From adamc@acpub.duke.edu Wed Nov 18 14:47:11 MET 1998
Article: 39044 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Adam Cadre <adamc@acpub.duke.edu>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Photopia Phaq v1.0 [very long]
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 06:21:50 -0500
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the Photopia Phaq, v1.0
(warning: only read this if you've already played the game)

Q: Okay, here's the first question.  You ripped this Q&A idea off from
   Ben "Pinback" Parrish, didn't you?

A: Actually, yes.  But that's okay -- he stole from me first.  What,
   you think *Ben Parrish* came up with "hard jeans"?

Q: Whatever.  So.  I thought your follow-up to I-0 was supposed to
   be Pantheon.  What ever happened to that, punk-ass?

A: First of all, take your Haldol.  Secondly, well, I started in on
   Pantheon toward the end of '97, and even sent out a working version
of the first section to some beta-testers.  But even by the beginning
of '98 I knew that I wanted to retool the concept.  Also, I had a
great idea for a comp game that I was eager to begin working on.

Q: Photopia?

A: Actually, no.  The game I started working on in March -- and
   referred to on ifMUD as "my comp game" -- was something else
entirely.  I don't want to give too much away, so I'll just say that
its name starts with a V.

Q: Swell.  So what happened to the V game?

A: Jonesboro, Arkansas.  A couple kids opened fire on their classmates,
   which just so happens to be how my novel ends.  Right then I knew I
had to finish the novel before the bookstores filled up with stories
about school shootings.  So I didn't work on any IF at all until I
finished the novel in early July.

Q: So why didn't you go back to the V game at that point?

A: A couple of reasons.  One, the idea sort of outgrew the bounds of
   the comp; two, I figured that my chances of finishing Photopia
by the deadline were better than those of finishing the V game on time.

Q: So you'd already thought up Photopia?

A: Sort of.  The name came first: in early '96, I was taking a class
   for which we watched some Doris Day movie, and the prof handed out
photocopies of an old magazine with an article about it.  The magazine
was called, I thought, PHOTOPIA.  Which I thought was one of the
coolest neologisms I'd ever run across.  Then I realized, wait --
that's not an I... that's an L!  "PHOTOPLA"?  No, the last letter had
been cropped.  It was PHOTOPLAY.  So "Photopia" was all mine.

Later I discovered that some company had already trademarked that
word.  Fortunately, I wasn't distributing my game through CMP, so I
didn't have to change the title to "Alley Dawson: Mostly Dead" or
anything like that.

Q: So you had a title.  When did you find something to attach it to?

A: Not for a while.  At first I thought I wanted to do something
   that was in large part a strategy game -- that you'd have these
differently colored discs that you had to deploy somehow, making sure
you had the right one in the right place and so on.  Then I worked up
this whole treatment about a group of six kids, who, upon reaching
adolescence, are sent out into the forest, where they each find a
colored disc.  Each disc would grant a different superpower.  I may
still do something with this idea, though the fabulous INHUMANS #2
by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee sort of stole my thunder there.

Then, in April, I saw THE SWEET HEREAFTER.

Q: And what's that?

A: The best movie ever made.

Q: What's it about?

A: Babysitters and bus crashes.

Q: Ah, so you're a plagiarist.

A: That's not a question.  But yeah, I was heavily influenced by
   THE SWEET HEREAFTER.  I probably took the babysitter bit from it
(though I'd been wanting to do something with babysitters before I
saw it, and please don't take that out of context.)  More to the
point, seeing it made me think, wait, I don't want to do another
wacky adventure featuring a player character with some rather
extreme behavior right now; I want to try something literary and
beautiful.  Which isn't to say that I'll never do something like
I-0 again; rather, I'm hoping that the fact that I've released two
games as different as I-0 and Photopia will mean that from now on,
people will have no idea at all what to expect when I announce a game.

Q: What other influences were at work as you wrote Photopia?

A: Christopher Priest -- not the British one -- was a huge influence.
   He used to be known for his brilliant and hilarious dialogue, his
nuanced characters, his offbeat endings, and he's still known for all
these things, but he's even better known these days for the "Priest
plot": a type of storytelling in which not only is chronology mixed
up, but at the beginning, you don't even really know what you're
looking at as you read... but gradually you piece together who the
characters are, what the events you've just witnessed mean, and by
the end of the story, you can't imagine it any other way -- the
details have been related in exactly the right order for maximum
effect.  And whenever the issue of linearity has come up on the
newsgroup, I've thought of Priest: from one perspective, his stories
are completely linear -- it's static fiction, the reader can't
affect the story except by turning the page -- but from another, they
could scarcely be less linear.  But how to build a story from the
accumulation of carefully arranged vignettes in IF?  Photopia was in
part an attempt to answer that question.

Another influence was Robert C. O'Brien.  Most people know him from
MRS. FRISBY AND THE RATS OF NIMH, but I was mainly thinking of his
book A REPORT FROM GROUP 17 as I wrote Photopia.  In this book, a
twelve-year-old girl gets kidnapped, and it happens very close to the
beginning -- O'Brien has all of a paragraph or two to make us care
about her before the kidnapping happens.  And he does.  How?  By
presenting her through the eyes of her worshipful five-year-old
brother.  I used this technique often in the game: Alley is only
seen through the eyes of people who adore her -- her parents, Wendy,
Jonathan, the Mackayes.  And I also got to do something O'Brien
couldn't: I got to arrange things so that the player adopted the
personae of those who cared about her.  The player, if I did my job
well, never thinks, "Hmm... is this Alley all she's cracked up to be?"
the way an outside observer might; Alley's *your* daughter, *your*
babysitter, *your* junior-high crush.  Through *your* eyes, she's all
that and a potato chip factory.

The girl in GROUP 17 was named Alison; Alison also struck me as a
sort of archetypically Canadian name, and I wanted Alley's name to
have a Canadian feel to it.  Partly because THE SWEET HEREAFTER was a
Canadian film, and partly because I'd just read a book that was in
part about Canada World Youth and Katimavik, and very much wanted
Alley to be a part of such a program.  To that end, I invented
Turtalia (the state with which Dorado was at war in RA Montgomery's
Choose Your Own Adventure book ESCAPE -- thought that might give me
away): just as my Dorado is the state which might have been had
Gadsden stayed sober and actually purchased land with an outlet to
the Gulf of California, my Turtalia is the state which might have
existed had the US actually fought for 54-40.  Hence the use of
the metric system and the lack of the extraneous "u" in "color".

Q: What about the various colored scenes?

A: Hmm?  Well, in the back of my mind I'd wanted to try a fantasy
   game, just because for the most part I hate fantasy; this may seem
to make no sense whatsoever, but I get a kick out of taking genres that
strike me as unappealing and trying to "redeem" them by approaching
them from a different perspective.  At some point in the near future
I'm going to do a mystery and a college game, for instance, and
neither one is going to look anything like other mysteries or other
college games.  So I'd been collecting ideas for what I could put into
my fantasy game -- ideas that seemed to fit the genre but with no
elves, orcs, wizards or any of that.  Everything fell into place the
moment I realized that if I used the title "Photopia", then I could
associate each fantasy scene with a color; each one could be part of
a continuing story, the same story Alley would be telling Wendy; I
could include "real life" scenes to show where Alley got the idea for
each one; and then the final scene would be Alley in her crib, looking
at her multicolored mobile.

One theme I wanted to address in the colored scenes was the barrenness
of most IF locations.  There's a reason why most places in IF are so
empty, why no matter where you are -- a dungeon, a space station, an
entire city or world -- chances are it'll turn out to have been long
abandoned.  To wit: characters are hard to code.  I thought it'd be
interesting to play with that theme a bit, to justify the inevitable
barrenness, and luckily, I had a perfect explanation at hand: the
places of the story mirror Alley's life.  The colony on the red planet
(not necessarily Mars, you'll note) had so much potential, but
something went wrong early on and snuffed it out before it had a
chance -- just like Alley.  This is a theme that I've had something of
a personal stake in since my sister's death.

Q: That's not really what I meant, though.  Where did you rip off
   the ideas for each colored scene from?

A: Well, only one of them was borrowed directly from other sources.
   The idea for the sky-blue puzzle came from Ron Hansen's MARIETTE
IN ECSTASY, in which two sisters play a little game: "You're in a
locked room. How do you get out?"  "Call for help."  "No one hears
you."  "Look for a key."  "There is none."  "Dig under the walls."
"The ground is too hard."  "I give up."  "The room has no ceiling.
And you have wings."  I thought this would make a fabulous IF puzzle.
But just leaving the player in a chamber didn't seem satisfactory:
without anything to do, the player might well get frustrated (cf. The
Persistence of Memory.)  Enter Opal O'Donnell.  Her chicken-comp game
had a similar solution, but the setup had a twist: it wasn't a single
room in which you were stuck, but a maze.  I asked for permission to
steal that element, and she agreed.

Q: She also submitted the game to the comp in your stead.  Why?

A: I wanted my entry to be anonymous -- partly to avoid people with
   axes to grind, but mainly so that people wouldn't get distracted
expecting this game to be anything like I-0.  The last thing I
wanted was for players to spend half an hour trying to get Wendy to
undress.  I also didn't want people to spend time guessing who wrote
it -- again, partly because I expected they'd figure it out fairly
easily, but mainly because I didn't want it to be an issue.  A proxy
seemed to be the ideal solution: voila, anonymity without a pseudonym.
Since I'd already discussed the game with Opal, she seemed like a
perfect choice.

Q: Isn't that kind of unfair to her?  Here she's getting all these
   accolades, but she has to fend them off because she didn't really
write the game.  Seems like a cruel trick to pull.

A: We discussed that.  She said it wouldn't be a problem.  Did it
   turn out to be one anyway?  You'll have to ask her.

Q: In any event, you didn't finish answering the questions.  Where
   did you get the ideas for the other scenes?

A: The purple scene was primarily inspired by Neal Stephenson's THE
   DIAMOND AGE, in which a young girl named Nell has a "primer" which
teaches her life lessons, using four characters to do so: Dinosaur,
Duck, Peter and Purple.  But only the first three are actually
involved in the lessons -- lessons in self-defense, in avoiding
treachery, in table manners, that kind of thing.  At one point one
character points out that Purple -- the only human one -- just sort
of stands around.  "What's *she* do?" the character asks.  Replies
another character, "Nothing yet.  I suspect she'll have plenty to
teach Nell once she hits adolescence."

But Stephenson skips that part!  Which left me way pissed, since I
find adolescence more interesting than childhood.  We get excruciating
detail about the Castle Turing -- but Purple vanishes without a trace.
It *sucked*!  So when I settled on the color scheme, I knew that the
purple scene was going to involve a young woman in purple with
something to teach Alley.

Q: That scene also is completely non-interactive.  Why?

A: A few reasons.  One, I decided that Alley was going to be the one
   character that you yourself didn't play.  She's 100% NPC.  Also,
my original plans called for interactivity in the purple scene, but
for it to be told in the first person, since Alley's relating her
own dream... but I discovered there was no way I'd be able to do
something as complicated as equipping the program to make that kind
of switch mid-game and still get the entry in on time.  And since
I'd also originally planned for all the real-life scenes to be non-
interactive, and unfold exactly like the purple scene does, complete
with ersatz >DO THIS messages, but then scrapped the idea since I
figured that it'd make for a weaker work and that people wouldn't like
it, I thought I'd resurrect the idea for that one scene, partly just
to see what people thought.

One more note on the purple scene.  As noted, it was inspired by
the fact that Neal Stephenson cut Purple's lessons from THE DIAMOND
AGE.  Those lessons no doubt dealt with the onset of sexual maturity.
Alley is not quite thirteen at the time of her death; that is to say,
she's more than old enough for this to have become part of her life.
So I had a "real life" scene, linked to the purple scene much as the
swimming pool scene is linked to the sea-blue scene or the astronomy
scene is linked to the gold scene, in which the astute player could
have picked up subtle clues that yes, Alley is far from unaware of
her sexuality.  And, in the end, I cut it: it threw off the pacing.
How's that for irony?

Q: Yeah, it's like rayeeain on your wedding day.

A: Here's another idea I ended up scrapping: at one point, I'd planned
   for half the scenes to feature Alley at later points in her life.
I had a scene with her in college, and another where she's got a kid
of her own.  And at the end the player would realize, wait, those were
scenes which could have been, but now never will be.  But I ended up
not using that idea, figuring it'd be too confusing for most players.

Q: That's nice.  So you *still* haven't finished answering the
   question -- where did the other four colored scenes come from?

A: The forest scene came from my trips to the actual Petrified Forest
   in Arizona -- I almost spent $150 on a beautiful piece of malachite,
but decided I couldn't afford it.  The berry-eating wolf came straight
out of a dream I had.  And the weather salesman came from a misheard
lyric.  The Offspring have an absolutely amazing song called "Change
the World", which begins, "I see the way the salesmen stare into the
sun."  But for the longest time I thought it was, "I see the weather
salesman stare into the sun."  And I thought, a weather salesman!
That is such a cool idea!  Then, when I discovered that wasn't the
line at all, I knew I had to write a story with a weather salesman in
it.  Photopia had a place for him, and there you have it.

The beach of gold was an idea I'd had ever since I was six, when I
read in Carl Sagan's COSMOS that gold was formed in supernovae.  That
book and TV series also sparked my interest in Mars -- hell, it
sparked my interest in everything.  Virtually the entirety of any
sense of wonder I may have is derived pretty much solely from that
book.  I also believe that Carl Sagan is responsible for any eloquence
I may have developed over the years: his work was what taught me the
power of a well-wrought sentence, a perfect paragraph.  Around the
time of his death in December 1996, I read many testimonials from
people who said that Carl Sagan's work had been what prompted them
to go into science.  I didn't go into science.  But Carl Sagan's work
is what prompted me to become a writer.  Without COSMOS, I don't think
I'd be a tenth as creative as I am.  I'd be living a life straight
out of Human Resources Stories.

Q: And what about the undersea castle?

A: Saw one in a fishbowl once.

Q: One thing a lot of people have remarked about is the dynamic
   mapping in the castle and on the red planet..  Why'd you do that?
Just for the fun of it?

A: No -- it wasn't fun.  I did it, as is my wont, through brute force:
   most of the code in the comp release of the game is the series of
switch statements that comprise the map of the red planet.  I got one
digit wrong -- put a 4 where a 5 was supposed to go -- and bang,
there's your power plant bug.

I didn't do a lot of planning before I started coding.  I knew I had
about six weeks to bang out this game, and had to start as soon as
possible.  I didn't even know the order of all the scenes when I
started; at the time I started coding, I only had the game planned
out through sea-blue.  The rest I arranged on the fly.

So when I was ready to start layout out the red planet, I initially
started with a conventional 5x5 map, and started coming up with
different layouts for where things should go.  I knew that I wanted
lots of broken pieces of construction equipment scattered about --
in fact, the idea of an abortive space colony came about as a result
of trying to figure out a vaguely plausible reason to have broken
pieces of construction equipment everywhere.  Why?  Because there
just so happen to be a bunch of broken-down bulldozers and cranes
and such in the otherwise quite Edenic photos that Jock Sturges,
my favorite photographer, has taken in northern California.  It's
just so wonderfully jarring to see the oh-so-prelapsarian Misty
Dawn hanging out in the middle of the Klamath National Forest with
trees and rocks and a raging river-- and the rusted cab of some
old dump truck.  Broken construction equipment has resonance for
me.  So I started picking places on the map for it, more or less at
random... but then it occurred to me, wait, this is a story that
Alley is telling.  So Wendy should discover things in Alley's chosen
order no matter which compass direction she selects.  So the dynamic
mapping was prompted by the storyline, not the other way around.

Q: Speaking of static vs. dynamic, why tell this as IF at all?  Why
   not regular prose fiction?  It's certainly linear enough.

A: True, the player has little power to affect the events of the
   story.  But it was crucial to me, was in a sense the whole point
of the piece, that the player *inhabit* the places of the game.  In
the "real life" sections, I wanted to provide the experience of
hanging out with this kid, to the extent I could; in the bedtime-
story sections, it was absolutely vital that the player be the one
wandering around in the various strange locales of the tale.  Quite
frankly, there's not enough to them to be worth experiencing them
secondhand.  I came up with these places, and I wanted to plop the
player down in them just long enough for her to look around, say
"Whoa, neat," and then move on.  Rockvil in the third person would
have been a fourth-rate dystopia; being there was what made it so
chilling.  An author can incarnate a place in IF in a way that's
not possible in other media.  If incarnating places is the point
of what the work is trying to achieve -- which, in this case, the
colored sections of the story were -- then IF is the way to go.

Q: Okay, so here's the biggie.  What does Photopia mean?  What's
   the message?

A: Interpreting the story is the players' job, not mine.  Some of
   the discussion I've read -- that of what the seed pod might
symbolize, for instance -- races far ahead of where my conscious
mind was at the time I wrote it.  This delights me to no end.

But I will point out one thing that was on my mind, which only
crystallized for me after rereading Geoff Ryman's indescribably
wonderful novel WAS -- a book which, like Photopia, features
numerous focal characters, skips around in time, place and
perspective, and dwells on how elements of a story have been
influenced by events in the lives of the tellers.  It also deals
with the vicious cycle of abuse, in which being treated cruelly
turns children into thoroughly hateful people, which in turn
leads others to treat them cruelly, which makes them still more
hateful, and on and on and on... and leads them to introduce
cruelty into the lives of others, who are transformed into
abusers in turn... but there's a flip side.  I mentioned earlier
that one of the tricks I picked up was to present Alley through
the eyes of those who adored her.  And she's a wonderful kid,
and worthy of adoration.  Why?  How did she come to turn out
that way?  I would argue that it was precisely *because* she was
adored.  If you get to them early enough, being treated lovingly
turns children into thoroughly lovable people.  I don't think
it's any coincidence that one of the most wonderful, kindhearted,
and least neurotic people I've ever been lucky enough to know
is also one of the only people I can think of who actually had
a thoroughly happy childhood.  (She also beta-tested this game,
despite having no interest in IF whatsoever, and caught a bunch
of bugs that I would never have caught in a million years.
Thanks, Karen.)

So here's the thought I'd like to leave you with.  The death of
a loved child is tragic.  But the life of an unloved child is
more tragic still.  I kinda doubt that a computer game is going
to motivate us to become a more loving species, but if somehow
it did, I wouldn't, you know, object.

  -----
 Adam Cadre, Anaheim, CA
 http://www.retina.net/~grignr


From icallaci@csupomona.edu Wed Nov 18 15:30:33 MET 1998
Article: 38987 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: icallaci@csupomona.edu (Irene Callaci)
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Subject: Re: [COMP] Competition Results!
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 00:57:49 GMT
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On Wed, 18 Nov 1998 00:26:25 GMT, Lelah Conrad wrote:

>On 17 Nov 98 04:53:12 GMT, Barbara Robson wrote:
>
>>..  Photopia was the point at which I realised this.
>>I found it a bit irritating and it didn't hold my interest for the 
>>first couple of scenes, so I didn't feel like giving it the time it
>>deserved ...
>
>I had the same initial reaction, so I put it aside.  It didn't reach
>out and catch my attention.  When all the reviews came out raving
>about it, I went back to it.  It is a beautiful piece of work,
>haunting, evocative.  It took a bit of patience to actually get into
>it.  You will want to play this one.

Same initial reaction here. I thought it would be about two
adolescent boys' attempts to have sex. The f* word in the
beginning text struck me as deliberate shock value, so I put
the game aside and came back to it later. I'm so glad I did.
The night I finished it, I woke up about 3:00 a.m. and could
*not* stop thinking about it. What a beautiful job.

irene



From doeadeer3@aol.com Wed Nov 18 16:37:43 MET 1998
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From: doeadeer3@aol.com (Doeadeer3)
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Subject: Re: What I want to see next year
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In article <erkyrathF2KyLL.36E@netcom.com>, erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew
Plotkin) writes:

>* Games with hundreds of NPCs, but no player character at all.

Interesting idea, but what is the player's perspective? Just watching? Can they
move around? Fly over ahead? Use x-ray vision? 

>* Games where every verb is disabled to add a sense of realism.

Hmmm, is that realistic, though?

>* Games where the protagonist has such an opinionated personality that he
>completely ignores what you type.

Now this might be fun...

>take the box
"No, I am not going to take the box and you can't make me."

>kick self
"Getting hostile about it just makes me more inclined to ignore you."

>kiss self
"Kissing up to me isn't going to work either."

>quit
"Not going to let you. Nyah, nyah." 

Oops, we've seen that one already.

>* Time limits instead of space limits -- games with lots of rooms, but
>which last exactly one turn. 

It would provide a lot of immediate motivation, for each single room.

Your mission if you choose to accept it...  tick... tick.. tick...

Exits are east and west. You have to leave this room in one turn or it will
explode.

tick... tick... tick...

>* Games which are tutorials on how to write tutorial games.

Zarf, be quiet! I am sure you have just given someone out there an idea!

>* Games written in languages that nobody understands, possibly not even
>the author.

Now that is a bit unkind, people for whom English is not a first language
really can't help it.

Oh, you were referring to Rybread. Sowwy.

>* Games where you try to lose -- featuring "instant win" traps, unlosable
>states, and "guess-the-parse-error" puzzles.

Neat, expanding on the "getting rid of your inventory instead of taking it"
idea. Reverse the usual parameters. 

>kill self
"You bring the razor closer to your wrist. But just as you are about to make
the first cut, it shatters into infinitestimal pieces."

>kill self
"You raise the gun to your temple, but just as you start to pull the trigger it
falls apart in your hand."

>kill self
"You can't. Sorry, you're going to have to live and face the consequences --
playing the rest of this game." 

>* Games with a negative number of rooms.

Hmmm, which leaves the player exactly where? Maybe in...

You are trapped in the parser. All around you is complicated code. You are
afraid of moving for fear of breaking something. If you do, you will never be
able communicate with this game. Exits are only through correctly and exactly
worded commands.

>?
I didn't understand that sentence. 

You bump into an not_understood flag. It increments.Your chances of escape
lessen.

>* Games which are so good that they destroy the art of interactive fiction
>forever.

But I thought you had done that already.

Doe :-)  Smiling sweetly.







Doe      doeadeer3@aol.com       (formerly known as FemaleDeer)
****************************************************************************
"In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane."  Mark Twain


From jcmason@uwaterloo.ca Wed Nov 18 16:38:37 MET 1998
Article: 38979 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: jcmason@uwaterloo.ca (Joe Mason)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: What I want to see next year
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Doeadeer3 <doeadeer3@aol.com> wrote (not insribed, ok? wrote):
>
>Neat, expanding on the "getting rid of your inventory instead of taking it"
>idea. Reverse the usual parameters. 
>
>>kill self
>"You bring the razor closer to your wrist. But just as you are about to make
>the first cut, it shatters into infinitestimal pieces."
>
>>kill self
>"You raise the gun to your temple, but just as you start to pull the trigger it
>falls apart in your hand."
>
>>kill self
>"You can't. Sorry, you're going to have to live and face the consequences --
>playing the rest of this game." 

ITE 2?

Or Inhumane, perhaps?

>Hmmm, which leaves the player exactly where? Maybe in...
>
>You are trapped in the parser. All around you is complicated code. You are
>afraid of moving for fear of breaking something. If you do, you will never be
>able communicate with this game. Exits are only through correctly and exactly
>worded commands.
>
>>?
>I didn't understand that sentence. 
>
>You bump into an not_understood flag. It increments.Your chances of escape
>lessen.

I'm reminded of an old TRS-80 magazine which contained reviews of a fictitious 
series of games, including "Postman's Nightmare" and "Programmer's Dungeon".

Programmers Dungeon was a game where you wandered around a "dungeon" which was
actually the code of a program.  Your goal was to debug it.  Thing is, the
program to be debugged is the game itself.  The review mentioned the
fascination of failing to solve a puzzle and having the game crash and give
you a syntax error.

Oh, yes, and there was this gem from the Postman's Nightmare review: 
"Incidentally, while in the Hardware Store, don't type TAKE INVENTORY or you'll 
be held up for four days counting carriage bolts."

Joe
-- 
I think OO is great...  It's no coincidence that "woohoo" contains "oo" twice.
-- GLYPH


From wheeler@jump.net Wed Nov 18 16:44:02 MET 1998
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From: "J. Robinson Wheeler" <wheeler@jump.net>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: [Four in One] Designs and amusements
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Mild Spoilers for "Four in One", ranked #16 (of 27) in the 1998
IF Competition, follow:

                          ---====---

Many people have mentioned the transcript for 4in1 in their
reviews, some calling into question why I released it. The answer
is that it was the act of submitting the pretend-transcript to
Stephen Granade's contest that inspired me to actually create the
game it described. Prior to that, I had considered it beyond my
ability to code.

It was also a test of a theory of IF design that I was toying with:
write a transcript of the winning solution, including some amusing
diversions. Then, plot a strategy that will result in a game which
will be able to produce the same transcript, if played. It turns
out that the comp98 version of 4in1 cannot produce the transcript,
but you have to roll with the ideas you get.

At its foundation, it is a simple logic puzzle of the kind:

Brothers A, B, C, and D sometimes get along and sometimes don't. If
B is in a room with C, he will leave unless A is present. If A and
C are left alone in a room, both will leave. If B is left alone in
a room with D, D will leave. A won't come with you unless at least
one of his brothers is present. D won't come with you unless all
three of his brothers are present. You must get all four brothers to
follow you. In what order do you have to pick them up?

On top of this is a secondary puzzle, of making rehearsals and
shooting takes once you get them to the set.  The way to solve the
game is to realize the nature of the primary puzzle, to play with
the game long enough to determine the behaviors of A, B, C, and D,
and finally to devise a strategy which will reliably enable you to
get all four to the set at least twice in the game's allotted time.
An average winning solution is possible in forty or fifty moves,
and with some luck (there is a random element) in fewer than that.

This seemed like a game of appropriate size for a two-hour
competition, so once I had plotted it this far I began coding in
earnest, starting with the floor map and a non-functioning Groucho.
I added objects, room descriptions, and all of the NPCs. Over time,
I made each brother's basic behavior work, one at a time, and the
game quickly came to life.

It was intricate work, coding behavior for a new brother that
worked along with, and didn't break, the code I'd already written
for the other ones. It felt like designing one of those fantastic
old clockworks that put on little animated shows. It still has this
feel to it, and I'm sad that some reviewers couldn't appreciate the
craftsmanship of the clockwork, instead decrying it for what it
wasn't.

                          ---====---

There are quite a number of frills and amusing things to do while
playing the game if you set aside for the moment the problem of
winning, like calling Clark Gable on the phone, or asking Groucho
stupid questions. There is one genuine easter egg in the game, of a
nature as nearly hidden as (in some applications) hitting shift-
control-F1-w to pop up a fun screen, but possible to discover if
through attention to detail and happy accident. The source code 
will be available on gmd soon for those who just want to see what
to do.

All of the NPCs understand these questions:

  - [NPC], WHAT IS [object] 
  - [NPC], WHERE IS [ object || NPC ] 
  - [NPC], WHO IS [NPC] 
  - [NPC], WHO ARE YOU 
  - [NPC], WHAT ARE YOU 
  - [NPC], WHO AM I 
  - [NPC], WHAT AM I 
  - [NPC], TELL ME ABOUT [ object || NPC ] 
  - ASK [NPC] ABOUT [ object || NPC ]

These may also be typed straight into the command line without being
directed at an NPC. The only reason to try them out is that one
of the questions provokes a particularly interesting response.

Most NPCs answer generically, but Groucho, having little tolerance
for stupid questions, has sarcastic answers to them. He isn't as
constantly chatty as he is in the movies because, except for Harpo,
they are written to resemble their off-screen personas. However, 
Groucho can be counted on for a few quips, including:

  - 14 responses to 'GROUCHO, WHERE ARE YOU' 
  - 14 ways of telling you he's going back to his room 
  -  9 responses to 'GROUCHO, WHO AM I' 
  -  7 responses to Chico's crowded room 
  -  6 responses to being ordered to WAIT 
  -  3 responses to being ordered to SMILE, depending on 
       whether there's a woman in the room, and if one of 
       them is Margaret Dumont 
  -  3 responses for when you CUT before you've said ACTION


For the synonymous ASK [NPC] ABOUT and [NPC], TELL ME ABOUT
commands, there is a base of knowledge in the game, keyed to
whether it's a subject about which the particular NPC would be
likely to either know or have an opinion.

Some of these go several levels deep. For example, if you ask
Groucho about his books, he'll tell you that he reads because he
has insomnia. You can also ask about his insomnia. It's possible to
piece it together that his insomnia was caused by the stock market
crash of '29. Groucho comments on that by mentioning Eddie Cantor,
and finally, you can ask Groucho his opinion about Eddie Cantor.

If you don't know who Eddie Cantor is, you can always ask Scotty,
who has at least one thing to say (not always very enlightening)
about every knowledge subject in the game -- a holdover from an
alpha version in which the player was redirected to "ask Scotty - 
he knows everything" in the default NPC "I don't know" response.

Just for fun, here's a list of things that can be reliably asked
about in the game (not guaranteed to get a good response, but the
parser recognizes them -- an artifact of running out of development
time and energy):

  - All other NPCs, by name 
  - All objects in the game 
  - Notable MGM stars of the era
  - Minnie, Manfred, and Gummo Marx 
  - Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, 
    Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera, Room Service 
  - MGM, Paramount, Warner, Universal, Columbia, RKO
  - Zeppo's agency 
  - Leo McCarey, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Jack Benny, George Burns 
  - Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton[1], Harold Lloyd 
  - The shooting script, scene 62, the film (this picture), comedy


NPCs who generally have something particular to say when you talk
to them are:

  - Groucho, Harpo[1], Zeppo, Chico, Margaret Dumont, Scotty, Val,
    Frenchie, Susan, Buster Keaton[2].

If the subject is specific films (this script, this picture, A
Night at the Opera, or their previous pictures), then Irving,
George, and Morrie might have something to say.

                          ---====---

I guess my point is this:  Did you remember to have fun with this
game?  Apparently, some people did and some people didn't.  The 
ones who didn't sounded as impatient and ready to split a gasket 
as the lemonade vendor in Duck Soup, which to me is actually rather 
funny.  So, they quit my game in a huff, or a minute and a huff, 
and graded it as "not fun, just annoying."  I've got just one 
response to that:






              >HONK HONK<



                              ---jrw  6:00am  18 Nov 98 

=======

[1]     The magic word "xyzzy" toggles Harpo's ability to talk. If I do
    an update, I'll probably put a leaflet in his dressing room which
    plainly says: "Magic word xyzzy" so that one is encouraged to use
    this word around Harpo. He still isn't, by nature, particularly
    talkative, but he does have things to say about his family.

[2] Buster Keaton, besides belonging to the category of "notable
    MGM stars of the era[3]," is also an NPC in the game who is full of
    opinions about everything -- provided you can find him (see note[3]
    below).

[3] The notable MGM stars of the era are part of the knowledge base
    of the game (and able to be called on the phone) because they are,
    in fact, in the game. Finding them on the sets of the MGM lot
    (which you can plainly see out Irving's window) gets you the last
    lousy point in the game.  This is also the Easter Egg.



-- 
J. Robinson Wheeler
wheeler@jump.net            http://www.jump.net/~wheeler/jrw/home.html


From erkyrath@netcom.com Thu Nov 19 09:39:22 MET 1998
Article: 39067 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: Re: [COMP 98] Photopia some more
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I note that several people have said "Photopia isn't interactive enough"
-- for example:

Sam Barlow (sb6729@bris.ac.uk) wrote:

> Everything was very well implemented
> and well written, but I came away feeling like I had been on a
> rollercoaster- plenty of thrills, etc. but it was just a rollercoaster.
> And I disliked the multi-choice chat (though I don't want to start off
> another "Ask vs. multiple choice thread so move on). 

I'd just like to repeat that this is not a universal view. I thought
Photopia had *exactly* the right amount of interaction. For itself.

> Although Photopia
> was an enjoyable and rewarding experience I wouldn't like other IF games
> to go in this direction.

This is a dreadful thing to say. This is saying that this particular
style (subgenre) of IF is dead -- nobody should ever do it again. What if
someone else had come up with a game of this style last year? Should Adam
then not have written Photopia? 

You may say, if you like, that you wouldn't like *all* other IF games to
go in this direction. *I* wouldn't like all other IF games to go in this
direction. But that isn't really likely.

My point here is, future IF authors, don't accept one set of opinions as
*the* concensus on how IF should be written.

Hm. Something similar happened with Plant. I saw one reviewer saying
(paraphrased) "Hey, I really didn't like the drawn-out plot exposition
sequences where you type "wait" a dozen times. If you're going to put in
that much non-interactive plot, use a single huge chunk of text." 

Well, you may recall Mike Roberts's *last* game, The Legend Lives, where
one common criticism was "Geez, lose the huge non-interactive chunks of
text." (I was one of the people saying that.) 

I'm betting that a lot of work went into Plant to string out that
exposition and integrate it into the game. (Just because it *does* so in
such a subtle and complex -- and, to me, effective -- manner.) I reacted
rather the same way when I was writing So Far; there are some fairly
blatant "busywork" scenes, where you diddle around doing nothing much
while Stuff happens off in the distance.

Obviously, Mike (and I) could say, gosh, the pendulum's swung back, and
my next game will profer big cut-scenes once again. But that way lies
nutville. 

IF is now big enough that people can dislike works on *structural*
grounds, not just because the writing sucks or because they don't like the
subject matter. (In fact, IF has been this diverse for at least the past
two competitions, but I'm not sure if it's been recognized.)

--Z



-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From obrian@ucsu.Colorado.EDU Thu Nov 19 09:40:14 MET 1998
Article: 39091 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Paul O'Brian <obrian@ucsu.Colorado.EDU>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Adam's review of LBM and HRS
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 15:30:34 -0700
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On 18 Nov 1998, Adam Cadre wrote:

> Life is *not* "inherently unfair" -- it's only unfair because we let it
> be so.

I am amazed that this argument is coming from the same guy who wrote 
Photopia. Could life get any more unfair than it gets in that game?
Perhaps, judging by the context of the post, you meant "The economic
system" or "The distribution of resources" rather than "Life."

I am distinctly *un*amazed that it is coming from the same guy who wrote
the lyric "Your self-esteem/ Supports the machine."

> Is it realistic to crush one's co-workers with a vending machine?  I'll
> admit it doesn't happen often.  But it should.  Okay, maybe that isn't
> the precise manifestation of that rage that one might hope for, but on
> the other hand, it's no worse than letting the rage eat you alive,
> swallow your soul.

It isn't? The revolution won't get very far if all the alienated workers
spend their time pushing each other under heavy falling objects. 

> Little Blue Men is a prompt to fight the system; if you surrender
> to it, by stamping your forms like a good little drone, you lose.

As we're discussing in another thread, it looks like if you fight the
system, by offing your co-workers, melting your boss, and escaping the
office... you lose.

By the way, I'd just like to point out that we've now seen both
psychoanalytic *and* Marxist readings of Little Blue Men. I'm starting to
feel like I'm back in graduate school!

Paul O'Brian
obrian@colorado.edu
http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~obrian

(Sorry to start a new thread with this -- I deleted the original post
before I realized I wanted to reply to it, and so am cutting & pasting
>from Deja News.)



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From: Chris Markwyn <markwync@xmission.xmission.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Adam's review of LBM and HRS
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Paul O'Brian <obrian@ucsu.Colorado.EDU> wrote:
[Snip]
> By the way, I'd just like to point out that we've now seen both
> psychoanalytic *and* Marxist readings of Little Blue Men. I'm starting to
> feel like I'm back in graduate school!

Next I will present my argument, based on the idea of "the death of the
author," that since the reader/player is the only true author of a work of
literature, I should therefore get all the prizes from the competition.

--Chris Markwyn


From obrian@ucsu.Colorado.EDU Thu Nov 19 09:41:05 MET 1998
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From: Paul O'Brian <obrian@ucsu.Colorado.EDU>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Adam's review of LBM and HRS
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 18:08:27 -0700
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On Wed, 18 Nov 1998, Adam Cadre wrote:

> When I say "life is only unfair because we let it be so," I certainly 
> *don't* mean that Alley did anything to bring what happened to her upon 
> herself.  When I say "we", I don't mean each of us, individually -- I 
> mean we as a species.

Ah, I'm with you now. I see your point. I wonder, though, if this problem
is necessarily endemic to the individualistic mindset. It seems to me that
if you combine that mindset with a firm belief in the interdependence of
each individual with her environment and all the other people in it, you
could arrive at a philosophy which says that the best thing for the
individual *is* the best thing for the species. Did that make sense? The
philosophy would be this: "Doing the right thing means doing the best
thing for myself as an individual at all times, keeping in mind that my
happiness and well-being is interdependent with the happiness and
well-being of others, and the health of my environment." Sadly, having
everyone arrive at this philosophy is just about as likely as having
everyone stop thinking of himself as an individual. 

> > I am distinctly *un*amazed that it is coming from the same guy who wrote
> > the lyric "Your self-esteem/ Supports the machine."
> 
> "Regime", actually, though your line may be better.  I'll consult my 
> fellow Sadies.

D'oh! I knew I should be listening to that song louder. Well, same idea,
anyway. 

> > It isn't? The revolution won't get very far if all the alienated workers
> > spend their time pushing each other under heavy falling objects. 
> 
> No, but it'd be a good way to assure that the revolution *will* be 
> televised: on Fox's "World's Wackiest Workplace Mishaps III"!

You are so freaking hilarious. 

> Nah.  For instance, no one has yet mentioned the psychomorphology of the 
> clitoris.  Oh, wait, I just did.  Okay, bring on Homi Bhabha.

Aaah! And you thought "Cattus Atrox" was scary...

Paul O'Brian
obrian@colorado.edu
http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~obrian





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From: Paul O'Brian <obrian@ucsu.Colorado.EDU>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Adam's review of LBM and HRS
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 21:43:40 -0700
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On Wed, 18 Nov 1998, Second April wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Nov 1998, Paul O'Brian wrote:
> > philosophy would be this: "Doing the right thing means doing the best
> > thing for myself as an individual at all times, keeping in mind that my
> > happiness and well-being is interdependent with the happiness and
> > well-being of others, and the health of my environment." Sadly, having
> > everyone arrive at this philosophy is just about as likely as having
> > everyone stop thinking of himself as an individual. 
> 
> Um...well, we've certainly got a philosophy that likes the "doing the
> right thing means serving my own self-interest" part; it's called
> objectivism, Ayn Rand is its major advocate, and it's, not to put too fine
> a point on it, a load of trash. 

Er, yes. Well, I certainly didn't mean to sound objectivist, though I see
how you might read the first part of my statement that way. I can't say
I've ever read Rand, but I have been lectured by her disciples a number of
times, and have formed a negative opinion of objectivism from those
experiences. The second part (the interdependence part) of my statement is
*crucial* to the whole. Crucial, I say. 

> As for putting it all together--well, that's a complicated set of variables
> to parse out when you make moral decisions, I'd say. Not that moral
> decisions should be oversimplified, but it's not always obvious what best
> serves your well-being, the health and well-being of others, and the
> health of your environment, and expecting people to adequately take all
> that into account invites self-serving decisions ("I can figure out the
> first part, and that'll have to do").

It does? If that's what they do, they're not following the philosophy. I
don't think there is any simple formula for making moral decisions. I
don't think that even the "Golden Rule" is all that easy to follow all the
time (especially since in hindsight I realize that I often don't know
what's best for myself.) Of course it's not always obvious what's best for
yourself, others, and the environment, but I'd like it a lot if people
always gave their best guess before making a moral decision. Being the
fallible creatures they are, they will sometimes be wrong. I can live with
that. At least the interests of others and of the environment will have
been *considered* before the decision is made. Self-serving decisions
don't do that. 

> Meaningful moral decisions need to rest on something more reliable, and
> less susceptible to abuse, than self-interest, even enlightened
> self-interest. 

I'm not convinced there is anything less susceptible to abuse than
enlightened self-interest, at least in the sense I'm speaking of it. 

> Like--but no, I'm dangerously close to starting another
> religion thread already.

If you're about to say "like a religious doctrine", I have a feeling you
mean it in as specialized a sense as I mean "enlightened self-interest."
Certainly I don't think you'd make the case, having read your Chaucer,
that religious doctrine in general isn't susceptible to abuse. 

Paul O'Brian
obrian@colorado.edu
http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~obrian





From sandifer@crmse.sdsu.edu Thu Nov 19 18:00:46 MET 1998
Article: 38869 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: sandifer@crmse.sdsu.edu (cody sandifer)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: acid.z5 walkthru contained herein
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1998 11:03:55 -0700
Organization: San Diego State University
Lines: 76
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Xref: news.lth.se rec.games.int-fiction:38869

Hey everyone.  I intended to upload this to /incoming, but ftp.gmd.de
keeps calling me dirty names and denying my access.  So, I'm posting
instead.

S
P
O
I
L
E
R

S
P
O
I
L
E
R

S
P
O
I
L
E
R

S
P
A
C
E

This here is the solution to Acid Whiplash (acid.z5), by Rybread Celsius
and Cody Sandifer.  The zcode game file can be found on ftp.gmd.de in

/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/acid.

If you haven't already done so, you should probably try

Liquid (games/competition96/liquid/liquid.z5),
Rippled Flesh (games/competition96/ripflesh/ripflesh.z5),
and Symetry (games/competition97/inform/reflect/reflect.z5)

before giving acid.z5 a shot.  Trust me on this one -- it's worth it.

Anyway, here goes:

get scroll.
read it.
w.
push button.
w.
u.
open tip.
i.
open book.
z.z.z.z.z.
punkrock.
s.
x hat.
x designs.
x crucifix.
pull thread.
in.
drop thread.
break law.
drink puddle.
z. (12 times)
w.w.w.w.n.w.n.w.
z. (15 times)
e.e.e.u.u.u.w.w.
open book.

That's it.  Don't forget to hit AMUSING for a list of pleasurable treats.


From tril@host.ott.igs.net Fri Nov 20 09:38:32 MET 1998
Article: 39172 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: tril@host.ott.igs.net (Suzanne Skinner)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp98] More praise for the good stuff (1 of 2)
Date: 19 Nov 1998 19:43:01 GMT
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Doeadeer3 (doeadeer3@aol.com) wrote:

: In article <731nnk$ljf$1@ns1.otenet.gr>, "Aris Katsaris" <katsaris@otenet.gr>
: writes:

: >>My feeling is that this piece,
: >>well-written as it undoubtedly is, is not sufficiently interactive
: >>to qualify as IF; hence the low mark I gave it. (If I want non-
: >>interactive fiction, I'll read a book! No disrespect to Adam, but

I think you've got the wrong attribution here. I seem to recall Aris raving
about the game.

: I feel the same, but we are in a minority.

Well, it's ultimately a matter of your personal preferences, right? And
there's nothing "right" or "wrong" about those. But I'm going to indulge
in a defense of Photopia's interactivity.

Okay, maybe it's not IF as we're accustomed to thinking about it. But
there were definitely some techniques used in Photopia that could not
possibly have been pulled off in a book. Example:

[Warning: major Photopia spoilers ahead]






.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.









... when you are wandering around the crystal labyrinth, and you take your
spacesuit off, and a few turns later, the game casually mentions something
about your wings.

My reaction: Whaa--I have--but if I--then I can.....

> fly

Wooooohooooo!

This was, I think, my absolute favorite part of the game. There was something
magical about that revelation, and acting on it, and then seeing the maze as
a mandala from high above. In that moment, I felt utterly immersed. I was no
longer the player; I *was* Wendy.

I can't always put my finger on all the little tricks Adam used to immerse
me in the experience, I just know it worked. Yes, the game is ultimately
very linear, and yes, you don't have much control over the flow of events.
Yet it *is* interactive in some pretty innovative ways. And, all that aside,
I really, really liked the story.

....But I don't think those who didn't care for it are necessarily "missing"
something. They just don't have the same triggers I do, I guess.

-Suzanne

--
http://www.igs.net/~tril/
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From lac@nu-world.com Fri Nov 20 09:39:04 MET 1998
Article: 39160 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: lac@nu-world.com (Lelah Conrad)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp98] More praise for the good stuff (1 of 2)
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1998 02:04:58 GMT
Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com - Discussions start here!
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On 19 Nov 1998 19:43:01 GMT, tril@host.ott.igs.net (Suzanne Skinner)
wrote:

 
>[Warning: major Photopia spoilers ahead]
>
>
>
>
>
>
>.
>.
>.
>.
>.
>.
>.
>.
>.
>.
>.
>.
>.
>.
>.
>.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>... when you are wandering around the crystal labyrinth, and you take your
>spacesuit off, and a few turns later, the game casually mentions something
>about your wings.
>
>My reaction: Whaa--I have--but if I--then I can.....
>
>> fly
>
>Wooooohooooo!
>
>This was, I think, my absolute favorite part of the game...

	My favorite parts were the transitions from scene to scene.
For example, right after you fly around, the story cuts to Jonathan in
the school gym saying, "She's an angel."  That took my breath away.  I
replayed the game just to experience that moment again.  
	Another  transition I especially liked was the splashdown of
Wendy on the planet turning into the splash of Alley falling into the
swimming pool.  
	In fact, it was probably the poignancy of all the transitions
that was the most captivating thing to me -- everything seemed to just
fit together perfectly.

Lelah

You know, I just had another thought.  Photopia was more like a movie
(a good one) than an IF game.  Adam, maybe you ought to head for
Hollywood.


From lpsmith@rice.edu Fri Nov 20 09:40:44 MET 1998
Article: 39148 of rec.games.int-fiction
From: lpsmith@rice.edu (Lucian Paul Smith)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp98] More praise for the good stuff (1 of 2)
Date: 19 Nov 1998 23:04:34 GMT
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Aris Katsaris (katsaris@otenet.gr) wrote:

: This particular game wasn't very interactive (though I believe more
: interaction could have hurt it my removing the sense of inevitable tragedy)
: But it was certainly fiction. Most IF games (certainly the puzzle-oriented
: ones) couldn possibly be considered fiction the same way a book can, but I
: don't see many people complaining about this.

You know, I would have agreed with you a few days ago, but I've been
thinking, and I've changed my mind.  Photopia *is* interactive.  It just
isn't interactive in the way we normally think of games being interactive.

Nothing you do makes a difference on the final *event* of the piece.  But
it *does* make a difference on your own personal perception of the event.

<blatant spoilers follow>













I'll take two examples:  the scene with Jonathan, and the scene with
Alley's dad.  There are completely different things you can do in each.
*Very* different things.  With Jonathan, you can chicken out, and not ask
Alley to the dance.  With the dad, you can neglect to spend time chatting
with Alley, and just call her inside.  With the drunk fratboy at the
beginning (OK, so I lied about two examples) you can get your friend to
drop you off at the side of the road, somewhat absolving yourself of
guilt.

The game won't comment on these changes (and actually, I wish it would
more, but anyway), but it makes a difference anyway.  To *you*.  It's
almost like the rather ambiguous ending of Spider and Web--that game only
tells you if you've made a difference or not, not whether the difference
was good or bad.  Here, you can have a better or worse relationship with
your kid, or can tell Alley or not that you liked her, or can tell the
drunk friend or not that he's an idiot.  The tragedy still takes place.
But how did you behave toward the victim?  That's what I think Photopia is
ultimately about, and that's why I think it's interactive.

-Lucian




From tril@host.ott.igs.net Fri Nov 20 10:00:42 MET 1998
Article: 39168 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: tril@host.ott.igs.net (Suzanne Skinner)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp98] More praise for the good stuff (1 of 2)
Date: 20 Nov 1998 03:36:07 GMT
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[Photopia spoilers ahead]



.
.
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.
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.
.






Doeadeer3 (doeadeer3@aol.com) wrote:

: Okay, I am going to be jumped on but...

Nope.

Look, guys. It's okay if you don't like Photopia! I don't exactly see some
marauding cadre of Photopia-lovers thumping on dissidents, which is what
a few of you are making it sound like... :-/

: I felt no sense of tragedy, because I wasn't involved. I was reading the
: story not being a part of it.

As I said in my last response, this is very much a personal thing--a matter
of what triggers work on you. I had exactly the opposite experience--by the
end of this game, I felt that I knew and was connected with Alley, through the
various people who had known her....in a way I've rarely felt, either in
int-fiction or regular fiction. Yes, the story and the conversation were
scripted, yes it wasn't very interactive by the usual meaning of the word
here in r.[g,a].i.f.....but dammit, it worked somehow. For me. And I can't
point to any one thing that made it work.

I felt I knew her through her father, through Wendy, through that boy...and
then there was that overarching narrator voice in the "fantasy" scenes that
I learned was Alley also. That was also a part of coming to know her--
experiencing the creations of her imagination.

Again, this is a personal thing. If this didn't work for you, you aren't
any less "right" than those for whom it did work!

: Doe :-) Like I said, great writing, poor game.

I don't think I'd even say that Photopia is a game at all. It's a form of
fiction I'm not sure we have the right word for. It's about being a part
of the story, but not controlling it.

And that's about as clearly as I can put it.

-Suzanne

--
http://www.igs.net/~tril/
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------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------


From erkyrath@netcom.com Fri Nov 20 10:01:05 MET 1998
Article: 39145 of rec.games.int-fiction
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
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From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: Re: [Comp98] More praise for the good stuff (1 of 2)
Message-ID: <erkyrathF2oyM5.Dn2@netcom.com>
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roger@firedrake.avertspam.demon.co.uk wrote:

> I do realise I'm in a minority here. I'm not claiming Photopia is
> in some absolute way "bad"; I'm saying that it didn't work, _for me_,
> as a piece of interactive fiction.

And the player is always right. :)

> It felt like a short story, so much
> so that I couldn't help comparing it with real short stories, against
> which it falls short. Would I rather play Enlightenment again or reread
> a story I know? I don't know; either could be fun, depending on my mood.
> Would I rather play Photopia again or reread a story I know? The story,
> easily.

This is an interesting point. Enlightenment isn't the sort of game I'd
play again (at least not for several years). All the fun is figuring out
puzzles, and I now know the solutions. 

I'd definitely play Photopia again -- in fact, I did play it again after I
finished it. Because it *is* a story, I like it for the same reason I like
good stories, and knowing how it's going to go doesn't spoil the important
parts.

BTW, another point that I don't think has been mentioned: Because of the
hand-holding, or railroading if you prefer, Photopia is damn near ideal
for introducing newbies to modern IF.

--Z

-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From sc467@barnard.columbia.edu Fri Nov 20 10:01:15 MET 1998
Article: 39162 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Stacy the Procrastinating <sc467@barnard.columbia.edu>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp98] More praise for the good stuff (1 of 2)
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1998 21:19:36 -0500
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On Thu, 19 Nov 1998, Andrew Plotkin wrote:

> BTW, another point that I don't think has been mentioned: Because of the
> hand-holding, or railroading if you prefer, Photopia is damn near ideal
> for introducing newbies to modern IF.


...which I've been using it for left and right ;-).  I love it that I
finally have an IF work I can pass on to people without worrying that
they'll get stuck on guess the verb or the first puzzle and abandon the
genre forever.  It's definetly not representative of the way IF usually
works, but its a great start.

-stacy



From mol@bartlet.df.lth.se Fri Nov 20 10:01:46 MET 1998
Article: 39141 of rec.games.int-fiction
Path: news.lth.se!not-for-mail
From: mol@bartlet.df.lth.se (Magnus Olsson)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Tragic IF (was: [Comp98] More praise for the good stuff (1 of 2))
Date: 19 Nov 1998 23:50:54 +0100
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Warning: spoilers for "Photopia" follow:

In article <erkyrathF2oIDz.MsJ@netcom.com>,
Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com> wrote:
>roger@firedrake.avertspam.demon.co.uk wrote:
>
>> Something to consider: would it have been a worse game if, say,
>> typing "stop" early had caused a more minor accident, letting Alley
>> survive? 
>
>Yes.


Well, I'm not sure it would have been a worse *game*. It is possible
that a game, with the object of saving Alley's life, would be better
for some people.

It would have made an immensely worse *story*, however, and Adam is
out to tell a story, not to entertain you with puzzles. I think adding
any more interaction to "Photopia" would risk ruining the story, or at
least diluting it. To me, a substantial part of Photopia's impact is
knowing - or guessing - what's going to happen, yet not being able to
stop it. Sort of like a classic tragedy, where everybody but the
protagonist realize what's happening and how impossible it is to stop
it from happening. What would "Oedipus", or "Hamlet", be with happy
endings?

Which leads me to the following though (which is 100% serious and not
at all intended as sarcasm):

Suppose I was toying with the idea of making a game of a classic
tragedy, such as Hamlet. Would such a game be made better *as
a game* by changing the ending, so that (supposing Hamlet was the
PC) it would be possible to avert everybody's getting killed at 
the end?

Would it even be possible to make "traditional" IF out of a classical
tragedy? To achieve maximum impact, the audience should realize where
the protagonist is heading long before he or she does. But in IF, the
protagonist *is* the audience.

I don't have an answer to this, but I'd be interested in hearing your
thoughts.
-- 
Magnus Olsson (mol@df.lth.se, zebulon@pobox.com)
------    http://www.pobox.com/~zebulon   ------


From sc467@barnard.columbia.edu Fri Nov 20 10:02:43 MET 1998
Article: 39161 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Stacy the Procrastinating <sc467@barnard.columbia.edu>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp98] More praise for the good stuff (1 of 2)
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On 19 Nov 1998 roger@firedrake.avertspam.demon.co.uk wrote:

> Something to consider: would it have been a worse game if, say,
> typing "stop" early had caused a more minor accident, letting Alley
> survive? (That way, most of the hospital scene could work.)
> 
> I admit, I prefer some sort of happy ending. I note that several
> judges had the same problem I did on my first run-through, that the
> ending doesn't _feel_ like an ending; one wonders what one did
> wrong to get such an abrupt finish. A real ending would _end_
> something...


But that's what's so wonderful (to me) about Photopia's ending--it *fits*.
When I turned off the light switch, I knew that was it.  I love that
someone was finally able to use IF to create a story instead of a game
(AMFV came close to doing this). I think the ending is also more literary
than most IF endings--since there was no "game," it wouldn't have worked
to have some big "congratulations, adventurer! here is your reward for
overcoming obstacles and solving puzzles!" ending.  (although, the Purple
scene is that in a way--it's certainly the climax).

Not that I'd want to see games disappear or anything, but there's room in
the genre for both game IF and story IF.  No choices doesn't mean no
interactivity.  Hopefully this will unlock all sorts of creativity in the
genre...I'd love to see more of this sort of thing.  (Of course, this is
probably because I'm so abysmally bad at puzzles--Photopia is the first
game ever I didn't get stuck in.  No wonder I love it <g>.)

-stacy



From mol@bartlet.df.lth.se Fri Nov 20 10:03:26 MET 1998
Article: 39184 of rec.games.int-fiction
Path: news.lth.se!not-for-mail
From: mol@bartlet.df.lth.se (Magnus Olsson)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp98] More praise for the good stuff (1 of 2)
Date: 20 Nov 1998 09:59:40 +0100
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In article <19981119230129@firedrake.demon.co.uk>,
 <roger@firedrake.avertspam.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>In article <7326ip$srg$1@ns1.otenet.gr>,
>Aris Katsaris <katsaris@otenet.gr> wrote:
>>This particular game wasn't very interactive (though I believe more
>>interaction could have hurt it my removing the sense of inevitable tragedy)
>
>Hmm... I'm afraid I'm not convinced. My feeling was very much "what's
>the point" - if the events are going to happen anyway, why bother to
>take time to try to work out how best to influence them?

I think Lucian hit the head of the nail in his post. Let me expand a
little on his view (as I perceive it):

The events are happening anyway. The tragedy is that you can't stop
them.  The beauty of "Photopia" - which would be very different to
reproduce in a non-interactive medium - is that while you can't affect
what happens to Alley, you can affect what happens to *you* (i.e. to
the people around her).

Come to think of it, this is reminiscent of some aspects of "I-0"
(which is of course an utterly different work): within at least some
of the plot branches, you can't affect what happens very much, but you
can choose different ways that Tracy interacts with the world, even if
the end results are more or less the same (e.g. you can choose to
persuade a man to do something by seducing him or by crying - the
result in terms of what actually happens is very similar, but the
implications are quite different).

-- 
Magnus Olsson (mol@df.lth.se, zebulon@pobox.com)
------    http://www.pobox.com/~zebulon   ------


From Avrom_Faderman@email.msn.com Fri Nov 20 10:04:49 MET 1998
Article: 39153 of rec.games.int-fiction
From: "Avrom Faderman" <Avrom_Faderman@email.msn.com>
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Subject: Re: [Reviews] DGlasser speaks
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Spoilers for Photopia....






















Did anyone else have the exquisite, chilling moment of misunderstanding when
you first discover Wendy's wings, but before you know the "puzzle" scenes
are part of a story Alley is telling Wendy?

Suddenly everything seemed to come together...the strange, dreamlike nature
of Wendy's experiences, the drunken kids running a red light, the hospital
scene ("Is she...?"--just a pronoun, no name), the foreshadowing in Wendy's
near-death as a little girl...

Oh, poor Wendy!

But that's wrong, of course.  And you get another chill when you figure
*that* out.  At least, I did.

Avrom





From mkimball@xmission.com Fri Nov 20 10:06:52 MET 1998
Article: 39166 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Matt Kimball <mkimball@xmission.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: [Comp98] A review, of sorts
Date: 20 Nov 1998 02:14:24 GMT
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You read archives of rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction
for the previous few years.  You meditate on the advice.  Carefully,
you construct a work exploring some of the ideas people have thrown
around the newsgroup.

Your work isn't puzzle driven.  In this era of modern IF, we like to
think that we have gotten beyond puzzles.  The choices you make in the
game affect the outcome in subtle and sometimes unpredictable ways.
Your work isn't yet-another chiched fantasy treasure hunt.  Everyone
knows those are overdone.  It's more realistic, and you are actually
interacting with people, not objects.  In fact, one might even call it
"simulationist".  There is not necessarily a correct choice, there are
simply outcomes which result from your choices.  Sounds pretty good,
doesn't it?

You have just finished writing Human Resource Stories.

Watch what you ask for.  You just might get it.

----

So, what was Harry thinking?

I've been talking to Harry through email.  He sent me the source to
HRS.  I think the 'why' command explains some of Harry's thoughts.  Go
ahead, fire up Frotz and type 'why'.  I'll wait.

Back?  "This project is the antithesis of CASK (my first project)".
This says something.  If you were around around during the third
annual IF competition, you remember the atmosphere of r.g.i-f.  For
those of you who weren't around, here is the quick version: Some
people posted some reviews which were rather inflammatory.  There was
some arguing.  There were reviews of reviews of reviews.  Someone then
posted some reviews which were *really* inflammatory.  There was lots
of arguing and lots of bruised egos.

I believe that HRS is counter-reaction to all of the intense criticism
>from the first competition.  Harry wanted to do something which was
entirely unlike everything which people complained about in the third
competition.  No fantasy.  No illogical puzzles.  Player choices
should affect the ending.  Write about what you know.  Throw in a few
easter eggs.  Don't do something that's been done before.

What came out?  Human Resources Stories.  Still got that copy of Frotz
up?  Good.  Type 'secret'.  "The following is a list of what's wrong
with this game."  Apparently Harry knew that HRS wouldn't be very
interesting.  Is this Harry's obscure message to the IF community that
if an author just follows the requests of the reviewers, without
putting any of his passion into his work, you'll get something like
Human Resource Stories?  I think it might be.  

On the other hand, Harry might just be self-effacing.  "This program
is filled with spaghetti codes elements," says the sample program
included with HRS.  The source code to HRS itself also has the same
comment.

I've got a few words for Harry:  Thanks for sharing your IF with us.
Please keep writing.  Next time, follow your passion.  Write about
something which you *want* to say.  Don't require obscure commands to
get your message across.  Beat the reader over the head with it.  And
don't listen to other people's advice.  Including mine.

----

So, Harry, did I miss the point too?

-- 
Matt Kimball
mkimball@xmission.com


From erkyrath@netcom.com Fri Nov 20 14:36:32 MET 1998
Article: 39191 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: Re: [Comp98] More praise for the good stuff (1 of 2)
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Suzanne Skinner (tril@host.ott.igs.net) wrote:

> I don't think I'd even say that Photopia is a game at all. It's a form of
> fiction I'm not sure we have the right word for. It's about being a part
> of the story, but not controlling it.
>
> And that's about as clearly as I can put it.

I'll be happy to fuzz it up for you. :)

Is it "letting the author control the story" if it never actually happens?
If you are an active player, find solutions to obstacles, and get to the
end feeling like you've "solved it"?

Is the distinction you're trying to make even meaningful if you only play
"Photopia" once?

--Z

-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From mkkuhner@kingman.genetics.washington.edu Fri Nov 20 14:37:23 MET 1998
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From: mkkuhner@kingman.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Tragic IF (was: [Comp98] More praise for the good stuff (1 of 2))
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In article <7327ce$skn$1@bartlet.df.lth.se>,
Magnus Olsson <mol@bartlet.df.lth.se> wrote:
>Warning: spoilers for "Photopia" follow:

>It would have made an immensely worse *story*, however, and Adam is
>out to tell a story, not to entertain you with puzzles. I think adding
>any more interaction to "Photopia" would risk ruining the story, or at
>least diluting it. To me, a substantial part of Photopia's impact is
>knowing - or guessing - what's going to happen, yet not being able to
>stop it. 

I'm inclined to agree about the interaction, with the single exception
of the dream sequence.  If I can't be Alley having a dream, I would
rather be Wendy (or someone) interacting with Alley's dream in some 
way.  Having to hit <return> over and over broke the spell of the 
game for me, and was the only part that really did.

I thought it attained complicity even when it wasn't all that
interactive, as in the drowning scene.  I actually went back and
replayed as far as that scene just so I could move *faster*,
a choice which the game did accomodate:  I felt guilty about being
a bad parent.

As for the tragedy question, I can only say that after I finished
_Photopia_ I thought about going back and replaying it to see if
there was, in fact, some way to save Alley--and I felt rather ill.
If I had found one, that would have meant my whole approach to the
"game" was misguided--I should have been trying to solve the problem
rather than experience it--and I liked the experience that I'd
had.  I also think that the conversations, which worked well for
me, would have been spoiled if I'd replayed them over and over
looking for the "right solution", which a more game-like approach
would almost have required.

I'd like to say, though, that I don't think all stories make the
kinds of interaction verus storytelling tradeoffs necessary that
this particular one does.  I don't think a _Photopia_ style game
with multiple endings would necessarily be a bad thing:  just not
_Photopia_ itself.

Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu


From lpsmith@rice.edu Fri Nov 20 14:46:35 MET 1998
Article: 39181 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: lpsmith@rice.edu (Lucian Paul Smith)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: [Photopia] Who did you identify with?
Date: 20 Nov 1998 06:21:01 GMT
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[Spoilers, just in case]:















I said this on ifMUD, and I'll say it again here:  For me, personally, the
tragedy of Alley's death can be summed up in the thought, "My God, that
poor boy will never date anyone else again in his life."

I way over-identified with Jonathan.  Extremely so.  Because, as a Jr.
High/High school kid, I had crushes that lasted for *years* that I never
talked about with anyone.  And here I was, put back in the same situation,
given a chance to redeem myself.  And then to have it cruelly snatched
away,... it was heart rending.

My theory is that if I had been a dad, I would have identified more with
one of the father figures in the game; probably Alley's dad.  The night
sky struck a different resonant chord in me, but more of a 'potential me'
one than a 'this is me in the flesh' that Jonathan's scene had.

It may be that if I was a young child with an older sister, I might have
identified with Wendy.  But I was the oldest kid, and never had anyone
like Alley babysit me, so it's hard to say.  Did anyone else identify most
strongly with Wendy?

Heck, if I had been one to carouse in college, maybe I'd have guiltily
identified with the fratboy.

To me, the weakest links were with Wendy and with Alley's mom.  And I
wonder if this is because I'm male, because Adam's male, or both, or
neither.

One of the biggest disappointments I felt upon discovering that Photopia
was actually written by Adam was that the male characters I had so
strongly identified with weren't written by a female.  That would have
been, I felt, a major accomplishment.  So now I'm wondering if the female
characters that Adam wrote were equally identifiable-with to female
players.  My guess is no, but I'm not sure.

So, who did you identify with the most, and why?

-Lucian


From wheeler@jump.net Fri Nov 20 14:53:54 MET 1998
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From: "J. Robinson Wheeler" <wheeler@jump.net>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: [Four in One] Designs and amusements
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 09:13:54 -0600
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Mild Spoilers for "Four in One", ranked #16 (of 27) in the 1998
IF Competition, follow:

                          ---====---

Many people have mentioned the transcript for 4in1 in their
reviews, some calling into question why I released it. The answer
is that it was the act of submitting the pretend-transcript to
Stephen Granade's contest that inspired me to actually create the
game it described. Prior to that, I had considered it beyond my
ability to code.

It was also a test of a theory of IF design that I was toying with:
write a transcript of the winning solution, including some amusing
diversions. Then, plot a strategy that will result in a game which
will be able to produce the same transcript, if played. It turns
out that the comp98 version of 4in1 cannot produce the transcript,
but you have to roll with the ideas you get.

At its foundation, it is a simple logic puzzle of the kind:

Brothers A, B, C, and D sometimes get along and sometimes don't. If
B is in a room with C, he will leave unless A is present. If A and
C are left alone in a room, both will leave. If B is left alone in
a room with D, D will leave. A won't come with you unless at least
one of his brothers is present. D won't come with you unless all
three of his brothers are present. You must get all four brothers to
follow you. In what order do you have to pick them up?

On top of this is a secondary puzzle, of making rehearsals and
shooting takes once you get them to the set.  The way to solve the
game is to realize the nature of the primary puzzle, to play with
the game long enough to determine the behaviors of A, B, C, and D,
and finally to devise a strategy which will reliably enable you to
get all four to the set at least twice in the game's allotted time.
An average winning solution is possible in forty or fifty moves,
and with some luck (there is a random element) in fewer than that.

This seemed like a game of appropriate size for a two-hour
competition, so once I had plotted it this far I began coding in
earnest, starting with the floor map and a non-functioning Groucho.
I added objects, room descriptions, and all of the NPCs. Over time,
I made each brother's basic behavior work, one at a time, and the
game quickly came to life.

It was intricate work, coding behavior for a new brother that
worked along with, and didn't break, the code I'd already written
for the other ones. It felt like designing one of those fantastic
old clockworks that put on little animated shows. It still has this
feel to it, and I'm sad that some reviewers couldn't appreciate the
craftsmanship of the clockwork, instead decrying it for what it
wasn't.

                          ---====---

There are quite a number of frills and amusing things to do while
playing the game if you set aside for the moment the problem of
winning, like calling Clark Gable on the phone, or asking Groucho
stupid questions. There is one genuine easter egg in the game, of a
nature as nearly hidden as (in some applications) hitting shift-
control-F1-w to pop up a fun screen, but possible to discover if
through attention to detail and happy accident. The source code 
will be available on gmd soon for those who just want to see what
to do.

All of the NPCs understand these questions:

  - [NPC], WHAT IS [object] 
  - [NPC], WHERE IS [ object || NPC ] 
  - [NPC], WHO IS [NPC] 
  - [NPC], WHO ARE YOU 
  - [NPC], WHAT ARE YOU 
  - [NPC], WHO AM I 
  - [NPC], WHAT AM I 
  - [NPC], TELL ME ABOUT [ object || NPC ] 
  - ASK [NPC] ABOUT [ object || NPC ]

These may also be typed straight into the command line without being
directed at an NPC. The only reason to try them out is that one
of the questions provokes a particularly interesting response.

Most NPCs answer generically, but Groucho, having little tolerance
for stupid questions, has sarcastic answers to them. He isn't as
constantly chatty as he is in the movies because, except for Harpo,
they are written to resemble their off-screen personas. However, 
Groucho can be counted on for a few quips, including:

  - 14 responses to 'GROUCHO, WHERE ARE YOU' 
  - 14 ways of telling you he's going back to his room 
  -  9 responses to 'GROUCHO, WHO AM I' 
  -  7 responses to Chico's crowded room 
  -  6 responses to being ordered to WAIT 
  -  3 responses to being ordered to SMILE, depending on 
       whether there's a woman in the room, and if one of 
       them is Margaret Dumont 
  -  3 responses for when you CUT before you've said ACTION


For the synonymous ASK [NPC] ABOUT and [NPC], TELL ME ABOUT
commands, there is a base of knowledge in the game, keyed to
whether it's a subject about which the particular NPC would be
likely to either know or have an opinion.

Some of these go several levels deep. For example, if you ask
Groucho about his books, he'll tell you that he reads because he
has insomnia. You can also ask about his insomnia. It's possible to
piece it together that his insomnia was caused by the stock market
crash of '29. Groucho comments on that by mentioning Eddie Cantor,
and finally, you can ask Groucho his opinion about Eddie Cantor.

If you don't know who Eddie Cantor is, you can always ask Scotty,
who has at least one thing to say (not always very enlightening)
about every knowledge subject in the game -- a holdover from an
alpha version in which the player was redirected to "ask Scotty - 
he knows everything" in the default NPC "I don't know" response.

Just for fun, here's a list of things that can be reliably asked
about in the game (not guaranteed to get a good response, but the
parser recognizes them -- an artifact of running out of development
time and energy):

  - All other NPCs, by name 
  - All objects in the game 
  - Notable MGM stars of the era
  - Minnie, Manfred, and Gummo Marx 
  - Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, 
    Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera, Room Service 
  - MGM, Paramount, Warner, Universal, Columbia, RKO
  - Zeppo's agency 
  - Leo McCarey, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Jack Benny, George Burns 
  - Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton[1], Harold Lloyd 
  - The shooting script, scene 62, the film (this picture), comedy


NPCs who generally have something particular to say when you talk
to them are:

  - Groucho, Harpo[1], Zeppo, Chico, Margaret Dumont, Scotty, Val,
    Frenchie, Susan, Buster Keaton[2].

If the subject is specific films (this script, this picture, A
Night at the Opera, or their previous pictures), then Irving,
George, and Morrie might have something to say.

                          ---====---

I guess my point is this:  Did you remember to have fun with this
game?  Apparently, some people did and some people didn't.  The 
ones who didn't sounded as impatient and ready to split a gasket 
as the lemonade vendor in Duck Soup, which to me is actually rather 
funny.  So, they quit my game in a huff, or a minute and a huff, 
and graded it as "not fun, just annoying."  I've got just one 
response to that:






              >HONK HONK<



                              ---jrw  6:00am  18 Nov 98 

=======

[1]     The magic word "xyzzy" toggles Harpo's ability to talk. If I do
    an update, I'll probably put a leaflet in his dressing room which
    plainly says: "Magic word xyzzy" so that one is encouraged to use
    this word around Harpo. He still isn't, by nature, particularly
    talkative, but he does have things to say about his family.

[2] Buster Keaton, besides belonging to the category of "notable
    MGM stars of the era[3]," is also an NPC in the game who is full of
    opinions about everything -- provided you can find him (see note[3]
    below).

[3] The notable MGM stars of the era are part of the knowledge base
    of the game (and able to be called on the phone) because they are,
    in fact, in the game. Finding them on the sets of the MGM lot
    (which you can plainly see out Irving's window) gets you the last
    lousy point in the game.  This is also the Easter Egg.



-- 
J. Robinson Wheeler
wheeler@jump.net            http://www.jump.net/~wheeler/jrw/home.html


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From: bones@i.am
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp98] More praise for the good stuff (1 of 2)
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In article <3654cc3b.1788190@news.nu-world.com>,
  lac@nu-world.com (Lelah Conrad) wrote:
>
> You know, I just had another thought.  Photopia was more like a movie
> (a good one) than an IF game.  Adam, maybe you ought to head for
> Hollywood.

