benjoyce25

Here, too: As the interview wrapped up, Gilbert and Grossman confirmed that Return to Monkey Island is not the last game in the series, and that the door is open for more games in the future.

I am fairly certain hopeful that, maybe 4-5 years down the line, someone will take a crack at an MI game, extending the universe, maybe beyond our most beloved hero, and delivering a shawshbuckling adventure fit for that time.

Well, there _is_ a hillbilly in that game, with a very similar design, who just happens to be burning down a carnival...

I adore this idea, that we may, as a community, accept that the developers take us seriously, and – through game mechanics, dialogue and storytelling – we are invited to share a vision of what certain perennial themes mean to us. And that it shall free us to (maybe) partake in new adventures, take other characters for a spin, explore pockets of the Monkey Island universe, free from "unfinished business," as Gilbert and Grossman have said.

No disputes there, either way.

Okay, that is a reasonable criterion. Which media products handled that well?

Delightful! Reminds me of Disney's Hollywood Studios, and the very deliberate behind-the-scenesiness of the Keys to the Kingdom tour organised by the park.

Care to share photo sources, if there are any?

A curious notion, work. Certainly, whether we like it or not, digital gameplay might often feel like work. And yet... How would you (and y'all) define the difference between the work of figuring out the solution to a concatenation of puzzles (which can be tedious, trial-and-error, and time-wasting), and the work of interpretation (free-from flights of fancy with foundations in fictional facts)? In what ways do they tax the mind differently? Why should one of those acts of labour satisfy even the most hard-nosed adventure enthusiast, but not the other?

Here is the thing though: even with quite explicitly definitive endings, even literature students (who should be at least very invested readers, if not superreaders) find out very early on that interpretation is a many-splendoured thing (thanks, Ms. Han), and that a prism of different version spring up almost immediately when someone throws the "But what did it all mean in the end?" rock into the Pool of Donchaseeit.

As I am not aware of one, I would like to see the initial brainstorming sheets, similar to the way the TWP devblog has done. To wit. Especially look at 1, 6, 14, 24. (28.) When it comes to TWP (yes, wrong forum): On the other end, you can also see the bleed-through from The Cave: 16; and MM/DOTT: 19. And the eventual 'winning design', 30, with 28, 22, 21, 11 and bits of 6. Which to my mind just goes to show that, as far as the developer are concerned, "themes are my reality" (pace Richard Sanderson).

Fair enough, I share a certain wistfulness for a 15-hour game with, like, Terror Island being populated with characters and Brrr Muda having more than three locations, as well as a Scurvy Island with many shops and developed characters with aspirations and personality quirks. That being said, I think the developers have been very, very focused on _theme_ being the driving force of the adventure. They wanted to work without interference, interpellation and internet critique during development. It is a highly personal project, and the way I understand it, that is the theme that interested them the most. I cannot blame them for finding a highly resonant theme and authoring a work that felt important to them.

Thing about the nostalgia as well, is that it is much more of a _critique_ of nostalgia than just pure '-baiting'. Most characters talk about it in more or less subtle ways, like the Voodoo Lady who actively warns against the deleterious effects of nostalgia. It might be fruitful to think about two kinds of nostalgia: reparative nostalgia, in which you simply "want to put back everything as it was, reality be damned", and reflective nostalgia, in which you do not try to erase the passing of time, and you work through the pain, the -algia part of nostalgia, by reflecting upon the passing of time, what good and ill it had brought, and how you have changed as a person.

My pet theory is that the art style (shaded and oblong Alegría/Corporate Memphis) makes perfect sense in light of the ending's representation of the world of Monkey Island. It is abstract, it is cardboard cutout, because, well...

To my mind, it is a cheeky aside, a knowing wink to teach that the rules of storytelling are malleable. Also, it is good parental practice to teach kids the rules, then, once they have acquired them and start applying them, you also show the limit cases where you can subvert the rules for effect. As is with writing/storytelling of any kind.

Hi all, actual benjoyce from all of those years ago, mostly from MILegend.com! I am also one of those people with a lifelong obsession with the games, starting from the tender age of 9, with CMI being my first game. I wrote my BA (2009) and MA Theses (2011) on the games, comparing the Disney influences, theme park design and adventure game design, as well as the many-many meta-layers of references of these games, sprinkling it with a bit of Baudrillard here, a bit of On Stranger Tides there (this before the 4th POTC movie, too), few kicks of theme park history, and a big dollop of game studies for good measure. I have even returned to the games later in my scholarly career here. And I think I am about to write a game studies paper on ReMI eventually. I think that ReMI is a fine addition to the series, and a genuine iteration of the same principles that made the games great back in their day. Ron Gilbert was into meta for many, many reasons, mostly because postmodernism was in the Zeitgeist and a lot more innocent that the metafiction we get these days. But I believe that ReMI in particular owes its humour and metafictional aspects very much to William Goldman's fairytale adventure novel, The Princess Bride, and I especially emphasise that it is the novel, because it has a lot of textual shenanigans that plays with both the way stories are told, and also the nature/status of fictionality. Goldman's constant barrage of patently absurd historical claims and the obvious fictionalisation of his authorial persona, the numerous digressions, omissions, blatant lies, tall tales, asides, and the whole "found manuscript"/"fictional editor" shtick is very much in the same vein as Gilbert and Grossman's masterful play with the computer game as a (meta)medium. There are several themes that run through Gilbert's whole oeuvre, intense preoccupations and hard-won lessons of storytelling, observations of real life and human nature that go well beyond the MI games, and his protagonists always seem to be "Lost in the Funhouse," to quote John Barth's lovely short story, which, incidentally, touches upon the same themes as ReMI, and it ends like this: "He envisions a truly astonishing funhouse, incredibly complex yet utterly controlled from a great central switchboard like the console of a pipe organ. Nobody had enough imagination. He could design such a place himself, wiring and all, and he's only thirteen years old. He would be its operator: panel lights would show what was up in every cranny of its cunning of its multifarious vastness; a switch-flick would ease this fellow's way, complicate that's, to balance things out; if anyone seemed lost or frightened, all the operator had to do was. He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he's not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator- though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed." Quite like a game designer's passion, wouldn't you say so? But I don't believe that Gilbert _certainly must have_ been aware of Barth's work (and while aware of The Princess Bride as a movie, not sure about him having read the book, either) but still, they are not essential to the argument. What is essential, though, is that Maniac Mansion, DOTT, The Cave and Thimbleweed Park are also part of this metafictional house of mirrors because they all seem to be centred around a few core themes: 1. The more aware we are of the artifice of art, the more we are equipped to deal with the absurdities of life. 2. The worlds we build in our fantasies and imagination are true to us, but might be paper thin for others. 3. Our personal quests are dangerous things to actually attain, because with the end of our quests, we lose something of our sense of self. 4. The human condition is one of always seeking, of finding new adventures, 5. Putting an end to interpretation is impossible, definite answers to find meaning and to stabilise it is a fool's errand. 6. Excursions, digressions, side-paths, getting lost are an integral part of getting where you want to be going. Sooo, they are very postmodern attitudes by nature. For these reasons (and because I would have accepted whatever ReMI would end up being at the hands of Terrible Toybox), I am grateful for the ride, and they way I eventually want to give back to the developers and the adventure gaming community is to continue to interpret, critique, and analyse this game as the metamodernist masterpiece I believe it to be.