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I guess I’m still glad I made the game the way I did, because, well, it was my vision of the game and I didn’t want to compromise that part of it. The need for closure turns out to be very strong. But it has become obvious from reviews and reactions that many people considered the basic conceit of not having an author-provided ending as a design problem in its own right. At that point, the idea for Terminal Interface for Models RCM301-303 was effectively ready. The idea of tagging soon followed, and how it could be used for a devilish and murderous plan. Hence, I decided to change the minion into someone who is actively trying to betray us and would gloat about his victory if we ended up following his plan. That is opaque, sure, but not what I was going for.
![me interface trminal me interface trminal](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/PQ0AAOSwlw1ds4fW/s-l400.jpg)
With no good in-game way of telling the player that not killing the minion was a problem, I could expect the vast majority of players to just play the simple version of the story, never realise that more was needed, and quit with a feeling of bemusement. However, I realised that this made Master! extremely hard to pull off. Having the author end a game is a way of reducing this openness and opaqueness, and I wanted to experiment with not doing that. (Myself very much included.) One of the cool things about parser games is that they are inherently open and therefore opaque: you never know whether you have done everything, have seen everything, of whether whole realms of hidden content are just one command away. Not only does this make perfect sense in the game’s fiction, but it’s also a way to explore how games can work without relying on the somewhat childish “you have won!” message that – let’s admit it – is so very comfortable to nearly all of us.
![me interface trminal me interface trminal](http://fashionclever773.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/6/7/126716032/470903792.jpeg)
You log into the mech at the beginning of the game, you log out at the end, and the game doesn’t tell you if you have arrived at a winning state or not. One thing that interested me about Master! was that the player had to reach their own conclusions about when their goals were met. And so I decided to make this game called Master! (although at that point I was already thinking about a new title), because it seemed like a simple enough project to pull off in a couple of weeks. But perhaps I needed to prove to myself that life isn’t over when you have two kids, that you can still find time for your own creative projects. Objectively speaking, it was not a great moment – I had more time available approximately anywhere during the last six years. Then, late this summer, as my newborn daughter was settling into a more comfortable sleeping rhythm, I suddenly decided that I wanted to enter the IF Competition. So this game was bouncing around in the back of my mind, but for various reasons, none of them extremely clear even to me, I didn’t make new works of IF for about six years. The game’s title would, of course, have reflected the last panicked exclamations of the poor minion as he belatedly realised that you had sacrificed him for your own good. The crucial point was that the minion could not help but learn the secret recipe as he steered the mech through the lab, so the player had to figure out that after destroying the recipe, the mech with the minion would also have to be destroy. Inside the mech would be a minion on whose descriptions of the environment the player would have to rely, since the mech’s camera had been broken when the explosion took place.Īll of this may sound a lot like Terminal Interface, but in Master! the explosion was entirely real and the minion was hapless and trusting. Except that it wasn’t really Terminal Interface that I had in mind, but a game that I used to think of under the title Master! In this game, the player would remotely steer a mech through a drug lab that had exploded, with the aim of destroying the secret recipe of the drug before their rivals could arrive to steal it. The idea for Terminal Interface had been in the back of my mind for a long time, perhaps eight years or more. Warning: Extreme spoilers for Terminal Interface for Models RCM301-303 ahead.