The Future of IF
Jim Aikin
in a technical sense (more sophisticated parsers, etc.), though that's
always an interesting topic, but in a broader sense.
I'm bringing this up because I'm wondering about my own level of
commitment to the field. As a (once-upon-a-time) published science
fiction novelist, I have a strong bias in favor of actually getting
paid for my creative work. Thus, the idea that I'll forevermore be
writing my IF for free is, if not actively irksome, at least something
I need to take into account in planning my weekly schedule of
activities.
One way of looking at it is that for text-based IF to become
marketable, it would inevitably have to become a completely different
animal -- tricked out with graphics and music, click-and-use
inventory, a dumbed-down parser that the Great Unwashed could deal
with, and so on. If you buy this line of thought (and I'm not saying I
do or don't), what the IF community/ghetto has at present is actually
the best of all possible worlds -- very serviceable free tools for
creating free games, and a small but loyal fan base that actually
downloads our stuff.
(Does anybody have any idea how many IF fans there actually are at
present? Are we talking 200 people worldwide? 2,000? Surely not more
than that....)
On the other hand, a case could be made that at some point in the not
too distant future, some type of text-based IF could conceivably
resurface as a marketable commodity, at least in a modest sense. If
20,000 people will buy a paperback book by a virtually unknown SF
author (and they will), surely it's not much of a stretch to imagine
that one might be able to sell 20,000 copies of a $29.95 IF game if it
were (a) well written, (b) attractively packaged, (c) bug-free, (d)
competently distributed, and (e) imaginatively promoted.
For this to happen, it seems to me, we'd need at the very least a
cross-platform game interpreter that didn't look like a refugee from
1985 (or 1978...). After tinkering for a few weeks with the idea of
developing my own delivery platform, however, I've reluctantly
concluded that I'm not enough of a programmer to put it together.
Does anybody else think such a delivery platform is desirable? Or is
everybody but me happy writing free software?
FYI -- yes, I know about html tads and blorb/glulx. IMO, there's more
to looking credible in 2002 than just being able to slap your own
jpegs into the text window.
--Jim Aikin
************************************
"Those instances of it which lack
the quality referred to as 'swing'
are meaningless." --Duke Ellington
************************************
kodrik
> cross-platform game interpreter that didn't look like a refugee from
> 1985 (or 1978...). After tinkering for a few weeks with the idea of
> developing my own delivery platform, however, I've reluctantly
> concluded that I'm not enough of a programmer to put it together.
First, read this post
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=mxrpg+group:rec.arts.int-fiction&hl=en&selm=u90a4o2v9buo11%40corp.supernews.com&rnum=1
I am dedicating my time to writing a new engine to sell IF games. It will
make IF easily accessible to the masses and attractive as a licensing
product for some markets.
Right now, I am concentrating on enhancing my engine greatly, but when it's
ready I will start discussions to figure out what best ways to approach
selling the games so my engine can support them.
Meanwhile, if you want to email me, I will be glad to discuss with you the
posibiilties I currently see.
As for the player interface, my engine will be able to use Flash as a front
end so multimedia will not be an issue. Again, I will talk about this later
when I am at this stage but you are welcome to email me about it.
Kevin Forchione
news:f904a017.02041...@posting.google.com...
> One way of looking at it is that for text-based IF to become
> marketable, it would inevitably have to become a completely different
> animal -- tricked out with graphics and music, click-and-use
> inventory, a dumbed-down parser that the Great Unwashed could deal
> with, and so on.
Not interested. That's not why I do IF.
>If you buy this line of thought (and I'm not saying I
> do or don't), what the IF community/ghetto
I'm not sure "ghetto" is the right word, in that it implies, amongst other
things, "a situation conferring inferior status or limiting opportunity".
The IF community is more akin to a biker club.
>has at present is actually
> the best of all possible worlds -- very serviceable free tools for
> creating free games, and a small but loyal fan base that actually
> downloads our stuff.
Yep.
--Kevin
Jim Fisher
> too distant future, some type of text-based IF could conceivably
> resurface as a marketable commodity, at least in a modest sense. If
> 20,000 people will buy a paperback book by a virtually unknown SF
> author (and they will), surely it's not much of a stretch to imagine
> that one might be able to sell 20,000 copies of a $29.95 IF game if it
> were (a) well written, (b) attractively packaged, (c) bug-free, (d)
> competently distributed, and (e) imaginatively promoted.
I don't mean to sound pessimistic, but I seriously doubt that there will
ever be a sizable paying market for IF again. Now I don't doubt that there
is a marginal possibility that text adventures (with or without graphics)
could become popular for a time, possibly with the development of some new
platform such as a cell phone that plays text adventures (I understand they
have those). However, the work we have done for *free* over the last decade
has been both our greatest success as a community and our greatest inhibitor
with regard to monetary value. We have created hundreds and hundreds of
games of varying quality for *free*, devised numerous open-source
interpreters for virtually any platform for *free* and produced
walk-through, hints, and how-tos for *free.* Even given a revival in
popularity, how many people would actually pay for a text adventure now?
It is possible that a game time that could be created in the future that
might possibly command enough respect for people to actually pay for, but it
wouldn't have anything to do with the game itself. More probably it would
be because some famous, well-followed, main-stream static-text author (with
more of a following than the fabulous Douglas Adams) decided to do a
cross-over, say... Stephen King, and some well-funded agency publicized the
heck out of it.
Just my opinion.
--
Jim (AT) OnyxRing (DOT) com
Visit "An Inform Developer's Guide" or browse the
"ORLibrary" extensions to the standard library at
www.OnyxRing.com
----------------------
Some days you eat the code; some days the code eats you
Jim Fisher
Um, I retract this. I meant to say "as much of of more of a following
than..."
OKB (not okblacke)
> The IF community is more akin to a biker club.
And we all ride Corley Motors exclusively!
--
--OKB (not okblacke)
"When I'm on the road, I'm indestructible. No one can stop me. But they try."
--Ben
Jim Aikin
> http://groups.google.com/groups?q=mxrpg+group:rec.arts.int-fiction&hl=en&selm=u90a4o2v9buo11%40corp.supernews.com&rnum=1
I read that at the time you posted it. To be honest, it seemed a little
scattered to me. (Still does.) Hopping from Zork to minitel text games
to RPGs to online game-playing, by way of some kind of Bible for
children ... and then there's this whole thing about databasing IF
functions. That's your project too, right?
I'm thinking of something a little more conventional, I guess.
> I am dedicating my time to writing a new engine to sell IF games. It will
> make IF easily accessible to the masses and attractive as a licensing
> product for some markets.
Without knowing more specifics about what you have in mind, it's tough
for me to comment on that. Your parser was the subject of a recent
thread about ignoring not-understood words, as I recall. I thought some
of the points that were raised were cogent.
In the age of the Internet (though in a slightly different sense than
you mean if you were referring to your parser), everything is
"accessible to the masses." The trick, as Frank Zappa so pithily put it,
is to get the kid to walk up to the cash register with your hunk of
shrinkwrapped plastic in one hand and some money in the other. If you
can do that, you can make a living at it. If you can't, you can't. Real
simple.
> Right now, I am concentrating on enhancing my engine greatly, but when it's
> ready I will start discussions to figure out what best ways to approach
> selling the games so my engine can support them.
Isn't that backwards? Don't you support the games by building an engine
first, and *then* sell them? I understand you're not a native English
speaker, so I don't want to be too harsh, but I really don't understand
what you're getting at.
> As for the player interface, my engine will be able to use Flash as a front
> end so multimedia will not be an issue.
My impression is that Flash is mainly designed for Web content delivery.
(Correct me if I'm wrong -- maybe I'm thinking of Shockwave.) Maybe it's
just me, but I more or less hate the Web. Great informational medium,
lousy entertainment medium. For one thing, it ties up my phone line. For
another, it's slow-slow-slow. Then there's the non-trivial question of
how you get anyone to pay for Web content. At minimum, this requires a
secure server and stuff.
I'm an old-fashioned guy. (Yes, I'm over 50.) I like the idea of selling
CD-ROMs, because I have a weird idea that people are more likely to pay
for something they can hold in their hot little hand.
Thanks for your feedback, though. I'm really not trying to be a
curmudgeon here. I'm very interested in everything anyone has to say on
this topic. One of the interesting things about this community is that
there are so many points of view. The old blind-men-and-the-elephant
schtick.
--Jim Aikin
Jim Aikin
> I'm not sure "ghetto" is the right word, in that it implies, amongst other
> things, "a situation conferring inferior status or limiting opportunity".
I was being deliberately provocative. But I'd suggest that "limited
opportunity" is a precise characterization of the present situation, in
two related respects: (a) there's no money, and therefore (b) there's no
possibility of developing any type of IF that would require extensive
work with sophisticated software tools (and therefore money). Not saying
TADS 3 isn't sophisticated, but it's sophisticated specifically ***in
terms of the norms of this community.***
>>has at present is actually
>>the best of all possible worlds -- very serviceable free tools for
>>creating free games, and a small but loyal fan base that actually
>>downloads our stuff.
>
> Yep.
Okay. If the consensus is with you on that, then I'm simply out of step.
That's what I'm trying to find out.
--Jim Aikin
Jim Aikin
> Now I don't doubt that there
> is a marginal possibility that text adventures (with or without graphics)
> could become popular for a time, possibly with the development of some new
> platform such as a cell phone that plays text adventures (I understand they
> have those).
Ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh. (That's 9 ughs.)
> However, the work we have done for *free* over the last decade
> has been both our greatest success as a community and our greatest inhibitor
> with regard to monetary value. We have created hundreds and hundreds of
> games of varying quality for *free*, devised numerous open-source
> interpreters for virtually any platform for *free* and produced
> walk-through, hints, and how-tos for *free.* Even given a revival in
> popularity, how many people would actually pay for a text adventure now?
You may be right. On the other hand, "of varying quality" is a
significant qualifier. Most people who might be interested in playing a
text-based game (a) don't know our community exists, and if they do
happen to stumble on it (b) have no idea how to separate the wheat from
the chaff, content-wise.
> More probably it would
> be because some famous, well-followed, main-stream static-text author (with
> more of a following than the fabulous Douglas Adams) decided to do a
> cross-over, say... Stephen King, and some well-funded agency publicized the
> heck out of it.
Good suggestion!
--Jim Aikin
kodrik
> scattered to me. (Still does.) Hopping from Zork to minitel text games
> to RPGs to online game-playing, by way of some kind of Bible for
> children ... and then there's this whole thing about databasing IF
> functions. That's your project too, right?
No, the beginning was my personal experience and what brought me to decide
in designing this engine.
The project is a a server based engine that can interact with different
remote interface (flash, Java, xml).
> Without knowing more specifics about what you have in mind, it's tough
> for me to comment on that. Your parser was the subject of a recent
> thread about ignoring not-understood words, as I recall. I thought some
> of the points that were raised were cogent.
Well, I put my engine up saying it wasn't ready and the Ritual was to help
me improve on it at an early stage. It succeeded too well and prompted me
to write another engine.
Actually, the ignoring words was one good aspect of the parser and the
reaction during the phase I was improving on the Ritual and the engine were
positive, but they were some bad aspect:
* Disambiguiation.
* Match of parts of words. If you typed, "think about bob", it would see
the "out" and think that's what you meant.
* Work in creating objects with all possible interaction easily built in.
The two first one were solveable with the current system but the third
prompted me to take a whole different approach. It will still be structure
based but will match the "subject", "verb", "preposition", "direct object",
"indirect object" and perform appropriate action depending on behaviors
defined in the library.
Disambiguation and misunderstanding have both been solved also by matching
full word and identifying sentence structures.
>> Right now, I am concentrating on enhancing my engine greatly, but when
>> it's ready I will start discussions to figure out what best ways to
>> approach selling the games so my engine can support them.
>
>
> Isn't that backwards? Don't you support the games by building an engine
> first, and *then* sell them? I understand you're not a native English
> speaker, so I don't want to be too harsh, but I really don't understand
> what you're getting at.
The engine is made so games can be selled and since it's server based, some
of the playing environment is in the engine. For example:
* we could sell a minimum of $20, with most game being $5, it would help
sell more game by the playr having credits and being first attracted by a
pericular game
* we could have a credit-back guarantee like with payper-view movies, if
you play a game less than 15 minutes, you can cancel your purchase and get
credite for the value of the game.
* We could have a preview limited by time or other facter, play this game
for up to 10 minutes without logging in to see if you like it.
This is too early to talk about it that's why I said I would rather wait, I
will bring it up when the engine is ready but before commercial games are
finished so authors have an idea of what options they will have.
