Expanding the Audience/Community. WAS: Long-Form IF Comp
Paul J. Furio
started turning. I wanted to add my own two cents, but also cover
some other ground. Thus, I decided to start a new thread, so I would
not be highly derailing the old one.
Let me also preface what I write below with the following disclaimer:
I tend to drift in and out of this community as time allows, mostly
due to work and family pressures. Thus, if I misrepresent or slight
anyone, or I'm unaware of something, I apologize in advance. I know
there are people who are very dedicated and put lots of effort into
the IF community, and I hope I represent your efforts fairly.
That said, let me begin by stating what I percieve to be the original
problem: There is the perception that there are not enough "Long Form"
Interactive Fiction titles (that being perhaps reasonably defined as
being Retail Era Infocom Title equivalent) of sufficient quality (also
defined as Infocom-level in quality), and the ones that are released
are not played as widely as desired, nor is there the hoped for level
of recognition for these titles. Instead, because of events such as
the IFComp produce a large number of games, and the Comp itself is an
annual event that is widely (for this genre and community) publicized,
shorter and/or smaller games submitted to the Comp (or the Spring
Thing, or whatever else exists that I'm forgetting) tend to overshadow
any other releases during the year.
Now before I dive into my suggestions on how to approach this problem,
allow me to take you on a brief trip down Game Development Lane. I've
just come off of a three year stint in what is known as the "Casual
Games Industry," mainly producing Flash games for websites and IM
clients, with some occasional jabs at Next Gen Console games, and
several years developing so-called AAA Games before that. Recognition
and publicity are huge issues in this world, where the multimillion
dollar contracts or the advertising revenue (in the case of Casual
Games) generated make or break a studio, and determine whether or not
any given group gets to make another title together as a team. Mostly
publicity is generated via rather unscrupulous methods, such as
bribery towards highly visible "game review" websites (look up the
Kane & Lynch Gamespot debacle). There are of course advertising
budgets to produce television spots, and the companies which happen to
own networkable consoles can grab eyeballs every time the user turns
on their system by pushing an ad to whatever the startup page is for
their particular console. (Valve's Steam system also has this
advantage on the PC platform.)
Yet, smaller, more risky, more artistic and arguably creative titles
do flourish, although they struggle greatly to do so. Take, for
example, Introversion Software, a British team of a dozen, who
released Darwinia, the winner of the 2006 Independent Game Festival
Grand Prize. Darwinia wasn't flying off the shelves initially, and
was only recieving attention from indie game fans and former
Introversion customers until it was released through Steam, via which,
by Introversion's own admission, Introversion kept from going under.
While certainly a great game in it's own right, the accolades of the
IGF award and the visibility afforded via Steam were enough to raise
Darwinia in visibility enough to be noticed by those who would
otherwise simply be focused on the Supreme Commanders, Half-Life 2s,
and Halos of the gaming world. Of course, Introversion had some good
tactics even before hitting Steam, such as "free advertising" via
magazine and newspaper interviews.
Finally, let me say this: while the vast majority of the modern game
development community understands that IF is not commercially viable,
there is a great respect and fondness for the heyday of Interactive
Fiction titles. Sadly, most of the modern development community is
unaware that these games are still being made, and that there exist
tools such as TADS, Inform, and even Inform 7 (I imagine most C++
developers would be shocked at the capabilities of Inform 7, frankly).
Which brings me to some suggestions for how we can improve the length,
quantity, and quality of IF games, as well as increase their
visibility and improve our community.
First, I'm not sure another Comp is what we need. Instead, perhaps a
better solution is the expand and raise the visibility of an existing
annual award "show", such as the XYZZY Awards. Adding categories for
Long Form IF, or Best Packaging/Best Feelies, or something-that-means-
Professionalism-but-does-not-deride-other-entries, any of these may be
a good idea. Just as films that are Oscar Nominated experience a
resurgence in viewing before the actual ceremony, nominees for these
awards will almost certainly get higer visibility and more plays than
random releases throughout the year. And yes, if this is now how
entries are currently handled, I think community nomination is the
best way to go; I wouldn't worry much about ballot-stuffing just yet.
Next, we should strive to enhance visibility and cooperation among the
IF Community websites. Crossposting the same information from XYZZY
to the IFWiki to BrassLantern and even SPAG is a good way to innundate
the community with much needed information. As a former manager once
told me, "Information Is Blood", and no team or group can live without
it. We should investigate RSS feeds so that people can be notified of
new releases without having to seek it out. Even the LiveJournal
groups for IF should get more traffic than they do now. We should
also "polish up" the existing sites. I'm sure Eileen Mullen puts
forth a Herculean effort to maintain the XYZZY site, and there's no
doubt that the familiarity of the layout is extremely comfortable to
the majority of existing IF players. However, I think we could
attract a larger audience with a slightly more "appealing" layout,
perhaps with some of the IF Cover Art gracing the home page, or more
frequent updates. (Don't hate me, Eileen! I love the XYZZY!) This
may involve some more volunteerism from the community. Hopefully
people would be willing to step up.
We should take another cue from the Entertainment Industry, and adjust
our release dates. Everyone knows that movies come out on Fridays
(well, Thursday at Midnight, unless it's a really big budget film
released on a Holiday weekend, then it's Wednesday). Books, Music,
and Video Games all come out on Tuesday. (All popular web comics
follow a similar, rigid schedule.) A smattering of releases here and
there in the IF community are likely to go unnoticed beneath the other
traffic on RIIF if they are not timed regularly. We should select a
weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly schedule (although I personally would
prefer more often if releases permit it), and stick to that for
announcements. What if every other Tuesday we could all look forward
to hearing about two or more new titles? Wouldn't that be exciting?
Wouldn't the following Wednesdays be days that you would clear out so
you could experience whatever new greatness there was? If the above
coordinated community sites would enforce and promote this kind of
schedule, I think we'd see more of a draw and a regular attendance.
Finally, I think we should attempt to partner or integrate our
community and games with an existing game development community.
Perhaps it's the IGF, or maybe we email the hell out of the Game
Developers Conference and get a talk or two going there about the IF
community and it's potential for cellphones, mobile devices, or
attracting new audiences. One thing game developers yearn for but are
loathe to admit is that they want to create games that are considered
"art". I think there have been at least as many, if not more, genuine
works of art in IF than in any other single genre in electronic
gaming. If we can get some exposure and interest in IF, perhaps even
by riding the resurgance in "classic" gaming, we can expand our user
base and the number of authors creating IF. The Penny Arcade Expo
(PAX) might be another possibility, as it has usurped E3 as the "Con
To Attend" in the gaming industry, and I strongly suspect that Gabe
and Tycho are both aware and (perhaps secretly) fond of IF and it's
history.
These are my comments and suggestions. There is nothing that would
please me more than to see a dozen or so Infocom-era length (and
quality) games released every year, complete with available feelies
and packaging. I'd love to see a real, live, attended-in-the-flesh by
dozens (or even a hundred!) Awards Ceremony annually. I think there
are more comments to be made regarding what it would fully take for
this task to be achieved, but for now, I welcome your feedback.
Thanks.
-Paul J. Furio
Jim Aikin
> Yet, smaller, more risky, more artistic and arguably creative titles
> do flourish, although they struggle greatly to do so. Take, for
> example, Introversion Software, a British team of a dozen, who
> released Darwinia, the winner of the 2006 Independent Game Festival
> Grand Prize.
There was a novel by that title in 1999. I don't know if they're related.
> A smattering of releases here and
> there in the IF community are likely to go unnoticed beneath the other
> traffic on RIIF if they are not timed regularly. We should select a
> weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly schedule (although I personally would
> prefer more often if releases permit it), and stick to that for
> announcements.
Does anyone know how many games are released per year? Other than Comp
games, I mean. I suspect that a timed release on the 1st of every month
would be about right.
> Finally, I think we should attempt to partner or integrate our
> community and games with an existing game development community.
A friend of mine gives talks (on music software and hardware) at DIY
conferences. There's a whole underground DIY scene -- people building
robots and whatnot. I know very little about it, but text games would
fit very naturally into that scene, I'd think.
--JA
Fredrik Ramsberg
This is a loosely held-together community on the net. I think you've
mistaken it for a company. Here, there's no manager who can tell
people when and how to do things. I think this suggestion could only
serve to split up the community in fractions - those who abide by the
rules and one or more groups who don't.
Sounds much like the recent proposal of a committee which will judge
the quality of all games and decide which ones are good enough to be
released. That too works fine in a company, but not in a community
where participation is voluntary.
/Fredrik
Andy Leighton
Fredrik Ramsberg <fredrik....@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 22 Apr, 06:19, "Paul J. Furio" <p...@staticengine.com> wrote:
>> We should take another cue from the Entertainment Industry, and adjust
>> our release dates. Everyone knows that movies come out on Fridays
>> (well, Thursday at Midnight, unless it's a really big budget film
>> released on a Holiday weekend, then it's Wednesday). Books, Music,
>> and Video Games all come out on Tuesday.
>
> mistaken it for a company. Here, there's no manager who can tell
> people when and how to do things. I think this suggestion could only
> serve to split up the community in fractions - those who abide by the
> rules and one or more groups who don't.
Also it isn't true as far as books are concerned. A lot of books do
come out on a Thursday, but there are also a great many that come out on
other weekdays. For most books (and I would say IF as well) there isn't
such a first-night/first-week rush for consumption that one sees with some
other media.
What do I think is needed. First and foremost - compelling stories and
compelling gameplay. Easier said than done.
--
Andy Leighton => an...@azaal.plus.com
"The Lord is my shepherd, but we still lost the sheep dog trials"
- Robert Rankin, _They Came And Ate Us_
Jeff Nyman
what they are worth ...
"Paul J. Furio" <pa...@staticengine.com> wrote:
> These are my comments and suggestions. There is nothing that would
> please me more than to see a dozen or so Infocom-era length (and
> quality) games released every year,
The one thing I would add is that I have done some research with game
players and non-game players regarding current textual IF and "Infocom era"
textual IF and I've found that many such people *today* (except for those
who grew up with it) find that Infocom games are not all that high quality
at all. For those people who have some nostalgia value of those games (and I
am one), they always tend to hold a special place in our gaming hearts. But
for people today who don't share that, bringing out Infocom "quality" might
be the kiss of death.
This isn't to say there aren't exceptions to this and I don't pretend to
have presented every single textual IF game that Infocom put out there. And,
certainly, I can say that some games do seem relatively well-received
today -- up to a point. For example, people like "Trinity" and "Planetfall"
but eventually feel both get bogged down in their 'Rube Goldberg'-like
nature. On the other hand, a game like "Plundered Hearts" often did quite
well with a modern audience.
> Finally, let me say this: while the vast majority of the modern game
> development community understands that IF is not commercially viable,
> there is a great respect and fondness for the heyday of Interactive
> Fiction titles. Sadly, most of the modern development community is
> unaware that these games are still being made, and that there exist
> tools such as TADS, Inform, and even Inform 7 (I imagine most C++
> developers would be shocked at the capabilities of Inform 7, frankly).
I find this interesting if only because when I regularly talk to game
developers at various companies (for whom I do quality assurance and
testing) as well as in the independent and/or hobbyist sphere, they are all
very well aware of textual IF. Maybe not every nuance and detail but they
are certainly aware that there is a community out there. Also searching many
blogs (not all of them game related, granted) I often find many references
to either Inform 7 or TADS 3 or even just the idea of textual IF. Not many
of those game developers have too much desire, in my experience, to work on
textual IF but they do seem to be aware of it.
> Which brings me to some suggestions for how we can improve the length,
> quantity, and quality of IF games,
Note that not all of these necessarily go together. Just having more
quantity can have an inverse effect on your quality. Likewise, length can
drastically reduce quantity (because they take longer) and is no guarantee
of quality. I know this isn't quite what you are saying but I just want to
make the point since you use an "and" connector there, which might imply all
three must go together in order to have this improvement effort.
> First, I'm not sure another Comp is what we need. Instead, perhaps a
> better solution is the expand and raise the visibility of an existing
> annual award "show", such as the XYZZY Awards.
I agree about not needing another Comp. However, my personal opinion is that
what this community can best do to serve itself is start upping its own
expectations about the level of its craft. This is *before* making the craft
too much more visible to a wider audience.
I think more discussion about how textual IF is created, what design
decisions are made, why they were made, what tradeoffs were found, etc. is
what is needed. I think textual IF "collaborative workshops" (for lack of a
better term or phrase) are more needed. I think the improvement effort needs
to be more inwardly focused before too much external focus is attempted.
Earlier I said some of this would take place *before* making the craft too
much more visible to a wider audience. But I do also think there is some
element to bringing in segments of a possible wider audience in a controlled
context, sort of like sampling or "pilot studies." Basically seeing what
does and does not work or resonate with people based on what amount to
controlled experiments that are capable of being re-tested with various
other segments or samples to see if actionable information can be drawn from
various responses.
In other words, a modern audience -- or segments of it -- can potentially
help in the study and furtherance of the craft. This wouldn't be by
dictating what the craft should become, but rather helping to show how the
craft can evolve to support and entertain a new audience.
> We should take another cue from the Entertainment Industry, and adjust
> our release dates. Everyone knows that movies come out on Fridays
> (well, Thursday at Midnight, unless it's a really big budget film
> released on a Holiday weekend, then it's Wednesday).
That's mainly because of catching people when they don't have to work the
next day. Movies tend to be released when it's felt they can catch the big
bucks. The first weekend (or first couple days) of a movie release are when
the big dollars either roll in -- or don't. So the best time to have them is
on a weekend when more people can be off work, thus upping the chances more
people will take in a theater. Holiday weekends work on the same logic. Yes,
the big-budget films often try to squeak out that extra day hoping people
will catch a really late show or maybe even take the Friday off if the film
is really anticipated.
