Jeremy Douglass’ Dissertation

on interactive fiction is now available. Jeremy was kind enough to let me read a draft a few weeks ago, and I found it quite enlightening. The introductory chapters, where he re-evaluates the timeline of IF and discusses the role of academic criticism in studying new media, I found pretty convincing.

More challenging is his argument that the term “player character” should be abolished entirely, on the grounds that it conflates several different kinds of relationship that the player can have with the characters in the game, and that using the terminology makes it unnecessarily hard for us to distinguish those different functions. I’m not sure whether this will change anyone’s long-held habits, but the argument is intriguing and worth a read.

Finally, Douglass offers several extended readings of specific works of IF, and especially a very long analysis of Andrew Pontious’ Rematch. This is great stuff, and I haven’t seen much IF criticism like it.

The book is not a small one and will take some time to go through, but it’s worth the attention. If at some point I come up for air from other tasks, I may address the substance of it at more length here — we’ll see.

In the mean time, congratulations to him for finishing, and thanks for making it available for everyone to read!

Too Many Things! (Or: in which Emily takes a little vacation)

I get lots of email about IF. Lots. And lots. This is flattering. However: the amount of time it takes to get through my inbox is becoming unworkable, and I need to get some other things done. So I am taking a break from some of it; specifically:

If you have bug reports or feature requests for Inform 7, they should go to Graham. That’s where they always wind up anyway, so you’re not missing anything by sending them there.

If you have coding support questions about Inform 7, they should go to rec.arts.int-fiction or to the #I7 channel on ifMUD. These days there are a fair number of people who have written complete I7 games and are competent to help with most requests. (We will still be monitoring the extensions-development thread.)

If you have hint requests about one of my games, they should go to rec.games.int-fiction.

If you want to comment on a review I wrote about your game, or give feedback on one of my games, that is terrific. I’m still interested, but I don’t promise to answer immediately. Please don’t feel snubbed.

If you have an I7 extension, you should go ahead and send it to me; I don’t promise that service will be instant, but this is one area where I don’t have a great substitute for me, so I will try to make sure any new material gets posted at least once a week. Please give your email a sensible subject line, such as “[I7] New Extension”.

If you want beta-testing, design guidance, help tracking down the URL of something you think I posted 5 years ago, etc., this is not really the best time.

ELO Conference

The Electronic Literature Organization is currently calling for presentation proposals and submissions of artists’ work for a conference in late May of next year. I know they’re interested in interactive fiction, so if you have something you’d like to submit to their gallery, now is the time — the submission deadline is November 30th. Artists selected are expected to attend the conference; some financial assistance is available.

Play It Yourself

On a previous post, we’ve been discussing what makes a game feel like work to play, and what doesn’t — and a lot of the answers come back to matters of polish. Is the game bug-free, or close to it? Are puzzles well clued? Are there responses to lots of unexpected commands? Are boring, repetitive actions omitted? Is the space easy enough to understand that the player doesn’t need to map? Does the game help track important clues for the player, so he doesn’t have to take notes?

People keep recommending beta-testing as a way to find and correct such flaws. This is good advice, but it misses a point I think is just as essential:

Play it yourself.

Competition Results

Congratulations to the winners of IF Comp 2007!

I7: New Version Up

For those who don’t follow rec.arts.int-fiction, there is a new release of Inform 7. In addition to fixing over a hundred bugs reported in the previous release, it provides dynamic string handling for the first time, and regular-expression matching.

This means that it’s possible to (for instance) run regular expressions on the player’s command to modify it before parsing; that it’s possible to make any “to say” phrase produce upper-, lower-, title-, or sentence-cased output; and that it’s easier to store and read back text files for use by Glulx.

There are other goodies too.

Art in Competition

One of the questions I semi-routinely get asked on interviews about interactive fiction is whether I think the annual IF Comp is a good thing for the community. I find the question hard to answer: the competition is so essential to the community identity that I have a hard time imagining it away, and besides, my opinion wouldn’t change anything; it’s like someone asking whether the human body would be more aesthetically appealing if it didn’t have a spine.

Nonetheless, I’m constantly conscious of the con arguments brought up a few times a year: that the competition siphons off attention from other games released at other times; that it produces a trend towards small games rather than epic works; that there is something wrong or unfair about the voting scheme (opinions vary on what that might be); and — my least favorite — that “real” artforms, like novels and paintings, are not produced primarily for competition, and that therefore competition is an unhealthy or unnatural context for artistic production, and we’d be better off without it. (Here we touch another of my pet peeves: people who make sweeping statements about “real” art are usually talking about [what they know about] commercialized artistic production in the early 21st century. I run into something similar with freshman mythology students: they’re often convinced that “originality” is the defining feature of good art, and so object to the fact that ancient authors reused mythological material. Their conceptions about literature have been shaped by market forces and copyright law in ways they don’t recognize. They also, if pressed, don’t have a very clear idea of what originality means, other than perhaps refraining from reusing the same plot and cast of characters from another work.)

Lately I’ve been reading two books that have helped clarify my visceral sense about this problem into something I can articulate.

Just a reminder

The 2007 IF Competition is winding down now: votes are due by the 15th, so if you wanted to play and vote, you’ve got one weekend left. The voting minimum is five games, so there’s still time even if you haven’t played many yet.

IF Comp in Public T-Shirts

George Oliver is selling t-shirts in celebration of playing IF Comp games in public. You might want one even if you play all your IF at home alone, though. Check out the art.