> My impression is that Flash is mainly designed for Web content delivery.
Flash and shockwave run great locally, there are many CDs sold whose
contents are based on this technology (especially kids games).
> (Correct me if I'm wrong -- maybe I'm thinking of Shockwave.) Maybe it's
> just me, but I more or less hate the Web. Great informational medium,
> lousy entertainment medium. For one thing, it ties up my phone line. For
> another, it's slow-slow-slow. Then there's the non-trivial question of
> how you get anyone to pay for Web content. At minimum, this requires a
> secure server and stuff.
All the games are run from my server so it doesn't require the author to
set anything up.
And yes, you will have to be connected to the internet to play as well as
create your game which will be a drawback for people like you, although not
for many people who have dedicated lines for the internet. There are
100,000s of people paying $10/month to play online role playing, it is a
market in demand.
I did this most importantly because the easiest and most lucrative market
to reach first is the mobile market. They make their money based connection
time so they want it to be server based and you get paid upfront a
licensing fee.
Also, being server based for internet play, we get much more information
about people playing our game and we can create a community which can
promote itself. When the community is large enough, we have data to support
the investment and interest to promote other distribution means (liek CDs).
> I'm an old-fashioned guy. (Yes, I'm over 50.) I like the idea of selling
> CD-ROMs, because I have a weird idea that people are more likely to pay
> for something they can hold in their hot little hand.
Yes, but my example with the Bible was to show how hard it can be to enter
the market of CDs. It is a market I want to reach, but I think the wisest
way to reach it is first to create the demand online.
Emily Short
jai...@musicplayer.com (Jim Aikin) wrote:
> I'm wondering how other IF authors see the future of this genre. Not
> in a technical sense (more sophisticated parsers, etc.), though that's
> always an interesting topic, but in a broader sense.
>
> I'm bringing this up because I'm wondering about my own level of
> commitment to the field. As a (once-upon-a-time) published science
> fiction novelist, I have a strong bias in favor of actually getting
> paid for my creative work. Thus, the idea that I'll forevermore be
> writing my IF for free is, if not actively irksome, at least something
> I need to take into account in planning my weekly schedule of
> activities.
1. I don't think IF is ever likely to be commercially viable again.
2. This does not bother me, since I don't really want it to be.
If I understand what you're saying in your posts, you'd like IF to sell
because then a) you'd be paid back for your time and also b) more
sophisticated resources would be involved. But then you get something
that puts game creation out of reach of the individual (e.g. me) and into
the hands of companies with marketing agendas, just like all those
commercial game companies out there already. They've done some good work
as well as bad, admittedly, but my sense is that for marketing reasons
there has been a bit of stagnation in what they're willing to try. Better
graphics engines, yes. Entirely new style of game, not so much. IF
remains vibrantly experimental, partly because it doesn't *have* to sell.
(NB that this is a barely-informed opinion which I gathered from the close
reading of one (1) issue of Computer Gaming World and some computer game
reviews on the web. I personally have not purchased a commercial game
since Where In Time Is Carmen San Diego?. So maybe I'm really just very
much the wrong person to ask.)
Still, I think that making IF into something that would appeal to a large
paying audience would also mean a fundamental shift in what it is. I
don't think the graphical-game audience is ever going to be interested
(read some of the comments on text adventures on download.com, if you want
a sense for people's reaction to a game without pictures); I don't think
the book-reading audience will really want to get into it unless/until we
have something a lot closer to natural language parsing, which is not a
matter of designing some cool interfaces that look like pages, but of
major linguistics/AI/cognitive science research and development.
I also don't really like the thought of what would happen if there were
tens of thousands of IF fans out there in the world. The fan/author ratio
would get a lot higher, there'd be less of a sense of equality and
collaboration; the community that I am fond of would dissolve.
There are a few things about the idea of commercial IF that appeal to me,
though the ability to provide high-quality feelies is the only one that
comes to mind at the moment. Yeah. Really, that's pretty much it.
Every time I express this opinion, it seems to make people annoyed, so
I'll apologize now if I've done it again. I do realize that for a lot of
people having a larger audience or monetary compensation for their work
would make a big difference. It would probably make a big difference to
me, too, in a strictly financial sense; I tend to spend between 10 and 80
hours a week on IF, depending on where I am in a project and whether
classes are in session. Billed at a reasonable scale, this would pay
several times my current income in the course of a year.
If it paid me at all, that is. I seriously doubt that any commercial
software company would hire me, given my total lack of formal CS
background or industry experience, and I suspect that I might not like the
experience of working for one, either.
I do this because I like the community and I like the artistic freedom.
Recommercializing IF would destroy both those things. And I disagree
strongly with the opinion expressed or implied by a number of people on
this subject, namely that an activity is not really worthwhile unless it
makes money. Admittedly it's a lot easier to explain your time
expenditure to curious friends/parents/spouses/etc. if you're drawing a
paycheck. And some people (Mercury did this, IIRC) will claim that
anything that can't earn money mustn't be any good. But the former one
can usually deal with somehow, and the latter is just patently false.
--
Emily Short
http://emshort.home.mindspring.com/index.htm
Sean T Barrett
>I'm wondering how other IF authors see the future of this genre. Not
>author (and they will), surely it's not much of a stretch to imagine
>that one might be able to sell 20,000 copies of a $29.95 IF game if it
>were (a) well written, (b) attractively packaged, (c) bug-free, (d)
>competently distributed, and (e) imaginatively promoted.
Seems like quite a stretch to me: the paperpack costs, what, $5.95,
and I if it's good, I can re-read it over and over; after the first
time, the surprises are gone but the essence of the work is not.
This is not generally true of story-driven games; you have to work
at it, even though the interaction is no longer interesting, after
the first time. (There are exceptions, but rare.)
Plus the potentially-reachable market is a smaller; you don't
get taught how to play IF in grade school.
SeanB
A.P. Hill
If you want to make a large sum of cash from your hobby, you could
look into reference material for that and then use that arcane wisdom
to your IF. I know some people who own little Baseball Card shops on
the corner, and they dress real fancy. Next time I'm in there, I'm
going to ask them they're secret to success.
"Say, hey bud. C'mhere for a sec. No, I don't want no Mantle card, I
was wondering, how much do you make selling those fancy cards over
yonder? "
It would be cool to see the following while driving down the road in a
honda:
"Now passing Walmart, Target, Blockbuster Video, Exxon, Interactive
Fiction Gazoobo, McDonalds, Texaco, and Home Depot. That would be
cool, I know I'd stop in to see the products.
Seriously though, I'm sure if there was money to be made, and I mean
big bucks like you stated you wanted, I'm sure that it would've been
done already and saturated with pop culture icons. I'm not so sure
Elton John would've been a music writer if Interactive Fiction was an
avenue for success. I'm sure at some point he began working on a Zork
like work entitled, "Loco the crazy cat", an interactive fiction, but
his agent probably said, "Hey Elton, that ain't cuttin' it. I mean,
there's no dough Elton. "
Being a cocaine dealer would probably be more 'money in your pocket'
than writing, if that's what you want is money, like you mentioned.
The writers who do their work for free because they enjoy it, are the
ones that sometimes get lucky and bring in a few bucks. That's not
my opinion that's facts based on Leonard Ruby Law of Theocratcicory.
A.P. Hill
24.256.354.49
Sean T Barrett
>the hands of companies with marketing agendas, just like all those
>commercial game companies out there already. They've done some good work
>as well as bad, admittedly, but my sense is that for marketing reasons
>there has been a bit of stagnation in what they're willing to try. Better
>graphics engines, yes. Entirely new style of game, not so much. IF
>remains vibrantly experimental, partly because it doesn't *have* to sell.
>(NB that this is a barely-informed opinion which I gathered from the close
>reading of one (1) issue of Computer Gaming World and some computer game
>reviews on the web. I personally have not purchased a commercial game
>since Where In Time Is Carmen San Diego?. So maybe I'm really just very
>much the wrong person to ask.)
As an insider in the game-industry, I agree. Even a company known
for doing somewhat innovative things, like Ion Storm Austin doing
Deus Ex, soon ends up in the position where the two products they
are doing are both sequels (Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3). Then again, I
am definitely a curmudgeon; there are smart people in the game
industry who would say I'm selling it short--or rather than while
most of the game industry is guilty, it's not a structural problem
with the game industry that can't be improved from within.
>If it paid me at all, that is. I seriously doubt that any commercial
>software company would hire me, given my total lack of formal CS
>background or industry experience, and I suspect that I might not like the
>experience of working for one, either.
On (a), hush you, as I've said before; but irrelevant because
(b) is no doubt true.
>I do this because I like the community and I like the artistic freedom.
>Recommercializing IF would destroy both those things.
Oops, I snipped the part where you talked about it breaking up the
community. First of all, the intellectual give-and-take collaboration
might well still happen between the authors, much as it has with
all those famous artist/author circles/schools through the ages.
Secondly, the existence of commercial IF would not prevent the
existence of "hobbyist" IF; and indeed, the hobbyist IF might well
stay experimental and still have the same community attending to it.
>And I disagree strongly with the opinion expressed or implied by
>a number of people on this subject, namely that an activity is
>not really worthwhile unless it makes money.
Of course I agree with this. Er, or disagree with this. Or rather,
I agree with disagreeing with this. Or, oh fuckit.
SeanB
Jim Nelson
>
> I was being deliberately provocative. But I'd suggest that "limited
> opportunity" is a precise characterization of the present situation, in
> two related respects: (a) there's no money, and therefore (b) there's no
> possibility of developing any type of IF that would require extensive
> work with sophisticated software tools (and therefore money). Not saying
> TADS 3 isn't sophisticated, but it's sophisticated specifically ***in
> terms of the norms of this community.***
I guess I see the TADS and Inform parsers as sophisticated, period.
They've enjoyed years (a decade!) of work, rework, and constant
evaluation by, in essence, a loyal, responsive beta-test community. Any
software house would be lucky to hold that kind of stable, robust code
base.
I hear what you're saying. Your Zappa aphorism is apropos, but what's
implicit in it is a marketing group, ad campaigns, distribution chains,
etc. I guess I don't see the parser as the problem; it's getting the
dogs to eat the dog food, as one salesman I once knew liked to say.
--
Jim Nelson
jim_n...@mindspring.com
Andrew Plotkin
> Still, I think that making IF into something that would appeal to a large
> paying audience would also mean a fundamental shift in what it is.
I don't think IF will ever compete for the attention of the market
that buys today's commercial video games.
*But* today's commercial video games are not aimed at the market that
bought the 1980's text adventures.
(I'm talking about markets, here, not individuals. As individuals,
lots of people are in both markets. Go look up the format of a PS2
game called _Rez_, and then figure out why I spent an hour playing it
last night. :-)
The book-industry model seems a lot more probable for 21st-century
commercial IF. Writing a book is not out of the reach of an individual
artist; in fact, individual artists dominate the book world.
As for the community -- the first World Science Fiction Convention, in
1939, drew 200 attendees. They presumably all knew each other; if they
didn't, they all did by the end of the weekend.
The Worldcon I went to last year got -- I can't find the number, but I
think three or four thousand attendees. We did not all know each
other. It would be cool to know everyone in the SF world. But you
know, a whole lot of people still managed to get together and talk;
and a *hell* of a lot more good SF was published in 2001 than in 1939.
> It would probably make a big difference to
> me, too, in a strictly financial sense; I tend to spend between 10 and 80
> hours a week on IF, depending on where I am in a project and whether
> classes are in session. Billed at a reasonable scale, this would pay
> several times my current income in the course of a year.
> If it paid me at all, that is. I seriously doubt that any commercial
> software company would hire me, given my total lack of formal CS
> background or industry experience, and I suspect that I might not like the
> experience of working for one, either.
That's the software-industry model, which isn't going to happen, in
either respect. You'll never be paid a programmer-traditional salary
for writing IF. You *might* be paid a few dollars per copy sold,
perhaps with a few thousand dollars advanced. Less money, but nobody
would be reading your resume beforehand.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
* Make your vote count. Get your vote counted.
DarrenH
an aesthetic point of view.
It will take innovation, not a stubborn reliance on old technology for
tradition's sake, to take IF forward. This will need to be in the form of
new parsers that are more pleasing to the eye and more contemporary in look.
An adherence to the old 'DOS look' isn't going to help the genre any more
than an insistence on using monochrome would in designing video games.
The writing out there is better than it's ever been. A perusal through some
of the best IF over the past few years will attest to that. But the parsers
need to be better...there's no need for some of the limitations that I've
seen even with new games, but once new game engines are designed that will
be less of a problem.
