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You Are Likely To Be Eaten by a Guava, May 21, 2012by Sam Kabo Ashwell (Seattle) Related reviews: oulipo, wordplay, remix, constrained writing, nouns, transposition, surreal, gimmick Zork N+9 is an Oulipan version of Zork, in which all the nouns of the text have been shifted by nine dictionary places. The result is a pile of beautiful, diverting nonsense. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Remove vote | Add a comment
Comments on this reviewPrevious | << 1 >> | Next Sonny Rae Tempest, May 23, 2012 - Reply Sam, Thanks for the review, especially one so thoughtfully considered. I am very appreciative. To address your questions regarding keeping some nouns as opposed to others: I wanted to keep as many verbs intact as possible, so any noun that could be used as a verb I left in (though I'm sure I missed a few). Second, I'm not entirely familiar with the command structure of Inform7, so any noun that could be used semantically by the program I left alone (eg: door, score, room, &c.). Some nouns that I thought were irrelevant to the interpreter turned out to cause errors when modified, so I left those as well. If I had a deeper understanding of Inform7 then I may have been able to catch everything, but unfortunately my skills in this arena are limited to code-butchery. Maybe in the future I'll play around with it more, see what I can do. Thanks for checking it out, and moreso for taking the time to explore it critically. I've never played The Gostak, but now you've got me curious! -SRT Sam Kabo Ashwell, May 24, 2012 - Reply Aha, I should have thought of that. Getting around this issue would be pretty low-level stuff in I7 -- for objects, you could just modify the printed name and put in an Understand statement. It'd be a small step above code-butchery, but a very small one. Joey Jones, May 21, 2012 - Reply Yet to play it, but from the source this was particularly delicious: "Oh dear. It appears that the smell coming from this room was coat gateau. I would have thought twice about carrying a tortoise in here." I can imagine what gateau that had been sitting in someone's coat would smell like, and it's amusing to think that this would be preternaturally appealing or especially repugnant for tortoises. Sam Kabo Ashwell, May 22, 2012 - Reply Right -- but again, in that context 'smell' is a noun! In this case it's funnier than, I dunno, 'smithy coming from this rosebed' would have been, but... nnnrgh. |