[IF Comp 2019] "The Surprise", by Candy Meldromon

-
(Note: Candy Meldromon is a psuedonym. I know who the author is, but I can't remember whether they made a public announcement of this, so I'll just leave the pseudonym in place.)

Ahw, congratulations! I’ve been there, which perhaps makes it more easy to relate to the situation. Well, not literally there, given that I’m biologically male, but as there as a biological male could possibly be.

Does The Surprise also work as a piece of fiction? Clearly, it’s very short. And the interaction is a bit fiddly, given that you have to find out which actions are possible in which sublocations. In fact, this is what most reviewers have complained about. However, this is definitely intentional? The way the interaction is set up makes you feel slightly disoriented, nervous, doing small things wrong all the time. It makes you ripe for the waiting-effect when you finally do the tests, which I found creates real tension. The phone call to your significant other is also well written; true to life, moving in a small quiet way.

The Surprise is not trying to do anything major or epic, but it shows us something that is human and as significant as anything can be in a human life. And, if I may be forgiven a horrible pun, it does that one small thing surprisingly well. Like a haiku executed with perfection. I rate this quite high.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Keeping the narrative pressure on

-
I played another session of Trollbabe yesterday, and I would like to take the opportunity to write a little bit about GMing this game (and similar narrativist games). This is not a worked out manifesto so much as an attempt to think through an approach that I've been taking more or less instinctively. First, some context. This game was online, with two people I had never played with before: Judith and Katy. Actually, it's not quite true that I never played with Judith. I've known her for some 38 years, and possibly the first roleplaying I was ever engaged in was on a vacation with her family and my family. She acted as a kind of story guide, and I and her brother Adriaan played characters in an unfolding short story. I was thrilled by the possibilities inherent in such an activity, but it would take more time before I really discovered the world of tabletop RPGs. Both Judith and Katy played a bunch of roleplaying games before, though as far as I can judge they were all fai...
Read more

Walter Benjamin, "Der Erzähler" (The Storyteller)

-
In the comments to my last post, Ian mentioned an essay by Walter Benjamin , Der Erzähler ( The Storyteller ). Benjamin was an important German philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century; he wrote on a wide range of topics, but his best-known work is probably his essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (it is widely cited as The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction , but The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility would have been a better translation). Der Erzähler is a very rich and complex essay. It claims to be a reflection on the work of Nikolai Lesskow (in English known as Leskov, I believe); but it also touches on the difference beween a story (in the sense that a storyteller tells stories; Erzählung , not Geschichte ) and a novel, on the communicability of experience, on the role of death in modern life, on the nature of wisdom, on the relation between man and nature, and on several other topics. All...
Read more

Thoughts on a Trollbabe session

-
Yesterday, I played a second session of Trollbabe with Erik and Michiel, even more delightful than the first. ( Trollbabe . I dislike the title of the game, to be frank, but it's the only thing about it to dislike. Let me stress that the whole point of the game is that you're playing strong, independent women. With horns.) To give you an impression of the context, let me say that both Erik and Michiel are very good friends of mine, and that we've done a fair amount of roleplaying before, though mostly D&D. In fact, the two of them have played various editions of D&D almost exclusively, and neither had any previous GMing experience. That was about to change. In the first session, I GMed their characters Rolda (Michiel) and Vekir (Erik), who were together in a single adventure -- something that is not a given in Trollbabe . This time, we were going to do the same thing, but in addition I would also get to play a character, one adventuring at a different location. Mi...
Read more