*sits down for story time*
Wonderful. *lol* Maybe the story time should come some time after the full version has been out for a while. I'm really enjoy post-modern and deconstructionist approaches to understanding the creations of others, and adding the creators explanations doesn't ruin anything for me: it enhances my understand and gives me additional viewpoints from which to peer.
I don't think telling the full meaning of the story after the full version is necessarily a good idea, cause I think part of the power in this games story is that on the surface, it's a pretty simple story (the ending makes this really clear), and there's one level of symbols that directly related to the plot of the story, which are pretty easy to understand (the earth shrinking, for instance). But then there's the other meanings for the symbolism in the game, which is shrouded from the player unless they really feel like digging deep to find something, and what is found isn't necessarily the same thing that another person will find. In fact, I don't even think that I see the same thing in the story as Edmund does, just because we have different memories and pasts. That, and he didn't really tell me what he had planned for the deeper meanings until we had to come up with names for the planets (which was after I had them mostly programmed).
Edmund made it really clear that this game is about childhood (he alludes that it's about his childhood in all the press releases). But like, it really could be about anyone's childhood, and what everything means to a specific person is really what he wants to interpret it as. Just because it deviates from what we had "planned" doesn't mean that that interpretation is necessarily wrong, just a different way of looking at things.
Anyway have you ever read a book, got really into it and loved the whole thing, then a movie of it comes out. The movie most likely presents the characters as different than you interpreted them as and imagined them to be. It's happened to me, it's happened to everyone. That's why movies are generally worse than their book forms (except for a few very rare cases). The books leave a lot to the imagination, so people generate their own mental picture of how things are supposed to be, and become disappointed when the director says "no your idea is wrong, this is what the main character is like..." It would be the same thing with this game if we revealed the true meanings of everything after the full game. People that cared would already have their own idea of what everything means, and it would be really weird to suddenly have your ideas changed when the actual symbolic layer is explained. It's like having an english teacher tell you what something means, when you think it actually means something else. Too bad, this is the real meaning.
I don't want people to feel that way. You got enough of that in high school english class. Just interpret it how you think, read what other people think, come to your own conclusion, and convince yourself that that is what we actually intended from the start. The story is much more powerful that way.
Player
