The Chinese Room

by Harry Josephine Giles profile and Joey Jones profile

2007
Surreal
Inform 7

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Review

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
The dream of a brain in a vat full of liquor., October 8, 2020
by Rovarsson (Belgium)
Related reviews: Fantasy

"The Chinese Room" posed a hard problem to my consciousness: three stars or four?

First off: nits to pick.
-Very annoying typos and misspellings ("er" instead of "her"), the consistent use of quotation marks instead of apostrophes (plover"s eggs).
-Many nouns or synonyms not recognized.
-Shoddy implementation of a cool device (the qualiascope)

-A rather big nit: there is an unmentioned path northwest from the beach.

My consciousness decided on four stars however.

-Although the game has no real story, the diverse puzzles are tightly held together by a very cool and engaging framework, the land of philosophical thought experiments.
-The puzzles are very well thought out, and more often than not very funny.
-Extensive background information, a crash course in the history of philosophy that makes an interested mind look up more on Wikipedia, or, in my case, open up my old copy of Bertrand Russel's "The History of Philosophy."
-The varied locations, landscapes and scenes are very nicely described, painting a picture in the player's head with a few well-chosen sentences.
-Playing illegal logic games with Willard Van Orman Quine (the philosopher with the coolest name ever.)
-An actual intuition pump!

A joy to play.

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NegSec, September 21, 2024 - Reply
I think, for the typos, because they are repeated so much. the authors are probably using Spivak pronouns, but they should should have said something about it in the essentials, at least to prevent getting so many emails about typos.
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