There should also be less of a reliance on any platform in particular, any
more than current graphical games rely on one of a very few engines to
design their games around (they usually don't). Proprietary engines are the
way of the future, and the way for better and better parsers to come out
and compete. In that vein it will be necessary to less 'download a game to
work with my parser' than it will be to download an entire game or order it
on CD....just like any other game.
Windows and Mac OS are the current general platform standards. As much as
anyone would like to argue against that fact, most people don't use Linux,
Unix, etc. on their desktops and programmers should focus on the 'real'
market out there to attain any sort of acceptance. Attempting to appeal to
only the fringe will limit acceptance to fringe users.
In short, the IF genre won't have to be 'dumbed down' as much as 'smartened
up' to appeal to a new generation of internet-chat-savvy users.
Just my thoughts...D
"Jim Aikin" <jai...@musicplayer.com> wrote in message
news:f904a017.02041...@posting.google.com...
Tom Smith
> I'm wondering how other IF authors see the future of this genre. Not
> in a technical sense (more sophisticated parsers, etc.), though that's
> always an interesting topic, but in a broader sense.
>
...
> (Does anybody have any idea how many IF fans there actually are at
> present? Are we talking 200 people worldwide? 2,000? Surely not more
> than that....)
Curses was apparently downloaded over 10,000 times. I don't know,
though what this includes: IF-archive? download.com? Graham Nelson's
site?
>
> On the other hand, a case could be made that at some point in the not
> too distant future, some type of text-based IF could conceivably
> resurface as a marketable commodity, at least in a modest sense. If
> 20,000 people will buy a paperback book by a virtually unknown SF
> author (and they will), surely it's not much of a stretch to imagine
> that one might be able to sell 20,000 copies of a $29.95 IF game if it
> were (a) well written, (b) attractively packaged, (c) bug-free, (d)
> competently distributed, and (e) imaginatively promoted.
> For this to happen, it seems to me, we'd need at the very least a
> cross-platform game interpreter that didn't look like a refugee from
> 1985 (or 1978...).
...
> FYI -- yes, I know about html tads and blorb/glulx. IMO, there's more
> to looking credible in 2002 than just being able to slap your own
> jpegs into the text window.
Unquestionably. Most of the world is not interested in virtual
machines, cross-platform portability, or (to be brutally frank)
Infocom compatibility. It is significant that the games which achieve
most success outside the IF community (on download.com,
theunderdogs.com and so on) are those that come in platform-specific,
easy-to-run executables.
On the other hand, IF is an inherently (visually) unattractive,
difficult to get into, unforgiving medium. As such I would doubt very
much whether it could reach a _mass_ audience, but it could probably
reach many more than it does today; possibly (with fingers crossed and
touching wood) a large enough audience to make commercial IF viable
again.
yrs,
Tom Smith
*********************
* Ivy Farm *
* *
* Coming soon to an *
* IF-Comp near you! *
*********************
DarrenH
game industry. I've always felt that there *is* indeed a market out there
that co-exists with the whole graphically-oriented game industry, but a way
has yet to have been found to attract it.
In a world where internet chatting and book sales are more popular than
ever, I believe there's a place for IF much larger than the one it currently
occupies.
Cheers, D
"Andrew Plotkin" <erky...@eblong.com> wrote in message
news:a9hesf$opu$1...@reader1.panix.com...
Eric Mayer
news:emshort-1604...@dialup-209.246.209.152.dial1.philadelphia1.
level3.net:
> In article <f904a017.02041...@posting.google.com>,
> jai...@musicplayer.com (Jim Aikin) wrote:
>
>> I'm wondering how other IF authors see the future of this genre. Not
>> in a technical sense (more sophisticated parsers, etc.), though
>> that's always an interesting topic, but in a broader sense.
>>
>> I'm bringing this up because I'm wondering about my own level of
>> commitment to the field. As a (once-upon-a-time) published science
>> fiction novelist, I have a strong bias in favor of actually getting
>> paid for my creative work. Thus, the idea that I'll forevermore be
>> writing my IF for free is, if not actively irksome, at least
>> something I need to take into account in planning my weekly schedule
>> of activities.
>
> 1. I don't think IF is ever likely to be commercially viable again.
>
> 2. This does not bother me, since I don't really want it to be.
>
> If I understand what you're saying in your posts, you'd like IF to
> sell because then a) you'd be paid back for your time and also b) more
> sophisticated resources would be involved.
Excuse me if this post looks weird. The Amissville garbage drove me to get
a new newsreader with a killfile capability. And I haven't tried posting
with it yet.
I agree that I can't see IF being commercially viable. The problem for a
lot of people, whether they're trying to write IF, or books, or music, is
that many of us have to expend so much time earning enough to make ends
meet that unless our creative efforts produce a little income, and thus pay
for some of the time we expend on them, we can't spend as much as we'd
like. Since my programming "skills" are rudimentary, to put it kindly, I'm
not really too frustrated by not being able to spend vast amounts of time
on IF, doing large games -- and the community can probably be thankful too!
Although I'd do more if I could.
However, my wife and I write professionally and to the extent that even
most novels don't earn enough to pay for the time expended it is difficult.
We could easily produce several books a year, if the books earned more, we
have plenty of ideas, but if we did at the current pay we'd starve. That
does point out that most of what you see on the book store and library
shelves is being produced by people who aren't doing it for a living. So IF
writers aren't in a totally different situation than most other authors.
<snip>
I don't think the book-reading audience will really
> want to get into it unless/until we have something a lot closer to
> natural language parsing, which is not a matter of designing some cool
> interfaces that look like pages, but of major linguistics/AI/cognitive
> science research and development.
>
I also agree with this. People like to be told stories, always have. They
don't necessarily want to interact. That's something different. But I do
think IF might have a chance, in the future, if we ever have usuable
electronic books and people get used to them. I can see interactivity
sneaking up. For example, at one time mystery readers used to try to mark
clues in the books. (Whence the obscure term 'obelists') Now I can see how
an electronic mystery might give readers an option to try to spot and mark
clues and get a score at the end - likewise enter a guess at the killer at
various points. And from there, a few readers might be willing to, say,
choose who to interivew first, where to bisit etc and you begin to creep
toward an actual game. Interacting with books. An odd idea for most. But at
one time a tv screen was something you couldn't do anything but sit in
front of and gawk at. (Or am I showing my age here?)
<snip>
> If it paid me at all, that is. I seriously doubt that any commercial
> software company would hire me, given my total lack of formal CS
> background or industry experience, and I suspect that I might not like
> the experience of working for one, either.
The glorious thing about IF is that unlike commercial games or movies or so
many other things - but like most books - it is still an individual thing,
written by one person, in one authorial voice and viewpoint, and do we ever
need more of that in today's world!
>
> I do this because I like the community and I like the artistic
> freedom. Recommercializing IF would destroy both those things. And I
> disagree strongly with the opinion expressed or implied by a number of
> people on this subject, namely that an activity is not really
> worthwhile unless it makes money.
This is a favorite opinion of society, so far as I can see. Unfortunately,
in my experience the most worthwhile things tend to be the worst paid. I
have to go and write an article for a legal encyclopedia now. But in my
opinion, the world would be a better place if people could get paid for
writing IF and anyone who wanted to add some more legal dreck to the world
had to do it in their spare time.
--
Eric
http://home.epix.net/~maywrite/
======================================================================
"Who does not see that I have taken a road, in which, incessantly and
without labor, I shall proceed so long as there shall be ink and paper in
the world? I can give no account of my life by my actions; fortune has
placed them too low; I must do it by my fancies." Michel de Montaigne
======================================================================
Philipp Lenssen
news:e0Zu8.16822$f5.1132263@news...
>..
> Windows and Mac OS are the current general platform standards. As much as
> anyone would like to argue against that fact, most people don't use Linux,
> Unix, etc. on their desktops and programmers should focus on the 'real'
> market out there to attain any sort of acceptance.
If you run the scripts on the server, you automatically reach cross-platform
by delivering standardized output. Text adventures seem to be ideally suited
for that, see http://www.ifiction.org/ . (Or for CYOAs, http://questml.com
... there's a new PHP port that's even practically cross-server.)
Developing games cross-platform is another issue.
DarrenH
server-delivered games are indeed the future. With a multiplayer graphical
game it might be reasonable, but I wouldn't be sure if IF is ideal for a
multiplayer environment.
"Philipp Lenssen" <len...@hitnet.rwth-aachen.de> wrote in message
news:a9hock$30a$1...@nets3.rz.RWTH-Aachen.DE...
Kevin Bracey
"DarrenH" <dar...@overtime.ca> wrote:
> I agree that, right now, IF seems to be somewhat stuck in the late 80's
> from an aesthetic point of view.
>
> It will take innovation, not a stubborn reliance on old technology for
> tradition's sake, to take IF forward. This will need to be in the form of
> new parsers that are more pleasing to the eye and more contemporary in
> look. An adherence to the old 'DOS look' isn't going to help the genre any
> more than an insistence on using monochrome would in designing video games.
Ironically, it's on the mainstream platforms that the VMs look the ugliest.
There's nothing in Inform or TADS that says the end result has to look ugly.
Look at Zip 2000 screenshots (see below) or Zoom for example.
The Z-machine for one can look a lot better than any of the poor souls stuck
with WinFrotz are probably aware.
--
Kevin Bracey
http://www.bracey-griffith.freeserve.co.uk/Zip2000/
Matthew Russotto
Kevin Bracey <ke...@bracey-griffith.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>
>Ironically, it's on the mainstream platforms that the VMs look the ugliest.
>There's nothing in Inform or TADS that says the end result has to look ugly.
>Look at Zip 2000 screenshots (see below) or Zoom for example.
I raise my middle finger to aesthetics. Or at least anti-aliased fonts
(ugh)
--
Matthew T. Russotto mrus...@speakeasy.net
=====
Every time you buy a CD, a programmer is kicked in the teeth.
Every time you buy or rent a DVD, a programmer is kicked where it counts.
Every time they kick a programmer, 1000 users are kicked too, and harder.
A proposed US law called the CBDTPA would ban the PC as we know it.
This is not a joke, not an exaggeration. This is real.
http://www.cryptome.org/broadbandits.htm
atholbrose
news:3f5c3628...@bracey-griffith.freeserve.co.uk:
> Ironically, it's on the mainstream platforms that the VMs look the
> ugliest. There's nothing in Inform or TADS that says the end result
> has to look ugly. Look at Zip 2000 screenshots (see below) or Zoom for
> example.
> The Z-machine for one can look a lot better than any of the poor souls
> stuck with WinFrotz are probably aware.
Once again, I fail to see any great aesthetic leap in Zip 2000 over any
other GUI Z-machine. Anti-aliased fonts? I have those, thanks. Resizable
screen? That too. I really dislike the thick gray border around the text
area.
So what exactly is it that I am missing to make the Z-machine look better
than it does in, say, Nitfol? Or the above-maligned WinFrotz?
Andrew Hunter
>I'm wondering how other IF authors see the future of this genre. Not
>in a technical sense (more sophisticated parsers, etc.), though that's
>always an interesting topic, but in a broader sense.
>
>I'm bringing this up because I'm wondering about my own level of
>commitment to the field. As a (once-upon-a-time) published science
>fiction novelist, I have a strong bias in favor of actually getting
>paid for my creative work. Thus, the idea that I'll forevermore be
>writing my IF for free is, if not actively irksome, at least something
>I need to take into account in planning my weekly schedule of
>activities.
I find it interesting that the Masterpieces collection is still selling
today (www.lacegem.com). This implies that the 1980's interface is not so
much the problem that many people think it to be.
>One way of looking at it is that for text-based IF to become
>marketable, it would inevitably have to become a completely different
>animal -- tricked out with graphics and music, click-and-use
>inventory, a dumbed-down parser that the Great Unwashed could deal
>with, and so on.
You can do all of this in glulx, and quite a lot of it in plain old
Inform. I'm not sure why you'd want a dumbed-down parser, though.
(With a decent interpreter, it'd probably look better done in plain
old inform...)
However, whether any of this is needed to sell or popularise the game
is another question entirely. Novels seem to have steadfastly resisted
colour illustrations despite the popularity of TV.
Maybe an improved parser is required. We haven't evolved much beyond
the old Infocom-style parsers. There has been a *lot* of research into
natural-language parsing that's passed us by. Most of this is developed
around generalised context-free parsers. And, er, I have one of those
written in Inform, if anyone's interested.
> If you buy this line of thought (and I'm not saying I
>do or don't), what the IF community/ghetto has at present is actually
>the best of all possible worlds -- very serviceable free tools for
>creating free games, and a small but loyal fan base that actually
>downloads our stuff.