I don't see how this really applies to textual IF except that you could
argue someone could perhaps have more chance to play textual IF over the
weekend. But I'm not sure that this same logic holds up well for games. The
shelf-life of many movies, at least in terms of big ticket sales, drops off
massively from the first couple days of release. Some of that is also due to
immediate competition the next week from other films coming out. So, again,
this is really more about getting as many eyeballs (with money) as quick as
possible.
> Books, Music, and Video Games all come out on Tuesday.
This is usually because distributors and publishers want to take advantage
of a full week of sales. This is because many of them then have a full week
to get on various charts that are put out the *following* week. This is
driven by sales and by the need to be visible in that next week -- but being
visible by having a lot of sales and making various charts so that sales
continue. Again, I'm not sure how closely textual IF follows this or even if
it should since it's not a commercial venture right now.
> traffic on RIIF if they are not timed regularly. We should select a
> weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly schedule (although I personally would
> prefer more often if releases permit it), and stick to that for
> announcements.
Which might remove the hobbyist nature of this, which I think is part of
textual IF's strength. People are often doing this because they truly enjoy
it. My concern is that what you are saying sounds like turning this into a
business. And in that case quality can suffer. It doesn't mean it would
suffer, granted, but it certainly could.
> What if every other Tuesday we could all look forward
> to hearing about two or more new titles? Wouldn't that be exciting?
For me, not really. Not unless the quality was good. I regularly hear about
new books, music, games and movies all the time. I would say 98% of them I
have no interest in whatsoever. First, there's a glut on the markets (making
it harder to separate the good from the bad) and second, the quality is
often what's lacking.
> If we can get some exposure and interest in IF, perhaps even
> by riding the resurgance in "classic" gaming, we can expand our user
> base and the number of authors creating IF.
My opinion is that too much emphasis on the "classic" nature of textual IF
is what may potentially doom it -- and I am basing this on some research,
admittedly limited - but research nonetheless - with current audiences of
various age groups. My opinion is that textual IF needs to be
"reinvigorated" for a new audience. That's not to say textual IF should
leave its current audience in the dust. Rather, that a segment of the
textual IF community is geared to upping the level of quality stortelling
and finding out what it is exactly that people will and will not respond to.
I think part of this means looking at potential pre-existing audiences
(whether those be game-players of other game formats, readers of novels,
whatever) and determining if textual IF can appeal to such groups by
appealing to common denominators of what people like in games *and* stories.
- Jeff
Conrad
wrote:
> > We should take another cue from the Entertainment Industry, and adjust
> > our release dates. Everyone knows that movies come out on Fridays
> > (well, Thursday at Midnight, unless it's a really big budget film
> > released on a Holiday weekend, then it's Wednesday). Books, Music,
> > and Video Games all come out on Tuesday. (All popular web comics
> > follow a similar, rigid schedule.) A smattering of releases here and
> > there in the IF community are likely to go unnoticed beneath the other
> > traffic on RIIF if they are not timed regularly. We should select a
> > weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly schedule (although I personally would
> > prefer more often if releases permit it), and stick to that for
> > announcements.
>
> This is a loosely held-together community on the net. I think you've
> mistaken it for a company. Here, there's no manager who can tell
> people when and how to do things. I think this suggestion could only
> serve to split up the community in fractions - those who abide by the
> rules and one or more groups who don't.
>
> Sounds much like the recent proposal of a committee which will judge
> the quality of all games and decide which ones are good enough to be
> released. That too works fine in a company, but not in a community
> where participation is voluntary.
>
> /Fredrik
I basically agree entirely with Fredrik here; but I also think there
are advantages to collaborative organization that we don't necessarily
want to give up on.
This is a real simple, cheap idea -- maybe too simple; but we could do
it tonight if we wanted to.
What if whoever runs the IF competition signs up on Google Ads, and
runs it off donations? $50 will drive a decent amount of traffic to
the site, and I'm sure we could raise that as a collaborative,
entirely voluntary effort without sneezing.
The thing with Google Ads -- there may be better deals out there -- is
that when you run out of dough, your ads wind down; but when you
replenish the coffer, they're back up.
So, drive people to a page with descriptions of the free game
downloads -- give each game a link, a blurb, and a pic -- and see what
happens.
Conrad.
ps - Despite being very interested in the IF idiom, it took me years
-- depending on how you count, 2-10 years -- to realize this community
even existed: I didn't know about Inform, TADS, HUGO, or any of it.
You can argue that's just a statement about Conrad being oblivious;
and that's fair enough; but I'm sure there are a lot of interested
people out there of equal oblivitude.
C.
Christopher Armstrong
> I basically agree entirely with Fredrik here; but I also think there
> are advantages to collaborative organization that we don't necessarily
> want to give up on.
>
> This is a real simple, cheap idea -- maybe too simple; but we could do
> it tonight if we wanted to.
>
> What if whoever runs the IF competition signs up on Google Ads, and
> runs it off donations? $50 will drive a decent amount of traffic to
> the site, and I'm sure we could raise that as a collaborative,
> entirely voluntary effort without sneezing.
Where do I send the money?
--
Christopher Armstrong
International Man of Twistery
http://radix.twistedmatrix.com/
http://twistedmatrix.com/
http://canonical.com/
George Oliver
> Does anyone know how many games are released per year? Other than Comp
> games, I mean.
For what it's worth, Jim:
Total games less IFComp games:
2007: 61
2006: 73
2005: 96
2004: 127
2003: 180
2002: 160
2001: 166
2000: 128
1999: 95
1998: 106
1997: 41
Total games:
2007: 88
2006: 116
2005: 132
2004: 163
2003: 210
2002: 198
2001: 217
2000: 181
1999: 132
1998: 133
1997: 75
Total IFComp games:
2007: 27
2006: 43
2005: 36
2004: 36
2003: 30
2002: 38
2001: 51
2000: 53
1999: 37
1998: 27
1997: 34
This is all from IFDB, so not sure how accurate it is but it should be
pretty close.
Now, if someone wants to do this by month...
Jim Aikin
> On Apr 21, 10:53 pm, Jim Aikin <midigur...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
>> Does anyone know how many games are released per year? Other than Comp
>> games, I mean.
>
> For what it's worth, Jim:
Good information. Thanks. I'm sensing a trend over the past five years.
But based on this information, it seems pretty clear that a "planned
release" on the first of every month would be about right -- five or six
games per month.
Jim Aikin
> I agree about not needing another Comp. However, my personal opinion is that
> what this community can best do to serve itself is start upping its own
> expectations about the level of its craft. This is *before* making the craft
> too much more visible to a wider audience.
>
> I think more discussion about how textual IF is created, what design
> decisions are made, why they were made, what tradeoffs were found, etc. is
> what is needed. I think textual IF "collaborative workshops" (for lack of a
> better term or phrase) are more needed. I think the improvement effort needs
> to be more inwardly focused before too much external focus is attempted.
I think this comment is right on the money. I'll go further -- I'll put
my money where my mouth is. I'm willing to step forward and be the
moderator/facilitator for an IF Development Workshop.
Details can be thrashed out as the idea develops, but as a baseline:
1. Participation would be limited to about nine or ten authors. As few
as three or four could make a successful group. If the group gets too
large, it could fission.
2. First-time authors would be welcome.
3. Any development system (Inform, TADS, ADRIFT, Hugo, even BASIC).
Preferably something that runs on both Mac and Windows.
4. Participants would have to be willing to provide alpha versions of
their work-in-progress to other members of the workshop, along with
development notes if needed.
5. Some level of commitment and seriousness would be expected. Tough to
enforce, but in my experience a successful workshop does not operate on
a drop-in-when-you-feel-like-it basis. Seriousness means:
a) You're working actively on building your own game. You can provide a
synopsis that describes, at least in rough form, the story arc, the
setting, the characters, etc.
b) You're willing to take seriously the suggestions and criticisms
coming from other members of the workshop.
c) You're committed to finishing your game and making it as good as
possible.
d) You're available on a regular basis to do alpha-testing of other
members' works-in-progress, and are giving them feedback.
e) If someone suggests that your game is similar to an existing game,
you're willing to download the other game and spend a couple of hours
exploring it in order to learn from it.
How does that sound? Viable? Idiotic? Does the idea need tweaking? If
so, tweak away!
--Jim Aikin
S. John Ross
> 2007: 88
http://www.xyzzynews.com/2007nominees.html lists 209 games as eligible
for the last XYZZY's ... I'm not well-versed in these matters so I
don't know if all eligble games had to be released on 2007, but that
had been my assumption.
Conrad
wrote:
>
> On Apr 22, 7:39 am, Conrad <conradc...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > This is a real simple, cheap idea -- maybe too simple; but we could do
> > it tonight if we wanted to.
>
> > What if whoever runs the IF competition signs up on Google Ads, and
> > runs it off donations? $50 will drive a decent amount of traffic to
> > the site, and I'm sure we could raise that as a collaborative,
> > entirely voluntary effort without sneezing.
>
> Where do I send the money?
See, that's what I like: a man of decision, a man of action.
Let's see...
I'm forwarding this to the guy who runs the IFComp, one Stephen
Granade, against the chance he's missed this or is hiding from us.
If you go to the ifcomp website, I suppose you could paypal his
address now, if you wanted to play with his head.
Conrad.
Conrad
>
> This is all from IFDB, so not sure how accurate it is but it should be
> pretty close.
>
> Now, if someone wants to do this by month...
Well, I got bored and broke it down a little.
For the not-too-big picture (18.2 KB), click here: [http://666kb.com/i/
ay11kjm5vb9iz4psf.png]
Conrad.
ps - that's
[tab delineated]
year total ifcomp proportion
1997 75 34 0.45
1998 133 27 0.2
1999 132 37 0.28
2000 181 53 0.29
2001 217 51 0.24
2002 198 38 0.19
2003 210 30 0.14
2004 163 36 0.22
2005 132 36 0.27
2006 116 43 0.37
2007 88 27 0.31
average 149.55 37.45 0.27
st dev 48.04 8.64 0.09
[space delineated]
year total ifcomp proportion
1997 75 34 0.45
1998 133 27 0.2
1999 132 37 0.28
2000 181 53 0.29
2001 217 51 0.24
2002 198 38 0.19
2003 210 30 0.14
2004 163 36 0.22
2005 132 36 0.27
2006 116 43 0.37
2007 88 27 0.31
average 149.55 37.45 0.27
st dev 48.04 8.64 0.09
[underscore delineated]
year____total___ifcomp__proportion
1997____75______34______0.45
1998____133_____27______0.2
1999____132_____37______0.28
2000____181_____53______0.29
2001____217_____51______0.24
2002____198_____38______0.19
2003____210_____30______0.14
2004____163_____36______0.22
2005____132_____36______0.27
2006____116_____43______0.37
2007_____88_____27______0.31
average_149.55__37.45___0.27
st dev___48.04___8.64___0.09
Conrad
>
> For the not-too-big picture (18.2 KB), click here: [http://666kb.com/i/
> ay11kjm5vb9iz4psf.png]
Rrr, that is:
Conrad.
George Oliver
> for the last XYZZY's ... I'm not well-versed in these matters so I
> don't know if all eligble games had to be released on 2007, but that
> had been my assumption.
Yeah, IFDB used the IF Archive for its db at first so it probably
didn't catch all the games released in a particular year. However
looking at the XYZZY list I see games such as:
Countdown 1 - the Body, by Ben Croshaw as "Yahtzee"
Countdown 2 - the Soul, by Ben Croshaw as "Yahtzee"
Countdown 3 - the Mind, by Ben Croshaw as "Yahtzee"
Pentari: Second Dawn, by Malinche Entertainment (Howard A. Sherman)
It doesn't look like Yahtzee ever uploaded that series to the Archive,
and on IFDB, Pentari: Second Dawn has a 2008 date on it. So it looks
like my data set might be full of holes.
Curse you, S. John Ross!
Jeff Nyman
news:ful7gp$c43$1...@aioe.org...
> Details can be thrashed out as the idea develops, but as a baseline:
> ....
> How does that sound? Viable? Idiotic? Does the idea need tweaking? If so,
> tweak away!
I like it.
I agree that a group could get too big. There could be multiple such groups
going on at a time, I suppose. But for the sanity of any one group, it is
probably best to have a bit more of a "we're in this together" feeling,
which more limited numbers of people tends to provide. (After all, if the
groups can be as large as possible we may as well just consider RAIF the
group.) Some groups could perhaps form around a theme (like "Science
Fiction") or a concept (like "Menu Based Conversations") or even a
combination ("Menu Based Conversations In Science Fiction Games"); other
groups might just form around getting something done. Each group could
probably set up its own charter. I'm not saying anything to lofty here; just
a general statement of what people hope to achieve or what the focus is.
I think a key deliverable from these groups is output. Not just of a game,
but of experiential notes, thoughts, problems, etc. Those could eventually
be shared with the community at large. The idea being that you give insight
into the creation of a work of textual IF and you see what people try, what
they avoid (for whatever reason), what they give up on, what they get
frustrated with, etc. That can range from "I can't think of how to convey
emotion" to "I'm so sick of searching the TADS 3 library" to just about
anything else.
Another output could be little snippets of code that someone managed to
learn as part of the collaboration. Eventually enough groups could gather a
lot of these snippets and make the available (whether on a Wiki or whatever
else). I can't tell you how many little code nuggests I find when I go
through various threads on RAIF but half the time you would never have known
to look in *that* thread (either because the title of the thread tells you
nothing or the thread meandered off into providing some techniques, etc). It
would be nice to have some way to gather those. In fact, if a person is
thinking more in terms of releasing snippets of code rather than full
source, they may be more inclined to think about how to generalize the code
so others can use it; which in turn helps the author use that code in their
next game.
