![]() Success and failure in wooing a particular townsperson, however, depends most on which particular rewards are offered to the player after each successful search and how these rewards line up with the townspeople’s individual gift preferences, and the outcomes are more or less the same. Give enough gifts, and a townsperson may fall in love and eventually marry you. ![]() If your Ranger talks to the townsfolk between winters, you can build relationships by making gifts of the items you find and the rewards you earn from your time spent searching in the forest. An opening sequence succinctly conveys the narrative frame-a hooded figure stumbles upon a magic staff of power and obligation, and then assumes a place as a small town’s “Ranger,” with a 15-year term of service spent rescuing the town’s lost children every winter. I’m hard-pressed, in fact, to figure out why high schools demand (or used to demand-I may be showing my age) that students focus on a poem so ripe for misinterpretation.Īnd what exactly, given all the (often misbegotten) baggage that Frost’s poem carries, are David Edery and his team at Spry Fox looking to do by self-consciously naming their new game Road Not Taken ?Īt first glance, Road Not Taken is not particularly concerned with matters of choice. The context is old age and impending death, not the seeming immortality of youth. It is a poem about limitations, in which possibilities are not just closing, but are in fact long since cut off. Of course, for a number of reasons, this characterization is almost entirely unfair, not in the least because it’s a misreading of Frost’s poem, which, if the reader takes the title seriously, is not a celebratory rumination on the path chosen by the poem’s narrator, but is at least as much driven by the narrator’s regret over the unknown, unimaginable road, well-trod or not, which was not taken. “I took the road less traveled by,” a certain segment of every generation seems to congratulate itself as it emerges from adolescence into adulthood, youth into middle age, “and that has made all the difference.” As I make my own way into middle age, it’s a sentiment loaded with the shortcomings of my parents’ generation, the student counterculture of the 60s and 70s settling into the unreflective, commoditized complacency and repackaged irrelevance of classic rock CD boxed sets, with their oversized photo-drenched mythologizing of how much better being young and starting a band used to be. ![]() His poem “The Road Not Taken” is probably more broadly known than read, functioning as a sort of cultural shorthand for self-satisfied nonconformity.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |