SHERLOCK HOLMES

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Sherlock Holmes, Narratives and Videogames

The Final Problem: Which One? A few words may suffice to tell the little that remains. An examination by experts leaves little doubt that a personal contest

between the two men ended, as it could hardly fail to end in such a situation, in their reeling over, locked in each other's arms. Any attempt at recovering the bodies was absolutely hopeless, and there, deep down in that dreadful caldron of swirling water and seething foam, will lie for all time the most dangerous criminal and the foremost champion of the law of their generation. The Swiss youth was never found again, and there can be no doubt that he was one of the numerous agents whom Moriarty kept in this employ. As to the gang, it will be within the memory of the public how completely the evidence which Holmes had accumulated exposed their organization, and how heavily the hand of the dead man weighed upon them. Of their terrible chief few details came out during the proceedings, and if I have now been compelled to make a clear statement of his career it is due to those injudicious champions who have endeavored to clear his memory by attacks upon him whom I shall ever regard as the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known

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I moved my head to look at the cabinet behind me. When I turned again, Sherlock Holmes was standing smiling at me across my study table. I rose to my feet, stared at him for some seconds in utter amazement, and then it appears that I must have fainted for the first and the last time in my life. Certainly a gray mist swirled before my eyes, and when it cleared I found my collar-ends undone and the tingling after-taste of brandy upon my lips. Holmes was bending over my chair, his flask in his hand. "My dear Watson," said the well-remembered voice, "I owe you a thousand apologies. I had no idea that you would be so affected." I gripped him by the arms. "Holmes!" I cried. "Is it really you? Can it indeed be that you are alive? Is it possible that you succeeded in climbing out of that awful abyss?"

The (Ab)Sense of Endings in Prince of Persia

THE MANY FACES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

(spot me if you can)

Data and Geordie play Holmes and Watson in the Holodeck of The Enterprise

Rethinking the telos The virtual is not opposed to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is

virtual. [...] Indeed, the virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the real object — as though the object had one part of itself in the virtual into which it plunged as though into an objective dimension. [...] The reality of the virtual consists of the differential elements and relations along with the singular points which correspond to them.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: The Athlone Press, 1994), p.209.

Since each is a passing present, one life may replay another at a different level, as if the

philosopher and the pig, the criminal and the saint, played out the past at different levels of a gigantic cone. This is what we call metempsychosis.

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 105; added emphasis.

Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened videogame

• Popular and well-acclaimed

• Combines the Sherlock Holmes stories with Lovecraftian mythos.

• Yet another pastiche of the Sherlock Holmes ‘canon’.

• Difficult to play.

• Point and click interface reduces

the freedom of gameplay.

Thank you

Dr Souvik Mukherjee,