(I know ... I'm kind of whipping a lot of ideas around here and not in the
most coherent fashion. This is kind of what the idea for IFWriMo -- based
loosely on NaNoWriMo -- was going to be when we discussed this awhile ago.
http://www.genuinetesting.com/IFWriMo/ifwrimo.html. That was a little more
"challenge"-based rather than "workshop"-based but the underlying principles
were somewhat the same and I think such a concept could be retrofitted to
remove any of the "challenge" and focus soley on the "workshop.")
I definitely agree on the idea of a level of commitment and seriousness on
the part of the participants of an individual workshop. That's not to say
people can't have fun with it, of course; rather, the seriousness is just to
taking the endeavor itself seriously and really putting forth some honest
effort.
Also I completely agree about the willingness to take suggestions and
criticisms. In fact, that would be a large part of the point. Egos would
have to be left at the proverbial door. I liken this ego problem to some
writer's groups where you either get the "everyone's work is great" groups
to the "everyone's work sucks" groups. The goal, I would hope, is to have a
middle ground where you can have honest collaboration and communication
among a relatively limited amount of people that share your level of
commitment.
- Jeff
Emily Short
> pretty close.
Hm, yeah -- I think the XYZZY eligibility lists might be more useful.
There are a bunch of issues that complicate this kind of assessment.
One is that some people don't make IFDB records for their games, and
have slipped through the cracks; another is that some records have no
year of initial release filled in the record. And then the list also
doesn't tell you anything about the size or quality of games -- in
particular, say, how many of them were Speed-IF. If I had to guess
based on hazy personal memory, I would suggest that the relatively
popularity of Speed-IF during the '99-'02 or so period artificially
pumps those numbers with 2-hour productions. A very small handful of
those were fun and enduring favorites. Most weren't.
Eriorg
> On Apr 22, 10:47 am, "S. John Ross" <sj...@io.com> wrote:
>
> > >Total games:
> > > 2007: 88
>
> > for the last XYZZY's ... I'm not well-versed in these matters so I
> > don't know if all eligble games had to be released on 2007, but that
> > had been my assumption.
>
> Yeah, IFDB used the IF Archive for its db at first so it probably
> didn't catch all the games released in a particular year. However
> looking at the XYZZY list I see games such as:
>
> Countdown 1 - the Body, by Ben Croshaw as "Yahtzee"
> Countdown 2 - the Soul, by Ben Croshaw as "Yahtzee"
> Countdown 3 - the Mind, by Ben Croshaw as "Yahtzee"
> Pentari: Second Dawn, by Malinche Entertainment (Howard A. Sherman)
>
> It doesn't look like Yahtzee ever uploaded that series to the Archive,
> and on IFDB, Pentari: Second Dawn has a 2008 date on it. So it looks
> like my data set might be full of holes.
>
> Curse you, S. John Ross!
Most AIF and Quest games, and many ADRIFT and non-English games,
aren't in the IF-Archive but in their own archives, so they're often
not in the IFDB unless someone added them...
Conrad
> Jeff Nyman wrote:
>
> > I agree about not needing another Comp. However, my personal opinion is that
> > what this community can best do to serve itself is start upping its own
> > expectations about the level of its craft. This is *before* making the craft
> > too much more visible to a wider audience.
>
> > I think more discussion about how textual IF is created, what design
> > decisions are made, why they were made, what tradeoffs were found, etc. is
> > what is needed. I think textual IF "collaborative workshops" (for lack of a
> > better term or phrase) are more needed. I think the improvement effort needs
> > to be more inwardly focused before too much external focus is attempted.
>
> I think this comment is right on the money. I'll go further -- I'll put
> my money where my mouth is. I'm willing to step forward and be the
> moderator/facilitator for an IF Development Workshop.
That's generous of you, Jim, and I encourage you to run a workshop.
If we're dealing with the stakes Jeff mentions -- namely that we make
no move to promote IF visibility until this workshop does whatever
it'll do -- then frankly, I'd be looking for that particular workshop
to be run by someone with extensive experience and a very positive
attitude toward IF.
I do encourage you to run an IF writer's group, though.
> Details can be thrashed out as the idea develops, but as a baseline:
>
> [..]
>
> How does that sound? Viable? Idiotic? Does the idea need tweaking? If
> so, tweak away!
I think running a workshop is a great way to prime that sort of cross-
fertilization of knowledge that provokes innovation and quality.
But are we to hold off promoting IF and making it more visible until
this workshop has successfully raised the community's level of
expectation about the craft of IF?
How do we ensure compliance?
How do we know when community expectations of the craft are
sufficiently raised? There's no success criteria, the outcome isn't
well defined, the only thing we've got is a "holding off" strategy.
No, I disagree on this one. I think the desire to hold off is coming
from the idea that existing text games aren't good enough. I don't
agree with that, and if I did, I think a stronger motivator for
improvement would be to bring a strong current of outsider traffic to
bear.
The press of that opinion is what the community needs to reinvigorate
it and motivate change.
Conrad.
George Oliver
> On Apr 22, 12:50 pm, George Oliver <georgeolive...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > This is all from IFDB, so not sure how accurate it is but it should be
> > pretty close.
>
> Hm, yeah -- I think the XYZZY eligibility lists might be more useful.
>
Here is what I have so far:
Year | XYZZY | IFDB
2007: 209 | 88
2006: 212 | 116
2005: 203 | 132
2004: 262 | 163
2003: 248 | 210
2002: 133 | 198
2001: 218 | 217
2000: 171 | 181
1999: 126 | 132
Jim Aikin
>
> If we're dealing with the stakes Jeff mentions -- namely that we make
> no move to promote IF visibility until this workshop does whatever
> it'll do -- then frankly, I'd be looking for that particular workshop
> to be run by someone with extensive experience and a very positive
> attitude toward IF.
>
> I do encourage you to run an IF writer's group, though.
That's very diplomatic of you. I know I've been accused of having a
negative attitude. If I can provide modest assistance in helping a few
games become better written and better implemented, I'm sure my attitude
will brighten.
> How do we know when community expectations of the craft are
> sufficiently raised? There's no success criteria, the outcome isn't
> well defined, the only thing we've got is a "holding off" strategy.
>
> No, I disagree on this one. I think the desire to hold off is coming
> from the idea that existing text games aren't good enough. I don't
> agree with that [snip]
I'm not advocating that anybody delay attempting to promote IF. If you
have ideas on how to do that, by all means -- full steam ahead! But I do
tend to agree with what I see as Jeff's underlying point, which is this:
You can attract all the foot traffic you like into the IF store by
putting up spotlights and having guys stand on the curb waving signs,
but if you want to turn the foot traffic into repeat customers (using
"customers" in the broad sense -- I don't necessarily mean paying
customers), you need to have the shelves well stocked with quality
merchandise.
There are certainly some fine games available for download. But there
are also a lot that are ... less than fine. Improving the overall level
of quality will, in the long run, keep the punters coming back for more.
--JA
Christopher Armstrong
> But are we to hold off promoting IF and making it more visible until
> this workshop has successfully raised the community's level of
> expectation about the craft of IF?
>
> How do we ensure compliance?
>
> How do we know when community expectations of the craft are
> sufficiently raised? There's no success criteria, the outcome isn't
> well defined, the only thing we've got is a "holding off" strategy.
>
> No, I disagree on this one. I think the desire to hold off is coming
> from the idea that existing text games aren't good enough. I don't
> agree with that, and if I did, I think a stronger motivator for
> improvement would be to bring a strong current of outsider traffic to
> bear.
>
> The press of that opinion is what the community needs to reinvigorate
> it and motivate change.
I started reading your message and I was so excited that I clicked
"reply", ready to write a rant of disagreement, before I even got to
these last two paragraphs. I see now that I agree with you. The idea
of holding off on PR is stop energy, and I don't think stop energy is
what is necessary here :-) There *are* fantastic games already. I do
think that the craft will, of course, improve over time, but I don't
think that anyone should wait for it to happen.
You know what I want to see? An Interactive Fiction game on Steam. I
think it can happen now. I wonder if any authors in RAIF have tried
contacting Valve about distributing their games on Steam yet?
Gerald Aungst
> I think this comment is right on the money. I'll go further -- I'll put
> my money where my mouth is. I'm willing to step forward and be the
> moderator/facilitator for an IF Development Workshop.
>
Personally I love the idea. I'm a new IF author trying to complete a
game for this year's comp, and I would love the feedback from such a
group as well as the insights I'd get from giving feedback to others. As
a teacher, I know that this kind of give and take is precisely what is
needed to develop writing skills.
I also agree with your prerequisites--it's important to get people in
the group who are committed to seeing it through and to contributing to
everyone's work.
Go for it! How do we sign up???
--
Gerald
Gerald Aungst
>
> Personally I love the idea. I'm a new IF author trying to complete a
> game for this year's comp, and I would love the feedback from such a
> group as well as the insights I'd get from giving feedback to others. As
> a teacher, I know that this kind of give and take is precisely what is
> needed to develop writing skills.
>
interested in is what I can get out of this hypothetical group--just the
opposite, really. I'd love the opportunity to help other writers polish
their work! I think that this newsgroup provides that to a point, but
mostly in little bits and pieces. A workshop format could tackle bigger
things and hash out deeper concerns in a more interactive (no pun
intended) way.
--
Gerald
Jeff Nyman
news:1b063f0c-f5b0-4ec5...@u69g2000hse.googlegroups.com...
> But are we to hold off promoting IF and making it more visible until
> this workshop has successfully raised the community's level of
> expectation about the craft of IF?
I may have sounded like this and, if so, I was somewhat incorrect in doing
so. I tried to avoid saying that when I said this:
> Earlier I said some of this would take place *before* making the craft too
> much more visible to a wider audience. But I do also think there is some
> element to bringing in segments of a possible wider audience in a
> controlled
> context, sort of like sampling or 'pilot studies.'
So, actually, I was talking about exposing other audiences to textual IF
*during* this process. But, that said, I think this is a moderate process
because, as Jim notes, attracting a bunch of people to something that they
don't necessarily find appealing just to show them that it's still not
appealing is not going to be much help.
But, that said, as you point out ...
> I think the desire to hold off is coming
> from the idea that existing text games aren't good enough.
You are correct that this would be an assumption and perhaps not even a good
one. What I can say is that in presenting current textual IF to many people
who were not previously exposed to it (or exposed only very peripherally)
the reactions were pretty negative overall. This isn't so much that the
games weren't "good enough." They clearly were good enough -- for a "built
in" audience of people who already accepted textual IF for what it currently
is and how it currently presents itself.
When you stepped outside that audience a bit and tried to get other
audiences interested, it's not so much that the games weren't "good enough"
in some categorical (and pejorative) sense; rather, they just weren't "good
enough" for that particular audience set. In most cases I found the
responses came down to something like this:
"So, is this a story? If so, I can read a lot better in most novels I buy."
"So, is this a game? If so, I can get a better game experience with {name of
game genre or specific game here}, along with graphics and sound."
Where I found you could really start to appeal to people is when you got
responses like this:
"So, a game that's a story? Or story that's a game? Okay, so what, though? I
can get that with .... oh, you mean the interactivity model is more ...."
More .... what? *That* is the sort of the key thing I kept focusing on with
people. What specific elements of the interaction model with textual IF were
*different enough* from other game formats and yet *similar enough* to
reading a story that textual IF was seen as providing a unique
gaming/reading experience. That experience is one that means textual IF does
not *compete* with novels or other game formats necessarily , but rather
makes textual IF stand apart as a viable format in its own right, one that
can engage and entertain people for reasons that are both similar and
dissimilar to novels and other game formats. In other words, utilizing the
strengths of both to provide a relatively unique hybrid.
In just about all cases, I never found games/stories of textual IF that
outside audiences really rallied behind. What the audiences did rally behind
were some of the potential that was seen in the concept, if only ....
And it's the "if only" that often kept coming back to the storytelling
ability and the ability of the author of the game to make a truly compelling
experience that exploited aspects of both storytelling and game, all within
a textual format. Just about everyone could see that it was easy to make a
textual IF "game." Just throw in a minimal setting, a lot of objects, and
some puzzles here and there. Bam. You have a game. What separated textual
IF, at least potentially, was the ability to tell truly effective and
engaging stories (like many of the vast reading public find in static
fiction) while allowing a level of interactivity within the context of that
story.
That just speaks to the players/readers. I also found this kind of thinking
spoke to potential authors. They wanted to know what techniques were
possible to achieve certain effects. But those effects were desired only
insofar as audiences were known to respond to them. But were audiences known
to respond to them? Which audiences? Was it possible to modulate the use of
a technique to engage different audiences or even engage the same audience
but in different ways?
> How do we know when community expectations of the craft are
> sufficiently raised?
It's a good question and one I don't have an answer to. I do think that part
of it would be by regular discussion of the craft that is referenceable and
provides for actionable growth. For example, why is it that when I brought
up menu-based conversations (in my "Teaching Storytelling (via IF)" thread)
as being off-putting to many people, there was so much initial surprise? But
then all the sudden many other people here chimed in saying the same thing.
And some authors were surprised at that.
I'm not saying this means the authors are "bad" or anything; but it does
show a community that is sometimes out of touch with its own experience
base. So, in a way, I agree with you: how do we know when the expectations
are raised? Right now, we don't, because people -- in some cases -- don't
even know what the expectations of their own community are. They certainly
then can't speak to the expectations of people who don't share the
background, traditions, and conventions of that community.
Likewise, when authors do try something (like menu-based conversations, or a
new form of conversation system, or a new way of storytelling, or the use of
flashbacks, or changing viewpoints, etc), to what extent is this tested with
the community? Clearly it is tested in that people can download and play the
game. But to what extent are these "tests" filtered back to the community in
some fashion, so that people can tell how successful a given technique was?
Did most people hate it? Love it? Didn't even notice? That's the kind of
stuff that helps a community grow: by testing out ideas and getting critical
response-feedback that allows people (such as authors) to evolve ideas.