>
>(Does anybody have any idea how many IF fans there actually are at
>present? Are we talking 200 people worldwide? 2,000? Surely not more
>than that....)
Hard to judge, and possibly not relevant to a serious commercial release.
To make it profitable, you would have to market it to people who aren't
currently IF fans. This doesn't necessarily mean that you'd have to
market it to fans of current games, either: people who like first-person
shooters/C&C-style strategy games aren't all that likely to enjoy IF.
There are a lot of people out there who don't like those styles of games
(and probably don't currently buy games as a result) who most certainly
would like IF, and would probably be willing to pay for a suitably
high-quality work. It's effectively a new market. Maybe the trick would
be to get distributed in bookshops rather than the more usual distribution
channels for computer games. Most round here distribute audio books, so
it might be possible to convince them to distribute /interactive/ books...
You'd need to convince them not to put it next to the MCSE books, though.
(Not that any of this is particularily new. After all, part of Infocom's
marketing strategy was to call what it produced 'Interactive Fiction'
rather than 'Adventure games'...)
In short, I don't think Interactive Fiction will ever sell again when
marketed as a 'computer game'. I'm not so sure about it if it was
marketed as something else. I'm positive that there are a *lot* of
people out there that haven't yet heard of IF, but would enjoy it if
they did.
>On the other hand, a case could be made that at some point in the not
>too distant future, some type of text-based IF could conceivably
>resurface as a marketable commodity, at least in a modest sense. If
>20,000 people will buy a paperback book by a virtually unknown SF
>author (and they will), surely it's not much of a stretch to imagine
>that one might be able to sell 20,000 copies of a $29.95 IF game if it
>were (a) well written, (b) attractively packaged, (c) bug-free, (d)
>competently distributed, and (e) imaginatively promoted.
Heh, most 'proper' games that cost more than that don't manage (c).
I imagine with similar pricing and suitable promotion, you could probably
sell a good number of copies. The fact that there is presently no IF
market means that there's some uncertainty here, though. The novelty value
might actually inflate your sales...
>For this to happen, it seems to me, we'd need at the very least a
>cross-platform game interpreter that didn't look like a refugee from
>1985 (or 1978...). After tinkering for a few weeks with the idea of
>developing my own delivery platform, however, I've reluctantly
>concluded that I'm not enough of a programmer to put it together.
Well, I maintain a cross-platform interpreter. What improvements are
required?
"Finish the Windows port" is one obvious one, o'course. Finishing the
v6 support would allow you to do most of what you want, I think, but
nice features like resizing and scrollback wouldn't work with v6.
I think the scrollback, at any rate, is more important than graphics.
>Does anybody else think such a delivery platform is desirable? Or is
>everybody but me happy writing free software?
>
>FYI -- yes, I know about html tads and blorb/glulx. IMO, there's more
>to looking credible in 2002 than just being able to slap your own
>jpegs into the text window.
Personally, I'm not a particular fan of Glk. Glulx does let you completely
replace the UI layer, though, so it may be worth a second look. If Glk/blorb
is the only problem with glulx, then this would seem an optimal solution.
Andrew.
--
____
\ \ \ Andrew Hunter <and...@logicalshift.demon.co.uk>
> > > http://www.logicalshift.demon.co.uk (me)
/_/_/ http://www.impulse.org.uk (impulse)
Andrew Hunter
>Kevin Bracey <ke...@bracey-griffith.freeserve.co.uk> wrote in
>news:3f5c3628...@bracey-griffith.freeserve.co.uk:
>
>> Ironically, it's on the mainstream platforms that the VMs look the
>> ugliest. There's nothing in Inform or TADS that says the end result
>> has to look ugly. Look at Zip 2000 screenshots (see below) or Zoom for
>> example.
>> The Z-machine for one can look a lot better than any of the poor souls
>> stuck with WinFrotz are probably aware.
>
>Once again, I fail to see any great aesthetic leap in Zip 2000 over any
>other GUI Z-machine. Anti-aliased fonts? I have those, thanks. Resizable
>screen? That too. I really dislike the thick gray border around the text
>area.
Hmm, tried using a serif font for any length of time as your display
font under Windows? (Or tried using the Mac OS X version of Zoom with
a serif font with Quartz rendering off, and then switched it on?).
Windows 'font smoothing' is not anti-aliasing.
The border in Zip2000 is optional, but it fits in with the RISC OS style.
In case you hadn't noticed, WinFrotz features a gray border, too.
>So what exactly is it that I am missing to make the Z-machine look better
>than it does in, say, Nitfol? Or the above-maligned WinFrotz?
ObPlug: the Mac OS X version of Zoom is at
http://www.logicalshift.demon.co.uk/, and that web page is complete
with screenshot for your comparason pleasure.
Nitfol features a very 'bare bones' interface (really required, because
it uses Glk), and is limited in the Z-Machine display features it can
emulate. WinFrotz provides an excessive amount of user interface cruft,
which is very distracting and totally unnecessary.
Uli Kusterer
OTOH I know of a lot of my friends who love to listen to audio books.
Would that maybe be a nice niche for IF to get into?
Today, there are cell phones that can read out the address book, and
which can take orders (from a limited set) in spoken word. Also, cell
phones today have built-in speakers and microphones, and most are even
able to display web pages, which means they definitely pack the
processing power already to run a text adventure.
If they get a little better, it would be possible to simply download a
text adventure to your handy, listen to the output, and speak into the
microphone to interact. Wouldn't that be ideal? IF is the best kind of
game for devices with the capabilities of a cell phone, where it's a
horrible experience to type in text using their tiny keyboards or trying
to read long passages of text from their stamp-sized displays...
Just some food for thoughts.
NB - Are there any existing games that take advantage of speech
recognition yet? I seem to recall that HyperTADS is able to do speech
output, but I don't think it recognizes yet.
Cheers,
M. Uli Kusterer
"The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere..."
Stuart Allen
> For this to happen, it seems to me, we'd need at the very least a
> cross-platform game interpreter that didn't look like a refugee from
> 1985 (or 1978...). After tinkering for a few weeks with the idea of
> developing my own delivery platform, however, I've reluctantly
> concluded that I'm not enough of a programmer to put it together.
JACL games are played using a web browser, so writing multi-media
games is very easy. The result of each of the player's commands is a
complete HTML page, so the sky is the limit when it comes to what the
display looks like. You can also use HTML forms to accept input from
the player, so allowing the player to choose between a command line
and a point-and-click interface is also possible.
Porting to other machines is also easy, as all the graphics etc are
handled by the browser. The interpreter consists of nothing more than
reasonably platform inspecific C code for outputing plain text (the
HTML page).
Of course, the other advantage is that games can be played over the
net using the same thin-client model that is used to play the game
locally, as the interpreter also has an integrated web server.
If you are interested in taking a look, visit jacl.sourceforge.net.
Regards,
Stuart
wo...@one.net
Hi Emily,
>1. I don't think IF is ever likely to be commercially viable again.
>
>2. This does not bother me, since I don't really want it to be.
<snip>
>I also don't really like the thought of what would happen if there were
>tens of thousands of IF fans out there in the world. The fan/author ratio
>would get a lot higher, there'd be less of a sense of equality and
>collaboration; the community that I am fond of would dissolve.
<snip>
>Every time I express this opinion, it seems to make people annoyed, so
>I'll apologize now if I've done it again.
<snip>
>I do this because I like the community and I like the artistic freedom.
>Recommercializing IF would destroy both those things. And I disagree
>strongly with the opinion expressed or implied by a number of people on
>this subject, namely that an activity is not really worthwhile unless it
>makes money. Admittedly it's a lot easier to explain your time
>expenditure to curious friends/parents/spouses/etc. if you're drawing a
>paycheck.
What you said! Kudos for the lady!
As for working for a software company without a CS degree, I don't
think the kind of company that would seriously contemplate text
adventure as paying concern would be terribly fussy about degrees when
they can get *experience* in the field.
You can type? You can make text adventures? Would you like to walk
down the hall, sit down at a free computer and start work *RIGHT NOW*?
:)
That's the typical attitude of companies that want good people. I've
been fortunate enough to get hired by two of them in my time. The
rest, well, they paid the rent. :)
Respectfully,
Wolf
"The world is my home, it's just that some rooms are draftier than
others". -- Wolf
atholbrose
news:slrnabpffi...@chrysoprase.localdomain:
> Hmm, tried using a serif font for any length of time as your display
> font under Windows? (Or tried using the Mac OS X version of Zoom with
> a serif font with Quartz rendering off, and then switched it on?).
> Windows 'font smoothing' is not anti-aliasing.
I regularly use Georgia, which is certainly a serif font, as my font with
all three interpreters I use (Nitfol, WinFrotz, HTML TADS). And, thanks, I
do know what font anti-aliasing is, and am familiar with several methods of
achieving it. Windows' "font smoothing" certainly is a form of anti-
aliasing; a somewhat limited one, especially when dealing with smaller font
sizes, yes, I'll grant that.
> The border in Zip2000 is optional, but it fits in with the RISC OS
> style. In case you hadn't noticed, WinFrotz features a gray border,
> too.
A gray border of the size I've configured Windows to use around all
windows, yes. Not having ever used RiscOS, I didn't realize that was a
common thing for its apps.
>>So what exactly is it that I am missing to make the Z-machine look
>>better than it does in, say, Nitfol? Or the above-maligned WinFrotz?
> ObPlug: the Mac OS X version of Zoom is at
> http://www.logicalshift.demon.co.uk/, and that web page is complete
> with screenshot for your comparason pleasure.
As I have looked at Zip 2000, I've also looked at Zoom.
> Nitfol features a very 'bare bones' interface (really required,
> because it uses Glk), and is limited in the Z-Machine display features
> it can emulate. WinFrotz provides an excessive amount of user
> interface cruft, which is very distracting and totally unnecessary.
I mainly use Nitfol for auto-mapping and other debugging commands and for
testing purposes. I'm certainly familiar with the Glk wrapper it uses and
the limits of Glk as a display engine for the Z-machine, especially when
dealing with Infernal Box Quotes. (Sorry, but the box quote is one special
effect I wish would Go Away.)
Not quite sure what you are referring to as far as WinFrotz' "cruft" goes;
I've never really heard a menu bar referred to as such. Everything else you
can turn off. And, yes, maybe I am a heedless barbarian, but I'd rather
have a proper menu than a strictly right-click one, even though I rarely
use the menus.
I still haven't seen anything to support the claims of better asthetics for
either interpreter. Configured to use the same (or as similar as you can
get) fonts and colors, I'd be hard put to label any one interpreter as
looking better than the other. We're dealing with text here, after all.
Jim Aikin
> I guess I see the TADS and Inform parsers as sophisticated, period.
Indeed they are. No quarrel on that point. They're sophisticated
*parsers.* What they're not is sophisticated tools for shaping end-user
delivery systems. For that, you have to go to something like Macromedia
Director. Director is, in its own high-priced way, laughably primitive
when it comes to certain things. (Music software at a tenth of the price
has a better multitrack score.) It's successful because it's adequate at
delivering animated sprites and clickable slide shows and stuff, and
that's what's needed for multimedia development.
> I hear what you're saying. Your Zappa aphorism is apropos, but what's
> implicit in it is a marketing group, ad campaigns, distribution chains,
> etc.
On some level or other, yes. I know musicians who have been able to
build successful careers as indie artists with no major label backing.
They are definitely in business! But their marketing and distribution
are quite limited compared to Sony or somebody. They have closets full
of CDs, they sell mail order or at gigs, they have websites and fan
mailing lists and all that stuff.
The economics of the situation are interesting -- buy a $15 major label
CD at Tower Records, and the artist gets maybe $1. If they're lucky. And
their manager will take a cut of that. An indie artist who sells a $15
CD mail order can put $12 in her pocket.
I don't think it's an either-or choice in IF, between Time/Warner/AOL
and freeware. I think there's probably a viable middle ground. Maybe the
music industry provides a possible model.
--JA
Jim Aikin
> If I understand what you're saying in your posts, you'd like IF to sell
> because then a) you'd be paid back for your time and also b) more
> sophisticated resources would be involved.
Basically, yeah. Paid something, anyhow.
> But then you get something
> that puts game creation out of reach of the individual (e.g. me) and into
> the hands of companies with marketing agendas, just like all those
> commercial game companies out there already.
Unclear. The tools you use would still exist, and in all likelihood the
community of interested amateur programmers (to say nothing of the fan
base of players looking for free games) would grow quite a bit.
