## Description
Kithe was an e-mag (electronic magazine) series that ran, on and off, for
three years, primarily documenting the comings and goings of members of the
computer art collective Mistigris through text captures of postings to
echomail networks, reformatted as articles. Oftentimes the conversational
style was a poor fit for conventional publication, or a biting quip was just
too short to publish on its own, and so these items were sat on until a
suitable form of presentation could be devised. This form was, it turns out,
the text adventure game — where themes and topics of articles could inform
the environment in which they were presented, and where polemics could be
presented as emerging from the virtual mouths of the very personages who put
them in writing… and most importantly, where people are going to be
expecting to be reading lots of text anyhow.
Hundreds of articles are collected and thematically organized in different
rooms, their specific display triggered (some more straightforwardly than
others) by appropriate use of objects to which they are linked. Text adventure
tropes (such as darkness) interfere with access to some areas, which become
“unlocked” after the right object is found — in return for reading, the
player will be rewarded with… more to read!
A vague game lurks in the background of this surreal library-cum-adventure;
some articles and some areas convey keywords necessary, as in Beyond the
Tesseract, for the nominal “completion” of the game — but as in any good cave
crawl, the reward here is really in thorough exploration.
Kithe #14