None of these specific findings within a community, of course, may say a
thing about how an "outside" audience would respond. But what I'm talking
about here is the type of experimentation done; the level of data that is
gathered to bolster further experimentation; the quality of how people go
about promoting ideas and techniques (and putting those to the test) within
the community.
A minor caveat to all of this: My whole career and background is predicated
upon three ... "axioms", I suppose you could call them: support with data,
manage with facts, convince with evidence. I've read far and wide in the
textual IF pantheon of material (from theses, to non-fiction books about
textual IF's history or mechanics, to blogs, to newsgroup postings, and so
forth) and I've rarely seen too much focus on providing data that people can
use. I see a lot of good experiment attempts: but there's no follow up to
see if the experiments worked. There's a lot of theory discussion (about
emergent systems, AI, narrative managers) but not as much about showing if
audiences would even care about those things or notice if they were put in
place.
So I guess what I'm more talking about here is simply setting expectations
for how we, as a community, experiment. Those expectations, when realized,
may then further help the community realize another higher set of
expectations about where the craft goes and the different ways it can go
there and how and when it can appeal to different audiences.
(I realize I often say things like "we as a community" and that would then
include me ... and that's probably a bit optimistic given that I haven't
done anything for the community. So I realize that in a lot of ways
everytime I speak I do so from some fairly shaky ground.)
Anway, does any of this make any sense? Or did I muddy the still waters?
- Jeff
Emily Short
<jeffnyman__nospam__@gmail__nospam.com> wrote:
> Clearly it is tested in that people can download and play the
> game. But to what extent are these "tests" filtered back to the community in
> some fashion, so that people can tell how successful a given technique was?
> Did most people hate it? Love it? Didn't even notice? That's the kind of
> stuff that helps a community grow: by testing out ideas and getting critical
> response-feedback that allows people (such as authors) to evolve ideas.
I think the trick for most of us is not that we aren't interested in
collecting data, but that we don't have the ability to enforce
collection. Feedback on games tends to come in the form of reviews
(when players feel like writing them) and email (ditto); and the
comments that come back aren't necessarily about the aspect of the
game you (as an author) thought was daring, experimental, etc. A lot
of the time comp games get a large number of short but idiosyncratic
reviews (thus not necessarily addressing specific experimental
features), while non-competition games get only a few, usually longer
responses. This is not enough to build into statistically meaningful
feedback. Sometimes as an author you have to wait *years* to get a
sense of what "most people" thought about a feature, as some sort of
community consensus emerges. So you (or at least I) write games and
then hope that someone notices the things about them that I thought
were interesting, and comments. Beta-testers help some, in being a
group I can actually interrogate, but most games have a small and
biased beta team.
Now, occasionally authors have posted things like "What did everyone
think about my use of technique X?" and sometimes even gotten answers
-- but even then it's usually the answer of a handful of people, and
they are (naturally) people from within the community.
Anyway, I guess what I'm getting at is that when someone says to me,
"you should test response to your techniques more widely," my response
is, "Love to. _How_?" I don't have access to teams of people willing
to be guinea pigs -- in fact, I'm not sure how to get such a team
short of hiring them. My close friends and family have all heard of IF
already so aren't novices, and even if we set that requirement aside,
they'd be a scientifically unhelpful group. But hiring a bunch of
people to play IF and report back is, sadly, not in my budget.
Evidently you've managed to find some groups to do this with, which is
fantastic -- and is in fact the aspect of your whole project that I
find most surprising. I'm not sure how one replicates that, though.
Jeff Nyman
news:9a6a50c4-c6f3-4edc...@m44g2000hsc.googlegroups.com...
> Feedback on games tends to come in the form of reviews
> (when players feel like writing them) and email (ditto); and the
> comments that come back aren't necessarily about the aspect of the
> game you (as an author) thought was daring, experimental, etc.
Understood. That's why I think something like the collaborative workshops
can start to foster that a bit more by making those elements the focus,
rather than just another competition or just the release of a game and
someone asking for reviews or feedback. NaNoWriMo succeeds not because
people end up actually using their 50,000 words as their novel; but rather
in the process of participating in a community that, while it does have an
element of competition, is really more about collaboration, including
individual groups that form solely to help authors test out ideas or
brainstorm.
> So you (or at least I) write games and
> then hope that someone notices the things about them that I thought
> were interesting, and comments. Beta-testers help some, in being a
> group I can actually interrogate, but most games have a small and
> biased beta team.
Again, understood. These things you are mentioning are exactly why I think a
more systematized format may be amenable to gathering this kind of data. (Of
course, I leave open the possibility of being completely and utterly wrong.)
What I mean by a "systematized format" is simply one that is geared with a
certain focus in mind and thus operates with a certain set of expectations;
those expectations being different in kind and degree from simply releasing
a game and hoping for comments or counting on reviews.
I know - the devil is in the details. But I think that kind of focus is at
least a way to potentially mitigate the points you bring up.
> Now, occasionally authors have posted things like "What did everyone
> think about my use of technique X?" and sometimes even gotten answers
> -- but even then it's usually the answer of a handful of people, and
> they are (naturally) people from within the community.
And that last part of the sentence is where I think the *during* part of my
previous response comes in, in terms of introducing the games to others
outside the community. The key is using the same kind of evidence gathering
techiques with both groups.
> Anyway, I guess what I'm getting at is that when someone says to me,
> "you should test response to your techniques more widely," my response
> is, "Love to. _How_?" I don't have access to teams of people willing
> to be guinea pigs -- in fact, I'm not sure how to get such a team
> short of hiring them.
That's just it, though; you don't necessarily need teams. And you don't need
whatever people you have, in all cases, to test a full game. Sometimes you
might want to test just a snippet of a game, similar to how an author
presents one or two chapters of a full work to see how people respond. You
can find out a lot with relatively little implementation and you can also
find out a lot by utilizing fairly effective investigative techniques, all
the while of course realizing that your data may be (and probably will be)
provisional. But the gradual and continued use of those techniques tends to
build up a pretty good picture.
In fact, this kind of thing, translated to another venue, is how I've made
my career these past twenty years: finding out what different people
consider "quality" in given products or services and how to determine the
best ways to go about finding that out, often under the same constraints you
mention: lack of access to massive numbers of people and lack of time on the
parts of those people I do manage to get.
> Evidently you've managed to find some groups to do this with, which is
> fantastic -- and is in fact the aspect of your whole project that I
> find most surprising. I'm not sure how one replicates that, though.
Yes, I agree -- replication is often the bane of any experimenter.
But, with that, I'll say this: I was a bit daunted when I first went into
this because lurking on the community many years ago and posting a few
careful things here and there, I started to think, based on the responses I
got: "Sheesh, it must be real hard to gather feedback because no one's
willing to help us out."
Well, when I actually got to talking with various people, however, I found
they were often more than willing to help out, particularly if I presented
things in a way that was tailored to interest that audience. I mentioned in
one of these thrads about talking with some PTA groups and with various
schools, for example, about the idea of bringing in a non-curriculum "study"
of textual IF. People were more than willing when I made it clear that this
could be an interesting study in creativity and storytelling for children.
Similarly, game programmers could often be made to be interested in the
concept if I proposed textual IF as a sort of "challenge", saying that
textual IF -- if done "right" -- could be just as competitive as graphical
games. (Leaving aside the notion of what "done right" means.) I met many of
these people through some companies I worked for as well as just by going on
various other newgroups or forum boards and talking to game programmers
about textual IF. But I piqued their curiosity and while I doubt many (or
even any) want to become textual IF programmers, they were willing to do so
long enough to give me data points and an understanding of how others view
the craft.
And, certainly, as you know from my other threads, writers were fascinated
by the concept and most of them I didn't even know. I met a few through
NaNoWriMo, one through LinkedIn, yet another through Pulse, and another by
simply writing to his publisher.
So I guess I'm not so certain my results are hard to replicate. Some of my
earliest posts were often asking just this question: what have people tried?
Who have they talked to or approached about textual IF? How did they
approach them? With ideas or with things to try? What was the evidence
gathering criteria? What was considered epiphenomenal and what was
considered determinative?
- Jeff
Conrad
>
> It's a good question and one I don't have an answer to. I do think that part
> of it would be by regular discussion of the craft that is referenceable and
> provides for actionable growth.
We have those discussions. I'm all for them. I don't think we need
to isolate ourselves from players to continue having them, though.
> For example, why is it that when I brought
> up menu-based conversations (in my "Teaching Storytelling (via IF)" thread)
> as being off-putting to many people, there was so much initial surprise? But
> then all the sudden many other people here chimed in saying the same thing.
> And some authors were surprised at that.
We-ell... that sounds to me like an argument for a larger population
of players.
> I'm not saying this means the authors are "bad" or anything; but it does
> show a community that is sometimes out of touch with its own experience
> base. So, in a way, I agree with you: how do we know when the expectations
> are raised? Right now, we don't, because people -- in some cases -- don't
> even know what the expectations of their own community are. They certainly
> then can't speak to the expectations of people who don't share the
> background, traditions, and conventions of that community.
So you're saying we need more players... from outside the IF
community.
> A minor caveat to all of this: My whole career and background is predicated
> upon three ... "axioms", I suppose you could call them: support with data,
> manage with facts, convince with evidence. I've read far and wide in the
> textual IF pantheon of material (from theses, to non-fiction books about
> textual IF's history or mechanics, to blogs, to newsgroup postings, and so
> forth) and I've rarely seen too much focus on providing data that people can
> use. I see a lot of good experiment attempts: but there's no follow up to
> see if the experiments worked. There's a lot of theory discussion (about
> emergent systems, AI, narrative managers) but not as much about showing if
> audiences would even care about those things or notice if they were put in
> place.
Well, I largely agree with all that stuff, and I think it's a sensible
way to run a software outfit, or even a loosely-knit band of
programmers. I see us as artists, tho, so the shakeup that I think
scares you of having a whole mob'a'folks descend on us unprepared with
comments like:
"Hey, what faggy kinda command is 'inventory' anyway? Who came up
with that shit? Why not call it 'stuff' er somethin?"
--don't bother me.
Conrad.
S. John Ross
> Curse you, S. John Ross!
[evil laughter, twisting of the mustache]
Jeff Nyman
> "Jeff Nyman" <jeffnyman__nospam__@gmail__nospam.com> wrote:
>>
>> It's a good question and one I don't have an answer to. I do think that
>> part
>> of it would be by regular discussion of the craft that is referenceable
>> and
>> provides for actionable growth.
>
> We have those discussions. I'm all for them. I don't think we need
> to isolate ourselves from players to continue having them, though.
But are these discussions we all have easily referenceable? If there are
these discussions, why is there often surprise that people didn't like
things (like menu-based conversations)? Are their discussions that are
refereneable that talk about design decisions made, roads taken that didn't
work out, etc? I know there's probably lots of experiential data in the
newsgroup (in fact, I know there is) but that's not always the most
referenceable, particularly since many threads go in and out of topic,
making it difficult sometimes to isolate the one or two little bits that may
actually be relevant.
Also, I don't think you need to *isolate* yourself from the new players. So
I agree there. What I do think is bringing in new players should be a
somewhat moderate process. I would certainly bring new players into those
discussions or I would bring solicited comments from those new players, if
they can't participate in person. Have those discussions happened? Are they
referenceable?
I'm sort of reminded of a great book: "If Only We Knew What We Know" by
Carla O'Dell and Jackson Grayson.
> We-ell... that sounds to me like an argument for a larger population
> of players.
Or understanding your *current* crop of players better before you start
trying to understand (and perhaps cater to) an even larger population.
> So you're saying we need more players... from outside the IF
> community.
I'm saying it might help to understand what the *current* community truly
does and does not like; or what seems to work and what does not. Can you do
that with outside players? Certainly. But if people's evidence-gathering
isn't all that great even with a community that *is* already interested, it
isn't going to be any easier with a community that you may have to
*convince* to be interested.
> scares you of having a whole mob'a'folks descend on us unprepared with
> comments like:
>
> "Hey, what faggy kinda command is 'inventory' anyway? Who came up
> with that shit? Why not call it 'stuff' er somethin?"
>
> --don't bother me.
You are characterizing my position correctly in that if those kind of
comments routinely come up, __and__ that's the best kind of commentary you
are getting, then I don't think much will change. Nor do I think any real
substantive data points will be added. Clearly I could be wrong though.
Maybe a better way to say this is by posing this:
There has, over the years, been an influx of new players and authors to
textual IF. I've seen that. So ... what has been learned? Or what has
changed? Or how has the landscape of textual IF opened up?
- Jeff
Emily Short
<jeffnyman__nospam__@gmail__nospam.com> wrote:
> But are these discussions we all have easily referenceable?
There's http://ifwiki.org/index.php/Past_raif_topics , which is a
fairly heroic job of organizing and classifying information that comes
up on RAIF: is that the kind of thing you had in mind? If not, what do
you envision?
> If there are
> these discussions, why is there often surprise that people didn't like
> things (like menu-based conversations)?
I think you may be extrapolating more from that incident than the
evidence bears, but I suspect part of it is that these discussions
rarely have statistical validity; people participate in them who are
interested and have strong feelings or new ideas, while people who
have weak feelings may sit them out. The fact that they're
discussions, not surveys, seems likely to filter the data. (No? I
mean, you obviously know more about collecting QA feedback than I do,
but that strikes me as an important factor.)
> Are their discussions that are
> refereneable that talk about design decisions made, roads taken that didn't
> work out, etc?
