An Abbreviated Night Before Christmas

This game seems to have been intended as a noke, but it's actually not bad. You are the papa in the poem, and the children, mamma, and stocking are there. And the poem's action just plays out one line at a time.

So, it's not that bad as interactivish poetry.

Originally I'd thought that there wasn't too much to this game. I'd struggled to find new meaningful actions that would progress the story, I thought that maybe there was some way to win this classic poem. The more I tried though, the less far I'd gotten. I tried every combination of verbs I could think of, and the only one that got me anywhere was "look". And I think that's the heart of this work.

Art is inherently useless. Okay maybe I said that wrong- art cannot be utilitarian. The second a work is relegated to mundanity, once it loses its conception and becomes a "thing I do things with", it ceases to have artistic merit. Sure you can view household products as abstract representations, and sure products can be aesthetically beautiful, but the my shoelace or my fork can't maintain that beauty while I'm using them to eat or walk from place to place.

That's what this work is to me, or this is how I perceive it anyway, it's a reminder to watch, to keep your distance from the fantastic. You'll get the most from this story if you try to listen to it, understand it, speak to it. But don't try gaming it or using it to win, no, you need to treat it with respect and let it tell its story.