Comments on: Playing Easy to Get

by: Jeremy Douglass

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 09:45:17 +0000

Worth mentioning that the art of satire is well developed in IF - currently 105 indexes as Satires in Baf's Guide to IF - and, as it notes, often the butt of the joke is another IF game, which is interesting....

by: Christy Dena

Sat, 27 Aug 2005 05:29:17 +0000

I'm adding Foom and TextModeQuake to possible entries as satires. While they do not try to satire quake as such (as far as I can tell) they tend to satirise graphic engines, the immersive aspects of FPS games, the seriousness of FPS games.

by: Jeremy Douglass

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 06:24:51 +0000

On your call for more satire: lately I've done some reading on David Byrne's PowerPoint art book and it began as a light satire while promoting yet another satire - and morphed into something more serious:

"A while ago, I decided to base the book-tour readings from my pseudoreligious tract The New Sins on sales presentations. I was going for a fair dose of irony and satire, and what could be better than using PowerPoint and a projector, the same tools that every sales and marketing person relies on?"
- Wired Issue 11.09 | September 2003 - Learning to Love PowerPoint

by: Jeremy Douglass

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 06:17:58 +0000

Christy, I especially like the point about spoofing as teaching tool - you are really assembling a lot of approaches with practical value for the classroom. In general, I agree parody and farce lowers the barrier to entry to a new technology, game environment, etc... an additional reason is that the fear of failure or demonstrating ignorance is not as great when pratfalls and awkwardness are part of the form. People are less embarrassed to trip and fall while attempting a clown-themed obstacle course than a military-styled one. In the humorous obstacle course, their failure can also be interesting and entertaining. This is one of the reasons why I think Douglas Adams was a natural author for interactive fiction - his style was sarcastic comedy, which made him uniquely suited to writing entertaining error messages. This followed naturally out of the Infocom house style - if people are going to be stumbling around making mistakes a lot while using a system, they might as well have fun doing it....