Photopia would not be as effective (or affective, for that matter) in another
medium. The great thing about it, one of Adam's triumphs, is the immediacy you
feel in each scene. I was not *watching* at Alley's father tell her about the
stars, I was *doing* it. I did not stand by as Alley's mother resuscitated her
drowning daughter, *I* was the one doing CPR.

An experiment: Run through a scene with scripting on. Print out the script and
read it. Which has more impact on you, playing the game or reading the script?

A movie would be the same. It's a passive activity, like reading. We do not
need another discussion of hot and cold McLuhan media theory, but I think
that the difference is central to why Photopia works so well.

Spread-out flat, in a glossy magazine, Photopia would be a decent, but not
great, short story (IMHO, of course). As a piece of IF, its amazing power
comes from the very careful use of the immediacy of the player character. You
*are* the direct cause of Alley's death, a worshipful girl, her loving
parents.

Kind Regards,
Bruce
bones (at) i.am

-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
http://www.dejanews.com/       Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own    


From edromia@concentric.net Sun Nov 22 23:15:13 MET 1998
Article: 39269 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: "Michael Gentry" <edromia@concentric.net>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp98] More praise for the good stuff (1 of 2)
Date: 21 Nov 1998 08:01:28 PST
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>I might even be persuaded to agree that if this were a conventional
>short story, it would be better the way it is.  But as far as I'm
>concerned, if there's any purpose whatsoever to making a story
>*interactive*, it's so that you can make a difference to the outcome.


According to that criteria, nearly every piece of IF that's ever been
published on or off this newsgroup is a dismal failure.

I interpret the "interactive" part of interactive fiction to mean that it is
fiction you can *participate* in. This can, but does not necessarily,
include the ability to change the outcome.

Photopia is a story about a young girl full of promise, who died. As such,
it is a tragedy. It is effective as tragedy because the tragedy is
unavoidable. It is effective as IF because it allows you to *participate* in
her life, from the perspective of those who affected or were affected by
her.

-M.
================================================
"If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding.
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?"




From mccall@erols.com Sun Nov 22 23:15:39 MET 1998
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From: mccall@erols.com (TenthStone)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp98] More praise for the good stuff (1 of 2)
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Russell Wallace thus inscribed this day of Sat, 21 Nov 1998 22:39:50
+0000:

>Michael Gentry wrote:
>> Photopia is a story about a young girl full of promise, who died. As such,
>> it is a tragedy. It is effective as tragedy because the tragedy is
>> unavoidable. It is effective as IF because it allows you to *participate* in
>> her life, from the perspective of those who affected or were affected by
>> her.
>
>So what?  You can't affect the one thing that really matters.

Thus, a tragedy.

As an example, Shakespeare.  In the comedies, chance is allowed to play an
enormous role.  Not one of Shakespeare's tragedies truly relies on luck --
very well, so Polonius is killed by accident, sparking his son to revenge.
The only characters affected are those who are not central to the tragedy.
Hamlet knows he has a choice between justice and death, and so he chooses.
An escapeable tragedy is irrelevant, because there can be no cartharsis,
no expatriation of emotion if nothing is changed.  The truth is that
change will come, for better or worse.

If Photopia were Zork, it would be a failure.  The question here is
whether you think it should be.

Regarding those incapable of experiencing the characters: I pity you.

-----------

The imperturbable TenthStone
tenthstone@hotmail.com          mccall@erols.com        mccallr@gsgis.k12.va.us


From graham@gnelson.demon.co.uk Sun Nov 22 23:16:00 MET 1998
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From: Graham Nelson <graham@gnelson.demon.co.uk>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp98] More praise for the good stuff (1 of 2)
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In article <738kck$810@spool.cs.wisc.edu>, Dan Shiovitz
<URL:mailto:dbs@cs.wisc.edu> wrote:
> In article <3657c109.13497599@news.erols.com>,
> TenthStone <mccall@erols.com> wrote:
> [..]
> >As an example, Shakespeare.  In the comedies, chance is allowed to play an
> >enormous role.  Not one of Shakespeare's tragedies truly relies on luck --
> 
> Romeo and Juliet being the notable exception.

Hamlet could easily have ended happily, if the misunderstanding
between H. and Laertes had been resolved about two seconds
earlier.  The King would have been deposed, the Queen wouldn't
take the poison and they could have entertained Fortinbras with
hot buttered crumpets.

For almost half its performance history, King Lear was performed
with a rewritten ending, in which Cordelia isn't executed (again,
a matter of chance timing, really), because audiences preferred
it that way.  (These rewritings were sometimes amazingly gross.
I looked up a lot of this sort of thing about "The Tempest"
last year, and found that there were versions in which literally
everybody had extra cousins, brothers and sisters around, so as
to flood the stage with women -- this is in Restoration England,
with women at last allowed to act -- and gratuitous amounts
of extra magic, etc.)

And as for Macbeth... have you ever been to Scotland?  There's
really a hell of a lot of blasted heath to wander around on,
and the chances of stumbling across three (count them) three
witches can't be all that enormous.

-- 
Graham Nelson | graham@gnelson.demon.co.uk | Oxford, United Kingdom



From glasser@DELETEuscom.com Sun Nov 22 23:16:54 MET 1998
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Subject: Re: [Comp98] More praise for the good stuff (1 of 2)
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Jon Petersen <enoto@ucla.edu> wrote:

> TenthStone wrote:
> > Thus, a tragedy.
> 
> Well, no. If Alley had a fatal flaw which led to her demise, it'd be a
> tragedy. As it is, it's just a bummer.

Oh, I'm sure we can think up a Fatal Flaw for her.

Hmm.  The reason she died was that she chose to be with an adoring
little girl half her age over being with a lot of people her age (and
Jon) at a social event.  This, coupled with the fact that she stated
that most of her friends were not her age, shows that she is very
antisocial, capable only of feeling good when around young (or old)
people that she has charmed into adoration.  Her fear of the dance was
that Jon would not truly adore her (like Wendy, her parents, and so on
do) and leave her for somebody else.  This is why she makes sure that
their date is alone.

In fact, Alley is an egomaniac, thriving off others' love without giving
out anything of her own.  If she had done the right thing and attended
the social event with people of her own age, instead of telling escapist
stories to a little girl who doesn't know better than to love her, she
would not have died.

Whatever.

-- 
David Glasser glasser@NOSPAMuscom.com http://onramp.uscom.com/~glasser
DGlasser @ ifMUD : fovea.retina.net 4000 (webpage fovea.retina.net:4001)
Sadie Hawkins, official band of David Glasser: http://sadie.retina.net
"We take our icons very seriously in this class."


From craxton@erols.com Mon Nov 23 13:26:44 MET 1998
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From: Craxton <craxton@erols.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [COMP 98] Photopia some more
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 00:27:14 -0500
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Lelah Conrad wrote:
> 
> On 18 Nov 1998 16:45:18 GMT, adam@princeton.edu (Adam J. Thornton)
> wrote:
> 
> 
> >
> >You get to be pretty much everyone in the story *except* the main
> >character.
> 
> Well, yes of course.  That was obvious.  Hence my comment on another
> thread about this being the *remembrance* of Alley in some way, in the
> same way as at a memorial service.  She's not really in the story,
> except as seen through everybody else's eyes.
> 
> BTW, I take it to mean also then that the opening line "Let's tell a
> story together" is NOT Alley speaking to Wendy but Adam's authorial
> statement about the multiple perspectives, e.g. "let's all of us" (all
> the people who reflected on her meaning for them.)

Could be both.

What I really liked about the change of perspective is that It's a very
acurrate portrayal of what it's like when a young person dies. You spend
practically the entire game learning stuff about this Alley person. The
player has not the slightest idea what's going on, or how Alley relates
to it. And just when it's all starting to make sense- *snap* Game Over.
It speaks very well of wasted potential, of all Alley could have done
had she lived. Like the queen's land, that was dead when she arrived.
It's a very tragic and moving piece. I wonder if Mr. Cadre has suffered
any personal loss recently. If not, he sure has the emotion of such a
happening down pat.

				-Craxton


From katsaris@otenet.gr Mon Nov 23 13:28:39 MET 1998
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From: "Aris Katsaris" <katsaris@otenet.gr>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Tapestry vs. Photopia (spoilers for Tapestry and Photopia)
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LucFrench wrote in message <19981122020940.28377.00001123@ng74.aol.com>...
>[Warning: The following post could be considered flame bait. Please, do not
>read this post if you feel like insulting everybody in sight.]
>
>I recently heard a comment, and I'd like to add to it.
>
>Photopia is just a lesser shadow of Tapestry. (Hereafter referred to as P
and
>T.) [Please include if you quote this post; it'll make things clearer to
those
>who read the thread.]

Spoilers for Photopia and Tapestry below:














I disagree completely. For starters I consider them vastly different in many
ways. In the parts where they are similar I consider P to be superior.

>[Also note that I use the word "worldview" heavily in this post. I find it
much
>clearer then the heavily overused "paradigm"; forgive me for stealing a
chapter
>out of Orwell (using the clearer of two words when the opportunity presents
>itself).]
>
>T uses the interactivity of the medium to its great advantage. The three
>endings, particularly the Morningstar ending, felt much more dangerous,
because
>the player _had_ performed the actions that led to the fate of the PC.
>
>P doesn't use the medium quite as well. While I was playing it, I felt the
>fourth wall grinding against me, primarily because the actions were so
heavily
>scripted. (Although the Gold scene's explanation was actually fairly nice.)


I disagree. In P I never felt the actions to be limited within the
reasonable scope of each character's personality or the story-within-a-story
logic.

T however forced me to take a path, which was not the only one available to
the character. The most obvious example is the third scene where you can't
choose Morningstar's path by typing 'stop'. This scene was precisely written
thus, so that one life (besides your own) will have to be lost. However this
made the last scene completely meaningless. It didn't give you the least
control to change the situation.

You are given some control in the 'mother dying' situation; but your choice
there is once again limited to only one decision (which destination you'll
tell the driver to go), all the previous command once again heavily scripted
and more unreasonably (where I am concerned) than P is.

In fact in some ways T cheats there as well, since the decision you are
forced to take, is the repercussion of a previous decision (negligence)
which you are not allowed to correct.

You are given some control in the second scene as well, but once again you
are not allowed to take some actions: you are not allowed to open the drawer
for example, when my character would have opened it under similar
circumstances.

>Leaving aside the issue of philosophy, I suppose the reason why I preferred
T
>to P was that T had several worldviews, while P had several perspectives.
At
>their cores, T is a classical work of philosophy, while P is a Postmodern
>piece; the distinction is fairly important.

>
>(Postmodernism (from this fellow's view) is an exercise in futility; the
>fundamental worldview is that there is no truth, merely perspectives. While
I
>understand this worldview, I prefer to mix it with the decidedly more
edible
>substance of classical thought, that there *is* absolute truth; it may not
be
>attainable by mere humans, but it *exists*.)


I'm not accustomed with using these terms, so forgive if I am wrong but I
believe that 'truth' (as in 'eternal truth') where Photopia is concerned is
not a issue. All of the story takes part in a strictly realistic universe
(++r++ in Harry H's scale :) ), only the foreshadowing dream of Alley
providing some evidence of the existence of a possible afterlife. Players
are allowed to believe that she will become an angel, or that she will have
to live through the cruel afterlife foreshadowed in her dream, or that
there's no afterlife at all.

In short P is dealing with facts, not with truths.

On the other hand T is using mythological and religious figures. Assuming
one doesn't believe in them, they don't have as much strength. If one
accepts them though, I'll have to say they were misused; and in fact I have
philosophical problems with them. What is the path of the Third Fate? Why
does Lucifer's path symbolise the human willingness to help others? Is
saving your wife, or preventing the death of a girl really such a devil's
path?

Perhaps that's exactly what you mean, in which case I apologise. But though
I believe both mythology and realism can be used with equally strong
effects, in this case Photopia's stark realism was far more effective, than
T's (dubious) use of mythological imagery, where I am concerned.

>T and P, while having similar messages about Fate,

I disagree, and that's why I believe they are not easily comparable. They
don't have similar messages. Tapestry's message is that your choices were
all for the good and that you must simply face your guilt (which seem a
kinda stupid comment: certainly people often make wrong decisions which hurt
them, and guilt isn't the only problem?) and that the bad things that happen
in life will happen regardless of your actions.

I disagree with the above, and that's why I consider Tapestry inferior.

Photopia offers a much more simple, and at the same time much more
irrefutably true, message about Fate: "Bad things happen. Life is unfair."
But it did not necessarily say that this is inevitable: only impossible to
change by some people. If you could control the drunken guy, you could have
changed it. But you couldn't control him and you couldn't change it. He was
the 'bad' guy and bad guys often triumph over the good.

>go about it in very
>different ways. P juggles several viewpoints, and, in my opinion,
ultimately
>fails, because the player, eventually, has no illusion that they can change
the
>story in any way.

Why should P offer that illusion? It didn't offer that illusion, because
there was no way they could change it. Nothing Alley or Wendy's father did
was wrong.

>T gives this illusion (in fact, the basic premise *is* that
>you can change the ending)

But you do change the ending. In fact the writer shows clearly which ending
he prefers, that of Clotho. The Atropos path is completely unappealing and
redundant to the story. You can see the Morningstar path is considered wrong
by the writer, by its name alone.

And Tapestry reinforces the opinion that Clothos' path is the correct one,
with artificial means: The letter, the understanding that your mother knew
it was the correct thing to do, the knowledge that you'll have to kill one
of the two children as well as the inability to stop the car. This is just
plain ineffective- why shouldn't you be left with the doubt that your mother
thought you abandoned her, or the belief that your wife could want to live?

Tapestry is philosophically flawed IMAO.

>, although it ultimately denies it at the end.


Wrongly denies it. He could have been driving more carefully and he was to
blame for the accident. This would have changed his life.

Moreover it's illogical that one has to stick to the path he has chosen.
That one of Tim's decisions were wrong doesn't mean everything was. In his
place I would do the Thompson account but never kill my wife, *and* would
stop the car. The game didn't allow me to do this, and thus I got annoyed,
given moral dilemmas but forced to follow the writer's choices.

Tapestry is a very good IF, 8 to 9 points. But IMO Photopia is 10, the only
game I thought about for days afterwards (and still think about).

Aris Katsaris




From Avrom_Faderman@email.msn.com Mon Nov 23 13:29:39 MET 1998
Article: 39364 of rec.games.int-fiction
From: "Avrom Faderman" <Avrom_Faderman@email.msn.com>
Subject: [Photopia] What I would--and wouldn't--change (spoilers)
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 1998 19:15:12 -0500
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This post is pure fantasy, of course.  Not only *did* I not write Photopia,
I don't wish to flatter myself by thinking I *could* have written it.  For
one thing, I'm not that good a writer, and nowhere *near* that good a writer
of fiction;  for another thing, I can't even get the *&$! parrot in "Ruins"
to do what I want it to.  And of course the game is finished, or at least as
finished as Adam wants it to be;  I don't presume to *really* tell him to
make any changes, particularly not major ones like the ones I'll mention
below.  I'm quite aware that if I want these ideas implemented, I should
write my own damn game, and I'm equally aware that if I do so, it will not
be as good as Photopia.

Fortunately for me, however, criticism (by which I mean critical analysis;
only about half of what follows is in any way negative) is far easier than
authorship, so in what follows I'm going to discuss how I think Photopia
could overcome what many people have (correctly, IMO) picked out as its
flaws without losing what an almost entirely disjoint set of people have
(correctly, IMO) picked out as its considerable--in fact,
remarkable--virtues.

Spoilers abound in what follows;  I'll be discussing the game in detail.
























About two thirds of the people who've played "Photopia" have raved about its
beautiful structure and sense of inevitability;  about a third have
complained about the fact that you can't *change* anything in the story.
Yes, they say, you can make individual scenes work a bit differently
depending on your responses, but you don't have the feeling of changing
anything *global*.  You haven't really done anything;  this makes the game
non-interactive in a static fiction-like way.  They claim that this makes it
harder to identify with the characters, to feel like you're *part* of the
plot.

Now, I think there are two things that should be made clear about
identification here:

For one thing, even in a good game, it needn't be literal.  As I've written
before, I can't literally see myself as Christabel, Ralph, the protagonist
of Kissing the Buddha's Feet, Tracy Valencia, or even (perhaps especially!)
the Zork adventurer.  I don't think that this hinders the kind of
identification necessary here.  I don't need to *be* any of these people,
but it has to be easy and fun (or in some other way worthwhile) for me to
*pretend* to be these people.  I need to be able to empathize with them,
even if the empathy falls short of a merging of egos.

For another thing, I myself didn't have much trouble identifying in the
requisite sense with the characters in Photopia.  I don't have much trouble
identifying with the characters in good static fiction either.  However,
since Photopia (unlike most fiction) is written in an interactive medium, it
has many more tools to force identification.  I think those who have
criticized it have at least been correct that it didn't make full use of
these tools.  Even engaging as static fiction can be, when all is said and
done, the reader is reduced to the role of *observer*.  And although in one
playthrough Photopia does a very good job of covering this fact up, it makes
the player so impotent that they are reduced to the role of observer as
well.

SO:  Is the solution to make Photopia "solvable," to allow the player to
save Alley, as many have suggested?

Oh good lord no.

Not all stories have happy endings;  nor should they.  Photopia is a
story--a tragic story--not a puzzle.  The idea is to experience a world, not
solve a problem;  if it were the latter, Photopia would be stripped of half
its innovativeness and all of its poignancy.  The death of Alley is
inevitable--not causally (since it turns on a fair bit of bad luck) but
thematically;  neither the queen of the lifeless realms nor the "passing of
the torch" to Wendy nor Wendy-as-angel nor the swimming-pool scene nor the
golden beach.

But there's a difference between foreordaining the *ending* of a story and
foreordaining the entire story.

The largest problem with Photopia, I think, is that the scenes are
*entirely* self-contained.  Absolutely *nothing* you can do (so far as I can
tell) has any effect on *any* other part of the story.  To a certain extent,
this is a function of the "Priest plot," since it's not guaranteed that
things you do early on will come chronologically earlier than what you see
later.  In many cases, however, they do, and in other cases they could, and
it would have been good for the game to use this fact.

A particularly vivid example is the relationship between the story Alley
tells Wendy with the rest of the game, particularly the relationship between
"Gold" and the scene involving her father.  It's interesting to note that,
in all the previous scenes, the real-world scene that related to the story
scene preceeded it;  "Gold," however, came before the scene it allegorizes,
and that, I think, is unfortunate.

If, as Alley's father, you steer the conversation in a particular direction,
it ends with a discussion of the differences between the value of life and
the value of gold, explaining the previous scene beautifully.  If you don't,
however, the exact force of the "gold" scene remains a mystery;  gold as a
symbol of something that is valuable only because it happens to be rare is
greatly obscured.

Here is a great place to add more interactivity.  Put the "gold" scene
*after* the discussion between Alley and her father.  Have the discussion
lead to one of two different *possible* scenes, a la "Losing Your Grip."
Both need to emphasize the value of life, but they can do it in different
ways, depending on the imagery you, as Alley's father, implanted in her so
many years ago.

Should it be possible for Alley to die as a young girl?  No;  that would
destroy the story.  But acting stupid as her mother, forcing the exchange
student to save her life, should have *some* repercussions.  Put
*something*--a vague note in her reaction to her mother, an aspect of the
"sea-blue" story, *something*--in a later scene that shows the game's
universe has registered your actions.  Allow the player to have some lasting
impact on the story.

This is a thin line to walk, of course.  In Graham Nelson's "war between a
crossword and a narrative," the balance of power is crucial, and in a game
with no "solution," where "crossword" isn't to be taken literally, it's
very, very delicate.  I personally think that Photopia demonstrates that
letting the narrative win entirely can yield a very, very, very good game.
But the crossword, in the form of blank squares in need of filling in, even
if there's no one right way to fill them, even if the narrative is the
*objective* of the game, is such a powerful tool of identification that it
can benifit even a very, very, very good game.

Best,
Avrom





From Avrom_Faderman@email.msn.com Mon Nov 23 13:29:43 MET 1998
Article: 39366 of rec.games.int-fiction
From: "Avrom Faderman" <Avrom_Faderman@email.msn.com>
References: <utM28ZnF#GA.271@upnetnews03>
Subject: Re: [Photopia] What I would--and wouldn't--change (spoilers)
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 1998 19:35:29 -0500
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Xref: news.lth.se rec.games.int-fiction:39366

I wrote...





















...
> The death of Alley is
>inevitable--not causally (since it turns on a fair bit of bad luck) but
>thematically;  neither the queen of the lifeless realms nor the "passing of
>the torch" to Wendy nor Wendy-as-angel nor the swimming-pool scene nor the
>golden beach.

...which is a sentence fragment of a more-than-usually horrible kind.

Add "...would make any thematic sense without the death of Alley."

Avrom





From erkyrath@netcom.com Mon Nov 23 13:29:54 MET 1998
Article: 39353 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: Re: [Photopia] What I would--and wouldn't--change (spoilers)
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Avrom Faderman (Avrom_Faderman@email.msn.com) wrote:

> Spoilers abound in what follows;  I'll be discussing the game in detail.























[snipping wildly...]

> But there's a difference between foreordaining the *ending* of a story and
> foreordaining the entire story.

> The largest problem with Photopia, I think, is that the scenes are
> *entirely* self-contained.  Absolutely *nothing* you can do (so far as I can
> tell) has any effect on *any* other part of the story.  To a certain extent,
> this is a function of the "Priest plot," since it's not guaranteed that
> things you do early on will come chronologically earlier than what you see
> later.  In many cases, however, they do, and in other cases they could, and
> it would have been good for the game to use this fact.

I see what you're trying to do.

I wonder, though, if it wouldn't cause nearly as strong a negative
reaction. "I acted differently, and it caused this change in the story
later, but was it a *real* difference? No! It was a one-sentence change in
the text! (Or whatever.) It didn't have any impact on what *actually
happened.*"

(This is a hypothetical reaction, not my own. Anyone?)

(Although I *do* tend to see text-only plot differences as somewhat
unsatisfying. _Spider And Web_ does this, for example, and I'm not
completely happy with the results. On the other hand, I'm also not happy
with the way _Grip_ handles it -- splitting into two scenes that rejoin
later.)

(No, I don't know what would be a satisfying replacement.)

--Z

-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From lpsmith@rice.edu Mon Nov 23 13:30:21 MET 1998
Article: 39376 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: lpsmith@rice.edu (Lucian Paul Smith)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Photopia] What I would--and wouldn't--change (spoilers)
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Andrew Plotkin (erkyrath@netcom.com) wrote:
: Avrom Faderman (Avrom_Faderman@email.msn.com) wrote:

: > Spoilers abound in what follows;  I'll be discussing the game in detail.























: [snipping wildly...]

: > But there's a difference between foreordaining the *ending* of a story and
: > foreordaining the entire story.

: > The largest problem with Photopia, I think, is that the scenes are
: > *entirely* self-contained.  Absolutely *nothing* you can do (so far as I can
: > tell) has any effect on *any* other part of the story.  To a certain extent,
: > this is a function of the "Priest plot," since it's not guaranteed that
: > things you do early on will come chronologically earlier than what you see
: > later.  In many cases, however, they do, and in other cases they could, and
: > it would have been good for the game to use this fact.

: I see what you're trying to do.

: I wonder, though, if it wouldn't cause nearly as strong a negative
: reaction. "I acted differently, and it caused this change in the story
: later, but was it a *real* difference? No! It was a one-sentence change in
: the text! (Or whatever.) It didn't have any impact on what *actually
: happened.*"

: (This is a hypothetical reaction, not my own. Anyone?)

Judging from the volume of people that complained about the phrase
'fratboys' not changing to 'fratboy', I think there's a vast untapped
market for this type of change here.  I mean, really--one letter!  That's
all people wanted!  And I, at least, replayed the entirety of Photopia (up
to that scene) for the express purpose of seeing that letter go away.

[Spoilers for 'Spider and Web' follow.]











: (Although I *do* tend to see text-only plot differences as somewhat
: unsatisfying. _Spider And Web_ does this, for example, and I'm not
: completely happy with the results. On the other hand, I'm also not happy
: with the way _Grip_ handles it -- splitting into two scenes that rejoin
: later.)

This was, in fact, my one gripe with 'Spider and Web'--the refusal of the
game to acknowledge that I had tried something different.  *I* knew what I
wanted to do, and I wanted the game to tell me, "Yes, you did that."
Instead, I got the annoyingly anonymous 'You have made a difference.'  It
wouldn't have had to have been much, just enough to differentiate the
various endings.  (And, BTW, the little phrase about the guards' eyes
sliding over the various items in the room was almost enough.  Maybe it
could have *been* enough if the emphasis had been placed differently.)

Here's a hypothesis:  People play interactive games in part because they
want to see what impact they can have on the world.  In puzzle-based
games, this impact is often clearly demonstrable in the change in the
landscape--new vistas opened, old foes defeated, etc.  In less
puzzle-heavy games, this influence becomes harder to see.  And, as such,
the author, if they want to satisfy this craving, needs to come up with
some new form of influence the player can have on the story.  This can be
as simple as 'fratboys' to 'fratboy', or it can be as complex as Grip's
diverging branches.

-Lucian


From jcmason@uwaterloo.ca Mon Nov 23 13:43:29 MET 1998
Article: 39338 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: jcmason@uwaterloo.ca (Joe Mason)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Tragic IF (was: [Comp98] More praise for the good stuff (1 of 2))
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Dylan Thurston <thurston@math.unige.ch> wrote (not insribed, ok? wrote):
>
>The point of classic tragedy is that the hero's fate is inevitable and
>doesn't depend on mistakes the hero makes, right?  So perhaps the best 
>thing would be to allow multiple different endings in which everyone
>dies.

No, the point of classic tragedy is that the hero's fate can be averted, but
the hero doesn't do it.  You could consider it "inevitable" because the
hero's character leads him to make mistakes, and if he'd chosen otherwise
then he'd be a different person.  But it definitely depends on the hero's
mistakes - or, more precisely, the hero's character flaw.

>For instance, Hamlet might kill his uncle earlier; but then he still
>gets in a duel with his uncle's lackeys.  (I'm blanking on names.)
>Maybe in some endings everyone dies in a war with Norway.  And so
>forth.
>
>Would that work?

No, because there's always a point where the hero *could* turn aside.  As an
example, an ending where everyone dies in a war with Norway - is it something
Hamlet does to bring this on?  If not, then death in a war would be
extraneous to the plot.

It IS possible to have multiple tragic endings.  For instance, if Hamlet goes
to war in Norway and gets killed there because he can't stand to be in the
same household as his uncle and vows never to return, then that would be
based on Hamlet's character flaw and it would be a tragic ending.  But there
would still be other options which SHOULDN'T be tragic - like sitting down
and having a good long talk with his mother, perhaps.

Joe
-- 
I think OO is great...  It's no coincidence that "woohoo" contains "oo" twice.
-- GLYPH


From Avrom_Faderman@email.msn.com Mon Nov 23 18:31:43 MET 1998
Article: 39249 of rec.games.int-fiction
From: "Avrom Faderman" <Avrom_Faderman@email.msn.com>
Subject: Comp 98 Reviews
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1998 21:08:19 -0500
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Hi all,

Here's a set of disorganized ramblings about many of the games submitted to
comp 98.

My apologies for not having more consistently detailed things to say...for
some bizzarre reason, I simply forgot my intention of keeping good notes
while I was playing the games.

Also, I'd like to apologize in advance for any offense I may have given,
particularly with my scores.  Reading over other people's, I think I may
have been a bit harsh...a "5", for me, was a solidly satisfactory game,
either a very robust one with nothing outstanding or one with flashes of
genius but serious flaws.  It's not to be taken as an insult; it's above the
mean score I gave.

I've never yet given a "10", probably because I've always been hesitant to
use up that last little bit of leeway.  And I didn't give anything a "1"
this year, because I *have* given it in past years, know what merits a 1,
and nothing this year was anything like that bad (no "House of the Stalker,"
for instance).  So the following scores are all between 2 and 9.

I'm going to try to avoid spoilers, but I'm not going to try very hard.
People who haven't played the games, consider yourselves warned...



















Acid Whiplash:  5.

I feel a little bad about not giving this a higher rating.  After all, a
year ago or so, I said about Rippled Flesh, "1:  Although I'm looking
forward to the parodies."  And here's a *great* parody of all that is
Rybread:  Bits of confusing, misspelled, and inconsistent puzzling,
interspersed with commentary that at least twice made me laugh out loud.

But, well, maybe I should be more careful what I wish for.  When all is said
and done, you still have to play a game that could well have been written by
Rybred Celsius.  I never got out of the pope's hat until the real
walkthrough was posted on this NG (after the competition ended).  And while
the game's response to "Walkthru" was "in character," so to speak, it still
prevented me from seeing two of the cut scenes, which are really the big
payoff in playing;  after all, the rest of the game isn't so much a *parody*
of Rybread as an *imitation*.

Well, the one cut scene I did get to, together with the sheer brilliance
with which Cody duplicated Rybread's writing (no mean feat, I think!) was
enough to boost the game up to a 5.  Which is saying a lot, really,
particularly given the ratings I gave Punkirita and Rippled Flesh.


Arrival: 5

Well, now I wish I could go back and withdraw my vote.  HTML Whoosis?  I
just played this game on reg'lar old TADS, not knowing it wasn't intended to
be so played, and the rating above reflects that.  Now I think I probably
missed half the fun.  Sorry, Stephen.  I think I cheated your game out of at
least 2 points or so.  But how were we supposed to know, and where do we get
this mysterious "HTML TADS"?

Since I still don't know the answer to that question, this review is the
review of the all-text game as well.  The NPCs are cute, and the PC is a
nice touch.  I'm not sure what I think of the puzzles...in particular, I'm
*still* not *quite* sure I understand how the ship's fuel tank works--it
seemed inconsistent to me in a couple of ways.  And the puzzle with your
parents, I think, even required a bit of prescience, since it depended so
crucially on timing.


Cattus Atrox: 4

I agree with almost all of the criticisms of this game that have been
posted.  Lot's of waiting, too little implemented, too little explanation,
last scene more cheesy than scary--I agree.  Most of the game was *not*
good.  So why did I give it a 4 instead of a 1?

As other people have noted, the first scene stands out from the rest of the
game.  For me, it was worth a full 3 points.  I have, very simply, never
been scared by a computer game before.  Not by Lurking Horror, not by
Theatre, not by any of the supposedly scary games we've had.  But the first
scene of C.A. scared the living daylights out of me.  That's got to be worth
something.  Three points, in this case.

Of course, as soon as you get to the phone, and find out Susan doesn't
accept most reasonable phrasings of most things you might want to say or ask
her about, things go rapidly downhill.  And the last scene--yeccch.  And not
for the reason for the author intended--not that it was shocking or
horrifying or frightening;  it was just so...*tawdry*.  Like a bad C-budget
"erotic" horror movie.


The City: 6

This game was short.  Very short.  But it was well done, even if the opening
device was a little tired by now.  Atmospheric, a bit spooky, and that same
tired opening device is *very* well implemented, as is dialogue.  The ending
scene was a bit corny, but still, overall, not a half bad little game.



The Commute: 2

What can I say about this game that hasn't been said before?  The idea isn't
very original, the story isn't gripping, the few puzzles are unintuitive,
but that isn't the real problem.  The real problem is the parser.  I know, I
know, writing a parser is hard, and even this one represents a real feat.
But that's not an excuse if there already *are* very good prewritten parsers
freely available.  I don't want to use a Word Processor written in
microcode, and I don't want to play a game written in a standard programming
language for the same reason--even if both are amazing feats.



Downtown Tokyo, Present Day: 5

Cute.  Not very interactive, alas.  Most of it, in fact, not interactive at
all;  since your choices tend to be limited to "wait," "x _", and the one
action the story wants you to take.  That wouldn't be a problem in a deep,
sprawling story, but something this light-hearted seemed to cry out for ways
to bend it.

And I can't be *blown away* by something, even something this cute, with so
little plot and characterization *and* so few puzzles.  A limitation on the
genre for me, probably, since of course the kind of movie the game is
parodying is famously low on plot and characterization, and it's not clear
how to work puzzles into a movie.

Question:  I *thought*, in one game, the monster layed an enormous egg.  I
had to quit playing at that point, and for some reason didn't bother to
save.  I was never able to duplicate this scenario.  Is it an easter egg
that I just found by chance, or did I dream it or something?



Enlightenment: 7

Zero-Sum Game meets Zork:  A Troll's Eye View.  Very nice.  Cute, funny,
great attention to detail, original idea, generally well-written puzzles.  A
few obscure ones annoyed me (another poster wrote about the trouble they had
with the "gate" being opaque;  I had the same problem).
The goodies were a *definite* plus;  it was *almost* like opening up a new
infocom package.

WARNING:  This was such a pleasant little game, I'm very worried that
someone will try to make a full-length game using effectively the same
concept.  Please don't.  This idea was cute for *just about* as long as this
game lasted;  it would *not* be cute for a 15-hour gameplay game.

Oh, and I don't quite understand--*how* did you get in without "checking the
bridge"?


Fifteen: 2
No plot, almost no descriptions, no NPCs, and the biggest puzzle is a
fifteen puzzle.  Didn't we trash Activision for putting one in "Return to
Zork?"  Isn't one included with the Mac OS?  I'm sorry, this is prehaps an
unfair diatribe, but if I never see another:

fifteen
towers of hanoi
parity
lights-out

puzzle, it will be too soon (this does not include Gareth Rees' original
*takes* on these puzzles in "Magic Toyshop."  What I should say is if I
don't see another one of these puzzles all-but-unadorned, it will be too
soon).


Four in One: 5
Chaotic, funny, and (alas) frustrating.  The implementations of the Marx
Brothers are great, and for the first 15 minutes or so, it's a lot of fun
trying to get them all into the same room.  But there's just too much
*random* going on...I felt like, when I did solve the game, it wasn't so
much that I figured something out as that I got incredibly lucky;  perhaps
some evidence for that is that I beat the game once early on, and even
making extensive use of saved games (including one that I made close to the
original solution) I have been unable to beat it since.  There's also a
rather serious bug involving the scoring system;  it's possible to get well
upwards of a perfect score if you get lucky *enough*.


Human Resource Stories:  4
I found this a kind of cute and very simple CYOA type game.  Nothing
special, but nothing offensive either.

Of course, I didn't find any of the easter eggs until they were pointed out
on the newsgroup after the judging, and I (miraculously, I guess) always got
a salary that corresponded pretty well with my grades (A+, A+ A gave me
$85k,  B C C gave me $25).  The random salary hurts it, and the diatribes
hurt it a *lot*.  I don't think I'd be so generous if I were rating it now.


I Didn't Know You Could Yodel:  2
Er...Not a big one for scatological humor, offensive depictions of various
ethnic groups, or long strings of riddles, I'm afraid.  Sorry.


In the Spotlight:  4
Well, it seems pretty well implemented, but I don't know what I think of the
puzzle.  Not only is it entirely unoriginal, I'm not sure it *works*.
I'm not convinced that the solution could possibly work if the strings are
short enough that you couldn't just *hold* one while you walked over to the
other.  I can't say more without a big spoiler though, so maybe I'll leave
this for a separate post.
Anyway, it's one well-coded puzzle.


Informatory:  4
Some people said it didn't work as a game, but was a good tutorial.
I gave Zarf's "Lists and Lists" a 7 when it came out.  That wasn't much of a
game, but it was a *great* tutorial.  I came away really feeling like I
understood (very basic) LisP.
I'm not sure I think Informatory worked that well even as a tutorial.  The
first, "game"-like part, didn't really teach Inform.  I solved it, and I
still don't know Inform--I solved it by looking through the code for obvious
keywords and making educated guesses.
And the second part wasn't really a tutorial.  It was basically, "Go get the
manual, study it, see if you can answer these multiple choice questions, and
then *exit the game* and write a program with almost no feedback."  I've
heard of self-paced courses, but this is a bit much!


Lightiania:  2
Too many "look under things to find things that unlock things" puzzles.
And, although I hate to dock a game for this reason, too obviously lacking
in proofreading by a native speaker of English.  Finally, "find a spaceship,
get it working" is a bit overdone.


Little Blue Men:  6
Hmm.  Here's an interesting one.
It suffered from poor dialogue, a few missing reponses (the water cooler is
*very* picky about syntax, in particular;  many other devices are as well),
and the fact that I could simply *not* sympathize with the main character.
But the irony at the end is fun (except see below), and the points the game
raises about what constitutes an "optimal" ending are interesting ones.
They're *not*, despite what people have said I think, the same points raised
by Infidel or A Change in the Weather, since here, unlike in those two
games, the whole irony is that the ending is fundamentally the same as the
beginning.  The character has, although they don't realize it, moved around
in one big circle.  And, of course, on some level we don't realize it
either.  We've solved puzzles, explored terrain, and ended up in a place
that is *superficially* very different from the one we started at.
An great conversation piece.  It will need a bit more editing and writing
before it's a great game



Mother Loose:  7
Positively adorable.  Darling descriptions, neat NPCs, and (this is perhaps
its greatest plus) remarkable replayability.
Only two complaints, and they're pretty small:
1)  Too many puzzles revolve around just inspecting things really closely
2)  The tone is a bit inconsistent.  Most of this could be a children's
game, or (since the puzzles are too hard for kids) at least a game for the
child in all of us.  But there are these strange little touches of grimness
that hurt that effect--like your mother's near-speculation on what would
have happenned to her in a couple of days.  Worth eliminating, I think.



Muse:  8
A poor man's Thomas Mann (why did this remind me more of Mann then Austin?
I don't know...maybe it was just a superficial thematic element, but I don't
think so...temptation, inaccessability, and a nice set worldview upset by
unexpected possibilities are *deep* thematic elements both in this game and
Death in Venice) with a happy ending.  It suffers in comparison to the
original, perhaps, but what wouldn't?  Overall, nicely done!
My one objection involves one of the puzzles (no, this isn't puzzleless IF,
for all its literariness):  There's something very contrived about the
"getting Konstanza to trust you" section.  It seems to revolve around
finding a sheer *number* of things to say to her and ask her.  It seems odd
that after talking to her for hours about your life and hers, with no
success, a mention of the innkeeper can "put you over the top," so to speak.
I needed a hint to figure out what I was supposed to be doing in this
section, and then I spent a good bit of time just wracking my brain for
various bits of smalltalk to make, especially odd since making *random*
smalltalk (as the game suggests you do when you "talk to Konstanza") seems
to do very little good.
But a very good game.  IMO, the second best this year, and it would have
been the best in most other years.



Photopia: 9
...which brings us to the game that unseated Muse.

I hate to keep quoting myself, but I think in the same post where I called
out for a Rybread parody, I said, of "In the End," that it was a
controversial and groundbreaking game definitely worth the download--but
that in five years it would be of merely historical interest, because the
"either the genre [of puzzleless IF] would be fully explored or abandoned as
sterile or we would have moved way beyond this."

Five years has come early, folks.  If "In the End" was the "Collossal Cave
Adventure" of puzzleless IF, "Photopia" is its "Planetfall."  "In the End"
opened a new vista, but "Photopia" shows us that it's more than a curiosity,
that great things can be done with it, that it's here to stay.  WOW.
Plotting, characterization, style...amazing.

So why not the "Trinity" or the "So Far" of puzzleless IF?  Well, good as
Photopia is, I think we've still got a ways to go before the genre hits its
*maximum* stride.  The one thing Photopia lacks is any kind of real
interactivity.

On the first playthrough, the game is executed so brilliantly that this
isn't even noticable.  Someone just said (damn, now I cant find who said
it--sorry) that the game is very "Plastic," and that's in large part what
does it.  (If you look carefully, it's not just in the "IF Authorship"
scenes.  When you choose to hit the brakes is in fact irrelevant, but the
game makes this flow so smoothly that you don't even notice that the first
time through.)

But play the game over again, and seams begin to show.  Not horrible seams,
just mainly that it becomes more *obvious* that more or less nothing you do
can have any substantial impact on the story.  And I mean *nothing*, unless
you count the two things you can do (one reported bug, one other that's a
spoiler that I'll just send to Adam Cadre) inside stories that grind the
game to a halt.

(Here's an idea, although it's just an idea, along the lines of "I-O" in
that it lets you subtly change the personality of an important character.
At one point, as Alley's father, you can "Tell Alley about crystal spheres."
I wanted the discussion to go in a *really* different direction after that
point, to abandon science and get into myth, beauty, and fiction.  After
all, it's only important to the story that Alley be *smart*...she doesn't
have to be *scientifically* inclined.  Why not give the player a chance to
make her an artist or a humanist, if they so desire?)

There's one place where this even leads to a minor story bug--it's possible
to get out of the car in the first scene...but in a later scene, there's a
line of dialogue (referring to "frat boys" in the plural) that seems to have
forgotten you did this.

Sorry, this really isn't meant to be harping on what are really minor
problems with a really good game.  It's just that this game is *so close* to
being a perfect "10," just that it could be turned into one by fixing a
couple of bugs and introducing a *little* player control over the story
universe, that I think it's *especially* important for me to mention the few
things I found wrong with it.

(By the way, by "a little control" I mean just that.  I don't think it needs
to be possible to avert the story's ending or change any of the major
events;  if it were, it would risk destroying the magnificent jigsaw-puzzle
the author has assembled.  It should just be possible to have a *little*
effect on some *minor* details, so you don't feel *quite* as much like
you're just reading and not participating.)


The Plant:  7

Now, despite what people have said, I don't think this is much more than a
puzzle game.  But it's a *good* puzzle game.  The puzzles are clever, the
NPC (there's only one, really) is cute though not very functional, the
scenery is nicely described.

The bar-code puzzle is ingenious, as is *most* of the
getting-into-the-glass-atrium puzzle (except that it was hard to simply
*find* the portal, given that it didn't seem you could get the cage to the
right position and the game was kind of finicky about what syntax would tell
you of the thing's existence).

Generally a pleasant game, well above average.



Purple:  4

A potentially nice game rather marred by annoying features and bugs.

Some of the puzzles seemed a bit illogical, with me not being quite sure how
I solved them even after I did.  And Karl got lost in the underground
passages *way* to easily.

And I couldn't finish the game, because while I thought I had everything on
the beach that Karl asked for, after a while he stopped *doing* anything
with them!  AARGH!

Needs polishing, but has considerable promise.



Research Dig:  3

Too many keys, too much unbelievable dialogue, too abrupt an ending, too
many mistakes (including the already-mentioned feet-inches confusion), and a
puzzle that even after I had figured out I couldn't solve (the boat
puzzle...a change of room description would have been very nice;  I kept
thinking I was supposed to go NW *in the boat*).  The ending was the biggest
problem;  it seemed like the game was supposed to be much bigger, but that
2/3 of it just got crammed into a "cut scene" at the end.  No finding out
who the villain is, no great climactic chase...just find an object, start to
leave, and the game's over...*poof*.  If it's polished and expanded, I'd be
interested to see the result.


Ritual of Purification:  6

Yes, this game had some real problems.  The prose was occasionally purple,
and the metaphysical themes were murky.  But the characters were
entertaining, the descriptions were at *times* (those times when they
weren't overwrought) beautiful, the atmosphere was amazingly consistent, and
the coding (so far as I could tell) was impeccable.  Cool down the prose a
bit  and the metaphysics a lot, and add some more detailed puzzles, and this
would be one hell of a fantasy game--no pun intended.  Harder way to go:
Cool down the prose and metaphysics a bit, be clearer about what you're
trying to get accross, and add a bit of plot, and you could have one hell of
a "literary" game.  The first is definitely easier, and it would give you
quite a bit:  Rich, painting-like descriptions in fantasy games is an area
that I think is still underexplored.


Spacestation:  4

Hmm.  I've since found out that this game was almost entirely lifted from
the Planetfall sample transcript (I didn't recognize it;  it's been about 10
years since I opened my "Planetfall" box).  I would probably give it a lower
score now that I know that so little is original.

The reason I didn't give it a very high score before is that it's too short.
Little is implemented, there are almost no puzzles, and there's certainly no
story.  The Fussbudget was cute, though, which got it the "4", although I
guess those points should really go to Steve Meretzky.



Trapped in a One-Room Dilly:  6

Basically a slightly less clever version of "Enlightenment."  Everything I
said about that, minus about half the "cute" and "funny" and 1/3 the
"original idea," but keeping all the "attention to detail", minus the
complements about the "goodies," plus a minor grouse about picky syntax in
the last puzzle, plus another about using a "lights-out" puzzle, but plus
extra kudos because the puzzles formed an even more diverse set.  Net loss
of a point.


Where Evil Dwells:  5

Generally a pretty nice game.  Well implemented, some cute scenes (I liked
the goblin!), a diverse if sometimes unintuitive bunch of puzzles.

So why only a 5?  Well, for one thing, the game was really not at all
original, and for another (as several people have pointed out), the tone was
disturbingly inconsistent.  It was *fun*, but by no means *exciting* or
*immersive*.  It needed *oomph*.

More consistent tone would go a long way towards this.  Write a comedy game,
a black comedy game, or a horror game...not a weird pastiche.


That's it!  I'll post spoilery things separately.

Avrom







From enoto@ucla.edu Mon Nov 23 20:46:33 MET 1998
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From: Jon Petersen <enoto@ucla.edu>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Photopia] Who did you identify with?
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1998 01:07:26 -0800
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Lucian Paul Smith wrote:
> 
> [Spoilers, just in case]:










> I way over-identified with Jonathan.  Extremely so.  Because, as a Jr.
> High/High school kid, I had crushes that lasted for *years* that I never
> talked about with anyone.  And here I was, put back in the same situation,
> given a chance to redeem myself.  And then to have it cruelly snatched
> away,... it was heart rending.

I really loved that scene, too. Even if I couldn't 100%
identify--probably like many people here, I was much too shy and
demoralized through junior high to ask anyone out--I loved it. More than
anywhere else, it was here that I had the most control over shaping the
character's personality. You could make him overcome his fear and ask
out Alley. You could have him flee (probably what I would have done, and
you too by the sound of it, Lucian). You could also have him
overcompensate by being an arrogant ass (asking for the orange after
you've got the apple). The fluidity that particular character had was
both the "interactive" storytelling part of Photopia at its best and a
very, very slick reflection on how adolescence is what shapes us more
than anything else.[1]

Actually, one other piece of IF about adolescence sticks out: Liza
Daly's awesome "Bloodline". (This game takes far less time to beat than
it took me to write this post, yet it manages to make MY TOP TEN IF
GAMES EVER.) This game is also all about the choices you make in
adolescence.[2]

> So now I'm wondering if the female
> characters that Adam wrote were equally identifiable-with to female
> players.  My guess is no, but I'm not sure.

Wow. That's a really interesting point, Lucian.

After some reflection, the three scenes featuring adult women are, to
me, the least fulfilling. This is because these scenes have fewer
conversational options than any of the other scenes (well, except for
the hospital scene). In Photopia, talking was how our PCs made
themselves interesting to us, and the two adult women didn't really get
to express anything.

Let's go through the scenes: the first is pretty rushed, since you're
giving Alley CPR. Talking is limited to asking Gabriel to take over for
you. The second, as Wendy's mom, is barely there; only one turn, and
more of a transition to the last scene. Conversationally, you can thank
Alley for babysitting in a rather terse manner. As Alley's mom again,
you cycle through the Photopia and shut off the lights, but again your
conversational choice is quite limited: ASK SAM ABOUT PHOTOPIA. The
men--the frat guy, Alley's dad, Wendy's dad, and Jonathan--are all much
more voluble.

So, what do other people think? Do you agree with the way I've put all
this? Does this strike you as significant or insignificant? Is it a
weakness in Photopia, or is it in some ways a commentary? Is it possible
that Alley is better off dead, since there's the chance she might become
as homogenized as these two basically indistinguishable characters are?
Or what?

				Jon

[1] I should also note that playing a kid with the same name as myself
also helped endear me to him.

[2] Basically irrelevant, but while I'm mentioning Art I Like Concerning
Adolescence, let me recommend "Heavenly Creatures," a way brutal and
painful [also, apparently, true] movie about the sheer intensity and
chaos of adolescence. Especially the hatred engendered in the child for
the parents. "Welcome to the Dollhouse" isn't bad either.


From im@cs.york.ac.uk Mon Nov 23 20:47:30 MET 1998
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From: Iain Merrick <im@cs.york.ac.uk>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Photopia] Who did you identify with?
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Jon Petersen wrote:

> Lucian Paul Smith wrote:
> >
> > [Spoilers, just in case]:































[...]
> > So now I'm wondering if the female
> > characters that Adam wrote were equally identifiable-with to female
> > players.  My guess is no, but I'm not sure.
> 
> Wow. That's a really interesting point, Lucian.
> 
> After some reflection, the three scenes featuring adult women are, to
> me, the least fulfilling. This is because these scenes have fewer
> conversational options than any of the other scenes (well, except for
> the hospital scene). In Photopia, talking was how our PCs made
> themselves interesting to us, and the two adult women didn't really get
> to express anything.

Hmmm... I disagree with this, actually.

First of all, I'm not sure who I identified with most strongly, but when
considering Alley's death my first thought was (and is): "poor Wendy".

I didn't really _identify_ with the two mothers very strongly, but they
were both interesting characters.

Although the scene at the end with Wendy's mum (well, 'mom') is very
short, I find it interesting because she's the only character in the
game who's not head-over-heels in love with Alley. In fact, she's very
slightly cold towards Alley, and possibly slightly jealous that Wendy
likes her so much.

But for me, this makes the scene where Wendy's dad wakes up in hospital,
and asks after Alley, even _more_ touching. I'm not quite sure why.

As for Alley's mother (um, Mary?), she seems a bit more level-headed
than her husband, which I find quite amusing in the final scene. Just
like a man to waste time tinkering with a silly machine! Well, at least
Alley likes this 'photopia' thing of his...

-- 
Iain Merrick


From mkkuhner@kingman.genetics.washington.edu Mon Nov 23 20:47:50 MET 1998
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From: mkkuhner@kingman.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Photopia] Who did you identify with?
Date: 20 Nov 1998 15:11:34 GMT
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Lucian Paul Smith <lpsmith@rice.edu> wrote:

>One of the biggest disappointments I felt upon discovering that Photopia
>was actually written by Adam was that the male characters I had so
>strongly identified with weren't written by a female.  That would have
>been, I felt, a major accomplishment.  So now I'm wondering if the female
>characters that Adam wrote were equally identifiable-with to female
>players.  My guess is no, but I'm not sure.

>So, who did you identify with the most, and why?

Alley's mom.  No question.  I had to go back and replay the first
part of the game so as to try to get Alley out of the pool right away
as soon as I heard the splash, because I felt so guilty about not
reacting immediately.  It actually bothered me that evening after I
stopped playing.

Alley's dad felt more like a "type" to me:  I could see what the
story was doing, but I felt detached from it.  Same with the
boyfriend.

Hate to contribute to gender stereotyping, but that's the way it hit me.

Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu


From obrian@ucsu.Colorado.EDU Mon Nov 23 20:48:29 MET 1998
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From: Paul O'Brian <obrian@ucsu.Colorado.EDU>
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Subject: Re: [Photopia] Who did you identify with?
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On 20 Nov 1998, Lucian Paul Smith wrote:

> [Spoilers, just in case]:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> So, who did you identify with the most, and why?

Wendy's dad, by far. 

Like Lucian, I'm probably most *similar* to Jonathan -- I remember that
middle school time very vividly, and I wasn't much different from Jonathan
during that time, except I would never have been able to actually ask
anyone out. But he's not the one with whom I identified the most.

I'm not a father. I'm male, and married, but I have no children. I've
never had occasion to hire a babysitter. But during the driving scene,
while I was talking to Alley, I felt all the respect and fondess for
her that the story had been cultivating all along blossom in that short
conversation. Then, at the green light, like so many other people, I felt
a flash of panic, of sudden realization. I said STOP, but I couldn't stop.
I was right there, and I couldn't save her.

That's what Photopia was all about for me. I identified most with Wendy's
dad because his experience was the closest to my overall experience with
the story. 

Paul O'Brian
obrian@colorado.edu
http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~obrian






From siffert@museworld.com Mon Nov 23 20:49:06 MET 1998
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From: "Curt Siffert" <siffert@museworld.com>
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Brad O`Donnell wrote in message <3655E5B5.3F37@unb.ca>...
>Lucian Paul Smith wrote:
>
>
>> So, who did you identify with the most, and why?
>
>
>SPOILERS
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>  The narrator of the story-in-the-story (you know, the one
> who goes off on tangents at the ends of sentences, explaining
> things because they're never sure if their point is coming
> across.)

    I have to say, even though it was a relatively minor part
    of the story, this was probably one of the most powerful
    (memorable) realizations I had about the story.  You know,
    that feeling of when something "clicks".  There's nothing
    I like better than the feeling of going back to something
    I thought I had finished, and discovering something new.
    First time I played the game, I didn't understand the
    parenthetical definitions, thought it was just the author
    making smart-alecky comments at first.  Then after I
    knew the secret (having entirely forgotten about the
    definitions), I experienced them again and all of a sudden
    it was about the tenderness of Alley towards Wendy.
    Click.  That was a really poignant moment for me.

    Curt





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From: lac@nu-world.com (Lelah Conrad)
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For heaven's sake there are probably spoilers below but if you haven't
figured that out yet, well...



On 20 Nov 1998 06:21:01 GMT, lpsmith@rice.edu (Lucian Paul Smith)
wrote:


 
>So, who did you identify with the most, and why?

Heh.  As I wrote to Adam, I have a daughter named Ali, though it was
the older one (Jaci) who would have drowned if I hadn't been there,
and also she who was in the serious automobile accident.  (Sigh,
parenting.)  So I identified with the parental perspective, I guess,
though I could definitely also see through the eyes of the others.
[And by the way, Jarb, now that you are a dad -- there is no horror
story quite so scary as being involved in one like Photopia in real
life...  :)  ]

As an aside, someone commented that Alley was overly idealized.  That
is undoubtedly true (NOBODY raises teenagers without more conflict
than this game reveals, but then Adam wouldn't have experienced that
yet), but on the other hand, this idealization often happens when
someone so beloved dies -- the good stuff just outlives the bad.  So,
because this was essentially the view of a dead person by the people
who loved her, sort of like the things people say at memorials, I
thought it rang true.
	But I think Adam slyly poked fun at his big, all engrossing
tragedy with that tiny overheard line in the hospital about the
"machine eating my dollar" (or somesuch) -- it was a perfect, succinct
way to point out that for other people, our deepest, most heartfelt
tragedies, unfolding before their eyes, are peripheral to their own
little mundane daily struggles. 
 
Lelah


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From: Kristofer Osegard <kjetil@bucky.win.bright.net>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Photopia] Who did you identify with?
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 1998 14:45:22 -0600
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 Lelah Conrad wrote:

> As an aside, someone commented that Alley was overly idealized.  That
> is undoubtedly true...but on the other hand, this idealization often
> happens

> when

> someone so beloved dies -- the good stuff just outlives the bad.  So,
> because this was essentially the view of a dead person by the people
> who loved her, sort of like the things people say at memorials, I
> thought it rang true.

I maintain that Alley was too perfect, and thus seemed artificial.  Not
only that, but drunken Rob was too vile to seem like more than a plot
element.

These are, obviously, the victim and the villain, and although I know
people who share characteristics with both of them, I've never heard of,
met, or seen anyone without some annoying foibles or redeeming qualities,
respectively.  Yet as far as I can see, Alley has no frailties or
shortcomings.  Jon is nervous about talking to her, but she isn't the
slightest bit nervous about talking to him.  If fact, Alley is so
incredibly responsible and mature that she isn't upset by having to
decorate the gym for a dance she won't be attending.  She's so
unconcerned with her pubescent social life that she doesn't even think to
tell Wendy's parents about the dance.

Alley likes astronomy.  She's acutely curious.  She likes kids.  She eats
fruit!  Not some gooey, hyper-caloric, nugat-filled candy bar, but
fruit!  In short, Alley is the perfect date, as envisioned by every
high-school-aged social misfit boy in the world.  Ask her to the dance,
and what does she do?  She doesn't just say no - she says no and then
immediately makes plans with you for another time!  Incredible!

Rob, on the other hand, contains absolutely nothing of value.  He is a
cad: a horrible mess of vulgar libinal appetites, selfishness,
irresponsibility, and overindulgence.  And he's male.  In every respect
Rob is the opposite of Alley.

And so the story comes down to something as simple as evil triumphing
over good.

And that would be all, except for the order in which the story is told,
with dramatic irony.  From early on we know what's going to happen, but
the characters don't, and we can't tell them, and we can't do anything to
stop it.  Most of the story is spent making us like Alley, since we know
her death is imminent.  It's manipulative, but very effective.

My nickel in the grass.
-Kristofer



From adam@princeton.edu Mon Nov 23 22:49:01 MET 1998
Article: 39313 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: adam@princeton.edu (Adam J. Thornton)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp98] Little Blue Men
Date: 17 Nov 1998 21:43:20 GMT
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In article <Pine.GSO.3.96.981117132636.24156A-100000@ucsu.Colorado.EDU>,
Paul O'Brian  <obrian@ucsu.Colorado.EDU> wrote:
>as there is for a psychoanalytic one. That's why I wanted a little
>something to grasp onto before being flung headlong into the land of
>metaphor (or even midway through). If there were some flashbacks to a
>mental institution, or a description of taking peyote before going to the
>Republican Convention (the best mode of attendance, I think), or a hint
>that the PCs corporeal body is dead, or something like that, I would have
>had a structure into which the symbols could be placed. As it was, the
>symbols didn't really seem to attach to anything. Symbolism is great, but
>it's much more powerful when the metaphors actually represent something
>concrete in the story, rather than just floating unconnected.

Ah.

My reaction is exactly opposite.

If you ground the weirdness of the office in much of anything concrete, the
story becomes just that: a story.

Whereas now, it's a parable.

What it's a parable symbolizing, I don't know at all.  The psychoanalytic
reading made sense but one of the seductive things about Freud is that you
can fit damn near anything into a Freudian paradigm.

I think it is a reading, perhaps, of coming to terms with religious
choices: the two co-workers represent the ends of the spectrum in
ungrounded wishywashy new-Age metaphysics and rigidly-ordered
anal-retentive legalistic religioun (Orthodox Judaism, maybe?)  Biedermeyer
is the stern, loving, but ultimately misguided Catholic Church, and
Robertson represents the dark side of fundamentalism: he has taken "this is
my body; this is my blood" a leetle *too* far.  The water, of course, is
the Water Of Life, the direct revelatory connection to God, which the
Church hierarchy cannot abide but which fundamentalism cannot survive
without.  The Coke represents worldly pleasures and their pitfalls.  The
toilet represents sin, but we won't explore that on a family newsgroup.

Ultimately the protagonist rejects it all and becomes a Buddhist, taking
another spin on the Wheel of Life by using the copy machine to duplicate
his self, with variations.  The fat naked guy is *obviously* the Buddha.

Of course, a Freudian would claim that this all reduces to his
interpretation anyway.

Adam

P.S. No, of course I don't believe a word of this.  I don't know what the
game was about, but I did really, really like it.  It made me feel frosty.
-- 
adam@princeton.edu 
"There's a border to somewhere waiting, and a tank full of time." - J. Steinman


From erkyrath@netcom.com Mon Nov 23 22:49:29 MET 1998
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From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: Re: [Comp98] Little Blue Men
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Mary K. Kuhner (mkkuhner@kingman.genetics.washington.edu) wrote:

> I guess our local slang must be atypical, because around here "frosty"
> and "steamy", colloquially, *both* mean "angry, pissed off."  The
> only distinction is the temperature of the anger:  frosty is a cold
> calculating anger, like when someone cuts you off in traffic and you
> plot how to destroy his car, and steamy is a hot emotional anger,
> like when you roll down the window and yell at him.

> It was clear from context that that's not what the game meant, but
> I sure had trouble getting into the idea of "frosty" as a goal
> state.  Though maybe, thinking about the game, this was intentional?
> Does "frosty" mean something more positive in *anyone's* slang?

I read both words exactly as your colloquial usage. The character in LBM
could be raging and swallow it, or raging and explode with it. Excellent
choice of language on the author's part.

--Z
 
-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From edromia@concentric.net Mon Nov 23 22:49:44 MET 1998
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From: <edromia@concentric.net>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp98] Little Blue Men
Date: 17 Nov 1998 18:01:53 PST
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Paul O'Brian wrote in message ...
>On 17 Nov 1998, Chris Markwyn wrote:
>> [Freudian psychoanalytic reading of LBM snipped]

[religious reading also snipped]
[American political reading snipped, too]

Actually, you're both off-target. It's interesting to me that you keep
returning to these opposing dichotomies -- psychotic self-destruction vs.
womb-like bliss; hell vs. heaven; repressive political status quo vs.
anarchist utopia; etc. And always one "good", one "bad".

The point was, actually, that *both realms are precisely the same*.

I tried to drop clues to this effect in Ed Asner's speech, which contains
wording that is suspiciously similar to Biedermeyer's, and in the fact that
he wore the same thick glasses as the rest.

(By the way, to the guy who made the Ed Asner reference: I like you. You
make me laugh.)

You weren't meant to like the idea of spending eternity with naked Ed Asner
any more than you were meant to like the idea of spending eternity stamping
paperwork. The protagonist of the story thought differently, of course; but
by that time you should have been accustomed to the fact that the
protagonist sees things a bit differently than you do -- and to the fact
that the protagonist's own perceptions can at times be redirected against
his will.

The office was a prison. The pastoral hillside was another kind of prison.
Or rather, the same kind of prison behind another kind of facade. The first
prison obviously wasn't working as well as the Little Blue Men had hoped, so
they had another one waiting for Our Hero when he finally found the edge of
the curtain and stepped offstage.

The cheesy punchline to LBM is this: the one thing that you want to avoid
*at all costs* is...learning to love yourself. That way lies acquiescence,
complacency, and defeat. Ask Robertson about it -- they nearly got him, and
it drove him mad. It is, perhaps, Our Hero's fatal flaw that he believes
that staying frosty will save him, when it in fact only brings him closer to
his doom.

Which means, of course, that, much like the counterfeit bill red herring,
this game is an exercise in futility. There is no way to win[1]. There is
only the struggle to put off losing as long as possible, and to take as many
as you can with you when you go. The moment Our Hero thinks he has escaped,
he has actually come full circle to the beginning once more.

There is no winning transcript. The game is unsolvable. Some of you may
consider that an undesirable trait in IF; some of you may feel that this
fact utterly devalues everything you thought was good about the game. I can
only spread my hands and say, "Eh." This is not, unlike the "discussion
questions" in my postscript, an ex post facto attempt to insert subtext that
I didn't think of beforehand. This is honest-to-god what I was thinking when
I wrote the ending.

So there you have it. I want to say that I found everyone's criticism
helpful and insightful. If there's something in the game that you didn't
get, that's my fault, not yours. I'm actually quite pleased that it got the
warm reception it did -- I feel a lot better about the game now than when I
was coding it. The Miss Congeniality award is a particular honor (do I get a
prize for that?...).

Thanks,

-M.
================================================
"If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding.
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?"

[1] You might make a case that the "crushed by vending machine" ending comes
close to "winning", after a fashion -- at least it's a way out. (I know this
is the opposite of what I said in the postscript. I was messing with you.)




From markwync@xmission.xmission.com Mon Nov 23 22:50:41 MET 1998
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From: Chris Markwyn <markwync@xmission.xmission.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp98] Little Blue Men
Date: 18 Nov 1998 03:17:13 GMT
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edromia@concentric.net wrote:
> Actually, you're both off-target. It's interesting to me that you keep
> returning to these opposing dichotomies -- psychotic self-destruction vs.
> womb-like bliss; hell vs. heaven; repressive political status quo vs.
> anarchist utopia; etc. And always one "good", one "bad".

> The point was, actually, that *both realms are precisely the same*.

Hmm.  I didn't mean to suggest that the return to the womb I saw at the
end of the game was a preferred ending, merely that it was the only option
left open to the protagonist after he self-destructs.  I may not have
made myself clear, though.

> I tried to drop clues to this effect in Ed Asner's speech, which contains
> wording that is suspiciously similar to Biedermeyer's, and in the fact that
> he wore the same thick glasses as the rest.

I caught the glasses, but I didn't pay enough attention to the two
speeches.  I'll have to go back and check that out.

[Snip]

> There is no winning transcript. The game is unsolvable. Some of you may
> consider that an undesirable trait in IF; some of you may feel that this
> fact utterly devalues everything you thought was good about the game. I can
> only spread my hands and say, "Eh." This is not, unlike the "discussion
> questions" in my postscript, an ex post facto attempt to insert subtext that
> I didn't think of beforehand. This is honest-to-god what I was thinking when
> I wrote the ending.

No, I liked the fact that it was "unsolvable."  Which is not the same as
unfinishable, of course.  One of the things I liked about the game was the
way it undercut the "normal" activities of IF: solve the puzzle, get to
the next room, solve the next puzzle, etc.  Does it really matter if you
can turn off the smoke detector, copy the dollar bill, steal the form, or
whatever?  Or is it better to just stamp the paperwork and "win?"  All
that mental energy exerted to move along in the story, and you wind up
with Ed Asner.

> So there you have it. I want to say that I found everyone's criticism
> helpful and insightful. If there's something in the game that you didn't
> get, that's my fault, not yours. I'm actually quite pleased that it got the
> warm reception it did -- I feel a lot better about the game now than when I
> was coding it. The Miss Congeniality award is a particular honor (do I get a
> prize for that?...).

I'm glad I could be helpful.  I like a game that makes me think, and
LITTLE BLUE MEN was one of only two or three this year that really made me
think about it after I was done, rather than simply deleting it and moving
on to the next one.

--Chris Markwyn



From ted_mcmanus@my-dejanews.com Mon Nov 23 22:51:26 MET 1998
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Subject: Re: [Comp98] Little Blue Men
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In article <72tgln$sk1@journal.concentric.net>,
  <edromia@concentric.net> wrote:

> P.S. I'll send a can of Butt-Stompin' Green Beans to the first person who
> can tell me the historical significance of the name "Biedermeyer."

I don't know much about German history, so this was a well-motivated
opportunity to learn a bit.  Not a bad thing, that.

>From what I've pieced together, the Biedermeier period is Germany's
post-Napoleonic recovery period, dating from about 1815 to 1850.  After the
political ideals of the French Revolution had crashed and burned, it was a
time of resignation and acquiescence to existing national and social orders. 
(One might see this whole historical drama re-enacted in miniature in LBM.)

It was also a time of urbanization, as industrialization drew the rural
populace to the city.  With industrialization comes the oppressive factory
work environment, and the rise of the bourgeois at the expense of the
proletariat. (Again, strong correspondence to LBM.)

I'm not clear on this, but "Biedermeier" is apparently a portmanteau word,
combined 'from two caricatures which appeared in German magazines of the
period, Mr. Biedermann and "Bummelmeier"'.  Whether these are the names of
the particular caricatured characters or the magazine titles is a mystery to
me.  I don't have a German dictionary here which I trust, but "Bieder" seems
to mean "convention," which makes me badly want to look up "meier/meyer," a
task with which my online translation tools are not helping me.

The uninspired design of furniture and fashion particularly popular among the
German middle class during this time is still referred to as Biedermeier
style. It was apparently not ambitious in design, and aiming for quiet
complacency certainly fits the context here.

The wealth of relevant social, political and cultural associations wrapped up
in a character's name like this is a wonderful thing.  This one character's
name adds resonance to the whole story, vivifies its themes, and places it
against a textured background of important and complicated historical
movements.

I'd already considered LBM rich, deep and meaningful before this.  Now it's
just that much richer, deeper and more meaningful.

I sincerely hope Little Blue Men has a strong and lasting influence on IF.

- Ted McManus

-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
http://www.dejanews.com/       Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own    


From Avrom_Faderman@email.msn.com Tue Nov 24 12:44:45 MET 1998
Article: 39403 of rec.games.int-fiction
From: "Avrom Faderman" <Avrom_Faderman@email.msn.com>
References: <utM28ZnF#GA.271@upnetnews03> <erkyrathF2urM1.Eq0@netcom.com>
Subject: Re: [Photopia] What I would--and wouldn't--change (spoilers)
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 19:11:32 -0500
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Andrew Plotkin wrote in message ...
>Avrom Faderman (Avrom_Faderman@email.msn.com) wrote:
>
>> Spoilers abound in what follows;  I'll be discussing the game in detail.

Medium-mild spoilers for "Losing Your Grip" have been added, as have itsy
bitsy teensy weensy spoilers for "Spider and Web."
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>I see what you're trying to do.
>
>I wonder, though, if it wouldn't cause nearly as strong a negative
>reaction. "I acted differently, and it caused this change in the story
>later, but was it a *real* difference? No! It was a one-sentence change in
>the text! (Or whatever.) It didn't have any impact on what *actually
>happened.*"


I think a well-placed word or two can do wonders.  That wasn't *all* I was
advocating, but it would be a great start...

>
>(This is a hypothetical reaction, not my own. Anyone?)
>
>(Although I *do* tend to see text-only plot differences as somewhat
>unsatisfying. _Spider And Web_ does this, for example, and I'm not
>completely happy with the results. On the other hand, I'm also not happy
>with the way _Grip_ handles it -- splitting into two scenes that rejoin
>later.)


I must admit "Spider and Web" had me stymied well before the ending (three
rooms with alarms have me stumped...I'll prolly post a spoiler request some
point soon;  I had been so proud of getting through So Far all-but-on-my-own
I was trying to resist), so I can't comment.

What "Grip" does wouldn't always work, but I think the technique worked
masterfully in "Grip" (though "Grip" was less masterfully written than
"Photopia" in general, I think) and I think it could work masterfully
here--the episodic nature of the stories is the key.

One thing I thought "Grip" did less than perfectly was this:  While there
are two places the player can dramatically influence the next episode, in
only one of them is it (so far as I can tell) at all logical.  If there was
a reason why your hiding place had to do with your next psychic "fit," the
game didn't make it clear.  Obviously, Photopia is so carefully assembled
that splits like that should have real significance.

At the other extreme, you want to keep the effects reasonably subtle
(demanding little *&!@, ain't I?).  The Marie/Jeffrey split in "Grip"
suffered (although only slightly) from the exact opposite malady as the
Hospital/University split;  the decision the player made was representative
of a very obvious and slightly cliched dichotomy of personalities.  Perhaps
this is in some way related to the "show, don't tell" dictum--the language
in the party interlude was so obvious that it skirted *telling* the player
things (although it never did so absolutely explicitly).

That's asking a *lot*, though.  A simple textual change would obviously be
vastly easier (it wouldn't require writing whole new scenes, for one thing),
and I think it would be very effective.

Avrom





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From: mol@bartlet.df.lth.se (Magnus Olsson)
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Subject: Harsh criticism (was: [Once and Future] all it's cracked up to be?)
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In article <73d36u$a62@journal.concentric.net>,
Michael Gentry <edromia@concentric.net> wrote:
>I briefly considered directly addressing your characterization of my review
>as "utter assassination," Magnus, but finally decided not to because I don't
>much enjoy pissing into the wind.

Well, actually, in this case it wouldn't really be pissing into the
wind. I realized after posting my reaction to your review that that
remark was a bit over the top; sorry for that.

What I meant was certainly not that your review was a deliberate
attempt to shoot down "OaF"; however, the impression I got from
reading it was that you absolutely hated OaF, that you couldn't find a
single redeeming feature in it but that you could find lots and lots
of absolutely show-stopping faults, etc, etc. Again, I'm sorry, but
however noble your intentions were, that's the impression it made on
me. "Assassination" is a bad characterization since it implies
malicious intent, but what I meant was that reviews like yours can
actually have the same effect as one. 

