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If you have to know, rather vile attitude. Granted, it was many many years ago, but I personally wouldn't care to look again.

Took part once. Pass 

https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/completed-game-announcements/shards-of-god/

I highly recommend this

Personally I am not seeing a positive reason to be infatuated with the technical part of (say) creating visual art. Yes, it takes time to form such a skill. But the skill itself rarely (at least consciously) directs the more purely creative part of thinking of the work. It is more of a barrier, in that if your skill is insufficient, you won't be able to fully recreate what you had in your head, despite that already being fully formed in your mind.
It's also, itself, not apparently tied to other insights. For example, take someone who creates a 3d model, using a program like Blender or 3dsmax etc, and renders that as 2d. And theoretically assume someone else would have been able (not very likely, but not strictly impossible either) to produce the same 2d image, using a web of mathematical functions (which, ultimately, the 3d modeller makes use of itself, but on a level you don't typically access as a modeler). The latter would have insight on those functions too, while the former operates on a far looser connection to forms, associating them with the means to something and not themselves-for-themselves tied to insights.
It's the same in painting; you need time to form the skills needed to draw by hand or apply color, but those are just means to an end, not something which typically (let alone consciously) affects your creativity; it just stands as a barrier to achieving the potential.

Likewise with stuff of the ags variety: you have to learn commands and the structure used specifically here, but I doubt anyone would seriously claim it is the ags-skill which matters and not the result as a game. In that regard, how could it ever be not positive to be in a position to simply have the result you imagined, by not needing to type any command? (though, of course, with current tech this isn't possible, it's fairly conceivable that in the future it will be). 

Oh, Dreams in the Witchhouse is also excellent! I just thought it wasn't made with AGS (?).

Double (triple) logins are allowed? 
I remember Slasher as a flash contest participant.

I was recently watching some videos about Dead Space, and the nature of the "Marker" there is also a type of a twist. Though ultimately it is the same scheme as with WH40K "gene-stealer cults", since the object/being just tricks its victims into believing it's something positive for them, while it merely seeks to use them as fuel.
It's not a pure type of twist, though. Because to any outsider, it'd likely not represent something positive (unless they are religious zealots who already worship it from afar).
Thus it could work as a twist only if the story is presented from the pov of a believer or someone under the influence of the Marker.

^Regarding AI establishing what works for humans as good art, I have to suppose this would quickly approach one of the many (already) known limitations of any level of a formal logic system. Of course the program can produce stuff and 'by accident' achieve very high quality, but I doubt it will be able itself to reproduce that (more likely that it will mathematically model the success as tied to parameters of the image it wasn't tied to for the human), and even if it does, it won't go above that level, while a human can (due to serendipity if not conscious calculation and extrapolation).

What I mean, the question is whether the human thought and perception may be described mathematically. So far most of the processes in human body were, at least this is my impression based on what I've read or heard. There's already some understanding of how human brain works. I cannot predict the future, but I think there's a realistic chance that, given time and effort, humans will be able to define how their own mind works, including intuition, perception of beauty, and so forth.

Of course the above assumes that the nature of our thought is deterministic. If there's, say, a spiritual essence which cannot be described by a formal logic, then we have a different situation...

I was only alluding to formal logic systems having inherent blind-spots (eg Goedel sentences), which aren't removed regardless of expansions of the system.
But I won't be at all surprised if the human mind (despite being closer to an analog machine, or at least looking like such) also has built-in defenses against everything being provable (or understandable) while still maintaining consistency.
Besides, even philosophically, how could one be aware of what being aware means, without that altering what being aware means? =>some level outside the stable one would appear to be needed, so the unawareness is just pushed there.

^Regarding AI establishing what works for humans as good art, I have to suppose this would quickly approach one of the many (already) known limitations of any level of a formal logic system. Of course the program can produce stuff and 'by accident' achieve very high quality, but I doubt it will be able itself to reproduce that (more likely that it will mathematically model the success as tied to parameters of the image it wasn't tied to for the human), and even if it does, it won't go above that level, while a human can (due to serendipity if not conscious calculation and extrapolation).

As for my remark about tedious mechanics, I already mentioned that future programs may well allow us to create digital images out of what we see in our imagination. Which in my view is certainly a bonus, since we imagined that in the first place, and being able or not to produce it mechanically yourself is surely secondary.

If the worry is about quality of art, I am pretty sure that future "AI" art programs will easily match the style of any human. Because they aren't limited by art skills, it's all math, so they will do it better in the same way that a pocket calculator will calculate better than the fastest human.
All that said, we should remember that the human will be needed still, even if only to serve as the evaluator of worth of the computer-produced art. The program itself cannot do it, because it's not actually sentient.

So the talented artist will still be around, just in the role of the eye - which imo is better, since the mechanics of producing art are tedious regardless of how good one is at it.