There is a modest collection (scattered, admittedly) of making-of
articles and development blogs. Off the top of my head -- I'm sure
there are more out there, but this is just what I remembered given a
few moments of thought:
Articles:
http://plover.net/~bonds/writing_cabal.html
http://www.goblinmercantileexchange.com/?p=858
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000010.html
http://adamcadre.ac/content/phaq.txt
http://adamcadre.ac/content/remains.txt
http://www.xyzzynews.com/xyzzy.6e.html
http://www.xyzzynews.com/xyzzy.8e.html
http://www.xyzzynews.com/xyzzy.16d.html
http://www.xyzzynews.com/xyzzy.6h.html
http://inform-fiction.org/I7Downloads/Examples/glass/Overview.html
http://inform-fiction.org/I7Downloads/Examples/bronze/Overview.html
http://inform-fiction.org/I7Downloads/Examples/dm/Overview.html
http://emshort.wordpress.com/writing-if/my-articles/making-of-metamorphoses-older/
Blogs:
http://monksbrew.blogspot.com/
http://numidea.wordpress.com/2008/04/17/bmc-production-blog-3-predraft/
http://jncullinan.wordpress.com/2008/03/29/various-random-musings-from-days-4-and-5/
http://spacecatrocketship.blogspot.com/search/label/Gun%20Mute
http://sturmdrangif.wordpress.com/ (though the latter at the moment
seems mostly tied up with Poster's distress over the IF community
etc., there is older material)
I can see the argument that not enough of this kind of thing is
written, or that it isn't written primarily on the topics that you're
interested in (namely, the storytelling issues involved), or that
there's not central organization for it (though the latter point could
probably be solved with ifwiki).
> Also, I don't think you need to *isolate* yourself from the new players. So
> I agree there. What I do think is bringing in new players should be a
> somewhat moderate process.
Given our advertising skills to date, I suspect that by putting forth
our best effort we'll achieve at most a moderate trickle. So that
doesn't strike me as a problem. (Or not as the kind of problem you're
worried about.)
> I'm saying it might help to understand what the *current* community truly
> does and does not like; or what seems to work and what does not.
Does one do that by discussion? Or survey?
Tom Hudson
> On Apr 23, 5:48 am, "Jeff Nyman"
> <jeffnyman__nospam__@gmail__nospam.com> wrote:
> > If there are
> > these discussions, why is there often surprise that people didn't like
> > things (like menu-based conversations)?
>
> I think you may be extrapolating more from that incident than the
> evidence bears, but I suspect part of it is that these discussions
> rarely have statistical validity; people participate in them who are
> interested and have strong feelings or new ideas, while people who
> have weak feelings may sit them out. The fact that they're
> discussions, not surveys, seems likely to filter the data. (No? I
> mean, you obviously know more about collecting QA feedback than I do,
> but that strikes me as an important factor.)
Yes - my experience with some menu systems are really inconsistent
with what was widely reported, which led me to the opposite conclusion
from "people" both as a player and on various toy projects. Since the
plural of anecdote is not data, I didn't see much point in joining
that conversation without something broader or deeper to say than a
report of my own experiences.
Academic approach to designing an experiment to test these things:
1. design a survey to measure 'immersion' or whatever other quantity
you're interested in maximizing with your conversation model (There
are several well-established surveys for graphical virtual reality,
but they probably don't transfer to text adventures well. This could
take some serious thinking in advance.)
2. find some way to validate it
3. find a bunch of other surveys to ask other questions you might be
interested in
4. get access to a captive population of undergraduates, and a couple
of grad students
- information/library science degree programs that include an
ethnography component are probably a good source of grad students for
this kind of research, but other institutions might have pockets of
the right kind of skills in other departments - sociology?
communication studies?
5. get approval from your institutional review board for human
subjects research; for this project, it's probably trivial.
6. have the grad students set up a room with a camera watching the
player, Camtasia or some other software recording the computer, and a
spare chair
7. have the undergrads play through two games (Comp-length is probably
perfect) while being recorded, videotaped, and observed by a grad
student
- survey before, between, and after as appropriate for your
various instruments
- half the students play the menu-driven game first, the other
half play the ask/tell game first, then switch
8. lock the grad students in a room for six months while they analyze
transcripts, annotate videos, look for correlations, etc.
Voila - 3 or 4 journal papers and a couple of masters theses worth of
hard data, at a cost under $100,000. If you're at a third-tier school,
you don't have to pay the grad students, and then you can do it for
well under $10,000. If it goes well, you can also name the survey
after yourself, and get cited by future IF researchers for decades.
(Video camera and camtasia might be superfluous; when I've helped with
this kind of work before we were looking at collaboration and use of
multiple tools, and so needed to capture the interaction between the
users as well as what they did with their computer. You could probably
get by with an in-game transcript and the ethnographic notes, although
you might want to augment the interpreter to capture timing
information - think time is often a significant measure.)
One catch would be finding a closely-matched pair of games where one
used ask/tell and the other used menus; ideal might be to have two
different games, both of which supported both conversation systems.
This would could require commissioning the games, which would
presumably add 6 months and $20-$40,000 to your cost. You would also
want a short game with zero conversation in it for a training session.
The one person I know doing this kind of work moved to Sweden. Any
idle profs in the audience?
Tom
David Fisher
news:57WdndFwQNAdp5PV...@comcast.com...
>
> Another output could be little snippets of code that someone managed to
> learn as part of the collaboration. Eventually enough groups could gather
> a lot of these snippets and make the available (whether on a Wiki or
> whatever else). I can't tell you how many little code nuggests I find when
> I go through various threads on RAIF but half the time you would never
> have known to look in *that* thread (either because the title of the
> thread tells you nothing or the thread meandered off into providing some
> techniques, etc). It would be nice to have some way to gather those.
This was one of the aims of the "IF Knowledge Base" idea mentioned in
January:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.int-fiction/browse_thread/thread/438aeb5525f86c8b
I have been thinking on and off about whether this is a good idea to do or
not. It's kind of nice keeping discussions about how to implement things on
RAIF, since that way it's always up to date, and the community gets to
communicate with each other, new ideas come up and interesting tangents
develop ... which might not happen if people just went to a web site to look
up "how to" topics all the time.
On the other hand, there is an awful lot of helpful advice buried in the
RAIF archives, which would be a shame to stay buried. (I've been making a
list of them on the side while I've been going though the archives lately
... about 80 topics so far). And a "code snippet" library would be really
handy ...
(The other problem for a potential IFKB is how to organise the information.
Maybe a "controlled vocabulary" of IF is needed, so people know what topic
to look things up under - or more importantly, what topics to file things
under. The anarchic concept of "tags" use in the IFDB breaks down a bit with
large amounts of data, so something more well defined would be needed).
I mention this because down thread you made some comments about things being
"referenceable", which the IFKB idea was meant to help solve.
David Fisher
Emily Short
> There is a modest collection (scattered, admittedly) of making-of
> articles and development blogs. Off the top of my head -- I'm sure
> there are more out there...
Speaking of which, I remembered these, which are pretty interesting:
http://www.avventuretestuali.com/avventure/cyclops
http://www.illuminatedlantern.com/if/blog/
Jeff Nyman
> There's http://ifwiki.org/index.php/Past_raif_topics , which is a
> fairly heroic job of organizing and classifying information that comes
> up on RAIF: is that the kind of thing you had in mind? If not, what do
> you envision?
To a certain extent this is good. Of course those link to newsgroup
discussions, which to someone trying to learn or distill what a community
has learned, a set of discussions like that (which often meanders and often
has side-topics) is not the best way to convey knowledge. It would be akin
to the Inform 7 "manual" having to be being distilled from a series of
relevant threads on a newsgroup. Possible, of course, but not the easiest
way to reference information.
But, that said, I think the past topics is pretty nice.
>> If there are
>> these discussions, why is there often surprise that people didn't like
>> things (like menu-based conversations)?
> I think you may be extrapolating more from that incident than the
> evidence bears, but I suspect part of it is that these discussions
> rarely have statistical validity; people participate in them who are
> interested and have strong feelings or new ideas, while people who
> have weak feelings may sit them out. The fact that they're
> discussions, not surveys, seems likely to filter the data. (No? I
> mean, you obviously know more about collecting QA feedback than I do,
> but that strikes me as an important factor.)
Certainly I would agree. That's why I think more focused venues for
gathering the feedback you desire are probably in order. Getting people who
are willing to participate to the extent necessary. (This must be some of
what people already do with gathering beta testers.)
Discussions, as you say, always filter data. So do surveys. That doesn't
mean, however, that statistical validity is lacking, at least not
necessarily; particularly since the emphasis here isn't so much on the
statistical nature of your results, but the means by which you gather
information in the first place. If everyone gathered data in similar
fashions you would soon find yourself with a lot of data. All of it filtered
to some extent, yes. But all of it potentially viable, depending on how it
was gathered.
Of course, if often helps to limit the number of participants. User stories
or requirements in many venues don't involve anyone and everyone. The
discussions usually center around the people who you know you want to
please. Even if the goal is to find out what kind of person you might
potentially please, focus groups are often relatively limited in size and
scope.
I also know a few people will bring in the "but we're artists; we're not
just writing games." That's fine and a valid point and for people who are
just worried about art for art's sake -- none of this will matter. But
writers and painters and composers are artists as well and often they are
often tapping into their audiences (both existing and potential) to
determine how they can further refine their craft, either to make existing
experiences more engaging or to provide new experiences.
> There is a modest collection (scattered, admittedly) of making-of
> articles and development blogs. Off the top of my head -- I'm sure
> there are more out there, but this is just what I remembered given a
> few moments of thought:
> .... links snipped ....
Right ... but, remember, some people (including myself) are talking about
bringing new people in. Those people aren't going to have those few moments
of thought available to them. Further, are they going to know to look in
this particular thread right here for those particular links you just
quoted? Probably not. They're going to ask the same questions ... and have
those links posted again. If someone remembers them.
I do know you mention the IFWiki and, I agree, that can be a good repository
for links like these, so I'm not dismissing everything here. The key thing
is that when you bring new people in, the idea of referenceable doesn't just
mean that "stuff exists somewhere" or "it exists but you have to distill it
from a bunch of threads."
>> Also, I don't think you need to *isolate* yourself from the new players.
>> So
>> I agree there. What I do think is bringing in new players should be a
>> somewhat moderate process.
> Given our advertising skills to date, I suspect that by putting forth
> our best effort we'll achieve at most a moderate trickle. So that
> doesn't strike me as a problem. (Or not as the kind of problem you're
> worried about.)
>> I'm saying it might help to understand what the *current* community truly
>> does and does not like; or what seems to work and what does not.
> Does one do that by discussion? Or survey?
I would say by experiment (meaning, actual working deliverables) that people
can play with and comment upon. If a new conversation-style system is being
considered, put it in a simple, limited context. Try that out with people.
Say what kind of commentary you're looking for. Then question the people who
worked with your game/concept/whatever. What did they like? Why? What didn't
they like? Why? The discussion follows from the experiment, I would think.
This doesn't have to be a full game. Most of what I hear are people talking
about involving beta testers which then have to consider large parts of the
entire game. What about just presenting isolated elements and having those
played around with? (Maybe this is done. I don't know.) But then have that
experiential data feed back into the community.
To some extent this limited context won't always work because some concepts
might require a more fleshed out game. For example, if you want to test the
ability to "convey emotion via character" you might have to create quite a
bit more game to allow for that possibility. I definitely grant that.
Other "experiments" can be done even in relatively limited game contexts, I
would think. For example, regarding viewpoint, writing a game (or section
thereof) that is written in first-person, third-person, and second-person.
People can play each version. Then discussion ensues. Which format did
people seem to prefer? Why? What did one viewpoint lack over the other? If
something was lacking, was it truly the viewpoint or simply how other
elements (like puzzles) were presented relative to that viewpoint? Could the
viewpoint be retained while changing the other elements?
- Jeff
Emily Short
<jeffnyman__nospam__@gmail__nospam.com> wrote:
> Discussions, as you say, always filter data. So do surveys. That doesn't
> mean, however, that statistical validity is lacking, at least not
> necessarily; particularly since the emphasis here isn't so much on the
> statistical nature of your results, but the means by which you gather
> information in the first place. If everyone gathered data in similar
> fashions you would soon find yourself with a lot of data. All of it filtered
> to some extent, yes. But all of it potentially viable, depending on how it
> was gathered.
Hm. Okay.
> > There is a modest collection (scattered, admittedly) of making-of
> > articles and development blogs. Off the top of my head -- I'm sure
> > there are more out there, but this is just what I remembered given a
> > few moments of thought:
> > .... links snipped ....
>
> Right ... but, remember, some people (including myself) are talking about
> bringing new people in. Those people aren't going to have those few moments
> of thought available to them.
Sure -- what I was asking was whether, if there were a more systematic
guide to finding them, those things would qualify as what you're
looking for, or whether you were looking for some entirely other kind
of writing or presentation.
> I would say by experiment (meaning, actual working deliverables) that people
> can play with and comment upon. If a new conversation-style system is being
> considered, put it in a simple, limited context. Try that out with people.
> Say what kind of commentary you're looking for. Then question the people who
> worked with your game/concept/whatever. What did they like? Why? What didn't
> they like? Why? The discussion follows from the experiment, I would think.
>
> This doesn't have to be a full game. Most of what I hear are people talking
> about involving beta testers which then have to consider large parts of the
> entire game. What about just presenting isolated elements and having those
> played around with? (Maybe this is done. I don't know.)
Certainly it's done -- I don't know how universally, but I've alpha-
tested various experimental techniques, and worked on alpha-tests for
others; and occasionally people have posted little demonstration games
whose whole purpose was to propose a specific gameplay mechanic.
I haven't really made a habit of publishing the results of alpha-
testing in some sort of compendium of feedback received -- but
generally that's because I consider the finished game the results, in
the sense that that's what the alpha testers and I came up with. I can
see the point that this doesn't warn other authors about blind alleys
we found, but on the whole I'm not sure how of many those were
especially interesting -- a lot of the time the feedback meant that we
added some features to the system in order to make it more user
friendly, not that we ripped out stuff and went back to the beginning.
I've scrapped a couple of projects entirely due to strongly negative
alpha feedback, but again, they were so idiosyncratic to start with
that I'm not sure it would be worth writing up the experience...