> If my review hurt anyone's feelings, I am
>sorry. I meant no offense to Kevin Wilson, and I'm pretty sure I meant none
>to you.

This is not a matter of hurting people's feelings, really. I can't
speak for Whizzard, of course, and I don't really think that he needs
to be protected (to paraphrase Espen Aarseth) from the harsh reality
out there. I certainly don't think that Mike Berlyn or CMP need such
protection - CMP is a commercial outfit and must be prepared to be
treated more harshly than us amateurs.

I did get a bit upset, but that was not because you had hurt my
feelings, but rather because I think you were being unfair to a game
that I happen to think is a good game, *despite* its flaws (just for
the record, I agree with you about some of the flaws you've listed; in
other cases, I don't agree). 

Clearly, our opinions differ as to the enjoyability of "OaF", and of
course I respect your opinions. I just felt I had to react to a review
that focused entirely on the game's flaws, while ignoring the good
sides, and doing so in a rather upset and accusatory tone, to boot - I
felt it gave a very skewed picture of the game.

Also, I stand by my remarks that just listing the flaws of a work:
"This doesn't work, that feature utterly stinks, etc" (yes, I know,
this is a caricature of your review) isn't very constructive
criticism. In the big flamewar/debate about harsh criticism after last
year's competition, somebody wrote that he'd been taught that
constructive criticism must include some praise. At the time, I was
inclined to dismiss that comment as softie nonsense; today, I'm more
inclined to agree. (Your amended review was much better in several
regards, by the way).

You may say that this is just the pot calling the kettle black. I've
written some pretty scathing reviews myself, haven't I?

Yes, I have. To this, I can only say mea culpa; I think I've learned
something since I wrote them. It's very very easy to write negative
criticism; it can also be fun, or at least relieving, to get your
frustration out of the system. But I really don't think it's good
practice to do so. 

As for SPAG policy: I've so far never rejected a review for being too
one-sided or too negative. However, I might very well do so in the
future. I think the crucial point is not negativity, but
one-sidedness, but of course I'd feel rather silly rejecting a review
for being too nice to the author :-).

However, and for the record:

You - and everybody else - are very welcome to submit negative reviews
or OaF or any other game to SPAG; but if they're simply a list of
flaws, I may ask you to at least consider writing something about the
good sides of the game as well (or if the game really doesn't have
any redeeming features at all - such games exist - at least to
motivate why you're feeling this way). 

>If anyone feels that my criticisms are not valid, they are free to
>dismiss or dispute them. I only offer them because I want to see CMP
>publishing games for some time to come, and I don't see that happening with
>products like this one.

I don't feel your criticisms are invalid, but rather that the way they
were delivered would increase the likelihood of their being dismissed,
or, which would be worse, simply discouraging poeple from writing IF
(rather than taking the criticism to heart and writing *better* IF).

To put it another way: if somebody writes a work of IF (or any other
creative work), and all the feedback they get is a list of things that
are terribly wrong with the work, without any mention of what's good
and what's work, they're not very likely to correct the errors -
they're far more likely just to conclude that the work was a dismal
failure that should be bureid and forgotten as quickly as possible.


So why don't I post a review of my own instead of attacking yours? you
may ask. 

The answer is that I will, but I've reserved my opinions for SPAG #16,
which will be out in a few days. Have patience until then.



-- 
Magnus Olsson (mol@df.lth.se, zebulon@pobox.com)
------    http://www.pobox.com/~zebulon   ------


From mol@bartlet.df.lth.se Tue Nov 24 14:30:57 MET 1998
Article: 39434 of rec.games.int-fiction
Path: news.lth.se!not-for-mail
From: mol@bartlet.df.lth.se (Magnus Olsson)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Once and Future] all it's cracked up to be?
Date: 24 Nov 1998 14:29:09 +0100
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OK: instead of criticism of how you deliver your criticism, here's a
response to your particular points. I'm not out to debunk you, or to
prove your arguments invalid. This is just discussion.

In article <73d36u$a62@journal.concentric.net>,
Michael Gentry <edromia@concentric.net> wrote:
>-    Large amounts of filler rooms don't work because they are tedious,
>serving only to drag the game out through excessive mapping, or to put undue
>weight on the player's faculties if he's navigating by memory. It doesn't
>make the game feel bigger; it just makes it feel more spread out and
>unfurnished.

You're assuming that the rooms are there just as filler material, to
"make the game feel bigger". My impression is that they're there to
provide atmosphere and flesh out the game world - a very different
thing. Of course, in some places (especially some locations on Avalon
itself), the game doesn't suceed very well. But just filler - no, I
don't think so.

>    I will recant one thing I said earlier: it *does* take more than
>patience to make a really huge game. But it doens't take much *more* than
>that to implement four empty, connected rooms, give them nearly identical
>descriptions and call them all "Dead Woodlands".

Now, this is quite a nasty thing to say. The implication is that the
author has more patience than talent. Is this really what you call
constructive criticism?

>-    Not implementing diagonal directions in an outdoor grid doesn't work
>because it breaks mimesis. We know the diagonal directions exist -- there
>are plenty of diagonal tunnels in the mousehole. So why can't I walk
>southwest on a wide open heath? It was a bad oversight.

I agree with you here. The entire geography of Avalon is confusing,
and not just because of this. I would actually have liked *more*
"filler" rooms in some places, to make the transition between the different
sub-sections of the island less abrupt.

>-    Rooms that are placed without regard to context don't work because,
>again, they bust up my mimesis. If this were meant to be a Myst-type game of
>surreality I would be more forgiving, but this game deals with worlds that
>have been, at least metaphorically speaking, pretty well mapped out already.

Come on - GKW's Avalon is to quite a large extent his own
creation. I'm sure that if he'd followed the existing literature, some
people (if not you) would have condemned the game for being too
derivative.

>I expect to be drawn into a landscape that will contain fantastic and
>mythological elements, but I also expect that world to be internally
>consistent and true to its own imagery. When it is not, I cannot get a
>mental grasp on the world I am supposed to be imagining; I am not drawn in;
>I am not immersed.

I think this is partly a problem with confusing geography, rather than
internal consistency, but, yes, OaF does suffer from the traditional
shortcoming of many adventure games, that of putting a lot of different
locations in close vicinity.

To be fair, I think OaF suffers from this to much less extent than most
similar games. But its world doesn't have the sense of unity that many
recent works have.

>    As a concrete example, I cite the entire mousehole sequence. The first
>few tunnels are not bad, but as soon as you dig through the first dirt wall
>everything flies out of whack. Rooms and objects are described with
>absolutely no regard for scale -- either these are all very tiny caves with
>needle-like stalactites, or the author has simply forgotten that the player
>is now a mouse. 

I think this is entirely in lione with the genre. Remember that this is
not a realistic caving trip; it's a mixture of myth and fairy tale. 

>A gold necklace can be comfortably worn while mouse-sized or
>while human-sized with equal ease, and it apparently grows with you if you
>wear it during transition, although no mention is made of this. 

For crying out loud, it's a maigcal necklace. Does everything have to
be spelled out in block capitals?

>An entire
>carrot, which would be about three times the size of an average mouse and
>would take days to eat, can be devoured in a single command with the generic
>response, "Yum, a carrot."

This does seem to be a real consistency problem.

> There is no acknowledgment that a "plank" small
>enough to be snapped by a jumping mole would be several times more flimsy
>than your average popsicle stick, and no explanation for how such a stick
>would be able to hold up the ceiling of a collapsing cave is ever offered.

Well, it was the stick that didn't break that could :-).

But I also had a problem with the "planks" - primarily because of a
different scale problem; I thought "plank" meant a human-sized plank,
not a mouse sized one, so I needed a hint even to try picking it up.

>    And finally, the witch-dunking tub. I did like the witch-dunking tub. It
>was an impressive witch-dunking tub, chillingly described. I particularly
>liked the image of the wooden tear. But what reason it could possibly have
>for being scaled to roughly five inches in length and stuck in the bottom of
>a mousehole persistently eludes me. I cannot fathom why it is there, and I
>gather from at least one post I've read that it in fact has no reason for
>being there other than to provide atmosphere, and to be a repository for two
>of the popsicle sticks.

Suppose somebody has been doing a witch-hunt among the mice?

Remember, this is a fairy-tale world. Sorry if it doesn't work for
you, but it does for me.

>    It doesn't work because it is neither a consistent nor convincing world,
>and it thus comes across as haphazardly designed.

What is convincing or not is of course entirely subjective.

But the world didn't strike me as more than marginally inconsistent
(and certainly more consistent than most fantasy games). I don't think
it's haphazardly designed at all, but maybe the author suffers a little
>from the common fantasy syndrome of throwing too much into one world.

For me, these worldbuilding problems were a bit irritating at times,
especially on Avalon. But they never broke my suspension fo
disbelief. Obviously, YMMV.

>-    Cardboard NPCs do not work, period. 

You're awfully cathegorical, aren't you? And why are you singling out
OaF, when there's hardly an NPC in the entire IF corpus that isn't
cardboard? 

I suppose your answer is "because the game was hyped as having very
well fleshed-out and deep NPCs"? It was, and I can understand your
disappointment. But OaF is rather uneven when it comes to NPC's, and I
think you're consistently passing judgment on it by its worst sides,
while ignoring the good ones. See below.

>My example here is Mordred. Mordred
>is a very important figure in the King Arthur myth, with real emotions and
>complex motives. I would not have been surprised to find that he was a major
>villain in this game, perhaps even the perpetrator of the catastrophe that
>the PC is trying to prevent. I *was* rather surprised to find him loitering
>at the edge of a lake three rooms into the game, just sort of irritably
>standing around as though waiting for a bus.

Mordred was a disappointment, yes. However, for me that disappointment was
outweighed by the NPCs I met further on.

>    I am given to understand from several people that characters further on
>in the game are much better defined. I'm quite glad to hear this; it
>encourages me and provides me with more incentive to finish.

Wait a minute - you're saying that you haven't even *seen* the other
NPCs?  In other words, you're condemning a game where you haven't even
*seen* more than a quarter of it? You're on very deep water, my friend.

Of course, if the first quarter of the game puts you off, this will
colour your perception fo the rest of the game, and you may not even
be willing to continue. Your criticism certainly remains valid criticism
of those parts you've seen.

But then YOU SHOULD SAY SO. I think it's overly harsh to condemn the rest
of the game when you haven't even met the major NPCs. At the very least,
you should give it the benefit of the doubt.
 
>-    Trial and error puzzles that kill you on a wrong guess don't work
>because they force me to use SAVE and RESTORE in order to solve them, a
>bullet through my mimesis. I did not fail the collapsing cave puzzle because
>of faulty reasoning or bad comprehension or failure to read carefully; I
>failed because I followed my natural adventurer's instinct: before one can
>solve a puzzle, one must at least *see* that puzzle so as to understand what
>the puzzle *is*. Unfortunately, the puzzle was a sucker-punch, specifically
>targetting those who followed this instinct. This does not contribute to my
>understanding of the game world or the story unfolding therein. It only
>contributes to my understanding of which hoops the author wants me to jump
>through.

I think that this is a very individual thing. The puzzle didn't strike
me as particularly unfair or mimesis-breaking. This is of course no defence
for the puzzle ("the player's always right"), but I think it's very hard 
to make puzzles that please everybody. 

To go out on a limb, I think that as soon as you have a puzzle in a
game, it will break mimesis for *somebody*. And OaF is traditional IF
in the sense that it's a puzzle game with a story, not an interactive
story with puzzles. 

>-    Parser bugs don't work because parser bugs are inexcusable. If there's
>one thing that cannot be overhyped *enough* in a game that has been
>developed as long as OaF has, it's a rock-solid parser. If CMP needed
>another year to beta-test the thing, then they should have taken it. It's
>not like their target audience is going anywhere.

Here we agree: the game really needed more beta testing, especially in
terms of vocabulary. It's not just outright parser bugs, but I had
rather a lot of problems with missing vocabulary.

>-    In-jokes just don't work for me. It's a matter of opinion. Some feel
>differently, although I think it was a mistake to say that the granite wall
>reminded the PC of a computer game he played when he was a kid, when the PC
>would have been a kid circa 1958.

I frankly don't understand what Whizzard was thinking of when he put
in that reference. Thinko?

>I would have liked to have seen a more story-oriented game. The legend of
>King Arthur is a grand and richly detailed story. A story-less,
>puzzle-oriented game sprinkled with elements of King Arthur is, in essence,
>little different from a story-less puzzle-oriented game sprinkled with
>elements of Quendor or Tolkien or Dr. Who or Dukes of Hazzard. 

If you haven't played the entire game, you really aren't in a position
to judge the entire game in this respect. The story-oriented aspect
becomes more prominent further on (though it never takes over) and the
game is far from story-less.

Of course, if the lack of driving plot in the beginning prevents you
>from getting involved, that's a valid criticism, but that's not what
you said.

>I would have liked to have been able to >THROW MYSELF ON THE
>GRENADE.

IIRC, "lie on grenade" works. Perhaps this is just a parser problem
(which should have been caught by beta testing)?

>Once and Future is a solid, decently written, puzzle-oriented game, and a
>lot of people on this newsgroup are very happy with that, and that is just
>fine. Once and Future does not, however, try new things. It is neither above
>nor beyond the norm. It does not intrigue me, immerse me, or stretch my
>mind.

Excuse me for pointing out the obvious, but this is a very far cry
>from your earlier characterization of OaF as very mediocre.

-- 
Magnus Olsson (mol@df.lth.se, zebulon@pobox.com)
------    http://www.pobox.com/~zebulon   ------


From mol@bartlet.df.lth.se Tue Nov 24 17:59:47 MET 1998
Article: 39425 of rec.games.int-fiction
Path: news.lth.se!not-for-mail
From: mol@bartlet.df.lth.se (Magnus Olsson)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Harsh criticism (was: [Once and Future] all it's cracked up to be?)
Date: 24 Nov 1998 10:49:03 +0100
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In article <73d36u$a62@journal.concentric.net>,
Michael Gentry <edromia@concentric.net> wrote:
>I briefly considered directly addressing your characterization of my review
>as "utter assassination," Magnus, but finally decided not to because I don't
>much enjoy pissing into the wind.

Well, actually, in this case it wouldn't really be pissing into the
wind. I realized after posting my reaction to your review that that
remark was a bit over the top; sorry for that.

What I meant was certainly not that your review was a deliberate
attempt to shoot down "OaF"; however, the impression I got from
reading it was that you absolutely hated OaF, that you couldn't find a
single redeeming feature in it but that you could find lots and lots
of absolutely show-stopping faults, etc, etc. Again, I'm sorry, but
however noble your intentions were, that's the impression it made on
me. "Assassination" is a bad characterization since it implies
malicious intent, but what I meant was that reviews like yours can
actually have the same effect as one. 

> If my review hurt anyone's feelings, I am
>sorry. I meant no offense to Kevin Wilson, and I'm pretty sure I meant none
>to you.

This is not a matter of hurting people's feelings, really. I can't
speak for Whizzard, of course, and I don't really think that he needs
to be protected (to paraphrase Espen Aarseth) from the harsh reality
out there. I certainly don't think that Mike Berlyn or CMP need such
protection - CMP is a commercial outfit and must be prepared to be
treated more harshly than us amateurs.

I did get a bit upset, but that was not because you had hurt my
feelings, but rather because I think you were being unfair to a game
that I happen to think is a good game, *despite* its flaws (just for
the record, I agree with you about some of the flaws you've listed; in
other cases, I don't agree). 

Clearly, our opinions differ as to the enjoyability of "OaF", and of
course I respect your opinions. I just felt I had to react to a review
that focused entirely on the game's flaws, while ignoring the good
sides, and doing so in a rather upset and accusatory tone, to boot - I
felt it gave a very skewed picture of the game.

Also, I stand by my remarks that just listing the flaws of a work:
"This doesn't work, that feature utterly stinks, etc" (yes, I know,
this is a caricature of your review) isn't very constructive
criticism. In the big flamewar/debate about harsh criticism after last
year's competition, somebody wrote that he'd been taught that
constructive criticism must include some praise. At the time, I was
inclined to dismiss that comment as softie nonsense; today, I'm more
inclined to agree. (Your amended review was much better in several
regards, by the way).

You may say that this is just the pot calling the kettle black. I've
written some pretty scathing reviews myself, haven't I?

Yes, I have. To this, I can only say mea culpa; I think I've learned
something since I wrote them. It's very very easy to write negative
criticism; it can also be fun, or at least relieving, to get your
frustration out of the system. But I really don't think it's good
practice to do so. 

As for SPAG policy: I've so far never rejected a review for being too
one-sided or too negative. However, I might very well do so in the
future. I think the crucial point is not negativity, but
one-sidedness, but of course I'd feel rather silly rejecting a review
for being too nice to the author :-).

However, and for the record:

You - and everybody else - are very welcome to submit negative reviews
or OaF or any other game to SPAG; but if they're simply a list of
flaws, I may ask you to at least consider writing something about the
good sides of the game as well (or if the game really doesn't have
any redeeming features at all - such games exist - at least to
motivate why you're feeling this way). 

>If anyone feels that my criticisms are not valid, they are free to
>dismiss or dispute them. I only offer them because I want to see CMP
>publishing games for some time to come, and I don't see that happening with
>products like this one.

I don't feel your criticisms are invalid, but rather that the way they
were delivered would increase the likelihood of their being dismissed,
or, which would be worse, simply discouraging poeple from writing IF
(rather than taking the criticism to heart and writing *better* IF).

To put it another way: if somebody writes a work of IF (or any other
creative work), and all the feedback they get is a list of things that
are terribly wrong with the work, without any mention of what's good
and what's work, they're not very likely to correct the errors -
they're far more likely just to conclude that the work was a dismal
failure that should be bureid and forgotten as quickly as possible.


So why don't I post a review of my own instead of attacking yours? you
may ask. 

The answer is that I will, but I've reserved my opinions for SPAG #16,
which will be out in a few days. Have patience until then.



-- 
Magnus Olsson (mol@df.lth.se, zebulon@pobox.com)
------    http://www.pobox.com/~zebulon   ------


From katsaris@otenet.gr Tue Nov 24 23:23:53 MET 1998
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From: "Aris Katsaris" <katsaris@otenet.gr>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp98] Little Blue Men
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 07:41:23 +0200
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edromia@concentric.net wrote in message
<72t9qh$im2@journal.concentric.net>...
>Paul O'Brian wrote in message ...
>>On 17 Nov 1998, Chris Markwyn wrote:
>>> [Freudian psychoanalytic reading of LBM snipped]
>
>[religious reading also snipped]
>[American political reading snipped, too]
>
>Actually, you're both off-target. It's interesting to me that you keep
>returning to these opposing dichotomies -- psychotic self-destruction vs.
>womb-like bliss; hell vs. heaven; repressive political status quo vs.
>anarchist utopia; etc. And always one "good", one "bad".
>
>The point was, actually, that *both realms are precisely the same*.


I understood that very well. I am glad to see that the writer of the game
also understands this. I *hated* the pink balloons. That was no heaven for
me. I wanted to punch out the happy naked man, much more than I wanted to
hurt my co-workers. And it originally annoyed me, thinking that the writer
thought the end was ideal.

It wasn't. It was as much a hell as the office. You learn to love the
meaningless office and you learn to love the meaningless valley. Equally
bad.

When I read the afterword, I understood that was your intention, and I was
extremely happy with the game.

>I tried to drop clues to this effect in Ed Asner's speech, which contains
>wording that is suspiciously similar to Biedermeyer's, and in the fact that
>he wore the same thick glasses as the rest.


Noticed it.

<Very correct analysis snipped>


>The cheesy punchline to LBM is this: the one thing that you want to avoid
>*at all costs* is...learning to love yourself. That way lies acquiescence,
>complacency, and defeat. Ask Robertson about it -- they nearly got him, and
>it drove him mad. It is, perhaps, Our Hero's fatal flaw that he believes
>that staying frosty will save him, when it in fact only brings him closer
to
>his doom.


Hmm... Hadn't noticed this, but it fits.

>Which means, of course, that, much like the counterfeit bill red herring,
>this game is an exercise in futility.

I spent a lot of time around that bill.... ARRRGH!

<snip>
>There is no winning transcript. The game is unsolvable. Some of you may
>consider that an undesirable trait in IF; some of you may feel that this
>fact utterly devalues everything you thought was good about the game. I can
>only spread my hands and say, "Eh." This is not, unlike the "discussion
>questions" in my postscript, an ex post facto attempt to insert subtext
that
>I didn't think of beforehand. This is honest-to-god what I was thinking
when
>I wrote the ending.


I'll have to think about this. But no I don't believe that winning is
necessary for IF. Photopia had no win scenario either, and it justly earned
first place.

>[1] You might make a case that the "crushed by vending machine" ending
comes
>close to "winning", after a fashion -- at least it's a way out. (I know
this
>is the opposite of what I said in the postscript. I was messing with you.)

That's the one thing that annoyed me in the Afterword. I thought that being
brainwashed by the glasses was far worse than being crushed by the machine.

I'm glad that you agree with me.

Aris Katsaris.




From greg@manifold.math.ucdavis.edu Wed Nov 25 09:55:33 MET 1998
Article: 39471 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: greg@manifold.math.ucdavis.edu (Greg Kuperberg)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Comments on Photopia
Date: 24 Nov 1998 22:32:56 -0800
Organization: UC Davis Department of Mathematics
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Xref: news.lth.se rec.games.int-fiction:39471

I'm with the majority (and with two friends who recommended the game):
Photopia is really good.  Certainly by the standards of interactive
fiction, it has masterful, interesting plot and character development.
Character development is the hardest part of good fiction, interactive
or otherwise.  You can tell authors who are good at it because they make
it look easy.

I would say that Photopia is the best story of any interactive fiction
work that I have ever played.  It isn't the best *game* -- Christminster
is a fun game and a pretty good story too -- but that isn't the point.
There are so many IF works that are maybe okay as games, but as stories
are pieces of !@$%^.  In this respect, Photopia is definitely breaking
new ground and it would be great if there were more games like it.

Adam Cadre has suggested that Photopia and I-0 are so completely
different, who knows what is third game will be like.  Actually with
hindsight I am not at all surprised that the two games have the same
author.  Here are some of the similarities that come to mind:

o Realism.  I really like this aspect of Adam's two games actually.
He breaks the techno-fantasy cliche of "You wave the magic wand and the
third moon in the sky glows more brightly as a robot appears..."

o Interesting, self-reliant female characters, in particular female
protagonists.  A friend of mine argued that I-0 was flawed because it
was "sexist".  I pointed out to him that at least Tracy Valencia is
resourceful, whereas the female lead in *his* game is not much more than
a stage prop.

o Emphasis on families.  In both games, there are lots of relatives.
In most IF, nobody has a mother and nobody is related to anybody.
To amplify the point, there is major symbolism in things
like cribs and footprints in cement.

o Cars, car crashes, and people talking while driving.  See the point
about realism.  If you put it together with the point about families,
it suggests that Adam Cadre grew up in a car :-).

o Emphasis on people and their personalities rather than puzzles or
uninhabited rooms.

There has been a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking about how to
improve Photopia.  Most of it --- the stuff like "too bad that Alley
and Josh didn't get to know each other" --- is missing the point.
Maybe these changes would make a better story and maybe not, but it would
be a different story.  At least Photopia is a story, and a good one too.
Given that, the story should be left alone.

Actually I might make two small, related exceptions to that.  As other
people pointed out, the explanation of Obers' paradox is wrong.
If stars did obey the inverse square law (which they do, with some
qualifications), then stars farther away wouldn't appear any dimmer,
they would just look smaller.  Stars would then be like snowflakes.
As Obers' reasoning predicts, when it's snowing the snowflakes cause a
whiteout after some distance.  There are several differences between the
real universe and the idealized one in Obers' paradox that explain why
the sky is dark. I think the most significant one is probably red shift.

But maybe it's realistic that Dad fudges some of the science :-).

Anyway if I were to change one thing in the story I would expand the
section in which Sam Dawson is explaining stuff to Alley.  Obviously
Photopia is not rewarding the player with points, but rather with
storytelling.  So the game could have at least a little bit of play
in it if you had to run it more than once in order to see all of the
things that Sam *could* explain and all of the things that Alley *could*
ask about or think of.
-- 
  /\  Greg Kuperberg (UC Davis)
 /  \
 \  / Visit the xxx Math Archive Front at http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/
  \/  * From A-hat to Z(G), ABC to ZFC *


From greg@manifold.math.ucdavis.edu Wed Nov 25 09:56:19 MET 1998
Article: 39475 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: greg@manifold.math.ucdavis.edu (Greg Kuperberg)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: More on Photopia, and how to respond to it
Date: 24 Nov 1998 23:05:52 -0800
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I liked Lucian Smith's question:  Which character in Photopia do you
identify with most?  I identified with Sam Dawson a lot, Alley some,
and not much with the other characters.  I should have identified with
Jonathan Kent, but I was too embarrassed to do so.  I agree that Alley is
a bit too idealized, but hey, it's not my story.  Besides, I'm a sucker
for stories about intelligent children, if done properly.

Photopia reminds me a little of two other works, the book "The Diary of
Anne Frank" and the movie "My Left Foot".  "My Left Foot" has a scene in
which the 7-year-old Christy Brown, who is almost completely paralyzed
with cerebral palsy, demonstrates to his family that he can read and write
by spelling out "MOTHER" with his left foot.  My wife said that the scene
was bluntly melodramatic, which is true, but I was moved by it anyway.

"The Diary of Anne Frank" has a passage in which Anne Frank repeatedly
gets in trouble by tricking and showing disrespect for her grade school
teacher.  The teacher punishes her with embarrassing busy work ("I am
a loud quack quack" 500 times, that kind of thing), which Anne takes as
creative writing assignments.  After three or four iterations she proves
that she is so talented at writing that the teacher decides never to
punish her again.  Instead she reads her short stories to the class.
Given what happened to Anne Frank in the end, I was again very moved,
in fact so much so that I couldn't concentrate on the book after that.

Admittedly, although Adam Cadre is a good writer, he isn't a match for
Anne Frank (not yet anyway).  Actually "Anne Frank" and "My Left Foot"
both illustrate what bothers me about the portrayal of Alley Dawson.
She is sufficiently intelligent that you'd expect her to be judgemental
about stupid people, or at least inwardly impatient.

Anyway, here are some thoughts about how to respond to Adam Cadre for his
"A+" game.  Assistance is the sincerest form of gratitude, hence:

o We should all send bug reports to Adam.  If nothing else, there are
a number of ommissions in the parser which no IF author can track down
single-handedly.  (E.g. in the very first scene, the answer to "x car"
doesn't make sense.)  Ideally Adam would respond in kind by listing
alpha-, beta-, and omega- testers in a credits section of the program.

o We should persuade Adam to release the source code so that fans of
the game can debug it even more diligently, and so that it can go into
the Linux distributions.  It would be great if it could keep
Christminster company in Red Hat Linux.

o We should try to sweet-talk Andrew Plotkin into adding color to XZip.
Maybe flattery will help:  Andrew is one of the main volunteers that makes
the new world of IF possible, and I think XZip is the most convenient
and attractive Z-code interpreter out there.  It would be great if it
supported color too.
-- 
  /\  Greg Kuperberg (UC Davis)
 /  \
 \  / Visit the xxx Math Archive Front at http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/
  \/  * From A-hat to Z(G), ABC to ZFC *


From erkyrath@netcom.com Thu Nov 26 01:08:29 MET 1998
Article: 39524 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: Re: More on Photopia, and how to respond to it
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Michael Straight (straight@email.unc.edu) wrote:
> On 25 Nov 1998, Greg Kuperberg wrote:

> > In article <Pine.SGI.3.95L.981125140611.6131A-100000@oldebor.york.ac.uk>,
> > Very few people in the world are saints who love everybody.  (Also saints
> > are pretty tired material for short stories, in my opinion.)  Not many
> > people are as creative as Anne Frank or Christy Brown either.  If the
> > intention was for Alley Dawson to be both a saint and a genius, then
> > maybe that was gilding the lilly.

> I don't see Alley as particularly "saintly" -- she enjoys telling stories
> to kids and is nice to a guy who asks her out.  She likes talking to her
> dad and is reasonably polite to the father of the girl she babysits.  I've
> known lots of people that were like that at Alley's age. 

Yeah, but she *also* helps out with the school decorating committee.
That's what ruins it for me. What a brown-noser. :-)

--Z

-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From spatula@s p a t c h.net Thu Nov 26 10:12:49 MET 1998
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On 20 Nov 1998 17:44:38 GMT, adam@princeton.edu (Adam J. Thornton)
wrote:


>
>You mean a story kind of like that, Doe?  Of course I see your point: you
>would rather be W than be reading a story about A and W telling a story.
>
>This is kind of why I left the history of science: I'd rather be writing
>code than writing stories about people who wrote code.
>
>I do think one of the neat things about Photopia was that it made me
>remember that IF I got to play--instead of just watch--was about
>storytelling.  But then I've gotten back into roleplaying as well recently.
>Which is more fun, as seen above, because the storyteller can make up new
>stories to go with unexpected player choices, rather than just saying "you
>can't do that."

There's got to be some give-and-take between a live storyteller and
the one experiencing the story, if they're to tell the story together.

Try getting to the Gold Beach in Photopia without taking the shovel
>from the undersea castle.  I made that mistake the first time around.
How the missing shovel is handled is nicely done.  From the game's
point of view, it's necessary to make sure the player's got the
implement, even if they were much too enthusiastic and left the castle
without remembering to "try to pick up everything you can", avoiding
an impossible game state.  From Alley's point of view, she's making a
small concession to Wendy who was obviously much too enthusiastic and
moved ahead without remembering to try and pick up everything she
could, avoiding a quickly-devised alternate plan ("suddenly a bird
drops a shovel out of the sky!")

It was a very nice touch and while it should have broken mimesis if it
were used in any other game, it was a great illustration of Wendy and
Alley telling a story together, using each other's feedback to change
the story.  I really liked that.

>(Assuming that the storyteller is any good.  Plenty of D&D games I've
>played have had the DM basically say "you can't do that" when I tried to do
>something the module didn't cover.)

Which is why I could never get into D&D unless the DM let my character
blow his nose at any given moment.


--
der spatchel                                          reading, mass 01867
resident cranky                                     fovea.retina.net 4000
spatchCoaster!                    http://spatch.ne.mediaone.net/coasters/
"Here's how the world will end: Kittens Discover Fire" - J. Kujawa


From neilc@norwich.edu Thu Nov 26 10:16:16 MET 1998
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From: neilc@norwich.edu
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Subject: Re: Photopia a tragedy?
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:09:34 GMT
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In article <73h6g2$7oq$1@oak.prod.itd.earthlink.net>,
  "Brandon Van Every" <vanevery@earthlink.net> wrote:

[Spoily Spoilers ahead]














> neilc@norwich.edu wrote in message <73cdue$4tt$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>...
> >
> >On this footing, Photopia isn't a particularly interesting tragedy. Boy
> drives
> >drunk - girl in wrong place at wrong time. There couldn't really be a more
> >senseless and inane reason for her death.
>
> Tragedies are about suffering.  If her death made sense, there would be no
> suffering.

Since you took the liberty of deleting my personal definition of a tragedy,
some of what follows doesn't make sense.

> >I perform (sing) at many funerals, and Photopia, to me, was very like the
> >"rememberance" section of a funeral, where different people stand and tell
> >their story about the deceased.
>
> That's an interesting observation, one that I cannot so easily dismiss as
> those of many other hardened adventure gamers.

I think Lelah Conrad made a similar observation.

> Might I ask, at what pace
> did you go through Photopia?  Myself, I barrelled right through it, taking
> no pause to think.  I simply flowed from one event to the next.  Was your
> experience more contemplative and reflective?  If so, what made it so?  Your
> personal disposition?  Elements of the plot, or the characters?

I moved slowly because that is how I like to read: ponderously. I also had
to replay up to the golden beach because I forgot to pick up the shovel. If
there was another way to retrieve the treasure chest I couldn't figure it out.

> >The strength of Photopia was that it made me empathise with the loss of the
> >characters I read about, in the same way that the personal anecdotes of one
> >who loved the deceased can. Those who she had touched suffer far more than
> >Alley. It is made clear in the game that Alley is moving on to something
> else
> >(just what is left ambiguous), but for the survivors, the ~"light has gone
> >out".

I agree that, by the Aristotle definition you are using, Photopia is a
tragedy.

By the definition I like, it isn't a very complex example. For me, the
complexity is what is rewarding about a tragedy, not the fact that they are
sad. I treasure the fun of analyzing a tragedy to find the loopholes, or
turning points in them. The earlier the turning point, the more I like it.

Photopia has erased the turning points and loopholes from the story. You
cannot affect those parts of the narrative that might save Alley from her
fate. So I chose to enjoy it on a different level: trying to understand what
was lost.

At no time did I feel I had the power to save Alley.

The only scene that didn't work for me was the hospital scene, where I
never figured out who I was until long after I had played and read a bunch of
reviews. I thought I was the same frat-boy as in the first scene. It was my
fault entirely. The game warned me to use 'who am I', and I ignored it.

> Well, let's write a plot summary for Photomania, the anti-climactic saga of
> a little girl whose death made perfect sense:
>
> Alley had been slumming it at the frat party.  She enjoyed having these two
> older dudes fondle her tender young breasts and as they raced recklessly on
> the highway, they plowed into a telephone pole.  She was the unlucky one,
> thrown clear of the wreckage and into a nearby swamp.  The phallic symbolism
> of a rocket hurtling to catastrophe pummelled her deep into the frigid muck.
> As her life passed before her eyes she regretted slapping the shit out of a
> little girl named Wendy she had been babysitting only hours earlier.  If
> only her parents knew what horrible things she did to the child with gold
> dust, or the true reasons for her lack of concern with 7th grade school
> dances.  Flying as a screaming eagle upon the hunger and misery of others,
> that frigid bitch Mother Nature herself clipped her wings and shut her trap.
> Transforming her into a petrified block of wood, she warmed her in the
> mantle of an undersea fireplace for all Eternity.  Her mother, wearing a
> tight-fitting brassiere and heaving with heavy-chested sobs over a cheap
> casket, wailed over and over again "I TOLD YOU SO!  I TOLD YOU SO!"

You are confusing 'senseless' with 'unjust'. The death of the above Alley is
just as senseless as that of the Photopia Alley. However, the cretin's death
is more justified (after all, she knowingly got in the car with a drunken
bastard, and was generally hateful). I agree that the unjust nature of
Alley's death is a useful element in Photopia.

> Now, what's wrong with this plotline from the standpoint of Tragedy?  Wait
> for it...
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> .
> One of them 2000 year old answers from the Poetics:
>
> Nor again should a very wicket person fall from good fortune to bad
> fortune - that kind of structure would be agreeable, but would not excite
> pity or fear, since the one has to do with someone who is suffering
> UNDESERVEDLY [emphasis mine], the other with someone who is like ourselves
> (I mean, pity has to do with the undeserving sufferer, fear with the person
> like us); so what happens will evoke neither pity nor fear.

I agree with Aristotle that the story you wrote above is bad by any definition
of tragedy.

--
Neil Cerutti
neilc@norwich.edu

-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
http://www.dejanews.com/       Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own    


From manorsof@iol.ie Thu Nov 26 13:07:49 MET 1998
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From: Russell Wallace <manorsof@iol.ie>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: I-0: A review
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A review of I-0, which I finished playing this evening and feel deserves
more attention than I've seen it get.

I-0 (short for "Interstate Zero") is the previous work of Adam Cadre,
author of Photopia.  (Those of you who've read my comments on Photopia
will perhaps be unsurprised that before I played it I was careful to
check the spoiler file to make sure that being raped and murdered wasn't
the only outcome allowed :))  The plot in a nutshell: you're Tracy
Valencia, a college student, driving home for Thanksgiving dinner. 
Things are going fine until your car breaks down on the highway.  You're
in the desert, thirty miles from the nearest habitation, and the
temperature is 120 Fahrenheit and rising.  The object is to get home
safely.

The tone is relatively light-hearted, but it deals with some serious
issues.  There are quite a number of ways of ending up in hospital, or
dead - but when that happens, by and large it's the result of an action,
or failure to act, that in that situation could do the same thing in
real life.  (Yes, hitching a lift in I-0 can get you into serious
trouble.  There are a couple of ways of getting yourself out of it
again, if you take a careful look at your inventory and surroundings.) 
Unlike in a lot of other games, I didn't find myself thinking "Yeah, I
could have seen that one coming - if I were psychic.  Oh well, restore
time again."

The level of puzzles (by "level" I mean both quantity and difficulty) is
on the light side.  If spending six months figuring out the Bank of Zork
is your fondest IF memory, I-0 mightn't appeal to you.  On the other
hand, it's not an almost-puzzle-free story like Photopia or A Mind
Forever Voyaging.

The puzzles *fit*, though.  No gratuitous obstacles that don't have
anything to do with the plot, no arbitrary "fiddle with these objects
six different ways until they click together" stuff.  A lot of them
center around people rather than things, and most of them have more than
one possible solution.  I was able to think about them in-character
rather than stepping out into game-player mode.  And what delighted me
most about I-0 is that there are several genuinely different ways of
winning.  That's something I'd love to see more authors do.

(A minor point: there are times when you have to do a good deal of
waiting; I wouldn't have minded seeing a "wait until something happens"
command implemented.)

Tracy's one of my favorite IF characters.  If an author is giving the
player a predefined character, it's always hard to strike a balance
between leaving the character largely undefined on the one hand and
dumping pages of biography at you on the other.  The ideal is to do it
piecemeal, in the descriptions as you go along.  Adam Cadre pulls it
off.  To me, Tracy felt like a real person.  So did the NPCs; I've
rarely seen comparable quality of NPC description and implementation.

The quality of implementation is nearly perfect.  No mistakes of
spelling or grammar, no bugs that I was able to find, practically no
instances of "guess the verb".  Things mentioned in room descriptions
can be examined, and the responses consistently manage to be witty
without breaking mimesis.

I've seen the game classed as pornography, which I find rather odd;
there's no real sexual content unless you choose to play it that way,
and even then the descriptions stay well within the bounds of good
taste.  If you didn't find Leather Goddesses of Phobos offensive, I
don't think you'll find I-0 offensive either.

I haven't much in the way of negative comments.  It's a fairly short
game, and there's nothing earth-shattering in it; the issue at stake is
whether one girl manages to get home safely in time for Thanksgiving
dinner.  But there's nothing wrong with that; not every story has to be
about saving the world.

In summary: on the Competition scale, I-0 gets from me a 9 out of 10.

-- 
"To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem."
Russell Wallace
manorsof@iol.ie


From lpsmith@rice.edu Thu Nov 26 17:06:01 MET 1998
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From: lpsmith@rice.edu (Lucian Paul Smith)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Guessing the verb in Cattus Atrox
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edromia@concentric.net wrote:
: Then (and I don't remember the exact wording, but it was pretty close to
: this), the head doctor looked right at me and said: "Administer CPR. Right
: now."

: Without even thinking, I typed in ADMINISTER CPR, and sonuvagun, it worked.

I've seen this other places and really liked it, too.  I did it myself
in 'Edifice' in the opening scene (although none of them were required
there), and it was used to great effect in 'Everybody Loves A Parade', in
many places, usually, again, for humor value.  Photopia had another scene
almost exactly as described above, even.  Actually, that was one of the
(few!) places Photopia broke down for me, because there was this woman
there, giving me exactly what to type in for several moves.  It was about
as interactive as the Purple section.

Heck, in an early version of Comp97, I had described the switches with the
words, "Setting the switches to 'on' will,..." and got a bug report that
the game did not accept >SET SWITCH TO ON.  I added that grammar, then
went back and changed the wording of the description to something more
obviously an IF-style verb construction.

Now let's look at Atrox.  I just replayed it, and had a heck of a time
getting to the aforementioned error messages.  Most things didn't seem to
be implemented--including my tormentors!  If I had the gun, however,
and tried to 'GET GUN', it told me:

The rope is too tight for you to free your hands.

So this gave me the grammar for 'FREE HANDS', but told me it wouldn't
work.  What this message implies to me is "OK, I'll assume you just typed
'free hands', since you'd have to do that first, and this is why it won't
work."

It does *not* give me the 'loosen' grammar.  So, let's say I actually *do*
type 'free hands', against likely odds.  It now tells me:

The ropes aren't loose enough to free your hands.

Here, 'loose' is *not* a verb--it's an adjective.  It would take an
intuitive leap to get to the nonstandard 'LOOSEN ROPES', even here.
Fortunately, at least 'UNTIE ROPES' is implemented.  So we do that, try
GET GUN again, and get:

Your hands aren't free.

'Free', again, isn't a verb!  The player now has to either try to remember
back to an earlier error message (which had discouraged this sort of
activity), or come up with something new, like, say, 'drop rope', which
won't work.

Now, let's try something else.  This is a bit of a setup, granted, but
see if you think, despite the odd grammar, a player might not be more
likely to follow this hypothetical transcript:

>GET GUN (or something similar--ATTACK KARL, for example)

The ropes are still pretty tight.  You can barely wriggle your hands.

>WRIGGLE HANDS

You wriggle your hands feverishly and the rope loosens up!

>GET GUN (or, again, something similar)

You'll have to disentangle your hands from the ropes first.

>DISENTANGLE HANDS FROM ROPE  ('from rope' would be optional)

You quietly free your hands from the ropes!

-----------
Now, obviously, these would not be the only commands at the player's
disposal.  If they wished to use 'LOOSEN ROPES' and 'FREE HANDS', they
should be allowed.  But when the game explicitly feeds you grammar, it's
reasonable to assume that the player might try it.

I've used odd verbs here on purpose, although I wouldn't suggest actually
using them in a game.  The point is that even such odd verbs have a
reasonable chance of being typed by the player if you give it to them.
"SET SWITCH TO ON" has got to be the most awkward way possible of saying
"TURN ON SWITCH", and yet, because that was the way I gave it to him,
that's what a player tried.  Not only that--they couldn't think of another
way to phrase it.

There are two take-home lessons from this.  And I don't mean to pick on
Atrox here; it's just the example that was brought up.

One:  If you want the player to do something slightly out of the ordinary,
you can steer them in the right direction by supplying them the correct
grammar, whether in an error message, description, or wherever.

Correlary:  If you *do* supply the player with a specific grammar, they
will want to use it.

-Lucian


From gkw@pobox.com Thu Nov 26 17:13:09 MET 1998
Article: 39537 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: gkw@pobox.com (Gerry Kevin Wilson)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Once and Future] all it's cracked up to be?
Date: 25 Nov 1998 08:33:18 GMT
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In article <73fir3$qvr@chronicle.concentric.net>
"Michael Gentry" <edromia@concentric.net> wrote:

[snip]

Well, in brief:
Approximate # of NPCs in OaF: 40
Approximate # of NPC conversation responses: 600
The Oracle, a character plainly visible in the area you were adventuring in, responds
to over 50 statements, not counting responses to show and tell. 

And, in case you still feel that the original post wasn't hurtful...let me quote some
relevant bits....Try to imagine coming home from a 70 hour work week, sitting down
to relax, and reading these statements about a game you worked 5 years on...

>Once and Future is, to me, a thoroughly mediocre game. The writing is decent
>but nothing to rave about. The story, insofar as there is a story, is thin
>and superficial.

>Feel free to debate this with me; I'm very interested to hear what others
>think. Some will probably argue that the game has nostalgia value, or that
>it is very good "for what it is." Unfortunately, "what it is" (so far) is a
>genre of game that was dying out even before Infocom had gone belly-up. I
>would really like to see Cascade Mountain Publishing turn into a successful
>business venture, and for that reason alone I'm not sorry I bought the game.
>But I predict that CMP will not last long unless they start publishing works
>more interesting, more original, and more ground-breaking than this one.

The rest of the post I can't really argue with, though I suppose I like the fairy
tale elements a lot more than you do. But then, I was raised on a lot more
fairy tales than Arthurian myths. Your mileage may vary. Sorry if you don't
like the game, but I'm pleased with the way it turned out, and if you give
the later parts of it a try you MAY (emphasis there) be pleasantly surprised.
Of course, it may not change your initial impression at all.




From mol@bartlet.df.lth.se Fri Nov 27 17:04:13 MET 1998
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From: mol@bartlet.df.lth.se (Magnus Olsson)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Photopia a tragedy?
Date: 27 Nov 1998 17:03:49 +0100
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In article <73h6g2$7oq$1@oak.prod.itd.earthlink.net>,
Brandon Van Every <vanevery@earthlink.net> wrote:
>Well, let's write a plot summary for Photomania, the anti-climactic saga of
>a little girl whose death made perfect sense:
>
>Alley had been slumming it at the frat party.  She enjoyed having these two
>older dudes fondle her tender young breasts and as they raced recklessly on
>the highway, they plowed into a telephone pole.  She was the unlucky one,
>thrown clear of the wreckage and into a nearby swamp.  The phallic symbolism
>of a rocket hurtling to catastrophe pummelled her deep into the frigid muck.
>As her life passed before her eyes she regretted slapping the shit out of a
>little girl named Wendy she had been babysitting only hours earlier.  If
>only her parents knew what horrible things she did to the child with gold
>dust, or the true reasons for her lack of concern with 7th grade school
>dances.  

(conclusion of story snipped)

My initial reaction to this is rather interesting:

I thought "Brandon, you utter bastard, how can you even think of
defaming in this way a poor innocent girl who's just died so
tragically?"

Only then did I remember that Alley was a fictional character.

I think this says a lot about Photopia - it happens that fictional
characters get so "real" for me that I care for their reputation, but
this is the first time it happens for a character in a game...


>Flying as a screaming eagle upon the hunger and misery of others,
>that frigid bitch Mother Nature herself clipped her wings and shut her trap.

Just BTW: have you ever considered entering the Bulwer-Lytton contest?

-- 
Magnus Olsson (mol@df.lth.se, zebulon@pobox.com)
------    http://www.pobox.com/~zebulon   ------


From cksmith@western.wave.ca Sat Nov 28 19:19:53 MET 1998
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From: Cameron Smith <cksmith@western.wave.ca>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Once and Future] all it's cracked up to be?
Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1998 12:26:31 -0500
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WARNING!  This post contains some minor spoilers.






















I've played Once and Future for about a total of two hours now, and I
think that it is more than a standard "quest" adventure.  To be honest,
I'm not the best puzzle-solver -- I'm easily stumped by puzzles, and my
attention span isn't all that great.  However, I've been quite satisfied
by my experience with OaF so far.  

I didn't find the opening section on the Island to be all that
difficult... the puzzles that I solved were fairly easy object puzzles,
I think and they were quite logical.  I then visited my three friends in
the present (or was it the future?) and fairly easily solved the puzzles
there.  I thought the writing was great, the NPCs were interesting
(although I didn't interact with them directly) and the story made my
want to continue on.  

I liked the changing pace and "feel" within the game so far, from the
opening scene where things are relatively non-linear, and the player has
to explore the island, to the Vietnam scenes where things are more
linear and the player jumps quickly from scene to scene.  I felt that
the puzzles were straightforward enough in this section that they were
there just to slow me down a bit and force me to read the text while the
plot advanced.  I found this section to be highly "story-based", in
contrast to the opening section.  

I apologize if I sound too positive so far -- I do agree that the game
isn't fully polished.  I've noticed a few bugs that I intend to send to
Kevin.  (In fact, one of the bugs gave away a puzzle.) But, I haven't
found any bugs that have seriously detracted from the gameplay.

So, in conclusion, I'd say that so far the game has been fun and if the
game doesn't worsen as I continue, it was definitely worth the money I
payed for it (and at our horrible Canadian exchange rate it wasn't
incredibly cheap).

Cameron


From edromia@concentric.net Mon Nov 30 12:06:20 MET 1998
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From: "Michael Gentry" <edromia@concentric.net>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Once and Future] all it's cracked up to be?
Date: 29 Nov 1998 12:10:23 PST
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Doeadeer3 wrote in message <19981129134645.26664.00002212@ngol03.aol.com>...
>
>In article <73rlb1$84e@journal.concentric.net>, "Michael Gentry"
><edromia@concentric.net> writes:
>
>>That's maybe why I sounded dismissive. Sorry; didn't mean it like that.
The
>>argument between you and me didn't start by being about specific merits of
>>the game, but when it did begin to move in that direction, it pretty much
>>directly jumped to "I like average, traditional puzzle-hunt games and I
>>don't like stuff I don't 'get'."
>>
>>I think pretty much the opposite. Let's shake on it.
>
>No, actually I didn't say that. (Haven't played O&F so I can't comment on
it.)
>
>I never used the word average. I also "get" almost everything, I just don't
>always "get" why I should want to play it or why it is "fun".


Sorry; these are specifically the statements I was thinking of:

"I wouldn't be expecting stories or things so far "out there" I didn't "get"
it."
"That is my goal, medium-well text adventure game, traditional format."
"I guess, in all honesty, I am not a big fan of interactive-fiction. I AM a
big fan of text adventure games."

I took this to mean that you prefer traditional, puzzle-over-story type
games and that you're not crazy about the experimental stuff.

>I said I like INTERACTIVE-fiction ("text adventures"). It seems to me when
>people get fancier, more experimental, etc., the whole experience often
becomes
>less INTERACTIVE. The less interactive it is, the less I tend to like it.

>
>Because if I want just a story or to spend most of my time exploring a
>particular author's perspective, I can read a book or see a movie. But when
I
>am playing a computer IF "game" (whatever you want to call it), I want
>interactivity. To me, that is the whole point, using the medium, the
computer.
>That is what makes it a DIFFERENT experience from just reading or watching.

Okay. When you use the word interactive, it sounds to me like you mean
picking up things, using those things on other things, exploring all the
things you could reasonably be expected to explore, etc. I would also guess
that you mean being able to affect the outcome of a story, although I'm
still not sure if story is a big priority for you.

When I use the word interactive, I mean the ability to *participate* in the
narrative of the game. This may or may not include messing with things; it
may or may not include affecting the outcome of the story. To some degree,
participation is facilitated by allowing me to type in commands and see how
they affect the game. It is also facilitated by the author's ability to draw
me into the game and make me feel like I (the PC) am a part of an unfolding
story. That's why, for example, Photopia (and please, let's NOT turn this
into another Photopia thread) really worked for me, even though there is not
a great deal of breadth to explore. Instead, there was a lot of *depth* that
I felt immersed in, and felt as though I was participating in. That's why it
seemed very interactive to me, and hardly interactive at all to you.

I enjoy exploring and picking up things and using things on things and
solving puzzles as well, but only when they are subservient to an engaging
and immersive story. I don't like room descriptions and object descriptions
purely for their own sake.

I am very interested in exploring an author's vision. That's what I go into
any book, movie, or game looking for. I'm a writer and I like good writing
and I like it when good writers impress and surprise me. I enjoy stretching
my experience; I enjoy reading something strange and new that I have to work
a little to appreciate. I like work that pushes in new directions. Not all
of those directions always work for me, but I think it's a good thing to
have happening regardless.

I would like to see more games with "authorial vision" released, and I would
like to see them strive towards utilizing the interactive capabilities of
the IF medium to the best effect in supporting that vision. I want to see
stories that, by their very nature, could only have been told in the
interactive fiction medium, because the player's participation is necessary
to understand fully the author's vision.

>I also don't feel that there ARE that many good IF games (traditional
variety)
>at the archive.

I don't either (traditional variety or otherwise). I think there are a bunch
of mediocre ones, a hefty batch of stinkers, and a handful of real gems.

>So there is something I am simply not getting here. You specifically stated
>that you wanted CMP to publish a certain type of IF game. Limit itself to
the
>more experimental ones, I guess, I am not sure.

That's not true. I stated that I want CMP to live up to the standards that
they advertise. If they are going to publish traditional, puzzle-oriented
text adventures, they should advertise as such, but aside from that I don't
have a problem with it. I probably won't buy very many.

Now, I *also* stated that I don't think CMP will go very far with
traditional, puzzle-oriented text adventures. The reason I said this is
because my impression is that the market for traditional text adventures is
pretty small. The people in it are pretty set in their ways; they know what
they like and they expect their games to deliver the goods. I don't think
traditional text adventures have a whole lot to offer people who are not
already a part of this limited market. Therefore, even a well-advertised
game isn't going to make that market grow. On the other hand, games that try
to push the boundaries of what IF can do, and that manage to surprise people
who thought they knew what IF was about, have a better chance of changing
the mind of a non-fan and bringing new people into the market. Market gets
bigger, company does better. I would like to see CMP succeed as a business
venture, so I hope they throw a lot of effort into boundary-pushing games.

Mike Berlyn has a different opinion of the IF market; he thinks it's bigger
than I do and he's confidant that the traditional games will do very well.
I'm not sure I'm convinced, but I accede that Mr. Berlyn would probably know
better than I would.

>You implied anything other than that was a waste of your time.

What I meant to imply is that I don't enjoy them, I'm not obligated to play
them, I'm not obligated to like them, and I'm not obligated to buy them.

The same goes for you. I never got the impression that you felt Photopia was
time well spent on your part.

>By that implication you were dismissing 80-90%
>of IF games already at the archive (and future games) as being essentially
>"inferior".


If I had to guess, I'd estimate that maybe 80% of what's on the IF archive
right now is just not my cup of tea. I don't like them as much as the games
that *are* my cup of tea. Now what law am I breaking, exactly?

>All that is pretty sweeping, so I would like to hear what you have to say
about
>IF, what is inferior (medicore, average), what is better,


A lot of that I've already answered up at the top of this post. I don't like
traditional puzzle-hunt games very much. I like games in which story is
given priority over puzzles, in which the game's design is shaped in
accordance with that story.

>what IS experimental,

What is experiemental? Well, I suppose it's something that hasn't been tried
before. Something that utilizes the medium of IF in an unconventional
manner. Something that is about more than mazes with brass lanterns and
zorkmid coins and empty volcanoes and hot air balloons scattered here and
there. Pick an original vision and mold the conventions of IF in a new way
to fit that vision; you've done something experimental.

To return (briefly) to the example of Photopia: I don't think it failed to
use the medium of IF in a conventional manner. I think it succeeded in using
the medium of IF in an entirely original manner. Thus it was a very
successful experiment.

>the difference between interactive-fiction and text adventures

See above.

>and what you see happening in the future.

In the future, I see both types of games being designed, and I'm always
going to be more interested in the one type than the other.

>Is experimental always better?

Is it better than what? If you mean, "Does an experimental game always work
well?" then the answer is no. If you mean, "Is it always better that we
continue to experiment?" then the answer is yes. If you mean, "Will you
(Mike) always be more interested in experimental over traditional IF?" then
the answer is yes.

>Does it actually offer a better "playing" experience?

It does for me.

>And you may give me some ideas about what to write or how to write it.


I hope so.

-M.
================================================
"If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding.
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?"




From olorin@world.std.com Thu Dec  3 09:31:00 MET 1998
Article: 39774 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: olorin@world.std.com (Mark J Musante)
Subject: [Comp98] Finally Finihsed Reviews
Message-ID: <F3D4H1.A8L@world.std.com>
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 1998 00:10:13 GMT
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Hey, all -

A while back, I posted that I micro-reviewed 19 of the comp games.  Well,
I finally finished the remaining 8.  They're at:
    http://www.ministryofpeace.com/if/comp1998/
along with the transcripts.

These include:
	Trapped in a One-Room Dilly
	In the Spotlight
	Persistence of Memory
	The Plant
	Lightiania
	The City
	Four in One
	Enlightenment

Much apologisings for delay.


  -=- Mark -=-


From edromia@concentric.net Thu Dec  3 12:47:57 MET 1998
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From: "Michael Gentry" <edromia@concentric.net>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Once and Future] all it's cracked up to be?
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>And this doesn't mean that we should all strive for bare-bones,
>minimalist prose. One writer may use ten words to describe what
>another uses fifty for. But if they're both good writers, not a word
>should be superfluous in either text. (This isn't a paradox at all).


True, because what "contributes" and what does not depends in part on what
the artist is trying to accomplish -- and how the artist wishes to
accomplish it. What Ernest Hemingway was trying to accomplish in his writing
requires far fewer words than what Mervyn Peake was trying to accomplish in
*his* writing.

>I think OaF is at least as good as most Infocom games. Conversely, I'm
>not so sure that many Infocom games would live up to your standards if
>they were published today. This is not to say you're wrong in setting
>high standards, of course.


You're right; most Infocom games don't live up to my standards. (...anymore.
I was excited as anyone when Zork first came out, you know.) And yes, I
think that OaF is at least as good as...well, if not *most*...at least
several. But not as good as the ones I would still pay money for. (The ones
that, in fact, I *have* recently paid money for -- I bought the Masterpieces
CD, and there are about 20 games I could happily do without.)

Yes, I have high standards. I don't happen to think that they're
*unreasonable* standards, though.

-M.




From lpsmith@rice.edu Thu Dec  3 21:02:05 MET 1998
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From: lpsmith@rice.edu (Lucian Paul Smith)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Art and Interactivity (was Re: [Once and Future] all it's cracked up to be?)
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Michael Gentry (edromia@concentric.net) wrote:

: Geoff Bailey wrote in message <742k07$sbl@staff.cs.usyd.edu.au>...

: >It is also part of what made Magic: the Gathering such an enjoyable game.

: True, but Magic is a different type of game than an interactive fiction. The
: purpose of the card game is not to create a coherent narrative. IF does not
: revolve around the principle of every object in the game being fully
: implemented to interact in *any* way imaginable with every other object. In
: fact, most games severely restrict the interactivity of objects, relative to
: the full permutational total

But it is still possible to create coherent narrative even within the
context of emergent complexity.  This is what I was striving towards with
my language puzzle in The Edifice.  I coded up a ton of pieces of a
conversation.  Generally, barring a couple questions and the overall goal 
of the situation, any individual piece could come before or after any
other piece.  In fact, when I released the game, I had *no idea* whether
or not players would be able to create a coherent narrative out of all
those pieces.  But, generally, they did.

I'm not saying, of course, that all of IF should work this way.  I am
saying that, used appropriately, it can add to a game in a good way, in a
form completely unknowable to the author.

: >An illustrative example:

: [snipped. guy solves puzzle by lopping his own hands off, basically]

: Actually, this anecdote might serve better as a warning against implementing
: unnecessary objects for the sole purpose of supporting unnecessary grammar.

I think you've missed the point of the example.  The point was that the
player can come up with creative solutions to things using the rules the
author has set up in ways the author didn't expect.  The specific example
was probably a bug, but this doesn't mean that a similar situation
wouldn't be.

Another like example I can remember hearing of was in some graphical
adventure, possibly one of the Ultimas.  There was a chasm you couldn't
jump across, but which you could throw things over.  On the other side was
a switch.  The implementors designed the puzzle so that you would have to
use the telekinesis spell (or some such) to trigger the switch.  However,
some enterprising players discovered that if you killed one of your party
members, threw their body over the chasm, then resurrected them, they
could flip the switch directly.  

Again, you could label this a bug, but the designers were actually pleased
when they discovered you could do this, and left it in.

-Lucian


From pfg@cs.rmit.edu.au Fri Dec  4 10:12:10 MET 1998
Article: 39814 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: pfg@cs.rmit.edu.au (Paul Francis Gilbert)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Stuck in Once Future
Date: 4 Dec 1998 03:20:24 GMT
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zardak@dmv.com writes:


>Could someone offer me some hints on how to solve the third level of the
>mountain king area.
>I'm totally stuck.

>Thanks.

This is one of my favorite puzzles. The hints you get from the walls tell
you that the rooms form a set of rotating triangles. Each diagonal set of
two rooms is connected by an "invisible" room in a straight line between
the two end points. When you point the weathervane in a diagonal direction
and pull the lever, the entire triangle formed by the diagonal direction
and the diagonal direction counter-clockwise from it is rotated by 1.

Pointing the weathervane in a cardinal direction will simply swap in and
out the object from on eof the hidden rooms. 

Like so:

+-+-+
|\ /|
+ o +
|/ \|
+-+-+

By carefully chosing the rotations of each triangle, you cxan get all the
objects placed in their correct rooms.

--
Paul Gilbert           | pfg@yallara.cs.rmit.edu.au (The DreamMaster)
Bach App Sci, Bach Eng | The opinions expressed are my own, all my own, and
Year 5, RMIT Melbourne | as such will contain no references to small furry
Australia	       | creatures from Alpha Centauri.


From melchionna@tecnoprogress.it Fri Dec  4 10:12:34 MET 1998
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From: Luca Melchionna <melchionna@tecnoprogress.it>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp 98] Doe's (Female Deer's) Reviews, Photopia
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Doeadeer3 wrote:

>
>
> Too linear when on Red planet -- walk in straight line to get seed pod. All
> locations passed through are useless, just scenery.
>
> Too linear in sea castle -- wander around and find tower, take shovel, rest of
> area is useless.

I don't agree with that. I didn't play that part in this way. At that point I was
so happy there were no puzzles around, no vending machines, no spare parts under
four-poster beds, no magnetic mouse-robots, no brilliant devices,  that I felt I
could do what I really like, concentrating  on the words and the landscapes.
At a certain point I found out that stepping north or south or in whatever
direction from the spaceship was in any case the RIGHT choice, because the rest of
the rooms would fit according to your first choice. In that way I suddenly realized
I could also get rid of the mapper, and you know what ? I felt liberated, immersed
in the story waist-deep, in one word, interacting.
I know the majority or if-ers tends to be quite traditionalist, but thinking
interactivity is just a matter of inventory and mapping skills is not "mainstream
if".
It's an emotional legacy from the eighties (like the Cure).

Luca Melchionna



From edromia@concentric.net Fri Dec  4 14:59:45 MET 1998
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From: "Michael Gentry" <edromia@concentric.net>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Art & Interactivity
Date: 03 Dec 1998 17:46:21 PST
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(This is in response to Lucian Smith; for some reason my news reader didn't
snag his post, so I had to scrape it off DejaNews...)

>>>>>>>>>>
But it is still possible to create coherent narrative even within the
context of emergent complexity. This is what I was striving towards with
my language puzzle in The Edifice.
>>>>>>>>>>

I think we might be using the term "narrative" in two different ways. I'm
talking about the context of the story that the IF game is trying to tell.
Your language puzzle is very effective at creating a scene in which two
strangers attempt to communicate, but its complexity is subservient to the
larger story that Edifice is attempting to tell. The puzzle isn't designed
to be applicable in any conceivable context (e.g., you can't struggle to
communicate with the wildebeest on Level One) -- it only works in the
context that you specifically designed it for.

Actually, let's talk about your language puzzle. I'm going to go out on a
limb here and make an assumption about how you coded it, which may well be
wrong -- but bear with me, because I'm constructing a hypothetical argument.
(I'd love to hear how you *actually* coded it, but heaven forbid we should
get off-topic. :-)

Let's assume that you created the puzzle by laying down a series of ground
rules about grammar and word usage, and then generating a list of words that
had certain properties which allowed them to be affected in various ways by
these rules. So that, by applying these rules of grammar to any given
combination of words entered by the player, the computer can generate one of
several intelligent responses (The Stranger's face brightens in
comprehension. "[you are correct, this is my son]" he says.) or an error
(The Stranger shakes his head. "[you are speaking complete gibberish]" he
says.)

Now, barring bugs in the code, doesn't it stand to reason that someone
familiar with 1) the rules of grammar and 2) the complete list of possible
words and their properties could reasonably predict the outcome of any
sentence that the player tried to type? (I know it is conceivable that an
author could create a set of rules so complex and a list of words so
exhaustive that it would be impossible to completely familiarize yourself
with the system you just created, but let's limit our discussion to what can
be reasonably done within the scope of an ordinary IF game.)

Now consider this: let's say that, in fact, you *did* create your language
puzzle so complex that you can no longer predict the outcome of a given
piece of input. Let's say that someone out there has discovered an input
that lies well outside of the sense that you wanted your language puzzle to
convey, but which nevertheless falls through the rules of grammar in such a
way that it actually solves the puzzle. Let's say someone e-mails you and
says: "Hey, guess what? I was playing Edifice, and I discovered that if you
just say the word FOO five times in a row to the Stranger, he hands you the
healing leaf without further ado!"

Would you say to yourself, "Gee, that's neat! My game must be a lot richer
than I thought it was!" ...or would you say, "Hmm, there's something I need
to fix."

Another hypothetical, slightly more blatant example: suppose in a fit of
carelessness you forgot to trap the TAKE action for animate objects (which
is not something you can do in Inform unless you deliberately try to, but
I'm still being hypothetical), allowing the player to pick up any NPC, carry
that NPC in inventory, and haul that NPC to any room in the game, utterly
divorced from the context you designed the character for. Let's suppose some
enterprising player uses this loophole to carry his ailing son from Level
Two down to Level One and throw the kid into the Fire, which you, with a
conscientious eye towards object-oriented, simulationist programming, have
directed to consume and remove from play *any* object that gets thrown into
it. The son is burned to a cinder; the need for the fever leaf and, by
extension, the entire language puzzle, is apparently eliminated.

Has that player really found a clever way to "solve" Level Two? Or is this
something that you need to fix?

>>>>>>>>>>
I'm not saying, of course, that all of IF should work this way.  I am
saying that, used appropriately, it can add to a game in a good way, in a
form completely unknowable to the author.
>>>>>>>>>>

See, I'm arguing that, if the result is *completely* unknown to the author,
then the odds are astronomically against it adding to the game in a good
way.

>>>>>>>>>>
: [snipped. guy solves puzzle by lopping his own hands off, basically]

: Actually, this anecdote might serve better as a warning against
implementing
: unnecessary objects for the sole purpose of supporting unnecessary
grammar.

I think you've missed the point of the example.
>>>>>>>>>>

And here I thought I was being ironic. Yes, the point of the example was
that the player was very, very clever. *My* point was that the result was to
the detriment of the game.

>>>>>>>>>>
Another like example I can remember hearing of was in some graphical
adventure, possibly one of the Ultimas.  There was a chasm you couldn't
jump across, but which you could throw things over.  On the other side was
a switch.  The implementors designed the puzzle so that you would have to
use the telekinesis spell (or some such) to trigger the switch.  However,
some enterprising players discovered that if you killed one of your party
members, threw their body over the chasm, then resurrected them, they
could flip the switch directly.
>>>>>>>>>>

Okay, I'm glad you brought this up, because *I* wanted to bring it up, but I
couldn't remember the details. (I'm pretty sure it is from Ultima, one of
the later ones. Six or seven, maybe.)

This situation sort of works for me, and sort of doesn't. It sort of works
because a game like Ultima >6 is several orders of magnitude closer to being
a full-on simulation than interactive fiction is ever likely to get. It's
built to deal with real spatial physics in a way that text adventure games
are not. Thus, within the scope of the "laws of physics" that are
implemented in the game, this is a plausible solution to the puzzle.

The reason why it doesn't work is because it takes me out of playing the
game and puts me into just playing the numbers -- trying to second-guess all
the inner gears and workings that are supposed to be going on invisibly
behind the scenes.

Now, this might not bother me as much while playing Ultima, because the
appeal of Ultima rests on strengths other than a tightly-woven narrative
(real spatial mapping, buffing up experience points, etc.) -- but it would
be kiss-of-death while playing interactive fiction. Cutting off the PC's
hands in order to get through a one-object squeeze puzzle doesn't feel like
an alternate solution to me; it feels like directing a SharpClass piece of
code (which arbitrarily bears the short_name "axe") to send a CutAction
message to a couple of DisconnectableClass pieces of code (which arbitrarily
bear the short_name "hands") that the author didn't have the foresight to
label as InseparableClass as well, and thus find a cheat through the game. I
might feel pleased with myself in a smug sort of way, but I wouldn't really
feel clever and I wouldn't be enjoying the game.

Which is why I don't think it's a situation to be striven for, and why I
classify such a situation as a bug to be eliminated. Interactive fiction
works much better when its component elements are crafted with deliberate
purpose and context in mind.

-M.
================================================
"If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding.
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?"





From erkyrath@netcom.com Fri Dec  4 16:51:51 MET 1998
Article: 39828 of rec.games.int-fiction
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Subject: Re: Photopia...
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guybrush@netvision.net.il wrote:


> I have to disagree. IF gives a sense of involvement in the story that you
> don't get in a book. This is true even if you follow a very strict plotline
> and don't have much space to alter. Photopia, in my opinion, is a wonderful
> example to a beautiful creation, a work of art, which can't be better in any
> other medium. But still, it isn't  a game.

> I don't know if anyone knows The Dark Eye. It's an interactive experience (not
> IF) of some of Edgar Allen Poe's short stories. It has no puzzles, there are
> not many choices you can make in the game, but it still has something which
> neither the written stories nor any movie could ever have, because of its
> interactivity, and the result is spectacular.

(Yeah, I'm a few posts behind.)

I've played Dark Eye, and I liked it. However. I ask myself, what is the
interactivity in it that's different from the interactivity in Photopia?

As I recall DE (and it's been a couple of years), the choices I made were
basically the first level of puzzle-game-design: Have I clicked on the
right object? If yes, plot continues. If no, I'm stuck -- walk around
looking for the right object. Several times I *did* get stuck. Most of the
time, I understood where the plot was going, clicked on the object
representing what I wanted to do next, and the story continued.

In Photopia, most of the time, I understood where the plot was going,
typed in the right action, and the story continued. Once, I got stuck, the
game dropped a workaround for me, I used it, and the story continued.

Distinction two: DE is organized as an alternating set of episodes: "real
world" scenes alternating with surreal interludes. (You know, until I
started typing that sentence I didn't realize how close the parallel is...
Heh.) 

Ok, here's the difference: Photopia's episodes are in a fixed order. DE
has a hybrid model: the real-world scenes are in a fixed order, and in
each one, you get to the end and stop. Then you must play an interlude.
The interludes can be played in *any* order; you can work on all of them,
and as soon as you finish any one, the next real-world scene becomes
available. 

Now, my point is, this just doesn't strike me as *the* difference between
an interactive experience and a train ride. When I finished DE, I
certainly didn't think "Wow, I sure made a difference in how that ended."
It's perfectly obvious that the order of interludes is arbitrary. 

And the first distinction (about the plot continuing) is even less
important to me. Getting stuck and frustrated is *not* the kind of
interactivity I want; it's certainly interactive, but it's boring!
*Solving* puzzles (or "understanding", if you don't like the crossword
image) is what I enjoy, and I did that in both games. It's the *failure
mode* that's different between the two games: Would you like to get stuck
and never finish, or get dragged through a plot that you don't understand
any of because you're barely paying attention? These are equally
unenjoyable. And in fact, the existence of on-line hints or off-line
hints, *or even third-party hints on the net*, turns the former into the
latter.

Basically, a classification is of little interest to me if that's the
distinction it offers. 

Reiterating footnote: I think they're both excellent games. The excellence
comes from what's *in* there, not the overall structure. (Photopia has
interplay between the real-world scenes and the interludes. DE's
interludes are not connected to the real world, but there's a lot of
interplay *between* interludes -- they come in pairs, single stories seen
>from two different points of view.)

--Z


-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From edromia@concentric.net Sat Dec  5 15:31:13 MET 1998
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From: "Michael Gentry" <edromia@concentric.net>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Art & Interactivity
Date: 04 Dec 1998 17:16:40 PST
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Doeadeer3 wrote in message <19981203234337.03681.00000880@ngol07.aol.com>...
>
>In article <747etd$55m@chronicle.concentric.net>, "Michael Gentry"
><edromia@concentric.net> writes:
>
>>Which is why I don't think it's a situation to be striven for, and why I
>>classify such a situation as a bug to be eliminated. Interactive fiction
>>works much better when its component elements are crafted with deliberate
>>purpose and context in mind.
>
>Well, of course.
>
>I think this all started because I said an interactive-fiction game, one
that
>is truly interactive, allows the player to push the author's boundaries a
bit,
>explore outside their boundaries. I ALSO said that outside exploring is
written
>by the author too, that it is an illusion, but if done well, it remains a
good
>illusion.


