Jeremy Douglass evaluates Shade within the history of interactive fiction, and considers how light is represented in the code structure of scene descriptions, arguing that "[w]ithout vision there is no agency."
The source is the essay-review on www.electronicbookreview.com written by Jeremy Douglass
"Shade is an interactive fiction (IF, or "text adventure game") - an object-oriented story simulation in which a command line is used to interact with a text parser. The parser prints text describing the situation to the player ("You are sprawled on the futon") and the player responds by typing ("> EXAMINE FUTON") to receive a response ("The futon is definitely on the downhill side of life's rolling knolls."). By convention, IF descriptions are generally written in the second person, while player responses are imperative statements."
"Throughout Shade, you inhabit two worlds. In the first world, a vision of the apartment invites you to reflect on choices in your former life that lead to the second world, the reality of the desert and of the player's death. Although your apartment is brightly lit by a bulb, it is also a shadow world, the hallucination of a dead or dying shade. The question is not whether this death will happen, but when and how bad news will arrive."
All quotes were directly rewritten from the essay.