Progress made at last, with the needed help from Steve to remind me to go back to my Interactive Fiction training to a) keep checking Inventory–often finding I’ve picked up items along the way that were vital to the story (as was the key to the apartment gate) and to b) keep seeking clues to the "story". Meanwhile, I think I done cleaned this here town outta monsters–been carrying that board around with me through three trips through town! (I wonder if anyone else who has played Silent Hill has tried using it to smash through locked gates!)
John’s theory as well, that the reader of IF (and gameplay) learns a new set of rules in reading the media form has proven true, and navigation becomes a pattern that the reader must learn and use throughout. Oddly, I’ve just recalled my own introduction to IF, and how the learned responses were applied to reading static text until I shook my head clear of them (finding them useless, naturally, in unchangeable text format) while I was in the thick of the study process.
Learning to read–and in the process, to write–all over again.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology