you can't affect in any way. It's just a reflection of what you were in before. Sitting on the futon, you pass through another layer of mirror/mirage, this time reversing the roles of tormentor and victim. The only thing that makes me think this isn't another swap of roles is the fact that you see the tiny figure running for cover before the final transformation.

But then, it probably doesn't pay to try to make the game make too much sense. The work is a lot like Ubik in that way, or the brainwashing scene from "The Manchurian Candidate". It's clear that nothing you see is completely real.

On a slightly silly note, consider the statement that "a little shade trails behind [the dunes]". Well, if all three of you are dead already, that's exactly what you encounter. A little shade. Like the little drunk in the samble transcript for "Guess the Verb".

In article <3a19f905.101654229@goliath2.usenet-access.com>, carl@wurb.com (Carl Muckenhoupt) wrote:

And here's mine – though note that I arrived at it through extensive ifMUD discussion with J. Robinson Wheeler (Rob) and Dan Shiovitz (inky).

Personally, I buy the first one. The PC is delirious and dying, but also in the process of becoming one with the desert. Hence the references to switching places – not with some other, also lost person, but with the mechanism of his own death. This is borne out by messages earlier in the game, to the effect that you want to become one with the desert, and that if you stay in your apartment you will start to meld with its beige blahness. Moreover, the book turns into the Desert Elemental's Handbook by the end, so presumably that is what you now are. The desert itself, able to view your puny self from the outside. And, paradoxically, also merged with the furnishings, or the furnishings with you, or... something. It's all sand in the end.

Some have suggested that the game begins in darkness because you start out before dawn and work towards noon, when all shade is gone. I think that's perhaps wrong, and that there's a more general inversion at work: that the things you consciously fear are the reflections of what you ought to fear. Darkness, when the danger is day. Confinement, when the danger is the lack of protection. Being caught (note the hasty paranoid scribble re. the taxi), when the danger is not being found.

Buried inside all of that is the text adventure you're playing on your computer. When I saw that I was annoyed; I mean, such an old sad tired trope, right? Even the thing about being an IF author: I mean, on the one hand, yes, it's meta-clever, as Rob points out. But on the other hand, it's meta-clever that doesn't necessarily go anywhere, AND it's already been done – in Calliope. In fact, I'd JUST seen a badly- implented text adventure game running in Clock, so I was feeling less than charitable and if the writing hadn't been, otherwise, so damn good, that might've tipped me over the edge into quitting.

And why, for the love of Peter, if you're going to make a Cadre reference, have it be to a text adventure of his book? Why not either, a) one of the real text adventures he has really written, or some pastiche thereof; or, b) something lighter, like an IF-ication of the Eye of Argon MSTing? I guess my feeling was, when I was first reading this, that the author had hit some slightly off tone. Ready, Okay! is not the kind of thing that would lend itself to IF.

Well, right. But it's zarf. I didn't really piece this part all the way together until after I found that out.

[Sidenote: does a game written by a known-to-be-cryptic author, because people search it more deeply, actually bear more meaning than others? Take that well-known Borges story and reframe it like this: Pierre Menard writes a book, and it's dreck, but then, weirdly, there turns up an authenticated manuscript by Cervantes, and it's the exact same damn thing word for word; and because it says By Cervantes, it's studied until it yields fruit...

Eeagh, too much grad school. No offense, Zarf. This stuff wouldn't have been dreck regardless of author. Now, back to our regularly scheduled program.]

What follows spoils Ready, Okay! as well as Shade, so more space is needed, I suppose.




There.

The game, when you look at it, tells you not only that it's Cadre's Ready, Okay, but also that you keep dying of lack of insulin. Well, er, hunh? Kind of an odd hunger-type timing puzzle, except that obviously the point of it is to identify, for those who have read RO, which character your PC is. Namely, Molly, the narrator's 12-year-old sister.

An interesting choice in several ways. Molly is a nudist: probably a natural for the OM setting. She's also deathly afraid of water, at least any water that doesn't come from household piping –so much so that she's always calling the narrator to bring her rain gear for her at the slightest hint of drizzle. The touch of water brings her grief, and the prophetic knowledge of death.

She's also doomed. The reader of RO! knows, generally, that a lot of people are going to die, from the very first sentence. But he doesn't know, necessarily (though it seems plausible), that Molly has to be one of them; in fact there's a bit where she's in danger and seems possibly to be about to escape it. The most hideous moment of reading the book, for me, was the moment when I realized that she wasn't going to make it after all. Eccentric though she is, she's a source of much of the book's sweetness: expansively loving, beautiful, open. And the only, very far from sufficient, consolation, is that her brother reaches her before she dies, and that she is not alone.

So what would the game of that be like? Just as Zarf has it, I suppose: unwinnable. And any player with half a clue ought to KNOW it's going to be unwinnable, because the foreshadowing has been there from the beginning, from sentence one; in IF it would probably be in the ABOUT file. Forget the insulin: whether or not you die of diabetes is irrelevant because the whole universe is arrayed against you. You are inside the plot, inescapably, and it's one where you die.

The only way to win, says the text of Shade about the RO! game, is not to play.

The only way to survive Shade...

Right. (Lucian Smith's review remarks on this. The PC should just stay put and for heaven's sake NOT TOUCH ANYTHING.)