God knows I'm not a big fan of marketing agendas. One of the worst
things that happens to creative artists is when they get so successful
they can't afford to take chances anymore, because they have to pay
their manager's and press agent's salaries.
> They've done some good work
> as well as bad, admittedly, but my sense is that for marketing reasons
> there has been a bit of stagnation in what they're willing to try. Better
> graphics engines, yes. Entirely new style of game, not so much. IF
> remains vibrantly experimental, partly because it doesn't *have* to sell.
I love experimental work. I really ought to play more IF. I liked
Galatea. I started Varicella, which I guess may be experimental by IF
standards. It's very funny, but also infuriatingly difficult. It would
have made a crackerjack satirical SF novel with only a few cosmetic
changes. Adam could have made a lot more money at it, too -- but just as
important, a lot more people could have enjoyed it.
> Still, I think that making IF into something that would appeal to a large
> paying audience would also mean a fundamental shift in what it is.
You may well be right.
> I also don't really like the thought of what would happen if there were
> tens of thousands of IF fans out there in the world. The fan/author ratio
> would get a lot higher, there'd be less of a sense of equality and
> collaboration; the community that I am fond of would dissolve.
...or it would grow. But as much as I respect your work, Emily, I have
to say I think it's a little selfish for you to say you don't want there
to be tens of thousands of IF fans in the world. Is it right to deprive
them of the opportunity to enjoy your work (or mine)? Is it right to
deprive yourself of the opportunity to do even more and better work
because you'd be getting paid a living wage for doing it?
If you could have those two things with no artistic compromises, would
you be willing to sacrifice the sense of equality and collaboration?
> I seriously doubt that any commercial
> software company would hire me, given my total lack of formal CS
> background or industry experience, and I suspect that I might not like the
> experience of working for one, either.
You and me both.
> And I disagree
> strongly with the opinion expressed or implied by a number of people on
> this subject, namely that an activity is not really worthwhile unless it
> makes money.
I suppose what I said might be interpreted that way. Please allow me to
explain. Where I'm coming from is, I've written five novels. The first
two were published, got good reviews, earned out their advance. The
third, fourth, and fifth were never published, and probably never will
be, for reasons having more to do with the vicissitudes of the
marketplace than their worth as stories.
As I get older, I find that I'm less inclined to write yet another novel
and throw it in a drawer. I find that a very sad and frustrating thing
to do. So I look around for something I can do that will satisfy me
creatively and also (a) get distributed to more than, say, 500 people,
plus (b) make me a little extra money on the side.
Does that put it in perspective?
--Jim Aikin
Jim Aikin
> As for the community -- the first World Science Fiction Convention, in
> 1939, drew 200 attendees. They presumably all knew each other; if they
> didn't, they all did by the end of the weekend.
Excellent analogy, Andrew. You're always on the dime.
> You'll never be paid a programmer-traditional salary
> for writing IF. You *might* be paid a few dollars per copy sold,
> perhaps with a few thousand dollars advanced. Less money, but nobody
> would be reading your resume beforehand.
This is exactly the business model I'd like to see explored. It isn't a
business _plan_ yet, but it's a model. And it's a model with implications.
For instance: Trying to sell text-based IF in a computer store would be
a disaster. Can you imagine the outrage of a 13-year-old boy who brought
the shrinkwrapped box home, popped the CD in the drive, and then found
out he was expected to READ about the cool three-headed dragon on the
cover of the box?????
But put text-based IF in a bookstore, and the customer's expectations
change drastically (even if there's still a cool three-headed dragon on
the box).
It's also worth noting that while publishers (of SF, anyhow -- that's
all I know about) sometimes reject books that they think won't sell,
they rarely reject experimental books simply because they're
experimental. SF thrives on a certain type of experimentation.
Plus, the publisher can make a profit moving 15,000 units of a paperback
book. Don't try this if you're hiring animators, kids.
--Jim Aikin
Jim Aikin
> However, my wife and I write professionally and to the extent that even
> most novels don't earn enough to pay for the time expended it is difficult.
> We could easily produce several books a year, if the books earned more, we
> have plenty of ideas, but if we did at the current pay we'd starve. That
> does point out that most of what you see on the book store and library
> shelves is being produced by people who aren't doing it for a living. So IF
> writers aren't in a totally different situation than most other authors.
No kidding. When I sold my first novel, I thought it was ironic that the
person who drove the truck to deliver it to the bookstore expected to
make a living wage, but I was expected to do it because I loved it. If I
write one book a year and get $5,000 for it, I'm chipped beef on toast.
--Jim Aikin
Jim Aikin
> Seems like quite a stretch to me: the paperpack costs, what, $5.95.
More like $8.95, these days.
> and if it's good, I can re-read it over and over; after the first
> time, the surprises are gone but the essence of the work is not.
> This is not generally true of story-driven games; you have to work
> at it, even though the interaction is no longer interesting, after
> the first time. (There are exceptions, but rare.)
I fail to discern an essential difference, unless it's that most IF is
badly written compared to decent-quality static fiction. I have re-read
a few novels with pleasure (after the passage of some years). Even
mysteries, once enough time had passed that I was no longer sure who
done it. If an IF work were equally well written, I'm sure I'd do the
same thing.
Always assuming it was still compatible with my new computer OS --
**not** a trivial issue.
--Jim Aikin
Jim Aikin
> JACL games are played using a web browser, so writing multi-media
> games is very easy. The result of each of the player's commands is a
> complete HTML page, so the sky is the limit when it comes to what the
> display looks like.
As long as you're happy inside the browser window, and as long as you
don't care what the fonts look like.
> Of course, the other advantage is that games can be played over the
> net using the same thin-client model that is used to play the game
> locally, as the interpreter also has an integrated web server.
I wouldn't call that an advantage. This is the wrong thread for this
discussion, and I wouldn't want to insult you in the event that you have
some personal stake in jacl, but over-the-Net play is, in my opinion, a
horrible idea for one-person IF (okay for MUDs, I'm sure). It ties up my
phone line, downloads are slow-slow-slow, and then the web page tells me
it won't run unless I jet off somewhere and download some plug-in that
it wants to use.
Over the Net play is ducky for solitaire, I'll admit that. For anything
requiring immersion, it's a loser, and likely to remain so until we all
have broadband cable and Microsoft tattoos on our butts (thus assuring
total system integration and compatibility).
--Jim Aikin
Sean T Barrett
>>So what exactly is it that I am missing to make the Z-machine look better
>>than it does in, say, Nitfol? Or the above-maligned WinFrotz?
>
>ObPlug: the Mac OS X version of Zoom is at
>http://www.logicalshift.demon.co.uk/, and that web page is complete
>with screenshot for your comparason pleasure.
I really don't get this--sadly neither you nor Kevin B have
been posting screenshots of the things you're complaining about.
In point of fact, the WinFrotz I run (and you can make an
unmodified WinFrotz look like this, this has nothing to do
with my bugfixes) looks like this:
http://nothings.org/winfrotz.gif
Forgive the size. It uses a fixed-width font because I'm kind
of old-school that way--the color scheme also imitates the
old Atari 8-bit default text display. As you can see, Windows'
font smoothing provides proper anti-aliasing, if your fonts
use sufficient pixels per character.
All I see in the various screen shots you two have posted is lots of
OS-specific border coloring/imagery etc. that I am always quick to turn
off anyway. (Note the lack of gradient title bar in my screen shot.)
Of course there is other optional "junk" that you can turn on
in WinFrotz, and it defaults to on, but that's a sort of standard
"make it easier for novice users", and having it available at all
seems better than not having it available. For example, when I'm
playing comp games, I leave WinFrotz' status bar on, since that
shows the time played.
SeanB
Eric Mayer
news:3CBCDBC6.5040103@kill_spammers.org:
> Andrew Plotkin wrote:
>
>
>> As for the community -- the first World Science Fiction Convention,
>> in 1939, drew 200 attendees. They presumably all knew each other; if
>> they didn't, they all did by the end of the weekend.
>
>
> Excellent analogy, Andrew. You're always on the dime.
>
Well, yeah, except the hard core, fanzine fans, who consider themselves the
*truefen* descendants of that group still all know each other, and their
aesthetics are very different from all those thousands of Worldcon
attendees. And I suspect, as with sf, any If that gained a much larger
following wouldn't be the stuff this small community most enjoys.
Eric Mayer
That number sounds about right! And I've had the same thought how everyone
in the industry, except the folks who produce the product, expect pay.
Weird, but I guess it has something to do with everyone wanting to be a
writer, creating a labor glut.
David M Einstein
: In article <f904a017.02041...@posting.google.com>,
: jai...@musicplayer.com (Jim Aikin) wrote:
: > I'm wondering how other IF authors see the future of this genre. Not
: > in a technical sense (more sophisticated parsers, etc.), though that's
: > always an interesting topic, but in a broader sense.
: the book-reading audience will really want to get into it unless/until we
: have something a lot closer to natural language parsing, which is not a
: matter of designing some cool interfaces that look like pages, but of
: major linguistics/AI/cognitive science research and development.
The problem is not so much the parser as the other end. The reason that
adventurespeak exists is the same reason that ask/tell and menus exist for
npc conversation, there is no way to handle all of the cases. If one is
willing to relinquish control one can make IRC chatterbots, but it is hard
to make a coherent statement with a chatterbot. The difficulty of having
the game respond in ways that the author can accept, let alone approve of,
increases dramatically with the size of the allowed input.
Deinst
Waiting with bated breath for Savoir-Faire.
Eric Mayer
news:Xns91F2EA0484F0...@199.224.117.11:
> Jim Aikin <kill_spammers@kill_spammers.org> wrote in
> news:3CBCDBC6.5040103@kill_spammers.org:
>
>> Andrew Plotkin wrote:
>>
>>
>>> As for the community -- the first World Science Fiction Convention,
>>> in 1939, drew 200 attendees. They presumably all knew each other; if
>>> they didn't, they all did by the end of the weekend.
>>
>>
>> Excellent analogy, Andrew. You're always on the dime.
>>
>
> Well, yeah, except the hard core, fanzine fans, who consider
> themselves the *truefen* descendants of that group still all know each
> other, and their aesthetics are very different from all those
> thousands of Worldcon attendees. And I suspect, as with sf, any If
> that gained a much larger following wouldn't be the stuff this small
> community most enjoys.
>
>
It is probably not of great interest to this group but since I jumped in
with that comment regarding the expansion of the sf community, I should
note, very briefly, that you can't really equate First Fandom (That small
1939 sf group) and what it quickly became with the IF community. Writers
like Clarke, Bradbury and Ellison were fans but, unlike IF folks whose
hobby revolves around producing IF, sf fandom very quickly occupied itself
with activities other than fiction writing - which is, and was, considered
downright gauche at best. Practicing pros like Wilson Tucker, Bob Shaw and
Terry Carr did fanzines and wrote essays in fandom. Not fiction. Of course
they had outlets for their pro work that writers of IF don't have. The
audience they aimed for with their professional writing was not themselves,
or other fans particularly. So I would not be quick to draw any
conclusions, positive or negative, from a comparison of such different
groups.
Jim Nelson
> Jim Nelson wrote:
> > I guess I see the TADS and Inform parsers as sophisticated, period.
>
> Indeed they are. No quarrel on that point. They're sophisticated
> *parsers.* What they're not is sophisticated tools for shaping end-user
> delivery systems.
I guess I can concede that. But there's been a lot of talk lately about
the parsers' crudity, and frankly, the more I peek under TADS' engine,
the more uninformed I consider these opinions.
> I don't think it's an either-or choice in IF, between Time/Warner/AOL
> and freeware. I think there's probably a viable middle ground. Maybe the
> music industry provides a possible model.
My thinking is, to do what you want requires multiple people (unless one
person can code, write prose, craft plots and characters, compose music,
and build eye-popping graphics -- on evenings and weekends.) Then it
starts sounding like part-time salaries, if not full-time, and if you're
going to spend that kind of money, it would be foolish not to go the full
mile and market it.
So, no, I'm not thinking the either-or. You could do all this without
AOL-Time-Warner or freeware. But what's the middle ground? You expect
to be paid for your work, fair enough. How much do you expect to be
paid?
--
Jim Nelson
jim_n...@mindspring.com
Jim Nelson
>
> Forgive the size. It uses a fixed-width font because I'm kind
> of old-school that way--the color scheme also imitates the
> old Atari 8-bit default text display.
Ha! And I thought I was the only one.
--
Jim Nelson
jim_n...@mindspring.com
Jim Aikin
> So, no, I'm not thinking the either-or. You could do all this without
> AOL-Time-Warner or freeware. But what's the middle ground? You expect
> to be paid for your work, fair enough. How much do you expect to be
> paid?
