The following are two pieces that I created in response to Edward Packard's The Cave of Time. The intention is to tease apart the book's narrative and ludic aspects, in order to see how they work independently. Read more about the issues at stake and my methodology.
Every Path Through the Cave of Time is an attempt to strip away from Cave of Time all ludic aspects. It consists of fifty-four texts: one for each possible path through the book. The resulting texts emphasize the book's narrative wackiness, but also reveal how each of the stories rely on their cousin stories for context and cohesion.
Cave of Time: The Computer Game emphasizes the graph-crawling aspect of the book, attempting to make exploring the book easier and more rewarding. It keeps track of what paths the player has taken through the book, and rewards points not just for reaching every page and every ending, but also finding the longest and shortest possible paths. Backtracking is both easy (just hit the "backspace" key) and encouraged—indeed, you can't "win" the game without backtracking. Introducing explicit goals and differently valued outcomes adds interest to the experience, but perhaps makes it too easy to ignore the narrative richness of the text.
The projects above belong to Adam Parrish. Sabrina Banes provided material assistance in their realization.
The text of Cave of Time is copyrighted. It is used here without permission for academic purposes only.
