In the parser game Three-Card Trick you play Morgan the Magnificent, a magician seeking to assure that he's never again upstaged by Ivan, that other magician whom he considers to be a charlatan hack. This short, linear and impeccably written parser adventure debuted in the first Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction (an exposition whose name I hope to not have to type too often in life, and given its quadrenniality, my hope should be realised) and now reappears in Spring Thing 2016. Three-Card Trick manages to develop multiple dimensions of surprise and suspense over its duration, and thus, like a good magic trick, is itself surprising in a delighting way.
The archness, pride and arrogance of both magicians comes through in the narration and the dialogue via all kinds of showmanship, ranging form the boastful to the oily to the spectacular (spectacular within the parameters of a card trick). Each card that is turned over and each bold pronouncement presents another dramatic moment in which the story could easily take a sharp turn, and the author zooms in on a lot of these held-breath moments by having the player hit a key to draw out each word of a sentence. I personally think this device needs to be hitting home above a pretty high threshold to merit its use, and it's handled about equal best I've seen in this game.
The craft of directing player action to a single end in a linear parser game is wrangled breezily. The phrases you need to type are often dispensed verbatim as part of prose descriptions in the preceding paragraphs. Subtlety doesn't really matter because these directions coincide entirely with the strong motivations of the narrator and the scope of the required actions in the game. Nor does the overall linearity mean that Three-Card Trick is underimplemented. Most good idea tangents work, and almost all people and things I tried looking at were described through the consistent prism of Morgan's condemnational eye.
About the only thing that even mildly perturbed me was that the compass the player is handed at game start, which is supposed to make navigation super-easy by allowing one to type IN and OUT to move towards or away from goals, confused me. Not the idea of it, which is great, nor the explanation for it, which is basically 'it's magic', but just that in this scheme that's trying to be so simple, I found it ironically easy to be uncertain about where IN was going to lead next and where OUT was going to lead next. Sometimes I had to reverse when I found myself going the way I hadn't anticipated.
There's some weird humour attached to the title of the game in light of what it reveals to be the significance of the 'three-card' element of the trick. This plays to the idea of misdirection in magic, as if everyone who is amazed by this trick was somehow figuratively looking in the wrong direction, or figuratively dwelling on the wrong thing, in the first place. It's also strange that the people at the exposition can be repeatedly amazed by the same trick when it's being repeated in back-to-back performances, though the game certainly points a finger at their notions of fashionability. I found that these unusual little openings in the gameworld, applicable to but unnoticed by its characters, added a speculative dimension to the experience of a kind that I think is hard to get out of parser games that direct player action as strongly as this one.
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I recently showed my three and a half year-old nephew how to do a magic trick using a special trick cup and ball that I got out of a showbag when I was a kid. I was impressed that he had the dexterity to manipulate the ball-hiding fake lid on the cup, but after he did the trick and I acted surprised at the ball's disappearance, he put his finger inside the fake lid and whispered confidentially, 'The ball's in here.'
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