But you do win – by transposition of places. And then the little figure says "my turn." What does that mean? That it's Zarf's turn to play one of your games? That the PC's rational mind is taking over again for the actual final moment of death? That the battle with the desert is to begin all over again, time-looped hideously in some kind of moebius reality? I've heard various theories.

So what? Well, a couple of things occur to me, I guess. One is that it's possible that all that stuff I mined out of the Ready, Okay reference doesn't really go too deep, and that Zarf just happened to have read RO! recently and felt like tipping his hat (does he wear one? mental note to replay BAP) to Adam. But I don't like that theory. In fact, I'm going to assert my right as reader to partially determine the significance of the text. It goes deeper because I saw depth, nyah. The inner game is a half-mirror of the outer; the doomed Molly like the doomed PC, but given a half-twist because her fears and her eventual fate are different. And the PC's is, in a way, worse, because alone. There's a comment there too. If you win, you win alone.

The game draws our attention (in itself, in its nature) to this interesting question: why does the audience stick with a story when the ending we want is guaranteed never to come? Why are we playing? Why read RO! to its screeching conclusion, like observing an inevitable car cr–

Oh.

Well, it's a problem that comes up again and again with the Cadre oeuvre, isn't it? Count the happy endings, my friends. I count: 1. And it was in the game I liked least of his works, and could take least seriously. If you take a Cadre sort of plot and subtract out the wacky characters and vicious humor and substitute for this the haunting loneliness of the zarfian vision, Shade is what you get. Tragedy, warning signs, inevitability, tightly locked together. A concern with the reliability of the narrator and the narrator's perception (though that comes up in another zarfian context as well.)

So there's that. But there's also the curious identity of the PC: IF player, would-be IF-author. BAP plays with identity by contortion and multiplicity: you become many people. Shade plays with it by dissolution: you become no one. You lose track of what is inside yourself and what is outside. Player or author. Dreamer or dream. The PC becomes the desert that destroys him; the player is coopted into being the driving force of the game that defeats him.

Notice how gleeful you get, at the end, tearing stuff down, crumbling it up. I thought this was pretty clever on the part of the game, because just as the text describes, I'd gone manic at this part. As a player, you're forced to shift your goal partway through the game. You stop trying to stop the sand flood and start provoking it, not because you hope to survive, but because the plot demands it, because it's the only action you can take that has any meaning, and because in some strange way it feels defiant and grants a blessed relief.

See? You, the player, are now playing for the universe, not for the PC. You're advancing the dark cause. You're killing your poor little avatar. Knowingly. You've ceased to be the man and become the desert.

OM.

On Tue, 21 Nov 2000 09:31:16 GMT, emshort@my-deja.com wrote:

According to psychoanalytic theory, masochism is a result of perceived powerlessness. If you see pain as inevitable, the only way to gain a sense of control over it is to inflict it on yourself deliberately.

Carl Muckenhoupt <carl@wurb.com> wrote:

I get it now; the reason some people keep playing a particular comp game even though it has so far been torture is because they figure the rest of the comp games will be just as bad.

SeanB

I finally played Shade again (after getting stuck) on Sunday, and I'm not going to get a chance to replay it for a week...

Carl Muckenhoupt <carl@wurb.com> wrote:

You know, I understand the ending of Shade even less after reading these posts. Basically there are a bunch of details I don't recall from the game here, but I don't know if that's because I was so bewildered by the game that I lacked a coherent mental framework to hang the details on to remember them, or if I just didn't encounter them:

I don't remember any comment from the tiny figure.

I vaguely remember a little weirdness with the mirror, but I don't remember the room being restored after viewing it. My recollection is the progression from room to desert was steady and consistently one-way.

SeanB

On Wed, 22 Nov 2000 18:13:27 GMT, Sean T Barrett <buzzard@world.std.com> wrote:

At the end:
The tiny figure crawls out from under the sands. It's dead.

"You win," it says. "Okay, my turn again."

This is after you look in the mirror. The description changes to "Not much of an apartment, no. ..." and describes things in such a way as to suggest nothing's happened. Instead of the room being "nearly barren now; walls and ceiling are blank", it has "one desk ... dusty computer ... your futon. Second-hand stereo ... A kitchen nook one way and a bathroom nook the other." The plant even reverts to a hyacinth (let's see, I've seen hyacinth, spider plant, palm, and cactus–anything else?).

Yet something is still amiss. Whenever you try to look at something, you get back "You can't quite make out anything unusual."

Whenever you try to open or close or touch something, or sit down, or do anything, you get back messages about how you're getting dizzy, how you need to sit down. In fact, I did try to sit down:

> sit
(on top of the futon) You reach out and touch your hand to the futon. It feels like glass.

The reflection shimmers like water, but the mirror is only heat – pooling among the dunes, rising from the sands.

... which sort of assumes you tried to touch the mirror earlier, since the description then is much the same:

> touch mirror
You reach out and touch your hand to itself. It feels like glass.

Are you really getting anywhere, or are you going around in circles? Mr Plotkin seems to have taken the concept of a one-room game to its logical conclusion: not only does the game contrive to keep you from moving anywhere, the very situation prevents you. No matter what you do, you still can't make a change.

No wonder people have been saying they were weirded out by it.

–Matthew W. Miller – mwmiller@columbus.rr.com