[spoilers] Identifying George Shirley

[Bees?]

I identified George Shirley by pure luck during my playthrough, and I'm wondering what the intended way to identify him without guessing was.

So far, I've figured out that:
- his hammock is hanging with him inside in Syed's death scene, but he doesn't seem to have any unique identifiers there that carry over to other scenes
- during the artist's death scene, he's sitting next to Wei Lee, but his hammock tag is hidden

Other than that, I'm not sure how you're meant to figure out who he is. For a while, I had him and Alexander Booth swapped, since they were the only unidentified English seamen who were still alive at that point.

e: I guess maybe the way you're meant to solve it is to compare shoes? (similar to how you're expected to identify the Chinese topmen)

I went back and compared his shoes to Booth's shoes, and it seems like Booth's shoes are always rendered without any detail, whereas if you look super close, you can _kind_ of make out buttons on Shirley's shoes. It's pretty subtle and hard to make out through the dithering unless you know what to look for.

Shirley's hammock: https://i.imgur.com/dkqit7s.png

Shirley's foot on left, Booth's foot on right: https://i.imgur.com/UoROjlR.png

[Badger]

I found that in 2.1, that his number was among the Chinese hammocks.
38 Huang Li
40 Li Hong
41 Wei Lee
59 George Shirley

In the later scene you mentioned, he is in fact sitting with Wei Lee. You can confirm that Wei Lee slept right there, because of the number on the hammock behind him at the table. But the hammock behind George was obscured. Both of their hammocks were in the same general location as 2.1. The fact his hammock was there, but you couldn't see the number was an indicator that he in fact slept there.

[Bees?]

Ah, that's clever, I didn't consider comparing his hammock position between the two scenes!

That makes sense, though, since at that point, they're the only two from that hammock section still alive, which explains why there's only the two hammocks.

[Badger]

Originally posted by Bees?:

Ah, that's clever, I didn't consider comparing his hammock position between the two scenes!

That makes sense, though, since at that point, they're the only two from that hammock section still alive, which explains why there's only the two hammocks.

I honestly didn't notice at all that they were the only ones left. I just thought the other two put their hammocks away, and were on other duties. I didn't think about that. Nice!

[Lim-Dul]

I mainly identified him through the "hammock comparison technique" between II.1 and VII.2 as described by BadgerMole and the additional hint of them being the only ones left as laid out by Bees?

Another very slight hint - sorry if I'm overthinking it - the person, who we later identify as George Shirley, seems to be kind of open-minded as to mingling with the other ethnic minorities. On the crew sketch he's gambling with Hamadou, Alexander and Jie Zhang and later on, in VII.2, he's having a drink with Wei Lee, making the connection between the hammock tag in II.1 and his physical representation in VII.2 stronger, I feel. I mean, the hammock of George Shirley is hanging among the Chinese topmen, even though he's an English seaman.

Since the game intentionally leaves some space to fill in the blanks with one's own stories and imagination, I think George Shirley would have been a pretty fun guy to hang around with. :P

He doesn't seem to mind hanging around with everyone on the ship regardless of ethnicity and role and dies while (unsuccessfully) trying to save a fellow crewman from being blasted.

[Baller12]

Once I solved George Booth and learned that Pope had indeed accounted for racial diversity, I started really looking hard at the guy who'd turn out to be George Shirley.

Since the beginning I'd pegged his picture as "possibly Chinese" because the visual language of the drawings consistently uses eyebrows to encode "Chinese". Interesting. But he wears English clothes, and is balding, not shaven like the other definitely-Chinese guys. Maybe he's . . . ethnically Chinese but *nationally* English (like Booth and the African-American Smith)? This might account for his language fluency.

Then I looked at all the other Chinese crewmembers' names—3/4 have "Lee" or "Li" somewhere in their names. What if that's a clue, what if "Shirley" is an Anglicization of "Shue Lee"? The Indian guys probably took Christian first names to fit in, despite their clearly Muslim last names.

I swung, and I hit, and I don't care if Pope had intended it that way, it's my head canon now.

This is what I love about the game—you need information that is *outside* of the game, information imported from the Real World. I'm fascinated to speculate how much trouble someone with social dysfunction, or far cultural remove, might have with this game—how would you know or infer that social class plays into the Midshipmen's camaraderie, that speaking a language not everyone in the card game understands will get you knifed, that the stereotypically French shirt is in fact historical, that the Fourth Mate's Steward is not cut out for this life and probably perceived as "soft" and thus sheltered and sent off in a lifeboat with the women?

Every screenshot I see gives me a lump in my throat because I can never again play this game for the first time :-(