SPOILER WARNING



Do NOT proceed unless you have both read READY, OKAY! and played

SHADE.  This message spoils both.

























From: emshort@my-deja.com

Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction

Subject: Shade [SPOILERS] [longish]

Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2000 09:31:16 GMT



In article <3a19f905.101654229@goliath2.usenet-access.com>,

  carl@wurb.com (Carl Muckenhoupt) wrote:

> Since several people have mentioned not understanding the ending of

> "Shade", here's my take on it.



And here's mine -- though note that I arrived at it through extensive

ifMUD discussion with J. Robinson Wheeler (Rob) and Dan Shiovitz (inky).



> That last meaning is quite telling.  At first, I thought that the PC

> was delirious from exposure to the desert sun.  On reflection, I think

> the PC is already dead before the game begins.



Personally, I buy the first one.  The PC is delirious and dying, but

also in the process of becoming one with the desert.  Hence the

references to switching places -- not with some other, also lost

person, but with the mechanism of his own death.



This is borne out by messages earlier in the game, to the effect that

you want to become one with the desert, and that if you stay in your

apartment you will start to meld with its beige blahness.  Moreover,

the book turns into the Desert Elemental's Handbook by the end, so

presumably that is what you now are.  The desert itself, able to view

your puny self from the outside.  And, paradoxically, also merged with

the furnishings, or the furnishings with you, or... something.  It's

all sand in the end.



Some have suggested that the game begins in darkness because you start

out before dawn and work towards noon, when all shade is gone.  I think

that's perhaps wrong, and that there's a more general inversion at

work: that the things you consciously fear are the reflections of what

you ought to fear.  Darkness, when the danger is day.  Confinement,

when the danger is the lack of protection.  Being caught (note the

hasty paranoid scribble re. the taxi), when the danger is not being

found.







Buried inside all of that is the text adventure you're playing on your

computer.  When I saw that I was annoyed; I mean, such an old sad tired

trope, right?  Even the thing about being an IF author: I mean, on the

one hand, yes, it's meta-clever, as Rob points out.  But on the other

hand, it's meta-clever that doesn't necessarily go anywhere, AND it's

already been done -- in Calliope.  In fact, I'd JUST seen a badly-

implented text adventure game running in Clock, so I was feeling less

than charitable and if the writing hadn't been, otherwise, so damn

good, that might've tipped me over the edge into quitting.



And why, for the love of Peter, if you're going to make a Cadre

reference, have it be to a text adventure of his _book_?  Why not

either, a) one of the real text adventures he has really written, or

some pastiche thereof; or, b) something lighter, like an IF-ication of

the Eye of Argon MSTing?  I guess my feeling was, when I was first

reading this, that the author had hit some slightly off tone.  _Ready,

Okay!_ is not the kind of thing that would lend itself to IF.



Well, right.  But it's zarf.  I didn't really piece this part all the

way together until after I found that out.



[Sidenote: does a game written by a known-to-be-cryptic author, because

people search it more deeply, actually bear more meaning than others?

Take that well-known Borges story and reframe it like this: Pierre

Menard writes a book, and it's dreck, but then, weirdly, there turns up

an authenticated manuscript by Cervantes, and it's the exact same damn

thing word for word; and because it says By Cervantes, it's studied

until it yields fruit...



Eeagh, too much grad school.  No offense, Zarf.  This stuff wouldn't

have been dreck regardless of author.  Now, back to our regularly

scheduled program.]



What follows spoils _Ready, Okay!_ as well as Shade, so more space is

needed, I suppose.































There.



The game, when you look at it, tells you not only that it's Cadre's

_Ready, Okay_, but also that you keep dying of lack of insulin.  Well,

er, hunh?  Kind of an odd hunger-type timing puzzle, except that

obviously the point of it is to identify, for those who have read RO,

which character your PC is.  Namely, Molly,  the narrator's 12-year-old

sister.



An interesting choice in several ways.  Molly is a nudist: probably a

natural for the OM setting.  She's also deathly afraid of water, at

least any water that doesn't come from household piping -- so much so

that she's always calling the narrator to bring her rain gear for her

at the slightest hint of drizzle.  The touch of water brings her grief,

and the prophetic knowledge of death.