However, I look forward to seeing what you come up with.
David Fisher
<Y6KdnQ7cA6ALVJLV...@comcast.com>, Jeff
Nyman<jeffnyman__nospam__@gmail__nospam.com> wrote:
> "Emily Short" <ems...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
> news:309ff9b8-06b5-4cd2...@m36g2000hse.googlegroups.com...
>
>
>> There's http://ifwiki.org/index.php/Past_raif_topics , which is a
>> fairly heroic job of organizing and classifying information that comes
>> up on RAIF: is that the kind of thing you had in mind? If not, what do
>> you envision?
>
> To a certain extent this is good. Of course those link to newsgroup
> discussions, which to someone trying to learn or distill what a
> community has learned, a set of discussions like that (which often
> meanders and often has side-topics) is not the best way to convey
> knowledge.
Thus the IF book I am currently writing, which is intended to be a distillation of everything related to IF authoring contained in the RAIF archives.
But it won't necessarily be easy to update; I am trying to keep it as readable as possible (and printable as a self contained book), which conflicts with the idea of being modifiable by other people (like a Wiki would be). If some kind of "IFKB" existed (mentioned elsewhere in this read), the topics in the book would be linked to relevant sections of the IFKB, which seems like the best of both worlds to me (a readable non-language-specific reference linked to up to date information and implementation details/code snippets for specific languages).
> But, that said, I think the past topics is pretty nice.
Thanks! (To Emily, too).
David Fisher
(Note to self: must stop using so many brackets (parentheses)).
dott.Piergiorgio
[snip because of lack of line breaks in your reply...]
I can ask, for IF knowledge base you mean something like Roger Firth's
Inform Faq, but more universal and general ?
http://www.firthworks.com/roger/informfaq/index.html
For the classic Wiki problem (the continuous edit) I suggest that wiki
can be used for building & brainstorming on the idea or topic, and when
is reached a good version of it, fix it in an static webpage (whose can
be also a write-protected wiki entry) AFAICT that is how are managed the
various internal wikis used in corporate intranet environments.
Best regards from Italy.
Dott. Piergiorgio.
Eric Eve
> Where I found you could really start to appeal to people is when
> you got responses like this:
>
> "So, a game that's a story? Or story that's a game? Okay, so what,
> though? I can get that with .... oh, you mean the interactivity
> model is more ...."
>
> More .... what? *That* is the sort of the key thing I kept
> focusing on with people. What specific elements of the interaction
> model with textual IF were *different enough* from other game
> formats and yet *similar enough* to reading a story that textual
> IF was seen as providing a unique gaming/reading experience. That
> experience is one that means textual IF does not *compete* with
> novels or other game formats necessarily , but rather makes
> textual IF stand apart as a viable format in its own right, one
> that can engage and entertain people for reasons that are both
> similar and dissimilar to novels and other game formats. In other
> words, utilizing the strengths of both to provide a relatively
> unique hybrid.
>
> In just about all cases, I never found games/stories of textual IF
> that outside audiences really rallied behind.
I've been wondering about this statement since I read it. Do you
mean, that you never found existing works of IF that your audiences
were totally happy with, or that you couldn't find any that showed
any signs of coming close (if only half-way close)? If you mean the
latter, that leads me to wonder if:
(a) The audiences you're investigating have interests that barely
overlap with those of this community (in that none of the games
we're happy to write and play engage your target audience); or
(b) None of the members of this community (or any other known
authors of IF) has the ability to craft a decent IF narrative (of
the sort your target audience might be interested in); or
(c) The medium of IF is simply not fit for conveying the kinds of
narrrative that your target audience would appreciate; or
(d) The techniques for producing satisfactory narrative IF have
not yet been developed; or
(e) Some works of reasonably good narrative IF exist, but you
(and your test audience) haven't come across them.
I suspect that (a) is partly true and partly false (as all too many
generalizations about "the community" tend to be); that is, my sense
is that at least some members of this community would like to both
write and read/play good narrative IF. But it may be, of course,
that those of us acclimatized to existing IF may have different
expectations of good narrative IF from those of your outsiders. I
think it would be surprising if no existing IF author had the
ability to produce at least half-way decent narrative IF, which
makes me a little sceptical of (b). If (e) is at all likely to be
the case, I'm sure there are people here who would be able to
suggest what the best narrative works of IF are you should try out
on your audience, but I suspect this is not the issue either. It
seems to me that you're operating on the assumption that (d) is the
best explanation, which strikes me as possible but not beyond
reasonable doubt, which unfortunately does not rule out (c).
This is in no way intended as a negative criticism of what you're
trying to do; I for one would be extremely interested to learn what
comes out of it, and what you find the successful techniques for
producing good narrative IF to be. Also, your work with your group
may constitute at least a partial test of the truth or falsehood of
explanation (c), which would be an interesting result in itself.
If, on the other hand, by " I never found games/stories of textual
IF that outside audiences really rallied behind" you mean only that
none were found to be *totally* satisfactory, that might imply that
some were found to be partially satisfactory (in terms of the
interests and expectations of this outside audience), and it would
then be interesting to know what distinguished this partially
satisfactory group of games. Were there, for example, particular
techniques that this audience found promising but not sufficiently
well executed?
> What the audiences did rally behind were some of the potential
> that was seen in the concept, if only ....
> And it's the "if only" that often kept coming back to the
> storytelling ability and the ability of the author of the game to
> make a truly compelling experience that exploited aspects of both
> storytelling and game, all within a textual format.
Again, I should have thought that some existing works of IF might
come closer to doing that than others (since many don't even attempt
it, while others clearly are trying to tell a story).
> Just about everyone could see that it was easy to make a textual
> IF "game." Just throw in a minimal setting, a lot of objects, and
> some puzzles here and there. Bam. You have a game.
Sure; and it may be that such games get a more sympathetic response
here than they would among the kind of audience you're
investigating, which in part goes back to my possibility (a). We've
all played games like this (well, nearly all, I should heed my own
warning about generalizations) and that probably helps shapes our
expectations when we meet games that do quite a bit more.
> What separated textual IF, at least potentially, was the ability
> to tell truly effective and engaging stories (like many of the
> vast reading public find in static fiction) while allowing a level
> of interactivity within the context of that story.
Yes, though I suspect the kind of techniques you're looking for will
need to exploit (rather than merely allow) a level of interactivity
within a narrative context.
> That just speaks to the players/readers. I also found this kind of
> thinking spoke to potential authors. They wanted to know what
> techniques were possible to achieve certain effects. But those
> effects were desired only insofar as audiences were known to
> respond to them. But were audiences known to respond to them?
> Which audiences? Was it possible to modulate the use of a
> technique to engage different audiences or even engage the same
> audience but in different ways?
All interesting questions, but they leave me wondering to what
extent audiences have to be educated to appreciate IF. By 'educated'
I don't mean formally taught (necessarily), but rather attuned to
whatever conventions IF needs to employ to achieve its effects (the
obvious example being coming to accept the limited kinds of commands
that that usefully be entered by the player/reader; another example
being agreement on what it is or is not reasonable to expect a work
of IF to implement).
>> How do we know when community expectations of the craft are
>> sufficiently raised?
>
> It's a good question and one I don't have an answer to. I do think
> that part of it would be by regular discussion of the craft that
> is referenceable and provides for actionable growth. For example,
> why is it that when I brought up menu-based conversations (in my
> "Teaching Storytelling (via IF)" thread) as being off-putting to
> many people, there was so much initial surprise? But then all the
> sudden many other people here chimed in saying the same thing. And
> some authors were surprised at that.
Although, interestingly, IIRC the reasons given for disliking
menu-based conversations were not wholly different from the reasons
given for preferring some form of ASK/TELL system in Mike Roberts's
article on "Choosing a Conversation System" in the TADS 3 Technical
Manual; IOW this was not some wholly new conclusion concerning
something that had never been discussed before in a reasonably
accessible place. And of course this is not the only place (outside
RAIF discussion threads) that one can find discussion of the pros
and cons of various IF conversation systems.
Conversely, I don't think it is the case that conversation menus are
universally disliked. At the risk of making the kind of
generalization about "the community" I regard as potentially
suspect, my impression is that moderate mainstream opinion accepts
that different kinds of conversation system suit different games. As
an author I've always preferred to use some form of ASK/TELL, but as
a player I can't say I've always disliked conversation menus every
time I've encountered them; sometimes they seem to work well enough.
> I'm not saying this means the authors are "bad" or anything; but
> it does show a community that is sometimes out of touch with its
> own experience base. So, in a way, I agree with you: how do we
> know when the expectations are raised? Right now, we don't,
> because people -- in some cases -- don't even know what the
> expectations of their own community are.
As Emily Short pointed out elsewhere in this thread (if I'm not
misunderstanding her), I think it would be dangerous to draw this
conclusion from this particular piece of evidence. Of course it
partly depends which "people" we're talking about; I suspect people
who have been around long enough to read some of the material
available (e.g. on web sites like Emily's, or the articles on Brass
Lantern, or sections on the craft of IF by Graham Nelson and Mike
Roberts in the DM4 or the TADS 3 Technical Manual, and so on and so
forth) and to have followed many of the discussions on RAIF and
RGIF, and to have read quite a reviews on RGIF, SPAG etc., will have
developed a fairly good sense of what kinds of thing are (almost)
always execrated (poor writing, pointless mazes, unimplemented
scenery, badly clued puzzles etc.), what kinds of thing are
generally approved, and what kinds of thing are matters of dispute
or individual taste (into which category conversation systems seem
to me to fall).
Of course, new members of the community won't have absorbed this,
but that's likely to be true of neophytes in any field.
> They certainly then can't speak to the expectations of people who
> don't share the background, traditions, and conventions of that
> community.
No, indeed (and I repeat it's very interesting to learn of your
experiences with such people).
But, to go off at something of a tangent (since I realize this is
tangential to most of what you've been saying), I sometimes feel
there's a lack of clarity in some discussions about wanting to reach
people outside "the community". At least, there seem to me to be two
quite different conceptions in view:
(1) There are a significant number of people out there who would
enjoy IF as it currently is and would be hapy to join "the
community" as it is, if only they knew about it (the issue is then
how to find them and let them know of our existence).
(2) There are a significant number of people out there who would
enjoy IF if only it were different in some way (the issue is then to
change the nature of IF to appeal to these people).
Of course, both these ideas may be true, but we're in danger of
talking at cross-purposes if we don't keep them distinct. It also
seems to me to be quite unrealistic to tell "the community" that we
"the community" should change the nature of IF in order to attract
more players/readers/members. For one thing, "the community" is not
the kind of entity that can meaningfully take on such a project
(only individuals or groups of individuals committed to such a goal
can do that) and for another, many member of "the community" are
presumably here pursuing a hobby which they're broadly happy with,
and have no particular interest in recruiting more players just for
the sake of it, particular if it means fixing something they don't
see as broke. Appeals to change the nature of IF to appeal to a
larger audience *can* sound as self-defeating as appeals to make
chess more drafts/checkers to appeal to a wider audience.
And of course, this *is* tangential to what you're saying, since
you're clearly not saying that we all need to change what we do,
you're simply investigating what would appeal to a different kind of
audience (and suggesting that those of us with an interest in such
matters might learn from this).
> So I guess what I'm more talking about here is simply setting
> expectations for how we, as a community, experiment. Those
> expectations, when realized, may then further help the community
> realize another higher set of expectations about where the craft
> goes and the different ways it can go there and how and when it
> can appeal to different audiences.
>
> (I realize I often say things like "we as a community" and that
> would then include me ... and that's probably a bit optimistic
> given that I haven't done anything for the community. So I realize
> that in a lot of ways everytime I speak I do so from some fairly
> shaky ground.)
I think the problem with phrases like "we as a community" is that it
can all too easily suggest something a good deal more organized that
"we as a community" are. To the extent that your musings have
inspired Jim Aikin to set up an IF Development Workshop, that's all
well and good, of course, but it also illustrates that nothing much
will happen unless particular people take certain initiatives and
other people are persuaded to join in, which (I suspect) will always
be something rather differently from "we as a community" agreeing to
adopt a certain policy or to organize feedback in a certain way or
do anything else; "we as a community" are simply not the sort of
organized entity with any mechanism for decision-making that can
said to achieve any such things.
OTOH ISTM that you have already done quite a bit for this community
by reporting your findings to date and stimulating a good deal of
very interesting discussion!
-- Eric
David Fisher
message news:ctWPj.21527$o06....@tornado.fastwebnet.it...
> David Fisher ha scritto:
>
> [snip because of lack of line breaks in your reply...]
Sorry about that -- different news reader to normal ... (it was also meant
to stay inside the original thread. D'oh!).
> I can ask, for IF knowledge base you mean something like Roger Firth's
> Inform Faq, but more universal and general ?
The idea was basically to have a set of editable "how to do task X in
language Y" topics which anyone can update.
Here is the original thread:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.int-fiction/browse_thread/thread/438aeb5525f86c8b
> For the classic Wiki problem (the continuous edit) I suggest that wiki can
> be used for building & brainstorming on the idea or topic, and when is
> reached a good version of it, fix it in an static webpage (whose can be
> also a write-protected wiki entry)
Thanks for that thought,
David Fisher
Jeff Nyman
news:fupjcn$8m6$1...@frank-exchange-of-views.oucs.ox.ac.uk...
>> In just about all cases, I never found games/stories of textual IF that
>> outside audiences really rallied behind.
>
> I've been wondering about this statement since I read it. Do you mean, ...
You are correct. This was a big vague and non-informative on my part. What I
meant was that while most people agreed there were some interesting elements
to the story, or interesting puzzles as part of a game, just about
everything we looked at just didn't read very well.
