Introcomp Works: Tin, Three Princes

I meant to play and review all the introcomp games this year, and then other aspects of life intervened. So I didn’t vote and didn’t write up comments on most of them.

However, there’s no reason not to post the comments I did make:

Three Princes: Argh, I can’t get into this one at all. I can’t figure out what to type, and there’s a woeful lack of responsiveness to lots of basic attempts to type on the keyboard.

Tin: This is kind of awesome. Admittedly, subversive re-tellings of classic stories are nothing new, but I took a certain sick pleasure in the way this particular one went. It was also among the most polished of the entries and felt solid throughout. That said, I’m not sure how well it meets the “do you want to play more?” criterion: I feel like the premise might not bear the weight of a full-length game. It makes for a great short diversion — the length of this introduction, e.g. — but I don’t know that I want to play another hour or two or five of it.

What Would James Bond Do?

In a response to my recent comments on his work, Mark Bernstein writes:

I wasn’t actually talking about ate and hamartia, or not only about them: there’s a simple logistical contradiction that lies at the heart of IF. You’re the hero. You’re in a tight spot. Things seem hopeless.

>What do you do?
>

Well, what would you do? What would James Bond do, or wily Ulysses? They’d do something brilliant, totally unexpected, something nobody would have thought of. They’d do the one perfect thing that only they could do to get out of this tight spot.

So, you rack your brains. And you come up with something incredibly clever, unexpected, and far-fetched. Something perfect! But I’m just a writer, not a hero: have I thought of your incredibly clever strategem? If I have, you’re deflated: it’s not heroic after all, it was just a puzzle and you’ve supplied the correct answer. A tough puzzle, maybe, but (obviously) the author was here before you.

And if I have not been here before, the game’s going to say, “I don’t understand.” So, heads you lose, and tailsyou lose.

I have several responses to this:

Comments on Jim Aikin’s SPAG Specifics article on Floatpoint

Jim Aikin wrote a review of “Floatpoint” in the most recent SPAG, which was, I think it’s safe to say, deeply negative. As a rule I don’t answer negative reviews: it looks defensive and lame, and one should, y’know, take one’s medicine and shaddup. Besides, Jim is a guy with a well-known peppery disposition, given to lively rants; I don’t imagine this was meant personally, and don’t take it so.

However, in this particular case the review ignores or misconstrues a lot of the text presented in the game, so I’d like to clarify a couple of things. Jim did email me some time ago and ask me a few questions; at the time it seemed clear to me that he hadn’t seen all the relevant text yet — I had the impression that he hadn’t finished playing — so I wrote back that I wasn’t going to answer because it might spoil things, since I thought he hadn’t found all the backstory that mattered yet. That was the end of our conversation on the point; possibly he took it to mean that I didn’t actually have an answer.

I’d also like to say, before I get into this, that I do hugely appreciate reviews of my work; they give me cause for plenty of thought, and affect the design of things I do afterward. And I think SPAG specifics is a terrific institution, because it lets reviewers roll up their sleeves and get at the meat of a game. There’s a kind of pre-emptive bit in Jim’s review asking

Before we get to the bad news, we need to digress briefly to ask a thorny question: To what extent should works of interactive fiction be held to the same standard as other works of fiction? To put it another way, how much slack are we cutting ourselves here? Given that writing IF places somewhat different demands and constraints on the author than conventional fiction, and given also that the IF community is tiny and not well supplied with Stephen Kings or Arthur C. Clarkes, is it reasonable to expect that an IF author will meet readers’ expectations in the realm of conventional story values, or would that be asking too much?

While this is, er, a bit aggressively phrased, I’d say: of course not. I haven’t read any Stephen King or, indeed, much Arthur C. Clarke, so I can’t speak to their merits, I think IF should be held to high standards, and that the development of those standards is the ongoing work of artists and critics alike. I have some doubts as to whether what constitutes good writing on the page is quite the same as good interactive design, as I’ve written elsewhere; it’s a bit telling that in those cases where a popular mainstream author wrote or contributed to IF, the results were interactively flawed (Mindwheel, Amnesia) or required major overhaul by the assistant who was actually designing the code (Hitchhiker’s) or both (Bureaucracy). But none of that pertains to fundamentals of plausibility in a serious work: of course we should look for well-thought-out narrative.