After much digging through DejaNews, I did indeed find where you said that.
So groovy! I'm glad we agree. I've been trying to make the point that
"pushing the author's boundaries" doesn't make any sense in the first place
because, as you kindly pointed out, it is *all* written by the author.

I agree with you that, when done well, the illusion "holds" -- that is to
say, a skillful author can make the boundaries invisible, much the same way
a magician uses misdirection to make a magic trick look real. Draw the
player's attention away from the limits of the game, and focus on the
elements that give the illusion of freedom. It's a sign of a very
well-written game.

Now, we do at times disagree as to the best way to achieve this. I don't,
for example, think spatial exploration is a prerequisite for interactivity.
I also think it's a mistake to decry authorial vision at the expense of
"player-oriented games", because I don't think authors should remain
shackled to a set of unchallenged audience expectations. We don't improve
without taking risks, and you can't take risks without trying to stretch
those expectations a little.

But I'm with you in spirit, though, and that's the important thing.

-M.
================================================
"If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding.
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?"




From mkkuhner@kingman.genetics.washington.edu Tue Dec  8 10:04:45 MET 1998
Article: 39889 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: mkkuhner@kingman.genetics.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Art and Interactivity (was Re: [Once and Future] all it's cracked up to be?)
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In article <eCTZcJjI#GA.210@upnetnews03>,
Avrom Faderman <Avrom_Faderman@email.msn.com> wrote:

>That, I think, is what's most important to most I-F
>players' sense of "winning", "progress", and "puzzles"--the solution isn't
>what most benefits the PC;  it's what opens up the most story--or, *only
>when there's no more story to be opened*, what provides the best sense of
>climax and/or closure.

Yes!  That's what I was trying (and failing) to articulate earlier.
Knowing that there's a bunch more story in there, and failing to find
it, is "losing" for the player/reader.  If you make the player "lose"
in this sense, she may well go back and try other branches, make an
exhaustive search even, and this may damage the flow of your game/story
as narrative.  The player motivation overwhelms the character 
motivation (which presumably was perceived as pointing towards the 
original decision).

I nearly spoilt "Photopia" for myself this way, but luckily there
were enough warn-offs to make me realize it wasn't going to be a good
idea.  (The conversations will, I think, suffer greatly from being
treated as puzzles.)

Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@genetics.washington.edu


From lpsmith@rice.edu Tue Dec  8 22:03:58 MET 1998
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From: lpsmith@rice.edu (Lucian Paul Smith)
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Subject: Re: Art & Interactivity
Date: 8 Dec 1998 16:37:24 GMT
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<cross-posted to raif>

Michael Gentry (edromia@concentric.net) wrote:
: (This is in response to Lucian Smith; for some reason my news reader didn't
: snag his post, so I had to scrape it off DejaNews...)

: >>>>>>>>>>
: But it is still possible to create coherent narrative even within the
: context of emergent complexity. This is what I was striving towards with
: my language puzzle in The Edifice.
: >>>>>>>>>>

: I think we might be using the term "narrative" in two different ways. I'm
: talking about the context of the story that the IF game is trying to tell.
: Your language puzzle is very effective at creating a scene in which two
: strangers attempt to communicate, but its complexity is subservient to the
: larger story that Edifice is attempting to tell. 

I was, indeed, trying to just talk about that one scene, and not the
entirety of 'The Edifice'.  But I still contend that 'a scene in which two
strangers attempt to communicate' counts as 'narrative'.  I think the rest
of our conflict rests in some later assumptions you make,...

: Actually, let's talk about your language puzzle. I'm going to go out on a
: limb here and make an assumption about how you coded it, which may well be
: wrong -- but bear with me, because I'm constructing a hypothetical argument.
: (I'd love to hear how you *actually* coded it, but heaven forbid we should
: get off-topic. :-)

As it happens, I've written an article on this for XYZZY #16, "Parlez-vous
Nalian?", and have released source code for it as well, at

ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/programming/inform6/library/contributions/nalian.inf

: Let's assume that you created the puzzle by laying down a series of ground
: rules about grammar and word usage, and then generating a list of words that
: had certain properties which allowed them to be affected in various ways by
: these rules. 

<snip>

: Now, barring bugs in the code, doesn't it stand to reason that someone
: familiar with 1) the rules of grammar and 2) the complete list of possible
: words and their properties could reasonably predict the outcome of any
: sentence that the player tried to type? 

OK, you told me to bear with you in your hypothetical example, so, yeah,
had I coded Edifice like this, this would be true.

It is not, however, what I was talking about.

As it happens, I hard-coded in every last response Stranger can say.  For
any given input, you will always get the same output.  But what I meant
by 'emergent complexity' in this case was not the possible response to a
single line of input, but, rather, the *entire conversation* that resulted
>from a series of inputs, based on the growing understanding of the player.

I would venture to say that no two people experienced the same
conversation with Stranger.  Likewise, no two people's understanding of
Nalian grew in the same shape.  This is borne out by the e-mails that I
got asking me for the definitions of words they didn't get:  each person
had their own list, quite different from anyone else's.

So my point was not that I didn't know what would happen if the player
typed, "Stranger, Foo" five times in a row.  I could tell you exactly what
would happen.  What I *didn't* know was if the conversation was navigable.
I didn't know if there were many ways to arrive at an understanding
between the player and Stranger, or if there were only a few, or only one,
or none, or what.

In a highly condensed sense, this is exactly what happens for an author of
an entire game.  Sure, they can tell you exactly what will happen to any
given input in a given set of conditions.  What they *can't* tell you for
sure is whether that output will make any sense to the player, and whether
or not they'll be able to use that understanding to help them progress in
the game.  There is no 'ideal transcript' for many games.  The complexity
each player bring to the game, combined with the complexity of the rules
themselves, make for an unpredictable result--and an unpredictable
emergent narrative.

I'm wandering here, let me see if I can relate what I've been saying to
the rest of the conversation.

Way back when, you said:

----------
It bears mentioning that, insofar as every last detail, no matter how
insignificant-seeming, that exists within the world of a game must
necessarily have been deliberately coded there, line by weary line, by the
author, it is patently impossible to do *anything* that the author didn't
foresee.
----------

In 'The Edifice', I deliberately coded in line after weary line of code,
and it was patently impossible to have a conversation that I *did* forsee.
Every last player of my game 'pushed the author's boundaries'.

: See, I'm arguing that, if the result is *completely* unknown to the author,
: then the odds are astronomically against it adding to the game in a good
: way.

The result of a single line of input?  Yes, generally, I agree with you.
The resulting narrative that emerges from a series of input?  I disagree
again.

: >>>>>>>>>>
: I think you've missed the point of the example.
: >>>>>>>>>>

: And here I thought I was being ironic. Yes, the point of the example was
: that the player was very, very clever. *My* point was that the result was to
: the detriment of the game.

No, the point of the example (in my mind, at least) was not about the
cleverness of the player.  The point was that the player's understanding
of the situation led them to behave in a manner that the author didn't
anticipate.  The fact that the actual command they used was also not
anticipated served to emphasize the point.

I admit it wasn't a stellar example.  I think we saw it from two different
angles, too, which didn't help.  For me, it was a bug that pointed towards
the possibility of something greater.  For you, obviously, it was just a
bug.

<snip Ultima example>

: The reason why it doesn't work is because it takes me out of playing the
: game and puts me into just playing the numbers -- trying to second-guess all
: the inner gears and workings that are supposed to be going on invisibly
: behind the scenes.

Again, I think you're focusing on the 'bug' aspect of the example, and not
on the potential it points to.

So, let me try to come up with a better example.  The conversation in
Edifice is pretty good--let me try to talk about your game 'Anchorhead'
now.

<mild spoilers ahead>









On day 3, I think it was, you've discovered a bunch of horrible things
about the situation you're in, and, more specifically, about things that
are happening to your husband.  He was gone for most of day 2 when you
were discovering these things, but he's back again in the morning, and, if
you pester him trying to tell him about all the stuff you've discovered,
he gets annoyed and storms out of the house.

I think it's fair to say, from reading some of your posts, that this was
supposed to indicate to the player that they shouldn't pester Michael so
much, and focus on other things.  For me, though, this scene really worked
especially well *as narrative*--I thought it was a wonderful way of
working within the limits of IF to produce believable behaviour for both
the main character and for Michael.

Could you have told me what would happen if I entered ">PESTER MICHAEL. G.
G. G. G." ?  Yes.  Could you have told me what it would mean to me?  No.

: Which is why I don't think it's a situation to be striven for, and why I
: classify such a situation as a bug to be eliminated. Interactive fiction
: works much better when its component elements are crafted with deliberate
: purpose and context in mind.

The player will always be unexpected.  It's part of the charm of IF.  As
an author, you can either try to work with that force, try to subvert it,
or try to quash it.  I think the first two options make for a more
enjoyable playing experience for the player.

-Lucian



From lac@nu-world.com Thu Dec 17 11:15:17 MET 1998
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From: lac@nu-world.com (Lelah Conrad)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [OAF] Done in Faery?
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On 16 Dec 1998 10:25:56 +0000, Martin Dransfield
<Martin.Dransfield@texcel.no> wrote:

 
>I must admit that I didn't check the consequences of giving the crowns
>to the Queen before this thread, but have you been back to the
>mountain after handing over the Earth Crown?  

Yes, and while you're at it, don't forget what handing over the air
crown does -- you have to go back to that point where you met the swan
to see that.
>
>Looks like an idea for a sequel: Avalon II - Revolution in Faeryland.

For some reason when I read this I had a sudden vision of Kevin going
door to door piping "Avalon calling!", selling shiny little crowns out
of his pink cadillac.  

Lelah

whose mind is very random at times :)


From terra@planetquake.com.spam Tue Jan 19 17:31:13 CET 1999
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From: terra@planetquake.com.spam (BabelFish)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: [REVIEW] MUSE: An Autumn Romance
Date: Tue, 19 Jan 1999 16:10:46 GMT
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WARNING! ACHTUNG! AVVERTIMENTO! AVISO! ALERTA! AVERTISSEMENT!

                  Possible Spoilers Below

WARNING! ACHTUNG! AVVERTIMENTO! AVISO! ALERTA! AVERTISSEMENT!



MUSE: An Autumn Romance
by Christopher Huang

Review by Ryan N. Freebern

Perhaps I'm not as appreciative of fine art as others around here, or
maybe I just see things differently. But while people have praised
Huang's "MUSE" to high heaven (and even awarded it second place in the
1998 IF competition), I don't consider it worth nearly that much
praise, as it seems to me still a work in progress.

The story itself is quite interesting, and a problem I have grappled
with on several occasions (although I am only 18, age gaps have
affected me in powerful ways already). The protagonist Dawson is
certainly a little-used type of character in IF, as most seem to be
either totally ambiguous or young and healthy. I find Huang's use of
an older man, combined with the Victorian period  and the constraints
of the clergyhood, to offer a new way of presenting puzzles to the
player quite ingenious.

However, I found the first-person perspective almost distracting.
Issuing commands to Dawson as if I were him, and having him respond in
the past tense and the first-person was slightly confusing. I felt
like typing "INTRODUCE YOURSELF TO THE ARTIST" instead of "INTRODUCE
ME TO THE ARTIST," and the like.

For a game that professed to put NPC interaction as a top priority, I
found characters giving standard "I don't have a response for that"
responses far too often. If more time were devoted to keying up
responses for any question or statement that the player could make, it
would give the characters more life and certainly move the story
along. More than once I was stuck as to what I was expected to do
next, and nobody was telling me anything I didn't already know. In a
romance, you'd expect the fraulein to answer quite profoundly to "ASK
KONSTANZA ABOUT LOVE," or "KONSTANZA, MARRY ME." Each of those simply
produced a standard not-interested response.

Also, I think the linearity of the game was far too much like a
Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, with several preprogrammed endings -
endings that I was easily whisked along to once I had typed in the
correct phrase in the correct place. (I know linearity is a problem
all IF authors struggle to overcome, and very few games have managed
to diverge far from the linear approach, so I suppose this complaint
goes for most games.)

A few nitpicky things: the fact that Dawson was a clergyman didn't
have
terribly much impact on the story, except for limiting his actions. I
couldn't read any passages of my Bible for inspiration ("I practically
know the whole thing by heart," Dawson responded), and prayer was
completely futile.

My storage trunk, despite being one of the very few carryable objects
in the game, was of very little import. At the least, there could be
something in it with which I could accomplish something - money with
which to purchase things? A gift which I had planned on giving Emma
but could give instead to Konstanza? I don't know. And the fact that I
couldn't stick the trunk under Viktor's feet to support him, but had
to "HOLD VIKTOR" instead was annoying. Later, while attempting to
cheer Viktor up, Rene wouldn't respond to "RENE, SWITCH ROOMS" or any
variation thereof - only "RENE, CHANGE ROOMS" seemed to do anything.

Yvette and Father LeBrun were both very static characters who could
have used some fleshing out and, had they been given a more active
role in the story, would have definitely been very interesting.
Perhaps Yvette could have had a crush on John Austin and been
heartbroken when he fell in love with Konstanza. Perhaps the good
priest could have overheard something that would make your job
slightly easier.

Looking in directions needed more description. In the rooms in the
Inn, the command "LOOK OUT WINDOW" was incomprehensible, and while
standing on the open pier, jutting out into the English Channel, I
typed "LOOK WEST", only to receive the response that "I saw nothing
interesting about the west wall." Wall? Not being able to sit down
while in the pub or the church was diconcerting (Dawson is an old man
- he likes to rest his muscles sometimes) and more detail in the
surroundings might be nice: being able to read the gravestones,
perhaps, or at least browse the headlines on the newspapers in the
postmaster's office.

One thing I do prefer about MUSE as opposed to some games is the fact
that it is set in the real world, and doesn't depend upon strange,
fantastic settings all the time (like Andrew Plotkin's "So Far," for
instance.) While fantasy does have its place in IF, I usually find
realistic, earthly settings much more interesting and comfortable than
imaginary ones. But that's just personal preference.

Overall, MUSE was a neat little story that wrapped itself up nicely
with a bow, but inside the package were several unsatisfying elements
and loose ends which disturbed me, in a second-place game. In my
opinion, the game should have been kept in development for a while
longer to flesh things out more - characters, conversations,
environmental details in particular. Still, an interesting change of
pace from other IF games I've played, and one with a promising future.
I look forward to future works from Huang.

-r



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From: "Aris Katsaris" <katsaris@otenet.gr>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [REVIEW] MUSE: An Autumn Romance
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 1999 19:28:52 +0200
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BabelFish wrote in message <36a6f389.89827750@news.logical.net>...
[spoilers below]


























>>This criticism doesn't make sense. Linearity and several endings? It is
>>perhaps somewhat like a CYOA book, but much more interactive, don't you
>>agree?
>
>A limited branch-tree, then, not linear. What were the possible
>endings? Leave on the boat immediately (which is what I did the first
>time I played... heh, Mom has instilled in me a sense of keeping my
>promises), let Viktor hang and marry Konstanza, though unhappily, or
>get Konstanza together with John and let them be happy.


There are more. After John draws Konstanza buying the picture will not make
him certain of his abilities and after you leave, he'll take his own life.
Or after getting them together not meeting them again leaves you quite
depressed. And perhaps there's one more I don't remember. I believe there
are 6 possible endings.

Aris Katsaris




From mberlyn@cascadepublishing.com Sun Feb  7 22:23:45 CET 1999
Article: 41051 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: "Mike Berlyn" <mberlyn@cascadepublishing.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Any official name for this?
Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1999 12:07:16 -0800
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They are commonly known as "feelies." At least that's what we called them at
Infocom.

-- Mike
http://www.cascadepublishing.com


Roger J. Long wrote in message <79kku1$l82$3@news-2.news.gte.net>...
>Infocom included extra items in their games, such as a "Don't Panic"
>button for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  I've been calling them
>Freebies, but I've seen other people calling them Feelies.
>
>Is there any "official" designation for these?




From dmss100@york.ac.uk Tue Feb  9 17:43:49 CET 1999
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From: Den of Iniquity <dmss100@york.ac.uk>
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Subject: Re: Nominees for 1998 XYZZY Awards announced
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On Fri, 5 Feb 1999 spatula@s wrote:

 > On 5 Feb 1999 14:32:36 GMT, willwink@informatik.rwth-aachen.de (Lutz
 > van Hasselt) wrote:
 >
 > Who?

Hmm. Lutz wrote:
  >> > Best individual NPC
  >> >   Anchorhead (Michael Gentry)
  >> Who?

IE, which indiviual NPC from Anchorhead - failing, it seems, to notice the
paranthetical statement 'Michael Gentry'. 


Start of a transcript of
ANCHORHEAD
An interactive gothic by Michael S. Gentry

(Type HELP or ABOUT for some useful information.)

Release 4 / Serial number 990201 / Inform v6.15 Library 6/7
Standard interpreter 1.0 (6F) / Library serial number 970918

>x office
The door has a glass front with the name of the real estate company --
Benson & Brackhurst -- stenciled across it. The blinds are drawn, the
lights are off inside, and no one appears to be home. Odd, since the agent
knew you were coming today. 

>xyzzy
Michael Gentry appears in a puff of smoke.

"Did I appear in a _puff_ of smoke?" Michael enquires, half to himself.
"What a revolting cliche. Something for revision 5." He produces a
notebook from a pocket and starts to scribble something down about
appearing in a more original manner.

>Michael, hi
"Hi there. What do you think of it so far?"

>Michael, it's great
"Don't be shy to criticise it, please. You know I love feedback of any
sort. Did you like Little Blue Men?"

>yes

"Really? That's great." Michael plucks the umbrella from your hands, and
stares down its length carefully, as if examining it down to the very
code. He closes and opens it thoughtfully. "I'm glad Little Blue Men
was as well-recieved as it was, being experimental and all that. Did you
know it has been nominated for Xyzzy awards? I was afraid people would be
turned off by the PC."

You are getting wet.

>undo
Outside the Real Estate Office
[Previous turn undone.]

>no "Really? What was it that you didn't like? I mean... Hang on, did you
just undo your turn? What are you afraid of? I would have given the
umbrella back. I'm not going to bite your head off or anything." Michael
grins. You have a strange image of him looming over you, teeth poised; in
his game, you realise, he could do exactly that. You tremble slightly.

>transcript off

End of transcript.


-- 
Den




From tessman@remove-to-reply.interlog.com Thu Feb 11 16:06:26 CET 1999
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From: "Kent Tessman" <tessman@remove-to-reply.interlog.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction,rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Hugo v2.5b for Win32, Mac (Glk)
Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 19:23:57 -0500
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I've uploaded Hugo v2.5b to ftp://ftp.gmd.de/incoming/if-archive.  Included
is a Mac Hugo Engine executable package (which runs courtesy of Glk).  At
the moment, it's in beta (as are the Win32 Glk version, and the Glk Hugo
source in general), even if it's not explicitly named as such.

Glk Hugo is text-only at the moment:  it doesn't support Hugo's more
advanced features such as arbitrary windowing, colored text, graphics,
sound, or music.  My next Glk-related project is to get graphics working in
some sort of portable manner.

Thanks to Andrew Plotkin, one of the harder-working men in rock and roll
these days, for helping to refine the Glk interface layer into shape and for
compiling the Mac package.  However, please e-mail me with bug reports for
any version (Mac included); presumably any problems will be in my interface
layer, and if not, I can pass it on to the proper authorities.

I'd also be interested in hearing from Hugo authors to see how various
programs perform under Glk:  everything I've tested seems to behave
properly, or at least as expected.

These are the uploaded files:

    hugov25_win32.zip        - Windows 9x/NT executables
    hugov25_macglk.hqx       - Macintosh executable (engine only)
    hugov25_winglk.zip       - Win32 Glk executable (engine only)
    hugov25_32bit.zip        - 32-bit DOS executables
    hugov25_16bit.zip        - 16-bit DOS executables (sans hegr.exe)
    hdgr.zip                 - 32-bit DOS graphical debugger

    hugov25_source.tar.gz    - Main source distribution
    hugov25_win32_source.zip - Windows 9x/NT source
    hugov25_16bit_source.zip - 16-bit DOS source
    hugov25_32bit_source.zip - 32-bit DOS source
    hugov25_glk_source.zip   - Glk source (including Win32 and Mac)

--Kent

_____
Kent Tessman
The General Coffee Company Film Productions
http://www.geocities.com/hollywood/academy/5976/





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> First, I point out that, in the earlier Infocom games, you could do
> just about anything.  Many of these games had a begin-game and an
> endgame, and then the middle was whatever you wanted to make it.  That
> was certainly an appeal behind Zork I & II; go, have fun, do things in
> whatever order, etc.  Think of Suspended.  "You are here.  Much must
> be done.  What do you do?"  This appeal reached its logical extreme in
> Deadline, where you could do bloody-well ANYTHING (or nothing); the
> plot would begin or end with or without you.

Well, sorta. Lots of things would only happen if you took the right
actions to initiate them. But it's true that there were timed events that
you were likely to miss if you weren't on the ball.

> But towards the end of the beginning period (ugh), games were coming
> out that were more linear.  This is, I suspect, inevitable, given the
> nature of fiction; the demand for more story than "wander, get stuff"
> or "wander, get stuff, kill bad guy" means the story can't possibly
> branch to include every intricacy -and- still maintain the illusion of
> a determanistic story.  Usually, then, they try to "fudge" it with
> non-linear portions of a linear game (ala Hitchhiker's Guide to the
> Galaxy).  At its worst, this technique results in things like Sherlock
> and (to a lesser extent) Once & Future:  "The complex, intricate,
> weaved story will progress once you accumulate the four beakers of
> Foozle!"

True, but it wasn't always so clumsy. In Ballyhoo, the story advanced once
you did certain things, and the connections weren't too obscure or
contrived. Trinity, moreover, combined linearity--the ending chapter--with
non-linearity--the middle section of the game, quite well at that. (At
least, I thought so.) Plus (I'm not saying that you were arguing this) I'm
not sure that the "wander around and get stuff" model always produced a
poor story; Spellbreaker, for instance, pretty much fit that model, but I
thought it told a fairly compelling story.

> You also mention a couple of times that, if you know what you're
> doing, the games are quite short.  Well, that's true... but I don't
> think they were really meant to be replayed.  Now, if you're a psychic
> playing Seastalker, you're in for a short experience. :)  But
> otherwise, it'll take you a while (and Seastalker -was- meant to be
> solved and solvable by younger players).

Also, hints cost something, so one gave the games a good shot with one's
own wits. With Masterpieces, the hints are right there in the CD, or on
Peter Scheyen's web site if you prefer it that way. Sure, if you have lots
of willpower, you can stare at a problem for months, but I don't think
many people have that kind of willpower--and when hints are readily
available, it shortens the total time spent playing the game a whole lot.

Duncan Stevens
d-stevens@nwu.edu
773-728-9721

Love in the open hand, no thing but that,
Ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt,
As one should bring you cowslips in a hat
Swung from her hand, or apples in her skirt,
I bring you, calling out as children do,
"Look what I have!--And these are all for you."

--Edna St. Vincent Millay




From dns361@merle.acns.nwu.edu Mon Feb 15 20:44:40 CET 1999
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From: Second April <dns361@merle.acns.nwu.edu>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Infocom and the Test of Time
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> Nord & Bert - Pretty damn bad. Of course this is not a traditional game, and
> since english isn't my first language I might not appreciate all of the humour
> in it. But I thought the whole concept was uninteresting, and rather silly.
> I ended up using the hints for the entire last chapter...

A lot of the humor in Nord & Bert turns on cliches or idioms that you
might not have recognized, particularly in the "Buy the Farm" and "Eat
Your Words" sections; I found those parts pretty funny, though others were
less inspired ("Act the Part," I always thought, was particularly weak).
It's an uneven effort, but the high points are quite good if you're
familiar with the wordplay.

> Seastalker - Ok, this is aimed at beginners, and might be a good game for
> younger people. But it's very short, really. If you know what to do you can
> get through it in 15 minutes.

It is pretty short, and the middle section seems almost comical--lots of
characters come running up to you and say "Gee, Fred, there's a problem in
the C sector! Do you suppose I should take the obvious steps to solve it?"
"Okay, done!" But I'd hold this to a lower standard.

> Sherlock - One of the better ones, although you can solve many of the problems
> 'by accident', that is, you can solve problems before you know you have to.
> In a detective story, the fun should be to see the plot unfold, but this is
> more a treasure hunt than anything else.

I found this one somewhat disappointing--and I played it when it was first
released--though it has a few nice puzzles. I don't remember solving
puzzles before I knew I had to, though.

> Plundered Hearts - Well, being male, maybe I have a bit of a problem
> identifying with a girl falling for a dashing pirate...all in all, it's an ok
> game, although the story doesn't do much for me. Once again, it strikes me
> as very short...my memories of the old Infocom games was that they were huge,
> but that may have been compared to the other IF games around at that time...

I think Plundered Hearts is shorter than most--perhaps because the
designer spent more time and memory fleshing out NPCs than coding puzzles.
(There are more, and better, NPCs than in most Infocom entries.)

> Having said all of the above (which is very IMHO, of course), I must say that
> about ten years ago, I was a huge fan of Infocom. I bought Planetfall,
> Stationfall, Hollywood Hijinx, Ballyhoo, Starcross and Cutthroats for my C64,
> and loved them...(well, maybe not Ballyhoo, that had some strange ideas in
> it..)

Interesting, since Cutthroats (sorry, Mike, but it's true) and Hollywood
Hijinx are often considered substandard by Infocom fans. (I've played 
them and I have to agree.) Don't discount the effects of the feelies,
including the packaging, and the cognitive dissonance aspect of paying a
good deal for one game--you may have been more inclined to consider them
good games because you paid $30 or $40.

> I think part of it is that the genre has evolved since then. There are many
> games in the if-archive that are at least as good as Infocom ever was, and a
> few that is better.

True. (Remember, however, that Infocom was dealing with space and memory
limitations that don't plague current game authors.) Even in the best of
the best--Spellbreaker in particular--there's plenty of unimplemented
scenery, which would earn those games some bad press today but which was
no big deal then. I played some of the Infocom titles when I was a wee
lad, and the only one I remember being really disappointed in was
Moonmist--and at the age of 12, I was probably getting a little old for
that one anyway. When I tried others recently for the first time, I found
several not quite up to par--for that matter, when I went back and looked
at some that I _had_ played long ago, I thought they didn't all measure
up. (Sorcerer in particular, and Zork I is pretty clunky in some ways.)
But the good ones--Enchanter, Spellbreaker, Trinity, Beyond Zork,
Infidel--well, they're still pretty good. (And I played Starcross,
Suspended, and Deadline for the first time in the last year or so and was
favorably impressed.)

There's a range in quality of Infocom games, in short. The best still look
good, even after GMD has changed the scene; the others are now average at
best.

Duncan Stevens
d-stevens@nwu.edu
773-728-9721

Love in the open hand, no thing but that,
Ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt,
As one should bring you cowslips in a hat
Swung from her hand, or apples in her skirt,
I bring you, calling out as children do,
"Look what I have!--And these are all for you."

--Edna St. Vincent Millay




From dns361@merle.acns.nwu.edu Wed Feb 17 10:17:49 CET 1999
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From: Second April <dns361@merle.acns.nwu.edu>
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Subject: Re: Infocom and the Test of Time
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> >Plus (I'm not saying that you were arguing this) I'm
> >not sure that the "wander around and get stuff" model always produced a
> >poor story; Spellbreaker, for instance, pretty much fit that model, but I
> >thought it told a fairly compelling story.
> >
> Again, true... except those damn cubes -were- a bit annoying.  And, as
> I said, those stories needed to be written;  (IMO) any game that had
> you collect, say, a dozen pyramids, would be questionable.  (One of my
> gripes with Curses).

The cubes were a contrivance, true...but the genius of Spellbreaker is
that you didn't _feel_ like you were just wandering around picking up
stuff, because the game did something novel with it, namely the
non-contiguous geography (most of which eventually fit together). As far
as I'm concerned, that model of game (collect the set of related
objects) is still perfectly viable as long as any given game does
something interesting, meaning that there's more of a point to it than
just collecting the stuff. (Or maybe all I require is that the writing be
as good as Dave Lebling's was in Spellbreaker, namely damn good. I dunno.)

> > Also, hints cost something, so one gave the games a good shot with one's
> > own wits. With Masterpieces, the hints are right there in the CD, or on
> > Peter Scheyen's web site if you prefer it that way. Sure, if you have lots
> > of willpower, you can stare at a problem for months, but I don't think
> > many people have that kind of willpower--and when hints are readily
> > available, it shortens the total time spent playing the game a whole lot.
> 
> OTOH, I don't have the free time to stare at a screen for three months
> -not- having fun.  I did when I was fifteen, but not now.  I'll give a
> game a fair bit of thought, but ultimately if I'm not getting it I'll
> go on.

Very true. I'm much the same way. (I sometimes tell myself, hey, even with
the limited time I have, I'm gonna figure stuff out myself, no matter how
long it takes. But I always give in and check hints or walkthroughs after
I'm stuck--partly because I usually have a nagging suspicion, too often
justified, that I'm on the right track but haven't hit on the right
syntax, or alternatively that the solution is something out of left field
that I wouldn't be likely to guess.) I do solve some without hints, but
they're usually the easier ones--I can think of only one latter-day game
with no walkthrough at all available (and almost no discussion on r*if 
that would supply hints via DejaNews) that I solved (Holy Grail by Jim
MacBrayne), and I don't remember regarding that as a particularly
satisfying experience even if I did plow through it on my own. And come to
think of it, I was stuck for a good long while (several months, and I put
the thing down altogether because I lost interest) on a problem that
turned out to be a case of bad syntax. So perhaps you're
right--unavailability of hints and satisfaction with a game experience may
not have much to do with each other.

All this reminds me that I was writing a series of Infocom
reviews/retrospectives on rgif a while back and never got around to
resuming them, though I do intend to at some point. I did most of the
fantasy games, but didn't get past those. Perhaps, sometime soon, I'll
pick that up again.

Duncan Stevens
d-stevens@nwu.edu
773-728-9721

Love in the open hand, no thing but that,
Ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt,
As one should bring you cowslips in a hat
Swung from her hand, or apples in her skirt,
I bring you, calling out as children do,
"Look what I have!--And these are all for you."

--Edna St. Vincent Millay




From erkyrath@netcom.com Wed Mar 24 11:27:48 CET 1999
Article: 41880 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: REVIEW: Shivers
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REVIEW: Shivers

(Review copyright 1999, Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>)

Graphics: pretty good
Plot: adequate, though small
Puzzles: mostly good
Difficulty: very easy to very hard
Gameplay: good
Interface: average
Atmosphere: good
Writing and dialogue: lousy
Forgiveness rating: you can never get stuck, but you can get hurt and
lose progress if you make mistakes. Save frequently.

I'll try to keep this short... as if that ever works. But _Shivers_ is
an *old* game. 1995, if I read the copyright dates aright. I picked it
up, used, on a whim. And wound up having a lot more fun than I expected
-- although I certainly had to make allowances.

The big problem is the obvious one: _Shivers_ comes from the era when
graphical game designers knew for a fact that the puzzles were
everything. The same murky pool of game-stuff as _The Seventh Guest_.
This time the puzzle-obsessed lunatic built a museum, not a mansion, but
you know it's going to have soup cans in it somewhere. Or something.

The wind-up: your annoying teen friends dare you to spend the night in
Professor Windlenot's haunted museum. That's all. Naturally you find
your way inside (by solving puzzles). And then this *thing* rears up out
of the underground pool and... attacks you. Drains your life essence.
And then you knock over a jar and start to learn what's going on...

Well, it's not complicated. I'll leave the background to your own
exploration, but the structure of the game is this: ten ixupi, evil
Mayan spirits, are lurking around the museum. There are also ten pots
and ten lids. Find a matching pot and lid, and you can capture the
associated ixupi. (Ixupus? Never mind.) Capture all ten, and you win.

It's a classic plot-token game, but it's put together more cleverly than
you might think. There are twenty major puzzles, hiding the twenty
tokens, but they *also* pace your exploration of the museum. Many of the
puzzles give access to new areas, or clues to other puzzles, with the
pot or lid along as a bonus. That works well -- much more motivation
than if every puzzle gave you an identical reward, checkmarks on the
plot tally.

In addition, there's a strong random element. The pots and lids are
arranged randomly. Also, the ixupi move around; a spot may be safe one
time you pass by, and dangerously inhabited the next. (You can usually
guess *which* ixupi is nestled in a particular place, both by the
location and the distinctive sound... but I won't give that away
either.) If you disturb an ixupi, you get hurt; if you try to capture
the wrong ixupi with a given pot, it's snatched and hidden elsewhere in
the museum. I won't say there's a whole lot of replay value -- most of
the fun is puzzles, which are invariant -- but there's a sense of
looseness and flexibility that most other, more narrowly-plotted games
lack. The ending channels down quite naturally, with only a bit of
hand-of-god plot manipulation, so that the last ixupi is always captured
in the same place and leads straight into the end-scene.

The environment is a lot of fun, too. The outside grounds, where you
start, are a bit crudely done, even for the era. But the inside is
charmingly rich and detailed. It's big and complicated. It's got secret
passages. It's a museum of mysteries, strange phenomena, and folklore --
pure crackpottery, in fact. Professor Windlenot was a credulous loon and
a showman, a P. T. Barnum who believed his own stories even as he faked
up exhibits to describe them. His personality is the best-developed
aspect of the game, gesticulating cheerily from every corner of the
four-story folly that he tried to inflict on the public. Yes, yes, I
liked it. You get the idea.

The puzzles themselves range from genuinely original ideas, to
interesting variations of standards, to a couple of really moldy
classics. (A maze. Mastermind! Even in 1995 they should have known
better. The jumping pegs puzzle, fer cryin out loud. You can bet I went
straight to the Web for a solution to *that*.) A few were seriously
challenging; a few more were trivial; most were in between. There are
clues piled on clues in places; clues scattered everywhere, in every
medium. Given that and the broad, explore-everywhere structure of the
game, you wind up having to keep the whole game in your head at once.
There are always large pools of puzzles and clues to be matched up. Yum.
If you're going to have a puzzle-fest, that's the way to do it. 

On the down-side... I don't know who came up with the inventory
management, but he or she should be slapped. You can only carry one
object at a time -- a pot, a lid, or a matched pair. So every time you
find a new token, you have to put down the one you were holding. Back
where you found it, or in another hiding spot. You *can't* gather them
all in a convenient place. (Not even the exhibit hall they originally
came from.) This is annoying and stupid.

It also exacerbates another problem: the place is fun to explore, but by
the end you've spent a *lot* of time just going back and forth. Some
secret passages speed up travel, but not enough. Some sort of "go
straight there" option would have helped a great deal, although I don't
see an obvious place in the interface for it.

The manual is pretty awful as well, although I suppose I shouldn't be
paying it much attention. You shouldn't either. It explains the story
background outright, spoiling the careful pacing of revelation that's in
the game itself. And the "getting you started" walkthrough is about the
clumsiest piece of info-dump narrative I've seen in many a game. "I
found a strange-looking earthenware object... perhaps this was one of
the talisman lids he had talked about? I took a closer look by clicking
on the eye on the toolbar." Cringe.

I'd guess I spent fifteen or twenty hours on _Shivers_. More than I
usually do on graphical adventures, even the modern multi-CD
extravaganzas. On the other hand, a lot of that was flailing around,
battering myself against puzzles, or trying to find more clues. I got
seriously annoyed more than once. (I nearly microwaved the CD when I hit
the jumping pegs puzzle.) But, in the end, I enjoyed it. And the ending
left a couple of ends cunningly loose. I'll be on the lookout for the
sequel.

Er, assuming the sequel was ever published for the Mac.

Conclusion: Worth grabbing if you see it in the remainder bin.

Availability: Ha.

System requirements: System 7.1, 68040 or better, 5 megs free RAM (8 on
PPC), 256-color display. Yes, that old.

Macintoshness: Terrible. No menu bar; the options for saving and
restoring are modal, badly designed, and don't use Mac file dialogs.
Feh.

(This review, and my reviews of other Mac adventure games, are at
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/gamerev/index.html)

--Z
-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From lraszewski@loyola.edu Wed Mar 24 11:28:03 CET 1999
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From: lraszewski@loyola.edu (L. Ross Raszewski)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: REVIEW: Shivers
Date: 23 Mar 1999 18:52:05 GMT
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On Tue, 23 Mar 1999 05:25:53 GMT, Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com> wrote:

>It also exacerbates another problem: the place is fun to explore, but by
>the end you've spent a *lot* of time just going back and forth. Some
>secret passages speed up travel, but not enough. Some sort of "go
>straight there" option would have helped a great deal, although I don't
>see an obvious place in the interface for it.

I agree wholeheartedly. You might be interested to know that the sequel does
feature such a... er... feature.

One thing that your review didn't mention is that the museum is riddled with
artefacts left behind by previous visitors. Piecing together their story from
these clues was probably my favorite part of the entire game.

>
>I'd guess I spent fifteen or twenty hours on _Shivers_. More than I
>usually do on graphical adventures, even the modern multi-CD
>extravaganzas. On the other hand, a lot of that was flailing around,
>battering myself against puzzles, or trying to find more clues. I got
>seriously annoyed more than once. (I nearly microwaved the CD when I hit
>the jumping pegs puzzle.) But, in the end, I enjoyed it. And the ending
>left a couple of ends cunningly loose. I'll be on the lookout for the
>sequel.
>
>Er, assuming the sequel was ever published for the Mac.

The sequel is not nearly as engaging, if popular opinion is to be believed,
though it is longer.
It has some nice music.


From obrian@ucsu.Colorado.EDU Wed Mar 24 11:30:54 CET 1999
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From: Paul O'Brian <obrian@ucsu.Colorado.EDU>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Comp. 99 thoughts
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 15:42:47 -0700
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On Tue, 23 Mar 1999, Joe Merical wrote:

> Well, if there will be a Competition 99, it's a few months away. 

For certain values of "a few months." It's March, and the competition
entry deadline is typically around September. Six months. 

> But as a
> newbie in the field of IF programmers, I'd just like to post my thoughts on
> it.  I was browsing through the Comp entries from previous years, and I'd
> have to say I'm disappointed that there's no elmination phase. 

This has come up before, with good reasons on both sides. I'm of the mind
that the competition works quite well as is. Adding an "elimination phase"
would mess with the randomizing done by Comp99, and would unnecessarily
lengthen the judging period. Also, I don't think that adding hurdles for
entrants and judges will necessarily result in better games.  

> I can't
> believe that some of these entrants got prizes.  I'm not going to name names
> but I saw many entries that had terrible plots and blatantly copied
> code. [list of examples snipped]

Those are the entries that don't do as well. What's wrong with that? Is
the objection that they're winning prizes? Well, I guess I just don't see
the harm. 

Look, last year was the first time that every entrant to the competition
won a prize. This happened because so many generous people donated prizes,
large and small. I see these donations as a good thing. So what if there's
a prize for 27th place? Considering that all the prizes are donated, it
seems to me that the abundance of prizes is an indicator of the commitment
and generosity of the IF community. These are not qualities I want to
discourage.

> I'm not trying to discourage people from entering games in the IF
> Competition.  That's the last thing I want happening. I'm just saying that
> some better authors need to start entering the Competition and show mediocre
> authors, like myself, the types of games that deserve prizes.  

Great authors enter the competition every year. Lousy authors enter the
competition every year. Perhaps, through encouragement and practice, some
of those lousy (or, as you rate yourself, "mediocre") authors can become
great authors. One form of encouragement is a prize. It seems to me that
saying "these lousy games don't deserve prizes!" isn't going to motivate
many mediocre authors to get better. 

I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. But then again, I'm naive enough to think
that most people don't spend hours and hours putting together an IF game
just to receive a jar of Ass Kickin' Peanuts. 

> I admit that
> I will probably enter Comp '99 and, hopefully, enough people will enter so
> that there WILL be people without prizes.  That's the point to a
> competition.  

I disagree. Denying prizes to entrants may be the point to some
competitions, but as I see it the point of the IF competition is the
creation of quality IF. The prizes are icing. I really doubt anybody's in
this for the money or the merchandise. It's not like I can pay my rent
with any of the prizes from the IF comp, and I'm willing to venture that
even last year's top prize looks pretty lousy when viewed as a per-hour
wage. (Unless Adam spent 25 hours or less on Photopia). 

> You don't have to try for anything when you're going to win
> anyway.

Again, for certain values of "win." Coming in 27th doesn't equal "winning"
in my book, even if you do get a prize. 

You know, I mean no offense by this statement, but I think focusing on who
does and doesn't win prizes is a bit of a strange way to approach this
competition. I would suggest that the prizes, and even the placings are
not the point of the Comp. The idea behind this thing is to get more
people writing IF, and by any measure it has succeeded wildly at that
goal. It succeeded when there were more authors than prizes, and I suspect
it will continue to succeed even though for one year there have been more
prizes than authors. That's because the prizes are fairly peripheral to
the main pleasures of the IF Comp: artistic achievement, peer review, and
community participation.

> Hopefully, someone will criticize me so I CAN get better.

As one of many reviewers of the comp games I feel safe in saying: Count on
it. Prize or no prize. 

Paul O'Brian
obrian@colorado.edu
http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~obrian





From obrian@ucsu.Colorado.EDU Tue Apr  6 17:16:18 CEST 1999
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From: Paul O'Brian <obrian@ucsu.Colorado.EDU>
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Subject: Re: Comp. 99 thoughts
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On Fri, 2 Apr 1999, Knight37 wrote:

> I do think the contest should divide
> the "pro" IF authors from the "amateurs".  

I have a response to this.

I wrote it last year. 

http://x14.dejanews.com/getdoc.xp?AN=405262641

I am very gratified that all my predictions for the 1998 comp were
confirmed.

Just for fun, here is the 1998 stat update:

* 7 of the top 10 games were written by authors who had never entered the
competition before.

* The highest placing former entrant came in 4th.

* Other placements of former entrants: 8th, 9th, 18th, 20th, 23rd, 27th
(last)

* None of the winners of any previous competitions entered the 1998
competition.

* 4 out of the top 10 games were written by authors who had never released
an IF game of any kind before. (Unless Chris Huang released something
before MUSE that I missed. In that case it's 3 out of 10.)

* The highest placing author who had previously released IF came in first
(under a pseudonym). This is the second time this has happened. At no time
has a "veteran" author won the competition using his or her own name.
(Well, Magnus won the TADS category in 1995 when the competition was split
into language divisions, and he had previously released IF. However, that
competition had rather a different form than the current ones.)

Paul O'Brian
obrian@colorado.edu
http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~obrian





From stupid_q@my-dejanews.com Tue Apr  6 21:42:37 CEST 1999
Article: 42104 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: stupid_q@my-dejanews.com
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Books we'd all love to see
Date: Tue, 06 Apr 1999 11:44:16 GMT
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If IF were real life.......well, there'd be a lot of money made in writing
about the private lives of NPCs (except those in _GAGS_ games, maybe :-).
As a sample of corny humour (and I mean as corny as popcorn) here are
some demented samples..

Andrew Morton : "Charles And Joanna : Unhappily Ever After" :-D

Nancy Friday : "My Father, My Self - The Life of Konstanza von Goethe"

Anthony Trollope : "The Vicar of Barchester"

Carl Adamson (Joy's son) : "Running Free"

Any more ideas?
Happy - uh - reading!            - Quentin.D.Thompson

-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
http://www.dejanews.com/       Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own    


From adam@princeton.edu Tue Apr  6 21:42:41 CEST 1999
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From: adam@princeton.edu (Adam J. Thornton)
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Subject: Re: Books we'd all love to see
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In article <7ecs2g$n6u$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
 <stupid_q@my-dejanews.com> wrote:
>If IF were real life.......well, there'd be a lot of money made in writing
>about the private lives of NPCs (except those in _GAGS_ games, maybe :-).
>As a sample of corny humour (and I mean as corny as popcorn) here are
>some demented samples..

>Andrew Morton : "Charles And Joanna : Unhappily Ever After" :-D
>Nancy Friday : "My Father, My Self - The Life of Konstanza von Goethe"
>Anthony Trollope : "The Vicar of Barchester"
>Carl Adamson (Joy's son) : "Running Free"

>Any more ideas?
>Happy - uh - reading!            - Quentin.D.Thompson

Spoilers for _In The End_, _Planetfall_, and _Stiffy Makane_:


















Boyd MacDonald: "Stiffy Makane: Not Just a Man, a Piece of Meat."
Joyce Carol Oates: "Depressing and Boring, Just Like All My *Other* Books:
                     That Guy in _In The End_, a Pathetic Life and
		     Pointless Death" 
Joseph Campbell: "The Tortured God: Floyd and the Autosacrificial
                   Archetype." 

Adam
-- 
adam@princeton.edu 
"There's a border to somewhere waiting, and a tank full of time." - J. Steinman


From stupid_q@my-dejanews.com Wed Apr  7 13:57:08 CEST 1999
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From: stupid_q@my-dejanews.com
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Books we'd all love to see
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Silly me - how could I forget

John Le Carre - "The Spy Who Came In From The Web" (sorry, I couldn't resist
it) The Hardy Boys (with guest appearance by Matthew Barringer) - "CaseFiles
No.3000: The Mystery of the Missing Knife!" New England Journal of Medicine:
"A Case Study On Incontinence in 29-Year Olds following the Ingestion of
Prune Juice" (choke on _that_ one.....)

And a theme song for all NPCs -
Pink Floyd, "Speak To Me".

Warning: more to come...... :-)

                                          Quentin.D.Thompson.

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http://www.dejanews.com/       Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own    


From rglasser@ix.netcom.com Thu Apr  8 09:52:12 CEST 1999
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From: Russell Glasser <rglasser@ix.netcom.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Books we'd all love to see
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I'm going with a Steve Meretzky Theme...

Jill Simm: Confessions In A Life That Only Has Major Events Once Every Ten
Years.

Kitty Kelly: The Unauthorized Biography of Wife #2375648 of the Sultan.

Ernie Eaglebeak, CEO of MagicSoft: The Rode Behind


stupid_q@my-dejanews.com wrote:
> 
> If IF were real life.......well, there'd be a lot of money made in writing
> about the private lives of NPCs...

-- 
Russell may be heckled at
        http://www.willynet.com/rglasser

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.  Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man."
                -- George Bernard Shaw


From erkyrath@netcom.com Sat Apr 17 16:39:22 CEST 1999
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From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: REVIEW: Starship Titanic
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REVIEW: Starship Titanic

(Review copyright 1999, Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>)

Graphics: quite good
Plot: good, but small and unimportant
Difficulty: impossible unless you're the author or a telepath
Interface: probably acceptable if you have a studly-fast machine; poor
otherwise
Gameplay: miserable
Dialogue and writing: excellent
Forgiveness rating: you cannot get stuck or make a mistake. But
replaying to repair missteps can be tedious.

More than a decade after Infocom released the text games _Hitchhiker's
Guide_ and _Bureaucracy_, Douglas Adams returns to the computer gaming
world with _Starship Titanic_.

Unfortunately, it's no good.

Damn.

I shall explain why, conforming to my usual habit when trashing games --
with fairly specific examples. So this review contains a bunch of
spoilers. On the other hand, my big complaint is that the game is
unsolvable without cheating, so maybe that's okay.

Up to you.

The scenario is straightforward. You're sitting at home, and this
spaceship crashes into it. Into your home, that is. Well, precisely, the
bottommost tip of the docking keel crashes into your home. The spaceship
itself is bigger. A bit.

It *is* called "Titanic", after all.

So out comes this DoorBot, who politely explains that the ship is lost;
out of control; uninhabited except for robots, all of whom are insane
(not excepting the DoorBot); and would you come inside and help fix
things up, please? Well, why not.

Why not indeed.

In you go, as a Super Galactic Class Traveller -- which is to say, you
sleep in a multifunctional closet and eat greasy chicken. (One chicken
to a passenger.) And thus the challenge begins; gathering pieces of the
ship's AI so that the damn thing works right, and, more importantly,
getting yourself an upgrade to First Class.

Because in travel, style is everything.

Okay, speaking of style, I can't keep that style up. Here's the thing.
_Starship Titanic_ is full of puzzles that are entirely impossible to
solve, unless you're Douglas Adams. The range of action is out of
control. You have no idea what kind of actions are possible, and
therefore experimentation is hopeless. Good ideas don't stand out, and
nearly-good ideas don't get responses that indicate that you're close.

Things start out so well, too. The opening scenes are a textbook example
of leading the new player along, showing off the ropes. The DoorBot
explains how to pick up an object, speak to a robot, push a button. The
first major puzzle involves concerted fiddling with the popup furniture
in your Super Galactic closet -- and it's a lovely puzzlebox, physically
plausible and with a clear goal. (Okay, mostly clear. I got the idea
when clicking on the flopped-out bed gave the response "The bed can't
support your weight in this position.")

So I got that bit, and got the next bit, with the helpful prompting of a
robot or two. Great, I thought. Adaptive hints. The robots even turn up
spontaneously when you seem stuck.

Then I got stuck. Stayed stuck for a while. Robots didn't say anything
useful. Nothing obvious to do; I'd explored everywhere I was allowed to
go. I checked the cheat book. The cheat book said to take the feather
that you got from the parrot, and tickle the nose of the giant
Succ-U-Bus robot downstairs.

*Huh?*

First, I hadn't gotten a feather from the parrot. To do that, you have
to drag the parrot to your inventory; when it escapes, it leaves a
feather. But the parrot makes such a fuss when you click on it that I
hadn't *tried* dragging it; it was obviously impossible. Second, all the
Succ-U-Bus robots complain about their internals; I didn't hear anything
>from  that particular one that indicated that it wanted to sneeze. Third,
this thing is *designed* to move large objects around the ship -- in
fact, the thing stuck in its throat is a human corpse -- and a feather
is supposed to affect its nose? Does it even have a nose? I thought that
was a mouth?

It was pretty much all downhill from there. There was the button that
said "Please poke with long stick", but if you wait to get the Long
Stick that you find elsewhere in the game, you'll never get it; you have
to use a *different* stick which is obviously shorter. Some actions have
to be performed by robots, but you never get into the habit of asking
robots to do random things, because they all seem to be limited to their
particular functions, and always refuse all other requests. Some objects
are used by dragging them into other objects and releasing the mouse
button; other are used by dragging them *back and forth* over other
objects, *without* releasing the mouse button. Try the wrong form, and
nothing happens. Or maybe you have to try it more than once. There is
never any encouragement to try again, or try it differently. 

Barely-marked controls do random things approximately related to their
markings. Usually. I could tell that the blue fuse with the fan symbol
activated the fan, but it also activates the cube room lever?
Okaaaaay... And the Arboretum controls obviously control the season in
the Arboretum, but I certainly wouldn't have walked around the ship
after setting the Arboretum to Spring, just to discover that a light
fixture was sneezing. (Pollen, apparently. Yes, there's a pollen-level
report on TV. That doesn't lead me to expect a sneezing light fixture.)
Answering robot questions is rarely important, and you're always
prompted repeatedly when it is important -- except for the one critical
time when if you don't answer, the puzzle silently bogs down and becomes
unsolvable. At least, I think it was unsolvable. I certainly couldn't
solve it without restoring an earlier position, and I was reading the
cheat book. (Ok, not *really* unsolvable -- I could have gone through
much trouble to re-acquire all the objects I'd just wasted. No thanks.)

I'm condensing a lot of complaints into a short space, because I just
don't have the energy to be detailed. I'm sorry about that. Let me scan
the cheat book for other puzzles I cheated on. There were lots. Heck,
there were lots of puzzles that I *still* don't understand, because I
either cheated or solved them by accident. The logic doesn't always
become obvious afterward. One locked elevator let me in as soon as I got
the part to fix it. It turns out that was a complete coincidence; I had
managed to arrange the other elevators correctly while getting that
part. I have no idea how to tell what order to insert the AI parts in.
Don't get me started on how long it took to get them out after I
inserted them in the wrong order. (Fifteen minutes of futile clicking.
Plus quitting the program and restarting. Three times. I think what was
screwing me over were clues to the right order; but I was past caring.)

Let me talk about the robots. The authors put *incredible* effort into
these robots. They have reams and reams of conversation (literally
thousands of lines of dialogue); a complicated parser system; they're
loaded with clues; they have personalities that vary over time (or with
appropriate fiddling.) Douglas Adams writes, "YOU WILL NOT GET BORED
TALKING TO THESE ROBOTS."

I got bored talking to those robots.

The parser pretty much boils down to a keyword search. I *know* it's
more complicated than that; there are hints of smartness in answering
*kinds* of questions ("what is X?", etc.) But it doesn't work well
enough to *use*. Attempts to follow threads of converation seem to get a
couple of responses, and then tail off into "I don't understand." There
are many, many clever variations on "I don't understand". But they all
mean the same thing.

And there's no particular reason to talk to them. Sure, all the dialogue
is well-written -- Adams is good at that. It's funny. It's well-acted.
The personalities come across. They're all *annoying* personalities.
That's the first problem. I wasn't interested in hearing the war stories
of the old veteran LiftBot, or the DeskBot's gossip. When I tried to
pump them for information about the ship, I got a few pieces of
information, and then repeats or nonsense. So I gave up. And the
information wasn't even always right. Various places were listed as
being "along the second class canal". Asking about that got "by the art
galleries". Okay, I knew where that was. But I couldn't enter, even
though I was a second-class passenger. There was another canal, listed
on the map as "first class canal". I asked about that. "By the art
galleries." Wrong-o. It was just seeing the keyword "canal". That
happened to heterodyne with other unclarities to completely confuse me,
but nothing else really worked any better. When trying to get the
BellBot to fix a light bulb, I tried about six obvious variations before
looking in the cheat book and typing the exact words shown in the screen
shot.

This is becoming a very long rant, and I don't want to simply rant. Let
me try to explain the underlying flaws here.

As Vinge once said -- focus, people, *focus*. Traditional text-adventure
English has exactly three ways to talk to another character. "Ask robot
about <subject>." "Tell robot about <subject>." "Robot, <standard
verb>." Those are what the player knows to try, and those are what the
author knows to cover. Game designers, beware temptation: more flexible
is *not* automatically better. If there are more than a few obvious ways
to give a command, you *must* cover *all* of them, or the system fails.
The light bulb problem is a classic example. I tried "fix the light
bulb" and "give me the light bulb" and "get the light bulb". Nothing
happened. It was triggering various responses about the keyword "bulb",
but not the action I wanted.

There are design problems that the text-adventure world solved so long
ago that we don't even notice the solutions any more. Object
manipulation. I put a piece of chicken under the mustard spout. Yellow
goo poured out, slid over the chicken, and disappeared down the drain.
Yay! I've spiced the chicken. Well, no, I haven't -- I later discover. A
text game would have said something like "Yellow goo pours over the
greasy chicken, slides off, and pours down the drain, leaving no
residue." And maybe you could taste it and find it still bland (and
greasy). And then you'd know to wipe the grease off. Here, the only clue
is that the object is called "greasy chicken" (I'd seen no other kind)
and its icon remains unchanged (surprise!) There's lots of this. 

If the authors had spent a tenth of those megabytes of robot dialogue on
game responsivity, quite a lot of this could have been avoided. "The
lemon is beyond arm's reach." "The parrot squirms in your grasp."
"Clouds of pollen swirl around you, drifting into ventilators... you
hear a distant sneeze." "The chicken whizzes past you and skids along
the floor. The Succ-U-Bus snorts once, gulps, and eructates with
satisfaction." "Where do you want to hit the waiter?" "What do you want
to poke the button with?" "The left lever slides up as the right lever
slides down." "The parrot flaps around the room, apparently oblivious to
the pistachios."

Hell, I would have killed for an "EAT CHICKEN" command at one point. I
won't even get into that.

I'll admit the game is pretty. Everything is huge, marble, and shiny.
Lots of reflections. Clean to the point of spartaness, but it's a
brand-new ship, so what do you expect. However (it's all with the
"howevers" in this review) it can be very hard to figure out where
things are. All the walking transitions are very blurry and fast. Fast
is good when you're moving around a lot, but if you're moving around a
lot, you're already holding down the Shift key to *skip* the
transitions. When you're not, you may actually want to see how places
connect. I often couldn't.

Speaking of transitions... the elevators. My god in wine-dark heaven,
the elevators. The Shift key *doesn't work* in the elevators. Many
important places can only be reached by elevator, and there's *no way*
to skip or abort the very attractive movie of elevator shaft going past.
I swear one of the rides was a minute and a half long. I had time to get
up and get a snack from the fridge before it was over, and I had to take
that ride half a dozen times in the course of the game. I started
keeping a book next to the computer, and reading during the elevator
rides. Did *anybody* playtest this thing?

Really, the whole game was too slow. I suspect that's one broad reason I
had trouble; I didn't want to experiment, because it *took* so long. My
machine was at the bottom of the requirements list -- 120 MHz CPU, and I
installed only (sigh) 160 Mbytes of commonly-used images on my hard
drive. If you can possibly spare 550 Mbytes of hard-drive space, for
gods' sake take that option. Anything to improve the delays of switching
between inventory and talk mode.

I have written down here "cursor stuck". What does that mean? Oh, yes --
when the scene changes or a hotspot moves, the cursor doesn't change
shape until you move the mouse. Very small bug, irritating far out of
proportion. Led to all sorts of confusion. Again, did anybody playtest?

(I'm sure the authors will write me and say yes, there were playtesters.
Sorry. It's a rhetorical question. What I meant to ask was, please, can
I meet the playtesters and *set them on fire*?)

Twitch. Twitch twitch.

The sad part is, there are some really beautiful puzzles in here. I'm
not going to talk about them, because I've filled up this review with
ranting. Sadder, many of the very bad puzzles are good puzzle *ideas*,
implemented very badly.

And the integration is great. Every puzzle is there for a reason.
Everything makes sense in the context of the situation. Nothing was
added because the ship's designer was a mad genius with a penchant for
puzzles. Very impressive. End of compliment.

There's a plot. It's not really a plot you get involved in; it's the
business of discovering what happened on the Titanic, and how it all
Went Wrong. It's a fairly entertaining story as you learn it, but
there's not really that much of it, and it doesn't have anything to do
with you. The ending doesn't resolve much of anything, either.

Oh well. At least the game comes with a cheat book.

The back of the cheat book has the blurb, "This may be the game that
re-ignites the adventure genre! -- P.C. Gamer magazine."

I think I want to set them on fire, too.

Conclusion: With the cheat book, a fairly amusing semi-interactive
movie, punctuated by boring elevator rides. Without the cheat book,
unsolvable.

Availability: Just came out, so it's easy to find and heavily hyped.

System Requirements: 120 MHz Powermac, MacOS 7.5, 4x CD-ROM drive, 32
MBytes RAM, 160 MBytes hard drive space, thousands of colors. I'd add
that you need either a much faster CD-ROM drive or half a gig of hard
drive space, or it gets painfully slow. (I tried turning up my Mac's
disk cache, at the suggestion of a helpful member of the audience.
Didn't help any.)

Macintoshness: Near-zero. The menu bar is inactive, except for a "quit"
command. Loading and saving is done through a fairly clumsy in-game
interface, featuring an astonishing total of *five* save slots. 

However, if nothing else, the game *does* ask permission before
switching your monitor resolution. That's getting to be a rare courtesy
these days, and I want to point it out specially. I'm grateful, fellas.


(This review, and my reviews of other Mac adventure games, are at
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/gamerev/index.html)
   
--Z
-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From burnekoj@cs.lafayette.edu Sat Apr 17 16:39:57 CEST 1999
Article: 42205 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: burnekoj@cs.lafayette.edu
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: REVIEW: Starship Titanic
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 22:46:02 GMT
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I just wanted to put my two cents in about this game.  First of all I beat the
game without a single hint.  I'm either very lucky or very intelligent or some
odd combination of both.  I vote for the latter because there were some points
brought up in Mr. Plotkin's review that made me go, "Huh?  You mean THAT'S the
way that worked."

It probably also helped that I had a large hard drive and was able to copy
the contents of all 3 CDs and so never had to swap a single CD.  I probably
would have hated the game if I had had to swap CDs every five minutes because
there is indeed a lot of wandering around wondering what to do.

But what I really wanted to comment about was the following:

> If the authors had spent a tenth of those megabytes of robot dialogue on
> game responsivity, quite a lot of this could have been avoided. "The
> lemon is beyond arm's reach." "The parrot squirms in your grasp."
> "Clouds of pollen swirl around you, drifting into ventilators... you
> hear a distant sneeze." "The chicken whizzes past you and skids along
> the floor. The Succ-U-Bus snorts once, gulps, and eructates with
> satisfaction." "Where do you want to hit the waiter?" "What do you want
> to poke the button with?" "The left lever slides up as the right lever
> slides down." "The parrot flaps around the room, apparently oblivious to
> the pistachios."

When I finished the game my exact thought was: That was an old fashioned text
adventure implemented as a graphic adventure.  I think this is what the
complaint really is.  You see, I didn't find the puzzles any more illogical
than the ones found in the Zork Trilogy and believe me I HATE the Zork Trilogy
because of their illogical nature.  If you must know Deadline, Witness and
Suspect are my three all time favorite Infocom games followed closely by
Plundered Hearts.  But I digress.  Anyway, I kept thinking that the puzzles
felt very old fashioned in their thinking and would have worked better if
implemented in text.

I found Starship Titanic commendable not only for bringing back the
text-parser for verbal input but for brining back the text-feel to the
puzzles.

Oh well, just my opinion really.

Sincerely,
Jesse Burneko

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From erkyrath@netcom.com Sat Apr 17 16:40:21 CEST 1999
Article: 42210 of rec.games.int-fiction
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
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From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: Re: REVIEW: Starship Titanic
Message-ID: <erkyrathFA5ryB.4nw@netcom.com>
Organization: ICGNetcom
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burnekoj@cs.lafayette.edu wrote:
> I just wanted to put my two cents in about this game.  First of all I beat the
> game without a single hint. 

Huh. Okay. 

How long did it take you?

And how did you find the nose? Really. I'm curious about what line of
reasoning, or luck, led you to the right location and the right method of
grabbing it.

> It probably also helped that I had a large hard drive and was able to copy
> the contents of all 3 CDs and so never had to swap a single CD.  I probably
> would have hated the game if I had had to swap CDs every five minutes because
> there is indeed a lot of wandering around wondering what to do.

I didn't have to swap every five minutes. Disk 1 contains the opening and
closing; and disks 2 and 3 seem to each contain about two-thirds of the
game. So swapping was actually pretty rare.

But the CD reading time sure added up. Copying all the data to hard drive
would certainly have made it feel more responsive.

> But what I really wanted to comment about was the following:

> > If the authors had spent a tenth of those megabytes of robot dialogue on
> > game responsivity, quite a lot of this could have been avoided. "The
> > lemon is beyond arm's reach." "The parrot squirms in your grasp."
> > [...]

> When I finished the game my exact thought was: That was an old fashioned text
> adventure implemented as a graphic adventure.  I think this is what the
> complaint really is.  You see, I didn't find the puzzles any more illogical
> than the ones found in the Zork Trilogy and believe me I HATE the Zork Trilogy
> because of their illogical nature. 

It's very hard for me to judge, of course, how I would enjoy the original
Zork trilogy today. 

Maybe ST is an *old-fashioned* text adventure -- and I've gotten used to
*modern* text adventures, which have evolved a hell of a lot since Zork 1
came out.

However, I still suspect that there's a real difference in the realm of
focus and range-of-action. That, combined with the slowness, made me
entirely unmotivated to explore randomly and try absurd things for weeks
on end. (Which I *know* is how I solved the Zork games.) Text games react
faster. 

> I found Starship Titanic commendable not only for bringing back the
> text-parser for verbal input but for brining back the text-feel to the
> puzzles.

I guess I'm glad the puzzles worked for *somebody*. :-)

I don't know if you can say "bringing *back* the text parser", though. The
dialogue parser in ST is entirely a new thing. It's in no way a descendant
of the Colossal Cave interface. (And I don't just mean syntactically.)

--Z

-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From sgranade@lepton.phy.duke.edu Sat Apr 17 16:42:29 CEST 1999
Article: 42219 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Stephen Granade <sgranade@lepton.phy.duke.edu>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: REVIEW: Starship Titanic
Date: 14 Apr 1999 08:45:47 -0400
Organization: Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
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burnekoj@cs.lafayette.edu writes:

> But what I really wanted to comment about was the following:
> 
> > If the authors had spent a tenth of those megabytes of robot dialogue on
> > game responsivity, quite a lot of this could have been avoided. "The
> > lemon is beyond arm's reach." "The parrot squirms in your grasp."
> > "Clouds of pollen swirl around you, drifting into ventilators... you
> > hear a distant sneeze." "The chicken whizzes past you and skids along
> > the floor. The Succ-U-Bus snorts once, gulps, and eructates with
> > satisfaction." "Where do you want to hit the waiter?" "What do you want
> > to poke the button with?" "The left lever slides up as the right lever
> > slides down." "The parrot flaps around the room, apparently oblivious to
> > the pistachios."
> 
> When I finished the game my exact thought was: That was an old
> fashioned text adventure implemented as a graphic adventure.  I
> think this is what the complaint really is.  You see, I didn't find
> the puzzles any more illogical than the ones found in the Zork
> Trilogy and believe me I HATE the Zork Trilogy because of their
> illogical nature.

I know that my tastes have certainly changed since I played the Zork
trilogy. I have much less patience with puzzles that have illogical
solutions or that require a burst of telepathy. What made it worse for
me in Starship Titanic is that experimentation was in no way
rewarded. There was no feedback for close-but-not-quite solutions;
there was little feedback for correct solutions. Things would happen
without me understanding why they happened. In one notable instance, I
didn't even realize that something had happened until hours
later. Combine that with the slowness of traversing ground in a
graphic adventure and you have a situation which not only discouraged
experimentation, but also took an active role in beating it to a
bloody pulp.

> I found Starship Titanic commendable not only for bringing back the
> text-parser for verbal input but for brining back the text-feel to the
> puzzles.

However, I don't want a text feel to puzzles in a graphic adventure. A
lot of what I think of as "text feel" is inextricably tied up in the
text interface. Attempting the same thing in a graphic adventure will
likely result in me turning the CDs into pretty frisbees.

Stephen

-- 
  Stephen Granade                | Interested in adventure games?
  sgranade@phy.duke.edu          | Visit Mining Co.'s IF Page
  Duke University, Physics Dept  |   http://interactfiction.miningco.com


From erkyrath@netcom.com Sat Apr 17 16:42:44 CEST 1999
Article: 42221 of rec.games.int-fiction
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
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From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: Re: REVIEW: Starship Titanic
Message-ID: <erkyrathFA6L0M.7u2@netcom.com>
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Stephen Granade (sgranade@lepton.phy.duke.edu) wrote:
> > When I finished the game my exact thought was: That was an old
> > fashioned text adventure implemented as a graphic adventure.  I
> > think this is what the complaint really is.

> I know that my tastes have certainly changed since I played the Zork
> trilogy. I have much less patience with puzzles that have illogical
> solutions or that require a burst of telepathy. What made it worse for
> me in Starship Titanic is that experimentation was in no way
> rewarded. There was no feedback for close-but-not-quite solutions;
> there was little feedback for correct solutions.

Yeah. What he said. Absolutely.

> > I found Starship Titanic commendable not only for bringing back the
> > text-parser for verbal input but for brining back the text-feel to the
> > puzzles.

> However, I don't want a text feel to puzzles in a graphic adventure. A
> lot of what I think of as "text feel" is inextricably tied up in the
> text interface. Attempting the same thing in a graphic adventure will
> likely result in me turning the CDs into pretty frisbees.

I noticed after posting my review that the puzzles I *didn't* mention --
the puzzles I dismissed, as it were, with "there are some really beautiful
puzzles in here. I'm not going to talk about them, because I've filled up
this review with ranting." -- were the most *non*-text oriented. The
music-room puzzle, and the bridge. Those were high points. (Although,
since I was already in the mode of having given up on the game, I didn't
actually get much out of them.)

--Z

-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From muckenhoupt@my-dejanews.com Mon Apr 19 14:16:51 CEST 1999
Article: 42291 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: muckenhoupt@my-dejanews.com
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: IF Database proposal
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 13:44:29 GMT
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This is Carl Muckenhoupt of Baf's Guide.  I still don't have
proper NNTP access, which is probably a good thing all told, but
I do have something to post, so I'm forced to do so via a portal.
I apologize in advance for any advertisements that they may
have tacked onto this message.

Now then.

Back in October, Greg Kuperberg made a few posts about
improving the archival of interactive fiction.  Although his
ideas received much criticism, I'd like to make a proposal
relating to some of the issues he raised.

Basically, I've been thinking about my site and what it's good
for.  Kuperberg identified it as one of the better front-ends
to the Archive, despite its problems.  Why?
There are many more sites devoted to interactive
fiction now than there were when I started the Guide.
New games tend to get in-depth analysis.  What's more, the
Archive itself is providing more information about games,
and the Archive's Master Index exists in web form.
As far as I can tell, the Guide's virtues are that it
covers more games than the other review sites and that it
provides more information than the webbified index - and yet,
in both of these respects, it ultimately falls down.  It
indexes a lot of games, but not *all* the games.  It provides
a lot of cross-indexes, but not not a general searching tool.
There is room for improvement here.

So here's what I'd like to do.  I'd like to make a database
containing a comprehensive index of the Archive, including
all the information at Baf's Guide and then some.

I'm willing to implement the database myself, but I'd like
volunteers to help me populate it.  I've never asked for
outside help on the Guide, because the most important part of
the Guide is the reviews, and I feel it important to keep
those under a single viewpoint.  This database will be
different; its content will be factual, not subjective.
I'll make another post brainstorming on what data belongs in
the database, in hope of suggestions.

This database will form the basis of the next revision of
Baf's Guide.  The reviews and ratings will be provided by
some other mechanism, but the indices and any other search
results will be generated from the database.  Unless someone
has a better home for it, the database will be housed on
www.wurb.com, a severely underutilized Pentium 120 running
Linux.  The raw data will be available for mirroring, and
the database will be accessible for updating by anyone who
cares to (unless this proves to be a problem, of course).
A web front-end should be provided for adding and updating.
Non-web front ends too, if feasible.  Perhaps even a guest
account for telnet access, from which the database can be
modified using command-line tools.  I will probably be the
main one who winds up maintaining the database, but I'd like to
at least make it easy for authors to enter their own games
into the system, or for anyone who notices a game missing
to add it.

Incedentally, while some derided Mr. Kuperberg's suggestion
of giving each game a serial number, I should point out
that meaningless ID numbers for each game (and, indeed, each
implementation of each game) are a likely natural consequence
of any reasonable database design.  Whether these numbers
are used anywhere outside of the database itself is without
import, as far as I'm concerned.

Finally, I'd like to make the following points:

This database would not require any changes to the Archive
itself, or any extra work on behalf of Volker Blasius or
David Kinder.  However, it does not lessen their work either.
Like Baf's Guide and ifarchive.org, it would be a "para-site"
(from the Latin "para", meaning "beside"; a site that lives
alongside another.)  People can use it or ignore it, as they
wish.  I am not trying to replace anything except my own
back-end code.

Once the enormous task of entering the current contents of
the Archive is completed, it should be a minor matter to add
new entries as they come along.  Especially if authors enter
their own games.