That's a fair question. First off, I'm happy to acknowledge that I don't
know where the middle ground is. I'm wondering if anybody but me is
interested in searching for it. I'll also admit I'm not an entrepreneur.
But let's make up some numbers:
Let's assume a CD-ROM containing a well-developed, well-written,
attractively packaged IF title could be sold retail for $29.95. That's
$15 to the creator(s). Let's assume such a title, sold through
bookstores, could move 20,000 copies. That's a gross income to the
creator(s) of $300,000. Let's assume half of that goes to promotion,
licensing the installer and the copy-protection, unsold inventory, stuff
like that. That still leaves $150,000. If the team that creates the
title includes one author, one graphic artist, and one programmer, and
if they all contribute equally, each walks away with $50,000.
Don't hold me to these numbers. I could be off by a factor of ten in
either direction. But if you only saw a prospect of making $5,000 for a
year of evenings and weekends programming a work of IF that you could be
truly proud of, would you do it?
For some reason, I don't think that's a very tough question.
--Jim Aikin
Jim Aikin
> That number sounds about right! And I've had the same thought how everyone
> in the industry, except the folks who produce the product, expect pay.
> Weird, but I guess it has something to do with everyone wanting to be a
> writer, creating a labor glut.
That's an important factor. Almost as important, perhaps, is the
question of who has their hand on the money spigot. If you get to write
the checks, do you write the other guy a big one and yourself a small
one? Nah.
--Jim Aikin
Jim Aikin
>>One way of looking at it is that for text-based IF to become
>>marketable, it would inevitably have to become a completely different
>>animal -- tricked out with graphics and music, click-and-use
>>inventory, a dumbed-down parser that the Great Unwashed could deal
>>with, and so on.
>
> You can do all of this in glulx, and quite a lot of it in plain old
> Inform.
My impression was that glulx doesn't support mp3 playback, only wav and
(shudder) mods.
> However, whether any of this is needed to sell or popularise the game
> is another question entirely. Novels seem to have steadfastly resisted
> colour illustrations despite the popularity of TV.
All analogies (including, perhaps especially, my own) are suspect. We
simply don't know what analogies might be valid with respect to IF. Last
time I was in Border's Books, though, I noticed a whole rack of
full-color "graphic novels" next to the science fiction. Comic books for
grown-ups, you sneer? Could be -- but then, what is television if not
comic books for grown-ups? So there's your analogy, if you want one.
Novels have not,in fact, resisted color illustrations in toto.
*Publishers* of mainstream novels resist color illustrations, because
for one thing they're expensive. In kids' books they're felt to be
essential, but I do have an illustrated edition of Huckleberry Finn on
my shelf, and some illustrated Dickens. It's been done.
> Maybe an improved parser is required. We haven't evolved much beyond
> the old Infocom-style parsers. There has been a *lot* of research into
> natural-language parsing that's passed us by. Most of this is developed
> around generalised context-free parsers. And, er, I have one of those
> written in Inform, if anyone's interested.
I'd like to know a lot more about it. My Inform is real rusty. Is the
source code available? Can you post a synopsis of what it does to this
group? Is it described on your website? (I don't see a link to it from
your home page.)
This is off-topic, but I was thinking tonight that it would be dead
simple in either Inform or TADS to implement this grammar:
>heloise, where is the mustard?
What you do is, you tell the parser "where" is a verb and "is" is a
preposition. The parser thinks this is no different structurally than
"heloise, piss in the mustard". It passes the command to heloise, and
she responds as she sees fit. As an added bonus, the user can
interrogate the software directly:
>where is the revolver
Again, it's handled as if "where" were a thing you wanted to do, rather
than an interrogative.
> Hard to judge, and possibly not relevant to a serious commercial release.
> To make it profitable, you would have to market it to people who aren't
> currently IF fans.
Good point.
> Maybe the trick would
> be to get distributed in bookshops rather than the more usual distribution
> channels for computer games.
I think this is almost certainly correct.
> I'm positive that there are a *lot* of
> people out there that haven't yet heard of IF, but would enjoy it if
> they did.
I agree.
> The fact that there is presently no IF
> market means that there's some uncertainty here, though. The novelty value
> might actually inflate your sales...
Again, I think you're absolutely right.
> Well, I maintain a cross-platform interpreter. What improvements are
> required?
Do you want the long wish list or the short wish list? Let's start with
a few items indiscriminately chosen from each.
A music soundtrack (mp3) that could be faded out when the reader leaves
a room would be a must. (I'm also a composer, you see.) Fadeout is
essential.
Some form of customizable "look and feel." This could be as simple as
custom colors and menu font for the interpreter's main window, or it
could be more elaborate.
Graphics (jpeg or gif) that don't simply splot into the text window and
then scroll up out of sight when you add more text. This is ugly. I've
designed a much nicer way to do it, but in the process I seem to have
inadvertently thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Many systems could
be envisaged; my idea is to have a 1/4-size thumbnail representation of
the current room's image/illustration, which you can click on to cause
it to fill the main window. Unhappily, this more or less requires a
fixed size for the main window. There are other ways to do it.
Password-based copy protection. In general I sympathize with the free
software philosophy, but I have this weird mental blind spot when my own
copyright is being violated....
For a commercial release, one really ought to include a notepad whose
contents can be saved with the game file.
> Personally, I'm not a particular fan of Glk. Glulx does let you completely
> replace the UI layer, though, so it may be worth a second look. If Glk/blorb
> is the only problem with glulx, then this would seem an optimal solution.
I can't even keep the difference between glk and glulx in my mind for
more than 30 seconds running. If there's a worse bunch of names for
software, I have yet to run into it. Possibly it will do most of what
I've been envisioning, but that mp3 thing is kind of a deal-breaker.
--Jim Aikin
Philipp Lenssen
news:POZu8.16839$f5.1133596@news...
> Hi Philipp, you are certainly correct, but I would wonder if
> server-delivered games are indeed the future. With a multiplayer
graphical
> game it might be reasonable, but I wouldn't be sure if IF is ideal for a
> multiplayer environment.
>..
There's nothing that forces a server-side application delivered on the web
to be multiplayer (even if technically it might come more natural if you
want to go for it). I also don't think player expectations automatically go
that way.
Stuart Allen
> Stuart Allen wrote:
>
> > JACL games are played using a web browser, so writing multi-media
> > games is very easy. The result of each of the player's commands is a
> > complete HTML page, so the sky is the limit when it comes to what the
> > display looks like.
>
> As long as you're happy inside the browser window, and as long as you
> don't care what the fonts look like.
I don't see what it is about being browser based that makes the fonts
fixed. Writing a small configuration screen (as a reusable library)
that allows the player to chose the font type and size would be very,
very easy.
> > Of course, the other advantage is that games can be played over the
> > net using the same thin-client model that is used to play the game
> > locally, as the interpreter also has an integrated web server.
>
> I wouldn't call that an advantage. This is the wrong thread for this
> discussion, and I wouldn't want to insult you in the event that you have
> some personal stake in jacl, but over-the-Net play is, in my opinion, a
> horrible idea for one-person IF (okay for MUDs, I'm sure). It ties up my
> phone line, downloads are slow-slow-slow, and then the web page tells me
> it won't run unless I jet off somewhere and download some plug-in that
> it wants to use.
I would call it an advantage if it doesn't have any negative side
effect during normal play. For example, I run games on a small
text-only unix box, but play from a Windows machine connected via
ethernet. This suits me for many reasons, but I could run both the
server and client under Windows if I wanted. Why only have
non-networked when you can have both?
The other advantage I have found is that people can look at a game
with minimal investment, then install it to play in depth if they
decide they want to.
Stuart
kodrik
> discussion, and I wouldn't want to insult you in the event that you have
> some personal stake in jacl, but over-the-Net play is, in my opinion, a
> horrible idea for one-person IF (okay for MUDs, I'm sure). It ties up my
> phone line, downloads are slow-slow-slow, and then the web page tells me
> it won't run unless I jet off somewhere and download some plug-in that
> it wants to use.
As a player I understand perfectly that you don't like remote play and
don't want to have anything to do with it.
But as an author who wants to reach as many people as possible, remote play
is an advantage and greatly widens your audience.
I thought this thread was about the future of IF and I strongly believe
remote play in various form is part of this future
kodrik
> *parsers.* What they're not is sophisticated tools for shaping end-user
> delivery systems. For that, you have to go to something like Macromedia
> Director. Director is, in its own high-priced way, laughably primitive
> when it comes to certain things. (Music software at a tenth of the price
> has a better multitrack score.) It's successful because it's adequate at
> delivering animated sprites and clickable slide shows and stuff, and
> that's what's needed for multimedia development.
>
> (Correct me if I'm wrong -- maybe I'm thinking of Shockwave.) Maybe it's
> just me, but I more or less hate the Web.
I think you don't realize that Director and Flash are kind of extensions of
each other. Flash is more targeted to artists while director (which
produces shockwave movies) is more targeted to advanced programs (using 3d
for example). They actually interact great with each other and can be used
for remote or local play.
Jim Nelson
> Don't hold me to these numbers. I could be off by a factor of ten in
> either direction. But if you only saw a prospect of making $5,000 for a
> year of evenings and weekends programming a work of IF that you could be
> truly proud of, would you do it?
>
> For some reason, I don't think that's a very tough question.
First, don't forget Uncle Sam. And don't forget that the money you took
out of half the gross profits, the $150,000 toward "promotion,
licensing the installer and the copy-protection, unsold inventory" etc.
comes out of your pocket *before* you collect that first dime. (Even if
you aim low in your estimation, you're out $15,000 up front.) And,
profitability is not a sure thing. It just might not sell.
Risk $5,000 and a year's free time to (potentially) come out ahead
$5,000? That's not so appetizing. $50K for $50K? Blood from a turnip.
Now, could you turn the plan into a publishing house? Incorporate,
loans, stock, etc? That's more interesting. Then it's not a project,
it's a career. A cool career. And you're risking someone else's money.
Unfortunately, they'll want to see more zeros and more commas in your
numbers.
--
Jim Nelson
jim_n...@mindspring.com
Richard Bos
> I "hear" you all saying that IF won't be commercially viable anymore.
> OTOH I know of a lot of my friends who love to listen to audio books.
> Would that maybe be a nice niche for IF to get into?
Erm, possibly. Or possibly the e-book market could be a starting point.
However, that's not the big problem, AFAICT. It will almost certainly be
possible to sell _some_ IF into a niche market, or even several niche
markets. The big question is: will it be possible to sell enough to make
a living of?
If you can, you've got yourself a profession, even if a small one. Very
well, have fun. If you can get this far in the first place you're
probably going to have no more problems with r.a.i-f free IF than book
authors have with fanzines.
If not, you should consider whether it isn't more rewarding to write IF
as a hobby and pay the rent some other way. Being paid for your work is
all very nice, but remember that it does create expectations - you're a
professional IF writer now, you're expected to deliver, even if the
money from IF only buys your butter and you need a real job to buy the
bread to go under it.
Richard
kodrik
> well, have fun. If you can get this far in the first place you're
> probably going to have no more problems with r.a.i-f free IF than book
> authors have with fanzines.
> If not, you should consider whether it isn't more rewarding to write IF
> as a hobby and pay the rent some other way. Being paid for your work is
> all very nice, but remember that it does create expectations - you're a
> professional IF writer now, you're expected to deliver, even if the
> money from IF only buys your butter and you need a real job to buy the
> bread to go under it.
Although I do think there is some money to be made in IF, I don't think it
will be enough to make a living off it. I view it more as a return or a
reward; in any way, it will not be a full compensation for the huge work
involved in making a good IF product.
Andrew Hunter
>and...@logicalshift.demon.co.uk (Andrew Hunter) wrote in
>news:slrnabpffi...@chrysoprase.localdomain:
>
>> Hmm, tried using a serif font for any length of time as your display
>> font under Windows? (Or tried using the Mac OS X version of Zoom with
>> a serif font with Quartz rendering off, and then switched it on?).
>> Windows 'font smoothing' is not anti-aliasing.
>
>I regularly use Georgia, which is certainly a serif font, as my font with
>all three interpreters I use (Nitfol, WinFrotz, HTML TADS). And, thanks, I
>do know what font anti-aliasing is, and am familiar with several methods of
>achieving it. Windows' "font smoothing" certainly is a form of anti-
>aliasing; a somewhat limited one, especially when dealing with smaller font
>sizes, yes, I'll grant that.
I didn't express myself well there. Font smoothing is not 'true'
anti-aliasing in that a font is rendered to pixel accuracy and then
smoothed. Personally (and aesthetics is a very personal thing), I find
true anti-aliased fonts a lot easier to read than smoothed fonts,
especially at small sizes.
