Artifice

Mon, Jan 9, 2006

That’s the title of my course this semester. I’m thinking possibly of substituting Primer for eXistenZ. I think Primer’s engagingly baffling, and it’s also one of the best movies about engineers qua engineers I’ve seen.

I did ‘solve’ Rhem, and getting the bridge to rise is really just the start of it. Clancy bought me the sequel as a present, and I’ve vowed to get through it without looking at a walkthrough, which I admit I did out of frustration two or three times in the first game. (In each case, it was something I would have figured out–my problem throughout was making the game more complicated than it actually was. You don’t need trigonometry to solve it, for example, and if something is baffling, it’s because you haven’t found the necessary information. I consistently missed out on this aspect of the game’s “puzzle rhetoric.”)