NOTE: I suppose there are spoilers for Transistor below. And above too, I guess, in a vague way. Um, sorry.
Mr. Bracket has a few additional comments for the reader, and his confederates, in the manual to Transistor's physical edition from Limited Run Games. Does the Process really want what the Camerata did for Cloudbank, as per the second remark? It just seems to want to build and reshape rapaciously, so far as it "wants" anything, and it appears that it'd get that more under Cloudbank's constant, go-nowhere transience than it would under the Camerata's envisioned strides toward more sweeping change but a greater semblance of permanence. Maybe I'm overthinking it: Royce wants to build, the Process wants to build, and what Royce wants, he assumes his comrades would want, too.
Here's the section from the manual on the Camerata.
It's weird seeing character traits all laid out plainly like this, as the actual game is obsessively, inexplicably vague about the smallest plot details, right down to the infamous "...oh, they were married" delayed realization.
55 is a pretty early "end" for a politician's career, but given everyone's likely a computer person in Transistor, I suppose 55 years *is* an awfully long time for a software element not to be replaced. Maybe Cloudbank is part of a nuclear bunker.
Apparently, the game is called Luminarise, not Luminalize, as I previously believed. I can't say one's an improvement over the other. I shouldn't be spending time on this, as I've got a ton of work to do, but I have to have some sort of down time, so here we go. Pics are on the official site; I assume that if you're reading this, you know the order of the Guardians' elements (yellow/Light, then purple/Darkness, etc.). Comments in italics are my own.
An additional discovery from Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things: a female game designer at Atari is credited for defining the distinction between first-person and third-person interactions in gaming. The distinction, at least as understood by Norman at this time, gets a bit confused with direct control of the icons or characters on screen versus, say, using a command line to tell a computer to execute operations, but it's interesting to hear that this very basic distinction was apparently first dissected in earnest by a woman.
The book is referenced is 1986's User-Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction, for those wondering.
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