The Mac OS X version of Zoom can do both. I should really have posted
screenshots in the first instance, but it was late... So, we have:
http://www.logicalshift.demon.co.uk/etc/zoom1.png (Quartz rendered)
http://www.logicalshift.demon.co.uk/etc/zoom2.png (Quickdraw rendered)
When rendering with Quickdraw, Zoom looks a lot better if Helvetica or
Arial are chosen as a font, but the comparason would not be fair if
we did that.
The best comparason is to use one for a long period of time, then the
other. Even comp games are designed to take two hours to complete, which
is a long time to look at a computer screen. Even minor improvements to
the legibility of the text can make a big difference over that kind of
time.
Zoom really needs this adding to the other ports: this is just a matter
of getting round to it, really.
>> The border in Zip2000 is optional, but it fits in with the RISC OS
>> style. In case you hadn't noticed, WinFrotz features a gray border,
>> too.
>
>A gray border of the size I've configured Windows to use around all
>windows, yes. Not having ever used RiscOS, I didn't realize that was a
>common thing for its apps.
It's not, and that's not what I said. The border is the same as RISC OS
uses around standard text fields, and was something I, personally, liked.
>>>So what exactly is it that I am missing to make the Z-machine look
>>>better than it does in, say, Nitfol? Or the above-maligned WinFrotz?
>> ObPlug: the Mac OS X version of Zoom is at
>> http://www.logicalshift.demon.co.uk/, and that web page is complete
>> with screenshot for your comparason pleasure.
>
>As I have looked at Zip 2000, I've also looked at Zoom.
>
>> Nitfol features a very 'bare bones' interface (really required,
>> because it uses Glk), and is limited in the Z-Machine display features
>> it can emulate. WinFrotz provides an excessive amount of user
>> interface cruft, which is very distracting and totally unnecessary.
>
>I mainly use Nitfol for auto-mapping and other debugging commands and for
>testing purposes. I'm certainly familiar with the Glk wrapper it uses and
>the limits of Glk as a display engine for the Z-machine, especially when
>dealing with Infernal Box Quotes. (Sorry, but the box quote is one special
>effect I wish would Go Away.)
Zoom's scrollback feature is pretty unique. If a box quote obscures something
you want to read, you can use the scrollbar to reveal it (I think Zoom is
the only non-Glk interpreter to support scrollback in this fashion), or
you can resize the window (Zoom will reformat appropriately as you resize).
>Not quite sure what you are referring to as far as WinFrotz' "cruft" goes;
>I've never really heard a menu bar referred to as such. Everything else you
>can turn off. And, yes, maybe I am a heedless barbarian, but I'd rather
>have a proper menu than a strictly right-click one, even though I rarely
>use the menus.
Personal preference thing. The designers of RISC OS always considered a
menu bar 'cruft', which is why no RISC OS application has one (context-
sensitive menus throughout). But it's standard practice for a Windows
application to use a menu bar in that fashion, so it's not particularily
fair game for comparason. The main things I dislike about about WinFrotz
are as follows:
- the default settings (white on blue? Courier? ick!). It might well be
configurable. A newcomer to the genre isn't going to be aware of this.
- the garish toolbar. Once again, configurable, but...
(and whether or not this improves ease-of-use or not is debatable)
- resizing, changing fonts, etc don't take effect until more text is
printed. It's a lot easier for a user to play with the settings if
their effect is immediately visible.
As an aside, you might not like Zoom's default configuration. If you're
distributing it with a game, and want that game to have a certain look,
then you can edit the default configuration file inside the bundle to
whatever you like. I'm not sure if WinFrotz lets you do similar. I suspect
even if it does, it doesn't let you alter the settings on a per-game
basis.
>I still haven't seen anything to support the claims of better asthetics for
>either interpreter. Configured to use the same (or as similar as you can
>get) fonts and colors, I'd be hard put to label any one interpreter as
>looking better than the other. We're dealing with text here, after all.
*shrug* As I said, aesthetics is a personal thing, and there are no
hard-and-fast rules. Anti-aliasing was always an emotive issue on
comp.sys.acorn.advocacy, for example (as were menus and toolbars,
incidentally).
Andrew.
--
____
\ \ \ Andrew Hunter <and...@logicalshift.demon.co.uk>
> > > http://www.logicalshift.demon.co.uk (me)
/_/_/ http://www.impulse.org.uk (impulse)
Rikard Peterson
news:ubqc86l...@corp.supernews.com:
> As a player I understand perfectly that you don't like remote play
> and don't want to have anything to do with it.
> But as an author who wants to reach as many people as possible,
> remote play is an advantage and greatly widens your audience.
> I thought this thread was about the future of IF and I strongly
> believe remote play in various form is part of this future
Here is another player that don't like remote play, despite having a
fast internet connection that cost me as much if I use it 8 hours a day
as if I only use it to check my mail once a day. I don't want it to be
the future (and was glad to see that you wrote *part of* the future).
Why? For some people it's a question of privacy, but that doesn't
bother me that much. I think that for me it's more beacuse I like to
"have it". I also prefer paper manuals to a PDF on the CD. Then there
is the stability of things (by which I don't mean bugs). I don't want
to suddenly be forced to upgrade something (hard- or software) to run a
computer program that ran fine yesterday.
Rikard
kodrik
> bother me that much. I think that for me it's more beacuse I like to
> "have it". I also prefer paper manuals to a PDF on the CD. Then there
> is the stability of things (by which I don't mean bugs). I don't want
> to suddenly be forced to upgrade something (hard- or software) to run a
> computer program that ran fine yesterday.
Everybody prefers locally once you know and trust the product. That is not
the question.
But to try something I don't know whether I like or not, I rather try it on
the internet with as little hassle as possible then download, install and
run it.
I've looked at much more products that were a click away than those that
require a download.
I see the internet as an advantage to reach a non-converted audience.
Another advantage of remote play is that the game can "follow you" easily.
You wake up, play a little on your home computer, go to work, play some
more on your work computer, go to lunch, play more on your cel phone...
Finally, the last advantage that is to come: the potential of multiplayer
interaction in IF, which requires a connection.
Expect for the multiplayer aspect, remote play doesn't enhance the play in
any way, on the contrary, but it helps reach a larger audience as well as
extend the means of play.
For an author who wants to reach a large audience, remote play shouldn't be
discounted on the fact that local play provides better gameplay.
Emily Short
<kill_spammers@kill_spammers.org> wrote:
> Emily Short wrote:
> > But then you get something
> > that puts game creation out of reach of the individual (e.g. me) and into
> > the hands of companies with marketing agendas, just like all those
> > commercial game companies out there already.
>
>
> Unclear. The tools you use would still exist, and in all likelihood the
> community of interested amateur programmers (to say nothing of the fan
> base of players looking for free games) would grow quite a bit.
Hmm. I'm less sanguine. But ok. Leaving this aside...
> I love experimental work. I really ought to play more IF. I liked
> Galatea. I started Varicella, which I guess may be experimental by IF
> standards. It's very funny, but also infuriatingly difficult. It would
> have made a crackerjack satirical SF novel with only a few cosmetic
> changes. Adam could have made a lot more money at it, too -- but just as
> important, a lot more people could have enjoyed it.
What "it"? It would have been a *different thing*. The infuriating
difficulty, the way that people shift their behavior subtly in reaction to
you -- those are unique to the medium. You could stick all the linear
text into a book, but it wouldn't be the same.
> > I also don't really like the thought of what would happen if there were
> > tens of thousands of IF fans out there in the world. The fan/author ratio
> > would get a lot higher, there'd be less of a sense of equality and
> > collaboration; the community that I am fond of would dissolve.
>
>
> ...or it would grow. But as much as I respect your work, Emily, I have
> to say I think it's a little selfish for you to say you don't want there
> to be tens of thousands of IF fans in the world. Is it right to deprive
> them of the opportunity to enjoy your work (or mine)?
Hrm. This argument feels sophistical to me; I'm not, in fact, *depriving*
anyone of anything. I am merely declining to proselytize. The
opportunity is there for anyone to take, if they can find it.
And I don't think it's unreasonable to wish a group to remain small if the
extreme growth of that group would change its nature. I went to a college
that I think was fantastic, and I wouldn't want to deny such an experience
to anyone who desired and was suited for it; on the other hand, part of
what made it fantastic was the 6-person seminar in the prof's living
room. Taking the enrollment from 1400 to 14,000 would change that pretty
drastically.
Obviously, we have pretty different ideas of what's going on here, because
you see this as a question of distributing a work of art which can be
received equally by any number of people. So the group size doesn't
matter to you. From my point of view, though, the context of the work is
fundamental. I am not just writing; I am writing *for* -- for this
community, for people who have a certain background, in some cases for
specific individuals.
I don't know; it's possible that that is in itself somehow a selfish
activity. I've certainly been called elitist, and snotty, and
egotistical, and a number of related nasty things. It's not my intention
to Keep People Out for the sake of it, but for me what is interesting is
this conversation, which is part theoretical discussion, part actual
works.
It's true that some people have apparently enjoyed my stuff who came to it
without a lot of prior knowledge of IF -- but I'm always faintly surprised
to hear it. If the system switched to being one in which, instead of
discussion of my work with peers, I received only fan mail from new
players, I'd find that a trade down. I'd rather have honest critical and
insightful reviews by one Paul O'Brian or one Duncan Stevens than quickie
emails of vague approbation from a dozen or a hundred random people.
I'm aware that there are people who review books, and that these people
are sometimes insightful. Methinks it isn't the same. Many of the people
in this community are fellow authors, people I sometimes critique in turn;
they're fellow theorists; many of them are friends. Don't tell me that
wouldn't change fundamentally if IF became a paying field.
(I also, I guess, have an almost allergic reaction to the process of
trying to attract the attention of random people. It is an honor and a
favor when people play my stuff. I don't like being pushy. Marketing is
pushy by nature.)
> Is it right to
> deprive yourself of the opportunity to do even more and better work
> because you'd be getting paid a living wage for doing it?
With all due respect, the work I am doing now is as much, and as good, as
it's going to get, barring that aliens should abduct me and upgrade my
brain. I put as much time into it as I can without some kind of
breakdown.
Possibly more. There comes a point in every project where it stops being
fun and becomes vile torture, and that is the point where I'm sleeping 4
hours a night and not eating, and everything I fix breaks something else,
and I can't remember what my own code does. But, dammit-- what in the
world has that got to do with money? How could anything I was paid
compensate for the strain? Or, again, how could I demand money for what I
do out of obsession? $5K a game would be both far too much and not nearly
enough. A good novel, a good game, a good research paper -- one goes
about them differently, but they all have this pull, the desire to bring
the thing into being as it *ought* to be; the world could burn away around
you and it wouldn't matter. And then, when you are done, you must be
silent and listen for people to tell you how it is not good enough, and
eventually you know enough to begin again.
And for that reason, I need to do something else with my life as well. I
cannot be all output and no input; I need my other work, if I'm going to
have any stability or anything to write *about*.
So however much IF paid, I don't think I could, or would want to, give it
more time than I do now. The only difference being paid would make would
be that I would be richer.
Yes, I realize it's not like that for everyone. I have no children to
feed, nor any cats either. I'm also the sort of person for whom money, or
anything else that I need but do not find inherently interesting, is a
very ineffective motivator. A lack of self-discipline, probably.
But I'm not talking through my hat completely. Having been paid a
commission and given guidelines for one game, I can say that I will not do
that again. It's not a bad game (if it ever sees the light of day), but
the experience is different from writing my own, and a lot of times it
became hard not to resent doing for money what, left to my own devices, I
would do gladly for free.
> If you could have those two things with no artistic compromises, would
> you be willing to sacrifice the sense of equality and collaboration?
No.
> to do. So I look around for something I can do that will satisfy me
> creatively and also (a) get distributed to more than, say, 500 people,
> plus (b) make me a little extra money on the side.
>
> Does that put it in perspective?
Sure -- I do understand why people want this. I just want something else.
I've played IF for a long time, but what brought me into the community was
the quality of the discourse, and the diversity of people's backgrounds
and perspectives. I spend most of my intellectual life among people who
are very bright, but very focused on their academic discipline.
I'm drastically in the minority here, I realize. If someone does manage
to make IF pay, I'll take my lumps (and probably leave the field, but
that's my problem, and I might well burn out at some point regardless.)
But you did ask what I foresaw, and what I wanted. What I foresee may be
incorrect, but what I want is respect, equality, common ground. Money is
a necessity of life, but I've not starved yet.