Finished the game now.
Beautiful, well done 

If I wasn't in a difficult financial situation, I'd support by buying. I hope many others do.

Thanks ^^ Not sure how I missed that. I thought I had

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examined all, multiple times. Maybe it was triggered by talking to the priest only after examining the room - ie it didn't matter if you had examined everything in previous attempts? Anyway, thanks, I will do the rest now.

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Game is great, by the way 

I am stuck. How do I

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create some background noise, after I've given the priest the scroll to examine?
I have to suppose that after I extract the rod, I will use that in the machine at the forge, to create a knife version - which likely was the murder weapon

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I will have a look (first impression is that it is very elegant)

Chesterton's The White Pillars Murder also has a nice subtype of twist. Though in a way it is similar to the one in Mousetrap, it rests on different protections and the short story is worth reading imo (can be found online, it's in the public domain).

If you use the current AI models for articles (I have had a few written by Chatgpt, not to publish of course), you will know they are prone to very serious errors, so require proofreading by default. Unless your company doesn't care about being ridiculed and will risk it so as to not pay even a basic proofreader (who costs less than an article-writer anyway).
Price may increase due to the proofreader needing to be at least familiar with what they are reading, to notice (at least the worst of the) mistakes.

An AI article still needs human supervision, so one has to suppose people will be paid to do that. And with articles that need to be insightful, you also require the proofreader to know the subject to a considerable degree.
In the future, we will probably have the tech to create videos/art/music directly from images/sound composition in our mind, so art is set to change massively regardless.

That's sad.
I am not sure if I ever actually played a Larry Vales game,  , the detective games by Yahtzee were what caught my attention.
But his Vales work will live on     

I am actually reading a Carr story these days. But given I want it for locked room examples, maybe I'll switch to the Burning Court (I was reading the Hollow Man, but I already know its plot).

The thread is supposed to be a discussion of twists in literature (film/tv series can also be mentioned), with some theoretical elements, but mostly geared towards presenting examples you find of note.


I think that the literary twist can be divided to a few distinct categories, most of which have to do with form.


Scope-wise, any author/creator will give the audience ample time to identify the setting, before coming up with a twist - otherwise it's not the same effect, but something more akin to a cynical or otherwise moody introduction (an example of such a non-twist, because it happens already in the prologue of a story, would be Level's very nice short story about a bank employee who is presented as very good and thorough in his job and a model employee, but soon we learn he stole money and then did surrender to the authorities and admit he stole the money but also lied that he lost it by being himself robbed later on. In reality he entrusted it somewhere, with the plan to get it after he would be released from serving a few years in jail). So one parameter would be time given before a twist, if it's intended to be such.

Another parameter is whether the twist is discussed to any degree in the story, prior to happening - that is to say, if the reader is given reason to suspect something may be different than presented. A good example of that would be Tanizaki's tale about a student at whose dorm some objects have gone missing, and there is a mystery as to who stole them. The student (the text is in the first person narrative) goes into length examining who could be the thief (but later he tells us that he is the one). So this is a case of a twist which potentially could be foreseen since its subject is at the very forefront of the tale.

For an example of a work where the twist is simply not discussed at all, and nothing prepares for it, I always think of Lovecraft's The Outsider. Because there we as readers simply never have any reason to suspect

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that the protagonist, his vast castle and the dark forest around it, all exist hundreds of meters below the ground...

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Of course this type of twist is form-wise the safest. You can't look for something, when you are unaware that it even exists.


There are various hybrids. Agatha Christie's plots are typical of a subcategory of hybrid twist which is both discussed and we are given specific reason to look away from the direction the answer is - she usually achieves that by providing a seemingly more than adequate reason for the reader to identify the guilty character as innocent (eg by placing the murder in a location which brings other suspicions, or using doubles). Another hybrid is common in works by ETA Hofmann (such as The Sandman), where instead of having other characters being antagonistic as to the guilt, they just overshadow the chosen to be revealed as wondrous, by being presented themselves as mysterious and even possibly supernatural (eg while we focus on the titular character of The Sandman, who may be anything up to a flying monster,

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we may not notice that much of worth in a rather stiff girl by the name of Olympia, but later on she is revealed to be an automaton.

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Ok, after this very brief mention of a few of the types, feel free to suggest your own favorite twists in literary stories.



Ps: you can mention Shyamalan, if you absolutely have to   Personally I only find the twist in I See Dead People as being of note. Of course he didn't help himself by (after his second movie) making people expect every single project of his to have a twist.

That said, the twist in ISDP is part of the group where the reveal changes a significant part of the meaning of the story. This often happens in Philip Dick's works, although there it is based on tech that makes the distinction between reality and hallucination difficult to pin down (as in Ubiq, but most of his other novels too).