XYZZY Finalists

The list of XYZZY Finalists is available — vote now!

Cover Art Drive

IF Cover Art Drive is now officially running. From now until April 30, I am collecting IF cover art on Flickr. There are a few pieces already there, but more will be posted as they’re contributed.

The idea here is to try to collect contributions of art to serve as cover images for existing IF. There are two reasons to do this: first, to make IFDB more attractive and less pure-text; and second, so that people writing about IF on indie game blogs and websites will have something other than a screenshot of raw text with which to illustrate their articles. (More about the rationale for this is here.)

[Edit: for reference, a list of how things stand.]

Cover art submitted and accepted, or submitted by author:

• The Act of Misdirection, by Callico Harrison
• An Act of Murder, by Chris Huang
• Adventurer’s Consumer Guide, by Øyvind Thorsby
• All Hope Abandon, by Eric Eve
• All Roads, by Jon Ingold
• And the Waves Choke the Wind, by Gunther Schmidl
• Attack of the Yeti Robot Zombies, by Øyvind Thorsby
• Augmented Fourth, by Brian Uri!
• Balances, by Graham Nelson
• The Baron, by Victor Gijsbers
• Being Andrew Plotkin, by J. Robinson Wheeler
• Blighted Isle, by Eric Eve
• Blue Lacuna, by Aaron Reed
• Breath Pirates, by Mike Snyder
• Cryptozookeeper, by Robb Sherwin
• Coke Is It!, by various
• Dangerous Curves, by Irene Callaci
• Distress, by Mike Snyder
• The Djinni Chronicles, by J. D. Berry
• The Edifice, by Lucian Smith
• An Escape To Remember, by IF Whispers
• Fate, by Victor Gijsbers
• A Fine Day for Reaping, by James Webb
• Fine Tuned, by Dennis Jerz
• For a Change, by Dan Schmidt
• Gardening for Beginners, by Juhana Leinonen
• Gourmet, by Aaron Reed
• Help! My Vacuum Cleaner is Broken!, by Admiral Jota
• In the End 2, by Adam Thornton
• LASH, by Paul O’Brian
• Learning to Cross, by Mark J. Musante
• Legerdemain, by Nathan Jerpe
• Letters from Home, by Roger Firth
• Losing Your Grip, by Stephen Granade
• Lost Pig, by Admiral Jota
• Luminous Horizon, by Paul O’Brian
• Lunatix — The Insanity Circle, by Mike Snyder
• Moon-Shaped, by Jason Ermer
• Mother Loose, by Irene Callaci
• My Name is Jack Mills, by Juhana Leinonen
• Nothing But Mazes, by Greg Boettcher
• Pass the Banana, by Admiral Jota
• Persistence of Memory, by Jason Dyer
• Photograph, by Steve Evans
• Revenger, by Robb Sherwin
• Ribbons, by J. D. Berry
• A Simple Theft, by Mark Musante
• Snowblind Aces, by C. E. J. Pacian
• Square Circle, by Eric Eve
• Tales of the Traveling Swordsman, by Mike Snyder
• To Hell in a Hamper, by J. J. Guest
• Trading Punches, by Mike Snyder
• Treasures of a Slaver’s Kingdom, by S. John Ross
• Undertow, by Stephen Granade
• Voices, by Aris Katsaris
• Waystation, by Stephen Granade
• The Weapon, by Sean Barrett
• Wearing the Claw, by Paul O’Brian
• Whom the Telling Changed, by Aaron Reed

Cover art submitted and declined or supplanted by other art:

• Aisle, by Sam Barlow

Cover art submitted:

• Ad Verbum, by Nick Montfort
• Anchorhead, by Michael Gentry
• Bad Machine, by Dan Shiovitz
• The Beetmonger’s Journal, by Scott Starkey
• A Change in the Weather, by Andrew Plotkin
• Chicken and Egg, by Adam Thornton
• The Chinese Room, by Harry Giles and Joey Jones
• Choose Your Own Romance, by David Dyte
• Christminster, by Gareth Rees
• The Corn Identity, by IF Whispers
• The Cove, by Kathleen Fischer
• A Day for Soft Food, by Tod Levi
• Deadline Enchanter, by Alan DeNiro
• Degeneracy, by Leonard Richardson
• Delightful Wallpaper, by Andrew Plotkin
• Delusions, by C. E. Forman
• Desert Heat, by Papillon
• A Dino’s Night Out, by Aris Katsaris
• Downtown Tokyo, Present Day, by John Kean
• Elizabeth Hawke’s Forever Always, by Iain Merrick
• Enlightenment, by Taro Ogawa
• Firebird, by Bonnie Montgomery
• Goldilocks is a FOX!, by J.J. Guest
• The Gostak, by Carl Muckenhoupt
• Guess the Verb!, by Leonard Richardson
• House of Dream of Moon, by IF Whispers
• Hunter, in Darkness, by Andrew Plotkin
• Janitor, by Peter Seebach and Kevin Lynn
• Katana, by Matt Rohde
• King of Shreds and Patches, by Jimmy Maher
• The Land of the Cyclops, by Francesco Cordella and Simone Di Conza
• Lost New York, by Neil deMause
• Masquerade, by Kathleen Fischer
• Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina, by Jim Aikin
• The One That Got Away, by Leon Lin
• Rameses, by Stephen Bond
• Rematch, by Andrew Pontious
• Scavenger, by Quintin Stone
• Shade, by Andrew Plotkin
• She’s Got a Thing for a Spring, by Brent VanFossen
• Sins Against Mimesis, by Adam Thornton
• Spider and Web, by Andrew Plotkin
• Sting of the Wasp, by Jason Devlin
• The Tarot Reading, by Michael Penman
• Theatre, by Brendon Wyber
• Worlds Apart, by Suzanne Britton