One of Kuperberg's major points was that downloads are slow.
Although the database does not address this issue directly,
it will force me to recode the Baf's Guide.  Once I'm doing
that, I might as well throw in the ability to choose a
mirror site.

Carl Muckenhoupt
carl@wurb.com

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From erkyrath@netcom.com Mon Apr 19 14:18:14 CEST 1999
Article: 42295 of rec.games.int-fiction
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Path: news.lth.se!feed2.news.luth.se!luth.se!sunqbc.risq.qc.ca!newshub.northeast.verio.net!ix.netcom.com!erkyrath
From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: Re: IF Database proposal
Message-ID: <erkyrathFAE3xD.8qr@netcom.com>
Organization: ICGNetcom
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]
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muckenhoupt@my-dejanews.com wrote:
> So here's what I'd like to do.  I'd like to make a database
> containing a comprehensive index of the Archive, including
> all the information at Baf's Guide and then some.

At one point, David Cornelson was hosting an "IF library", which was a
relational database of games and reviews. Data provided by volunteers.
(But not intended to be comprehensive, except in hope that volunteers
would contribute enough data to make it so.)

I've lost the URL, which gives you an idea how well it caught on,
unfortunately. (Originally at http://www.placet.com/int-fiction/library/,
but I think it moved at least once.)

I'm not sure what was wrong with it. I think a combination of the
interface being a little clumsy (in spite of much effort by David and us
guinea pigs), and not having enough entries to reach critical mass.

> I'm willing to implement the database myself, but I'd like
> volunteers to help me populate it.

A small group of dedicated volunteers would probably be better than
relying on the general public.

> Incedentally, while some derided Mr. Kuperberg's suggestion
> of giving each game a serial number, I should point out
> that meaningless ID numbers for each game (and, indeed, each
> implementation of each game) are a likely natural consequence
> of any reasonable database design.

This is what someone said about IP addresses, once upon a time. Then they
said it about domain names. ("Make them readable, but short and all
alphanumerics, arranged in a simple two-level hierarchy. It's not like
the general public will ever see them, much less have to type them.")

> Whether these numbers
> are used anywhere outside of the database itself is without
> import, as far as I'm concerned.

I would discourage it. (By making the numbers short and entirely random.)

> Like Baf's Guide and ifarchive.org, it would be a "para-site"
> (from the Latin "para", meaning "beside"; a site that lives
> alongside another.) 

Heh. There's gotta be a better term...

> Once the enormous task of entering the current contents of
> the Archive is completed, it should be a minor matter to add
> new entries as they come along.  Especially if authors enter
> their own games.

I would guess, with regret, that authors generally won't. 

> One of Kuperberg's major points was that downloads are slow.
> Although the database does not address this issue directly,
> it will force me to recode the Baf's Guide.  Once I'm doing
> that, I might as well throw in the ability to choose a
> mirror site.

Definitely.

--Z

-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From greg@manifold.math.ucdavis.edu Mon Apr 19 14:22:37 CEST 1999
Article: 42320 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: greg@manifold.math.ucdavis.edu (Greg Kuperberg)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: IF Database proposal
Date: 18 Apr 1999 23:49:35 -0700
Organization: UC Davis Department of Mathematics
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In article <7fcnjs$434$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
 <muckenhoupt@my-dejanews.com> wrote:
>Back in October, Greg Kuperberg made a few posts about improving the
>archival of interactive fiction.  Although his ideas received much
>criticism, I'd like to make a proposal relating to some of the issues
>he raised.

Well I'm very much flattered that my suggestoins earned serious,
long-term consideration.  I think that they were criticized so much in
October not for what they were as much as for the way that I offered them.

>Basically, I've been thinking about my site and what it's good for.
>Kuperberg identified it as one of the better front-ends to the Archive,
>despite its problems.  Why?

Maybe I can answer that question :-).

The reason that I find Baf's Guide so useful is that it coherently
integrates two different important functions: Reviews and comprehensive
listings.  The best-designed type of page in the guide is a single review
page, such as this one:

   http://www.wurb.com/if/data/items/games/sofar

This page has the review and the rating.  I can click on the game to
get the game, or on the author to get other games by that author, or on
the year, or on the platform.  The page has most of the essentials and
nothing that is not essential.  It presents something medium-complicated
in the most convenient possible form.

By contrast, the alternatives typically offer a cacophony of reviews in
one place, if I'm in "review mood", and in another place a flat list of
games, if I'm a "database fan".  The two don't cooperate.

I agree that the disadvantages of Baf's Guide should be seriously
considered.  However, let's not throw out the baby with the
bath water.  It is true that reviews come slowly and are only one
person's opinion.  But but but but a 10-line synopsis is enormously
useful, and so is a rating from 1 to 5.  At the very least, in an
"objective" system, there could be author-provided or contributed
objective synopses.  It is also true that the guide is not complete.
But but but but in its current form it taps the enormous strength of
the freeware/open-source/universal-archive philosophy of "The Archive".
If you want to list commercial games, or games available only at some
mangy, possibly temporary URLs, these should be as separate as possible
>from  the good stuff.

Rather than missing entirely new features, I think the biggest problem
with the Guide is that it doesn't go far enough with what it
does well.  For example, the listings pages, such as:

    http://www.wurb.com/if/data/items/ratings/*****

do not fully follow the philosophy of offering all important options.
Rather than just providing a single hyperlinked word, review pages,
you could have a whole line of links for each game (or two lines),
with the rating to boot, e.g. like this:

<li> <a href="/review?minster">[Review]</a> 
<a href="/zcode?minster">[Zcode]</a>
<i> Christminster </i>, by <a href="/author?rees">Gareth Rees</a>.
*****, <a href="/platform?inform">[Inform]</a>
<li> ...

If you implement this with the usual good judgement, it could be almost
as compact and just as self-explanatory as what you already have.
Of course you could also have more complete and consistent navigation
bars, a little bit of nice but restrained graphics, etc.

Most of this of course also goes for your proposed database.  For any
new service, I would like to emphasize that you have done well by
applying restraint and logical taste while at the same time providing a
lot of information.  If you confine the list of database fields to the
essentials, it will already be plenty complicated.

Here are some web sites that you may find useful as examples of striking
a balance between simplicity and power:

    http://www.imdb.com/            (Internet Movie Database)
    http://www.nytimes.com/         (New York Times, to an extent)
    http://www.google.com/          (Google search service)
    http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/  (My front end for the math archive)

>Incedentally, while some derided Mr. Kuperberg's suggestion
>of giving each game a serial number, I should point out
>that meaningless ID numbers for each game (and, indeed, each
>implementation of each game) are a likely natural consequence
>of any reasonable database design.

I mostly agree with this, but (since people seemed to miss the point
the first time), let me expand on where I disagree.

It is amazingly useful to have simple, consistent identifiers that include
the version number.  But they don't have to be numbers.  They could
be numbers, or they could be eight-letter words (like stock symbols,
but longer), or they could be a combination.  It would obnoxious and
counterproductive to deliberately obfuscate these numbers to make sure
that no one takes them seriously.  Consider, for example, that HTML
and URLs are amazingly successful partly because they are *not* too
obfuscated for humans to use them directly, even though the original
intention was that they would only be an ugly, low-level interface.
Deliberate obfuscation *never* makes the world a better place.
-- 
  /\  Greg Kuperberg (UC Davis)
 /  \
 \  / Visit the Math Archive Front at http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/
  \/  * Thought is free. - The Tempest *


From obrian@ucsu.Colorado.EDU Mon Apr 19 15:18:42 CEST 1999
Article: 42266 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Paul O'Brian <obrian@ucsu.Colorado.EDU>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: [Review] WackyComp games
Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 13:48:04 -0600
Organization: University of Colorado at Boulder
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Xref: news.lth.se rec.games.int-fiction:42266

Last year, Lucian Smith had this idea. He thought it would be cool to have
a "mini-comp", where a bunch of people wrote games based on the same
initial premise. There would be no prizes, but there would be voting, and
rankings. So he announced his idea (actually, in the announcement, he
attributes the idea to "someone on the ifMUD", but in the absence of that
anonymous genius, I'm giving Lucian the credit) on rec.arts.int-fiction,
and generated quite a bit of enthusiasm. Unfortunately, when he announced
the premise and the rules around it, they were so amazingly specific,
picky, and difficult to achieve, that he only ended up getting four
entries, some of those after his deadline. If the voting or the rankings
ever happened, I never saw it. He tried to scale back expectations by
announcing a "micro-comp" ("Submit one or two scenes from a mini-comp
entry!"), but by then it was too late: apparently the contingent of
possible entrants wanted their mini-comps to *really* be mini. The main
result of Lucian's backpedaling was to produce a proliferation of goofy
"meta-comp" ideas, each of which seemed to somehow incorporate all the
others that preceded it.

Into this morass waded Adam Cadre, who had a simpler idea: write a short
game that involves, in some way, a chicken crossing a road. It was dubbed
the Chicken Comp, and it was a big success, garnering 19 entries, most of
which were good, and many of which were wonderfully, hilariously funny. I
still crack up anytime I recall Rob Noyes' "The Lesson of the Chicken",
with its memorable piece of monologue, "Ah, Wang Chung. Everybody will
have fun tonight." The chicken-comp games were the highlight of the
summer, and set the stage nicely for the established IF comp in the fall.
There was still no official competition between the games except, as Cadre
put it, the inevitable "discussion of which ones r001 and which suck."

So along comes spring 99, and suddenly mini-comps are popping up like
mushrooms. There was the Xcomp, for paranormal games, the I-Comp, for
games without an inventory, and even the execrable Roadkill Comp, for
games that involve dead animals. Most of the spring mini-comps garnered
responses which made Lucian's mini-comp look swamped in comparison, and
David Glasser's WackyComp was no exception. The WackyComp stipulated short
games, each based on one of a list of quasi-aphorisms. The list's contents
don't matter, because there were only two games submitted, both ALAN
entries that based themselves on the first choice: "No knot unties
itself." I've tended mainly to review competition games, not spending much
time on mini-comps, but the author of one of the WackyComp games asked me
to take a look at the two entrants and provide a little feedback, so here
it is:

The shorter of the two entries is by "Jess Kiddon" (another of the
WackyComp's conditions was that its authors don't use their real names on
their submissions), titled "Knot to be Undone." The title is one of the
game's many puns on the word "knot." This is not to suggest that the game
is a huge mass of puns -- it's not a huge mass of anything. I'd be shocked
if anyone spent more than 10 minutes solving this game. There is virtually
nothing to do except for the actions to win the game. You play Weava
Knottersdaughter, professional knotter, though really what this means is
that you're a professional detangler -- the "knot shop" where you work
offers a knot-untying service. Anyway, in walks "the Body Adventura", a
stock adventurer type whose cryptic name, as far as I can determine, is a
really strained pun on the name of Minnesota's governor. He's gotten
himself stuck in a knot and your job is to untangle him, or better yet
keep him entangled and somehow become the Body Adventura yourself.
Luckily, this is no trouble, and then the game ends. That's it. This is
about as "mini" as a game can get, and still be considered interactive
fiction. For what it is, it's fine, but rather unsatisfying, kind of like
eating just one potato chip. 

A rather more substantial entry is "Skipping Breakfast", by "Dunnin
Haste." In this game you're a rabbit (though this is not immediately clear
unless you examine yourself), who is tied to a tree and about to become a
wolf's breakfast. The wolf is off gathering more wood for the campfire
over which he plans to cook you, so now's the time to make your escape.
Unfortunately, there's the small matter of the knotted rope which binds
you to the tree -- you can't untie it, and it won't untie itself. Or will
it? This game's puzzles are fun and rather clever, despite the fact that
there's a bit of "guess-the-noun", and that the conversation syntax is
sometimes too restrictive. The writing is charming, and the nature of the
puzzles is quite well-integrated with the game's fairy-tale atmosphere.
Though it's not quite as bare-bones as "Knot", "Breakfast" is still a very
brief game, with three points to be scored, relatively few objects, and
only one location. That's OK, though. It was fun while it lasted.

Both games are written and coded pretty well -- I found neither bugs nor
spelling/grammar errors in either one, though in both there was a real
paucity of synonyms. Moreover, they both adhere faithfully to the concept
behind the WackyComp, and work creatively within its confines. Neither
succumbs to cliche, and both were fun. My main complaint is that each one
(though "Knot" more than "Breakfast") is over almost before it begins, but
I suppose that's the nature of mini-comps. Perhaps these tiny games could
become preludes to fuller versions -- I wouldn't mind playing the sequel
to either. It's also nice to see the ALAN language gaining some devotees,
and perhaps one of these authors (whose identities are pretty clear from
their choice of language and their postings before the WackyComp -- nice
job Mikko and Lelah) will be the one to write a major game which really
shows off the language's capabilities. It seems to be the pattern that IF
languages only gain a significant following once a really well-done game
has been completed in the language, like Inform's "Curses" or TADS'
Unnkuulia series. Now that's a knot that won't untie itself, but the
nimble fingers of the WackyComp authors may be just the ones to unravel
it. 

-- 
Paul O'Brian     obrian@colorado.edu     http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~obrian
"I don't find it fantastic or think it absurd 
When the gun in the first act goes off in the third." -- Aimee Mann

























From mvuorine@cc.helsinki.fi Mon Apr 19 15:18:51 CEST 1999
Article: 42275 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: mvuorine@cc.helsinki.fi (Mikko P Vuorinen)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Review] WackyComp games
Date: 17 Apr 1999 15:52:18 +0300
Organization: University of Helsinki
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In <Pine.GSO.3.96.990416133703.13414B-100000@ucsu.Colorado.EDU> Paul O'Brian <obrian@ucsu.Colorado.EDU> writes:

>to either. It's also nice to see the ALAN language gaining some devotees,
>and perhaps one of these authors (whose identities are pretty clear from
>their choice of language and their postings before the WackyComp -- nice
>job Mikko and Lelah) will be the one to write a major game which really

Erm. I must admit that I didn't write either game. I couldn't write such 
good English, being a Finn and stuff. And my games look different too. But
if it's not me then who it is? And which one was written by Lelah?

















-- 
  ))))     ((((   + Mikko Vuorinen   +  mvuorine@cc.helsinki.fi 
 ))  OO  `oo'(((  + Dilbon@IRC&ifMUD +  http://www.helsinki.fi/~mvuorine/
 6   (_)  (  (((  + GSM 050-5859733  +
 `____c   8__/((( +                  +  Vuoden 1999 pistetilanne: 0


From lac@nu-world.com Mon Apr 19 15:18:58 CEST 1999
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From: lac@nu-world.com (Lelah Conrad)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Review] WackyComp games
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 00:50:12 GMT
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On 17 Apr 1999 15:52:18 +0300, mvuorine@cc.helsinki.fi (Mikko P
Vuorinen) wrote:

>... And which one was written by Lelah?"
 
"Knot To Be Undone".

Lelah "Jess Kiddon" Conrad


From erkyrath@netcom.com Thu Jun  3 14:31:35 CEST 1999
Article: 43227 of rec.games.int-fiction
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
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From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: Re: ANNOUNCE: AMPHIBIA CONTEST CANCELLED
Message-ID: <erkyrathFCq074.JKJ@netcom.com>
Organization: Netcom
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]
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Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 22:09:04 GMT
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Al (radical@qadas.com) wrote:

> After over a year of fighting with the code and all the other bullshit.
> I just got tired of only 30 people responding to the contest.

Do you know how many people vote in the big yearly IF competition? I
believe it's between 100 and 150. And that's a well-publicized event, with
two dozen free games and the attention of the entire newsgroup.

> what the hell do we have to do make them all pay for IF like
> CMP (Berlyn's site) does?

There are still many more free text adventures than commercial ones. That
means that reputation counts for a great deal. I *know* Whizzard, and I
know Michael Berlyn for that matter -- and I mean through their games, not
personally. 

I know very little about you. I played the demo/sample of your game. It
was quite a long time ago, and all I remember is that it didn't impress
me. I apologize if that's blunt, but there it is. The prose and the game
design both seemed very poor, compared to the standards we have today.

> Make 'em pay for it and they'll appreciate it better.

I don't think that is true. We've seen free games, shareware games, and
commercial games, and I think we judge them all by the same standards. I
certainly do.

The decision to charge money for a game is really a personal decision in
this group, not a marketing decision. The same people are going to hear
about your game either way. 

--Z

-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From nobody@no.bloody.where Thu Jun  3 14:34:08 CEST 1999
Article: 43236 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: nobody@no.bloody.where (Simon 'tufty' Stapleton)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: ANNOUNCE: AMPHIBIA CONTEST CANCELLED
Date: 03 Jun 1999 10:17:34 +0100
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Al <radical@qadas.com> writes:

> After over a year of fighting with the code and all the other bullshit.
> I just got tired of only 30 people responding to the contest.

Frankly, I'm amazed you had that many.  I just ran back to your 
original announcements and note that you were going to charge
between $100 and $250 just to enter.  Admittedly, for a prize of 
$100,000, but still....

> what the hell do we have to do make them all pay for IF like
> CMP (Berlyn's site) does?

Cascade Mountain Publishing is a small company run by one of the 
'old gods'.  People trust him not to deliver something shoddy.
And he doesn't shout at people.  Your last two posts on this 
subject have bee 'in-your-face' rants.  

Also, you post that you're going to release the "Largest IF game 
ever written" (in AGT, which is, of course, noted for the 
quality of the games written with it), then come back asking 
for programming help.  In rec.games.int-fiction no less.  Which
doesn't tend to make people trust you.  Also, I should point out 
that the CD was due to be released 1st Qtr 1998.
 
> Make 'em pay for it and they'll appreciate it better.

Oh, I doubt that very much.  I try to judge games in an impartial 
manner, but if I've paid for a poor quality game I will tend to 
feel more cheated than if the game had been free.
 
> Do you think Once & Future was worth the cost?

Absolutely.  Completely.  It was not without its flaws, but it
kept me coming back for a month or so, until I finished it.
Then I played it again, to see the things I'd missed.  One of the 
main problems with OaF was the length of time it had taken to 
get it released.  By the time it had been published, the world
had moved on and some of Kevin's innovations looked slightly tired.
This is going to bite you in the arse as well.  Assuming you 
ever release KoA, there will have been a number of photopia / S&W
type games released and unless you've been really innovative, the 
response is going to be a resounding 'So What?'.

> Were you frustrated with it.

At times.  But it's a puzzle-oriented adventure game.  If that's 
not at least part of the point, I don't know what is.
 
> What you get for free you don't appreciate.

Erm - yes I do.  I can't speak for you, but I definitely
appreciate what I get for free.

Now, you may feel that we're all a bunch of ingrates because
you were offering a *FABULOUS PRIZE* as an incentive for 
us to play your game, and we didn't jump at the chance to win
a *FABULOUS PRIZE*.  I don't.  And I don't appreciate being 
shouted at.

Still, good luck getting people to buy your software.  Mark 
me down as a 'no sale' though.

tufty

-- 
 _______                                              _______ 
| ----- |  Biased output from the demented brain of  | ----- |
||MacOS||  Simon Stapleton.                          ||Linux||
|| 8.5 ||                                            || PPC ||
| ----- |  sstaple AT liffe DoT com                  | ----- |
|   -+-.|  (if you can't figure it out...)           |   -+-.|
||                                            ||
 -------                                              -------


From dns361@merle.acns.nwu.edu Sat Jun  5 10:31:42 CEST 1999
Article: 43262 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Second April <dns361@merle.acns.nwu.edu>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Funny post
Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1999 21:40:37 -0500
Organization: Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, US
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Saw this on alt.humor.best-of-usenet.

Subject: Re: Found: knife and flashlight
From: j-zych3@coewl.cen.uiuc.edu (Jason Zych)
Newsgroups: uiuc.general, cmi.general

j-peal@staff.uiuc.edu (peal james r) writes:

>David Eldridge <deldridg@uiuc.edu> writes:

>>I found a pocketknife/scissor tool linked to a flashlight out on the
>>grainger quad today (5/27)  If you can describe the items and where you
>>lost them, send me an e-mail and I will give them back to you.

>Oh yeah, that's mine.  I had to set it down before I could pick up
>the bird in the cage.  How can I scare the giant snake away if I
>don't pick up the bird?

You are in a newsgroup. There are conversation threads leading in
many directions.

>talk about classifieds

You can't do that here!

You are in a newsgroup. There are conversation threads leading in
many directions.

>talk about abortion

Giant flames appear, blocking your path.

You are in a newsgroup. There are conversation threads leading in
many directions.

>talk about libertarianism vs. socialism

Other people emerge from the newsgroup and beat you savagely. You
have died.

Would you like to start over (y/n)?

Duncan Stevens
d-stevens@nwu.edu
773-728-9721

Love in the open hand, no thing but that,
Ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt,
As one should bring you cowslips in a hat
Swung from her hand, or apples in her skirt,
I bring you, calling out as children do,
"Look what I have!--And these are all for you."

--Edna St. Vincent Millay




From erkyrath@netcom.com Mon Jun 14 15:12:22 CEST 1999
Article: 43406 of rec.games.int-fiction
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
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From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: REVIEW: Titanic: Adventure Out Of Time
Message-ID: <erkyrathFDA1Mv.M33@netcom.com>
Organization: Netcom
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]
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REVIEW: Titanic: Adventure Out of Time

(Review copyright 1999, Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>)

Graphics: poor
Atmosphere: okay
Plot: poor
Dialog and writing: poor
Difficulty: fairly hard
Interface: good
Gameplay: very good
Forgiveness rating: you can die. You can make mistakes which make the
endgame more difficult, and the optimal solution impossible. In the
endgame, you can make mistakes which leave the optimal solution
impossible, or even leave any solution impossible.

It's interesting how much this game resembles _The Last Express_. I
don't know if one influenced the other -- or vice versa -- but the
designers made many of the same decisions. The setting, of course: 1912,
rumbles in Europe, Serbs and Germans and Bolsheviks and British spies
dancing every which way. A widely-branched plot with a large cast of
interacting characters. A few action scenes, in which dexterity is only
a superficial problem. Stylized character animation, allowing a very
large stock of dialogue.

In fact, _Titanic_ is such a similar game *idea* that it's even *more*
interesting how much better _The Last Express_ is. I could summarize,
"If you don't have good writing, all your other good ideas aren't worth
a damn," and end this review right here.

(But I won't. Heh.)

I have jumped ahead of -- jumped behind -- uh, I have elided some plot.
_Titanic_ actually starts in 1942. You're a has-been British secret
agent, sitting in a London apartment in the middle of a Nazi air raid.
You muse on the _Titanic_ assignment, the one you screwed up so badly --
thirty years ago -- that you were cashiered. Waste of a life. And then
all your windows blow in.

Blam. You're on the Titanic, and you seem to have been given a second
chance.

This is an interesting premise -- more interesting than I first
realized, in fact. You had/have several tasks to accomplish in 1912.
Each one affects a crucial event in subsequent history: the outbreak of
the Great War, the rise of the Third Reich, the Communist Revolution in
Russia. And, of course, your death by drowning on the sexiest boat in
history. Now, the "first time" (so to speak) you screwed up every task
except the last. You got to a lifeboat, returned to London, were fired,
and the rest of history turned out as *we* remember it. But you can do
better.

More on this later.

The course of the game goes pretty much as you'd expect. You run around
meeting passengers. One is your contact, Penny Pringle, and she starts
you off on your first quest. But you can't get thing A without object B,
and you can't get object B without clue C, but fortunately you meet a
passenger who wants favor Z and will give you Y in return, and in the
process...

The web of obligations and favors is really very well designed. I
haven't tried to map it all out, but it's clear that you have great
freedom to choose what order you play in. Minor tasks that should be
independent *are* independent. You can be following two or more threads
at once, advancing in each as you figure out (or stumble across) where
to go and who to talk to. Major events can affect each other, but there
are many alternate paths and solutions at the higher level as well. 

The most critical event, of course, involves several megatons of ice.
That changes everything. But you *don't* have to have all your eggs in a
row at that point. You have opportunities to repair mistakes, bargain
with other characters -- they're desperate too -- and generally patch up
any holes you may have gotten your game state into, before you head for
the lifeboats.

Of course, you're in much less of a rush before the crash.

The game is *not* strongly timed. You have a watch, but it seems to
advance by how much you accomplish, not in real time. So wandering
around cluelessly isn't penalized. The iceberg is tied to a particular
(and particularly dramatic) encounter, so if you save frequently, you
can back up and do extra work before you trigger the collision. After
the collision, as I said, you can still do work, but only so much of it.
Once the last lifeboat is gone, there's no hope.

So far, this sounds a lot like _The Last Express_. The big difference? I
simply didn't care about anyone in _Titanic_. The characters are walking
plot devices, every one. This is partially a consequence of the very
flexible plot structure. You can get into room Q at any point in the
game (after you encounter person P and find out what's in there.) This
means that person R, who gives you the opportunity to get in, has to
stand outside room Q for nearly the whole game. Implausible and boring.

This is endemic. One character is a psychic, meaning that he can give
you clues about objects, and his life seems to consist of standing by
the stairs being available to you. Except later, when he disappears, so
that there can be a subplot of finding someone who will tell you where
he is. Another character hangs around for hours for the sole purpose of
saying that he saw person K in location L, so that later, when character
W says he's looking for something that K lost, you know where to look.

Every piece of dialogue is either background (expressed in fairly clumsy
infodumps, sorry, I mean gossip) or (more frequently) a direct
derivative of some plot point. Everyone talks in favors and promises.
Write it down or keep it in your head, but you know that eventually
you'll be completing the favor and redeeming the promise.

Well, you get the idea. _The Last Express_ was full of fascinating, wild
characters, people with lives, interacting with each other. _Titanic_ is
full of plot devices who mostly wait to interact with *you*.

"If you don't have good writing, all your other good ideas aren't worth
a damn."

Oh, another thing. In _The Last Express_, you *yourself* are a
fascinating, wild, mysterious character. You learn more and more about
him as the game goes on -- and this works because the game provides all
your responses. _Titanic_, in contrast, has a menu-dialogue system. The
game provides a list of four or five lines, you pick one, and the other
character responds. Traditional, easy to use, and it makes you into a
complete nonentity. The original Colossal-Cave featureless protagonist.
People writing menu-dialogue games, take note.

(Featureless except for a beard, by the way. A single scene, late in the
game, shows you from third-person perspective. Must be a bit of a jolt
for female players. But I digress.)

(But while I'm digressing, I *was* impressed by the blackjack dealer,
and how his part was written. He's only involved in the plot at one
point, which means he actually has time to be... the subject of dark
allegations. I won't spoil the fun.)

Plot control is a little obtrusive at times. Characters go on convenient
errands, leaving thing unattended at just the right time. Objects often
appear when you encounter the task of finding them; you can't sneak in
earlier and mess up the plot graph. (In one egregious example, you
discover that one character is dead, but the body doesn't appear until
you talk to someone else.)

The interface is quite nice. It's a standard first-person view, but it
uses arrow keys for movement, instead of loading everything into the
mouse. So you never have to hunt for turn/walk hotspots; clickable mouse
areas are always people or objects. An arrow indicates whether the area
directly ahead is walkable, blocked, or a closed door (click to trying
opening it.) Unambiguous navigation. People blindly imitating the _Myst_
pure-mouse interface, take note.

Most of the puzzles are fairly easy, if you take a walk-around,
talk-to-everyone approach to getting stuck. However, a few seem badly
out of balance. In one case, I had to push someone through a particular
dialogue sequence, in a fairly bushy menu tree, before I asked a favor
of him. I had to go to a cheat page for that. In retrospect, I can see
that that particular branch was significant -- he said "Thank you" at
the end -- and I had actually tried it; but I had not tried asking him
for the favor after every single conversation attempt. No indication
that that was the right approach. In another place, I had to go around a
particular sequence of actions several times. Eventually the other
character involved gave me something. I was solidly on the walkthrough
by then, or I would never have tried it that many times. 

I played from the walkthrough from that point on, since I had no great
fascination with the characters or story. I just wanted to get to the
end as quickly as possible.

But the ending turns out to be the best part. First, there's the
post-iceberg endgame, which (as I said) can actually be several
different endgames, depending on what you've accomplished. Anything from
a simple quest for a lifeboat, to a mad rush to grab objects from all
over the ship. And there's a fair amount of real-life tension to work
with. (Meeting the steerage passengers, trapped below decks, was an
effective scene. Mind you, you only have to meet them so that they can
do you a favor. But that favor, like everything in the endgame, flows
naturally from the storylines earlier on.)

And then the denoument, after you escape on a lifeboat. You have
fulfilled none, some, or all of your tasks. History is changed. And
you're back in 1942 -- *a* 1942. If you did everything right, it's an
ideal 1942... quite different from the London Blitz of *our* history. If
you missed anything, things are bad, one way or another. All your
windows blow in, or the Nazis storm in, or the Communists drag you away,
or -- other possibilities -- and blam, you're on the Titanic, and you
have another chance.

I spent at least two hours playing through the endgame again and again,
deliberately screwing up in as many ways as possible. Because you get a
little summary of history each time. I counted seven possible versions
of the thirty-year period between 1912 and 1942, including the "real"
version and the "ideal" version. I was fascinated. Scribbling little
notes about each one. Truly, I was more intrigued by these variations
than by the main storyline of the game.

(An interesting note, perhaps not obvious. These histories are seen, and
judged, by someone *in 1942*. Today, we might consider our "real"
history to be one of the best of the variations shown in _Titanic_. The
Nazis were defeated, Communism fell apart, there hasn't been a world war
for fifty years. But for the observer in air-raid London, it's the
*worst* of all possible worlds. One Great War, brutal revolution in
Russia -- and now, he says in bitter despair, *a second World War*. What
could possibly be worse?)

Try it and see.

Conclusion: Good try, but not well-written enough to be really
interesting, except for the bits at the end.

Availability: You can buy it directly from the publisher's web page,
http://www.barracuda-gssm.com/. Or look around in bargain bins. It's a
hybrid Mac/PC game.

System Requirements: System 7.1, 68040 or better, 8 megs RAM total, 2x
CD drive, 256 colors. (16 megs RAM and Powermac recommended.)

Macintoshness: There are some interface annoyances. No command keys for
save and restore, although cmd-Q works. And you can't double-click a
game file to start it running -- which means that you *always* have to
boot the game with CD-ROM 1, restore a game, and then swap in CD-ROM 2
to play. Dumb.

(This review, and my reviews of other Mac adventure games, are at
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/gamerev/index.html)

--Z
-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From mberlyn@cascadepublishing.com Wed Jun 16 09:53:45 CEST 1999
Article: 43396 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: "Mike Berlyn" <mberlyn@cascadepublishing.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: ARGH! This is _clearly_ advertising!
Date: Sat, 12 Jun 1999 08:54:16 -0700
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Volker,

Fair is fair. :-)

Here's an anecdote from the Infocom-Berlyn archives:
I had been working at Infocom for awhile, and Marc Blank and I had easily
become friends, even though Marc was my boss. After work, Marc would come
over and hang out, and sometimes we (Muff, Marc & I) would go out to dinner.
One night, he informed us that a new guy was coming in to run the company, a
guy named Al Vezza. I shrugged and asked what was wrong with Joel running
the company. "Joel is too young (chronologically). We're doing business
products now, too, so we need an older face at the helm. Easier to raise
money, etc."

Well, it sort of made sense to me. Al had been the head of the Lab for
Computer Sciences at M.I.T. where all the Infocom guys had worked, and one
of the ten founding fathers (who we called floundering fathers, later
shortened to flounders) of Infocom. It took awhile, but this new guy, Al,
eventually made his way to my office. He introduced himself and then held
out his palm, face up. Into his palm he placed a bent paperclip.

"What is it I am holding in my hand?" he asked.

Not wanting to look the fool, I said, after .000001 nanoseconds of
deliberation, "A paperclip."

"Wrong," he said. "It's a sailboat."

I raised my eyebrows and smiled slightly, expecting an explanation.

"You'll never make a living in the creative arts," he said. And then he
walked out. (This was after I had made my living as a musician, composer,
and albeit slimly, as a writer, too.)

Later, I asked Marc what that was all about. Marc said, "He folds the
paperclip so the top part looks like a sail. He tries that on everyone. It's
his metric for creativity."

Live and learn. I sure am glad I took up a career selling shoes
door-to-door. Next time you hear "weasel-alien" you'll know to whom it
refers.

-- Mike
mailto:mberlyn@cascadepublishing.com
http://www.cascadepublishing.com
Publishers of (worth the money) Dr. Dumont's Wild P.A.R.T.I.

Volker Lanz wrote in message ...
>This is advertising! And as far as I can remember, that's against the
>netiquette, isn't it? Hmm, so that deserves punishment... Let me think...
>Well, how about Mike has to tell a funny little anecdote from the old days
>each time he does this? Or raffle a few games for free? Or... well, there
>are hundreds of possibilities! Let's go an' get him!
>
>- Volker
>
>
>Ps. The guy is right - go to http://www.cascadepublishing.com and get the
>games. They're worth their price. - Hm? What? Punishment? Me?
>
>
>




From mberlyn@cascadepublishing.com Wed Jun 16 10:09:16 CEST 1999
Article: 43433 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: "Mike Berlyn" <mberlyn@cascadepublishing.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: ARGH! This is _clearly_ advertising!
Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1999 09:46:05 -0700
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Hehe.

Florian, you will bleed me dry! I retain all rights to my memory, whether
biochemical, electronic, or ink on paper. In order to write yet another
anecdote, I must first remember one worthy of recounting... give me a few
months and I'm sure this aging memory will come up with something worthy.

In the meantime...

One day, Marc and I were minding our own business when Joel (the then
president) walked in to his office. I believe I was sitting in Marc's guest
chair at the time, and we were chatting about some changes we thought might
be appropriate to the development system. Joel said to Marc, "You ever hear
of a guy named Robert Corman?"

To which I responded, "Roger."

Marc said, "Yes, he's a director."

"He wants to have a meeting," Joel said.

"About?" Marc asked.

"Doing a Zork movie."

Interesting, I thought. So we took a meeting with Roger Corman's people.
There were big issues over creative control, and nothing came of it at the
time. Still, it was cool being a little game designer/small-time-author
taking a meeting with Corman.

-- Mike
mailto:mberlyn@cascadepublishing.com
http://www.cascadepublishing.com
Publishers of the Dr. Dumont's Wild P.A.R.T.I. (Not an ad -- just a
statement of fact. Hehe)

Florian Edlbauer wrote in message <3766347F.992EF057@REMOVE_THISzd.com>...
>
>
>Mike Berlyn wrote:
>
>> Volker,
>>
>> Fair is fair. :-)
>>
>> [anecdote snipped]
>>
>> -- Mike
>> mailto:mberlyn@cascadepublishing.com
>> http://www.cascadepublishing.com
>> Publishers of (worth the money) Dr. Dumont's Wild P.A.R.T.I.
>
>^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>Advertising again! So give us another story!
>
>(To be repeated an infinitum.)
>
>Florian
>




From MKST21C@prodigy.com Mon Jun 21 09:53:23 CEST 1999
Article: 43570 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: MKST21C@prodigy.com (Chris Lang)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Zork III fairness?
Date: 19 Jun 1999 03:10:48 GMT
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Matthew Murray <mmurray@cc.wwu.edu> wrote:
>
>	I've been trying, but haven't been able to completely follow this
>thread.  What exactly is the issue with the earthquake?  And, did I 
read
>correctly that the aquaduct is involved somehow?  If so, could someone
>explain that to me?  I've never caught it any of the times I've played 
the
>game.
>

   Well, the earthquake has generated controversy among the modern IF 
community for its unforseeable nature (see the other replies for more 
details), but I don't think it's as unfair as a certain other element....


SPOILER SPACE.....
It
is
pitch
black.
You 
are
likely
to
be
eaten
by 
a 
grue.
Your
sword
is 
glowing
with 
a 
faint
blue
glow.

    For all the controversy surrounding the earthquake's destroying the 
High Arch (by the way, it IS possible to kill yourself to get out of 
there if you're trapped in all the versions I've played. One can always 
JUMP into the chasm), 
I don't feel it's as unfair as a certain random occurence in the Royal 
Museum.
   In order to solve the Crown Jewels puzzle, one must travel back in 
time to the Jewel Room of 776. One cannot leave the room or return to the 
present until the guards in the next room leave. So far, so good. All one 
has to do is just WAIT or LISTEN until the guards leave, right?
  Unfortunately, there's a chance that a guard might decide to check the 
Jewel room before leaving, and if he does so, he kills you right there. 
To make matters worse, the game session ends at this point (since you're 
presumably out of reach of the Dungeon Master or anyone else that could 
help you). It's not as if you called attention to yourself by making 
noises or anything; it's just a chance occurence. It rarely actually 
happens, but if it does, there's no way to defend yourself. You can't 
hide, you can't fight, and you can't flee. And no, that invisibility 
potion doesn't work, either. 
  To me, this is unfair. The player is killed through no fault of his/her 
own. Modern IFfers believe that it SHOULD be possible, in theory, to 
finish a work of IF any time you play it, as long as you do everything 
right. In that light, the '776 Jewel Room guard' is worse than the 
earthquake/aqueduct problem. It can happen regardless of what the player 
is doing at the time; in those 5 to 10 turns the guards are present, the 
player is in danger of having the game come to a screeching halt while 
not doing anything wrong. 
   And, of course, one can't finish the game without getting in that 
situation in the first place. 
   I find this element rather odd, considering the 'be kind to the 
player' elements in the other Zork games (resurrections, gnomes, and 
other elements that would let the player continue, but without getting 
all the points). I have to wonder just what sort of mood the Implementors 
were in when they programmed in this occurence.

                                                Chris Lang



From mberlyn@cascadepublishing.com Thu Jun 24 17:22:12 CEST 1999
Article: 43709 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: "Mike Berlyn" <mberlyn@cascadepublishing.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Zork Movie (was: ARGH! This is _clearly_ advertising!)
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 07:31:04 -0700
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Mangus,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. Muffy and I were on our first
vacation in about 6 years. Man, did we make up for lost time! Hehe.

Anyway, the Zork movie never happened, and we never really talked plot --
just creative control. We (Infocom) were very wary of just licensing the
name and letting them do whatever they wanted with it, and they (Corman's
people) were wary of having a bunch of MIT geeks involved in anything
Hollywood.

As the immortal Infocom parser would say,
>TAKE MEETING
Nothing happens.

-- Mike
mailto:mberlyn@cascadepublishing.com
http://www.cascadepublishing.com
Publishers of the Astronomer's Journal.

Magnus Olsson wrote in message <7k7m97$bei$1@bartlet.df.lth.se>...
>In article <7k60bq$1a04@enews5.newsguy.com>,
>Mike Berlyn <mberlyn@cascadepublishing.com> wrote:
>>"He wants to have a meeting," Joel said.
>>
>>"About?" Marc asked.
>>
>>"Doing a Zork movie."
>
>A Zork movie? Well, if they could make a Super Mario movie...(BTW, I just
>heard that the Swedish distributor of the Super Mario games have persuaded
>the city in which they're located to name a street after Mario).
>
>Are you at liberty to discuss what it would have been about - the
>story of an adventurer who breaks into a white house, battles a troll,
>and goes on to rule over the dungeon, or would it be an unrelated
>story set in the Zork universe?
>
>--
>Magnus Olsson (mol@df.lth.se, zebulon@pobox.com)
>------    http://www.pobox.com/~zebulon   ------




From mann@pa.dec.com Sun Jul  4 13:03:27 CEST 1999
Article: 43876 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: mann@pa.dec.com (Tim Mann)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: way off topic (was Re: Unfair Games)
Date: 3 Jul 1999 16:43:16 GMT
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The Smothers Brothers used to do a version of that song, which the reminder 
has gotten going through my head endlessly...

My old man's a sailor
What do you think about that?
He wears a sailor's collar,
He wears a sailor's hat.
He wears a sailor's raincoat,
He wears a sailor's shoes,
And every Saturday evening,
He reads the Sailor's News.  [or was that Sunday News?]

Repeat with "anthropologist," "refrigerator repairman," and "cotton pickin' 
finger lickin' chicken plucker" in place of "sailor" (including the last 
line).

In the second-last verse Tom gets frustrated and says "Playboy" instead 
of the Refrigerator Repairman's News.  In the last verse he gets fed up 
and shouts out "My old man wears a BRA!" over and over until Dick calms 
him down.

Tim Mann <mann@pa.dec.com>  Compaq Systems Research Center

http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/personal/Tim_Mann/



From adam@princeton.edu Sun Jul  4 13:04:11 CEST 1999
Article: 43882 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: adam@princeton.edu (Adam J. Thornton)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: way off topic (was Re: Unfair Games)
Date: 3 Jul 1999 18:30:03 GMT
Organization: We don't need no steenking organization!
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In article <377e5161.1215842@news.nu-world.com>,
Lelah Conrad <lac@nu-world.com> wrote:
>FYI, in case you weren't aware, the last phrase ("cotton pickin'") is
>now considered a racist, derogatory term among those who teach
>tolerance/non-hate speech to kids in public school. 

Sheesh!

Plenty of poor *white* people picked cotton too.  It's not racist, it's
classist, and the two are not, and never were, identical, even in the
South.  And of *course* it's derogatory.  That's what the phrase is *there*
for, e.g.: "There ain't no cotton-pickin' *way* I'm gonna rewrite _Stiffy's
Sundae Surprise_ in AGT so your mouth-breathing script-kiddie friends can
play it without having to download a Zcode interpreter."

And as for songs, I always rather liked:
"Oh, my father's a geneologist, a geneologist, a geneologist,
 And a mighty fine geneologist is he-e.
 All day he asks "Who's your daddy?  Who's your daddy?  Who's your daddy?"
 And when he comes home, he asks "Who's your daddy?" to me."

And if this discussion goes on any longer I'm going to have to roll out the
heavy artillery and start singing "The Hedgehog Can Never Be Buggered At
All."  You've been warned.

Adam
-- 
adam@princeton.edu 
"My eyes say their prayers to her / Sailors ring her bell / Like a moth
mistakes a light bulb / For the moon and goes to hell."  -- Tom Waits


From erkyrath@netcom.com Sun Jul  4 13:05:34 CEST 1999
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Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Unfair Games
Date: 2 Jul 1999 15:24:54 GMT
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David R <david_rendall@hotmail.com> wrote:
> John W. Kennedy <rri0189@ibm.net> wrote in message
> news:377CB591.16A306C7@ibm.net...
>> was referring to the fact that, in the UK, "dust", unmodified, also
>> means garbage, which it never, ever means in the US.
> 
> Really? Where in the UK is it used in that way? I've never heard it used on
> its own to mean garbage: dustman , dustbin are fine, but not dust by itself.

It may not be, but it's recognizable with that meaning in compounds.
*That's* not true in the US.

> Now, who can remember all the words to "My old man's a dustman..."

....He wears a dustman's hat;
He's got Gorblimey trousers
And he lives in a council flat.
He looks a proper na-na
In his great big hobnail boots;
He's got such a job to pull them up
That he calls them daisy roots.

--Z (Foo mum ble bar kla con boz tra! Foo mum ble bar kla con boz tra!)

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From russotto@wanda.vf.pond.com Wed Jul  7 20:37:08 CEST 1999
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Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Adventure question (possible SPOILER)
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In article <01bec804$11c4ff20$0a0e1881@rotonoto.unm.edu>,
Bob Reeves <rreeves@unm.edu> wrote:
}In the Inform version you have a 95% chance of not getting out, which seems
}excessive; going west doesn't hurt you, however. There was a version I
}played back in the eighties where going west indeed diminished your chances
}of getting out, but otherwise your chances were usually better than 5%.
}Just keep trying. (You know what you have to do while you're there, I
}hope?)

According to some old FORTRAN source:
East, North, South, NE, SE, SW, NW, Up, and Down, bring you back to Witt's End
with 95% probability.  They all bring you to the anteroom with 5%
probability.  West brings you to the cave-in with 100% probability.
This is the same as the Inform version.

I had once started a list of the differences between Inform advent and
the original, but I lost it somehow...  IIRC, the biggest one is what
happens when the lamp burns out.  In the original, if it burns out
above ground you get forced to quit.  Otherwise you get to wande
around in the dark until you die.  In Inform, if it burns out below
ground you get forced to quit.  
-- 
Matthew T. Russotto                                russotto@pond.com
"Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in pursuit
of justice is no virtue." 


From mol@bartlet.df.lth.se Thu Jul  8 13:36:17 CEST 1999
Article: 44010 of rec.games.int-fiction
Path: news.lth.se!not-for-mail
From: mol@bartlet.df.lth.se (Magnus Olsson)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction,rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: Defining IF (yet again) (was: Are there any IF+RPG?)
Supersedes: <7m1qrd$a50$1@bartlet.df.lth.se>
Date: 8 Jul 1999 11:34:22 +0200
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In article <37840842.6F689266@jump.net>,
J. Robinson Wheeler <wheeler@jump.net> wrote:
>Magnus Olsson wrote:
>
>> And, more to the point, none of the roguelikes can be said to be IF
>> in the usual sense of the word. OK, they're certainly interactive,
>> and they're fictional, and there's some little plot (in the form
>> of quests etc) but in that case Doom is IF as well.
>
>Well -- it is, isn't it?  I wouldn't say it's outside the circle
>entirely. 

Well, if you think of it that way, almost any computer game is IF,
considering that almost all computer games nowadays have some sort of
storyline to keep things together (there are exceptions, like chess
games, of course).

We must draw the line somewhere. Exactly where is hard to define, but
if we start counting rogue as IF then the distinction ebtween
IF and other computer games becomes meaningless.

>Really, DOOM is an exaggerated version of Hunt the 
>Wumpus.

Well, you could say that an awful lot of computer games are exaggerated
versions of Wumpus, but when you broaden your definitions like that they 
ultimately become meaningless. "A horse is just like a cat; they're both
quadrupedal mammals" is a true statement, in a sense, but it's not very helpful
when you're looking for a good pack animal.

>  Is Wumpus IF?  I guess maybe not.  

A more meningful way of thinking of Wumpus is as a precursor of
IF, in that it was the first game that represented the world as
a directed graph of "rooms" connected by "passages" (previous games
would either have no notion of geography at all, or take place
on a grid-like "board").

>Rogue and Wumpus were both text games.

I don't think Rogue can be considered a text game - it's a *graphic*
game, only it's character graphics rather than bitmaps or vector graphics.

This is a very important distinction - Rogue was one fo the first
games (perhaps the first) where you actually could see your character
moving around on a map, rather than just reading descriptions of
what happened. (OK, "Star Trek" had its cahracter graphics "sensor
scans" before Rogue)

>  Rogue was also a sort of 
>adventure game.  Go into the dungeon, get the MacGuffin of Whoozis, 
>climb back up. 

Rogue is *definitely* an adventure game. It's just not IF.

> Not much of a plot, but one could imagine that you
>could stick a plot in there

Which people have done: Nethack, the direct descendant of Rogue,
contains a rudimentary plot, quests of different kinds, etc. It's
still not IF. WHy? Perhaps because the plot is not integral to the
game, but just an excuse for fighting monsters?

>or write a back-story to Wumpus. 

Obviously, that wouldn't make Wumpus IF either.

> Are
>we just talking about plotless games?  Is the plot the fiction we're
>talking about in IF?  Obviously not.  

Not so obviously, actually. The more I think of it, the more I'm
convinced that plot is an essential element in IF, just as plot is an
essential element in a non-interactive novel or short story. OK, there
are experimental novels that try to be plotless, but do they succeed?
Are they really novels? (That they can be works of art is obvious).

>Is it just the prose?  Hmmm.

Not *just* the prose, but I think prose is essential as, in the sense
that text IF uses text as the primary medium for interaction. The
player types textual commands and the game responds with textual
descriptions.  To some extent, this can be replaced and/or extended
with other interaction forms (such as the player clicking on a compass
rose to move, or the response to the player's typing "light candle"
being a pciture of a burning candle).

Of course, this means that graphic IF isn't text IF, which is a bit of
a tautology, but obviously these categories of games have something
in common. Which prings me back to what I called "plot" above.

On further consideration, "plot" isn't really what I'm after. It's more
what Espen Aarseth called "beign caught in a story" (he used it in 
a negative sense, but I actually think this is something *desired* by
devotees of IF-as-we-know-it (which, incidentally, is one of the reasons
Espen met such angry reactions on this group - he essentially said
that "IF is flawed because..." and then proceeded to list the very
properties of IF which *define* the genre, atl east for some of us)).

It's a bit hard to describe what I'm after, but it's the sense that
the game world is driven by some sort of master plan where you have to
follow a more or less rigidly defined path in order to set certain
events in motion and to advance the story. In its cruder forms - what
we call "linear" games - the player must perform a certain chain of
well-defined actions for anything to happen at all. The driving force
is usually a plot, but it needn't be; at least not a plot in the usual
sense of the word. For example, does "Advent" have a plot in the
conventional sense? It's debatable, but it certainly has the driving
force that says, essentially, that "OK, here's this cave for you to
explore, but you must explore it in the way the author has decided".

Also, it's essential that there is an element of simulation - the game
world contains objects with which you can interact and which respond
to your actions in certain well-defined ways, but the simulation
should be subordinate to the driving force.



So, where does this leave Nethack?

TO begin with, the interactionis primarily graphical, not textual,
though text is used for game messages and there are some "cut scenes"
in the form of largish chunks of prose. So it's not text IF.

Is it graphic IF, or some other non-text IF?

Well, the simulation elements are there. And there is a "plot"
structure; the game is driven by the need to solve problems, perform
certain actions and fulfill quests. 

But this isn't the essence of the game. At its heart, Nethack (and its
ancestor Rogue) is about killing monsters - 95% of the time and effort
goes into combat against randomly occuring monsters. There is no
"plot" or "driving force" behind this combat (well, of course there is
the driving force of needing to win the combat, but that kind of
driving force exists in *all* games - it's called rules).

-- 
Magnus Olsson (mol@df.lth.se, zebulon@pobox.com)
------    http://www.pobox.com/~zebulon   ------

-- 
Magnus Olsson (mol@df.lth.se, zebulon@pobox.com)
------    http://www.pobox.com/~zebulon   ------


From mol@bartlet.df.lth.se Sat Jul 10 12:02:52 CEST 1999
Article: 44067 of rec.games.int-fiction
Path: news.lth.se!not-for-mail
From: mol@bartlet.df.lth.se (Magnus Olsson)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction,rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: SPAG has a new editor
Date: 10 Jul 1999 09:54:07 +0200
Organization: The Computer Society at Lund University and Lund Institute of Technology
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NNTP-Posting-User: mol
Xref: news.lth.se rec.arts.int-fiction:61672 rec.games.int-fiction:44067


After careful consideration I've decided to resign as editor of SPAG,
effective immediately. 

This is not an easy decision; my years with SPAG have been great fun.
However, finding myself with less and less time to devote to IF, I
would like to devote that time to active authorship.  I've had my turn
at editing; it's time to pass the torch on to someone with fresh ideas.

The new editor is Paul O'Brian <obrian@colorado.edu>, who should be
well-known to readers of SPAG and the int-fiction newsgroups for his
comprehensive and often profound reviews. Paul says that there will be
no changes in editorial policy, at least not for the time being. 

>From  today (July 10, 1999), submissions and game ratings should be
sent to obrian@colorado.edu rather than to me. (I will of course
forward any recevied but not yet published submissions to Paul). 

As before, the SPAG Web page (http://welcome.to/spag) is maintained by
Joe deRouen <jderouen@airmail.net>. I will continue to maintain the
SPAG mailing list. 

-- 
Magnus Olsson (mol@df.lth.se, zebulon@pobox.com)
------    http://www.pobox.com/~zebulon   ------


From mol@bartlet.df.lth.se Sat Jul 10 12:02:54 CEST 1999
Article: 44069 of rec.games.int-fiction
Path: news.lth.se!not-for-mail
From: mol@bartlet.df.lth.se (Magnus Olsson)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction,rec.arts.int-fiction
Subject: New source code release: Zugzwang
Date: 10 Jul 1999 12:02:25 +0200
Organization: The Computer Society at Lund University and Lund Institute of Technology
Lines: 21
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Xref: news.lth.se rec.games.int-fiction:44069 rec.arts.int-fiction:61673

You may remember the April 1st, 1998 release of the TextFire 12 pack
of demos, and that one of the demos was called "Zugzwang - the
Interactive Life of a Chess Piece".

Release 2 of this game, with Inform source code included, has now been
uploaded to ftp.gmd.de. It's currently in
/incoming/if-archive/zugzwang.zip.

For those of you who haven't seen it, this game lets you play the part
of a pawn in an ongoing chess game. Don't worry if you don't know how
to play chess: an on-line rule book is included in the game.

I've spent some time cleaning up and commenting the source code. I think
it might be of interest to Inform programmers as an example of how
to use Inform's object-oriented features, as well as how to implement
a chess board and display it on the status line.


-- 
Magnus Olsson (mol@df.lth.se, zebulon@pobox.com)
------    http://www.pobox.com/~zebulon   ------


From erkyrath@netcom.com Sun Jul 11 01:36:05 CEST 1999
Article: 44072 of rec.games.int-fiction
Path: news.lth.se!feed2.news.luth.se!luth.se!uio.no!uninett.no!news.maxwell.syr.edu!ix.netcom.com!not-for-mail
From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Are there any IF+RPG?
Date: 10 Jul 1999 17:24:04 GMT
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Magnus Olsson <mol@bartlet.df.lth.se> wrote:
> In article <7m5scd$mme$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,  <okblacke@my-deja.com> wrote:
>>Here's an interesting digression: I don't think Rogue *was* the first of
>>the rogue-like games.
>>
>>The Rogue History homepage doesn't give a date more specific than 1980,
>>but I think it was 1979 when Don Worth released "Beneath Apple Manor",
>>which may have preceded.  It was certainly on store shelves in 1980.
> 
> I must confess to never having heard of "Beneath Apple Manor" -
> could you tell us a little more about it?

Ooh, hrm. I played it (also around 1980.)

It was for the Apple 2, probably in Applesoft Basic. It used the Apple
lo-res mode (40x40 *large* pixels on the screen, 4-bit color.) Obviously,
different things were coded by colors rather than letters.

It was okay. Slow and frustrating, really. When I later (in college)
encountered Rogue, I didn't miss BAM.

The various Apple 2 pirate archives might have it, mumble mumble usual
disclaimer.

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From karvic@aldwark.freeserve.co.uk Sun Jul 11 21:24:08 CEST 1999
Article: 44082 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: "karen" <karvic@aldwark.freeserve.co.uk>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Jewel of Knowedge review (possible mild spoilers)
Date: Sun, 11 Jul 1999 07:38:31 +0100
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This game can be downloaded from ftp.gmd.de/if-archive, under the gamefile
name Jewel.z5.  It is the first offering by a promising new author,
Francesco Bova, and hopefully it won't be the last.  It is a traditional
dungeon crawl, so for you purists out there, it's ideal.  In my opinion (not
worth much, but there you are), there are far too few traditional text
adventures being written nowadays, and I have to confess I am not too sure
that I like the way that interactive fiction is heading.  I like to have
puzzles to scratch my head over, and the trend towards puzzleless games
doesn't appeal to me at all.  You might just as well write a book and be
done with it.

There, now I'll get off my soapbox, and on with the game.  I found it to be
very atmospheric, with a decided feel of the old Zorks about it, and that
sucked me in right from the beginning.  I'm an absolute sucker for that kind
of game.  When you start, you find yourself deep underground, obviously in
the middle of some quest or other, but with very little information on what
you are supposed to be doing.  This had me stumped at first, but you do have
a travelling companion (Jacob), and if you start talking to him about
various things, you will find the game soon opens up, and since poor Jacob
doesn't live very long, as usual in this type of game, you find yourself
alone and very much up the creek without a paddle!  I am not giving away
anything here by telling you this, since in order for the game to start
properly, unfortunately poor Jacob has to go and meet his Maker.

OK, so you're now even deeper underground, and you must start to wander
round the various tunnels and passageways in order to achieve your object of
finding this wondrous jewel which is reputed to give it's owner unlimited
knowledge and power.  I really don't want to say much about the puzzles
since it would give too much away, but there are lots of things to do in a
very small playing area.  What about that porous wall that you can look
through - can you get to the other side of it?  What about that shaft above
the geyser - are you able to get up there?  What about the crack in the roof
of one of the tunnels?  What about that skeleton that seems to be hiding
something?  The list goes on, and you haven't even met the three dragons
yet!  Is there any way of getting in contact with the people who sent you on
this foolhardy mission in the first place?

These are just a few of the questions you will have to find the answers to
while playing this game.  There are many more of course, and I have to say
that although I got stuck in several places, none of the problems is
insoluble with a little thought, and a lot of lateral thinking.  Just a word
of warning, don't be too quick to be destructive and violent - think about
things.

When I finally got to the endgame and found the jewel, I was quite relieved.
I know from messages on the newsgroups, that several people didn't like the
ending, but I have to say that I found it to be a very refreshing change.  I
won't say more than that, as I don't want to spoil things, but I would be
very interested to know what other people think.

There are still one or two minor bugs in the game, but nothing that will
stop you completing it.  The author is aware of them, and they should be
cleaned up shortly.

I may be a little biased here, since I was involved in the beta-testing, but
I would thoroughly recommend this as a smashing little game to while away a
few hours.  I do hope the author continues to write games like this, for
those of us who still prefer a good old 'zorky' type of game.









From erkyrath@netcom.com Sun Jul 11 21:24:15 CEST 1999
Article: 44086 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Jewel of Knowedge review (SPOILERS)
Date: 11 Jul 1999 18:27:17 GMT
Organization: Netcom
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Xref: news.lth.se rec.games.int-fiction:44086

SPOILER space











karen <karvic@aldwark.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> When I finally got to the endgame and found the jewel, I was quite relieved.
> I know from messages on the newsgroups, that several people didn't like the
> ending, but I have to say that I found it to be a very refreshing change.  I
> won't say more than that, as I don't want to spoil things, but I would be
> very interested to know what other people think.

Okay.

A refreshing change from what? The Zork-1-era "take all the treasure and
run" attitude? I really don't think you can say that in the same review
with nostalgia about "good old zorky adventure". Infocom had gotten away
>from  the treasure hunt plot by the time of Zork 3, they gleefully gutted
it in Infidel, and they never went back to it. 

(As the overall plot, I mean. It stayed an element of mid-games, but not
endings.)

And the ending scene of _Jewel_ just struck me as extremely shallow. Dan
Shiovitz already said this, so I won't repeat it. I had no reason to
believe in any of the consequences shown. Is omniscience bad? The author
says so, but doesn't make me feel that it's part of the universe he's set
up; it's just tacked on.

The author could just as well have said "You take the Jewel. You now know
everything. Unfortunately, the druids forgot to tell you of the terrible
curse, that anyone who learns too much will be devoured by his own hat.
Munch munch."

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From lemonhead@anti-social.com Thu Jul 22 14:30:39 CEST 1999
Article: 44212 of rec.games.int-fiction
Path: news.lth.se!feed2.news.luth.se!luth.se!logbridge.uoregon.edu!nntp2.deja.com!nnrp1.deja.com!not-for-mail
From: lemonhead@anti-social.com
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: IF people photograph archive
Date: Sat, 17 Jul 1999 11:46:47 GMT
Organization: Deja.com - Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
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Xref: news.lth.se rec.games.int-fiction:44212

Hello!  I have created an archive of all the photographs I could find
of people involved with the interactive fiction "scene".

Ever wanted to know what the people whom with you are chatting on IFMud
look like?  Here is your chance:

http://members.xoom.com/headlemon/ifpeople.html

I have found photographs of the following people.
If you have photographs of other IF-ers, please let me know!

Stuart Adair
Jouni Alkio
Torbjorn Andersson
Matthew Amster-Burton
Steve Bernard
Jon Blaskowitz
Adam Cadre
John Cater
Rybread Celsius
Ivan Cockrum
Lelah Conrad
David Cornelson
Stacy Cowley
Liza Daly
Neil deMause
Jason Dyer
David Dyte
Ian Finley
Andrew Frederiksen
Ryan Freebern
Graham Fyffe
Allen Garvin
Michael Gentry
Dave Gilbert
David Glasser
Joe Grzesiak
Aapo Haapanen
Ola Mikael Hansson
Christopher Huang
Doug Jones
Chris Klimas
Carl Klutzke
Jennifer Maher
Joe Mason
Steve McKinney
Iain Merrick
Eileen Mullin
Mark Musante
Graham Nelson
Dylan O'Donnell
Opal O'Donnell
Marnie Parker
Ben Parrish
Jason C. Penney
Alex Pepperberg
Andrew Plotkin
L. Ross Raszewski
Mike Reddy
Mike J. Roberts
Evin Robertson
Joe de Rouen
Cody Sandifer
Andrew Schepler
Gunther Schmidl
Dan Schmidt
Miron Schmidt
Dan Shiovitz
Lucian Smith
Mike Snyder
Simon Stapleton
Ola Sverre
Bradd W. Szonye
Kent Tessman
Adam J. Thornton
Jason M. Tucker
Mikko Vuorinen
J. Robinson Wheeler
G. Kevin Wilson
Dan Wood


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.


From Arcum_Dagsson.with.extra.spam-cleaning.power@spam-h*ads.spam-h*ads.roly-poly.spam-fnord-h*ads.at.hotmail.dot.com Thu Jul 22 14:31:30 CEST 1999
Article: 44226 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Arcum_Dagsson.with.extra.spam-cleaning.power@spam-h*ads.spam-h*ads.roly-poly.spam-fnord-h*ads.at.hotmail.dot.com (Arcum Dagsson)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction,rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: YES, THE PHOTOS ARE FAKE (was IF people photograph archive)
Message-ID: <Arcum_Dagsson.with.extra.spam-cleaning.power-1807991823290001@ppp232.cas.las-vegas.nv.skylink.net>
References: <7mpq8o$a83$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <7mt4kj$niq$1@newssrv.otenet.gr> <Pine.SOL.3.91.990718171135.24237A-100000@godzilla5.acpub.duke.edu> <7mtm7v$md4$1@flood.xnet.com>
Organization: Sold*vi, Inc.
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Xref: news.lth.se rec.arts.int-fiction:61994 rec.games.int-fiction:44226

In article <7mtm7v$md4$1@flood.xnet.com>, Jason Compton
<jcompton@xnet.com> wrote:

> In rec.games.int-fiction Adam Cadre <adamc@duke.edu> wrote:
> : There.  Now no one even has to go to the trouble of reading anything more 
> : than the subject line to get the point.
> 
> : This little prank didn't bother me at all until I discovered that a lot 
> : of people didn't seem to realize that it was, in fact, a prank.  I mean, 
> : come on, people, how gullible can you get?  Yeesh.
> 
> Well, I could see how someone could be fooled.  I couldn't bring myself to
> look at anywhere like most of the pictures, but while some were clearly
> ridiculous, others were simply pictures of garden-variety ugly folks,
> and there are ugly people out there in the world, so someone might have
> given the benefit of the doubt to the simply ugly (but not naked)
> individuals.

Well, I was willing to accept the photo of Rybread at face value, Zarf
seemed possible, if not quite as,well, Zarfian as I expected. Then I
looked at the knife-wielding picture, and thought, well, maybe one of us
*is* really a knife-wielding maniac(or plays one on tv...)... Then I
looked at Graham Nelson, and David Dyte, and decided that it was just a
little too out there to be real....
--Arcum Dagsson
--
"I looked into your eyes, and my world came tumbling down..."

"You can't have that! That snorkel's been like a snorkel to me..."


From jonadab@bright.net Thu Jul 22 14:32:00 CEST 1999
From erkyrath@netcom.com Thu Jul 22 15:43:18 CEST 1999
Article: 44318 of rec.games.int-fiction
Path: news.lth.se!feed2.news.luth.se!luth.se!nntp.primenet.com!nntp.gctr.net!hermes.visi.com!news-out.visi.com!ix.netcom.com!not-for-mail
From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Stuck in "Jewel of Knowledge"
Date: 22 Jul 1999 13:27:44 GMT
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Magnus Olsson <mol@bartlet.df.lth.se> wrote:
> (Spoilers ahead)
> 
> * a skeleton that I can't do anything with

Can't do anything with this yet.

> * a piece of moss that I can't do anything with

You can use it to clean things. Look in the same room you found it.

> * a glacier that I lack the means to melt 

Tools will come later.

> * a porous wall that I'd like to pull down but lack the strength to

You can climb it.

> * an Unimpressive Grotto where the game goes to such lengths to tell
>   me that there's nothing interesting about that it just must be a
>   puzzle :-)

It's not.

> * A seemingly unmappable maze (the garden with gypsum flowers).
> * A molten plain which I can't get across.

Much later.

> I've made a little progress with the garden - it seems that if I crush
> or touch a flower, I can figure out which way the wind blows, but I
> can only do this twice, and then I'm stuck again.

Guess more verbs. Each one must be different. (It is generally agreed that
this was a uniquely bad idea for a puzzle. :-)

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From tar_palantir@my-deja.com Sun Aug 15 10:44:07 CEST 1999
Article: 44806 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Maxwell's Demon <tar_palantir@my-deja.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Text Comix] Suggestions welcomed!
Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 02:05:22 GMT
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Here goes:

Un cavalier, qui surgissant de la nuit,
Court vers l'aventure au galop.
Son nom, il le signe a la pointe d'un Z5,
Un signe, le signe de Zarf.

Not bad, eh? Zarf, the protector of newbies from evil philistines!

Coming soon to a newsgroup near you.










--
You are free and that is why you are lost.


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.


From erkyrath@netcom.com Tue Aug 17 22:13:07 CEST 1999
Article: 44836 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Apple IIe emulator question
Date: 17 Aug 1999 13:45:37 GMT
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davidsdoty@my-deja.com wrote:
> I'm using the apple IIe emulator I got from the gmd archive on Windows
> 95.  Is it possible to save games?  When I tried, I had to fill out
> this weird little series of questions, then the save failed.  Any
> advice would be welcomed.

The Standard Apple 2 setup was two floppy drives, marked "slot 6 drive 1"
and "slot 6 drive 2". (Meaning there was a two-drive disk card in slot 6,
of course. You could buy more cards and put them in more slots, but two
floppy drives was generally enough.)

The Apple 2 interpreter asks you which drive to use, and then asks you
which game to save -- six or eight saved games can fit on a floppy,
depending on how much RAM the game has to save. Just picture the disk
divided into six or eight bins.

When you play a game in the emulator, you've got the game disk in drive 1.
Saving there is bad, since you'd overwrite the game. Instead, set up the
emulator with a blank, formatted disk in drive 2, and save there.

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From knight37@gamespotmail.com Wed Aug 18 13:49:37 CEST 1999
Article: 44854 of rec.games.int-fiction
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Subject: Re: Shrinkwrap (was Re: Original Starcross...)
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Fortran Dragon <fortran@earthlink.net> wrote

> My glass typewriter shows Mark Stevens typing...
> [Snip]
> > You have to be careful with this -- it's relatively easy to get
> > something re-shrinkwrapped (ask around, and I'm sure a friend of a
> > friend of a friend has access to one). It's always possible people are
> > doing this to jack up the price a little bit, which is one reason why
> > I never factor this into the equation.
>
> Your point is well taken.  I guess I've been lucky to deal with
> people that have always been honest about the shrinkwrap.
>
> One question:  do these shrinkwrap machines leave the little
> round hole in the shrinkwrap?  Is that a reliable indicator of original
> shrinkwrap or can it be easily duplicate on the in-store machines?  (Ok,
> two questions.  :))

I know a used software dealer who reshrinks the titles. He puts a sticker
on them that says "used software" and he makes sure anyone who buys from
him knows what they're getting. I am not sure why he does this, but he
does.

Anyway, I've seen a LOT of re-shrinks as a result of going to his store
frequently.  And I've seen a lot of them that have little holes, and
some that don't.  So I would have to say that it's not a sure indicator
that a shrink is original, but it might be an indicator (if you see
holes) that the shrink is NOT original.  It does seem to be that most
of his NEW software (factory shrinked) are a LOT tighter-fitting, plus
there is very little box-wear on those, unless they've been mishandled
in shipping.

Knight37

P.S. I wonder if maybe the factory shrink TASTES different than the
re-shrink plastic?  Hmm...

> ENTER STORE

You see rows and rows of software.  The store has new titles on the
west side, and used titles on the east.

> W

My, my, isn't this a grand collection of new games. You see a pristine
box labeled "System Shock 2" that you feel strangly drawn to.

> GET BOX

Which box do you mean?  "System Shock 2", "Star Fleet Command",
"Civilization 2: Test of Time", "Seven Kingdoms 2", "Kingpin",
"Discworld Noir", "Might and Magic VII", "Darkstone", "Malkari",
[20 PAGES SNIPPED]
or "Alpha Centauri"?

> SEVEN KINGDOMS 2

Taken.

> X IT

Hey, wait a minute!  This box is empty!  This is one of those
"fool's games" that tricks you into thinking your favorite game
is out.

[ Your score just went down. ]

> SHIT!

Real adventurers don't use profanity.

> BULLSHIT!

Real adventures don't use profinity. Dumbass.

> KICK COMPUTER

You don't see a computer here.

> GET BOX

Which box do you mean?
[SNIP!]

> ARRRRG!!!!

A little, bald man with taped glasses walks up to you.
"Can I help you?"

> KILL MAN

Violence is not the answer to this one.

> GET "System Shock 2"

Taken.

> TASTE IT

It tastes a bit like chicken.

The little man looks at you funny and slowly backs away.

> E

You see rows and rows of software.  The store has new titles on the
west side, and used titles on the east.

You see the little man here, but he flees to the east.

> E

Wow! All the old classics are here, and they're even SHRINKWRAPPED!
You see rows of boxes of older games.

The little man is here, grabbing frantically at a telephone.

> GET BOX

Which box do you mean? "Wing Commander", "Ultima 7", "System Shock",
"Flight of the Intruder", "Pools of Radiance", "King's Quest",
"Leisure Suit Larry", "Infidel", "Loom", "Doom", "Lemmings",
[SNIP!]

> SYSTEM SHOCK

Taken.

The little man retreats to the west.

> X IT

It's the original packaging!  And it's shrinkwrapped!  Wait a minute,
there's a little sticker on the box.

> READ STICKER

"PREVIOUSLY OWNED SOFTWARE"

> SHIT!

I told you real adventurers don't use such language, looser!

> BITE ME

Violence is not the answer to this one.

> TASTE IT

Tasting yourself? Now that's pretty sick!

> TASTE BOX

Which box do you mean?
[SNIP!!]

> TASTE SYSTEM SHOCK

It tastes like old chicken.

You hear sirens approaching from a distance.

> QUIT

Are you sure you want to quit?  > Y

Game over.  You have scored, wait a minute, no you didn't.
You are a complete LOOOSER.

Knight37





From adamc@duke.edu Sun Aug 22 10:29:51 CEST 1999
Article: 44983 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Adam Cadre <adamc@duke.edu>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Contest Scoring Question
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1999 18:37:26 -0400
Organization: Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
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Avrom Faderman wrote:
> What do people think?  Would requiring normalization of scores (or doing so
> automatically) be a good idea?  Or would instituting some other official
> guideline (even something as simple as "A game with a score of 10 should be
> at or nearly on a par with your favorite game;  one with a score of 5 should
> be about average;  one with a score of 1 should be one worthy only of
> parody") be better?

To me, 10 means "I want this game to win the comp" and 1 means "I want this 
game to come in last."  Since I tend to have just a few favorites in any 
given comp batch, most of my scores cluster around 2 and 3, making my 10 
even more powerful.

An example.  Let's say there are three games in the comp, each with 99 
votes, and all three have an average score of 5.  Now, you like the first 
game quite a bit, and want it to win the comp; the others you don't care 
for.  Grading against all games that could conceivably be written, you 
decide to hand out a 7 and two 4s.  This leads to a net score of 5.02 for 
the game you like, and a 4.99 for the games you don't.

