“Ruined” co-creator Christian Neuhaus recently joined a podcast to talk about a different type of interactive fiction: text adventure games from the 1980s. Episode 23 of The Retro Adventurers looks at three Sherlock Holmes games: Sherlock (Melbourne House), Sherlock Holmes: Another Bow (Bantam Software), and Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels (Infocom). https://retroadventurers.podbean.com/e/23
In Sherlock, you take a train to Leatherhead and investigate a double murder that resembles two cases from the canon. In Another Bow, you’re on an ocean voyage with an abundance of noteworthy people from 1919 and in The Riddle of the Crown Jewels, you play as Watson and traverse London in a quest to recover the stolen jewels.
The show notes include links for playing the games in a browser and links to the games’ Interactive Fiction Database pages, where user’s manuals for two of the games are available. All three IFDB pages have download links, if you have software for playing ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and Infocom games. The user’s manual and the “lost manuscript” that accompanied Another Bow are available here: https://www.mocagh.org/loadpage.php?getgame=anotherbow
I tried some prompts with OpenAI’s DALL-E image generator around fall 2023. Holmes’s criticism in “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” that Watson “degraded what should have been a course of lectures” got me thinking of a contemporary course of lectures: TED Talks. I decided to see how DALL-E would represent a Sherlock Holmes TED Talk of a well-known story. The text in bold is the prompt I gave to DALL-E and the following images are the results.
sherlock holmes presenting “the adventure of the speckled band” as a TED talk
I then decided to describe the type of scene I wanted, and exclude the subject of the talk, as DALL-E appeared to be interpreting it as instruction to put a band around Sherlock Holmes.
sherlock holmes in a dark auditorium giving a TED talk
Looks more like a TED Talk from Inspector Lestrade.Benedict Cumberbatch as Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Phantom of the Opera as werewolf Sherlock Holmes.
sherlock holmes TED talk in a dark auditorium
“If you remember only one thing from my lecture, I hope it is teetberd.”
To make Sherlock Holmes more recognizable, I gave DALL-E some iconography to incorporate.
sherlock holmes wearing a deerstalker hat and inverness cape in a dark auditorium giving a TED talk
“Good night, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. And nice hat.”
Maybe I was overloading DALL-E with imagery. I removed ‘inverness cape’ from the prompt.
sherlock holmes wearing a deerstalker hat in a dark auditorium giving a TED talk
Would calling it a ‘cap’ instead of a ‘hat’ make a difference? No.
sherlock holmes wearing a deerstalker cap in a dark auditorium giving a TED talk
It looks like his presentation is about deerstalker caps too. Or maybe it’s a presentation about being stalked by a deer.
Returning to the first prompt, I decided that DALL-E didn’t recognize “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” as “the one with the snake” and gave it an image to show in the presentation.
TED Talk about snakes, presented by sherlock holmes
Who better than a snake-man to give a presentation about snakes?
Because the “speckled band” prompts were yielding illustrations, I tried specifying that I wanted a more realistic image.
photograph of sherlock holmes presenting “the adventure of the speckled band” as a TED talk
I don’t know where the idea of showing Sherlock Holmes as a perfume bottle person came from.
Finally, I tried a series of prompts where I directed DALL-E to imitate the style of Sherlock Holmes illustrator Sidney Paget.
a sidney paget illustration of sherlock holmes giving a TED Talk
Sir Ian McKellan returns for the Mr. Holmes prequel.
a sidney paget illustration of sherlock holmes in a dark auditorium
(Interesting in this and the following that DALL-E included a light source without prompting.) a sidney paget illustration of sherlock holmes speaking in a dark auditorium
a sidney paget illustration of sherlock holmes in a dark auditorium giving a TED talk
An Abraham Lincoln keyed to mutant superhero powers instead of deductive ones
In conclusion, my thoughts about these images align with a statement from the story I used in the first prompt: “some comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace.”
BONUS IMAGES
At first, I mistakenly used the wrong spelling of “deerstalker.” I don’t have a problem admitting to that, since the results were pretty funny.
sherlock holmes wearing a dearstalker hat and inverness cape in a dark auditorium giving a TED talk
Only image to give TED Talk presenter Holmes a lanyard.I asked for Sherlock Holmes, not Cornelius Fudge.
sherlock holmes wearing a dearstalker hat in a dark auditorium giving a TED talk
Completely inaccurate. Microphones like that aren’t at TED Talks.
On March 25th Shakespeare in Busan performed a theatrical adaptation of Ryan North’s To Be Or Not to Be: That is the Adventure, a “chooseable-path” retelling of Hamlet. Like You’ve Ruined a Perfectly Good Mystery, the play featured a narrator soliciting choices from the audience. But in this case the audience was (potentially) global: the performance was livestreamed on YouTube, and viewers could vote by commenting on the YouTube video or by adding #tobeornottobe to a tweet. I enjoyed observing through @ruinednarrator the audience engagement on Twitter and the enthusiasm for this form of theater.
Below is a recording of the performance, which features multiple passes through the book. In addition to choosing different directions for the plot, To Be Or Not To Be gives you the option at the beginning of following one of thee characters: Ophelia, King Hamlet (deceased), or Prince Hamlet.
You've Ruined a Perfectly Good Mystery! 