To Say Nothing of the Dog

Have you all read Three Men in a Boat (Jerome K Jerome) yet? Do so! It's the funniest book I've ever read, bar none. Three late-nineteenth-century young men take a boating holiday up the Thames, with many digressions, but the simplest things are described in such a way to leave you literally gasping for breath. Does anyone else agree or disagree?

To Say Nothing of the Dog is a time-traveling homage to that book, by Connie Willis. I love the set-up, with people madly running round half-cocked trying to achieve unlikely things and being impelled into Victorian boating holidays, and all of the echoes of TMiaB are well done; lots of touches and attitudes make me smile.

Unfortunately, I didn't really enjoy the book as a whole. It -- inevitably -- didn't capture a lot TMiaB's humour, and the style, while nice, never really made me laugh. The characters were pleasant, but I never really cared about them. So all in all, a nice book but a slight miss for me. However, I might try another book by Willis: I get the impression it could all come together very well if things were just a bit different.

Winnie-the-Pooh Flash Game

You will remember the flash game? I won't link to it here because I hope to upload version 0.4 shortly, with new levels, more plot and a fiddled interface.

What I like about it is the complexity of the characters. Many games do wonderful things with enemies with very simple rules (eg. Chip's Challenge, Deadly Rooms of Death) which can literally be summed up in one or two clauses. These are a bit more complicated, enough to have some challenging emergent behaviour. Instead of exploring interaction solely on a map, you have to explore abstract state spaces that control them, the idea being even one enemy can be challenging.

Although it should always be fairly logical, simple and graspable, many levels are essentially written around observing, predicting and exploiting just one aspect of behaviour. And others are tweaked to make the overall effect what you'd expect -- eg. if being chased by two enemies, and you go round a corner, and the first follows you, the second will follow him, rather than standing around stupidly. Exploiting that subtlety is far ahead, but it correctly gives you what you'd expect: both continue following you, but they don't just automatically know where you're going.

However, I think I was too niggardly. I like exploring every aspect of interaction of each piece of scenery, but I should have had some more simple interface: a fence, a gate, etc. Then levels could be simpler because you don't need to justify "you can get him but he can't get you" you can just do it, and if you have a fence it's entirely obvious what that means.

Anyway, the point of the post. I never had a name for the game. What should I call it??