Real Discovery, Virtual World

The room is mostly dark. The first exceptions are the glowing letters of text which describe a small portion of forest. They are the fuel my mind is working on. I can see the forest, the axe on the ground, the rabbit which is in the dead pine needles. I know I have just come from the back of the house and will soon see a paddock. I have walked this way before. See the text is a door out of my dark room into another place, another world.

The second break in the dark of the room is a small desk lamp. It is below eye level pointing directly down on the desk and really only illuminating one thing, a pad of graph paper. On the pad of paper is a set of boxes and arrow and notes beside the boxes and the boxes themselves are labeled. At first glance you might think it is a drawing of a conspiracy theorist’s wall of connections, because all of the boxes are connected with lines and arrows, but the lines are ink, not red yarn, and there are no highlighted newspaper articles. This is a map of the virtual world, the place my mind in inhabiting, as I currently know it.

I need the axe so I type “Get Axe” and the screen tells me I now have it. I consult my map and decide where I want to go, what edge I push out, what item I might not have tried. What will happen is I get the umbrella and go west, where the cliff is, and I jump? How will I sort out the maze where you can’t go east and them west and expect to end in the same place? Perhaps this will be the time I can solve the mystery of the sundial. There is no careful hand eye coordination. There are no sweeping graphics to take your breath away. This is a place where discovery is king. It is not the dog that jumps through the window that scares you, it is a the simple message, the “Thief is here!”.

I see I need to get back to the house, where I pick up the umbrella in the hallway, then west through a clearing, I avoid the maze and I am over to the cliff. The screen tells me I can see the rocks and crashing waves below. My map ends here. I type jump.

See sometimes discovery is finding out what you are not supposed to do. You get to that edge, make a rational choice and see what the results will be. In this case, because I did not yet know I needed to open the umbrella, I fell screaming to my death on the rocks below. This was before the days of saved games, so it meant I started over.

Starting over, though, is actually not true. Because the whole game is about discovery, you never really start over, you carry the game with you. You learn and learn about the world, about the items, about the unusual commands, which you might type in frustration, until you find all the treasures, until there is nothing left to do and you leave a master of a virtual world. There is no save to prove it, anymore that you would want to save a record of you completing a novel, you are the proof.

One night, I think, this map will be complete. I will have solved all the riddles and stored all the treasures in the trophy case, but until them I will keep reading and mapping and discovering.