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Jason and Medea
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About the game
The scene is a street in Corinth, and also a stage in Athens: fourteen thousand spectators are watching from the stone seats. You play Medea, the foreign princess who helped Jason win the golden fleece and left everything to follow him. Now he plans to marry the daughter of the king of Corinth, and the king has ordered you and your two sons out of the city.
Jason has come to explain himself, and the chorus of Corinthian women is listening. You cannot stop the marriage, but you can win the argument. Every exchange is a small duel of words: you pick a topic, decide whether to press your point or protect yourself, and watch the women's sympathy move towards you or towards him.
Victor Gijsbers wrote it for the IF Demo Fair at PAX East 2011, as an experiment in treating conversation as combat. Much of the dialogue is adapted from Euripides' Medea, in E. P. Coleridge's public-domain translation, which the author modernised.
Playing it here
Click Play now and the story starts in the player. Jason speaks first, so an
argument is already under way. Everything is typed: write a command after the
> prompt and press Enter. The game is in English. Type about for the
author's guide, the background of the myth and the commands.
Commands
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
argue |
list the topics you can raise |
argue about topic |
start an argument on that topic (one word is enough) |
attack |
press your point: better odds of winning, but higher stakes |
defend |
hold your ground when you think you are losing |
inventory (i) |
see what you are carrying |
show something |
bring something out in front of everyone |
status |
show the numbers behind the argument |
about |
background, instructions and credits |
save / restore |
keep your progress in this browser and load it back |
A few things worth knowing
Attack when you are right, defend when you are not. Attacking raises the stakes of the current argument; if you think Jason has the better case, defend and wait for a better topic.
The chorus is the judge. Their mood, shown in the room description, tells
you who is winning. status shows the same thing in numbers.
Check your inventory early. What you carry can turn an argument, and the author points out that timing matters.
It is short. A play-through takes a few minutes, and the dice make each one a little different, so it is worth trying more than one approach.
Credits and licence
Jason and Medea was written by Victor Gijsbers, with text adapted from Euripides, Apollonius of Rhodes and Friedrich Nietzsche, and is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. The licence text and the complete source code of this release are linked from this page.