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Eight years ago, the reclusive novelist Helen DeWitt published The Last Samurai. This told the story of a cash-poor young linguist and the education of her intellectually curious young son. The critic Sven Birkerts recently called it, in New York magazine, the most underrated book of the last decade. Still, the book is hardly unappreciated: The Last Samurai was widely praised, translated into other languages, celebrated as a “cult” book, and reached a large audience. Many readers’ reaction to The Last Samurai focused on the bond between mother and son and the peculiarity of the son’s gifts. These things reflected only part of DeWitt’s purpose and her range. What was more rarely said was that The Last Samurai was also an angry book, about the curse of living with too much curiosity and intelligence in too pinched, prosaic, and conventional a world. At age 47, DeWitt’s success and frustrations led her to leave the United States again and take up residence in Berlin. She has since written

My favorite solution was to make the insta-death choice very rare (You chose door number two? You’re dead!) and focus on a wide range of variables to track choices with the main story. Players don’t have cut-and-dried choices that point in obvious directions, but more subtle choices that could each turn out well. Each choice has real consequences and real rewards far beyond issues of death and survival. They take the player along differing paths through the main story and result in a range of consequences and endings, depending on the preponderance of choices made throughout the game. This…

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