This time, visiting Trip and Grace as their friend George, brought out some new things as well as replaying the old. The good part is that I seem to have successfully gotten both Trip and Grace to admit their feelings, and to let me know that I’ve helped them. There was a phone call in this episode from Trip’s mother, and while I tried to make one of them answer the phone, I assume that as in a previous session where Grace’s father called, it is meant to be picked up by the answering machine so that you can possibly glean some information from the caller’s message.
While some of the responses were out of whack with what was offered in my end of the conversation, it would seem to be a question merely of expanding their vocabulary and provide more proper responses. But then, who knows what a user will ask? And me, I still think that Photopia should have been programmed to recognize the word "cry."
My major frustration with the piece is that I do not seem to have enough time to respond, and feel pressured to come up with the proper "plotted out" question or answer, or risk being ignored. While this is good in that it makes the action flow more smoothly without the down time of silent space, I’m thinking maybe that if Trip or Grace put some music on the stereo system it might make it less noticeable and allow for a more natural visit.
They also seem to get into the argument rather quickly. But heck, that’s their problem.
I think I’m almost ready to go for the background notes on this. I didn’t want to get them earlier because I would have been too tempted to look them up before playing enough with the program to figure some things out for myself. And that, basically, is the more interesting part of the whole experiment. (Unlike Silent Hill 2, where it was a matter of life and death when I was getting clobbered by those yucky skin stretching things!)
Honest, I could care less if Trip and Grace split up. ACCKKKK! A spider just came down in front of me!
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology