The other innovative aspect of For a Change is the syntax, which is fractured, confusing, and fascinating; the author has chosen a mode of expression that makes sense on its own terms, but is quite definitely nonstandard English. Everything can be deciphered with a little thought, of course, and usually the key is realizing that a word, in the game's world, can act as a different part of speech than expected. The effect is very much like reading e.e. cummings (I was reminded in particular of the poem "anyone lived in a pretty how town"); once the reader recognizes how certain words are being used (in that particular poem, for instance, "anyone" should be parsed as a name), the whole thing falls into place. The syntactical shifts in For a Change usually arise from the way the author personifies and animates generally inanimate objects by giving them verbs suggesting conscious action. It's a credit to the author that his work recalls cummings, and that getting used to the unusual syntax is rewarding rather than irritating.
Due to the above elements, For a Change is both a challenge and a pleasure to read. The following is typical of both aspects:
Lantern Room This subsection of the inset brightens and flickers. The shadows belong to the air more than you do, it seems. They walk the cordstone walls; they move and excite. The shadows look to a wall, to bars in the wall, and the songlantern behind them. Further in is east, further out is west, and a slope obtains up to the south. >examine songlantern The songlantern hums and burbles, circled by brightening words, evading the bars and piercing the silence and darkness.
"The shadows look to a wall..." suggests that the shadows converge on the bars, but the reader must first recognize that "look" is the game's way of personifying and giving life to the shadows, rather than binding them to the literal and inanimate reality. As for the songlantern, the reader has no way of visualizing what it is, and the description doesn't help; it merely gives the reader some elements to draw on in coming up with his or her own image. The word itself is evocative, rather than merely cryptic (at least, I found it so)--and the description conjures up a variety of images and sounds in a way that few straight-syntax descriptions could do. Similar is the following: "Then there is a moment of loudness and shock." An explosion? A clap of thunder? A scream? It could be any one, or all three, or none; the language is calculated to allow the player to choose.
The fiction aspect of For a Change succeeds brilliantly, then (in my book, at least), but does it work as a game? The bag is a little more mixed on this count. Most of the puzzles require intuitive leaps of one kind or another, some greater than others; there is logic to all of them (logic on the game's terms, at least), but some of them make more sense after the fact. The problem in one particular puzzle is that the game requires a syntactical leap of faith, in a sense--not so much in what you type as in the way you parse a certain object's name, and the properties you ascribe to the object as a result of the parsing. The correct solution is quite consistent with the feel of the game, but getting used to the game's approach to grammar and actually predicting how the game will approach a given word (sufficiently so to make the prediction the basis for a puzzle solution) are two different things.
The other problem with the game element of For a Change is that it's a little directionless; the initial directive is this: "The sun is gone. It must be brought. You have a rock," which doesn't exactly give the player much of a nudge in discerning the proper path. Adding to the aimlessness aspect is that the first puzzle isn't solvable until a certain event happens, and it's possible for the player to fail to trigger the event early on and wander around getting frustrated. True, the game is relatively small, and there aren't so many puzzles that the player is likely to remain clueless for long--and the hint system does help. Still, the initial playing experience can be a little daunting--the player's initial reaction might well be "not only don't I understand what anything is, I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing or how to go about it."
Even if it's less than perfect as a game, though, the interactive aspect of For a Change is one of its greatest strengths--because it is through the player's interactions with the environment that he or she generates images, forms an impression of what this elusive world is like. Giving the player a variety of ways to interact with the characters and objects ensures that different players will come away with different impressions, for example in the following:
>examine toolman The toolman is bright and misty. Thoughts and uses hang from his shoulders like birds.Or:
>give bar to toolman The toolman gently misunderstands. The toolman smiles softly.A player can easily generate an image of the toolman as animate or inanimate, depending on how he or she chooses to approach him (or it), and neither one is clearly wrong or right. This indeterminacy can be achieved in static fiction, to be sure, but interactive fiction can do it much better--an author can deliberately accommodate multiple ways of visualizing the same object or character--and For a Change takes advantage of its medium in some novel ways. Similarly intriguing about For a Change is the way it deals with scale; all measurements are relative ("To your north is a massive transparent cube, perhaps five of your heights on each side"), leaving the distinct possibility that the events are taking place on a microscopic level, or a cosmic level, or somewhere in between.
Though, again, it's not for everyone, For a Change is the sort of experimental work that the competition was meant to foster; it's not the most successful entry as a game, but it's certainly well done fiction, and I gave it an 8 in the competition.