Now, let's say you're like me, and give the games a 10, a 2 and a 1.  Now 
the scores end up 5.05, 4.97 and 4.96.  A somewhat bigger spread.

Now let's put these approaches in the same pool.  There are 98 votes for 
each of these games, and they average out to 5.  You vote 7, 4 and 3; I 
give those games, respectively, a 1, a 2 and a 10.  Your favorites work 
out to a 4.98, a 4.96 and a 5.03.  My vote has had a greater impact on 
the final scores.

And that's why I vote the way I do.  I'll give up to 4 points to a game 
that I acknowledge to be well-done, but don't care for.  To get even as 
high as a 5, your game has to be one I really enjoy.

  -----
 Adam Cadre, Issaquah, WA
 http://adamcadre.ac


From erkyrath@netcom.com Sun Aug 22 10:30:49 CEST 1999
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From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Contest Scoring Question
Date: 22 Aug 1999 01:20:25 GMT
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Avrom Faderman <Avrom_Faderman@email.msn.com> wrote:
> What do people think?  Would requiring normalization of scores (or doing so
> automatically) be a good idea?  Or would instituting some other official
> guideline (even something as simple as "A game with a score of 10 should be
> at or nearly on a par with your favorite game;  one with a score of 5 should
> be about average;  one with a score of 1 should be one worthy only of
> parody") be better?

The question you seem to be asking is, over what *set* do you normalize
the 1 - 10 range. (The set of competition games that year? The set of all
competition games you've ever played? The set of all notional games you
ever might play, from the worst imaginable to the best imaginable?)

I more or less use the second of those definitions. I can see arguments
for all three, but none really convincing, so I guess I'd say we should
continue leaving it up to each player's discretion.

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From faderman@pacbell.net Mon Aug 23 09:33:48 CEST 1999
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Steve Young wrote in message <935334657.989235@ns2.saturn.ispc.net>...
>
>Adam Cadre wrote in message ...
>>To me, 10 means "I want this game to win the comp" and 1 means "I want
>this
>>game to come in last."  Since I tend to have just a few favorites in
>any
>>given comp batch, most of my scores cluster around 2 and 3, making my
>10
>>even more powerful.
>
>The trouble is if your scoring system took hold, the only games that
>would come anywhere would be middle of the road games, that although
>they didn't add anything new were fairly inoffensive, fairly liked, and
>as such wouldn't be marked excessively either way. Whereas the best
>games would be marked way up or down according to the whims of the
>participent and how it might effect their own favourites. Hardly a
>criteria of the best short games of the day.


Actually, it seems to me that if there's any trouble with Adam's scoring
system, it's exactly the opposite--broad-appeal,
everyone-enjoys-but-nobody-loves games have almost no chance if everyone
scores like that.

Massive simplification to demonstrate basic point ahead.

Let's suppose that after eliminating the games that nobody likes, the comp
were left with 2 other sorts:  "Controversial" games (ones that are in half
the players' top 15% and in half the players' bottom half) and
"uncontroversial" games (ones that every player ranks as pleasant but
basically middle-of-the-road...in the second 25%, maybe).

If everyone used a scoring system like mine, with a huge bunch near 4-6 and
only outliers near the top and bottom, "controversial" and "uncontroversial"
games might do about evenly well--controversial games would get a pretty
even mix of 8-10 and 1-5 and uncontroversial games would get 5-7 from almost
everyone, giving games of both types an expected average of around 6.

If everyone used Adam's system, with the big bunch near the very bottom but
with a very sharp curve towards the top as one approaches the best games in
the competition, controversial games would still come off OK--they'd get
8-10 from about half the people and 1's from the rest, giving them an
average of about 5, but uncontroversial games would be getting 3's and 4's
>from  almost everyone, with an expected average of about 3.5.

Now I said "trouble," but I'm not sure it is trouble.  Maybe we *want* to
encourage games at least some people love over games everybody likes--that
sounds like the better bet if we want lots of experimental stuff, at least.
Which would be an argument for Adam's system.

(The extreme version of fostering this would be to ask everyone to vote for
the best game rather than rate all of them.  Then even being everyone's
second-favorite wouldn't be as good as being the top pick of a few.)

(For pure useless intellectual curiosity's sake, it would be interesting to
see an analysis of past competition results along the lines of...which games
were the most people's top pick?  How closely does that correlate with the
actual contest results?  But that question's probably more trouble to answer
than it's worth.)

Best,
Avrom







From olorin@world.std.com Mon Aug 23 22:56:41 CEST 1999
Article: 45016 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: olorin@world.std.com (Mark J Musante)
Subject: Re: [announce] Varicella
Message-ID: <FGxDI2.7KJ@world.std.com>
Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1999 15:54:01 GMT
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Adam Cadre (adamc@duke.edu) wrote:
> 				---------
> 				VARICELLA
> 				---------
> 	 	   written and programmed by Adam Cadre
> 		   available now at http://adamcadre.ac

Just as an aside, I've done a detailed analysis of the zcode file and
have determined that this game was actually written by Opal O'Donnell.


  -=- Mark -=-


From vince@cs.Stanford.EDU Tue Aug 24 18:04:49 CEST 1999
Article: 45038 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: vince@cs.Stanford.EDU (Vincent Laviano)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [REVIEW] Valicella ***SPOILERS***
Date: 24 Aug 1999 07:24:15 GMT
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Big time Varicella spoilers below...  Proceed at your own risk.














THIS IS SPOILER SPACE.













THIS IS EVEN MORE SPOILER SPACE.













I initially meant for this to be a short post, simply stating that there
are multiple solutions for several of the games puzzles (as I discovered
when I read Sam Barlow's review and found out how he defeated Varicella's
rivals).  However, I tend to ramble, and, ever since I completed the game
on Sat evening, I've been anxious to discuss it.  So, my "brief" comment
got long and somewhat review-ish.  

I suppose I should also introduce myself since this is my first post here
in a very long time (by here, I mean r.a.i-f as well as r.g.i-f -- I tend to
view them as two facets of the same thing).  I'm Vince -- a long time lurker 
(since the early nineties).  I kept telling myself that I would post regularly
once I had completed and released my own game... and, well, here we are close
to a decade later.  "Always another comp on the horizon" and all. Anyway. 

Sam Barlow writes:
:                                 The fact that all the puzzles involve
: Valicella using others to do his dirty work (Sierra to kill Pierre, a
: _remote_ controlled car to kill Louis, Charlotte to kill Rico, Modo's
: devices to kill Wehrkeit, Modo to kill Modo) is a breath of fresh air.
: This isn't the fantasy world that IF normally inhabits--the one where
: the player does all the work. 

I was surprised to read this, since I had not realized that there were
multiple solutions to so many puzzles.  The only such puzzle that I noticed
while playing the game was the problem of getting the vials from Modo's
chamber.  One can adopt a harsh tone and get the guard to retrieve them,
or one can simply bring Princess Charlotte along and she will yell at the
guard without being prompted to do so.  As an aside, Princess Charlotte's
various comments (a large collection of IF in-jokes among them) are great --
particularly the Star Wars reference if one dons the oxygen mask in front
of her.  I liked the way the text she spoke was not capitalized (she reminded
me of Delirium in Neil Gaiman's _Sandman_ series), and I also liked the way
that Wehrkeit's text was capitalized in a haphazard fashion. It contributed
to establishing the tone of these characters for me.

So... I dispatched Pierre as Sam Barlow did. He was the first rival 
that I was able to defeat, since my initial strategy after exploring the 
palace was to hang out in my quarters and spy on everyone. Though I
initially took my recording to the Queen thinking that she would order him
executed instead of going catatonic on me.  

I never attempted to take the remote controlled car from Charles. Instead,
I got rid of Louis by taking his bottle of booze and tossing it into Modo's
pit.  He went after it.  Bad move.  I spent a lot of time trying to poison
his booze with the yellow fluid, but I eventually gave on this as a dead
end.

Charlotte can be used to kill either Louis or Rico, though I don't know of
any other way to get rid of Rico.  I attempted to get her to kill both of
them by bringing her to their meeting in the palace courtyard, but to no
avail.  She took out Louis, got carted away by the guards, and then Rico 
became confused: "I could have sworn I saw him here."

I'm not sure what is meant by "Modo's devices" (Yay! Another excuse to replay
the game...), but I killed Wehrkeit with my (well, Vericella's -- see, the  
game really is engaging) own hands, which seems appropriate given the fate
of Terzio.  So this is a case where Vericella did not use someone else to do
the dirty work for him.  Of course, the helicopter crash that he suffered
when I called Venice and told him that he had raided their weapons caches
sure helped.

And finally, yes, Modo killed Modo.  The oxygen mask escaped my notice, and
I had a really hard time figuring out how to enter his "domain."   Sierra's
guard said something about him exiting, but not entering, so I spent a lot
of time poking around her room trying to find a secret passage or something.
Of course, when I finally *got* to the chamber with the gas canisters...
<shudder>  It is kind of strange how, unless Varicella discovers the fate
of a rival, the rival is undefeated, even in the case of those rivals such
as Modo who defeat themselves.

: And it isn't the _zany_ world of
: LucasArts where the player bumbles around and others end up motivating
: the action. I chose to manipulate these characters. I was _happy_ when
: I caught Pierre abusing Charles--Ha! I've got him now! (I was also
: shocked, but you get the idea). I took advantage of Charlotte's weak
: mental state and the abuse she was subjected to further my own lot. The
: adventure protagonist often commits immoral acts with little regard for
: others. It's nothing new. But here I was _aware_. There was a moral
: structure, but I accepted that I had to go against it because everyone
: else was. Either I got fucked or they did. My simple definition of IF
: is "a fiction where interaction is offered as part of the
: message/impact of the piece". _Normally_ the story contains the message
: and the puzzles are there to slow the exposition down. Puzzle
: interaction is a neat way of involving the player. But, Valicella truly
: uses its puzzles to communicate its message.

I agree.  It was frightening how easily I entered the role of Varicella.
Before I had even left the Salon, having only looked at the notes I had
taken on my master key, I was thinking about who I should knock off first.
(I also thought that Marco might turn out to surprise us all -- no luck.)
I was happy when Charlotte gutted Rico (he deserved it), and I was equally
happen when Sierra took off Pierre's head (he also deserved it).  In fact
there was hardy a character in the game who didn't.  Eventually, I started
wondering... did I deserve it too?

: In gaming terms, my first impressions of the puzzles were wrong; none
: are contrived. I solved all the puzzles through "thinking". You know; I
: want to do this--pause...--how about trying this? A good amount of
: hands-off-keyboard time. There was a little experimentation, but most
: of the time an idea occurred and then I realised the idea within the
: game. No accidental solves or brute force puzzles. The presence of
: several "red herrings" adds to the strength of the puzzles. The player
: doesn't run around trying to find a use for a tulip _just_ because he
: found one. Looking at his inventory isn't going to help as much as
: looking at the situations he finds himself in. Whereas Photopia wasn't
: puzzless but, rather, easy-puzzle-full, Valicella has puzzles that do
: need solving. But in solving serve to put you into the mindset of the
: character. Puzzles that force you to become more involved in the
: surroundings in a non trivial way.

I got the feeling that _Varicella_ had people that needed solving rather 
than puzzles that needed solving.  And, for Varicella, that meant finding
something or someone to *use*. The manipulation and use of people by others,
particularly the use of women, seemed to be one of the major themes of this
story. 

Another theme, as evidenced by the ending of the story, is the perpetual
cycle of abuse embodied by Prince Charles, who has a childhood for which
the phrase "dysfunctional" is a gross understatement and who later takes it
out on the word (in a very literal sense here). This theme is mentioned in
Adam's Photopia Phaq (as is a mysterious game that starts with the letter V)
in the context of a novel by Geoff Ryman that was one of Photopia's
inspirations. 

(Sam's discussion of the abusive environment in which this game takes place
snipped.)

: There have been several games recently that have scorned the typical
: ending. For a long time adventure games have been just that,
: "adventures"--what ever happens the player has an exciting romp. But
: times are changing. Valicella is easily the best of the new bunch.
: Quite old-fashioned in its structure (though harking back to less
: popular forms) but very modern in all else. I was shocked that there
: should be as vocal and cynical a character as Miss Sierra. I just
: didn't expect such a character in an adventure game. My response was

: > Sierra, You're supposed to sit there and give me information on the
: characters, maybe swap an object or two. You are not allowed to rant!
: You're not allowed an opinion on things! (unless it's a murder game and
: I wanted to know why you killed your dad)

Yes, Sierra seemed to be, more than any of the other characters, a voice
for the author.  I innocently asked her about the books on her bookshelf...
and... Wow.  Try asking her about China, too.  Actually, try asking her
about most anything.  (As an aside, the one thing that none of the characters
had anything to say about was the (in Charlotte's words) hellmouth in
the compass rose.)  

One of my complaints about the timing of the game is that there really
isn't much time to really talk with Sierra aside from badgering her about
the phone and Venice.  I attempted to put together a walkthrough that
included some (very important to the story, but not to actually winning)
conversation, but there really wasn't enough time in the game world.  The
save-restore aspect of the game is integral to the experience (in the same
way that it is integral to the _Spider and Web_ experience).  Such a walk-
through would need to include multiple passes through the game to achieve the
effect that I was after -- I think that I was looking to assemble a piece of 
static fiction, a short story.  To its credit, _Varicella_ makes that very
difficult.

Some commands (e.g., "ask Sierra about me" and "kill Klaus") make reference
to the save-restore nature of the game, with varying degrees of obliqueness.
In this vein, one way to reconcile the conflict between the need to save
and restore and the desire not to want to act based on knowledge of the
future is by imagining that Varicella was hanging out in the Salon during his
manicure and going over various plans in his head.  One could view all but   
the ultimate successful attempt to have occured in his mind.  Perhaps this is
far-fetched, but oh well.

I think that the "tone" command is a qualitative advance in terms of NPC
interaction, though some may not like the game putting words in Varicella's
mouth. I think this works much better in a game such as this, with a definite
PC, than in a game that allows the player to play "as themselves."  Even
more important, to me, was the number of things that each character could be
successfully asked about.  Also, the characters maintained some state (at
least a flag for each question indicating whether it's been answered already).
All of these things worked together, along with a dose of plain old good
writing, to create a collection of characters who were individuals, down to
the palace guards, the gardener outside (the reason, in Sierra's mind, that
Varicella will have one day off a year when he's in Hell) who the player 
could (as far as I know) never even talk to, and the Turkish chef who speaks
in a French accent to mock Varicella for his formerly low opinion of Turkish 
chefs.  These characters, with the exception of the page and the steward, all
have names (albeit, some of them are of the form Guard #1234) and 
personalities. They inhabit a world that is completely fleshed out, in which
the parser and game engine virtually disappear and one thinks "What should I
do?" not "How do I explain to the game what to do?"  The one place where the
game fell down here was when I tried to "give four bills to Sierra."

I lived in this world for 24 hours, two hours in Varicella's life replayed
over and over (in his mind?) until he got it right.  My world did not exist
(well, except for the fridge) while I did this.  The highest praise that I
can think of would be to say that I wish that *I* was the one who wrote this
game. But that would be unseemly.


Vince Laviano
vince@cs.stanford.edu


From dfan@harmonixmusic.com Tue Aug 24 18:04:56 CEST 1999
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From: Dan Schmidt <dfan@harmonixmusic.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [REVIEW] Varicella ***SPOILERS***
Date: 24 Aug 1999 10:17:20 -0400
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vince@cs.Stanford.EDU (Vincent Laviano) writes:

| Big time Varicella spoilers below...  Proceed at your own risk.
| 
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| THIS IS SPOILER SPACE.

Indeed.

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| THIS IS EVEN MORE SPOILER SPACE.

Righty ho.

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| Charlotte can be used to kill either Louis or Rico

or Wehrkeit.

On the save/restore aspect: I prefer games to not be unwinnable on
first (or twentieth) playthrough.  But I don't mind so much when the
game is obviously set up to be an optimization puzzle, like Varicella
or A Change In The Weather.  It's the games that are sort of in
between, where you find out hours into a playthrough that you have to
start over, that bug me.

Other notes:

The multiple solutions thing is excellent.  When I first started
discussing the game with others we were all shocked to discover that
there were other ways of offing people.

I thought the 'tone' command was great.  The game made it very obvious
what the size of the space in which you could interact with people was.
One of the game design principles I've picked up (which doesn't apply
so much to IF, since it already uses language) is to give the player a
finite number of 'verbs' (ways to interact with her environment) and
then let her figure out how to use them, rather than have her flail
around not knowing what's possible and what's not.  The 'tone' command
was a fine verb in this respect.

The writing was just awesome.  I can't wait for Adam's novel.  Even
the guards were well characterized.  I laughed out loud once every
five minutes or so.

-- 
                 Dan Schmidt -> dfan@harmonixmusic.com, dfan@alum.mit.edu
Honest Bob & the                http://www2.thecia.net/users/dfan/
Factory-to-Dealer Incentives -> http://www2.thecia.net/users/dfan/hbob/
          Gamelan Galak Tika -> http://web.mit.edu/galak-tika/www/


From glasser@iname.com Fri Aug 27 16:52:36 CEST 1999
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From: glasser@iname.com (David Glasser)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Varicella Review
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 00:16:07 -0400
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Stephen Granade <sgranade@lepton.phy.duke.edu> wrote:

> "Avrom Faderman" <Avrom_Faderman@email.msn.com> writes:
> 
> > Piedmont is actually part of Italy, IIRC.  In the northwest.  Borders on
> > France (and Spain), though.
> 
> Piedmont is a term referring to a region of foothills near the base of
> a mountain and does get its name from such a region of Italy, but I
> doubt that's the only reference Adam was aiming for. Here in North
> Carolina (where Adam went to school for a while) there is a region
> known as the Piedmont. Since the opening of Varicella refers to
> Piedmont as "the laughingstock of the Carolingian league" I'm betting
> on the NC Piedmont as the major influence.
> 
> It's a shame that the Piedmont Boll Weevils aren't really part of the
> Carolina league.

Also, Piedmont is a city in California where famed IF author Matt
Barringer lived and famed IF company Textfire was founded.  But you know
that.

-- 
David Glasser: glasser@iname.com       | http://www.uscom.com/~glasser/
DGlasser@ifMUD:orange.res.cmu.edu 4001 | raif FAQ http://come.to/raiffaq
   tr/y/k;


From faderman@pacbell.net Fri Aug 27 16:52:56 CEST 1999
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From: "Avrom Faderman" <faderman@pacbell.net>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
References: <Oz5Wy8d7#GA.271@cpmsnbbsa02> <37c3b876.27642468@news.gte.net> <#Y7SfA57#GA.92@cpmsnbbsa03>
Subject: Geography and history in Varicella (mildly OT)
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I wrote:

>Piedmont is actually part of Italy, IIRC.  In the northwest.  Borders on
>France (and Spain), though.


and Spain?  What was I thinking?  It doesn't, of course;  Italy doesn't
border Spain at all.

Neat net link of the day:
http://clearwater.nic.edu/socsci/jasylte/HREMap.htm

has both a map of the HRE and Louis the Pious' division of the HRE among his
three sons, Lothar, Charles, and Louis...the event that never happened in
"Varicella"--instead, the HRE was turned into the Carolingean League
(Carolingean is apparently an adjective used to describe Charlemange and his
descendents...no idea why).

Approximately, Piedmont is the portion of the Italian dark green area that
lies west of Milan.
Provence (of which Avignon is the capital) is just across the border to the
west in the light green area, the part of France that bulges southwards into
the sea.
Venice (which, apparently, has seceded from the League entirely) is the area
described as "VENETIA" on the map.

Oh, and one other completely unrelated question.  Babelfish says that
"Varicella" means "Chicken Pox."  Anyone care to speculate on the
significance of that?  Or does Adam care to just tell us?

Best,
Avrom





From graham@gnelson.demon.co.uk Fri Aug 27 16:53:22 CEST 1999
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From: Graham Nelson <graham@gnelson.demon.co.uk>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Geography and history in Varicella (mildly OT)
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In article <3hrx3.5215$W5.481777@typhoon-sf.snfc21.pbi.net>, Avrom Faderman
<URL:mailto:faderman@pacbell.net> wrote:
> Approximately, Piedmont is the portion of the Italian dark green area that
> lies west of Milan.
> Provence (of which Avignon is the capital) is just across the border to the
> west in the light green area, the part of France that bulges southwards into
> the sea.

Piedmont is one of those pocket-states which was pawned back and
forth by the Great Powers fairly regularly: quite often it
belonged to the neighbouring pocket-state of Savoy, which is now
part of France.  Turin, the major city of Piedmont, used to be
called "the Queen of Savoy's drawing-room".

Barring a lot of international Congresses, post-war settlements
and the like, the history of Piedmont is essentially governed
by two men: Augustus Caesar, who first had built the trading
route via the Great St Bernard Pass into the Valais region
of Switzerland and thus, by the Rhone valley, into France and
the north; and Napoleon, for whom Piedmont was the essential
bridgehead into Italy.

-- 
Graham Nelson | graham@gnelson.demon.co.uk | Oxford, United Kingdom



From adamc@duke.edu Fri Aug 27 22:02:43 CEST 1999
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From: Adam Cadre <adamc@duke.edu>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: why chicken pox? (was geography and history in Vc)
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 11:39:20 -0400
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If you haven't played the game, don't read this post.



Avrom Faderman wrote:
> Oh, and one other completely unrelated question.  Babelfish says that
> "Varicella" means "Chicken Pox."  Anyone care to speculate on the
> significance of that?  Or does Adam care to just tell us?

Sure.

When I first came up with the idea for this game, the working title was 
"Sickest IF Game Ever Written".  I was planning to set it in the 
modern-day corporate world, chiefly influenced by one of my favorite 
television shows ever, "Profit" (which appeared for all of four episodes 
in the US.  Sigh.)  And initially, you were intended to play the nastiest 
character in the game -- in order to "win," you would have to brutalize 
any number of more or less innocent people in increasingly sadistic 
ways.  It was going to be something of an experiment to see when various 
people would finally throw up their hands and say, "Enough -- I don't 
*want* to win this thing anymore."

But while that might have been an interesting experiment a la Stanley 
Milgram, I decided that it wouldn't make for anything resembling a fun 
game.  So I decided to take a different tack: your character would still 
be a complete bastard, but the folks you were trying to knock off would 
be even worse.  That way, more players (but not all, of course) would be 
willing to step into Primo's side-latcheted shoes and gleefully set to 
the task of murdering several people.

Once I'd decided that, the name came immediately.  Chicken pox is a 
disease, but it's a relatively mild one as diseases go.  Just as the 
player character's soul is rather a diseased one, but not quite so much 
so as those of his rivals.

  -----
 Adam Cadre, Issaquah, WA
 http://adamcadre.ac


From franklir@lucia.u.arizona.edu Thu Sep  2 10:00:39 CEST 1999
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From: franklir@lucia.u.arizona.edu (Ryan J Franklin)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Yet Another Varicella Review
Date: 1 Sep 1999 23:48:01 GMT
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Minor spoilers ahead.  Another warning when major spoilers approach.

I should point out right away that I've always been fond of well-written
characters who are bad.  Bad in the sense of being cruel or callous or
excessively powerhungry.  I was a big fan of the BBC/Masterpiece Theatre
presentation of "House of Cards" (and its two sequels, about evil PM
Francis Urquhart), and spending a day being Primo Varicella compared quite
favorably with that.  

Stuff I liked:
	- The writing, and the basic story.  I won't give anything away
here, but it's an interesting setting and I really started to "get into
character" with Varicella; it's a rare treat to be able to get into the
head of an IF character, even a nasty little fop like Primo.  
  
	- I'm positive I didn't ask everyone every conceivable question.
So many characters had so many responses to so many things that I'm sure I
haven't run the well dry on any of them.  This makes even the more
enigmatic or unresponsive characters (the guard in front of Wehrkeit's
quarters, for example) feel like they're not answering me because they
don't want to, not because they're static potted plants who _can't_
answer.  As a result, I still want to play it even though I may(?) have
finished the game successfully.

	- Alternate solutions.  I restrained myself and only hit DejaNews
for the spoiler-laden posts on this topic after I'd managed to slog
through the game under my own power, and I'm very surprised to see that
some of the things I did were so...unseemly.  There were more elegant ways
of accomplishing my goals, apparently.  Again, this makes me want to keep
playing and trying new things.  

Going hand in hand with this, I liked that (for a game which has such a
brief playing time) there's lots of different things to see and do.  I was
strongly reminded of the old Infocom mystery games, where you could
spend the whole game following/spying on just one character and see a
bunch of little "easter eggs" while figuring out just when you had to be
certain places to get the right clues--except that Varicella (unlike, say,
Deadline) was almost exactly the right length for this style of game.
Long enough that a reasonably complex series of things can happen, but not
so long that finding out you missed something early on throws you into
frustrated convulsions at the thought of having to start over from the
beginning.  

	- I was a bad guy and I _still_ felt like I was doing the right
thing.  This is a tenuous thing to like, I admit, but it appealed to me.
Sue me.

Stuff I didn't like:
	- The timing was a little _too_ tight.  I'm sure this is
intentional--like someone else mentioned, one of the puzzles is how to
optimize your actions and accomplish everything before the hammer drops.
Still, it's not something I'm particularly good at, and I would've been
happier if I'd had a little more breathing space in there.  It's a little
disappointing that I can't stay and chat up a character for more than a
few questions without making it impossible for me to keep to my schedule.
Perhaps realistic, perhaps a good puzzle, but disappointing nonetheless.

	- This, again, might be my miserable skills at timing things
properly, but I could never manage to discover all the important
information _and_ use it properly in the same game.  As far as I can tell,
there was only one question I _had_ to ask in the game in order to use the
information from the answer (and only one piece of evidence I needed to
collect).  Everything else I could learn in one game, lose due to my time
running out, and then magically "know" the second time around.  I suppose
it might make some kind of sense (Varicella should already know some of
this information by virtue of his position), but it didn't feel right to
me.  I would've been happier if it were possible to learn all the
appropriate facts and act on them in a single story.

	- Nitpicky parser things: up and down are apparently synonymous
with "jump" and "lie down" when there's no appropriate exit, and while
I...or rather, while Primo is apparently aware enough of his person to
remember that he doesn't like lifting heavy objects, he'll bump into walls
or jump in the air whenever I (as an inattentive player who is moving
around faster than the room descriptions come up) try to send him in the
wrong direction.  Once is funny (like when you're with Charlotte and you
hit a wall); more than that is...well, I won't say it.  I'd have
appreciated a less goofy-looking variant of "You can't go that way" (stuff
like "Your master plan didn't involve pushing your way through
walls/growing wings and flying").  Poor Palace Minister; forced to leap
like a goon into the air, fruitlessly, just because I can never remember
that I've already reached the top of the tower or that the exit is
southeast.  I'd rather be gently chided for my mistake than have
Varicella's renowned sense of seemliness disrupted. ;-)

Overall, though, these weren't terrible flaws, and the story itself was
very well done.  It's not an epic, but it's damn good and well worth
playing.


That said....

BIG SPOILERS PAST THIS POINT (and a question that's bugging me)









More thoughts:
	- I didn't like Miss Sierra as much as I think I was meant to.  I
felt like I was supposed to think she was really incredibly cool, but
instead I only thought that she was okay--apart from being a little too
good at everything.  I was able to rationalize her amazing combination of
talents (gee, she's wickedly smart AND beautiful AND a badass) by
considering it in terms of how miserable Piedmont is--that Miss Sierra
probably wasn't the godlike omnipotent creature she's described as being,
but rather a fairly competent person surrounded by amazingly parochial and
incompetent slobs.  Not very convincing, I admit, but it was the best I
could come up with.

	- Instead, I found myself thinking that Primo and Charlotte made
quite a pair.  For one thing, I was able to think that Primo had at least
a tiny piece of kindness in him, a little soft spot of compassion in his
heart for her.  (The gardener story, by contrast, struck me as being a
pragmatic decision--of _course_ Varicella cares more about the garden than
he does about the sex of the person who tends it, so picking her as a
gardener is just plain good sense, not a compassionate act.)  This was a
nice touch; it might not be fully intended (though I wouldn't put it past
Mr. Cadre--I've played "Photopia," after all) but it really made the
characters come to life for me.

	- The other characters were all so thoroughly reprehensible that I
had no problem feeling righteous as I "removed" them.  Louis and Rico were
dead men the moment I talked to Charlotte, Bonfleche was entirely evil,
and Wehrkeit and Modo brought their fates on themselves (and what the heck
_is_ Modo's fate, anyway?) so I won't waste time feeling guilty for them.
As Varicella, I not only knew that I was best-suited to run the kingdom, I
also knew that I was dispensing justice at the same time.  If you're going
to be a bad guy, you should at least know that you're righteous. ;-)

	- I had Miss Sierra go down and execute Bonfleche for me, and I'm
curious what happened to the guard's rifle.  Maybe I missed it in the
whirlwind of activity, but it seemed to be in his hands, then he got shot,
then it vanished totally.  Not that I'd lug such a barbaric instrument
around, but I'd at least like to _try_. 


...and my big question:  Did I, in fact, get the optimal ending?  Charles
the Terror takes over at the age of 10?  Or was there something else I
could have done?


(and a minor question--I noticed that the alternative solutions mentioned
before had a lot of stuff with the remote controlled car; how the heck do
you get the transmitter for that?)

--
a very good game, i think
franklir@u.arizona.edu


From Avrom_Faderman@email.msn.com Thu Sep  2 11:09:50 CEST 1999
Article: 45415 of rec.games.int-fiction
From: "Avrom Faderman" <Avrom_Faderman@email.msn.com>
References: <7qkdvh$sg2$1@news.ccit.arizona.edu>
Subject: Re: Yet Another Varicella Review
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Ryan J Franklin wrote in message <7qkdvh$sg2$1@news.ccit.arizona.edu>...
[most of review snipped]

>
>BIG SPOILERS PAST THIS POINT (and a question that's bugging me)
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>More thoughts:
> - I didn't like Miss Sierra as much as I think I was meant to.  I
>felt like I was supposed to think she was really incredibly cool, but
>instead I only thought that she was okay--apart from being a little too
>good at everything.  I was able to rationalize her amazing combination of
>talents (gee, she's wickedly smart AND beautiful AND a badass) by
>considering it in terms of how miserable Piedmont is--that Miss Sierra
>probably wasn't the godlike omnipotent creature she's described as being,
>but rather a fairly competent person surrounded by amazingly parochial and
>incompetent slobs.  Not very convincing, I admit, but it was the best I
>could come up with.


I'm not sure exactly how much we're supposed to like Sierra.  She *is*
incredibly competent, and she *is* incredibly cool, and she at least has the
right reaction to Bonfleche.  But someone described her as "the mouthpiece
of the author," and I wonder if that's quite right.  In fact, I wonder if I
really like her much (by which I mean approve of her, not appreciate her as
a character) at all.

Why?  Well, first and foremost, her reaction to Charlotte.  Try asking
Sierra about Charlotte.  Maybe there's a grain of truth in what she says,
but really, that's a little hard!  Or try bringing Charlotte to Sierra's
quarters.  Note:  She'll go into *Rico's* quarters, but she won't go near
Sierra's.  Wow.  Whatever Sierra said to her, it must have been really
pretty bad.

And she's very happy to be a cold-blooded killer.  Look at what happens when
you don't kill Rico.  Of course, Varicella would have done the same.  But
Varicella's a pretty unpleasant character himself.

> - Instead, I found myself thinking that Primo and Charlotte made
>quite a pair.  For one thing, I was able to think that Primo had at least


Not physically, of course.  Try to REMOVE JACKET after you've untied her.
(Question for Adam:  Is Primo deliberately a sort of Anti-Tracy?)

>a tiny piece of kindness in him, a little soft spot of compassion in his
>heart for her.  (The gardener story, by contrast, struck me as being a


You know, it's strange, I got this sense too.

And by contrast, I *didn't* get the sense that Varicella had great
compassion for Prince Charles (although I certainly did).  I could almost
imagine a slight smirk come to his face as he made his recording and thought
about how he could use it to his own advantage.

I wonder why that is;  what the difference is.

>pragmatic decision--of _course_ Varicella cares more about the garden than
>he does about the sex of the person who tends it, so picking her as a
>gardener is just plain good sense, not a compassionate act.)  This was a


What are you referring to here?  I either never saw this description or
don't remember it.

> - I had Miss Sierra go down and execute Bonfleche for me, and I'm
>curious what happened to the guard's rifle.  Maybe I missed it in the
>whirlwind of activity, but it seemed to be in his hands, then he got shot,
>then it vanished totally.  Not that I'd lug such a barbaric instrument
>around, but I'd at least like to _try_.


Sierra grabs it.  Not quite sure why, given that she has her pistol.  Maybe
it's more powerful, or maybe she just doesn't want it to fall into anyone
else's hands.

>...and my big question:  Did I, in fact, get the optimal ending?  Charles
>the Terror takes over at the age of 10?  Or was there something else I
>could have done?


Not to my knowledge.


>(and a minor question--I noticed that the alternative solutions mentioned
>before had a lot of stuff with the remote controlled car; how the heck do
>you get the transmitter for that?)


Give the prince something else to play with.

Best,
Avrom





From mccall@erols.com Thu Sep  2 11:10:47 CEST 1999
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From: mccall@erols.com (TenthStone)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Yet Another Varicella Review
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On Wed, 1 Sep 1999 19:13:18 -0700, "Avrom Faderman"
<Avrom_Faderman@email.msn.com> wrote:

>
>Ryan J Franklin wrote in message <7qkdvh$sg2$1@news.ccit.arizona.edu>...
>[most of review snipped]
>
>>
>>BIG SPOILERS PAST THIS POINT (and a question that's bugging me)
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>Why?  Well, first and foremost, her reaction to Charlotte.  Try asking
>Sierra about Charlotte.  Maybe there's a grain of truth in what she says,
>but really, that's a little hard!  Or try bringing Charlotte to Sierra's
>quarters.  Note:  She'll go into *Rico's* quarters, but she won't go near
>Sierra's.  Wow.  Whatever Sierra said to her, it must have been really
>pretty bad.

Charlotte was a well-tailored character.  Most of them are.  This
bothers me a little because the women are almost textbook psychology
classes.  Sierra is the classic classy prostitute:  she leaps to the
aid of another misfortunate, she uses sex to manipulate the people in
power, she's supremely confident and competent, and she readily
resorts to cold violence to accomplish whatever else she wants.
Everything we know about Charlotte, on the other hand, can be reduced
to the word impetuous.

I think Sierra's viewpoint of Charlotte is a general anger on behalf
of women throughout Piedmont.  She doesn't treat the Queen well
either, but the Queen is a sad case.

>> - Instead, I found myself thinking that Primo and Charlotte made
>>quite a pair.  For one thing, I was able to think that Primo had at least
>>a tiny piece of kindness in him, a little soft spot of compassion in his
>>heart for her.  (The gardener story, by contrast, struck me as being a
>
>You know, it's strange, I got this sense too.

I thought Charlotte was the most attractive character in the game.
I also thought she was faining madness for quite a while.

>And by contrast, I *didn't* get the sense that Varicella had great
>compassion for Prince Charles (although I certainly did).  I could almost
>imagine a slight smirk come to his face as he made his recording and thought
>about how he could use it to his own advantage.
>
>I wonder why that is;  what the difference is.

Charles is portrayed as a brat in every single scene he's in;  it's
the player's knowledge of his past which creates sympathy.
Charlotte comes off much better.  From Sierra's perspective, I
suppose, one could say that she's the anti-Charles:  pathetic until
you know her past.

>>pragmatic decision--of _course_ Varicella cares more about the garden than
>>he does about the sex of the person who tends it, so picking her as a
>>gardener is just plain good sense, not a compassionate act.)  This was a
>
>What are you referring to here?  I either never saw this description or
>don't remember it.

Looking out the window of the salon while the gardener is out there?
I think that's what sparks the story.

>> - I had Miss Sierra go down and execute Bonfleche for me, and I'm
>>curious what happened to the guard's rifle.  Maybe I missed it in the
>>whirlwind of activity, but it seemed to be in his hands, then he got shot,
>>then it vanished totally.  Not that I'd lug such a barbaric instrument
>>around, but I'd at least like to _try_.
>
>Sierra grabs it.  Not quite sure why, given that she has her pistol.  Maybe
>it's more powerful, or maybe she just doesn't want it to fall into anyone
>else's hands.

She gets into a firefight with the guards.  You don't do that sort of
thing with a pistol and hope to make it out alive.

----------------
The Imperturbable TenthStone
mccall@erols.com  tenthstone@hotmail.com  mccallr@gsgis.k12.va.us


From news@adamcadre.ac Thu Sep  2 11:11:50 CEST 1999
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From: Adam Cadre <ac@adamcadre.ac>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Yet Another Varicella Review
Date: Wed, 01 Sep 1999 23:49:53 -0700
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John McCall wrote:
> Sierra is the classic classy prostitute:  she leaps to the aid of
> another misfortunate, she uses sex to manipulate the people in power,
> she's supremely confident and competent, and she readily resorts to
> cold violence to accomplish whatever else she wants.

I personally would dispute that she's *supremely* competent.  There
are a couple twists that I attempted to throw into the game to shade
this aspect of her character a bit.  First, it turns out that she isn't
as much on top of the situation as she'd like to think -- sure, she's
playing people, but as we find out, Modo has been playing her on a
level that, if you pursue this thread, can leave Sierra just as much
of a wreck as the Queen.  Secondly, while she may think that she's
bringing a modicum of justice to the world around her, Sierra doesn't
behave very nicely toward the people whose cause she presumes to
espouse.  For someone who goes on about cruelty to women as much as
she does, Sierra is remarkable cruel to both Charlotte and the Queen
herself.  And not in order to achieve her own ends or anything like
that -- she just gets angry and can't help herself.

> Charles is portrayed as a brat in every single scene he's in;  it's
> the player's knowledge of his past which creates sympathy.

Right.  It's easy to feel sorry for someone who's being victimized,
but the sad fact is that abuse more often than not turns its victims
into thoroughly unpleasant people -- in effect, it's another way that
they are victimized.  Dealing with such people and trying to help them
can thus be immensely frustrating and really just grind at your soul.
Thus, I wanted to make Charles's behavior such that you just want to
give him such a smack -- till you realize that it's having *received*
such treatment that *caused* that behavior.

  -----
 Adam Cadre, Sammamish, WA
 http://adamcadre.ac


From faderman@pacbell.net Thu Sep  2 11:11:57 CEST 1999
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Adam Cadre wrote in message <37CE1E11.1B73@adamcadre.ac>...
[about Sierra]
>playing people, but as we find out, Modo has been playing her on a
>level that, if you pursue this thread, can leave Sierra just as much
>of a wreck as the Queen.  Secondly, while she may think that she's


...for a while, at least.

She still has enough wits about her to be very valuable to Rico, and very
dangerous to Varicella.
(When I just read this, I assumed it would be another alternate solution to
a puzzle...but no dice, it seems).

Best,
Avrom





From news@adamcadre.ac Thu Sep  2 11:13:34 CEST 1999
Article: 45420 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Adam Cadre <ac@adamcadre.ac>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Yet Another Varicella Review
Date: Wed, 01 Sep 1999 23:30:58 -0700
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Avrom Faderman wrote:
> I'm not sure exactly how much we're supposed to like Sierra. She *is*
> incredibly competent, and she *is* incredibly cool, and she at least
> has the right reaction to Bonfleche.  But someone described her as
> "the mouthpiece of the author," and I wonder if that's quite right.

No, she's not a mouthpiece for the author.  I don't work outside-in;
I work inside-out.  Meaning that I don't come up with ideas to get
across and then work up characters to say them, but rather, I come up
with characters, and then figure out what they'd say.

Sierra was primarily meant as a Shakespeare's Sister riff (Virginia
Woolf, for those unfamiliar with the reference.  In fact, in some
versions of the game, you can refer to Sierra as "Judith".)  The idea
is that she's the kind of figure that comes along once in a century,
but since she's female, and dark-skinned to boot, she doesn't get to
be an Alexander or a Caesar or a Shakespeare.  Instead, she's relegated
to a life of prostitution -- and is actually quite fortunate to have
grown up in as classy a brothel as she did.  This is a world, like the
one Woolf describes -- and history books describe -- where the only
options for women are despair or madness, and it takes someone truly
remarkable to be able to chart a third course, fury, and not immediately
be consumed by it and turn to ash.  The other trope I was playing with
was the "hooker with a heart of gold" that Hollywood tries to feed us.
Having decided that, in keeping with the Judith Shakespeare riff, this
character would be a prostitute-turned-mistress, I wanted to steer well
clear of the "heart of gold" stereotype without simply plunging
headlong into the *other* stereotype and making her cold-hearted and
vicious.  In short, I tried to make her as three-dimensional as I
could, given the limitations of the form.  I also did quite a bit of
research on prostitution, as it happens (secondhand -- I don't have the
kind of nerve to drive to Nevada and walk into a bordello and ask for
interviews) and a lot of what I read ended up affecting the way I
shaped the character.

> Not physically, of course.  Try to REMOVE JACKET after you've untied
> her. (Question for Adam:  Is Primo deliberately a sort of Anti-Tracy?)

Well, yes and no.  The thought did occur to me, but I wasn't so
concerned with Tracy as I was with distinguishing Primo from his
rivals by making him the one among them who wasn't sexually rapacious.
But he's still a complete bastard, so his lack of rapacity couldn't owe
to decency or respect for women or anything like that; rather, it had
to be a sort of pathological aversion to sex and the corporeal.

Ryan Franklin wrote:
> I found myself thinking that Primo and Charlotte made quite a pair.
> For one thing, I was able to think that Primo had at least a tiny
> piece of kindness in him, a little soft spot of compassion in his
> heart for her.

Well, Primo doesn't care *only* for himself -- as his thoughts about
his father and grandfather and dead brother reveal, he works on behalf
of the House of Varicella almost as much as for Primo Varicella.  (The
black sheep, Secondo, is an notable exception.)  And Charlotte is his
sister-in-law, or almost -- that is, she is at least on the cusp of
being of the House of Varicella.  So, no, the occasional note of
tenderness was not at all accidental.

> Did I, in fact, get the optimal ending?

That's the "successful" ending within the bounds of the game.  There
is a much more pleasant easter-egg ending, though.  (And one accessible
via a standard Inform verb, no less.)

  -----
 Adam Cadre, Sammamish, WA
 http://adamcadre.ac


From mark@headspin.clara.net Thu Sep  2 12:31:38 CEST 1999
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On 01 Sep 1999 19:49:23 GMT, doeadeer3@aol.com (Marnie Parker) wrote:

>But I am probably one of the few that uses zip and jzip. Most now seem to use
>Frotz and WinFrotz.

>I just like that "old Infocom look" to much to switch.

I have to use WinFrotz in order to get my "old Infocom look". I grew
up playing Infocom games on the C64. Although the earlier games used
the C64's default light blue on dark blue colour scheme, the later
games used a rather pleasing light grey on dark grey, with white
highlights. So, I've now set WinFrotz up to replicate the old C64
colour scheme. Jzip could do it, but the ASCII colours weren't quite
right.


--
Mark Stevens

http://www.headspin.clara.net/


From obrian@ucsu.Colorado.EDU Thu Sep  2 22:49:41 CEST 1999
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From: Paul O'Brian <obrian@ucsu.Colorado.EDU>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Yet Another Varicella Review
Date: Thu, 2 Sep 1999 08:50:54 -0600
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On Wed, 1 Sep 1999, Adam Cadre wrote:

> Avrom Faderman wrote:
> > (Question for Adam:  Is Primo deliberately a sort of Anti-Tracy?)
> 
> Well, yes and no.  The thought did occur to me, but I wasn't so
> concerned with Tracy as I was with distinguishing Primo from his
> rivals by making him the one among them who wasn't sexually rapacious.
> But he's still a complete bastard, so his lack of rapacity couldn't owe
> to decency or respect for women or anything like that; rather, it had
> to be a sort of pathological aversion to sex and the corporeal.

There is a very funny contrast in the fact that I-0 carefully allows for
the possibility of the PC stripping down and strutting through the game
entirely nude, while Varicella's inventory is dominated by exquisitely
described clothes and any attempt to remove these clothes is met with "It
took you an hour and ten minutes this morning to finish attiring yourself.
You are scarcely about to let a fit of pique prompt you to undo all that
work."

-- 
Paul O'Brian  obrian@colorado.edu  http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~obrian
"Sometimes even music cannot substitute for tears."
                                               -- Paul Simon





From mccall@erols.com Fri Sep  3 09:59:25 CEST 1999
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On Wed, 01 Sep 1999 23:49:53 -0700, Adam Cadre <ac@adamcadre.ac>
wrote:

>Secondly, while she may think that she's
>bringing a modicum of justice to the world around her, Sierra doesn't
>behave very nicely toward the people whose cause she presumes to
>espouse.  For someone who goes on about cruelty to women as much as
>she does, Sierra is remarkable cruel to both Charlotte and the Queen
>herself.  And not in order to achieve her own ends or anything like
>that -- she just gets angry and can't help herself.

I figured she was just classist;  it's the idea of "you can't possibly
imagine what it's like".  Of course, both Charlotte and the Queen have
been seriously abused.  It's their reaction to the abuse that Sierra
can't stand -- the Queen becomes a weakling, Charlotte takes it in
stride.

The interesting thing is that there's no indication that Sierra's been
abused herself -- her prostitution is really a career, not some form
of sexual slavery.  She just identifies with people she considers
abused... which is strange, because Charles has lived the same
pampered life that Sierra objects to in Charlotte and the Queen.
I'm not sure whether it's hit youth or his gender that sets him apart.

Like I said, Sierra is very well crafted.

----------------
The Imperturbable TenthStone
mccall@erols.com  tenthstone@hotmail.com  mccallr@gsgis.k12.va.us


From news@adamcadre.ac Fri Sep  3 09:59:33 CEST 1999
Article: 45420 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Adam Cadre <ac@adamcadre.ac>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Yet Another Varicella Review
Date: Wed, 01 Sep 1999 23:30:58 -0700
Organization: http://www.port4000.com
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Avrom Faderman wrote:
> I'm not sure exactly how much we're supposed to like Sierra. She *is*
> incredibly competent, and she *is* incredibly cool, and she at least
> has the right reaction to Bonfleche.  But someone described her as
> "the mouthpiece of the author," and I wonder if that's quite right.

No, she's not a mouthpiece for the author.  I don't work outside-in;
I work inside-out.  Meaning that I don't come up with ideas to get
across and then work up characters to say them, but rather, I come up
with characters, and then figure out what they'd say.

Sierra was primarily meant as a Shakespeare's Sister riff (Virginia
Woolf, for those unfamiliar with the reference.  In fact, in some
versions of the game, you can refer to Sierra as "Judith".)  The idea
is that she's the kind of figure that comes along once in a century,
but since she's female, and dark-skinned to boot, she doesn't get to
be an Alexander or a Caesar or a Shakespeare.  Instead, she's relegated
to a life of prostitution -- and is actually quite fortunate to have
grown up in as classy a brothel as she did.  This is a world, like the
one Woolf describes -- and history books describe -- where the only
options for women are despair or madness, and it takes someone truly
remarkable to be able to chart a third course, fury, and not immediately
be consumed by it and turn to ash.  The other trope I was playing with
was the "hooker with a heart of gold" that Hollywood tries to feed us.
Having decided that, in keeping with the Judith Shakespeare riff, this
character would be a prostitute-turned-mistress, I wanted to steer well
clear of the "heart of gold" stereotype without simply plunging
headlong into the *other* stereotype and making her cold-hearted and
vicious.  In short, I tried to make her as three-dimensional as I
could, given the limitations of the form.  I also did quite a bit of
research on prostitution, as it happens (secondhand -- I don't have the
kind of nerve to drive to Nevada and walk into a bordello and ask for
interviews) and a lot of what I read ended up affecting the way I
shaped the character.

> Not physically, of course.  Try to REMOVE JACKET after you've untied
> her. (Question for Adam:  Is Primo deliberately a sort of Anti-Tracy?)

Well, yes and no.  The thought did occur to me, but I wasn't so
concerned with Tracy as I was with distinguishing Primo from his
rivals by making him the one among them who wasn't sexually rapacious.
But he's still a complete bastard, so his lack of rapacity couldn't owe
to decency or respect for women or anything like that; rather, it had
to be a sort of pathological aversion to sex and the corporeal.

Ryan Franklin wrote:
> I found myself thinking that Primo and Charlotte made quite a pair.
> For one thing, I was able to think that Primo had at least a tiny
> piece of kindness in him, a little soft spot of compassion in his
> heart for her.

Well, Primo doesn't care *only* for himself -- as his thoughts about
his father and grandfather and dead brother reveal, he works on behalf
of the House of Varicella almost as much as for Primo Varicella.  (The
black sheep, Secondo, is an notable exception.)  And Charlotte is his
sister-in-law, or almost -- that is, she is at least on the cusp of
being of the House of Varicella.  So, no, the occasional note of
tenderness was not at all accidental.

> Did I, in fact, get the optimal ending?

That's the "successful" ending within the bounds of the game.  There
is a much more pleasant easter-egg ending, though.  (And one accessible
via a standard Inform verb, no less.)

  -----
 Adam Cadre, Sammamish, WA
 http://adamcadre.ac


From tajc2@cam.ac.uk Fri Sep  3 13:04:55 CEST 1999
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From: tajc2@cam.ac.uk (Tom Clapham)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Yet Another Varicella Review
Date: 3 Sep 1999 09:39:09 +0100
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[Spoilers further down]

TenthStone <mccall@erols.com> wrote:
>Adam Cadre <ac@adamcadre.ac> wrote:
>
>I figured she was just classist;  it's the idea of "you can't possibly
>imagine what it's like".  Of course, both Charlotte and the Queen have
>been seriously abused.  It's their reaction to the abuse that Sierra
>can't stand -- the Queen becomes a weakling, Charlotte takes it in
>stride.
>
Takes it in her stride? She goes mad. Or she already was mad, depending on
which abuse you mean.

>The interesting thing is that there's no indication that Sierra's been
>abused herself -- her prostitution is really a career, not some form
>of sexual slavery.  

Well, I think she says at some point that she's been a working girl since
the age of eight... This said, I don't think she's ever been out of
control, which is what really seems to get to her.

>She just identifies with people she considers
>abused... which is strange, because Charles has lived the same
>pampered life that Sierra objects to in Charlotte and the Queen.
>I'm not sure whether it's hit youth or his gender that sets him apart.
>
Or even his parentage, as she seems genuinely sad that the King is dead.

>Like I said, Sierra is very well crafted.
>
Oh yes. 

BTW, has anyone found a way to take out Sierra? It seems reasonable to
think that you could still "win" by stopping her instead of Rico, who's
too languid to pose a real threat. You can get arrested by prompting her
to kill Bonfleche after he's already escapes, but then Bonfleche wins
anyway. If Charlotte kills Bonfleche then Sierra vanishes between the
chapel and his room.

--
Tom Clapham


From erkyrath@netcom.com Tue Sep  7 21:22:39 CEST 1999
Article: 45561 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction,rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Is EXAMINE necessary? (was Fyleet, Crobe, Sangraal)
Followup-To: rec.games.int-fiction
Date: 7 Sep 1999 14:54:13 GMT
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In rec.games.int-fiction Graham Nelson <graham@gnelson.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> As for the parser, I can't honestly see how improving the parser
> would much change, say, "Crobe".  Yes, there are a very few cases
> where, oh, "sit on throne" would be nice.  But given that the
> player knows that commands are minimal, "sit" isn't going to take
> too long to think of, is it?

Which brings us righht around to my original post, which said that -- as
far as I'm concerned -- it would be a big improvement. Really. 

Again, this is not a request to change the games. I'm just saying that,
um, you're wrong:

Crobe is uncomfortable for me to play. Adding a modern parser and
"examine" verb would make me much less uncomfortable, *even if all the
added commands were redundant and all the examine messages were defaults.*

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From ghira@mistral.co.uk Wed Sep  8 12:51:51 CEST 1999
Article: 45598 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: "Adam Atkinson" <ghira@mistral.co.uk>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: My impression of the Fyleet Crobe thread
Date: 08 Sep 99 09:43:19 +0000
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On 07-Sep-99 22:57:55, Adam Cadre said:
>Modern IF players: "I don't get it.  Aren't these just collections of 
>brutally difficult puzzles without the reward of lovely prose or an 
>interesting storyline for solving them?  Is it just the authors trying to 
>be difficult for difficulty's own sake?"

And the answers are, more or less, "yes" and "yes". But this is a bit
like the "Heroic Failures" entry on worst book reviews of all time
where someone in a countryside magazine pans "Lady Chatterly's Lover"
because it doesn't offer much insight into estate management and
groundskeeping. Many of the Phoenix adventures made no real attempt
to have lovely prose or storylines. I'm not sure even Sangraal has a
storyline. Maybe Xeno and Spy do: IIRC they're the only Phoenix
games that weren't Zork-style treasurehunts. I've only played the very
early stages of them since I found Xeno impossibly hard, and Spy came
out just before I left Cambridge.

>Original developers: "Pfah.  You think *these* versions are difficult?  
>You were *supposed* to play them after covering yourself with the dozens 
>of live scorpions that came in the box."

Of course, the originals didn't come in boxes. They were on a
university time-sharing system in various publicly accessible
directories.

However, I'm sure User Services would have been more than willing to
cover users in live scorpions on request. The securicup man and/or
Peter Crofts would probably have been only too happy to do this
even without the user asking for it. See JRP1's personal home page for
a collection of tales about these mythic figures.

-- 
Adam Atkinson (ghira@mistral.co.uk)
This .sig intentionally left blank.



From sgranade@lepton.phy.duke.edu Wed Sep  8 21:26:10 CEST 1999
Article: 45609 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Stephen Granade <sgranade@lepton.phy.duke.edu>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: How big is the "IF-community"?
Date: 08 Sep 1999 13:19:39 -0400
Organization: Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
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"James M. Power" <JPower@SpecialtyMarking.com> writes:

> Al's points are very interesting.  I followed the thread through and
> felt some of the counter-arguments were weak.  Several people argued
> that an inform game could be played by more people than a platform
> specific game.  Undeniably true, but it misses the point.  Al
> specifically addressed this when he said the average person doesn't want
> to do a two part download.

This is true; however, the average person won't be visiting the GMD
archive, at least not at first. "An FTP archive? For downloading? How
droll." They'll be visiting places like Download.com[1], and all of the
text adventures I know of that are available there come in a nice,
easy-to-download package.

People aren't likely to find GMD on their own. They're likely to find
out about it through other games they've played (which they've gotten
>from  places like Download.com) or from web sites, and if they have
problems once they find GMD, they're likely to contact the person who
helped them, either directly or indirectly, find GMD. That person can
then explain things a bit better.

All of this avoids the question of why games aren't packaged with
interpreters. There are a number of reasons for this on GMD. One is
for space purposes. The GMD IF archive lives on donated space; the
less space we use, the better off we are. Two is for purposes of
upgrading. Before I wrote WinTADS, the only TADS interpreters you
could use under Windows ran in a DOS window. Had all games before that
time been packaged with their interpreter, then you would have been
unable to use the spiffy new WinTADS interpreter with those older
games. Ditto for any other system you care to mention. And if an
interpreter turns out to have a bug, I'd much rather have to download
a single fixed file than re-download my entire collection of
games. Three is for aesthetic purposes. I have certain background
colors and fonts I like to use with games. If I had to reset these
values for each and every game I downloaded, rather than having to set
these values a handful of times for my Z-machine, TADS, and Hugo
interpreters, I would be very very angry.

> Perhaps an important question to game writers is this:  Do you want to
> write for a targeted group of people who understand what you are doing,
> can evaluate it and compare it with many other examples of the genre,
> and can discuss it in an intelligent and fun way in almost real time? 
> Or, do you want to appeal to a much wider audience, perhaps turning
> individuals on to if for the first time, but accept that much feedback
> will come from those who just don't get it, or didn't like the whole
> idea of text adventures?

This is not an either/or proposition, not even if you use an
established IF language like TADS or Inform. As people have pointed
out, you can create a single application version of your game using
these systems. Heck, with HTML TADS you can create an entire Windows
self-installing package complete with uninstall information.

Stephen

[1] Yes, I know Download.com only has pointers to where files are
stored, but finding places other than GMD to store a packaged version
of your game is not difficult.

-- 
  Stephen Granade                | Interested in adventure games?
  sgranade@phy.duke.edu          | Visit About.com's IF Page
  Duke University, Physics Dept  |   http://interactfiction.about.com


From lraszewski@loyola.edu Tue Sep 14 09:48:35 CEST 1999
Article: 45695 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: lraszewski@loyola.edu (L. Ross Raszewski)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction,rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Announcing: Fyleet, Crobe, Sangraal
Date: 13 Sep 1999 21:20:19 GMT
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On Mon, 13 Sep 1999 06:38:25 GMT, Steven Marsh <marsh@nettally.com> wrote:
>This actually happens, sort of, in Ultima V.  At one point, you need
>to get a password (which doesn't change from game to game) from the
>Bad Guys you've infiltrated; the only way to get it is to give up a
>name of a wizard from the Resistance, who is killed in the game if you
>tell them.  Now, this moral conundrum can be neatly short-cut by a
>Restore after learning the password; the game continues as normal, but
>the dramatic flow has been altered.  Fair?  I don't think so, but
>YMMV.
>
>[END SPOILER]
>

Perfectly fair.  By using 'restore' the player has stepped outside the
confines of the game. The author has no responsibility (And, IMHO, no
right) to fudge the game so as to prevent the player from cheating.
Once the player has stepped outside the game, he is no longer under the
author's jurisdiction.  If this ruins the fun for the player, it's THE
PLAYER'S FAULT, and just punishment for his cheating (I consider the whole
idea that the player should be penalized for cheating and that by
cheating the player lessens his fun to be somewhat facetious, but that's
neither here nor there.)


From erkyrath@netcom.com Tue Sep 14 10:00:59 CEST 1999
Article: 45703 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: REVIEW: Cythera
Date: 14 Sep 1999 04:59:06 GMT
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REVIEW: Cythera

(Review copyright 1999, Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>)

Graphics: mediocre
Plot: very good
Atmosphere: good in the background, but doesn't support the storytelling
Writing and dialogue: mediocre
Difficulty: pretty easy
Interface: okay
Gameplay: very bad to very good
Forgiveness rating: numerous ways to get stuck via minor mistakes

An unusual review for me, here. If you're used to my chronic outbursts
about graphical adventure games (and I hope you are), you probably ought
to adjust your expectations. _Cythera_ comes from a different branch of
the computer gaming tree: the computer role-playing game (CRPG),
top-view and graphical. This genre inherits most familiarly from the
_Ultima_ series, started by Lord British in the early Eighties.

To add to your discomfiture, _Cythera_ is available only for the
Macintosh. If you're reading this review on the Mac adventure gaming
newsgroup, that's no problem. If you're a PC gamer reading
rec.games.int-fiction, feel free to toss up your mouse in disgust and
skip to the next post.

Why am I breaking out of my usual rut? Well, I *did* play the game. (I
haven't played through any of the other modern CRPG offerings on the
Mac, but this one sucked down several days of my time.) And _Cythera's_
focus is more to the storyline, adventure gaming more than CRPG -- to
me, at least. (More on this below.) And also, it's a major release.
Ambrosia are considered heavyweights in the Mac game-design world. If
they want to get into the IF arena, I figure I owe them some commentary.
Or, perhaps, I just figure you-all deserve the illumination of my
opinions. (Otherwise, Bog knows, *anyone* might wind up guiding the
Concensus Decision. Heaven forfend.)

So, what have we? Opening text explains that you're snatched out of our
world into Cythera, a country ruled by the Land-King Alaric. His magical
bond with the land is weakening, a disaster that will plunge Cythera
into plague and famine if it's not reversed. You (of course) are the one
for the job.

The introduction to the game is quite smooth. After the initial
conversations, you wander around Land-King Hall, meeting a host of major
and minor characters -- Hadrian the guard-captain, Magpie the fool,
Demodocus the bard, and so on. The game uses a keyword conversation
system, so you can spend a fair bit of time drawing out information, at
your own pace. And reading the books in the library, of course. You get
lots of fragments of history, several hints of mysterious underpinnings,
a couple of tasks to undertake, some leads on people to seek out, and a
travelling companion or two. You also get an Event: an earthquake
damages part of the castle as you explore, revealing some secrets.

So you set off across Cythera, armed with all sorts of possible Things
To Do Next.

_Cythera_ takes the form of a CRPG, as I said. You have hit points,
skills, and stats; you can gain weapons and armor, and a list of
D&D-style spells. On the other hand... the core storyline has almost
nothing to do with these things. The authors insist that you can finish
the game without ever indulging in combat. I don't quite buy that -- a
bit of experience pumped into spells and defense makes the game much
less frustrating -- but the path to victory does not run from hackfest
to larger hackfest to hackfest of climactic proportions.

Mind you, you *can* play that way if you want to. There are many areas
where fighting prowess is darn convenient, and a few where you'll need
serious firepower to win through. But the point is (and the authors are
very good about this): the things you *can* do in _Cythera_ are a much
wider range than the things you *have* to do. If you fight through the
army of liches, it's not for a vital piece of the plot-puzzle. It's for
a magical sword, or shield, or crystal ball -- something which makes the
rest of the game easier, but which a less bloody-minded player could
live without.

In fact, most of the game is structured like this. Many plot-threads
branch out. I'm pretty sure I saw most of them, but I'm certain I didn't
see them all, and I didn't finish up every one I saw by the time the
game ended. Some require fighting, some require exploration, some
require talking to characters, some require solving puzzles or riddles.
A few of these threads form the critical path of the story; but most
lead to new skills, spells, party members, artifacts, or just pieces of
knowledge about the world of Cythera. The authors do *not* take the
attitude, nearly universal in adventure games, that you're damn well
going to take the complete tour before you win. It's a refreshing
change.

(I'm not sure whence comes this change, either. Maybe it's the relative
amount of effort that goes into plot design in this kind of game. In a
graphical adventure, every scene and image is days of work, budgetted
and paid for, and one can hardly afford any that aren't vital. In a text
game, scenes are text and far cheaper to produce, but then the overall
budget is smaller -- text adventure authors work in their spare time
these days, and without expectation of much profit -- and the writing is
anyhow all of the work that *does* go in. But in a CRPG-style game, the
engine and artwork soak up a great deal of work. Designing the scenario
isn't an afterthought, not by a long shot, but it's still a smaller
proportion of the total job than for "pure" adventures.)

(Or maybe the authors of _Cythera_ just have more willpower than I do.
Sure as heck, I'm never willing to let a player out the door without
swimming through every droplet of my game-designing sweat. If Ambrosia
doesn't have that character flaw, more power to them.)

Now, I still had some trouble with the way the thing fit together. Some
of the threads are very tricky to get into. You have to talk to the
right person, and mention the right keyword, with just the right
preconditions. Since there are many non-mandatory quests, you'd think
this wouldn't be a problem; a player should stumble into some threads
and not others. But it doesn't always work that way. You can often see
dangling plot pieces that you have no way to resolve. Sometimes they
never *will* be resolved, not unless you start the game over and follow
somebody else's walkthrough. 

(This is the downside of the won't-see-it-all design. Murkiness and
mystery is a fine thing halfway through a game, but when you reach the
end, anything that still hasn't connected is just an annoying hole.)

Quite often you're stuck in a quest, and you have no idea whatsoever how
to proceed. The bit you need can't be unstuck without three other bits,
>from  entirely different quests, and everything's so cleverly intertwined
that you don't know what else to work on. Yes, the underlying
connections between threads are going to be clear in retrospect, but
that doesn't tell you what to do *now*.

And sometimes there *aren't* any underlying connections. You can explore
an entire cave; then come back much later, following a clue, to find
that a convenient earthquake has opened up a new hole. Well, great. You
can walk into an area and get instantly killed, because you don't have
the item you need to advance the plot. Even better -- especially if you
don't understand what it is you need.

It can be even harder than that to decide what to do. The difference
between a jammed plot point, and a piece you just haven't solved yet,
can be completely obscure. One character says he's researching something
magical, and won't be finished until he figures out a particular
ingredient. Every time you talk to him, he says to come back later. In
fact, he'll *always* say that -- unless you find the ingredient
yourself. But this is not obvious. This happened to me all too often:
some character wanted information, and I could not for the life of me
tell whether I didn't yet have it, or just hadn't figured out how to
pass it along. The keyword conversation system can easily devolve into
random guessing, trying to prove that my protagonist knows what *I've*
figured out long ago.

You can get stuck. This was a big problem. I don't mind adventure games
where you can get stuck, or make disastrous mistakes; even if you don't
know they're mistakes until later. But that's the adventure UI,
particularly the text adventure UI; restarting the game has to be
*quick* for that to work. In a graphical game, where you have to sit
through long cut-scenes and image load-delays, it's awful. In a CRPG,
where you've put in hours of exploring and fighting and conversation,
it's worse than awful.

And it's clear in _Cythera_ that the authors don't want you getting
stuck *entirely* unawares. If you slaughter the townsfolk, the plot
falls apart and the game becomes unsolvable. *That* makes perfect sense.
But if you leave a vital item on the table in your room in the castle?
It vanishes -- the servants are tidy, or something -- and you're
screwed. You're supposed to store things in your dresser. I was lucky; I
only lost *replaceable* items learning this lesson. And then, how do you
know what's replaceable? The authors claim this isn't a pack-rat game;
and indeed most items you acquire can be thrown away without a second
thought. But, of course, you only know that in hindsight. While you're
playing, you have to hold onto at least one of everything, and
preferably some spares. And the inventories get awfully crowded.

(In hindsight, again, even some of the valuable items are really
replaceable. There are lots of backups and secondary options hidden
among the branching threads. But -- if you don't know about them, they
might as well not be there. This is where designer of a game has to step
back and consider the poor player's half-formed, inconsistent view of
the universe. The clues in the game point to intended solutions.
Alternatives are there if you stumble across them. But if you screw up
the primary path and don't notice the backups, you stop dead; there's
nowhere to attack the problem now, nowhere to *look*.)

I'm not going to get much into the interface here, because it's even
less relevant to my usual adventure reviewing. I found a lot to be
confusing, but they've rewritten the documentation since then, and I
haven't had a chance to compare the versions. Once I got used to it, I
didn't have any trouble. Except for picking up large stacks of coins.

The plot. I liked the plot. Really I did. It was strange and fraught
with complication; it delved; it had politics; the ending tied into the
beginning, and resolved. It was a *good* plot, not just "good enough for
a computer game." However:

(...Yeah, you knew there was a "however" coming...)

The game's implementation of the plot was frustratingly inconsistent.
Some touches were well-done -- even brilliant. (A plot thread early on,
entirely commercial and mundane, spreads out and deeper until it's the
crux of the ending. *Very* good.) But others just fell flat. It was
something about the timing, or the presentation. When a shocking
revelation is presented in dialog boxes, the same as every other
conversation you've seen -- and then your party walks away -- it's hard
for the sense of shock to really come through. It takes brilliant
writing to handle this, and the writing in _Cythera_ really is "just
good enough for a computer game."

(Graphics can do it too, but a tile-based top-down view is a much
clumsier medium than fully-rendered scenes. I'd seen just about every
tile of art in _Cythera_ long before I was finished. And it's not like
combining letters to make surprising new sentences, or colored pixels to
make images. A bunch of tiles forming a cave are, pretty much, just more
tiles forming a cave. Okay, a bigger cave is impressive, and you can
find stuff down there. But there's no atmosphere to it.)

The ending, in particular, was very anticlimactic. The authors elected
not to make it a huge and difficult battle; that left solving a puzzle,
finding a new item, or figuring out an important bit of the Way Things
Work. All of these, in fact, went into the ending. But -- for me at
least -- the timing was off. I found the item in the course of getting
something else -- two plot threads coming together, as ordained. That's
fine, but it left me thinking, gosh, I guess I can win now. The dialogue
said that vast forces would now be arrayed against me, but in fact I
walked across the island and did the final thing, and that was it. Run
closing text (intended to give a shiver, but didn't manage it) followed
by closing credits.

Oh well. Overall: The whole mess kept me intrigued enough to play for a
bunch of hours per day, for a bunch of days. Some of that time was
frustrated wandering around and trying things at random, and some was
dealing with bugs (mostly fixed now); but quite a lot was continuous
exploring. And I'm not going to argue with a game that has that much
explorable stuff in it.

Availability: On Ambrosia's web site. It's $25 shareware; without
paying, you can't get past a certain point in the plot, and you can't
learn healing magic (which will slow you way down, trust me).

Macintoshness: Designed by Mac people for Mac people, and they did an
acceptable job of it. Although that font is a little hard to read, in
the smaller point sizes.

System requirements: MacOS 7.6.1; 10 megs free memory; 256-color
display.

(This review, and my reviews of other Mac adventure games, are at
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/gamerev/index.html)

--Z



"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From ghira@mistral.co.uk Tue Sep 14 22:34:37 CEST 1999
Article: 45721 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: "Adam Atkinson" <ghira@mistral.co.uk>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction,rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Announcing: Fyleet, Crobe, Sangraal
Date: 14 Sep 99 18:10:26 +0000
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On 13-Sep-99 02:14:13, David Glasser said:

>Now, I don't know much about the Phoenix culture, but the original
>players of the games were all users of the Phoenix mainframe at
>Cambridge.  I'm guessing that many of the players knew each other, or at
>the least could communicate through some form of email or whatever.

Yes

>Was part of the reason for the super-hard no-cheat puzzles that people
>wanted to be able to proclaim that they were the first to beat each new
>game?

I don't really think so. The games appeared between 1978 (Acheton) and,
say, 1989 (Xerb). The community of regular players changed quite a bit
over that time, as you might expect given that undergraduates tend to
come and go. When I was there (mid to late 80s) there was one new JRP1
game a year, and that was about it. Most of the games on the system
had been there for quite a while.

>  Was the joy of playing a Phoenix game not just that it is fun to
>solve a puzzle, but to hope that you completed it before your peers?

There might have been a certain amount of that ... but the only time
it was visible was after the release of Sangraal. The first 10 people
to finish had their names added to the blackboard in Nastil-Xarn,
which was initially empty.

-- 
Adam Atkinson (ghira@mistral.co.uk)
If I were a bumble bee
Z wouldn't be a U.F.D.



From christineindigo@juno.com Fri Sep 17 13:12:13 CEST 1999
Article: 45755 of rec.games.int-fiction
From: christineindigo@juno.com (Christine "Green Leafy Dragon" Indigo)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction,rec.games.roguelike.misc
Subject: Re: Wanted: Very old stuff :-)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 1999 21:15:11 GMT
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On Thu, 16 Sep 1999 11:26:47 +0100, Graham Nelson
<graham@gnelson.demon.co.uk> wrote:

>Unfortunately, Crowther's version appears to be lost.  To the
>best of my knowledge, neither source nor object code exists any
>longer, and this is a real shame.  It was clearly not in common
>circulation after 1976 -- all of the very many Adventure extensions
>and clones in 1977-9 worked from Woods, not from Crowther.

Interesting.  Has anyone compiled a list of all of the known lost
games?  There's Ultima: The Mines of Mt. Drash (an unauthorized
spinoff that Sierra did right before Richard Garrott fled to start
Origin) and Lore (a roguelike on the University of Iowa mainframes; it
was prolly the first roguelike to have wilderness as well as a dungeon
setting).  Ularn seems to be lost too; however, I remember seeing it
in the catalog of a Miami shareware distribution company named
Software House (I think) as recently as three years ago.

