Couldn’t “solve interloper”

I’ve been obsessing about Interloper since the beginning, and when I saw the finale I knew I had to finish it out properly. But this article is my third attempt to write something about Interloper, after spending several weeks just doing research.

My first instinct after seeing the finale was to “solve” it. There was an enormous amount of information available that was all interconnected and painted a picture of this huge, fascinating world. Interloper F didn’t answer all the questions the series asked, but surely with all the clues it gave us, someone who really understood the series would put the pieces together. Surely I could, if I gave it some time and attention.

But that didn’t work.

Narrative spoilers

But this is not a Deltarune thing. For any narrative media, the experience depends on the work presenting the narrative flow it intends to. This includes reveals, this includes pacing, this includes characterization.

Getting information out of turn spoils the game. It does this so aggressively that breaking narrative flow has become one of the definitions for the word “spoil”, as in “ruin”. I have a much longer piece I want to write some day about information filtering in general, which is maybe the hardest problem ever?

For games like Deltarune, it’s taken for granted that people have at most a week of courtesy before the Internet is flooded with information. And of course there are some people out there who are eager to get that information as soon as possible; it is not universally true that people want to experience narrative as intended.

Except sometimes we care a lot

But is this a little silly? Is narrative purity so reverential that information should not flow through the normal channels by which ideas are pushed to us, like social media?

Here’s what piqued my interest about this today: gaming does have a reverence for not letting experiences be spoiled. It’s just very selective right now. We see this absolute demand that knowledge not be leaked, that games be allowed to communicate information to the player on their own terms. But beyond extremely new releases, we see this almost exclusively with regard to knowledge-based games or metroidbrainias, where knowledge is the gameplay mechanic.

Argument is stupid

First, to be clear, what was actually being argued at the time was exceedingly stupid. I’m not giving that any credit.

After committing to significantly overpay to purchase Twitter with no requirements that they do due diligence (yes, really!) Elon Musk tried to call off the deal.

Elon Musk@elonmusk

If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!

Thu Apr 21 18:53:55 +0000 2022

Elon Musk@elonmusk

That is why we must clear out bots, spam & scams. Is something actually public opinion or just someone operating 100k fake accounts? Right now, you can’t tell.

And algorithms must be open source, with any human intervention clearly identified.

Then, trust will be deserved.

1651594704000

Elon Musk@elonmusk

Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of usershttps://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-estimates-spam-fake-accounts-represent-less-than-5-users-filing-2022-05-02/ …

1652435078000

This was a pretty transparent attempt to get out of the purchase agreement after manipulating the price, and it was correctly and widely reported as such.

Scott Nover, “Inside Elon Musk’s legal strategy for ditching his Twitter deal”

Elon Musk has buyer’s remorse. On April 25, the billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion, but since then the stock market has tanked. Twitter agreed to sell to Musk at $54.20 per share, a 38% premium at the time; today it’s trading around $40.

That’s probably the real reason Musk is spending so much time talking about bots.

I don’t want to get too bogged down in the details of why Elon was using this tactic, but fortunately other people wrote pages and pages about it, so I don’t have to.