She's also doomed.  The reader of RO! knows, generally, that a lot of

people are going to die, from the very first sentence.  But he doesn't

know, necessarily (though it seems plausible), that Molly has to be one

of them; in fact there's a bit where she's in danger and seems possibly

to be about to escape it.  The most hideous moment of reading the book,

for me, was the moment when I realized that she wasn't going to make it

after all.  Eccentric though she is, she's a source of much of the

book's sweetness: expansively loving, beautiful, open.  And the only,

very far from sufficient, consolation, is that her brother reaches her

before she dies, and that she is not alone.



So what would the game of that be like?  Just as Zarf has it, I

suppose: unwinnable.  And any player with half a clue ought to KNOW

it's going to be unwinnable, because the foreshadowing has been there

from the beginning, from sentence one; in IF it would probably be in

the ABOUT file.  Forget the insulin: whether or not you die of diabetes

is irrelevant because the whole universe is arrayed against you.  You

are inside the plot, inescapably, and it's one where you die.



The only way to win, says the text of Shade about the RO! game, is not

to play.



The only way to survive Shade...





Right.  (Lucian Smith's review remarks on this.  The PC should just

stay put and for heaven's sake NOT TOUCH ANYTHING.)



But you do *win* -- by transposition of places.  And then the little

figure says "my turn."  What does that mean?  That it's Zarf's turn to

play one of your games?  That the PC's rational mind is taking over

again for the actual final moment of death?  That the battle with the

desert is to begin all over again, time-looped hideously in some kind

of moebius reality?  I've heard various theories.



So what?  Well, a couple of things occur to me, I guess.  One is that

it's possible that all that stuff I mined out of the _Ready, Okay_

reference doesn't really go too deep, and that Zarf just happened to

have read RO! recently and felt like tipping his hat (does he wear one?

mental note to replay BAP) to Adam.  But I don't like that theory.  In

fact, I'm going to assert my right as reader to partially determine the

significance of the text.  It goes deeper because I saw depth, nyah.

The inner game is a half-mirror of the outer; the doomed Molly like the

doomed PC, but given a half-twist because her fears and her eventual

fate are different.  And the PC's is, in a way, worse, because alone.

There's a comment there too.  If you win, you win alone.



The game draws our attention (in itself, in its nature) to this

interesting question: why does the audience stick with a story when the

ending we want is guaranteed never to come?  Why are we playing?  Why

read RO! to its screeching conclusion, like observing an inevitable car

cr--



Oh.



Well, it's a problem that comes up again and again with the Cadre

oeuvre, isn't it?  Count the happy endings, my friends.  I count: 1.

And it was in the game I liked least of his works, and could take least

seriously.  If you take a Cadre sort of plot and subtract out the wacky

characters and vicious humor and substitute for this the haunting

loneliness of the zarfian vision, Shade is what you get.  Tragedy,

warning signs, inevitability, tightly locked together.  A concern with

the reliability of the narrator and the narrator's perception (though

that comes up in another zarfian context as well.)



So there's that.  But there's also the curious identity of the PC: IF

player, would-be IF-author.  BAP plays with identity by contortion and

multiplicity: you become many people.  Shade plays with it by

dissolution: you become no one.  You lose track of what is inside

yourself and what is outside.  Player or author.  Dreamer or dream.

The PC becomes the desert that destroys him; the player is coopted into

being the driving force of the game that defeats him.



Notice how gleeful you get, at the end, tearing stuff down, crumbling

it up.  I thought this was pretty clever on the part of the game,

because just as the text describes, I'd gone manic at this part.  As a

player, you're forced to shift your goal partway through the game.  You

stop trying to stop the sand flood and start provoking it, not because

you hope to survive, but because the plot demands it, because it's the

only action you can take that has any meaning, and because in some

strange way it feels defiant and grants a blessed relief.



See?  You, the player, are now playing for the universe, not for the

PC.  You're advancing the dark cause.  You're killing your poor little

avatar.  Knowingly.  You've ceased to be the man and become the desert.



OM.