Cover art in progress:

Cover art requested:

Cover art “opted out”:

• Building, by Poster

What, no game criticism?

Over on Play This Thing!, Greg Costikyan has posted a critique about the lack of game criticism — as opposed to game reviews — in the industry as a whole.

I thought this was pretty interesting, because it hadn’t previously occurred to me as a problem. It’s true that I don’t see a lot of criticism of mainstream games myself, but then, I don’t own a console or a Windows computer, don’t play most of these games, and don’t regularly read the relevant websites and magazines. So I assumed this stuff was out there somewhere, even if I never ran across it. (And, in fact, several of Greg’s commenters argue it does exist.) But this got me thinking about the situation in IF.

fugue

A very short-short, not-very-game-like piece of mine has been published at Up Right Down. URD is all about retellings of the same story, so fugue won’t make much sense unless you read the basic plot and instructions. This one isn’t particularly directed at the IF community — it’s intentionally tiny, puzzle-less, and unresponsive to most of the standard IF verbs. But the story struck me as something I could work with and the constraints resonated well with the conversation-system experiments I was doing, and it all just kind of gelled.

I’ve always been a sucker for multiple tellings of the same story anyway.

It’s also an early application of Flaxo, a program I am liking more and more. I have had some trouble running ZMPP et al from my mindspring site, but Flaxo works fine. I’m not ready to use it to host longer games yet, since it doesn’t yet let the player restart and restore — but for something that’s only half a dozen moves or so to start with, that’s less of a problem. And Flaxo looks quite pretty as browser-based IF interpreters go.

IF Beginner’s Comp games

Spoilery, IF-Comp-style comments on the games for the IF Beginner’s Comp. If you haven’t played these and you intend to play them, you should do so before reading these reviews.

Okay, here goes nothing

So a little while ago I commented on the absence of cover art for IF games, and several people posted saying they didn’t feel like they had the skills/wherewithal to make art for their own games. I somewhat rashly suggested we should have some kind of cover art drive, whereby people could contribute art for other people’s games, and this met an initially positive response.

In Search of Test Cases

Short essay question:

Suppose someone handed you a brand shiny new library for implementing conversation in IF. What kind of thing would you want to use it for? What options do you want to make sure have been accounted for? [more inside]

More Play This Thing!

Over here.

That time of year

This is a great time to catch up on the interesting games of 2007 that you missed playing, because first-round voting for the XYZZY Awards is now open.

Emergent Puzzle Solutions

A recent RAIF thread brought up the Magnetic Scrolls games, and the fact that they used a simulationist system that could produce puzzle solutions that the game authors hadn’t thought of:

“Talk of current IF development drifted on to whether it’s possible to create a game in which the player is not really constrained by the author’s intentions. Michael noted that Magnetic Scrolls games were kind of like this-for example, if an object had the “sharp shards” bit set, dropping or throwing the object would cause it to shatter into many sharp shards. In total, 128 bits were used to describe a more or less working universe that the player could interact with in ways that hadn’t been anticipated. As an example, Michael described an unintentional situation in which one could put a rat in some liquid nitrogen, snap off its tail and, for a few turns, use the tail to puncture feed sacks and obtain food.”

This raised a fair amount of interest (most of the “ZOMG that would be GREAT!!” kind). This yearning to do something the author didn’t think of is something I hear a fair amount of: Mark Bernstein has complained that, because IF games anticipate solutions, the IF player is always robbed of the pleasure of having invented a novel solution because he always knows the author was there first. Emergent-solution design might address that complaint. It might also address the frustration players often feel when a logical-seeming approach is either forbidden or not recognized by the game at all.

So I found myself thinking, again, about why more IF games don’t work this way.