It was kind of like if you had a novel that had a cool character but a
boring plot. Or a nifty story idea but cardboard characters. Or interesting
characters and an interesting plot, but with horrible writing. The various
things that would make an editor go: Sorry, but no.
It was also felt that textual IF offered interesting challenges for a reader
because now the reader has to become more active. So I often found people
thinking about how one of their favorite novels or stories could be
translated into textual IF. So if they read a book by Stephen King or Dean
Koontz or Alastair Reynolds, they were interested in how that could
translate --- keeping the strengths of the writing but exploiting the
strengths of the interactivity. It's that latter element that was found to
be really lacking.
An interesting example of this was "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
which many people felt worked a bit as a game because the book itself was so
quirky. But people often looked at it like this: "I checked out the game
because I liked the book. So I figured the game was worth a chance. Having
done that, would I have checked out the book if I just had the game to go
on?" The answer was always no.
> (a) The audiences you're investigating have interests that barely
> overlap with those of this community (in that none of the games we're
> happy to write and play engage your target audience); or
I think this is partly true to some extent but they do have interests that
overlap if textual IF is seen as a storytelling medium that happens to allow
more interactivity. Some games did engage the audience, no doubt; but while
they did, they mainly engaged as games and even then that only worked for a
bit of time because textual IF, these days, really can't compete very well
solely on a game level.
> (b) None of the members of this community (or any other known authors
> of IF) has the ability to craft a decent IF narrative (of the sort your
> target audience might be interested in); or
I don't think that's true. (I know you aren't stating this as fact, but
presenting it as hypothetical.) I rather think that people just haven't put
emphasis on IF narrative (or elements of storytelling) that the target
audience I was dealing with would appreciate. This target audience was not
just writers, of course, but also readers. That's the key point here: the
audience I'm seeking are not writers, professional or otherwise. What I'm
seeking is the potential vast audience that already exists of readers of
fiction. There are *millions* out there.
I'm not saying all those millions would flock to textual IF, of course. But,
when you have a format that is based on reading text (like books), and that
has characters and settings (like books), and that has a protagonist that
the player/reader is ostensibly supposed to associate/sympathize with in
some fashion (like in books), it seems a bit of an oversight to not look at
how to target this kind of audience, given the many parallels.
And, mind, this audience did in fact see the interactive potential of
textual IF. That was a key point, in fact, that distinguished textual IF
from pure static fiction and even other game formats.
> (c) The medium of IF is simply not fit for conveying the kinds of
> narrrative that your target audience would appreciate; or
Again, I don't think that's true, but I admit: that's just a hypothesis on
my part. In fact, your statement is really my null hypothesis (which, of
course, usually exists to be disproved, hopefully).
> (d) The techniques for producing satisfactory narrative IF have not yet
> been developed; or
Or the necessary *expectations* haven't been set such that these techniques
are actively promoted and studied ... assuming, of course, that the audience
I mentioned above is one that is desired to be courted. (Clearly if you are
writing solely for the existing textual IF community, much of what I keep
blabbing about is going to be of much less importance.)
I think this is really the key point here. The techniques of narrative IF
probably do exist -- if, as I have been proposing, many of those techniques
can be borrowed from static fiction. The trick is that the techniques
certainly would require some modification here and there in order to exploit
the benefits of interactivity in a textual medium.
So, yes, I think this is probably hitting on the key element. Such
techniques are extant but perhaps not developed or, at the very least, not
experimented with much because most textual IF is geared to a community that
(perhaps?) hasn't seen the need to do so. Within that community, that makes
sense. But if the goal is to bring in "outsiders" then the question becomes:
which outsiders? Who are they?
My answer was: let's try the vast reading public who already enjoys reading
lots of text. Then try out textual IF examples with them. What do they like?
What do they not like? What did they think would make the experience more of
what they did like and less of what they did not? And so forth.
> (e) Some works of reasonably good narrative IF exist, but you (and your
> test audience) haven't come across them.
Very possible. In fact, I tried to find relevant works that would showcase
different aspects of what the textual IF format was capable of. It was
difficult to really come up with this, except by just trying the games. But
the problem is it takes a lot of time to try them and figure out which ones
might be "better" to present.
> write and read/play good narrative IF. But it may be, of course, that
> those of us acclimatized to existing IF may have different expectations of
> good narrative IF from those of your outsiders.
Certainly that's the case to a large extent. People who grow up with
conventions or traditions are clearly more likely to tolerate or enjoy them
while others see them as impediments. (You can even make this distinction
between readers of literary and so-called popular fiction, where often
people acclimatized to one have trouble understanding why others can't
become so acclimatized just by simple exposure.)
> satisfactory group of games. Were there, for example, particular
> techniques that this audience found promising but not sufficiently well
> executed?
People liked the use of first-person. It was found to be the most amenable
format for textual IF, although third-person seemed to have possibilities
but there wasn't enough example data to go on.
People liked the idea of the protagonist (PC) being totally distinct from
the player. Some works certainly did that (like "Rameses" and "A Crimson
Spring"). It was felt this could be taken a lot further.
People liked the idea of having to work information out of people, like NPCs
that would help further flesh out the story situation and what was going on.
They felt there could be more work here in terms of making the NPCs not just
machines that regurgitate information with the "press of the right button"
(i.e., ask the right thing or select the right menu choice). It was felt
that NPCs could be given a life of their own, so to speak. Not in the
context of making them wander around "intelligently" -- but rather the
potential for having their own motives and desires, often very much in
conflict with that of the player/protagonist. Further, the actions taken by
the player -- cumulatively -- would determine how the NPCs responded in the
story. There weren't many techniques seen like this, but people felt that if
it existed, it would be engaging and challenging.
> All interesting questions, but they leave me wondering to what extent
> audiences have to be educated to appreciate IF. By 'educated' I don't mean
> formally taught (necessarily), but rather attuned to whatever conventions
> IF needs to employ to achieve its effects (the obvious example being
> coming to accept the limited kinds of commands that that usefully be
> entered by the player/reader; another example being agreement on what it
> is or is not reasonable to expect a work of IF to implement).
Certainly I think this overall statement is true. What I wanted to do,
however, before educating was find out what conventions were truly
necessary, which were simply sufficient (for a given purpose), and which
were not really conventions at all, but simply limitations imposed due to
lack of expectations.
- Jeff
Eric Eve
>
> It was also felt that textual IF offered interesting challenges
> for a reader because now the reader has to become more active. So
> I often found people thinking about how one of their favorite
> novels or stories could be translated into textual IF. So if they
> read a book by Stephen King or Dean Koontz or Alastair Reynolds,
> they were interested in how that could translate --- keeping the
> strengths of the writing but exploiting the strengths of the
> interactivity. It's that latter element that was found to be
> really lacking.
I'm a bit sceptical that a favourite novel or story *can* be
translated into textual IF. Of course, that depends on what you mean
by "translated"; in particular I don't mean that you couldn't write
a piece of IF based on the themes, ideas, characters and elements of
the plot of an existing novel or story, but I suspect that in most
cases the adaptation would need to be more drastic than the word
"translate" suggests to me. In particular, I suspect the nature of
the medium probably places constraints on the kind of narrative
structures that are likely to work well, and that these constraints
will turn out to be rather different from those that operate in
novels, drama, film and so forth (at least as different as the
constraints of those forms are from one another, and quite possibly
more so).
> I'm not saying all those millions would flock to textual IF, of
> course. But, when you have a format that is based on reading text
> (like books), and that has characters and settings (like books),
> and that has a protagonist that the player/reader is ostensibly
> supposed to associate/sympathize with in some fashion (like in
> books), it seems a bit of an oversight to not look at how to
> target this kind of audience, given the many parallels.
Sure, of course this is question worth investigating, but I wonder
if the parallels may turn out to be as misleading as they are
helpful. That is, they may be helpful in providing categories of
things one might reasonably want to achieve in textual IF, but
potentially misleading in terms of the techniques best suited to
achieving them. For examples, techniques for establishing setting in
IF can on the one hand exploit interactivity (the player/reader can
choose to move around, examine details and otherwise probe the
environment in a way static fiction can't really reproduce), but on
the other hand needs to be constrained by the limitations of how
much text can usefully be displayed on screen at once (in room
descriptions, for instance), and the need to convey important
information about the environment without distracting the player
with too much irrelevant detail (here I'm only summarizing what
umpteen better qualified people have said before). I think in
practice this makes the techniques for establishing setting in
textual IF very different from those that are likely to work well in
print fiction, and the same may apply to the other elements. I don't
at all mean that this doesn't mean that these elements aren't worth
thinking about - of course they are - but I do think some of them
(such as setting) have already received quite a bit of attention and
others may need to be considered outside the print fiction box.
> Or the necessary *expectations* haven't been set such that these
> techniques are actively promoted and studied ... assuming, of
> course, that the audience I mentioned above is one that is desired
> to be courted.
Well, this sounds a bit chicken-and-egg to me. I can see why you're
saying that expectations might help to drive techniques, but in
another sense the techniques need to be demonstrated before there
can be realistic expectations.
> I think this is really the key point here. The techniques of
> narrative IF probably do exist -- if, as I have been proposing,
> many of those techniques can be borrowed from static fiction. The
> trick is that the techniques certainly would require some
> modification here and there in order to exploit the benefits of
> interactivity in a textual medium.
Again I wonder if "borrowed" and "modification" do justice to the
degree of adaptation that may be required. I fully agree it's worth
asking what features make print narrative work and how one might
achieve analogous effects in textual IF, but the achieving of
analogous effects might require rather different techniques (or
adaptations that are more radical than 'modification' may suggest).
To be sure, in both print fiction and IF one wants effectively
written prose, and techniques for writing effective prose in one
medium may apply quite largely in another, just as I can see that
techniques for writing good dialogue in print fiction can usefully
inform IF narrative to a considerable degree. But even there the
fact that the conversation may take a different turn depending on
player input adds a whole order of magnitude of potential
complication that writers of print fiction have never had to
consider. There's also the question of how far dialogue in print
fiction and dialogue in textual IF are performing the same
functions - it's true that there should be a considerable overlap in
function if the IF is also be good narrative, but dialogue in IF may
have to carry additional burdens not true of dialogue in print
fiction (in particular, providing the player/reader with information
s/he needs in order to decide what to do at some future point in the
narrative). I suspect that one of the reasons it has proved so
difficult to write NPC conversations that all players find
satisfactory is that the requirements of game-play and the
requirements of narrative (NPC characterization, natural-sounding
dialogue and the like), all too often pull in different directions.
I'm not saying they can't be harmonized somehow, but print fiction
of itself won't supply a model for harmonizing them (I'm not saying
that you're saying they are; I'm rather suggesting that that
experience gleaned from the ludic side of IF is going to prove just
as important to your goal as the techniques of print fiction).
> So, yes, I think this is probably hitting on the key element. Such
> techniques are extant but perhaps not developed or, at the very
> least, not experimented with much because most textual IF is
> geared to a community that (perhaps?) hasn't seen the need to do
> so.
Does "extant" mean actually extant in existing works of IF or
waiting to be discovered in some Platonic realm of ideal IF? I get
the feeling that quite a lot of people in the community have
*wanted* to tell stories through their IF, and that many players
(myself included) tend to prefer IF works that have a reasonably
strong story element to them to those that are purely abstract
puzzle-fests with minimal narratives. So I'm not sure that this is a
community that has in general seen no need to develop techniques for
story-telling in IF (as I said in my previous post). If as a whole
we haven't succeeded, it may be either because we lack the skills
(we're better programmers than writers perhaps) or perhaps because
we haven't been asking the right kinds of questions about how to
improve our narrative techniques or giving enough attention to
theoretical and technical questions about the narratology of IF
(which is where your line of inquiry could turn out to be highly
fruitful).
> Within that community, that makes sense.
Or it might be, as I suggested (and I think you agreed), that our
expectations have been shaped by the IF we've been exposed to (so
that we're more tolerant to the limitations of existing IF than your
group of outsiders is). Whether than means we set our sites too low
or your outsiders simply have unrealistic expectations of the what
the medium can achieve, I don't know. I shall thus be *very*
interested to learn how your researches proceed.
> People liked the idea of having to work information out of people,
> like NPCs that would help further flesh out the story situation
> and what was going on. They felt there could be more work here in
> terms of making the NPCs not just machines that regurgitate
> information with the "press of the right button" (i.e., ask the
> right thing or select the right menu choice). It was felt that
> NPCs could be given a life of their own, so to speak. Not in the
> context of making them wander around "intelligently" -- but rather
> the potential for having their own motives and desires, often very
> much in conflict with that of the player/protagonist. Further, the
> actions taken by the player -- cumulatively -- would determine how
> the NPCs responded in the story. There weren't many techniques
> seen like this, but people felt that if it existed, it would be
> engaging and challenging.
I suspect the reason this hasn't been done more is the sheer amount
of work involved in trying to implement this kind of thing. I at
least *tried* to implement NPCs with some (albeit not all) of these
characteristics in "The Elysium Enigma" and "Blighted Isle" (in the
latter, for example, there are a number of NPCs with different
agendas and the PC has to decide which of them to align himself
with, which may well then alienate some of the others), but it felt
a vast amount of work in relation to other aspects of the game, and
the results fell far short of my ambitions (partly just out of
fatigue, though lack of skill doubtless also contributed!).
To make NPCs who are this lifelike, and who have to exhibit a
convincing range of responses depending on what the player does, is
a *tremendous* amount of work relative to most other aspects of
IF-authoring (laying out the map, populating it with objects, and
setting up puzzles). I suspect this may be one reason why it hasn't
been attempted that much -- too few (amateur, hobbyist) IF authors
have the stamina!
OTOH, the NPC features built into the TADS 3 library suggests to me
that Mike Roberts must have given quite a lot of thought to
questions of this sort when he designed this part of the library.
