Black/White = theirloveissoshadesofgrey
Aug. 27th, 2004 03:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mayhapA while back, I tried out Jigsaw, a piece of interactive fiction that someone recommended on Slashdot. I failed to progress very far on my own because I'm not yet autistic--which is to say, I was utterly spoiled as a child by LucasArts adventure games, and I heartily second Ron Gilbert's article on Why Adventure Games Suck.
I mean, come on. In this game you had to pick up a sketchbook and a pencil at the beginning, and use them to draw at least four animals over the course of your adventures, with absolutely no discernible in-game reason for doing so. If you failed to do so, even if you got by all of the fiendish and clever (but mostly just fiendish) puzzles, you were still going to be utterly stuck in the endgame. Seriously, what is that? (I, er, gave up and just started reading the walkthrough to figure out how the game ended.)
Why was I playing Jigsaw, you might (very well) ask? Partly, it was the time travel that interested me--time travel is potentially one of my very favorite literary devices, and the objective of the game is to prevent time from being changed by traveling to various "key points" in history and making sure they come out the same. The promise of good writing and interesting quotations certainly didn't hurt.
What really intrigued me, however, was its creative approach to in-game romance. You, the protagonist, are dressed entirely in white. Your antagonist is a tantalizing figure dressed entirely in black, the one who is going around trying to change history. The two of you bicker, flirt, and romantically entangle throughout the course of the game. Black/White OTP! For maximum player identification with this storyline, neither character is assigned a gender. All such references are left carefully neutral--well, almost. The walkthrough author notes that at one point in the game, White needs to wear a stolen uniform and pass as member of the British Army in 1917, which is the one thing in the game that really, plausibly, only a male person could do--which leads her to conclude that Black must be female, because later in the game "you are definitely opposite genders" since you are romantically involved (!).
Well, that's one way you can project your own ideas onto a neutral canvas, I suppose. I, personally, cannot help seeing Black as a sort of Wimseyesque guy--it's the adverbs that do it for me; Black is always doing things winningly or charmingly or petulantly--and yet I can't help feeling that my character is male too, which, of course, I do not consider to preclude our romantic involvement. And, much as it isn't personally coming easy to me, it's perfectly possible to see either or both of them as female, too. I find this rather nifty.
Too bad about the inane puzzle-piece-collecting and 500 ways to die or get stuck by running out of time or missing some essential item hidden under a wardrobe. ;)
I mean, come on. In this game you had to pick up a sketchbook and a pencil at the beginning, and use them to draw at least four animals over the course of your adventures, with absolutely no discernible in-game reason for doing so. If you failed to do so, even if you got by all of the fiendish and clever (but mostly just fiendish) puzzles, you were still going to be utterly stuck in the endgame. Seriously, what is that? (I, er, gave up and just started reading the walkthrough to figure out how the game ended.)
Why was I playing Jigsaw, you might (very well) ask? Partly, it was the time travel that interested me--time travel is potentially one of my very favorite literary devices, and the objective of the game is to prevent time from being changed by traveling to various "key points" in history and making sure they come out the same. The promise of good writing and interesting quotations certainly didn't hurt.
What really intrigued me, however, was its creative approach to in-game romance. You, the protagonist, are dressed entirely in white. Your antagonist is a tantalizing figure dressed entirely in black, the one who is going around trying to change history. The two of you bicker, flirt, and romantically entangle throughout the course of the game. Black/White OTP! For maximum player identification with this storyline, neither character is assigned a gender. All such references are left carefully neutral--well, almost. The walkthrough author notes that at one point in the game, White needs to wear a stolen uniform and pass as member of the British Army in 1917, which is the one thing in the game that really, plausibly, only a male person could do--which leads her to conclude that Black must be female, because later in the game "you are definitely opposite genders" since you are romantically involved (!).
Well, that's one way you can project your own ideas onto a neutral canvas, I suppose. I, personally, cannot help seeing Black as a sort of Wimseyesque guy--it's the adverbs that do it for me; Black is always doing things winningly or charmingly or petulantly--and yet I can't help feeling that my character is male too, which, of course, I do not consider to preclude our romantic involvement. And, much as it isn't personally coming easy to me, it's perfectly possible to see either or both of them as female, too. I find this rather nifty.
Too bad about the inane puzzle-piece-collecting and 500 ways to die or get stuck by running out of time or missing some essential item hidden under a wardrobe. ;)
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Date: 2004-09-01 09:19 am (UTC)But I will try Jigsaw, so thanks for mentioning it here. ;)