Hsin-Hao Yu's Personal Blog

Spoiler alert This post is my thoughts on the puzzle design in Steve Meretzky’s 1990 adventure game Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls. It is NOT a spoiler-free review. If you haven’t played the game, stop right here. It’s a game worthy of playing, so you should enjoy it yourself. Reading further will absolutely spoil the fun for you. Jimmy Maher at the Digital Antiquarian has written about the historical context of this game in great detail, so I won’t repeat it here. Briefly, Spellcasting 101 was game designer Steve Meretzky’s first published game after the demise of Infocom. Although billed as a graphical adventure game, it is an Infocom-style text adventure through and through. The graphics are worthless add-ons. During my 2025 holidays, I decided to play this game instead of Meretzky’s Infocom-era oeuvre, because I’m not quite ready to tackle the proper Infocom catalog yet.

I have been fascinated by Balinese Ceremonial Music - a suite of three piano compositions published by composer and musicologist Colin McPhee in 1940. What makes these compositions so interesting is that they seem to inhabit the twilight zone at the intersection of two different worlds. On one hand, they work perfectly well in classical music concerts: The melodies do sound exotic at times, but they don’t appear to be too unexpected in a modern concert hall. Every time I listen to this music, I can’t help feeling it was composed by Colin McPhee himself.

Colin McPhee (1900-1964), a Canadian composer and musicologist who lived in Bali in the 1930s, was one of the first Western scholars who study Balinese gamelan as a research topic. He was forced to leave Bali in 1938 at the onset of WW2, and spent the next 20+ years working on Music in Bali - a monumental book in ethnomusicology published posthumously in 1966. In his memoir A House in Bali, McPhee wrote that during his life in Bali, he delighted (or maybe amused?) his Javaese and Balinese friends with a couple of informal concerts where he performed piano arrangements of gamelan music. Three of these piano pieces were published in 1940 under the title Balinese Ceremonial Music. They caught the attention of Béla Bartók, who was among the first to perform them in public.

1 Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote is my favorite story by Jorge Luis Borges. Every time I read it I find something new to think about. The premise of this story is sheer absurdity: the narrator claims that his writer friend Pierre Menard had accomplished an unparalleled feat in literature, but this magnum opus was invisible to most people, because it was identical to selected chapters of Don Quixote by Cervantes. Despite being identical to Don Quixote, Pierre Menard’s Don Quixote was not merely a copy of Don Quixote, according to the narrator. It was more subtle and deeper than the original, because the same words, written by a contemporary writer, were “infinity richer” in meaning, drawing on new ideas accumulated from 300 years of cultural and historical development following the days of Cervantes.

SPOILERS WARNING! In Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges, there is a story titled The Secret Miracle which I find particularly stimulating. The plot is centered on a writer who was sentenced to death. At the night before his execution, he begged God to grant him one more year of life so that he could finish writing an important piece of work. The next day, at the moment just before the bullet hit him, time suddenly stopped. From the writer’s point of view, all activities in the physical world had been frozen - the bullet remained stationary in the air, his body unmovable. However, his mind continued to function. The writer realized that he wish had been granted by God, and he was given a year to complete his unfinished masterpiece entirely in his head (Is the word “year” meaningful, you might ask, given that time had stopped? Well, the writer still experienced sleep, so there was still a mental measurement of time). The writer remained in this state for a year, in which he diligently wrote in his head. When his time was up, time resumed and the bullet hit his body and killed him. A true miracle had taken place, but it was a private miracle, because from the point of view of everybody else, nothing unusual happened. The story seems to argue that it was logically possible for certain types of miracle to happen without violations of physical laws being observed.