There are a few points that I’m not going to address, because I mostly want to talk about the approach of the review and the particular misreadings it introduces: Jim also takes exception to my description style and my delineation of characters, and on those things I think there’s no real defense needed or possible. We differ fairly significantly in our aesthetic sensibilities on these things, just judging from his comments on my work and my feelings about his. This is fine.

What follows is utterly spoilery, and it pretty much assumes you’ve both played the game and read the review. (An egotistical assumption, but hey, it’s my blog.)

For something lighter…

The other day I posted to Jay Is Games about the Commonplace Book Project games, and now there is a moderate-sized comment thread, in case you’re interested in reading some more reactions to Ecdysis, The Cellar, and Dead Cities. The thread also contains some hints about several of the chief puzzles. (And it appears that Dead Cities has even more possible outcomes than I realized myself.)

IF in the ACM literature, Part Four

I’ve been saving these for last, because they’re really the juiciest: a couple of articles authored or co-authored by Mark Bernstein.

Bernstein is the founder of Eastgate Systems, a company promoting serious hypertext. They sell a small but — within the hypertext community — highly respected collection of hypertext fiction and nonfiction, at serious book prices: much of it runs from $25 to $45. And they produce and sell Storyspace, a tool for hypertext creation. This is a niche market: the major works are self-consciously literary or pedagogical, and I think it would be fair to say that IF in general is a more populist form. At the same time, hypertext is a more successful niche market than IF: how many of us are selling IF game files at $45 a pop? how many would feel ballsy enough to try? And, leaving aside the commercial, hypertext also gets studied more extensively by academia, taught in more new media courses, and generally considered more serious.

Some of this has to do with accidents of community — with the sorts of people who happened to be drawn into creating each kind of thing, and with the ways in which they framed and presented their finished products. But I also think the media favor different kinds of content, and it’s interesting to look at why.

IF in the ACM literature, Part Three

Part 3 of 4 of commentary on the ACM archives I have been looking at.

IF in the ACM literature, Part Two

More from the ACM archives I have been looking at.

Grant Tavinor, “Video Games, Fiction, and Emotion,” ACM Conference Proceedings, Vol. 123, 2005. 201-207.

Mr. Tavinor’s work is focused on how we feel about the games we play, and how games evoke those feelings; he talks a bit about interactive fiction (though, I think, defining it a bit more broadly than as the text-based form I tend to mean on this site). But his conclusions leave out a lot of possibility. Here’s a sample of what I mean:

Emotions are involved in the affective framing of fictional worlds, making salient the goals and needs of those fictional worlds, so that our interaction in them is motivated and enhanced. The player of a video game feels angry at their inability to overcome the massive fiery lobster monster, frustrated by the difficulty of completing the platform-jumping task, fearful of possible loss, or elated at defeating the hordes of mutants or crazed chimpanzees. Consequently, the emotions seem to guide participation in the fictional world of the video game by boosting attention and concentration to deal with these challenges. The emotions we have for video games are framing devices that channel our interaction with these fictions.

Two readings of possible interest

The last couple of days have brought some interesting reads that weren’t announced on RAIF, so I’ll mention them here:

Trotting Krips’ review of Planetfall. I’ve never gotten around to playing this one myself.

Nick Montfort’s dissertation on nn, an IF development system he designed in the course of getting his doctorate at Penn. The dissertation runs to several hundred pages, so it’s not a light read, but I’d recommend a look to those interested in IF theory. Some of what he writes is fairly technical discussion of how his system works, and it’s difficult to judge its merits given that there aren’t any actual games written in it (as he admits himself); on the other hand, he also does a lot of theoretical definition of the different aspects of IF games.

Little Falls review

My review of Mondi Confinanti’s “Little Falls” is now up at IF-Review.

Whoa! or: Original research on the Crowther and Woods Adventure

Dennis Jerz has just released an article, set for Digital Humanities Quarterly, on the time-line of the original Adventure, together with an analysis of Crowther’s source code and how Woods changed it. There are also photographs of the actual cave rooms that correspond with the game, which are amazing. This is great stuff.