(rec.games.roguelike.misc added to the followups list; there's a Ularn
thread going on there right now)

Christine "Green Leafy Dragon" Indigo, Internet
Pornographer and proud member of the -=UDIC=-


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From lpsmith@rice.edu Mon Oct  4 13:41:03 CEST 1999
Article: 46047 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: lpsmith@rice.edu (Lucian Paul Smith)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp99] Competition games available
Date: 3 Oct 1999 19:12:25 GMT
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Dugan Chen (chenclan@direct.ca) wrote:
: Stephen Granade <sgranade@lepton.phy.duke.edu> wrote in article
: <jdvh8q5vig.fsf@lepton.phy.duke.edu>...
: > I hereby announce the official beginning of the Fifth Annual
: > Interactive Fiction Competition.

: I can't seem to flip the "Dos" switch in Comp99.z5. Every
: time I type in "flip dos," "flip dos switch" or "flip dos
: executable switch" I  get a "Which dos switch do you
: mean" followed by a list that takes up half the screen.

Whoops!  Confusion!

Sorry about that.  If you want to flip the DOS switch, use 'flip dos-only
switch'

The other switches are also aliased to 'dos' because DOS interpreters
exist for those systems.  And you can 'flip all dos switches' if you like.

Or move the games manually, of course.

And I forgot to give the actual DOS games the name 'dos' and 'dos-only'.
Whoops!

-Lucian


From sgranade@lepton.phy.duke.edu Wed Oct  6 15:50:25 CEST 1999
Article: 46155 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Stephen Granade <sgranade@lepton.phy.duke.edu>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Reporting bugs (was: Bugs and textfire addy)
Date: 06 Oct 1999 08:46:44 -0400
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"corky" <sharring@corplink.com.au> writes:

> Thanks for posting the textfire addy for newbies. Is the idea to post bugs
> to from the comp99 to this page? , and if so, where? Do I have  to be a
> judge to post bugs? Is it best to post to author first?  (If one can find
> the author....) What if a game is so 'buggy' it is annoying?   Why does a
> pair of socks go in the wash as two and come out as one??

Time for a quick posting of Stephen's Rules for Reporting Bugs:

The first person you notify is the author. Always. Authors are the
only ones who can fix the bugs, and they may not be reading whatever
newsgroup or forum you're reading and considering posting bug reports
to.

There is no second person to notify regarding bugs. In general it is
less than polite to post bug reports to r.g.i-f, as you're airing
dirty laundry.

There are exceptions to this. If someone is having trouble with a game
and posts a question about it, and you know this problem is due to a
pernicious bug, post about it. If someone asks, "I can't win this
game. Is that because of a bug?" you can post a verification. If you
want to post about how buggy a game is, why not include more of a
review with it? (And if you do that, be sure to take a look at Jacob
Weinstein's guide to giving feedback at
http://www.deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=415380919&fmt=text)

As far as competition-specific games go, if there's a game-stopping
bug which makes a game unwinnable, I'll mention it on the competition
web site. If you find one of those bugs, you can cc me when you mail
the author.

I did mention that you should mail the author, right?

Stephen

-- 
  Stephen Granade                | Interested in adventure games?
  sgranade@phy.duke.edu          | Visit About.com's IF Page
  Duke University, Physics Dept  |   http://interactfiction.about.com


From ghira@mistral.co.uk Thu Oct  7 10:41:47 CEST 1999
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From: "Adam Atkinson" <ghira@mistral.co.uk>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: General ? - Is Guess the Verb legitimate
Date: 06 Oct 99 19:25:02 +0000
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On 06-Oct-99 12:52:31, James M. Power said:

>Are guess the verb puzzles always accidental, or do some people consider
>them legitimate types of puzzles?

I should think they are frequently accidental.

However, I'm sure one can construct examples where guess the verb
might make sense.

Allow me to illustrate...

In my Phoenix game, Nidus (source on gmd.de, no zcode version yet),
the endgame consists of a maze combined with a guess-the-verb puzzle.

The maze contains magic spells, which create new paths through the
maze. Each spell may be activated by means of certain verbs - for
instance, one spell might be activated by being "chant"ed, "invoke"d
or "intone"d. Another might need to be sung or declaimed.

The bad guys detect each verb you use, and stop it from working again.
So after you've sung one spell, you can't sing any more.

In addition to this, some spells destroy other spells.

So to solve the endgame you need to map the maze, say the spells in
the correct order, and use the right verbs to activate the spells.

Is this a hideously over-the-top puzzle? Well, yes. But the
guess-the-verb component of it, whilst probably not the sort of thing
you were thinking of, strikes me as not totally unreasonable. It's
clear that guessing the verb is the puzzle itself. (The oddest verb
used to activate any of the spells is probably "yodel").

-- 
Adam Atkinson (ghira@mistral.co.uk)
A psychopath kills for no reason; I kill for money. (M. Blank)



From craxton@erols.com Thu Oct  7 10:42:30 CEST 1999
Article: 46182 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Craxton <craxton@erols.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: [SPOILERS] Re: erehwon - antimatter and reflection
Date: Wed, 06 Oct 1999 21:53:49 -0400
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Pristy wrote:
> 
> A reflection alone (a path around the Klein bottle) will not convert
> matter into antimatter. To do that, you need a time reversal. Thinking
> about it, that seems to be an amusing idea. What if time actually
> reversed? Then it'll become "herenow" instead of "herewon". :-)
> 
> Or wait, maybe reflection and charge reversal are possible without time
> reversal. That'll require a topology with charge coupled with spacetime.
> Hmm... That will require EM fields changing signs. Gravitational fields
> shouldn't change signs, though. Not so sure about spinor fields... ( I
> don't think the sign matters here... No, it doesn't matter. A full
> rotation will do the job. Though I think the signs of every spinor field
> should either all change or all remain the same.) I'll think further
> about it.

You're overanalyzing. Think of it like this- The outside of the bottle
is the material world, the inside is the antimaterial world. If you try
to interact with something from the wrong side of the bottle, you wind
up penetrating the surface of the bottle, causing matter and antimatter
to collide, and ka-boom. If, on the other hand, you walk until you reach
the same point on the other side of the bottle, you will have slipped,
at some indeterminate point, through forth-space (since a Klein Bottle
cannot exist in three-dimensional space) and into the other world, thus
becoming part of the other world yourself. Make sense?

					-Craxton
--
"All men are sexual. You'd better get used to it." -May Club
Long Live the Hentai Game!


From patrick@dogslobber.demon.co.uk Mon Oct 11 11:28:07 CEST 1999
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From: Patrick Hardlentil <patrick@dogslobber.demon.co.uk>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: General ? - Is Guess the Verb legitimate
Date: 09 Oct 1999 22:48:37 +0100
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Roger Eli Ostrander <ostran14@cse.msu.edu> writes:

> >WIN GAME
>  (by solving all the puzzles)

You can measure the depth of my hopelessness as a player by the fact
that I know this, but it's been done. SOLVE GAME lets you win in one
move - although the game says no moves - in (spoiler of sorts)...



Unnkulia Zero. My apologies if that is in fact what you're referring to.

Cheez,
-- 
| Patrick Hardlentil - patrick@dogslobber.demon.co.uk



From jcmason@uwaterloo.ca Wed Nov 10 13:26:10 CET 1999
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From: jcmason@uwaterloo.ca (Joe Mason)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: IF in comics?!
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Fraser <blancolioni@blancolioni.org> wrote:
>paene lacrimavi postquam chadschultz@my-deja.com scripsit:
>
>>I looked at today's User Friendly (www.userfriendly.org)comic strip and
>>look what I found...
>>
>>www.userfriendly.org/static/
>
>Just in case you're reading this tomorrow, the permanent URL is
>
>http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/99nov/19991109.html
>
>It's cute.

To get the context, though, you need to read yesterday's first, which I
assume is:

http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/99nov/19991108.html

Joe


From anson@DELETE_THISpobox.com Tue Nov 16 11:27:07 CET 1999
Article: 47014 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: anson@DELETE_THISpobox.com (Anson Turner)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Adam's reviews (1/6): intro
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In article <3830E7D9.2555@adamcadre.ac>, reply@adamcadre.ac wrote:

:* This year's entrants have certainly *heard* of debugging -- a fair
:  number of them actually left the debugging *on* when they submitted
:  their games.  (>PURLOIN ALL -- hey, I win!)

Wrong newsgroup for this, but...

Strict mode is set by default by the current version of the Inform
compiler, and the library sets DEBUG when Strict mode is enabled, so I'm
not at all surprised if people have been releasing Inform games with
debugging left on. They may not even know *how* to turn it off. (Use
compiler switch ~S to disable Strict mode.)

That is all.



Anson.


From gschmidl@xxx.gmx.at Tue Nov 16 11:44:07 CET 1999
Article: 47032 of rec.games.int-fiction
From: "Gunther Schmidl" <gschmidl@xxx.gmx.at>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: [Comp99] Ok, I admit...
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Load Only After Dark with the piracy bit set (example: frotz -p oad.z5)

Then type 'about'.

Thanks to all reviewers, good or bad -- just one thing: the game *was*
written in three days, but it was *not* rushed the way you think -- take a
look at the final compilation date :-)

Concerning the bugs: blame it on the beta-testers. (Or don't, which is a lot
fairer)

--
Gunther





From sgranade@lepton.phy.duke.edu Tue Nov 16 17:14:58 CET 1999
Article: 47043 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Stephen Granade <sgranade@lepton.phy.duke.edu>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: [Comp99] Results
Date: 16 Nov 1999 08:32:37 -0500
Organization: Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
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The results are in, thanks to Mark Musante, who did yeoman's work
despite the demands of being a new father.

The top three games were:

    1. Winter Wonderland
    2. For A Change
    3. Six Stories

and the winners in the Miss Congeniality contest were

    1. For a Change
    2. Hunter, in Darkness
       Winter Wonderland   (tie)

I'll put the rest of the results at the end of this message. They,
along with the average score each game received, are available at
http://www.textfire.com/comp99.

My congratulations to everyone who entered.

Stephen

--

 1        Winter Wonderland
 2        For A Change
 3        Six Stories
 4        Day for Soft Food, A
 5        Exhibition
 6        Halothane
 7        On the Farm
 8        Hunter, In Darkness
 9        Beat the Devil
10        Jacks or Better to Murder, Aces to Win
11        Erehwon
12        Insanity Circle, The
13        Bliss
14        Stone Cell
15        Four Seconds
16        HeBGB Horror!, The
17        Only After Dark
18        Moment of Hope, A
19        Chaos
20        Strangers in the Night
21        Lomalow
22        King Arthur's Night Out
23        Calliope
24        Music Education
25        Spodgeville Murphy and The Jewelled Eye of Wossname
26        Life on Beal Street
27        Remembrance
28        Thorfinn's Realm
29        Death to my Enemies
          Water Bird, The
31        Chicks Dig Jerks
32        SNOSAE
33        Pass the Banana
34        Outsided
35        L.U.D.I.T.E.
36        Guard Duty
37        Skyranch

-- 
  Stephen Granade                | Interested in adventure games?
  sgranade@phy.duke.edu          | Visit About.com's IF Page
  Duke University, Physics Dept  |   http://interactfiction.about.com


From turnbull@xserver.sjc.ox.ac.uk Tue Nov 16 17:16:06 CET 1999
Article: 47050 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: turnbull@xserver.sjc.ox.ac.uk (ct)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp99] Results
Date: 16 Nov 1999 14:52:00 -0000
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1. Winter Wonderland       (7.41)

1. Photopia                (8.15)

1. Edifice                 (7.73)


That is a fairly significant difference there. Vaguely surprising,
despite people's comments this year about no *LOVED IT* games.

regards, ct




From sgranade@lepton.phy.duke.edu Tue Nov 16 17:16:43 CET 1999
Article: 47051 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Stephen Granade <sgranade@lepton.phy.duke.edu>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: [Comp99] Review Archiving
Date: 16 Nov 1999 09:59:00 -0500
Organization: Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
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For those of you who, upon finding yourself awash in reviews, have no
idea when you'll be able to read them all, fear not! I will be
collating and archiving the reviews at
http://interactfiction.about.com/msubcomprev99.htm.

Anyone who would *not* like their reviews linked to (or stored on my
site) need only tell me. Conversely, if anyone would definitely like
their reviews linked to (or stored on my site), feel free to let me
know.

Stephen

-- 
  Stephen Granade                | Interested in adventure games?
  sgranade@phy.duke.edu          | Visit About.com's IF Page
  Duke University, Physics Dept  |   http://interactfiction.about.com


From erkyrath@netcom.com Tue Nov 16 17:17:01 CET 1999
Article: 47063 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp99] Zarf's reviews
Date: 16 Nov 1999 15:14:12 GMT
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Craxton <craxton@erols.com> wrote:
> 
>> > Neither, when you think of it, did *he.* That's the point- cliche or
> not, we
>> > think we're doing something heroic, and at the end we discover it's
> quite
>> > the opposite.
>>
>> That doesn't make it an effective story, for me. It makes it a cheat.
>> If the end isn't about what the beginning is about, why not just drop the
>> beginning entirely?
> 
> But it's *exactly* what the beginning is about.

I see the point you're trying to make, of course, but it just doesn't work
that way.

Any game (or written work, or movie, or Gatorade commercial) *must*
present an opening set of assumptions. Otherwise it would take eighteen
years to read the introduction to a story about an eighteen-year-old.

If the beginning is a lie, but there are hints as to the truth, the ending
can tie back to the hints. If the beginning is a lie, but there are
incomprehensible hints as to *something*, it doesn't work. The ending
doesn't tie back to anything; it might as well be a completely separate
work.

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From reply@adamcadre.ac Tue Nov 16 17:17:17 CET 1999
Article: 47065 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Adam Cadre <ac@adamcadre.ac>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp99] Zarf's reviews
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 07:48:10 -0800
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Andrew Plotkin wrote, re Bliss:
> If the beginning is a lie, but there are hints as to the truth, the
> ending can tie back to the hints. If the beginning is a lie, but there
> are incomprehensible hints as to *something*, it doesn't work. The
> ending doesn't tie back to anything; it might as well be a completely
> separate work.

I'm thinking that the reason this game seemed to work for me much more
than for most others is that I figured out exactly what was being
hinted at from the moment the hallway was mentioned -- and, in fact,
>from  that point on, I would have been quite angry had the ending been
anything other than what it turned out to be.

And I'm usually flat-out terrible at this sort of thing.

  -----
 Adam Cadre, Sammamish, WA
 http://adamcadre.ac


From bredon@hotmail.com Tue Nov 16 17:18:11 CET 1999
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From: bredon@hotmail.com
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp99] Zarf's reviews
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 15:56:00 GMT
Organization: Deja.com - Before you buy.
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In article <80r0b1$mak$1@autumn.news.rcn.net>,
  "Craxton" <craxton@erols.com> wrote:
>
> Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com> wrote in message
> news:80qs56$3s8$1@nntp6.atl.mindspring.net...
>
>
>
> > Oh yeah: whyever would the Devil have *painless, heatless* flame in
> > Hell?
>
> Well, just because he's the Devil doesn't necessarily mean he's *evil*
^_^.
Pretty much. He was showing off.

> I mean, how many Satans do you know who would win a soul off someone
in a
> moment of weakness... and then politely say "no thank you"? ^_^

Heh.  Lucifer, above all else, is a sportsman. And he has a weak spot
for romantics. And he knows that the player character is so clueless
about women that he'll get another shot (see the ending)

To quote the Kingpin talking to Spiderman "You have to be lucky a
million times.  I only have to be lucky once." :)

There is no way to lose the game as it stands. Time and lack of skill
made the time limit I was planning (600 moves) impossible to implement.
So, for posterity, here's what the losing ending looked like


"The watch on your wrist goes off, a high, shrill sound, that pierces
your brain.  The room begins to spin, and you sink to your knees,
despondent in the knowledge that your time is up.

You see a figure approaching, bearing some sort of uniform, and your
heart seizes in terror.  You fight off dizziness, and look around for
some sign of hope.

You want to run.

You want to hide.

You want to. . .

You want. . .

'You want fries with that?'

   ***You have lost***



If enough people express interest, and the Inform manuals from Cascade
come about (I destroyed mine getting the game to its current state) Ill
redo the game adding the time limit and a few other things being pressed
for time and skill made me leave out. . .

In a month or two, when I recover :)  Zarf, your comment on being sick
of reading your games output was right on.  As glad as I am that y'all
seem to like it, atm if I have to read one more line of it . . .


B


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.


From erkyrath@netcom.com Tue Nov 16 18:18:48 CET 1999
Article: 47072 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp99] Paul's reviews, Part 5 (LONG!)
Date: 16 Nov 1999 16:32:43 GMT
Organization: MindSpring Enterprises
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Paul O'Brian <obrian@ucsu.colorado.edu> wrote:
> HUNTER, IN DARKNESS by Dave Ahl, Jr.
> 
>    "Actually, Wumpus and Wumpus II are in 'More Basic Computer Games.'
>    Which has 84 games, and is indeed by David H. Ahl. Wumpus rules. All
>    IFers should play it. Indeed, play it before the competition so that
>    you have a sense of our collective roots. Then marvel at where we've
>    come."
>                                         -- Adam Thornton, 9/18/99
> 
> [...] And yet one wonders why Adam was exhorting us so enthusiastically
> to play this game, preferably before the competition.

If you *didn't* see that post, by the way, it's because Adam cancelled it
almost immediately.

He was a beta-tester, but he posted that on his own, without consulting me
first. I more or less blew my top at him, and he apologized and killed the
post. 

I spent the next weeks worried sick that it might have Ruined The Effect
for some hapless player. Fortunately, the whole mess turned out to be
trivial next to the lack-of-walkthrough problem. Heh.

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From erkyrath@netcom.com Tue Nov 16 18:19:22 CET 1999
Article: 47057 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Why if it isn't Old Farmer McGraw!
Date: 16 Nov 1999 15:08:52 GMT
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IF <mordacai@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> My primary goal for Life on BS was to make a
> game that was repugnant. 

Evidence indicates that you failed miserably. :-)

I'd say "better luck next time", but it's not exactly the right
sentiment...

> Thank you Adam for getting the joke. I am
> still flattered however that other people saw more to it than that. ;)

Heh.

If it makes you feel better, I never suspected that Exhibition and Beal
were by the same person; because Exhibition was clearly by a good writer,
whereas Beal was by someone who was couldn't write but was trying very
hard. 

I try not to make that distinction in my reviews, because what the hell
good does it do to say "Sorry, buddy, you're a lousy writer" to someone?

(Except in the most egregious cases. Sorry about that, _Outsided_.)

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From erkyrath@netcom.com Wed Nov 17 15:54:06 CET 1999
Article: 47105 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: *comp99* capsule reviews
Date: 16 Nov 1999 20:48:44 GMT
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Niz <niz@infidel.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> Hunter in Darkness
> Oh no, a cave crawl! In fact, Hunter in Darkness is a technically
> accomplished, and probably very accurate, simulation of the real pot-holing
> experience. The author has put a lot of effort into making the cave areas
> sound different from each other, but he doesn't quite pull it off. There is
> one stand-out scene where you are stuck fast, can't move forward an can't
> move back. The tension is palpable, and all the more so because the author
> has made it interactive rather than just a big chunk of text. However, the
> fact is, caving is boring. At the end of the day, this is just a big maze.
> As a result, I soon became impatient, and the sheer thought of having to map
> was enough for me to end my session.

So I guess the question is, how would you have reacted if I'd included
some in-game hints, and the first hint in that area was: "You don't have
to map any part of this game. Don't even try"?
 
By the way, Sarge was nice enough to give us authors a look at the
standard deviations of the scores as well as the averages. I'm fascinated
to note that _Hunter_ had the *highest* standard deviation in the
competition. People disagreed more about it than about any other game.

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From Laura.Knauth@asu.edu Wed Nov 17 15:56:07 CET 1999
Article: 47129 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: "Laura A. Knauth" <Laura.Knauth@asu.edu>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Third time's the charm, eh?
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 18:36:15 -0800
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I'm thrilled to have won the competition this year! I attempted to pull
together the most successful aspects of my previous two games along with a
lot of research and planning in to Winter Wonderland and am very gratified
that the majority of people enjoyed my efforts.

As soon as this quarter's over (hopefully the last one I need to graduate,
yeah!), I plan to release a second version fixing up some bugs and other
problem areas. So, please send along any bug reports, and I'll include you
in my list of credits.

I'm sorry to hear that the ice floe puzzle frustrated people. In an
afterthought, I added the line code to turn on all compass directions in
that area in an attempt to further convey a big, flat open space. Oops. It
seems that there is a resounding plea to put functionality first in this
case, so I'll be deleting that line of code in the future release. I'll
entertain any other constructive suggestions if you have them.

-- A big thank you to Stephen Granade and all those who volunteered their
time to do such a fantastic job running the competition!

Cheers!

-Laura

Laura.Knauth@Stanford.edu
http://www.stanford.edu/~lknauth/Winter/winter.html
(The Winter Wonderland Web Page - under construction)





From doeadeer3@aol.com Wed Nov 17 22:35:24 CET 1999
Article: 47194 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: doeadeer3@aol.com (Marnie Parker)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp99] David Glasser's "reviews"
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Date: 17 Nov 1999 19:27:51 GMT
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Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com
Message-ID: <19991117142751.09919.00000386@ng-ci1.aol.com>
Xref: news.lth.se rec.games.int-fiction:47194

>Subject: Re: [Comp99] David Glasser's "reviews"
>From: Dan Schmidt dfan@thecia.net 
>Date: Tue, 16 November 1999 11:33 PM EST

>| It's interesting to speculate about the judges based on their ratings of
>| some games; those that put HUNTER IN DARKNESS and EREWHON high (such as
>| myself) seem to be the more "technical/geek/cs/math/whatever" oriented
>| people, whereas FOR A CHANGE and so on seems to be liked more by the
>| literary people.  Or whatever; I'm not really into dividing people up.
>
>For what it's worth, I (a technical/geek/cs/math/whatever oriented
>person, though I do read a ton) wrote FOR A CHANGE, thought HUNTER, IN
>DARKNESS was the best game in the competition, and didn't like EREHWON
>much at all.  

Ditto, the two aren't that much alike.

I think I am a technical/artistic mix. Seems to me those that have been around
longer and/or have played more "amateur" games liked Hunter. I notice it did do
better with judges than in the contest as a whole.

I admired it for its quality, which was obvious once one took the time to
actually play it through. Responses for everything, small details can be
examined, good timing, sovlable puzzles and no bugs. Quite "smooth".

I think I remarked last year the thing I look for most in games is solidity.
Like the games Infocom produced and a lot of what finally creates solidity is
good betatesting (not just by people other than the author but by the author as
well). Next on my list (or first, but each are equally important) is
originality.

Good "art" is and will always be also well-crafted art.

HTH. HAND.

Doe :-)  


doeadeer3@aol.com -------------------------------------------------
Kingdom of  IF - http://members.aol.com/doepage/intfict.htm
Inform Tips - http://members.aol.com/doepage/infotips.htm
IF Art Gallery - http://members.aol.com/iffyart/gallery.htm





From skodat@blazenet.net Wed Nov 17 22:37:28 CET 1999
Article: 47211 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: "Stephen Kodat" <skodat@blazenet.net>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
References: <1e1dsvg.1piuq521e9qu6gN@[209.195.241.64]>
Subject: Re: [Comp99] David Glasser's "reviews"
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> Stone Cell (Middle Edge) [if the author hasn't come out now (I use an
> offline newsreader), I'm going to guess it's somebody who has written in
> TADS before, and perhaps a complicated game.  I'd guess J. Rob Wheeler,
> but that's almost certainly wrong]
>

Although I'll post a more complete response later to the critiques, mostly
to apologize for the difficulty of the puzzles and the wordiness, I'll now
take credit/debit for this game:

My name is Steve Kodat (who?).  I had written one short practice game, and
this is my first full-length.


> Eeeagh!  This introduction has broken my brain!  (It makes sense,
> though.)
>

See above.

> I do like this game.
>

Thanks!

> Why in the world does squirting the wall make the guard ignore me?
>

The idea is that the guard mistakes you for a boy, Matthew specifically.
This niche is a urinal and you are simulating a male's use of it with the
water bottle.

> The practice of not mentioning directions in the text is disorienting,
> but I'm living.
>
> The size and nonlinearity of the layout of the map is just pushing the
> limits of what I like, but I can handle it.  This is good.
>
> Where does one get Pynergevzr (rot13) from, other than combining those
> words in every way?
>

If you look at the portrait, you'll see two objects by the lady's feet.
Their description are the only two that match (hopefully) the two words in
the list.  Also, the boy is in that portrait, and his name is similarly
depicted with a tree with vines (Trevine).  And even more obscurely, the
lord's name is also represented by the heraldic emblem of a horse looking
backward (Ruecoult).

> Um, I would have liked it better had I not had to read the author's
> mind, but it was a good game.  (And granted, the impossible puzzles were
> *mostly* optional, but finding the bone and crack was too hard.)  But I
> still liked it a lot, and probably more than the average judge.


A very canny last remark.




From mol@bartlet.df.lth.se Thu Nov 18 20:35:06 CET 1999
Article: 47317 of rec.games.int-fiction
Path: news.lth.se!not-for-mail
From: mol@bartlet.df.lth.se (Magnus Olsson)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction,rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [comp99] My Comp Reviews -- Part 2
Date: 18 Nov 1999 20:34:22 +0100
Organization: Chronically disorganized
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In article <80rvq0$mmr$2@news.igs.net>,
Suzanne Skinner  <tril@host.ott.igs.net> wrote:
>So why don't I just cut to the real point. "Hunter, in Darkness" asked me
>to identify myself with a man who was hunting down and killing an animal
>for sport. I didn't.
>
>At least, as far as I could tell, it was for sport. No other reason was
>given.  If there had been an option to turn back, perhaps after noticing
>the signs of near-human intelligence in my prey, my reaction to this game
>may well have been utterly different. I couldn't find one, even by using
>txd. There was only one way to reach an endgame, and that was to follow the
>original plan to the end. I simply couldn't identify (didn't want to
>identify?) with this kind of single-mindedness, 

I had no problems identifying with the protagonist, but his single-
mindedness was a bit frightening. And I had some qualms when it turned
out the Wumpus was at least semi-intelligent.

I suppose the game may be taken as a commentary on the
single-mindedness of not only the original "Hunt the Wumpus", but of
many modern computer games as well (most notably the
first-person-shooters). The entire purpose of those games seems to be
to hunt and kill; "Hunter, in Darkness" confronts the player with the
consequences of this.

>I'm reminded of Aayela, another game of hunting in the dark for
>an elusive prey--and a game I loved. In Aayela, the second option *was*
>there. That made all the difference.
>
>(Now, watch: Magnus Ollson wrote them both, didn't he?)

No, I didn't; Zarf wrote "Hunter". 

But I'm deeple honoured that someone would think that I had written
one of Andrew's games. 

-- 
Magnus Olsson (mol@df.lth.se, zebulon@pobox.com)
------    http://www.pobox.com/~zebulon   ------


From dns361@merle.acns.nwu.edu Thu Nov 18 20:42:12 CET 1999
Article: 47243 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Second April <dns361@merle.acns.nwu.edu>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: attention for non-comp games
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 21:06:12 -0600
Organization: Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, US
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Xref: news.lth.se rec.games.int-fiction:47243

I've thought a bit about this problem myself. I try to review
some of the relatively recent games (along with a few of the forgotten 
golden oldies) when I write for SPAG, so that folks who haven't been
following along with recent releases might be encouraged to check
something out. However, I don't get around to playing everything that's
released, and I'm well aware that there are some good ones released
recently that I haven't gotten around to. Bad Machine, Rans, Guilty
Bastards, Enemies, Mulldoon Legacy, Break-In, and Winchester's Nightmare
are some of them.

Maybe a reviewer's team of sorts? A bunch of folks who agree to review
recent releases for SPAG, and tell each other what they're planning to
review so that everything noteworthy gets covered? It's possible, I guess.
I'm aware that a review or two in SPAG isn't the same as getting
mega-discussed on r*if, but it'd be a start, and SPAG reviews do
sometimes lead to further discussions on the newsgroups. In fact, the Book
Club could, if it felt so inclined, pick up on some interesting SPAG
reviews and choose the subject game for its discussion.

The main problem, to my mind, is that people might end up writing negative
reviews of things they don't much care for, because no one else was
interested enough to write. I generally don't write reviews where the
thrust is more negative than positive, barring special circumstances
(particularly interesting even if not entirely successful games, for
instance), though not everyone shares that view. What does this team do if
someone releases the equivalent of, oh, say, Thorfinn's Realm outside the
comp? (Sorry, author. Just coming up with an example of a game whose
reviews were lukewarm to cold, and whose genre, well, has been done.) This
problem goes for any planned attention-directing device, really; what if
those who ordinarily would review and discuss conclude that there isn't
much interesting to say?

Anyway, that aside, if anyone else is interested in the "reviewer team"
idea, I'd be happy to participate. Any one game could be reviewed by
multiple folks, of course, but the team would have to agree to cover games
that were getting neglected.

BTW, both C.E. Forman and I reviewed TATCTAE for SPAG; C.E. was a good
deal more upbeat than I was. (This was back in the day when I had no
compunction about reviews that were more negative than positive. I haven't
reviewed Heist because my policy has changed. I don't get along real well
with Andy's philosophy of puzzle design.)

Duncan Stevens
d-stevens@nwu.edu
773-728-9721

Love in the open hand, no thing but that,
Ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt,
As one should bring you cowslips in a hat
Swung from her hand, or apples in her skirt,
I bring you, calling out as children do,
"Look what I have!--And these are all for you."

--Edna St. Vincent Millay





From reply@adamcadre.ac Fri Nov 19 10:24:47 CET 1999
Article: 47372 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Adam Cadre <ac@adamcadre.ac>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp99] Even more reviews (Jerome Plapp's)
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 19:22:12 -0800
Organization: Rule #1 is, you do not talk about the Organization.
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> Am I the only one who figured it was just made-up slang, set in some
> indeterminite time and place in the future?

I assumed the same thing -- perhaps because my novel contains a fair
bit of made-up slang, created in order that it not seem immediately
dated.

But I didn't think Chicks Dig Jerks was set in the future.  Just an
alternate present.

  -----
 Adam Cadre, Sammamish, WA
 http://adamcadre.ac


From erkyrath@netcom.com Tue Nov 23 15:49:24 CET 1999
Article: 47524 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Where is Wumpus? (Re: [Hunter] Puzzle survey (SPOILER))
Date: 22 Nov 1999 15:35:47 GMT
Organization: MindSpring Enterprises
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karger@fermi2.chem.yale.edu wrote:
> Ross Presser <rpresser@nospamimtek.com.invalid> wrote:
> : alt.distinguished.arcum_dagsson@hushmail.c.o.m (Arcum
> : Dagsson).wrote.posted.offered: 
> 
> :>In article <8197rc$r6p$1@news.ycc.yale.edu>, karger@fermi2.chem.yale.edu
> :>wrote: 
> :>
> :>> : "original C source" (?)
> :>> : ftp://locke.ccil.org/pub/retro/wumpus-1.3.tar.gz
> :>> 
> :>> In fact, I believe the original game was written in BASIC. There's
> :>> a C port by the notorious Eric Raymond, which may be the one that's
> :>> linked here.  The C port contains the original BASIC in the comments.
> :>> 
> 
> : I too thought the game was originally in BASIC, from the Creative
> : Computing magazine, but the site I found that "original C source" says
> : that it dates back to 1972, from a mainframe implementation.  I didn't
> : actually read the source that I posted, so I didn't know about the
> : comments. 
> 
> Comments from the ESR C version:
> 
>  * The BASIC source is that posted by Magnus Olsson in USENET article
>  * <9207071854.AA21847@thep.lu.se>: he wrote
>  *
>  * >Below is the source code for _one_ (rather simple) Wumpus version,
>  * >which I found in the PC-BLUE collection on SIMTEL20. I believe this is
>  * >pretty much the same version that was published in David Ahl's "101
>  * >Basic Computer Games" (or, possibly, in the sequel).
> 
> So it *was* a mainframe, but it was BASIC.

Nobody has yet mentioned the original attribution: the game was written by
Gregory Yob. So says the David Ahl book.

http://www.emuunlim.com/doteaters/play4sta1.htm says:
   Hunt the Wumpus aka Wump,
   developed by Gregory Yob on a Time-Sharing System at the University of
   Massachusettes in Dartmouth in 1972.

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From ftww@cs.usyd.edu.au Tue Nov 23 15:49:29 CET 1999
Article: 47555 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: ftww@staff.cs.usyd.edu.au (Geoff Bailey)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Where is Wumpus? (Re: [Hunter] Puzzle survey (SPOILER))
Followup-To: rec.games.int-fiction
Date: 23 Nov 1999 12:11:46 +1100
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Xref: news.lth.se rec.games.int-fiction:47555


In article <81bnsj$nfr$5@nntp9.atl.mindspring.net>,
Andrew Plotkin  <erkyrath@netcom.com> wrote:
> Nobody has yet mentioned the original attribution: the game was written
> by Gregory Yob. So says the David Ahl book.

Ah, I had been wondering where the 'Wumpus Yobgregorii' had come from.
I meant to check the book when I was at my parent's place, but I forgot.
Thanks for clearing that up.

Cheers,
Geoff.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Geoff Bailey (Fred the Wonder Worm)   |   Programmer by trade --
ftww@cs.usyd.edu.au                   |       Gameplayer by vocation.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------



From erkyrath@netcom.com Tue Nov 23 15:52:51 CET 1999
Article: 47431 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction,rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [comp99] My Comp Reviews -- Part 2
Date: 19 Nov 1999 17:23:58 GMT
Organization: MindSpring Enterprises
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In rec.games.int-fiction Daryl McCullough <daryl@cogentex.com> wrote:
> In article <811kbu$tom$1@bartlet.df.lth.se>, mol@bartlet.df.lth.se says...
> 
>>>I'm reminded of Aayela, another game of hunting in the dark for
>>>an elusive prey--and a game I loved. In Aayela, the second option *was*
>>>there. That made all the difference.
>>>
>>>(Now, watch: Magnus Ollson wrote them both, didn't he?)
>>
>>No, I didn't; Zarf wrote "Hunter".
> 
> Did Andrew announce that, or did the literary forensics experts
> figure it out?

I announced it (on IFMUD first, then in my reviews when I posted them.)

Nobody figured it out. I'm kind of stunned by that, really. I didn't try
to conceal my writing style at all. I'm pretty well known *for* my writing
style, so I expected it to be recognized.

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From balthazar@erols.com Tue Nov 23 15:53:04 CET 1999
Article: 47437 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: "Dave Coleman" <balthazar@erols.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction,rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [comp99] My Comp Reviews -- Part 2
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1999 13:37:40 -0500
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Andrew Plotkin wrote in message <81413e$979$1@nntp3.atl.mindspring.net>...
>In rec.games.int-fiction Daryl McCullough <daryl@cogentex.com> wrote:
>> In article <811kbu$tom$1@bartlet.df.lth.se>, mol@bartlet.df.lth.se
says...
>>
>>>>I'm reminded of Aayela, another game of hunting in the dark for
>>>>an elusive prey--and a game I loved. In Aayela, the second option *was*
>>>>there. That made all the difference.
>>>>
>>>>(Now, watch: Magnus Ollson wrote them both, didn't he?)
>>>
>>>No, I didn't; Zarf wrote "Hunter".
>>
>> Did Andrew announce that, or did the literary forensics experts
>> figure it out?
>
>I announced it (on IFMUD first, then in my reviews when I posted them.)
>
>Nobody figured it out. I'm kind of stunned by that, really. I didn't try
>to conceal my writing style at all. I'm pretty well known *for* my writing
>style, so I expected it to be recognized.
>
>--Z
>
>"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
>borogoves..."

Although it's easy to claim it now, I will say that I figured Hunter was
Zarf's after playing it for about five minutes. I think it had to do with
the single-minded seriousness of the tone, along with the deep
implementation of the puzzles. It reminded me a great deal of Spider and
Web.

Once I had come to that conclusion in my mind, I knew not to waste time
mapping the maze. I wonder how many people would have looked for alternative
maze solutions if Zarf's name was clearly attached to the piece?

-Dave





From ftww@cs.usyd.edu.au Tue Nov 23 15:53:32 CET 1999
Article: 47499 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: ftww@staff.cs.usyd.edu.au (Geoff Bailey)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction,rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [comp99] My Comp Reviews -- Part 2
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Date: 22 Nov 1999 16:40:26 +1100
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In article <814596$kom$1@autumn.news.rcn.net>,
Dave Coleman <balthazar@erols.com> wrote:
> Although it's easy to claim it now, I will say that I figured Hunter was
> Zarf's after playing it for about five minutes. I think it had to do with
> the single-minded seriousness of the tone, along with the deep
> implementation of the puzzles. It reminded me a great deal of Spider and
> Web.

I also figured it out, but not that quickly.  I was impressed by the degree
of implementation of the place, but Andrew isn't (quite) the only person
who does that.  When I saw the supposed name of the author I knew that I
recognised it from somewhere; when I ran into the bats I realised where I
knew the name from, and it seemed likely to be a pseudonym.  But it wasn't
until I reached the maze section of the game (which was a while later -- I
spent ages trying to shoot the blasted rope in the middle so there wouldn't
be a pointy end) that I recognised the cave generator from Zarf's web pages.

[ Or rather, I spent a little time trying to map it and came to the
conclusion that it was automatically generated, and the penny dropped. ]

The fact that the maze seemed unsolvable by conventional means pretty
much forced looking for an alternate solution; it still took me a while
to see it, though.

Cheers,
Geoff.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Geoff Bailey (Fred the Wonder Worm)   |   Programmer by trade --
ftww@cs.usyd.edu.au                   |       Gameplayer by vocation.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------



From erkyrath@netcom.com Tue Nov 23 15:53:42 CET 1999
Article: 47520 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction,rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [comp99] My Comp Reviews -- Part 2
Date: 22 Nov 1999 15:15:48 GMT
Organization: MindSpring Enterprises
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Xref: news.lth.se rec.arts.int-fiction:66820 rec.games.int-fiction:47520

In rec.arts.int-fiction Geoff Bailey <ftww@staff.cs.usyd.edu.au> wrote:
> 
> In article <814596$kom$1@autumn.news.rcn.net>,
> Dave Coleman <balthazar@erols.com> wrote:
>> Although it's easy to claim it now, I will say that I figured Hunter was
>> Zarf's after playing it for about five minutes. I think it had to do with
>> the single-minded seriousness of the tone, along with the deep
>> implementation of the puzzles. It reminded me a great deal of Spider and
>> Web.
> 
> I also figured it out, but not that quickly.  I was impressed by the degree
> of implementation of the place, but Andrew isn't (quite) the only person
> who does that.  When I saw the supposed name of the author I knew that I
> recognised it from somewhere; when I ran into the bats I realised where I
> knew the name from, and it seemed likely to be a pseudonym.  But it wasn't
> until I reached the maze section of the game (which was a while later -- I
> spent ages trying to shoot the blasted rope in the middle so there wouldn't
> be a pointy end) that I recognised the cave generator from Zarf's web pages.

Damn! I was hoping nobody would catch that.

It's not even a fair hint, really. It's *not* the same code. The
algorithms have nothing in common, and I rewrote the source text from
scratch, or as scratchy as I could get working from the same brain.

Anyone who saw my web page could have stolen the idea. Yeah. That's the
monkey. :)

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From erkyrath@netcom.com Tue Nov 23 15:54:12 CET 1999
Article: 47445 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction,rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [comp99] My Comp Reviews -- Part 2
Date: 19 Nov 1999 19:21:44 GMT
Organization: MindSpring Enterprises
Message-ID: <814808$i54$2@nntp9.atl.mindspring.net>
References: <80rvq0$mmr$2@news.igs.net> <811kbu$tom$1@bartlet.df.lth.se> <813s9p$24je@edrn.newsguy.com> <81413e$979$1@nntp3.atl.mindspring.net> <8146qt$3dd$1@nnrp1.deja.com>
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In rec.arts.int-fiction J.D. Berry <jdberry@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <81413e$979$1@nntp3.atl.mindspring.net>,
>   Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com> wrote:
>>
>> Nobody figured it out. I'm kind of stunned by that, really. I didn't
>>try to conceal my writing style at all. I'm pretty well known *for* my
>>writing style, so I expected it to be recognized.
> 
> Do people feel as I do that if Andrew had attached his real name to the
> work he would have finished in the top 3?

That concern (unwanted bias) was one reason I decided to enter
anonymously.
 
> Perhaps all entries should be entered with aliases? 

That gets argued after every competition. The concensus has been that it
constrains authors in a way they may not want, and it risks turning the
whole thing into a "guess the author" contest. And different authors are
going to be recognizable in different ways and by different people, so you
can't even enforce the anonymity reliably.

Leaving the choice to each author has worked well so far.

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From rpresser@NOSPAMimtek.com.invalid Tue Nov 23 15:54:32 CET 1999
Article: 47517 of rec.games.int-fiction
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Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: A brief Hunter, In Darkness comment
From: rpresser@NOSPAMimtek.com.invalid (Ross Presser)
References: <80rvq0$mmr$2@news.igs.net> <811kbu$tom$1@bartlet.df.lth.se> <3835FAC2.38242FB8@cs.berkeley.edu>
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alt.distinguished.pasula@cs.berkeley.edu (Hanna Maria
Pasula).wrote.posted.offered: 

>I'm not sure that I agree, exactly. It did make me empathize with the
>Wumpus (we are two wounded creatures creeping through the caves, and it
>seems like it's only circumstance that decides who is the hunter and who
>is the hunted) but it doesn't seem like the protagonist  learns anything
>from this. Unless I missed some alternative ending, the Wumpus still
>gets killed. 

Well, there are several alternative endings where the player gets killed 
instead of the Wumpus.  And even in the "ideal" ending where the player 
lives and the Wumpus dies, you don't get to leave with a trophy.

-- 
Ross Presser
ross_presser@imtek.com
"And if you're the kind of person who parties with a bathtub full of
pasta, I suspect you don't care much about cholesterol anyway."


From edromia@my-deja.com Tue Nov 23 16:00:43 CET 1999
Article: 47449 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: edromia@my-deja.com
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp99] My Reviews
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1999 20:54:58 GMT
Organization: Deja.com - Before you buy.
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In article <19991119051906.24233.00000713@ng-fw1.aol.com>,
  doeadeer3@aol.com (Marnie Parker) wrote:
> >Subject: Re: [Comp99] My Reviews
> >From: jcmason@uwaterloo.ca  (Joe Mason)
> >Date: Tue, 16 November 1999 03:41 AM EST
> >Message-id:
>
> My take on A Moment of Hope:  it was a daring baring of soul. Truly
> one of the more experimential pieces of IF in a long time, because it
> is so close to real life. AND...  like this or not, I think some of
> you "guys" out there hated it because it made you wince because it
> was TOO REAL LIFE. Recalled past experiences. I, on the other hand,
> see it as one of the few pieces of IF that actually packs an
> emotional punch.

I'll tell you why I wasn't all that crazy about "Moment of Hope."

It is, indeed, very Real To Life. I had no trouble at all relating to
the protagonist, since I myself have been down that road more than
once. (And probably farther down it than he has; I noticed no incidents
of public drunkenness in "Moment," which is, I'm tempted to say, a damn
shame. Hey, there's nothing like getting smashed on tequila and
screaming your unrequited love into the night sky to clear out the old
dating angst.)

So, uh, like I said, I've been there.

But I've also grown up since then. So, I wager, have a lot of people on
this newsgroup. Other people may still have these sorts of problems,
and I do sympathize with them, but that doesn't change the essential
fact that what those people need to do is grow up.

I know it isn't ever easy. It wasn't for me. But there it is.

What this essential fact meant for me, playing this game, is that
although I could readily identify with the protagonist, I was unable to
take his plight very seriously. It just didn't bother me at all. I
think I would have liked the game a lot more if it HAD bothered me.
There was no emotional punch, just a sort of bemused sympathy and the
wish that I could communicate with this poor kid. I kept typing things
like LIGHTEN UP, GUY, and WHY DON'T YOU GO SEE A MOVIE?, and SEE, IF
YOU'D JUST LEARN TO DEAL WITH YOUR FEELINGS HONESTLY INSTEAD OF
TRUSTING THIS CYBER-EQUIVALENT TO 10TH-GRADE NOTE PASSING, YOU WOULDN'T
BE IN THIS FIX. But the poor sap just kept punching his pillow, and
wouldn't listen.

It was no trouble understanding why the protagonist was so scared of
dialing the phone, or writing an e-mail, or whatever, but in no way did
the game make *me* feel scared of it. It was hard to even play along. I
gleefully typed KISS GIRL when he walked by that gaggle in the hallway
by the gym, thinking, "Hee-hee, this'll freak him out! Probably do him
some good, too."

In the end, what kept me from really enjoying this game was the fact
that, for all his whinging, there was nothing really at stake for this
boy other than a certain amount of emotional embarassment, which is a
lesson he's going to have to live through sooner or later anyway. The
resolution, when it came, brought no sense of satisfaction or
accomplishment -- our hero discovers that, by pure luck, he managed to
avoid the embarassing consequences of a situation that his own
immaturity got him into in the first place. Gee, close call. Next time
try passing notes.

So, I'm not taking issue with the assertion that this game strikes
close to home. It undoubtedly strikes *very* close to home. But I
didn't dislike it because it made me uncomfortable. I disliked it
because it *didn't* make me uncomfortable. I disliked it because its
subject matter just isn't worth getting uncomfortable over, anymore.

If this work is, as many people are theorizing, autobiographical, I
would advise the author of an old writing saw: just because it's your
life, that don't make it interesting. (I should know; not only have I
been down that road, but I've also tried writing about it. Trust me,
friend, it ALWAYS sucks.)

And: I don't know who Anna really is, but writing an IF-comp about her
is a lousy way of getting her attention. And she'll probably miss the
point.

-Mike Gentry


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.


From lraszewski@loyola.edu Tue Nov 23 16:02:14 CET 1999
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From: lraszews@hal.suse.de (L. Ross Raszewski)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp99] My Reviews
Date: 19 Nov 1999 23:10:06 GMT
Organization: Loyola College in Maryland
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On Fri, 19 Nov 1999 20:54:58 GMT, edromia@my-deja.com <edromia@my-deja.com> 
wrote:
>
>It is, indeed, very Real To Life. I had no trouble at all relating to
>the protagonist, since I myself have been down that road more than
>once. (And probably farther down it than he has; I noticed no incidents
>of public drunkenness in "Moment," which is, I'm tempted to say, a damn
>shame. Hey, there's nothing like getting smashed on tequila and
>screaming your unrequited love into the night sky to clear out the old
>dating angst.)
>

You know, I'd have thought that I'm the only person who would ever say this, 
but you're damned right.

>
>What this essential fact meant for me, playing this game, is that
>although I could readily identify with the protagonist, I was unable to
>take his plight very seriously. It just didn't bother me at all. I
>think I would have liked the game a lot more if it HAD bothered me.
>There was no emotional punch, just a sort of bemused sympathy and the
>wish that I could communicate with this poor kid. I kept typing things
>like LIGHTEN UP, GUY, and WHY DON'T YOU GO SEE A MOVIE?, and SEE, IF
>YOU'D JUST LEARN TO DEAL WITH YOUR FEELINGS HONESTLY INSTEAD OF
>TRUSTING THIS CYBER-EQUIVALENT TO 10TH-GRADE NOTE PASSING, YOU WOULDN'T
>BE IN THIS FIX. But the poor sap just kept punching his pillow, and
>wouldn't listen.
>

Which, come to think of it, is exactly what the majority of people in that
situation would have done if you'd said it to them in real life.

>
>So, I'm not taking issue with the assertion that this game strikes
>close to home. It undoubtedly strikes *very* close to home. But I
>didn't dislike it because it made me uncomfortable. I disliked it
>because it *didn't* make me uncomfortable. I disliked it because its
>subject matter just isn't worth getting uncomfortable over, anymore.

Lucky fellow.  As you said, you've been in this place before, and if you
managed to get out of it purely by a force of will, you're a person of 
a much more powerful will than I am.


-- 
"It's a strange world; it's a very strange world, that leaves me holding on to 
nothing when there's nothing left to lose." -- Sarah McLachlan


From mikesnyder@worldnet.att.net Tue Nov 23 16:02:40 CET 1999
Article: 47450 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: "Mike Snyder" <mikesnyder@worldnet.att.net>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp99] My Reviews
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1999 15:22:04 -0800
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<edromia@my-deja.com> wrote in message news:814df0$8gh$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
> But I've also grown up since then. So, I wager, have a lot of people on
> this newsgroup. Other people may still have these sorts of problems,
> and I do sympathize with them, but that doesn't change the essential
> fact that what those people need to do is grow up.
>
> I know it isn't ever easy. It wasn't for me. But there it is.

---- spoiler space ----
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

I played "A Moment of Hope" for the first time last night. Like you, there
was a time when I could relate to the PC too, although her name was Kandi. I
was probably about the same age as the PC. Understanding why he does what he
does is very easy. It's easy to have low self esteem (and that's what it
boils down to) and feel uncomfortable around the opposite sex (are they
staring at me? are they laughing about me? will anybody *ever* like me?)

I'm a totally different person today (in my late 20's). Now I feel
completely the opposite. I don't worry about "will I ever get a date"
because I'm almost jaded on the subject. This didn't stop me from enjoying
the game though. I think it might have packed more punch if it had been
written in the 1st person instead of 2nd, because of its nature. I would
rather help the PC than be him. Still, I really enjoyed the game. I didn't
see the PC as a loser (as some have indicated) -- just a lonely, insecure
guy hoping for a lucky break.

Unfortunately, the PC missed the point about Anna. She doesn't care that
she's still confused on who "likes" her. She's probably damned near ecstatic
that so many *do*. To the point, she's very shallow. She has a lot of
growing up to do. There are people who could have explained to the PC what
had happened without making him feel like a creep, and Anna isn't one of
those people. I do think, farther down the road, she'll grow up and express
her thoughts with more tact. She might think the PC is a toad and that's her
right, but a little maturity would help her.

Like many, this has the markings of a true story. If it's completely
fictional (and especially if the author is nothing like the PC) then this
game could be considered (at least by me) *extraordinary* instead of just
pretty good. If it's a true story, I wish the author much luck, but do your
best to look past Anna. She's not the one.

Mike.




From edromia@my-deja.com Tue Nov 23 16:12:01 CET 1999
Article: 47597 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: edromia@my-deja.com
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: "TRUE emotional honesty"? (was [Comp99] My Reviews)
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 14:38:56 GMT
Organization: Deja.com - Before you buy.
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In article <19991122204415.10126.00001012@ng-cn1.aol.com>,
  doeadeer3@aol.com (Marnie Parker) wrote:
> >Subject: Re: "TRUE emotional honesty"? (was [Comp99] My Reviews)
> >From: doeadeer3@aol.com  (Marnie Parker)
> >Date: Mon, 22 November 1999 04:12 PM EST
>
> >I would say the strong reactions to the CHARACTER says something
right there.
>
> Hmmm, guess that could be misinterpreted.
>
> Meant "says something" as in: character was well written, author
conveyed what
> he intended to convey.
>
> As in character seemed real or to be interchangeable with the author
himself.
>

(This isn't so much a response to Doe herself as it is a response to
assertions that have popped up here and there on this thread, which
this comment of Doe's sort of typifies.)

I'm curious.

Why is "character seemed interchangeable with the author" equivalent
with "character seemed real"? Why, particularly, is it equivalent
with "character is written well?"

Why do so many people seem to equate "emotional honesty"
with "autobiography," whether of the frank variety or thinly disguised?

Has anyone here read, for example, "Sophie's Choice?" (Not the movie,
the book. I haven't seen the movie, I can't speak for the movie.)

Would you consider the characters in it well written? Would you
consider it an emotionally honest piece?

-M.


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.


From edromia@my-deja.com Tue Nov 23 16:16:25 CET 1999
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From: edromia@my-deja.com
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp99] My Reviews
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 14:47:51 GMT
Organization: Deja.com - Before you buy.
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References: <IM8Y3.54947$up3.84809@news21.bellglobal.com> <19991119051906.24233.00000713@ng-fw1.aol.com> <814df0$8gh$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <814lce$3c1$1@love.loyola.edu>
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Hmm... you know, I responded to this a while ago. I don't know why it
didn't show up the first time. Then again, I'm using DejaNews, so
really there's no telling WHAT I'm really looking at.

Anyway...

In article <814lce$3c1$1@love.loyola.edu>,
  lraszewski@loyola.edu wrote:
> >like LIGHTEN UP, GUY, and WHY DON'T YOU GO SEE A MOVIE?, and SEE, IF
> >YOU'D JUST LEARN TO DEAL WITH YOUR FEELINGS HONESTLY INSTEAD OF
> >TRUSTING THIS CYBER-EQUIVALENT TO 10TH-GRADE NOTE PASSING, YOU
WOULDN'T
> >BE IN THIS FIX. But the poor sap just kept punching his pillow, and
> >wouldn't listen.
> >
>
> Which, come to think of it, is exactly what the majority of people in
that
> situation would have done if you'd said it to them in real life.

Possibly. But then again, in real life I might have tried a more
sympathetic strategy. One of the side-effects of the author's strange
use of the "zero-feedback" noninteractivity (those moments where he
took the parser off the hook altogether) was that it simply added to my
bemused detachment. When I typed LIGHTEN UP, what I was really thinking
was LIGHTEN UP, THIS IS CLEARLY JUST A GAME.

> Lucky fellow.  As you said, you've been in this place before, and if
> you managed to get out of it purely by a force of will, you're a
> person of a much more powerful will than I am.

I wish I had an inspiring story to tell people, but I don't. I don't
know if you could even call it an effort of will. I just survived. And
when I came out the other side, I managed to salvage a bit of
perspective.

- Mike Gentry


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.


From erkyrath@netcom.com Tue Nov 23 16:25:45 CET 1999
Article: 47572 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: <ANN> New TADS game
Date: 23 Nov 1999 05:41:03 GMT
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Steve Evans <baskingshark@my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <81c6d9$tr5$2@nntp6.atl.mindspring.net>,
>   Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >> So, why the hell should I look at this game?
>> >> [noting that I apologized for that phrasing later --Z]
>> >
>> > Who said you had to?
>>
>> I don't have to. The author did imply, just by posting, that he
>> *wanted* me to.
> 
> Look Andrew, the author was simply announcing that he had written a
> game. He gave an honest assessment of what it was (and what it was not)
> so that people could make up their own minds about whether they wanted
> to give it a try. He was not implying that any particular reader would
> *want* to download the thing.

I think we're both pushing words into his mouth faster than he can spit
them out, so forget the real case.

*In general*, if an author posts a notice that says "I just wrote a game.
It's nothing special," it's pretty much a waste of keystrokes. That author
isn't talking to me. Call it humility or self-fulfilling prophecy of
defeat, but there's no reason to do it. 

If you think someone will enjoy your game, make them think so -- or at
least suspect it. If you don't, your game isn't finished yet.

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From robb_sherwin@juno.com Tue Nov 23 17:27:27 CET 1999
Article: 47121 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: robb_sherwin@juno.com (Robb Sherwin)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp99] Even more reviews (Jerome Plapp's)
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On Tue, 16 Nov 1999 16:02:21 -0700, Jerome Plapp <voxdei@asu.edu>
wrote:
>    Ok, one more note: the language. I don't have any problems with bad
>language/sexual situations and in fact I thought this was pretty
>appropriate and realistic in this game. It's just that I think the
>author was Australian, and, well, their slang is a LOT different from
>American slang. Some of the remarks seemed completely foolish and way
>out there to an American ear. This made it funnier, though.

Just to clarify:  

Actually, I was born and raised in upstate New York. As for the slang,
it's mostly an amalgam of words, expressions and concepts I
experienced / helped create at college, Cyrix and the New Orleans
Saints bulletin boards. 

I hadn't thought that it would get in anyone's way of understanding
what was going on, but I think in a lot of cases it did. If I write
another game with that tone, I am definitely including a "what does
xxxx mean?" routine.

Thanks for playing, I appreciate you posting your review. =)

-- Robb



=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Robb Sherwin, Fort Collins CO 
Reviews From Trotting Krips: http://ifiction.tsx.org
Knight Orc Home Page www.geocities.com/~knightorc


From wild_dj@mit.edu Tue Nov 23 17:28:28 CET 1999
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From: wild_dj@mit.edu (Jake Wildstrom)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp99] Even more reviews (Jerome Plapp's)
Date: 17 Nov 1999 20:59:41 GMT
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In article <80uugc$s1o$1@kimba.whitelion.org>,
Fraser <blancolioni@blancolioni.org> wrote:
>Just on reading opening paragraph: 'chaps' and 'lavatory' sound English;
>'you couldn't nail', 'lucked out', 'military school', 'assjack', 'stiffs'
>and 'knock outs' sound anything but Australian.  I have to wonder how
>you think we talk.  Mate.

Well, that's probably it--they don't sound much like English or American slang
either (or at least, _I've_ never heard "assjack". Maybe I lead a sheltered
life), and, when all's said and done, the majority of colorful slang in the
English language is either American, from some or other part of the UK (varying
a lot from place to place), or Australian. Since most of us (read: unwashed
American heathens) know the least about the particulars of Australian slang, we
assume anything unknown's from there, I guess.

+--First Church of Briantology--Order of the Holy Quaternion--+
| A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into         |
| theorems.              -Paul Erdos                          |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
|                       Jake Wildstrom                        |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+


From im@cs.york.ac.uk Wed Nov 24 15:14:09 CET 1999
Article: 47322 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Iain Merrick <im@cs.york.ac.uk>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Gordy's Incomplete IFcomp Journal
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 19:51:43 +0000
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Gordy Wheeler wrote:

>  The 99 Comp has arrived. Woo-HOO! Being a young, yet intense fan of text
> adventures, I feel it is my job, nay, my duty to judge and review for this
> year's comp. First off, I've gotta say...17 megs for the complete download
> and over THIRTY games?

17 megs, yes, but with the advent of multimedia extravaganzas it was a
bit asymmetric.

If the comp99 zip file was the solar system, Neil K. Guy would be the
sun and Mike Snyder would be Jupiter. And then maybe Ian Finley would be
Saturn.

I think I might have those last two the wrong way round, but this
metaphor is starting to worry me strangely so I'll say no more.

(PS - FWIW, this is why I split the mac archive into three packages. I
hope that didn't piss anyone off. If anyone actually used the mac
packages at all.)

-- 
Iain Merrick
im@cs.york.ac.uk


From wheeler@jump.net Wed Nov 24 15:15:11 CET 1999
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From: "J. Robinson Wheeler" <wheeler@jump.net>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp99] Zarf's reviews
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 12:53:51 -0600
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M. Wesley Osam :
> Magnus Olsson wrote:
>
> > Sorry, but I don't get the reference to the lemonade vendor -
> > could you please explain it?
>
> In "Duck Soup," Chico and Harpo play spies who disguise
> themselves as peanut vendors. Their cart is right next to
> a lemonade cart, and they spend a lot of the movie just
> bothering the lemonade guy for no particular reason.

The lemonade vendor was played by a comic actor named
Edgar Kennedy, acknowledged as master of the "slow burn"
when antagonized. The irritation starts out small and
manageable, seemingly under control, and then just keeps
building and building into full fury.

However, the Marx Brothers win in the end, because they
don't get mad. Eventually their adversary just has to
surrender and quit.


--
J. Robinson Wheeler       http://raddial.com/
wheeler@jump.net





From craxton@erols.com Wed Nov 24 15:15:23 CET 1999
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From: "Craxton" <craxton@erols.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp99] Zarf's reviews
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 21:02:59 -0500
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Magnus Olsson <mol@bartlet.df.lth.se> wrote in message
news:810hc5$lgd$1@bartlet.df.lth.se...
> In article <80sdjl$7h0$1@news.jump.net>,
> J. Robinson Wheeler <wheeler@jump.net> wrote:
> >You know, the more time goes by, and people are still writing
> >about how Four in One drove them batty, the funnier and funnier
> >the joke of it gets for me. I turned the IF community into the
> >lemonade vendor in "Duck Soup", and they still don't get it.
>
> Sorry, but I don't get the reference to the lemonade vendor -
> could you please explain it?
>

No, I couldn't. >:===8) Basically, there's a big slapstick segment where
Chico and Harpo harass a lemonade vendor. Slapstick can't really be
described with text, but it's funny as hell. Marx brothers rock. >:===8)

                                                                            
                -Craxton
--
"All men are sexual. You'd better get used to it." -May Club
Long Live the Hentai Game!




From bredon@hotmail.com Wed Nov 24 15:16:40 CET 1999
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From: bredon@hotmail.com
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [COMP99] Review Time!
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 03:50:29 GMT
Organization: Deja.com - Before you buy.
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> 37: "Beat the Devil"
>  Rating: 8
>  And so we end where we began- with a not-quite-masterful but
>  nonetheless solid game. This is one of the few games that manipulates
>  the quirky humor common to I-F in a manner that gets an actual laugh
>  out of me. Although both the "escape from hell" idea (Perdition's
>  Flames) and the "seven deadly sins" (Mimesis) have been done before,
>  this game still feels unique. Most of the game is fairly
>  straightforward, though I never did figure out what was written on
the
>  fishbowl. (And yes, I tried LISTEN TO FISHBOWL, got no response.)
DOH!  I cannot _belive_ I forgot to code that! And there is no way
to read what's on the fishbowl, but the fact that you tried to listen to
it means you got the reference :)

>  Nonetheless, I finished with 101 points, though the walkthrough was
>  necessary in a few places. Overall, an enjoyable way to kill a few
>  hours, and the kicker is that Lucifer not only says "no thank you" to
>  your soul, but keeps his promise in the end. Never deeval with the
>  devil, but if you do, it's nice to know he's a good sport.

Oh, he knows he'll get another crack at the main char.  Not in my next
game (though Lucifer will make a cameo :) ), but down the line, there
will be a rematch ;)

b


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.


From glasser@iname.com Wed Nov 24 15:17:47 CET 1999
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From: glasser@iname.com (David Glasser)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: *comp99* capsule reviews
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 00:14:16 -0500
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[Hunter in Darkness spoilers]

Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com> wrote:

> By the way, Sarge was nice enough to give us authors a look at the
> standard deviations of the scores as well as the averages. I'm fascinated
> to note that _Hunter_ had the *highest* standard deviation in the
> competition. People disagreed more about it than about any other game.

Well, I'd guess that true enjoyment of HUNTER really only came after the
player figured out or saw the key to the game, which admittedly was
after a difficult puzzle or two that made some give up.  Also, somebody
not familiar with Wumpus (I wasn't quite familiar enough until a few
weeks ago, really) would miss the point.

So it's not surprising that a game that reaches its enjoyment climax
late in the game and requires external knowledge has mixed reviews.  (I
loved it myself.)

-- 
David Glasser | glasser@iname.com | http://www.davidglasser.net/
rec.arts.int-fiction FAQ: http://www.davidglasser.net/raiffaq/
"So, is that superior artistry, or the easy way out?"
 --TenthStone on white canvases as art, on rec.arts.int-fiction


From walshj@cbs.curtin.edu.au Wed Nov 24 15:18:23 CET 1999
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From: "John Walsh" <walshj@cbs.curtin.edu.au>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: *comp99* capsule reviews (moan about Hunter)
Date: 18 Nov 1999 11:26:30 GMT
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My reaction, for what it is worth (and I was unable to submit my scores
because my laptop packed up in Kunming and I couldn't recreate the file in
time despite having spent at least two hours on bloody Snosae) was that I
hated this game from the beginning - simply because I have no desire to be
a person who crawls around in caves with a crossbow (I also would have
given low marks to the soft food game and anything that makes me a pre-teen
child). I just wanted to get rid of the weapon and do something else. 

No doubt I could say this about nearly all games (indeed fiction more
broadly) but there are just some situations to which I have no desire to
relate. I'm quite happy to be a graverobber or a vampire because these are,
as far as I am concerned, merely abstractions and with some vaguely
romantic appeal. However, I don't like hunters or hunting and there we are.









David Glasser <glasser@iname.com> wrote in article
<1e1dvvw.zwptfa1jrlncwN@[209.195.241.144]>...
> [Hunter in Darkness spoilers]
> 
> Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com> wrote:
> 
> > By the way, Sarge was nice enough to give us authors a look at the
> > standard deviations of the scores as well as the averages. I'm
fascinated
> > to note that _Hunter_ had the *highest* standard deviation in the
> > competition. People disagreed more about it than about any other game.
> 
> Well, I'd guess that true enjoyment of HUNTER really only came after the
> player figured out or saw the key to the game, which admittedly was
> after a difficult puzzle or two that made some give up.  Also, somebody
> not familiar with Wumpus (I wasn't quite familiar enough until a few
> weeks ago, really) would miss the point.
> 
> So it's not surprising that a game that reaches its enjoyment climax
> late in the game and requires external knowledge has mixed reviews.  (I
> loved it myself.)
> 
> -- 
> David Glasser | glasser@iname.com | http://www.davidglasser.net/
> rec.arts.int-fiction FAQ: http://www.davidglasser.net/raiffaq/
> "So, is that superior artistry, or the easy way out?"
>  --TenthStone on white canvases as art, on rec.arts.int-fiction
> 


From erkyrath@netcom.com Wed Nov 24 15:18:25 CET 1999
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From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: *comp99* capsule reviews
Date: 18 Nov 1999 14:52:19 GMT
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David Glasser <glasser@iname.com> wrote:
> [Hunter in Darkness spoilers]
> 
> Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com> wrote:
> 
>> By the way, Sarge was nice enough to give us authors a look at the
>> standard deviations of the scores as well as the averages. I'm fascinated
>> to note that _Hunter_ had the *highest* standard deviation in the
>> competition. People disagreed more about it than about any other game.
> 
> Well, I'd guess that true enjoyment of HUNTER really only came after the
> player figured out or saw the key to the game, which admittedly was
> after a difficult puzzle or two that made some give up.  Also, somebody
> not familiar with Wumpus (I wasn't quite familiar enough until a few
> weeks ago, really) would miss the point.

Actually, as I look at the reviews, external knowledge *wasn't* the
problem. I think just about everybody got the joke, including the people
who gave up and the people who gave me lousy scores. 

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From glasser@iname.com Wed Nov 24 15:18:51 CET 1999
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From: glasser@iname.com (David Glasser)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: *comp99* capsule reviews
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1999 18:51:58 -0500
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[Spoilers for HUNTER, IN DARKNESS]

M. Wesley Osam <wosam@SPAMBLOCKavalon.net> wrote:

> In article <8113r3$p7v$2@nntp6.atl.mindspring.net>, Andrew Plotkin
> <erkyrath@netcom.com> wrote:
> 
> > Actually, as I look at the reviews, external knowledge *wasn't* the
> > problem. I think just about everybody got the joke, including the people
> > who gave up and the people who gave me lousy scores. 
> 
> I didn't. What was the joke?

It was a "translation" of the ancient game "hunt the wumpus".  (A nice
port of that, written in perl by somebody I've seen on the IF groups,
can be found at language.perl.com/ppt/src/wump.)

In this game, you walk around a maze (the surface of a dodecahedron,
which you might recognize from a maze in Erehwon) and try to shoot a
Wumpus.  Some rooms have bottomless pits or bats that teleport you
around (like in the later Zork).

The interface simply allows you to move or shoot.

> (And what was going on with the maze? I have to admit 
> that I got bored and gave up as soon as I realized what 
> I'd wandered into, and it might have helped the game's 
> score if there had been a walkthrough of some sort so 
> I could bypass the puzzle and get back to the story.)

HtW *was*, in essence, a maze.  HiD would have been pointless without
it, in this fan's opinion.

The same can be said about the hunting theme.

-- 
David Glasser | glasser@iname.com | http://www.davidglasser.net/
rec.arts.int-fiction FAQ: http://www.davidglasser.net/raiffaq/
   tr/y/k;


From askelley@magicdoorknob.com Wed Nov 24 15:25:43 CET 1999
Article: 47512 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: askelley@magicdoorknob.com (Athan Skelley)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: The Water Bird (don't blame the beta-testers)
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1999 10:47:56 GMT
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Hello.  I wanted to write this message for several reasons.  First of
all, to apologize to all of those whose time I wasted with my
bug-ridden competition entry.  _The Water Bird_ should never have been
entered in the competition in its current state, and I realize that
now, but more on that later.

Second, to explain the situation with the beta-testing.  I have seen
messages wondering what exactly, given the proliferation of obvious
bugs, the beta-testers to _The Water Bird_ did.  The answer is that
the beta-testers were very helpful, and pointed out a number of bugs,
and the bugs remaining are due to the fact that they never saw the
final version of the game.  All the current bugs are either the result
of changes made after the version the beta-testers saw, or (in the
case of certain unfinished descriptions, such as that of the PC's
brother) things the beta-testers pointed out to me and I said I would
change and then forgot about.  The infamous returning-from-Cholok bug,
for example, arose from the fact that my beta-testers pointed out that
the exit to Cholok led to the crossroads, whereas it should have led
to the northern trail.  So I fixed the bug, but in my haste I botched
the fix and made the problem worse by linking the exit not to the
northern trail, but back to the same room instead.  The apparently
untested nature of _The Water Bird_ is entirely my fault, not the
beta-testers'.  The version the beta-testers originally saw was
solvable (I know that because the beta-testers got through it, and I
played through it myself before sending it to them); the worst of the
bugs are the result of changes I made to correct bugs in that version.

Yes, I realize that beta-testing should be an ongoing process and just
sending one version to the beta-testers and then never giving them the
"finished" version to test (or even running through it myself to make
sure it was still solvable) was irresponsible at best.  The only
reason I did it that way is because I was running out of time.  Which,
I admit, was no excuse.  I should have just withdrawn from the
competition and submitted _The Water Bird_ to the if-archive when it
was thoroughly tested.  In the immortal words of Cletus the
Slack-Jawed Yokel, shoulda but didna.  Yes, I know of all the warnings
of making sure every version is thoroughly tested, but in my
arrogance, I thought I was a good enough programmer that they didn't
apply to me, and that I could a) remember all the bugs my beta-testers
mentioned (without consulting the lists they gave me), and b) correct
the bugs without introducing additional errors.  Clearly, I was
stupendously wrong.  Consider me humbled.

I will release a corrected (and, this time, thoroughly tested) version
of _The Water Bird_ in a few weeks, which will also include additional
footnotes I had intended, but didn't have time, to add.  I now
fervently wish that I had not had such arrant and unquestioning
conviction of my inerrant abilities, and had simply withdrawn from the
competition rather than submitted such a bug-ridden version.  For one
thing, I think (in my admittedly highly biased viewpoint) that _The
Water Bird_ is, in its conception (if not in the execution of the
competition version), a good game, and deserves to be remembered for
more than the buggy mess that the competition version was.  Alas, even
after the release of the corrected version, I cannot now expect anyone
to think of the game without remembering what a travesty the first
version had been.  Furthermore, the competition version unjustly
reflects badly upon my beta-testers, who did the best anyone could do
under the circumstances and were not at fault for the bugs that I
introduced after the version they saw, or didn't correct despite their
informing me of them.