The combination of Topic Entries, ActorStates, Agenda Items and the
like all seem designed to support the kind of NPC complexity you're
looking for. The programming framework is largely there, but this
particular set of tools is perhaps too new for there to be a
recognized set of techniques for making the best use of them.
> What I wanted to do,
> however, before educating was find out what conventions were truly
> necessary, which were simply sufficient (for a given purpose), and
> which were not really conventions at all, but simply limitations
> imposed due to lack of expectations.
Sure, this is all worth asking about.
-- Eric
Jason Stokes
themselves: I think if anything the IF community is too amorphous and
inward-looking. I have more tolerance for this than most, but for most
people, what they really need is a single web portal, a one-stop shop, for
getting into IF . The IF archive, with its thousands of games, is just too
intimidating. For the newcomer, less is more. A page with links to the
best 20 free games, perhaps the best in each genre, is much better. Plus a
blog with /short/ reviews and snippets of information on what's going on in
the community. The ifwiki is similarly intimidating; it's a reference and a
meeting place for an existing community, not an introduction.
While it's wonderful, in some ways the IF /development/ community is too
healthy for its own good, in that there's an intimidating amount of stuff
out there. Winnowing down the chaff is vital. Ifiction.org looks close to
what I have in mind, except that it's a ghost site and has been since 2001
or so.
The games themselves: They need to make it easier on the player. Once upon
a time, text games were such a novelty people would voluntarily do a lot of
work to immerse themselves in them. They'd take notes and draw maps. These
days, people don't have the patience to do that, especially with all the
forms of instant gratification entertainment out there. The games need to
keep track of tasks and characters for you, and automap.
The upside is that many of the games people are doing today easily pawn the
best commercial games of the eighties. I'm playing "City of Secrets" by
Emily Short, and it is quite simply an extraordinarily polished piece of
work. If it had been released in the eighties or even the early nineties,
when IF was still a viable genre, it would have swept the gaming awards.
But /how do I find out about it?/ Especially if I've never played an IF
before. (Indeed, apparently the game is obscure even among IF fans, for
reasons unclear to me.) If you disagree with me about "City of Secrets",
insert your favorite IF produced in the last ten years. They are all, each
and every one of them, buried in the net. If finding the latest and best IF
from a standing start was itself an IF game, people would be complaining
about the obscurity of the clues.
S. John Ross
> from a standing start was itself an IF game, people would be complaining
> about the obscurity of the clues.
Well said :)
Emily Short
> Speaking more or less as a newcomer to IF fandom, if not the games
> themselves: I think if anything the IF community is too amorphous and
> inward-looking. I have more tolerance for this than most, but for most
> people, what they really need is a single web portal, a one-stop shop, for
> getting into IF . The IF archive, with its thousands of games, is just too
> intimidating. For the newcomer, less is more. A page with links to the
> best 20 free games, perhaps the best in each genre, is much better.
This sounds like roughly the intention behind
http://www.microheaven.com/IFGuide/
...which walks the player through playing instructions, downloading an
interpreter, and then choosing a game that will run on their platform
of choice. (Obviously, of course, the novice has to find that site...)
But it's not that no one has thought about this problem before.
Jim Aikin
Yes, well, finding the site would be a good trick. The site design is
primitive and unattractive by today's standards, and seems not to have
been updated recently.
Seems to me the IFDB is a more natural home for this type of
information. I haven't looked around there too much, but if there isn't
a page with general introductory information, it should be easy enough
to add one. I might even volunteer to write it.
--JA
Paul J. Furio
because I think his post more eloquently sums up some of my points
below:
I'd like to clarify some points, after reading the reponses to this
thread. I think there has been some great insight, but I think that
part of my original post was somehow not given as much thought as I
meant to give.
Now, I'm in agreement that some writers/implementers workshops would
be great for the producers of games. I'm also in agreement that this
is a community, not a business, and that fracturing the community is
not my intent. However, both of these points focus on the producers
of games, and not the players of games. Thus, I'd like to speak to my
perception of the players perception, if you will.
The vast majority of players (or consumers as they're referred to in
the business world) really like conformity. We want a variety of
experiences, but all in similar packaging. We enjoy a familiarity of
time, which is why we still watch television shows when they're on
even if we have a VCR or DVR, and we look forward to the coffee break
the next day to talk about who got kicked off Idol. We also want ease
of use, without having to worry too much about how things work, just
knowing that they work. Automobiles are devices that take gasoline
and transport us from point A to point B, but most drivers don't worry
too much about the workings of their internal combustion engine. They
just let the repair shop do the maintaince. Players also want
something new to look forward to, and we seek out movie previews and
hints about upcoming books or titles voraciously.
In my opinion, part of Infocom's success was due to their mastery of
(at least this segment of) understanding the desires of players. The
uniformity of packaging meant that every game was instantly familiar
upon opening it up, although the experience itself would be exciting
and new. Releases were fairly regular, and were well advertised and
previewed via the Status Line and magazine advertisements. And the
games just ran, with no worries about finding the right Interpreter,
or associating filetypes. (Besides Broadband proliferation, a similar
ease-of-use statement could be made about MP3s replacing CDs as the
dominant music format.)
My point is that instead of focusing largely on our needs as creators
of content and game designers, we need to be cognisent of how we
present our titles to those who would play them, and how comfortable
new people will be experiencing and opening themselves up to our
games. We want to make this barrier to entry as low as possible, so
that anyone who hears of our titles can come to a familiar website,
learn about their options (now and in the future), download and
install our games quickly and easily, and begin playing in an
environment that is familar and welcoming.
For good examples of websites that have tens of thousands of people
playing their games, I'd point to Pogo.com, or games.msn.com. Sure,
these are a slightly different audience, but the concept of ease of
finding an experience and ease of use is what I'm getting at. Again,
I'll also bring up Steam, which is more like the community we have,
where individual developers release their games through its familiar
client console, but this system certainly doesn't preclude other
developers from releasing titles anyway they want. However, there is
a clear advantage to the exposure of well polished, consistantly
formatted presentation of Steam games over more independantly released
titles.
In closing, I think we have some good potential to expand our
audience. People read online, as evidenced by blogs and journals.
People play games on computers, as evidenced by the past thirty years
of history. There's no reason we can't capture those gamers who would
enjoy a text adventure, or interactive fiction experience, who
otherwise would not look to this genre or the vast content already
produced as a viable entertainment souce. I think we need to simply
understand the potential audience a little better, and perhaps partner
a little more with our existing community base, as well as making more
frequent use of the UUIDs, Feelies.org resources, Game Art Standards,
and writers workshops that will produce a consistently high level
experience across all regions of the IF community. This, in turn,
will draw a larger crowd of players, which I believe can be a
refreshing revitalization of this genre.
Emily Short
wanted to say a couple things at the time, and was just too busy with
other tasks. However:
On Apr 26, 2:23 pm, "Paul J. Furio" <p...@staticengine.com> wrote:
> The vast majority of players (or consumers as they're referred to in
> the business world) really like conformity. We want a variety of
> experiences, but all in similar packaging.
I entirely see your point here. To some degree, IFDB and the creation
of multi-type interpreters is designed to help with that, though: the
packaging differences between a TADS 3 game, a z-machine game, or an
ADRIFT game are somewhat simplified for the player, because he no
longer has to understand what the types mean and maintain multiple
interpreters for them; and at least Zoom is able to plug in to IFDB
and get access to stuff there directly.
I continue to think that a front page *AT* IFDB would be better than a
front page elsewhere, because it would provide another attractive way
in to the database. But I know various people are working on their own
takes on this problem.
My question really is what you (and others) see as desirable features
of the standard packaging, beyond this. I really like having blorbed
metadata and cover art on a game, because it now makes that game
easier to file and more attractive in Zoom; are there other things you
have in mind?
(Feelies.org, incidentally, has been pretty quiet of late. I've passed
my part of the job on to others, but I am not sure how actively anyone
is pursuing new releases. On the other hand, that was mostly designed
for physical production, and was aimed at the IF community itself,
where I think what we want here is resources for creating virtual
packaging -- imagery, supporting documents, etc. -- and that's a
different kettle of fish.)
Paul J. Furio
> My question really is what you (and others) see as desirable features
> of the standard packaging, beyond this. I really like having blorbed
> metadata and cover art on a game, because it now makes that game
> easier to file and more attractive in Zoom; are there other things you
> have in mind?
In my opinion, I think we have something to learn from the bands Nine
Inch Nails, and the business owner and blogger Joel Spolsky who writes
JoelOnSoftware.com. We can reach a wider audience, and perhaps even
approach games that are net even or possibly profitable, if we use
market segmentation properly.
There are people who play IF who will never pay for it. That's fine,
there's plenty of free, quality IF out there. There are people who
enjoy free IF who would pay $5, or $10, or $20 for a game if it came
with something a little extra, like some feelies or nice packaging or
a soundtrack on CD (or CD-R). There are people who have never heard
of IF, fear downloading free software, but if they saw an entertaining
or interesting looking boxed game for $20-$50, they would buy it and
check it out. (There's also some crossover here of people who won't
take or purchase stuff that is inexpensive or free because they
believe "you get what you pay for", a fascinating business lesson that
I learned a little too late.)
What I'd like to see are a handful of companies, like the Illuminated
Lantern, that produce quality titles in physical packaging on a
regular basis, with goodies in the box, and do some semblance of
advertising. Perhaps they deal mainly through boutique game shops, or
museum gift stores depending on the genre of game. Perhaps they do
all their sales over the internet, with an instant download of the
game and a PDF of documentation, with physical goods shipped out
within a week. I'm not sure what the exact business model is, but I
think there's room for a half dozen or so businesses or organizations
doing retail quality work in the IF market, even if the output is only
100-500 physical units sold per game. I think that small run boutique
games can be at very least breakeven, and possibly profitable.
Coming from a background as a semi-pro touring musician, and currently
working in a professional full-time video game environment, I've seen
both ends of the marketing spectrum. In my opinion (and I don't have
hard research to back this up, so this is mostly anecdotal), IF games
are less "disposable" than music because of their interactivity, and
thus are less succeptable to the download-and-toss mentality of MP3s.
At the same time, these games don't have the massive costs of AAA
console titles, so they can be produced and marketed less expensively.
In summation, my current intention is for my next title (after this
years IFComp entry) to be available in a boxed version, with a printed
full color instructional and immersive booklet, as well as some
genuine feelies. I've already priced out the cost per box at under
$20, depending on exactly what feelies I go with. I'm guessing a
limited run of 100 boxes will be the goal, and I'll see where it goes
from there. After dropping $4k per run on printing 1000 of each of
the two CDs for my band, and still having half as many leftover
unsold, this is almost an inexpensive research project by comparison.
If it sells better than the CDs (not too difficult), I think I'd be
highly encouraged to seek out other like minded authors and developers
who wanted to produce physical products of their games, and see where
it goes from there.
Paul J. Furio
of Internet sniffing, it's clear I should probably get in contact with
the Textfyre guys.
Emily Short
> On May 3, 5:28 am, Emily Short <emsh...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>
> > My question really is what you (and others) see as desirable features
> > of the standard packaging, beyond this. I really like having blorbed
> > metadata and cover art on a game, because it now makes that game
> > easier to file and more attractive in Zoom; are there other things you
> > have in mind?
>
> In my opinion, I think we have something to learn from the bands Nine
> Inch Nails, and the business owner and blogger Joel Spolsky who writes
> JoelOnSoftware.com. We can reach a wider audience, and perhaps even
> approach games that are net even or possibly profitable, if we use
> market segmentation properly.
>
> There are people who play IF who will never pay for it. That's fine,
> there's plenty of free, quality IF out there. There are people who
> enjoy free IF who would pay $5, or $10, or $20 for a game if it came
> with something a little extra, like some feelies or nice packaging or
> a soundtrack on CD (or CD-R). There are people who have never heard
> of IF, fear downloading free software, but if they saw an entertaining
> or interesting looking boxed game for $20-$50, they would buy it and
> check it out. (There's also some crossover here of people who won't
> take or purchase stuff that is inexpensive or free because they
> believe "you get what you pay for", a fascinating business lesson that
> I learned a little too late.)
...hm. Okay -- this is not at all where I thought you were going with
this, but good luck with it.
Jim Aikin
I'll be interested to learn (if you care to share) what your reaction is.
First of all, I totally applaud you for your (tentative) business model.
I would love to see you succeed at it!
The reason I say that about Textfyre is not to disrespect Dave in any
way -- it's strictly because his business model doesn't fit well with my
independent creative spirit. From what I understand (unless it has
changed in the past few months) he's working on a model in which
implementers develop titles in a series to which he retains the
copyright, and over which he exercises creative control.
That's much more like network TV than like an indie rock band.
--JA
Paul J. Furio
> The reason I say that about Textfyre is not to disrespect Dave in any
> way -- it's strictly because his business model doesn't fit well with my
> independent creative spirit. From what I understand (unless it has
> changed in the past few months) he's working on a model in which
> implementers develop titles in a series to which he retains the
> copyright, and over which he exercises creative control.
Yes, I would much rather see an Infocom style method, which was also
similar to the production method (or at least the ideal to which we
strove) of my last group doing Casual Games. I'd rather hear pitches
of potential games to a "concerned group" (or perhaps the entire
"team"), make decisions about which ones will move forward, and then
have a serious production schedule with commitments for milestones and
in-box content. IP ownership could be negotiable on a game-by-game
basis, and would probably also adjust revenue sharing, and so on. I'd
really have to think about that part more solidly, and about how
"virtual" such a company could be, whether there would be real
employees, and so on.
I would also target a "literate adult" audience, as well, which I
think is a different niche than it appears Textfyre is after. I know
there's lots of money to be made marketing to children, but I think
that if the quality was consistantly high, the brand would be enough
of a draw that we could do a vast variety of different titles in many
many genres.
Still, I too am interested in seeing how Textfyre fares, as well as
what the future is of the Illuminated Lantern. I wish them all luck
and success!