Again, I apologize for having wasted the judges' time with the buggy
competition version.  I have learned my lesson, and will never again
have the unmitigated presumption to consider myself above the
guidelines that apply to other IF authors.  I regret deeply having
submitted to the competition such a ramshackle game.  (With no offense
to those who wrote reviews of the competition version of _The Water
Bird_, I don't think I'm going to be able to read any of them, at
least not for a while.  My overinflated ego has taken as many blows as
it can take for the moment, and I think I'll have to bring it down
gradually.)  For those who haven't played the competition version yet,
don't.  Please.  I am ashamed that anyone has played it as it is.  As
I said, I will release a corrected version in a few weeks.  For those
who _have_ played the competition version, please, play the corrected
version.  The fatal Cholok bug occurred about a quarter of the way
into the game, so you haven't seen the bulk of it anyway, and I
promise you that the next version I release will be thoroughly tested
and, while I can't guarantee that it will be absolutely free of bugs,
will at least be free of _blatant_ bugs, and will certainly be
solvable.  Although it's probably unfair of me to ask this, I would
hope that _The Water Bird_ can eventually be remembered not for the
buggy competition version I lament having submitted, but for the
corrected version of what it had been intended to be in the first
place. 

Once more, I apologize profusely for the horrible mess that I
submitted to the competition.  Please, despite the bad taste the
competition version may have deservedly left you with, I would hope
you would be willing to try the corrected version when I release it.
In the meantime, I'm going to go bang my head repeatedly against the
nearest wall now, maybe sear myself with some hot metal implements if
I get around to it...

----------------------------------------------------
Athan Skelley             askelley@magicdoorknob.com
www.magicdoorknob.com/askelley/index.html
----------------------------------------------------



From sarahb@sccs.swarthmore.edu Wed Nov 24 15:28:52 CET 1999
Article: 47526 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: "Sarah E. Bergstrom" <sarahb@sccs.swarthmore.edu>
Subject: Re: [COMP99] And the Winner is ...
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
References: <3838C93F.CF475994@yahoo.com>
(Note:  I only played about half of the entries...)
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JC Dooley <j_c_dooley@yahoo.com> wrote:
: So, of the COMP99 entrants, which one(s)...

: 1) provided you with the most enjoyable moment? What was it?

I'll admit it -- I'm a math geek.  Finding out that the desert maze in
Erehwon was a moebius strip made me very happy.  

: 2) provided you with the most annoying moment (other than this post of
: course)? What was it?

I played Water Bird before the unwinnable-bug was public knowledge, and 
really enjoyed it, especially since I never saw any of the other bugs.  
Then it got stuck in the unwinnable spot, and I was highly disappointed.  
(I still gave it a 9, since I found the premise, and the first puzzle, 
highly entertaining.) 

: 3) Had the best puzzle? What was it?

The first big one in For A Change.  The one where you realize what's 
going on.

: 4) Had the puzzle that made you go AAARRGH!? What was it?

The puzzles that make me go AAARRGH are the ones where a very similar 
solution specifically _doesn't_ work, and so I don't think to try the 
actual one.  The museum puzzle in Strangers was one, and then in For 
A Change I used the wrong one of the two very similar objects, saw that 
it didn't work, and didn't realize I'd used the wrong one until much 
later.  

: 5) Had the best piece of writing? Example?

Erehwon kept me laughing through the whole 2 hours, even when I had to 
consult the walkthrough.  I actually decided to stop trying to get unstuck
via the walkthrough so that I could play it later at my leisure.  Any 
game that makes me giggle (as opposed to laughing at it) is good.

: 6) Had writing that made you go AAARRGH!? Example?

Chaos.  The person-switches just drove me nuts.


From mikesnyder@worldnet.att.net Wed Nov 24 15:29:16 CET 1999
Article: 47546 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: "Mike Snyder" <mikesnyder@worldnet.att.net>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [COMP99] And the Winner is ...
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1999 16:08:46 -0800
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JC Dooley <j_c_dooley@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:3838C93F.CF475994@yahoo.com...

> Well, you get the idea.  Anyone wanna play along?

Me me!

But....

I (so far) have played about half the games (maybe less, not sure). I can't
really think of anything that qualifies for those questions, but I'll give
it a shot based on what I played.

1) Most enjoyable moment?
Not sure. Probably not the kind of answer you wanted, but I think creating
my entry was the most enjoyable moment.
For some reason, I really enjoyed the part of Halothane where the PC enters
the house to talk to that woman, around the time where it started making
sense what was happening.

2) Most annoying moment?
The ending to King Arthur's Night Out. <sigh> Not that it was a *bad*
ending, just not the one I'd hoped for.

3) Best Puzzles
I liked the Beat the Devil puzzles. Very enjoyable puzzles. I like the
"un"-machine.
I also liked King Arthur's Night Out which was just about right for me (got
stumped a few times though).

4) Puzzle that made me go AAARGH?
The tape recorder in HeBGB. I loved the game, but I got a tape stuck in the
recorder (by dropping it instead of first ejecting it) and stumbled around
on that for a while.

5) Best Writing?
I enjoyed Beat the Devil. Can't think of an example, but I found in humerous
and a good read. The writing in Lomalow was (even if I'm in the minority on
this) very imaginative and a pleasure to read. Actually, most of what I
played (at least from my amateur perspective) had great writing.

6) Writing that made me go AAARGH?
L.U.D.I.T.E. Maybe it *is* good writing, but it sure wasn't enjoyable to
read. It seemed like literary goo to me. The writing in Skyranch was
difficult to read as well.

Mike.




From odd1out@openface.ca Wed Nov 24 15:30:02 CET 1999
Article: 47557 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Miseri <odd1out@openface.ca>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [COMP99] And the Winner is ...
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 01:26:24 GMT
Organization: Deja.com - Before you buy.
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In article <3838C93F.CF475994@yahoo.com>,
  JC Dooley <j_c_dooley@yahoo.com> wrote:
> So, of the COMP99 entrants, which one(s)...
>
> 1) provided you with the most enjoyable moment? What was it?

The ending in The HeBGB Horror. I still smile when I think about
Shub-Niggurath "moshing with her thousand young".

> 2) provided you with the most annoying moment (other than this post of
> course)? What was it?

The cemetary scene in Chix Dig Jerks.  Where are the exits, and why am I
being blasted by someone who isn't there?

> 3) Had the best puzzle? What was it?

Right now, I only remember the final puzzle in Six Stories, the one with
all the mementoes.  I've heard someone somewhere call it old hat, but
this was the first time I'd ever seen it, and it made me go "aha!"

> 4) Had the puzzle that made you go AAARRGH!? What was it?

SNOSAE. Pick any puzzle out of SNOSAE, and that's it.  Well,
specifically the one with the key inside the globe and the lever that
drops it down a tube.

> 5) Had the best piece of writing? Example?

Er... I was impressed with Exhibition.

> 6) Had writing that made you go AAARRGH!? Example?

LUDITE, but not for the reasons you're probably thinking.  This was
Rybread after he got his hands on a spellchecker or a dictionary.  I was
just thinking, "ohmigawd, we killed the exuberance! We criticised his
old works so much that now he's gone and tried to become a sedate,
normal person, and he's just tossing out pale imitations of himself!
Rybread, wherever you are, put the spellchecker down! I promise I'll
never look down on your old bugs and stuff again!"

7) PC I would most like to slap?

The Student in Exhibition. She's got her head so far up her posterior
end, she probably combs her hair through her mouth.


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.


From jcmason@uwaterloo.ca Wed Nov 24 15:30:32 CET 1999
Article: 47641 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: jcmason@uwaterloo.ca (Joe Mason)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [COMP99] And the Winner is ...
References: <3838C93F.CF475994@yahoo.com>
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JC Dooley <j_c_dooley@yahoo.com> wrote:
>So, of the COMP99 entrants, which one(s)...

Of the few that I played...

>1) provided you with the most enjoyable moment? What was it?

Hunter, In Darkness, provided the creepy shivering claustrophobic trapped in
the passageway momeny...

>2) provided you with the most annoying moment (other than this post of
>course)? What was it?

The hint in Snosae that said, "Yeah, you screwed up.  It's unwinnable now!
Back to the beginning for you!  Ha ha!"

>3) Had the best puzzle? What was it?

Um.  Honestly, puzzles aren't something I remember much of.  It's probably
in Erehwon somewhere.

>4) Had the puzzle that made you go AAARRGH!? What was it?

Chix Dig Jerks: the car seat.  Where the hell did that come from?

>5) Had the best piece of writing? Example?

Hunter, In Darkness - no surprise there.  All the room descs.

>6) Had writing that made you go AAARRGH!? Example?

Chix Dig Jerks again: the fight with the shitwank.  Where the hell did it GO
to?

Joe


From volker.lanz@gmx.net Wed Nov 24 15:30:52 CET 1999
Article: 47658 of rec.games.int-fiction
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Reply-To: "Volker Lanz" <volker.lanz@gmx.net>
From: "Volker Lanz" <volker.lanz@gmx.net>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction,rec.games.int-fiction
References: <Uim_3.105145$y45.1866638@news4.giganews.com> <kkH_3.1592$qy2.9598@newsfeed.slurp.net>
Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] Infocom's DEADLINE Inform source code uploaded to ftp.gmd.de
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> It's not entirely clear to me: was this recreated by decompiling the
> z5 file, or merely recreated from scratch as a workalike?

A bit of both. I did decompile the DEADLINE story file with disinform and
had a look at that while recreating the game. Plus I played through the game
endless times to find out how what I saw in the decompiled code actually
turned out to look like during gameplay.

It isn't a 100% correct in some places (McNabb's movements in the garden,
for instance), because I couldn't really figure out what it exactly was to
be like.

And I still wonder how Marc Blank did implement the NPC movements,
technically. The approach I chose with the NPC Engine (which is similar to
moveclass.h) would have been way too slow for home computers in 1982 like
the Atari 800 and the C64. But apparently the movements in the original
aren't simply hard coded into the game file: Mrs. Robner, for example, has
to be moved to the living room when the phone rings, but the game cannot
know where she is right then, so a hard coded path wouldn't work.

- v







From anonymous@nowhere.com Wed Nov 24 17:23:46 CET 1999
Article: 47434 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Anonymous <anonymous@nowhere.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: [COMP99] Author's Lament
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1999 12:35:57 -0500
Organization: Seneca College
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First, a note to my fellow authors:  Regardless of where you placed
you're all winners in my book.  Thanks for contributing.

Translation:  I'm miserable.  I want company.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

I love the competition! Thanks to all for six weeks of pure
entertainment.

Translation:  LIVING HELL! Sifted through all this crap to check out the
competition... DAMN IT!...  Here's one that's pretty good... $*%#!...
Okay, here's one that sucks... at least I won't be last.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

And thanks to all for your insightful and thorough reviews.  They are
most helpful.

Translation: WHAT!  What do you mean the writing reminded you of your
last bout with hemorrhoids?... Can you read?... BASTARD!... WHAT!...
What do you mean the puzzles gave you a two day migraine?... Are you an
idiot!... BITCH!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Can't wait 'till next year :-)

Translation:  I GIVE UP!  I'm never, ever going to author IF again!  I'm
going to crawl into my closet now, fly my IF flag at half mast, and I
ain't coming out!... (Breathe... Breathe...) Okay, I might come out in
time for next year's Comp.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Finally, thanks to Stephen et. al. For organizing.

Translation: Sincere thanks Stephen. Well done.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

:-)



From sgranade@hanuman.phy.duke.edu Wed Nov 24 17:24:51 CET 1999
Article: 47476 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Stephen Granade <sgranade@hanuman.phy.duke.edu>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: [Comp99] Competition Statistics
Date: 21 Nov 1999 19:33:00 -0500
Organization: Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
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The authors have agreed to let me release the full statistics for the
competition; you can find them at
http://www.textfire.com/comp99/results.html.

The statistics include the top and bottom scores and the standard
deviation of the scores that each game received, and the number of
votes cast for each game.

Stephen

-- 
  Stephen Granade                | Interested in adventure games?
  sgranade@phy.duke.edu          | Visit About.com's IF Page
  Duke University, Physics Dept  |   http://interactfiction.about.com


From erkyrath@netcom.com Wed Nov 24 17:26:00 CET 1999
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From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp99] Competition Statistics
Date: 22 Nov 1999 19:42:26 GMT
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Ron Moore <humano@aol.com> wrote:
> There looks to be some twinkish reviewing going on with every game receiving at
> least one '1' and many of those at the bottom getting '9' or 10'.  Would the
> results have been much different throwing out the top and bottom 20% or so
> similar to gymnastics or diving judging?  Maybe it's the middle 5/7 something
> to that effect.  It's a good idea in general to cut off the ends if you have
> sufficient votes to work with.

Hmm. Convince me of why.

I don't have any problem with a few people being very generous or very
grumpy. That's what averaging is for. 

(I wanted to add that if one person gives every game a 1, it doesn't
affect the final scores at all. That's not quite true; it
disproportionately affects games that fewer people voted on. But the
skewing is still small.)

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From marshall@astro.umd.edu Wed Nov 24 17:27:26 CET 1999
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From: marshall@astro.umd.edu (James Marshall)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp99] Competition Statistics
Date: 22 Nov 1999 20:33:28 GMT
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In article <81c6b2$tr5$1@nntp6.atl.mindspring.net> Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com> writes:
>Ron Moore <humano@aol.com> wrote:
>> There looks to be some twinkish reviewing going on with every game receiving
>> at least one '1' and many of those at the bottom getting '9' or 10'.  Would 
>> the results have been much different throwing out the top and bottom 20% or 
>> so similar to gymnastics or diving judging?  Maybe it's the middle 5/7 
>> something to that effect.  It's a good idea in general to cut off the ends 
>> if you have sufficient votes to work with.

Yes, I believe that's how it's done in sports, they drop the one highest and
the one lowest score and then average the remaining ones together.  I'm not
sure if this is always statistically valid, but there's probably some
justification for it (e.g., one judge rating all the competitors from his/her
country higher than anyone else).

>Hmm. Convince me of why.

Well, if you don't mind some book quoting, I'll give an example.  :)  The
book is _An_Introduction_To_Error_Analysis_ by John R. Taylor, chapter 6.
Actually, this will be a paraphrasing because I just have my notes on the
book, not the actual book (I don't own it).  He uses Chauvenet's criterion
for rejection of data points and demonstrates its use by example.  I'm going
to assume you understand the basics talked about in here and not explain
everything; if you don't and want more, tell me and I should be able to help.

 Say you have six measurements:  3.8, 3.5, 3.9, 3.9, 3.4, 1.8 and all are 
 legitimate.  Then the average/mean is 3.4 and the standard deviation (sigma) 
 is 0.8.  The 1.8 measurement differs from the mean (3.4) by 1.6 or two 
 standard deviations.  Using Gaussians, the probability of a measurement being 
 outside 2*sigma is P(outside 2*sigma) = 1 - P(inside 2*sigma) or 1-0.95=0.05; 
 i.e., 5% or 1 in 20 measurements.  With only six measurements we expect 
 0.05*6=0.3 or 1/3 of a measurement as bad as the 1.8 observed.  If 1/3 of a 
 measurement is considered "ridiculously improbable" then we can reject the 
 1.8 reading.
 
 Chauvenet's criterion, as normally given, states that if the expected number
 of measurements at least as bad as the suspect measurement is less than 1/2,
 then the suspect measurement should be rejected.  Obviously the choice of
 1/2 is arbitrary; but it is also reasonable and can be defended.

No, I don't have how the 1/2 can be defended.  :)

>I don't have any problem with a few people being very generous or very
>grumpy. That's what averaging is for. 

True, but good statistics does more than just a straight average.  I'm not
claiming to be a statistics master or anything, but if you've got some
suspect deviant points and a valid reason to reject them (e.g., Chauvenet's
criterion), it's probably better to toss them out.  But you do need to have
a valid reason for rejecting the data, be it purely mathematical/statistical
as you might do for voting like this or some physical reason in the case of
say some scientific research.  You can't just toss data you don't like :)
but if you have a good reason for rejecting it, you probably should.

>(I wanted to add that if one person gives every game a 1, it doesn't
>affect the final scores at all. That's not quite true; it
>disproportionately affects games that fewer people voted on. But the
>skewing is still small.)

I think that would depend on the number of votes you're talking about.
I don't know what normal is for comp games, but the smaller the number of
votes, the greater the skewing will be due to an effect like you mention.
Quickie example:
50 votes at 7 points and 1 vote at 1 point:  average = 6.882
20 votes at 7 points and 1 vote at 1 point:  average = 6.714
10 votes at 7 points and 1 vote at 1 point:  average = 6.455
 5 votes at 7 points and 1 vote at 1 point:  average = 6.000
Ironically, the last choice has 6 data points and 1 suspect point 2*sigma
away from the mean (average) so it fits the example of Chauvenet's criterion
above and can be thrown out.  Note that down at that small a number of
votes (6) the one deviant point has dropped the average by one full point
by being included; that could be highly significant in the voting.  With high
enough numbers of votes like 51, that one 1 point vote is almost certainly
statistically acceptable and could be kept in that case.  For the middle
ranges of votes, you'd probably have to check to see if the one 1 vote is
statistically acceptable.  As you may have gathered, I don't know the 
details of the competition voting, but hopefully this post is of some use
in the discussion about rejecting bad data.  :)

-- 
      .      .        .       .         -- James Marshall     (CAS)   .   .
 ,.  -- )-- ,   , . -- )-- ,            marshall@astro.umd.edu   .,  .
          '             '       http://www.astro.umd.edu/~marshall
"Equations are living things."                                      .


From manorsof@iol.ie Wed Nov 24 17:27:45 CET 1999
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From: Russell Wallace <manorsof@iol.ie>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp99] Competition Statistics
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1999 22:10:53 +0000
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James Marshall wrote:
>  5 votes at 7 points and 1 vote at 1 point:  average = 6.000
> Ironically, the last choice has 6 data points and 1 suspect point 2*sigma
> away from the mean (average) so it fits the example of Chauvenet's criterion
> above and can be thrown out.  Note that down at that small a number of
> votes (6) the one deviant point has dropped the average by one full point
> by being included; that could be highly significant in the voting.  With high
> enough numbers of votes like 51, that one 1 point vote is almost certainly
> statistically acceptable and could be kept in that case.  For the middle
> ranges of votes, you'd probably have to check to see if the one 1 vote is
> statistically acceptable.  As you may have gathered, I don't know the
> details of the competition voting, but hopefully this post is of some use
> in the discussion about rejecting bad data.  :)

The problem I have with this analysis is that it confuses two completely
different domains.

In the domain of scientific measurement this sort of logic is perfectly
reasonable.  There's some single, objective truth out there and you're
trying to find out what it is.  Measurements that disagree with the
facts are just plain wrong, and should be discarded.

In this context though, we're talking about artistic judgement, and here
there is no single, objective truth.  There is no objective basis for
saying "this opinion is wrong".

Instead, applying your analysis we would end up saying that the sixth
person's opinion is "bad" and not "acceptable" purely and simply because
he strongly disagrees with the other five people.  This is a form of
argument that strikes me as being itself unacceptable.

-- 
"To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem."
Russell Wallace
manorsof@iol.ie


From brenbarn@aol.comRemove Wed Nov 24 17:31:51 CET 1999
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Subject: Re: [Comp99] Competition Statistics
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>In this context though, we're talking about artistic judgement, and here
>there is no single, objective truth.  There is no objective basis for
>saying "this opinion is wrong".
    I agree with this, but. . .

>Instead, applying your analysis we would end up saying that the sixth
>person's opinion is "bad" and not "acceptable" purely and simply because
>he strongly disagrees with the other five people.  This is a form of
>argument that strikes me as being itself unacceptable.
   . . .we also have to consider that our goal is to rank the games based on
how much the judges, as a group, liked them.  The issue is: how do we arrive at
the group decision, given only the individual decisions.  The current answer
is: average them.
     I'm still pondering over this myself.

From,
Brendan B. B. (BrenBarn@aol.com)
(Name in header has spam-blocker, use the address above instead.)

"Do not follow where the path may lead;
go, instead, where there is no path, and leave a trail."
   --Author Unknown


From erkyrath@netcom.com Wed Nov 24 17:32:15 CET 1999
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From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp99] Competition Statistics
Date: 23 Nov 1999 04:11:39 GMT
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Martijn <m.r.e.brons@palm.a2000.nl> wrote:
> Andrew Plotkin wrote:
> 
>> (I wanted to add that if one person gives every game a 1, it doesn't
>> affect the final scores at all. That's not quite true; it
>> disproportionately affects games that fewer people voted on. But the
>> skewing is still small.)
> 
> Even if all games have the same number of votes, higher rated games will
> be proportionately affected more than lower rated games. The order of
> the results won't change but the relative scoring will.

I don't think anything *matters* except the order of the results. 

I haven't heard anyone say "Yay, I got a 6.43, that's nearly twice as high
as _Pass The Banana_!" Most years, in fact, the numbers haven't even been
released. Only the rankings.

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From erkyrath@netcom.com Wed Nov 24 17:41:57 CET 1999
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From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction,comp.sys.mac.games.adventure,comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.adventure
Subject: NON-REVIEW: Cydonia / Lightbringer
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NON-REVIEW: Cydonia / Lightbringer

(Note: _Lightbringer_ was released some time ago as _Cydonia_. The name
was apparently changed for legal reasons.)

(Note 2: With some trepidation I'm crossposting this to the Mac adventure
newsgroup, the PC adventure newsgroup, and rec.games.int-fiction.
Followups are set to rec.games.int-fiction, because this is more a
game-design rant than a review of a particular game.)

I wanted to write a review, but I didn't. A review is hard enough to
write when you've *finished* a game. I only got about halfway through
_Lightbringer_; I doubt I'll ever see the rest of it. So no review
today.

Instead, I'll take this slice of my time and your attention to talk
about *bits* of _Lightbringer_. Or, in fact, to ramble a bit about bits
of _Lightbringer_. I'm good at rambling. I can go on about anything from
game design principles to the recipe for cayenne chocolate truffles, and
I intend to. Warn me if I outrun your patience.

Today's ramble is entitled: "Failures of Imagination: or, Oh No Not
Again: or, How Not To Think Like A Game Designer".

The first failure of imagination I must mention: fer chrissake don't
imagine that you can skip QA. Don't imagine that you can ship a CD with
a bug that traps the player in one area halfway through the game, making
it unwinnable. Don't imagine that putting a patch on your web site is an
adequate solution, because I didn't find out about it in time, and I'm
certainly not starting the game over from scratch. 

Enough said about that, I should hope.

The premise of _Lightbringer_ annoys me, as the premise of _Timelapse_
did. It's a unique form of nutbar who needs to believe that aliens built
pyramids in Egypt, or on Mars, or anywhere else that the human eye has
ever applied its overly aggressive pattern-matching. Though not,
unfortunately and however, a *rare* form of nutbar. So bookstores and
web pages continue to clog up with pandering, in varying degrees of
self-deluded sincerity and outright greed. This pisses me off. People
should be smarter.

This is not, mind you, really a flaw in _Lightbringer_. I doubt the
designers of the game believe there's a human face on Mars.
_Lightbringer_ is fiction -- based on a modern myth instead of an
ancient one. You may view it, if you like, as taking place in an
alternate world where that myth is true.

And the Martian Pyramid myth has no ending. Everyone knows how the story
*starts*: "Wow, look at this Viking probe photo! Mysterious and powerful
aliens must exist." But every version goes off its own way after that.
Each storyteller, whether he believes he's telling true or not, spins
his own story and ending and moral. It's wide open, really.

So I don't have a problem with a computer game that picks up the myth. I
do wish that _Lightbringer_ fell a *little* farther from the tree. It's
got a dying Earth, choked with human failings, which must be saved by
alien wisdom. No surprises there, hey? But of course I haven't seen the
ending. The fragments that I did see hinted at a third race, the true
aliens, who taught the Martians as well as the ancient Terrans. That
could turn out interesting. I can't tell from here, anyway, so I'll just
let it lie.

Good sleeping doggie. Let me turn to tinier matters.

The game is about the first manned mission to Mars. Then why, why, why
does your PDA have a complete dictionary and grammar for the Martian
language? Did someone find the Oxford Martian Dictionary embedded in a
meteorite in Antarctica? What?

Even worse -- that section in your PDA is labelled "Decryption". Have
you ever learned a foreign language? Was the class called "Decrypting
French"? The study of languages is called *linguistics*.

I am not nitpicking. Or -- I am nitpicking, to a purpose. Both of these
points illuminate the problem: a game designer thinking of a game only
*as* a game, and never as a story. Well, this puzzle *is* a secret code,
he thinks; naturally I'll call the solution "Decryption". Right?

When we get fancy on rec.games.int-fiction we call this "breaking
mimesis". Mimesis is the quality of a game that could be real life.
Well, not necessarily real life, of course. It could be sci-fi or
fantasy as well. But a game should read well *as a story*. Big gaping
plot holes are to be avoided. Imagine you are there; what *makes sense*?

(Yes, of course some things have to be fudged or skipped over. But not
important things! Perhaps your Martian explorers have a universal
translator... but then why make a big deal out of translation puzzles?
Just pop up English translations on the helmet screen, automatically.)

The Martian language is written from left to right, top to bottom. (Or
sometimes top to bottom, left to right. But real writing on obelisks and
such varies the same way; I'll accept that part.) Lucky that it
coincides with English/Latin convention that way, yes... but what are
these joined symbols, arrows above other glyphs? The grammar describes
them as modifiers. Fine. But the Translation, I mean Decryption, program
*doesn't use joined symbols*. Does *that* make sense, or is it merely
easier on the player? What good is a translator that doesn't accept the
written language it's translating? Doesn't even have a note about how to
transform to the format it accepts?

*Yes*, these sloppinesses bug me.

Failures of imagination. Did you know the Martians have the same five
platonic solids that we do? Of course they do -- that's mathematics.
(I'm willing to grant that they're *interested* in platonic solids. Hmm,
what if they weren't...)

But did you also know that Martians have the same three primary and
three secondary colors? Well, no. That's biology, and it's not even the
same for all Earth creatures, much less Martians. Some birds see in six
primary colors, three of them green. The red/blue/yellow of your youth
is pure human chauvinism, you hear me? (And so just as much is the
red/green/blue of your new web-design career.) 

What would a puzzle be like constructed around a non-human visual
system? Would you need filters? Special lights? Digital image processing
in your PDA? Would it be more *interesting* than yet another
yellow-and-blue-make-green puzzle? Eh?

I have strayed from the topic of _Lightbringer_, as I promised. It had
no yellow-and-blue-make-green puzzle. (The language combined the symbols
of "red" and "yellow" to make "orange"... and "red" and "blue" made
"purple"... but "green" was a symbol of its own. Clearly the Martians
designed web pages in nursery school.)

They did, I noticed, see the solar system in the same terms we do. An
interesting topic to slip, that one. How long *has* Saturn had rings?
Anyone check? I think the Jovian Red Spot is quite recent, geologically
speaking... did Martian civilization predate it? Anyone for an Oort
cloud? How about them asteroids?

I love questions like this. Sci-fi novels have been playing with them
for decades. I wish a sci-fi *game* would.

Melt 9 ounces of semisweet chocolate, 3/4 cup butter, and 4 teaspoons of
cayenne pepper. (Melting them in the microwave works if you're careful.
A double-boiler is more reliable.) Add 6 teaspoons of heavy cream and 1
1/4 cups powdered sugar. Mix well. Cover and chill overnight. Then form
the mixture into small balls and roll in a mixture of powdered sugar,
cocoa, cinnamon, and ginger. Store chilled.

(This review -- or whatever it is -- and my reviews of other adventure
games -- such as they are -- are at:
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/gamerev/index.html)

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From reply@adamcadre.ac Wed Nov 24 17:49:30 CET 1999
Article: 47611 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Adam Cadre <ac@adamcadre.ac>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: autobiography and art (was "TRUE emotional honesty")
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 10:25:10 -0800
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Michael Gentry wrote:
> Why is "character seemed interchangeable with the author" equivalent
> with "character seemed real"? Why, particularly, is it equivalent
> with "character is written well?"

Well, this particular text brings this issue to the fore.  Like I noted
in my review, the Cleanth Brooks school would eat me alive for going
outside the text, but those who insist that it's the power of the
writing that's making everyone think that the game is autobiographical
are being disingenuous -- compare the reply to >X ME with the author's
web page, or the plot of the game with the author's lamentations on
#traevoli-angst, and it becomes clear that the difference is academic.
Which doesn't mean it isn't worth discussing -- I mean, this is what I
worked on when I was an academic -- but it does mean that, in this case,
"character seemed interchangeable with the author" does *not* translate
into "character is written well."

Note that *that* doesn't necessarily mean the character *wasn't* written
well.

I keep meaning to discuss the ethics of casting an autobiographical
story into the second person, but not now.

> Why do so many people seem to equate "emotional honesty"
> with "autobiography," whether of the frank variety or thinly
> disguised?

It seems to be part of our culture that one must have some special
investment in a particular emotion or experience before one is allowed
to be associated with it, whether it be by incorporating it into one's
work or what have you.  I remember that after Mark McGwire donated a
million dollars to start up a child abuse prevention foundation, he
was hounded by the press and peppered with questions about how he was
abused as a child, and when he replied that he'd had a perfectly happy
childhood and just thought it was a worthy cause, he was viewed in some
corners with suspicion.  As Duncan Stevens pointed out upthread,
"if I'm appalled and angered by drunk driving and I don't know any
victims, why am I disqualified from writing about it?"  It's annoying,
to say the least.

Not that it's entirely incomprehensible: if a writer tries to describe
an experience or feeling that that writer has never had before, it's
liable to miss the mark and thus irk those who *have* had that
experience or feeling.  Hence the dictum Write What You Know and all
that.  But I'd humbly submit that if you take the time to learn about
people and develop some empathy, you can expand the range of things you
can write about well beyond the story of your own life.

> Has anyone here read, for example, "Sophie's Choice?" (Not the movie,
> the book. I haven't seen the movie, I can't speak for the movie.)

The movie has its weak points, but is, on the whole, pretty damn great.
The climactic scene from which the story draws its title gets most of
the ink, and it's a masterpiece, but the scene I most often find myself
reflecting on is the one with Emmi Hoess.  I found myself thinking
about it a few days back while reading this very thread.

But I digress.

  -----
 Adam Cadre, Sammamish, WA
 http://adamcadre.ac


From doeadeer3@aol.com Wed Nov 24 17:49:58 CET 1999
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From: doeadeer3@aol.com (Marnie Parker)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: "TRUE emotional honesty"? (was [Comp99] My Reviews)
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>Subject: Re: "TRUE emotional honesty"? (was [Comp99] My Reviews)
>From: edromia@my-deja.com
>Date: Tue, 23 November 1999 09:38 AM EST

>(This isn't so much a response to Doe herself as it is a response to
>assertions that have popped up here and there on this thread, which
>this comment of Doe's sort of typifies.)
>
>I'm curious.
>
>Why is "character seemed interchangeable with the author" equivalent
>with "character seemed real"? Why, particularly, is it equivalent
>with "character is written well?"

Okay, character seemed real is what I was focusing on. Find it hard to say what
I mean the first, second, third and even tenth time out.

I said true. Emotional honesty, was again, probably not the best choice of
words, not sure I can find them even now.

How about emotinally real?

>Why do so many people seem to equate "emotional honesty"
>with "autobiography," whether of the frank variety or thinly disguised?

I don't. I think A Moment was successful, very successful in what the author
was attempting to do, because people did react to the character as if he was
real. ("Grow up"). Or as if the character was the author, a pretty big
assumption to make. And, in essence, characters are never more than words on
paper. So reactions to this character as if he was real, means it was done
well.

People certainly can convey what feel like real emotions in
non-autobiographical work.
I think the inside perspective of what the character is actually feeling
probably works best for this. But there is something else involved, not sure
quite what it is because I am not a literary critic, that sets-up the character
as believable first before you can even relate to this character as having
these emotions.

>Has anyone here read, for example, "Sophie's Choice?" (Not the movie,
>the book. I haven't seen the movie, I can't speak for the movie.)

Too long ago since I read it.

>Would you consider the characters in it well written? Would you
>consider it an emotionally honest piece?

Probably. Hard hitting anyway, IIRC. But I really don't remember well enough.
And, in fact, I am sure if all I did was see the movie.

Doe :-)


doeadeer3@aol.com -------------------------------------------------
Kingdom of  IF - http://members.aol.com/doepage/intfict.htm
Inform Tips - http://members.aol.com/doepage/infotips.htm
IF Art Gallery - http://members.aol.com/iffyart/gallery.htm





From edromia@my-deja.com Wed Nov 24 17:50:34 CET 1999
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From: edromia@my-deja.com
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: "TRUE emotional honesty"? (was [Comp99] My Reviews)
Date: Wed, 24 Nov 1999 14:13:55 GMT
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In article <19991123164523.02073.00000985@ng-ce1.aol.com>,
  doeadeer3@aol.com (Marnie Parker) wrote:
> >Why do so many people seem to equate "emotional honesty"
> >with "autobiography," whether of the frank variety or thinly
> >disguised?
>
> I don't. I think A Moment was successful, very successful in what the
> author was attempting to do, because people did react to the
> character as if he was real. ("Grow up"). Or as if the character was
> the author, a pretty big assumption to make.

First off, from what I understand from others' posts, this was not a
big assumption at all. For many, I gather, it was a forgone conclusion.

As for myself, I realized right away that "Moment" was almost certainly
autobiographical. It much too meandering to be good fiction, but it was
much too detail-oriented and self-consistent to be bad fiction. And the
SweetHartz Website, or whatever he called it, was too complex and
contrived not to be transcribed directly from a real-life experience.

> And, in essence,
> characters are never more than words on paper. So reactions to this
> character as if he was real, means it was done well.

I don't think this follows. I didn't react to the character as if he
were "real", and I'll bet neither did many people who didn't like this
game. I reacted to him as though he were simply a direct reflection of
the author -- which is not the same thing.

Knowing that the game is not a story, but rather a confessional,
radically changes the perspective from which I can view and judge it. I
cannot be moved in any way by the author's skill at portraying emotion
in a believable, sympathetic character, because the author is applying
no such skill, and I'm well aware of it. Instead, I am asked to be
moved by the author's personal testimony of his own emotional distress.
It's a direct plea for personal sympathy, from a real person whom I
have never met, in a situation where I would never otherwise expect
such a thing to be asked of me. Which, to be blunt, strikes me as far
more emotionally manipulative than any piece of fiction could ever hope
to be.

Thus, when I type >GROW UP, I may be typing it into the game, but for
all intents and purposes I am saying it to the author. I am not
reacting to the "character" at all -- because I know that the
protagonist is not, in fact, a character. He's just a mouthpiece. That
is certainly not what one shoots for when trying to write a character
well.

-M.


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.


From mordacai@ix.netcom.com Wed Nov 24 17:51:40 CET 1999
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From: IF <mordacai@ix.netcom.com>
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Quentin.D.Thompson wrote:

> LIFE ON BEAL STREET: Why, oh why, did it have to be Ian Finley? One reviewer
> said he submitted it as a joke, but frankly I was really disappointed when I
> found out who wrote it: I thought it was by a new author who had Photopia in
> one cerebral hemisphere and Human Resources Stories in the other. It had all
> the vices of the latter, none of the virtues of the former, and it wasn't
> I-F. If I wanted to play a game typing just 1 and 2, I'd dig out "Rapture" or
> any of those other corny GAGS games.

        It was a joke.  Perhaps not a good one, but a joke nonetheless. Your
parallels are completely accurate.  But I think it was Lucian Smith, my wonderful

tester who put it best:  Refering to the mention of the "a butterfly flaps it's
wings in China..." line in the ABOUT text he said "The butterfly flapped its
wings 780 different ways, which changed the intensity, exact time, and duration
of rain in Chicago, but all anyone remembers is that they got wet."  Was I going
to far in doing this?  Maybe, but I think some interesting posts and discussions
have originated because of it, so that's justification enough.

Ian Finley





From mol@bartlet.df.lth.se Wed Nov 24 22:32:08 CET 1999
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From: mol@bartlet.df.lth.se (Magnus Olsson)
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp99] Competition Statistics
Date: 24 Nov 1999 20:23:04 +0100
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In article <81hd6e$867$1@bartlet.df.lth.se>,
Magnus Olsson <mol@bartlet.df.lth.se> wrote:
>Let's just say that the standard deviation is a measure of how
>spread-out the votes were; a standard deviation of zero means that all
>the voters gave the game the same score, and a high standard deviation
>means that they gave very different scores.

For those who don't mind *a little* maths, an explanation follows:

You know how to compute the mean score for a game, right. Now,
most of the votes probably differs from the mean (unless all
the voters agreed 100%). So let's consider how much the votes
disagree from the mean. 

Let's call the mean score M, and a particular vote v. Then the
difference between the vote and the mean is

v - M

But one problem with this is that this is a negative number if the
vote is lower than the mean. So let's square the number, so we
always get a positive result:

(v - M)^2

Now for the trick: take the average of this for all the votes. This is
called the variance, and is a measure of how much the voters disagreed
with each other. If all of them agreed, the variance is 0. If they
disagreed very much, it will be a large number (since most of the 
(v - M)^2 numbers will be large).

But, I hear you say, what about the standard deviation? Well, the
variance has one problem, and that's to do with the squares. If,
for example, we measure the variance of the length of IF authros
(rather than the quality of their works), we'll get a variance which
is measured in square meters, i.e. an area. It's more convenient
to work with a number that has the same unit as the original numbers,
so we take the square root of the variance.

And that, dear reader, is the standard deviation.



-- 
Magnus Olsson (mol@df.lth.se, zebulon@pobox.com)
------    http://www.pobox.com/~zebulon   ------


From karger@fermi2.chem.yale.edu Fri Nov 26 11:21:43 CET 1999
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From: karger@fermi2.chem.yale.edu
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Subject: Re: Vapourware: Inform port of "Wumpus"
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Magnus Olsson <mol@bartlet.df.lth.se> wrote:
: In article <81hmtf$l0j$1@news.ycc.yale.edu>,
:  <karger@fermi2.chem.yale.edu> wrote:
:>Magnus Olsson <mol@bartlet.df.lth.se> wrote:
:>
:>: Expect wumpus.z5 to appear on the IF-archive within a few days.
:>
:>Obviously, given its history, wumpus should be the example game for the
:>various IF languages.

: I don't think that's all that obvious - "Wumpus" is far too primitive
: to require the IF-oriented features of IF languages, let alone an IF
: library.  In other words, I think "Wumpus" is just as easy to write in
: BASIC as in Inform.

It might be harder to do in inform, actually, if for example you don't want
to have a > prompt on each turn, etc. I actually started a TADS port and
then realized I should instead probably spend my time on one of the other
15 projects I've started as ways to avoid doing actual work.

: You're joking, right?

It's fair to say that the whole post was a joke, yes. I happen to like
wumpus because TRS-80 BASIC was my first language, but I don't *really*
think it's such an amazing game, even if this puts me at odds with ESR.
(we're not worthy!)  Which is to say, it was impressive programming for its
time, but it doesn't retain its greatness the way, say, adventure does. Or
breakout, or the Scott Adams adventures.

: I'll make a fairly straightforward port. Zarf has already written an
: IF game in the Wumpus universe; I don't think I can outdo him. And even
: if I could, I'd just be dismissed as a plagiarist :-).

WEll, I guess there's at least one game from the comp I need to play now
(or does the spoiler mean I won't have fun any more?)

-Amir


From stupid_q@my-deja.com Sat Nov 27 20:42:53 CET 1999
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From: Quentin.D.Thompson <stupid_q@my-deja.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: [Comp99] Competition Statistics
Date: Sat, 27 Nov 1999 14:57:59 GMT
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In article <81hd6e$867$1@bartlet.df.lth.se>,
  mol@bartlet.df.lth.se (Magnus Olsson) wrote:
> In article <81h62i$bsd$2@nntp3.atl.mindspring.net>,
> Andrew Plotkin  <erkyrath@netcom.com> wrote:
> >The standard deviation is a bit more complicated than that. Roughly, it
> >means that 70% of the votes were within 2 of the average (the 4-8 range).
> >And 95% of the votes were within *4* of the average, and 99% were within 6
> >of the average. It recognizes that there are outliers.
> >
> >Of course, this is a pretty rough summary. (For one thing, we know
> >perfectly well that every vote was in the 1-10 range.)  The standard
> >deviation implicitly assumes that the votes lie on a smooth bell curve,
> >including fractional values and values outside 1-10.
>
> That's not true: the standard deviation doesn't assume anything about
> the distribution, it's just a function of the votes. It's your
> interpretation of the standard deviation which assumes a bell
> curve. And since the votes aren't distributed on a bell curve, that
> interpretation is misleading.
>
> Let's just say that the standard deviation is a measure of how
> spread-out the votes were; a standard deviation of zero means that all
> the voters gave the game the same score, and a high standard deviation
> means that they gave very different scores.

Out of curiosity, I just did a quick sort and compiled a list of the games
with the highest standard deviations. The highest SD, strangely, went to
"Hunter, In Darkness" with 2.42. Next was (ahem!) my very own "Halothane"
with 2.35, and "Erehwon" with 2.26. For those who're interested, the first
ten games with high SDs (in descending order) were: Hunter, Halothane,
Erehwon, Beal Street, Lunatix, Exhibition and Pass the Banana (a bizarre and
fortuitous tie..), and finally A Moment Of Hope, The HeBGB Horror! and The
Water Bird (the last three were also tied.) The _lowest_ SDs went to the
following games: Skyranch (a striking 1.10), Guard Duty and Outsided,
strangely enough games that received almost uniform low ratings (though I do
note that Guard Duty has scored at least one 9, and Outsided a whopping 7).
Does anyone want to extrapolate from this?


Quentin.D.Thompson. [The 'D' is a variable.]
Lord High Executioner Of Bleagh
(Formerly A Cheap Coder)


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.


From edromia@my-deja.com Wed Dec  1 09:45:27 CET 1999
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From: edromia@my-deja.com
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Anchorhead compared with Phantasmagoria
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 1999 21:53:28 GMT
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In article <8E8E6D939pt101594@199.45.45.11>,
  rpresser@NOSPAMimtek.com.invalid (Ross Presser) wrote:
>
> I've been playing the Sierra Online multimedia game Phantasmagoria
> [...] I don't have the game here, so I don't know what the date was,
> but I believe it was something like 1994 or 1995.  Did you happen to
> play it before creating Anchorhead, Mr. Gentry?

Umm...sorta. My cousin had it. I got about 1/3 of the way through the
first disk, I think. The sound card would only play the sound effects,
not the music or spoken voices. Then I had to go home. Never picked it
up after that, because the reviews I read didn't impress me much.

That was a few years before I started Anchorhead. It wasn't really on
my mind, although I suppose the whole wife-as-protagonist-with-maniacal-
husband concept might have been floating around in my subconscious
memory. (But then again, so was "The Shining," probably.)

The main inspiration for the story of Anchorhead (other than the
Lovecraft stories, of course) was actually a setting that I used for a
couple of RPGs that I ran back when I was still a White Wolf Junkie.
Back then it was called Oil City, Pennsylvania, and it was based on my
own wildly inaccurate memories of the *real* Oil City, Pennsylvania,
>from  when I visited it when I was, like, 6. The burned-out papermill,
the university, the shanty town, the lighthouse, the hideous Thing From
Beyond...all that's from an old Werewolf: the Apocalypse session and an
even older Wraith: the Oblivion session.

-M.


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.


From erkyrath@netcom.com Wed Dec  1 09:45:38 CET 1999
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From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@netcom.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Anchorhead compared with Phantasmagoria
Date: 30 Nov 1999 22:51:24 GMT
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edromia@my-deja.com wrote:
> The main inspiration for the story of Anchorhead (other than the
> Lovecraft stories, of course) was actually a setting that I used for a
> couple of RPGs that I ran back when I was still a White Wolf Junkie.
> Back then it was called Oil City, Pennsylvania, and it was based on my
> own wildly inaccurate memories of the *real* Oil City, Pennsylvania,
> from when I visited it when I was, like, 6. The burned-out papermill,
> the university, the shanty town, the lighthouse, the hideous Thing From
> Beyond...all that's from an old Werewolf: the Apocalypse session and an
> even older Wraith: the Oblivion session.

Huh. Wacky.

I was in Oil City just a few months ago. (For a concert -- don't ask.)

It didn't ring any bells, for what that's worth.

My predominant impression was three amazingly steep hills packed together,
with water running along the cracks in between, and a city clinging to the
15-foot-wide strips of flat ground between the hills and the water.

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From olorin@world.std.com Fri Dec  3 15:23:03 CET 1999
Article: 48011 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: olorin@world.std.com (Mark J Musante)
Subject: [SpeedIF] Press Release: Speed IF 7 is over
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Speed IF 7 Declared Success By All

ifMUD, 2 December 1999: OK, it was declared a success by one, really.  On
Thursday evening, five hearty gamewriters took on the task of, well,
writing a game based on a premise pluck'd from the fevered and feeble mind
of yours truly.

The premise and the games are available over the web.  Point your browser
at http://www.ministryofpeace.com/people/mark/if.html and select the 'Speed
IF 7' link.

The games have also been bundled up and shipped to GMD.  They're currently
at ftp://ftp.gmd.de/incoming/if-archive but will probably move in the not
too distant future.  You know the drill.

About Speed IF

Speed IF is a friendly competition in which participants write games in
a very short timespan, typically 1.5 to 2 hours.  They are given a premise
as an inspiration, and the results are made available immediately.  There
is no voting for them, but you can certainly discuss them -- even during
the competition.

About ifMUD

ifMUD is a gathering place for real-time chat with people familiar
with and interested in interactive fiction.  The web site is at
http://ifmud.port4000.com:4001/ and signing up simple and easy.  Come
join the mayhem, but bring your own monkey.

This press release contains forward-looking statements that relate to the
Speed IF 7's plans, objectives, estimates and goals. Words such as
"expects," "anticipates," "intends," "plans," "believes" and "estimates,"
and variations of such words and similar expressions, identify such
forward-looking statements. The Speed IF 7's business is subject to
numerous risks and uncertainties, including probable variability
in the Speed IF 7's quarterly operating results, manufacturing capacity
constraints, risks associated with the Speed IF 7's operation of its
host, the ifMUD (http://ifmud.port4000.com:4001/), dependence on a
limited number of customers, variability in production yields, the Speed
IF 7's ability to manage rapid growth, dependence on third parties and
risks associated with doing business in Asia and other areas of the
world. These and other risks and uncertainties, which are described in
more detail in the Speed IF 7's Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with
the Securities and Exchange Commission, could cause actual results and
developments to be materially different from those expressed or implied
by any of these forward-looking statements.


  -=- Mark -=-


From erkyrath@eblong.com Tue Dec  7 10:44:24 CET 1999
Article: 48098 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@eblong.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: REVIEW: The Crystal Key
Date: 7 Dec 1999 06:03:17 GMT
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(Review copyright 1999, Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@eblong.com>)

Graphics: good
Atmosphere: excellent
Plot: minimal, but what's there is acceptable
Interface: terrible
Gameplay: very good
Dialogue and writing: okay
Puzzles: very good
Difficulty: very hard, due to interface problems
Forgiveness rating: you can die. In a couple of places, an action which
ought to be completely innocent turns out to be a fatal error, and it's
not obvious *why* it's a fatal error.

Oh, dear. What a mixed blessing.

Here's a game been in development for a while. Well, they all are, I
suppose -- a graphical adventure that ships only two years after
inception is in a heck of a hurry. _The Crystal Key_, by its
documentation, has been growing for five.

That tells, I think. The game feels... a bit old. I remember what games
were like in 1995, 1996. Lessons yet to be learned. Okay, lessons
learned, but yet to be pounded into the heads of commercial game
designers. This game makes some classic mistakes. Then again, it gets
some things classically right.

But I get ahead of myself.

A radio telescope intercepts an alien message, from a besieged world to
its colonies. Bare days later, the aggressor (Ozgar to you) appears in
Earth's skies. Global cataclysm! Doom, doom, alas and crap. You, the
intrepid hero, are stuffed into an experimental hyperdrive ship and sent
off for help.

Well. And so the game itself, which (predictably) involves exploring the
ruins of the civilization which this Ozgar turkey already attacked. They
drove him back once, so it seems. How you don't know, but they have at
least one technology shared by none else: a portal that steps from world
to world. ("This is not your father's hyperdrive.")

Good stuff, yes, but the story really doesn't go much beyond that. You
hear more bits of story about Ozgar's assault, and the fall of Arkonia
-- but the game itself is entirely a matter of "explore more; get to
more places; get more tools." Eventually you have enough tools in enough
places to win. So you do that.

Plenty is involved in *doing* all of that. The game has lots of
subgoals, subsubgoals, and clever ways to achieve them -- puzzles, one
might say. And very well integrated. Some rough spots at the beginning,
perhaps. (Look, the aliens have locked their portal chamber with a
combination lock made of soup cans on a shelf! Okay, I'm sorry, they're
books. They sure *look* like soup cans--) But through most of the game,
your actions make good sense in terms of the worlds you explore. You use
machines that can reasonably be expected to do what they do, and be
where you find them. Locks protect places and objects that you'd expect
to be protected. Not too much is excessively contrived. (The contents of
the boss's desk, that was a stretch. But not too much else.)

And the game is surprisingly dense. ...What a confusing word; I shall
explain. The plot moves back over the same territory. You go through a
location once; and then again, later, for different reasons. An
inventory item is used for two different things, at different times. You
are snatched from one world, and then return via entirely different
means.

That's unusual, if you think about it. So many games invoke the trope of
"multiple worlds to explore" -- but most use it to *simplify* the game
design. Enter a world, deal with it, move to the next. No going back --
or if you can, it's because they're all independent, and no element of
one affects another. The plot is a set of self-contained scenes,
parallel or serial.

_The Crystal Key_ does the opposite. The story may physically span
several planets, but the plot is a single interwoven map, which you
gradually gain access to more and more of. (It is significant that
though each Arkonian world has a portal, all the portals are the same.
Each leads to any place you have acquired access to.) The last
exploration game whose layout was as carefully tangled was _Riven_ --
which puts this game in high-noble company.

(Footnote: I say "exploration game", to include such multi-world games
as _Riven_, _Morpheus_, and _Timelapse_. I'm not comparing this plot
to event-driven games like _The Last Express_ or _Titanic_. Those
games have very complex plots, but not in the same way; they are
sequences of events, branching over time. _The Crystal Key_ is a
sequence of essentially static places which you explore, which
nonetheless form a tangled, unlinear game. That's what brought on the
comparison to _Riven_.)

(Footnote deux: I just realized that I typed "Plot: minimal" up in the
header. I don't mean to contradict myself. By "Plot:" I meant the
underlying story, which as I said is mostly "Here's some background, now
explore." When I then talked about the tangled, complex plot, I meant
the design of what happens in the game. I should, perhaps, have been
saying "Gameplay". I should, perhaps, pick new terminology. --I should,
perhaps, get on with the review.)

That, all, is hindsight. I'll tell you my *first* impression of the game
(after soup cans): I got in a dune buggy and died.

Worse than that, really. I got through the first few scenes, solved the
two most contrived puzzles in the game, and found a vehicle. I boarded
the vehicle. It drove itself to another location. Well. I tried to get
out. It drove back to the first location -- and then, still under the
game's control, I got out of the vehicle, was captured by an evil guard,
*was told to switch CDs*, was thrown in a cell, and *then* got the
message "Game Over". 

Remember, the last action I had tried to perform was "get out of the
vehicle".

I nearly gave up on the whole game right there. "Open the door and die"
scenes were dropped like a hot pincushion in the Eighties. And when the
game forces you to stick in a new CD for the privilege of seeing your
death scene, it's time to get out the pitchforks and torches and go up
the mountain stalking the designer, who will most assuredly be played by
Boris Karloff.

Fortunately for Boris, I had no other graphical adventure games in the
house, so I had to keep playing this one. The truth, as it turned out,
is that being thrown in jail is only "Game Over" if you lack the tool
needed to escape. If I had succeeded in leaving the vehicle, I would --
*probably* -- have found that tool.

A small problem, you might think. A trivial bug: the hotspots for
getting out of the vehicle were not marked by cursor changes (unlike
every other hotspot in the game). And a small design oversight: the
return vehicle ride automatically triggered the jail-capture, whether
you had the tool or not.

Fixing the cursor bug would be idiot-simple. And rigging the plot, so
that the soldier only appears if you're carrying the tool, is just as
easy. It's a plot contrivance, yes; it makes no sense in the world's
terms. But it's the sort of contrivance that a player never notices --
at least in a game like this, where there's no "drop" action. It makes
the story work; the plot advances when you've explored enough (i.e.,
found the right thing). And it would have prevented a horrible
play-session train-wreck, which, please believe me, brought the CDs
within inches of a sparkly microwave demise.

Let me complain more about the interface. A standard panning display.
The cursor indicates movement hotspots (bar that one bug). The cursor
also indicates action hotspots. Some action spots are "click to make it
happen" -- examine, pick up, push, pull, whatever. Fine. Other action
spots do nothing when you click on them. These, you are told, are places
to use *objects*. You first select an inventory item, then click the
hotspot; if the item can be used on the spot, it will be.

Fine again; an admirably simple design. Problem is, the game is
sometimes too complex for it. A few things have to be dragged around the
screen, even though dragging while clicking is usually the "pan"
command. The cursor change that indicates this is sufficiently unobvious
that I didn't figure it out until after I'd finished the game.

And the final puzzle, while a brilliantly clever piece of game design,
just absolutely doesn't fit into the interface. I'm sorry. I knew what I
wanted to do, but I stumbled through doing it by pure trial and error.
Hotspots appear and disappear at random. Navigation stops working. You
have to use an inventory item on a room feature, but a closeup view of
that feature turns out to be the one view you *can't* use the item on. A
wall panel stops working and then starts again. One action drops an
inventory item (did I mean to do that?) and then another action must be
done *on* that dropped object (apparently because the designers couldn't
think of any hotspot that made sense. I couldn't either.)

In fact, none of that sequence really made sense. I clicked everything
on everything else, and hoped that the protagonist would carry out the
Clever Plan that the designers had come up with. Great plan; lousy
implementation. 

(If it makes you feel better, I know exactly how I'd implement it in a
text adventure. A text adventure has a "drop" command. You can drop
things whenever you feel like it, and if it makes sense to position them
usefully, the game can cue you by telling you you've done it. But, of
course, no pre-rendered graphical game can afford to have a "drop"
command.) (And note that "drop" would have messed up my proposed
solution for the jail-cell problem... complications, complications.)

I also had great trouble with the game's sense of focus. To get good
focus, you must design a game so that every important part of a room is
*obviously* important, and the background detail (however painstakingly
attractive) doesn't waste the player's time. In _The Crystal Key_, that
failed pretty miserably, I'm afraid. I wound up panning around *every*
room, waving the cursor in a fine grid over every steradian. It was the
only way to find every hotspot. Pixel-hunting isn't realistic, it isn't
good pacing, and it isn't fun. It didn't even work. A couple of tiny,
hidden-in-the-margin objects steadfastly resisted discovery. I had to
literally search through the CD's script files, find the hotspot
definitions for certain actions, deduce which rooms those spots were
defined in, and then go back and search those rooms in even more minute
detail. Cheating was mandatory. I *could not* have searched every room
in the game with the attention necessary to find those objects.

Focus can be large-scale or small. A detail in the room can be drawn to
draw attention -- or there can be something about the room itself which
draws attention, leading the player to search it. One problem with a
back-and-forth, go-everywhere game like this is that a missing object
can *be* anywhere in the game. Searching it all, as I said, is a
daunting prospect.

This is a hard problem. Contemplating a puzzle should point you at its
solution, but when you're staring at a safe, how do you know where to
search for the tool that breaks in? Once you *have* the tool, its use
may be brilliantly logical -- but that does no good at all if you've
never seen it. It could be lying in any corridor you've passed. (That,
therefore, is an archetypical case where the detail *must* draw
attention to itself. If the tool is hidden in its random corridor, hard
to see, the player may get stuck without any idea how to proceed. Like I
did. That's one place where I searched the game scripts.)

Contrariwise, if you have the relevant objects, the simple interface
lets you try every inventory item on every hotspot, fairly quickly. That
lets you brute-force a few of the puzzles. But not too many; more often
it cues you that you're on the right track, but still leaves the meat of
the puzzle to be solved.

Okay, that's deeper into game design theory than even I usually get.
I'll hurry forward. Let's see, I can leap lightly over the navigation
problems. (As usual for this game, the worst examples were at the
beginning -- four viewpoint-positions in a square room that were *not*
all connected to each other. C'mon, suck it up and render those extra
transitions.) (And then there was the lost-in-the-jungle scene, where I
had to play hunt-the-pixel just to count exits from each room. Focus
problem, again.) (And I should warn you about the final puzzle area --
the Clever Plan depended critically on its geometry, but that geometry
was so unclear that I had to take on faith it would work. I didn't
understand the details until it was all over; both my attempts at
mapping that area were dead wrong.)

No, no, I said leap *over* that...

I can happily recommend the artwork. Yes, it's a bit simple, compared
to some of the insanely-modelled extravaganzas we've seen. But the
artists get their point across. Lighting, sound, atmospheric effects;
the overall sense of place is excellent. My biggest complaint about the
first alien world was that it looked too *realistically* an Earthlike,
grassy hill. Despite the overprocessed anamorphic display effect. Not
shabby at all.

The authors fell a bit into the failures of imagination that I
complained about in _Lightbringer_. Once again, the boring old human
color wheel. The language-translation disc you find is, once again once
again, called a "decoding disc". And it translates into English, even
though it was made by one alien civilization to "decode" another. The
two civilizations share the same written numbering system, for that
matter. The authors seem to have just invented one and then said, "If
they're not from Earth, they use it." ("A completely parochial
attitude," Spock commented disapprovingly.) Worse, there's a single
navigation-coordinate system used by all *three* civilizations,
including Earth.

The ending of the game is pretty darn anticlimactic.

La.

Conclusion: Some very good material, obscured by some very annoying
problems. Have hints or a walkthrough handy when you play. _The Crystal
Key_ took me only about two days; it's smallish for a modern adventure
game. Then again, the list price is $20, which is half what most
adventure games cost. Consider it a worthwhile experimental short story,
rather than a disappointing mass-market novel.

Macintoshness: Awful. No menu bar. No way to prevent the game from
switching resolutions (and 640x480 mode looks *terrible* on some
machines I've used). To get to the save/restore screen, you use
ill-chosen and ill-implemented keystrokes. The save system doesn't use
Mac file dialogs, substituting its own storage system, which is limited
to ten saved games. That's just annoying. (I know some of you are
reading this on the PC games forum. I hope that bypassing the Windows
file dialogs, and being limited to ten saved games, is equally annoying
to you.)

System requirements: Box says MacOS 7.5, 120MHz PPC, 32 meg RAM. (For
you PC people, that's Win95/98, Pentium 133, and 32 meg RAM.) It
*claims* to want 70 megs of hard drive space, but I found it actually
needed 115 megs. And it also says "8x CD-ROM drive", which isn't an
exaggeration at all. My middle-aged PowerMac 9500 was fine for CPU
horsepower, but CD loading delays made navigation intolerable. Switching
to the kick-ass laptop with the 24x drive was a vast relief.

Availability: Dreamcatcher's on-line store, at
http://www.dreamcatchergames.com/store/index.html. It's a hybrid Mac/PC
package.

Bugginess: I managed to corrupt the save-game file once. (All ten
slots.) I don't know how, or whether it was a Mac-specific problem.
Fortunately I hadn't gotten very far; I wiped the file ("gmsv.tab") and
made a clean copy (from "gmsvEmpty.tab"), and started over. Thereafter,
I followed the following superstitions: Always label saved games with
alphanumeric names, no spaces or symbols, no more than eight characters.
Always save by hitting "x", not "s". Quit and back up the save file
every few hours, just in case. I don't know whether any of that really
helped; but I had no more problems.

(This review, and my reviews of other adventure games, are at
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/gamerev/index.html)

--Z



"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From erkyrath@eblong.com Wed Dec 15 13:02:33 CET 1999
Article: 48261 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@eblong.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: REVIEW: Amerzone
Date: 15 Dec 1999 04:38:25 GMT
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REVIEW: Amerzone

(Review copyright 1999, Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@eblong.com>)

Graphics: excellent
Atmosphere: excellent
Plot: starts well, but doesn't really go anywhere
Dialogue and writing: very good, but clumsy translation
Interface: mostly okay
Puzzles: pretty good
Difficulty: very easy
Gameplay: pretty good
Forgiveness rating: you cannot die or get into an unwinnable state.

The trouble with translations is that you never quite know what the
original author meant. The English-dubbed dialogue in _Princess
Mononoke_ is pretty good -- most places -- but I can't escape the
feeling that I'm watching someone else watch the movie, instead of
watching it myself. And the same is true in _Amerzone_... even its
title. What connotations does _L'Amerzone_ have in French? Is it a
homophone of the river Amazon? Does that tempting particle "zone" have
the same meaning it does to me? Is it a game of America, or of the
Americas, or of the Amazon? Of a fictional country, or of a fictional
river?

Or does it not mean a damn thing? I trawl for meaning, sometimes. Sorry
about that.

In the 1930's, an eccentric young French scientist, Alexandre Valembois,
took his newly-invented hydroplane into the depths of the Amerzone. He
sought the the White Birds, which flew in the legends of the Indians of
the undisturbed jungles. He was accompanied by a Jesuit missionary and a
Hispanic native Amerzonian. He came out alone, two years later, carrying
what he said was the sole egg of the White Birds. Naturally, nobody
believed a word of it.

Now, in 1998, he repents of his theft and wants to return the egg.
Unfortunately, he has become an eccentric *old* French scientist. So he
has asked you, a journalist friend, to take up the task. Everything has
changed, of course. Amerzone is a military dictatorship, being dragged
into the twentieth century; the Indian tribes are decimated.

But what the heck; it's a plot. And he's built a new hydroplane. You
head off in the explorers' tracks.

I wish I liked the story more. It's unusual, in a commercial game.
Explicitly *not* science fiction or fantasy. The author wanted to
portray progress, wilderness and civilization; a cultural symbiosis
between wildlife and humans living close to Nature; and, I guess, the
three viewpoints of the three original explorers.

But I really have to guess at that interpretation, because the game
doesn't *do* much with it. You meet all three characters, but you get no
sense of them -- they convey nothing more than their one-line
descriptions, and a shared tendency to drop dead after speaking. And the
myth of the White Birds... well, I won't give spoilers, but it aims at
being purely evocative, rather than the Quest of Cosmic Importance that
most games would slap on. Good try; but for me, it didn't evoke much.
Sorry.

"Returning the egg won't make everything better," says one character.
"But it may do some good." Mmm. Maybe if the early parts of the game had
set up some contrast -- scenes of Alvarezopolis, in modern Amerzonia.
Scenes of coffee-farming in razed jungle. Brutal atrocities -- or even,
for depth, polite peacekeeping -- by banana-booted military thugs.

But none of that appears; just trackless jungle and marshland, rotting
forts and villages, and an occasional drunk soldier in a jeep. Frankly,
in _Amerzone_, the Amerzone has already won. Without contrast, what good
*does* returning the egg do? That, I think, is what I miss.

A few plot holes poked their heads far enough out to annoy me. The
hydroplane, while endearingly multifunctional in its charming and
old-fashioned way, does have a habit of doing motorized things even
after it's out of gas. And I can't quite grasp how the 1932 expedition
managed to leave their navigation data behind in the form of 3.5-inch
floppy disks.

To the game itself. The interface is an interesting variant on
anamorphic panning. Instead of a standard mouse-cursor, with a
click-and-drag command to pan, the cursor is locked in the center of the
screen. *Any* mouse motion pans the view. To select a hotspot, you pan
it under the cursor and then click. (Closeups, and the inventory screen,
use the traditional moving cursor on a fixed view.)

This ought to work pretty well. It does imply that there are no
view-frame decorations in the panning view -- no "inventory" or "load"
or "save" buttons to click on. That's tolerable. Unfortunately, I was
playing on a Macintosh under Virtual PC; and the emulator just didn't
handle the mouse right. (I suspect that the game wanted to constantly
reposition the invisible hardware cursor to keep it centered, and VPC
wouldn't oblige.) The result was that any mouse motion put me in a wild
spin. Even the standard mouse screens were like steering a unicycle with
an accelerometer. I had to discard the mouse entirely and use the arrow
keys. Tolerable, but tedious.

I expect most players will find the game very easy. The puzzles are very
much a natural outgrowth of the story; you have to navigate a course,
find fuel for the hydroplane, pass natural obstacles. (The final
chapters, which might seem a bit contrived, are apparently part of a
challenge ritual designed by the Indians.) But all the actions are
pretty obvious. When they weren't, a simple try-every-item or
push-every-button strategy usually worked.

Actually, I looked at a walkthrough several times (my patience level was
low, for obvious reasons) and *every* time I found one of two answers.
Either I had forgotten to search the floor in some room, and just missed
some object -- or I had already figured out what to do, but failed to
make the game do it.

That latter problem was the worst, I found. Most of the game design --
the layout of hotspots and navigation and so on -- was acceptable. But
several scenes were just painful. Places where you had to look at object
A in order to manipulate control B. Controls that only worked in
closeups, where the closeup only existed to work the control, and could
have been deleted. Awkward navigation. In one memorable scene, you have
to click in the Right Place with a grapnel cursor -- and then pull a
separate grapnel lever to test whether it was Right. No cursor feedback.
The grapnel graphic doesn't even fire at where you click; it's a generic
center-shot unless you get it Right. There's no indication that clicking
*does* anything at all, in fact. I tried five or six spots, saw no
difference, checked the walkthrough, and discovered that I had simply
not gotten it Right yet. A few more tries, and it worked. I still don't
know whether I was supposed to click on the top or center of the target
object, or maybe somewhere above it.

I seem to have drifted from the "easy puzzles" point. Let me jump back
long enough to say that this is no bad thing. Miracle secret of the
ancient game-designers: solving an easy puzzle is 95 percent as
satisfying as solving a hard one. Really! You're interacting with the
world, you're making progress. You're seeing around the next corner.
That's the fun part. The balance in _Amerzone_ wasn't quite right; I
found the last couple of chapters to have the least interesting actions
(ignoring the hotspot and navigation annoyances). But overall, I wasn't
bored.

On the other hand, a puzzle that you stumble through *isn't* satisfying.
The very last scene had me doing things that I just didn't understand.
Only a few objects and a few places to use them, so I tried
everything-on-everything and won. But I still don't know why.

On the other other hand, easy puzzles *do* make the game go by quickly.
I finished in just two evenings. The game has zillions of locations --
the designers eschew transition videos, which leaves lots of room for
pan-views. But you don't spend much time in any one.

On the other other other hand, they're gorgeous. Did I mention that? I
liked the jungle in _Crystal Key_ last week, but this is a better
jungle. And a better desert island, marshland, and rain-shrouded
lighthouse. Terrific jungle critters. Lots of rotten wood and puddles.
After wading in the marsh, I wanted to check myself for leeches. All
credit to the artists. Scenery animations are perfectly blended into the
panning-view, which is nice; things happen even as you look around. And,
my favorite sneaky design detail of the year: a telescope surrounded by
a ring of crushed cigarette butts. That tells you more about the room,
and the guy who used it, than any amount of bongo-synth background
music.

Great, I've drifted away from the puzzles again, and I forgot to
complain about the maze. Everyone knows that mazes are Right Out, yes?
Well, there's the one marsh of about a dozen locations, and the only
purpose I can tell is to get you lost. It got me lost. In a gorgeous
way, but oh, I got sick of trying to get through it. There's no trick;
you just plow through. At least hedge-mazes are classy. Swamps is
swamps.

And then there's the translation. It's clumsy. Not bad, per se; the
English is just awkward. Which is a pity, because I get the feeling that
the original writing is pretty good.

Or maybe it's clunky, and the translator is shielding me. I'll never
know of my own eyes, will I? I'm not about to learn French. Too many
damn games to play. Heh.

Conclusion: Very pretty, and enjoyable, but perhaps too lightweight to
pay full price for. On the other hand, perhaps the story will work for
you. It didn't for me.

System requirements: 166 MHz Pentium, 32 meg RAM, 4x CD-ROM, 60 megs of
hard drive space. They recommend 200 MHz, 64 meg RAM, and as fast a CD
drive as you can find. On the Mac side, a 333 MHz machine running VPC
had plenty of CPU power, but -- as I said -- the emulation bugs make the
game almost unplayable. Not recommended to Mac folks, except
completists. Like me.

Availability: On store shelves.

(This review, and my reviews of other adventure games, are at
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/gamerev/index.html)

--Z


"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


From gschmidl@xxx.gmx.at Wed Dec 15 15:47:47 CET 1999
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From: "Gunther Schmidl" <gschmidl@xxx.gmx.at>
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> Anyone capable/willing?
> I keep getting caught up in playing it instead....(and yes, I have finished
> it. :-)

You may want to check out the home page for Worlds Apart (type ABOUT in the
game to see where it is), where the author has LOTS of stories from her
fictitious world; and she claims some of them will spoil the game, so I guess
that is kind of what you're looking for.

--
+-----------------+---------------+------------------------------+
| Gunther Schmidl | ICQ: 22447430 | IF: http://gschmidl.cjb.net/ |
|-----------------+----------+----+------------------------------|
| gschmidl (at) gmx (dot) at | please remove the "xxx." to reply |
+----------------------------+-----------------------------------+





From dsw@ionline.net Thu Dec 16 09:42:27 CET 1999
Article: 48281 of rec.games.int-fiction
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From: "David Welbourn" <dsw@ionline.net>
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Steve Nelson wrote in message <3857ECF9.B35B97B9@wycliffe.ox.ac.uk>...
>> [re: ROYGBIV]
>> It's a mnemonic for remembering the colors of the visible spectrum:
>
>I knew that, but I wondered about its significance!


Well, a lot of puzzles make use of the colour spectrum.  For example, one
Infocom game had the player find a set of old computer punch cards, each a
different color.  The order to put them into the computer was (of course)
red, orange, yellow, etc.  As a hint, there was a business card from ROY G.
BIV's computer repair shop in the game.

Another example, in King's Quest: Mask of Enternity, you have to shoot 7
coloured gongs with your crossbow to get something called the Stone of
Order.  Of course, the order you choose the gongs is red, orange, yellow,
etc.

The mnemonic simply helps people remember the colour order.

-- David Welbourn





From erkyrath@eblong.com Sun Dec 26 19:24:39 CET 1999
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From: Andrew Plotkin <erkyrath@eblong.com>
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Why a parser?
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Larry Smith <larry@smith-house.org> wrote:
> 
> Parsers are traditional in IF - probably because the
> original Colossal Cave was trying to be like a DnD
> session - but they _are_ computer games.  Has anyone
> given any thought to games with different interfaces?

Well, sure. Every graphical game since _Quarterstaff_ has given thought to
this problem. Most of the attempts are not specifically graphical, either.
A discrete inventory list (images or names of objects, doesn't matter)
and, for example, menus of verbs. Or some simpler mouse-action syntax --
drag A to B means "use A on B".

However, nobody has come up with an alternative interface that has the
*particular* feature of the Adventure parser. (Which really hasn't changed
since Adventure.) Namely, the balance between an (effectively) infinite
range of actions you *could* do, but a fixed small range of actions that
it makes sense to try (yet on a large range of objects), and nonetheless
just a few actions that actually work (yet you can tell if you're close.)

The interfaces with menus of verbs just don't capture this effect; when
you can see all the verbs, it becomes too trivial to mechanically try them
all. This is why that approach has been pretty much dropped in graphical
games. Most interfaces now support just two verbs -- "use it" and "use it
on the other" -- automatically inferring "take", "hit", "pull", "plug in"
as appropriate. And this is fine; certainly better than putting up a menu
of options where the correct one is always obvious.

(The range-of-action balance in graphical adventures is still there, by
the way. It's finding the interesting objects in a complicated graphical
scene. Text games have a similar schtick, of course.)

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."