Anyway. That's the last I'll say about this, since my opinion shakes out
to being mostly about me and the way my mind and emotions work, and has
nothing to do with economics or marketing or any of the practical things
of interest here. I apologize for the personal manifesto; the accusation
of selfishness made me want to explain.
--
Emily Short
http://emshort.home.mindspring.com/index.htm
Richard Bos
> > If not, you should consider whether it isn't more rewarding to write IF
> > as a hobby and pay the rent some other way. Being paid for your work is
> > all very nice, but remember that it does create expectations - you're a
> > professional IF writer now, you're expected to deliver, even if the
> > money from IF only buys your butter and you need a real job to buy the
> > bread to go under it.
>
> Although I do think there is some money to be made in IF, I don't think it
> will be enough to make a living off it. I view it more as a return or a
> reward; in any way, it will not be a full compensation for the huge work
> involved in making a good IF product.
Well, that's the problem, isn't it? You _did_ sell your product. It
doesn't matter to your customer that you're not doing this for a living;
_he_ paid good money for your product, and you'd better give service,
and you'd better do so _now_, or you've got another unsatisfied
customer.
The only way I can see out of this is to charge so little money that the
customer realises he can't really expect miracles. Even $6.75 won't do
that, let alone $16.75. You'd need to sell for something like $2.95,
which is probably less than production costs for the amounts IF is
likely to sell.
Richard
Richard Bos
> On Wed, 17 Apr 2002 00:51:35 -0000, atholbrose wrote:
> >Not quite sure what you are referring to as far as WinFrotz' "cruft" goes;
> >I've never really heard a menu bar referred to as such. Everything else you
> >can turn off. And, yes, maybe I am a heedless barbarian, but I'd rather
> >have a proper menu than a strictly right-click one, even though I rarely
> >use the menus.
>
> Personal preference thing. The designers of RISC OS always considered a
> menu bar 'cruft', which is why no RISC OS application has one (context-
> sensitive menus throughout).
Ouch. I agree with atholbrose here, context menus only is horrible
unless the program also has a _very_ comprehensive set of keyboard
shortcuts. If I can't use the keyboard most of the time, remind me
to avoid RISC OS... I prefer to live without RSI.
Richard
Andrew Plotkin
> Jim Aikin <kill_spammers@kill_spammers.org> wrote in
> news:3CBCDBC6.5040103@kill_spammers.org:
>> Andrew Plotkin wrote:
>>
>>
>>> As for the community -- the first World Science Fiction Convention,
>>> in 1939, drew 200 attendees. They presumably all knew each other; if
>>> they didn't, they all did by the end of the weekend.
>>
>>
>> Excellent analogy, Andrew. You're always on the dime.
>>
> Well, yeah, except the hard core, fanzine fans, who consider themselves the
> *truefen* descendants of that group still all know each other, and their
> aesthetics are very different from all those thousands of Worldcon
> attendees.
You make it sound like there was an irrevocable split. There was not;
I saw plenty of those hardcore fanzine people hanging out in
Philadelphia. Talking to each other, and everyone else.
--Z (not a hardcore fanzine fan, but I have, almost accidentally,
contributed to a couple.)
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
* Make your vote count. Get your vote counted.
Matthew Russotto
Andrew Hunter <and...@logicalshift.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>I didn't express myself well there. Font smoothing is not 'true'
>anti-aliasing in that a font is rendered to pixel accuracy and then
>smoothed. Personally (and aesthetics is a very personal thing), I find
>true anti-aliased fonts a lot easier to read than smoothed fonts,
>especially at small sizes.
>
>The Mac OS X version of Zoom can do both. I should really have posted
>screenshots in the first instance, but it was late... So, we have:
>
>http://www.logicalshift.demon.co.uk/etc/zoom1.png (Quartz rendered)
>http://www.logicalshift.demon.co.uk/etc/zoom2.png (Quickdraw rendered)
Quartz and Quickdraw both use anti-aliasing, not rendering to pixel
accuracy and then smoothing (e.g. gaussian blur). The difference is the
interpolation function; I believe Quickdraw is bilinear and Quartz is
bi-quadratic.
I personally find that both to be blurry, and prefer my fonts without
any anti-aliasing. The latest Zip Infinity V6 for OS X does allow you
to use Quickdraw anti-aliasing, though.
--
Matthew T. Russotto mrus...@speakeasy.net
=====
Every time you buy a CD, a programmer is kicked in the teeth.
Every time you buy or rent a DVD, a programmer is kicked where it counts.
Every time they kick a programmer, 1000 users are kicked too, and harder.
A proposed US law called the CBDTPA would ban the PC as we know it.
This is not a joke, not an exaggeration. This is real.
http://www.cryptome.org/broadbandits.htm
Andrew Plotkin
> Andrew Hunter wrote:
>>>One way of looking at it is that for text-based IF to become
>>>marketable, it would inevitably have to become a completely different
>>>animal -- tricked out with graphics and music, click-and-use
>>>inventory, a dumbed-down parser that the Great Unwashed could deal
>>>with, and so on.
>>
>> You can do all of this in glulx, and quite a lot of it in plain old
>> Inform.
> My impression was that glulx doesn't support mp3 playback, only wav and
> (shudder) mods.
That's not a barrier. That's laziness on my part. If someone said,
hey, I can contrive to get Glulx games into Barnes&Noble, you just
have to get the MP3 support working... Okay, I'd spend a year writing
a Glulx game, and do the MP3 work in the cracks. But it would get
done. :)
> We
> simply don't know what analogies might be valid with respect to IF. Last
> time I was in Border's Books, though, I noticed a whole rack of
> full-color "graphic novels" next to the science fiction. Comic books for
> grown-ups, you sneer? Could be -- but then, what is television if not
> comic books for grown-ups?
You think television is for *grown-ups*? :)
> I can't even keep the difference between glk and glulx in my mind for
> more than 30 seconds running. If there's a worse bunch of names for
> software, I have yet to run into it.
Thank you!
Glk is just the name for the part that handles input and output.
--Z
Georgina Bensley
> > My impression was that glulx doesn't support mp3 playback, only wav and
> > (shudder) mods.
>
> That's not a barrier. That's laziness on my part. If someone said,
> hey, I can contrive to get Glulx games into Barnes&Noble, you just
> have to get the MP3 support working... Okay, I'd spend a year writing
> a Glulx game, and do the MP3 work in the cracks. But it would get
> done. :)
Getting games into B&N might be tricksy considering how hard it already is
to get *books* into the stores... But what about small, invidually owned
(possibly used) bookshops? What sort of hoops does one have to go through
to get a small shop to carry a product? Anyone have experience here?
(Now, if a little engineering could build us a cheap, conveniently
portable "IF Reader" device that you could push in all the beach
bookshops where people are always looking for relaxing ways to spend their
time...)
DarrenH
Also, Lingo (used in Director) is a complete language in itself, and
ActionScript (for Flash 5) isn't too far behind....
Rikard Peterson
news:a9k1v3$5p6$2...@reader1.panix.com:
> Jim Aikin <kill_spammers@kill_spammers.org> wrote:
>> My impression was that glulx doesn't support mp3 playback, only
>> wav and (shudder) mods.
>
> That's not a barrier. That's laziness on my part. If someone said,
> hey, I can contrive to get Glulx games into Barnes&Noble, you just
> have to get the MP3 support working... Okay, I'd spend a year
> writing a Glulx game, and do the MP3 work in the cracks. But it
> would get done. :)
Wouldn't Ogg Vorbis be better?
Rikard (who knows nothing but have heard that Ogg is as least as good
as MP3 without license problems)
Andrew Plotkin
> Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> wrote in
> news:a9k1v3$5p6$2...@reader1.panix.com:
>> Jim Aikin <kill_spammers@kill_spammers.org> wrote:
>>> My impression was that glulx doesn't support mp3 playback, only
>>> wav and (shudder) mods.
>>
>> That's not a barrier. That's laziness on my part. If someone said,
>> hey, I can contrive to get Glulx games into Barnes&Noble, you just
>> have to get the MP3 support working... Okay, I'd spend a year
>> writing a Glulx game, and do the MP3 work in the cracks. But it
>> would get done. :)
> Wouldn't Ogg Vorbis be better?
Probably. That's one of the things that has to be looked at.
Philipp Lenssen
news:ubqmf5t...@corp.supernews.com...
>..
> Expect for the multiplayer aspect, remote play doesn't enhance the play in
> any way
What about being able to continue the same game from different machines
without installing any software, but simply submitting login and password?
If a web application does all I need than I prefer running it online
anytime. I understand there's a big difference between having a steady flat
rate (which should become more common by time) or paying by minutes. Also of
course the connection should not suddenly break and loose the player's game
data. Even though that happens in offline adventures as well, when they
crash -- in fact it's practically the only reason I used to save LucasArts
games (those with no-dead-end and continue where you left policy).
Eric Mayer
<erky...@eblong.com> wrote:
>Eric Mayer <emay...@epix.net> wrote:
>> Jim Aikin <kill_spammers@kill_spammers.org> wrote in
>> news:3CBCDBC6.5040103@kill_spammers.org:
>
>>> Andrew Plotkin wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> As for the community -- the first World Science Fiction Convention,
>>>> in 1939, drew 200 attendees. They presumably all knew each other; if
>>>> they didn't, they all did by the end of the weekend.
>>>
>>>
>>> Excellent analogy, Andrew. You're always on the dime.
>>>
>
>> Well, yeah, except the hard core, fanzine fans, who consider themselves the
>> *truefen* descendants of that group still all know each other, and their
>> aesthetics are very different from all those thousands of Worldcon
>> attendees.
>
>You make it sound like there was an irrevocable split. There was not;
>I saw plenty of those hardcore fanzine people hanging out in
>Philadelphia. Talking to each other, and everyone else.
>
>--Z (not a hardcore fanzine fan, but I have, almost accidentally,
>contributed to a couple.)
>
What we can see depends on our perspective, I suppose. My perspective
is that of someone who was, indeed, a hardcore fanzine fan for twenty
years, contributed -- on purpose -- literally hundreds of articles,
reviews, essays, columns, drawings, letters etc etc to fanzines,
from the smallest to the largest focal point fanzines. (One of the
qualifications for hardcore fans is to be able to say focal point
fanzine with a straight face) not to mention publishing dozens and
dozens of zines myself. (Hmmm, sounds like a let me introduce myself
post years too late)
As I said, the aesthetic, mindset, what have you, of the great mass
of folks who have joined the sf community since the early days are far
far different than the original core group's. A fact that has been
bewailed endlessly in fanzines over the years, despite that plenty of
fanzine fans will attend Worldcon along with thousands of other fans
of many other persuasions. But I wouldn't expect anyone to plunge into
fanzine fandom for twenty years to confirm this to themselves.
However, as I mentioned in my followup to my own hasty post, I think
the hobby represented by, and which grew out of those who attended
that convention in 1939, is so much different than that represented by
R*IF as to be irrelevant. The only interesting "lesson", from an IF
point of view, being that the IF audience might well expand, but it
could expand into a group with much different interests. Leaving
original IFers in pretty much the same place as now.
Which might not be a bad thing, if, like Emily, you see advantages in
remaining part of a small group with clearly shared interests. I have
heard, and pretty much agreed with, the arguments Emily gave, from
fanzine fans who preferred to define their group in such a way as to
keep it small and wedded to the original values. (The eternal debate
about who is a real fan is way off topic in this group).
However, anyone interested in what peculiar activities these "fanzine
fans" engage in can take a glance at my online "fanzine" featuring
honest to goodness, originally published by hecto, ditto, mimeo, etc.
fanzine material:
http://home.epix.net/~maywrite/hecto.htm
--
Eric Mayer
Web Site: <http://home.epix.net/~maywrite>
"The map is not the territory." -- Alfred Korzybski
Andrew Hunter
>In article <slrnabqngc...@chrysoprase.localdomain>,
>Andrew Hunter <and...@logicalshift.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>>I didn't express myself well there. Font smoothing is not 'true'
>>anti-aliasing in that a font is rendered to pixel accuracy and then
>>smoothed. Personally (and aesthetics is a very personal thing), I find
>>true anti-aliased fonts a lot easier to read than smoothed fonts,
>>especially at small sizes.
>>
>>The Mac OS X version of Zoom can do both. I should really have posted
>>screenshots in the first instance, but it was late... So, we have:
>>
>>http://www.logicalshift.demon.co.uk/etc/zoom1.png (Quartz rendered)
>>http://www.logicalshift.demon.co.uk/etc/zoom2.png (Quickdraw rendered)
>
>Quartz and Quickdraw both use anti-aliasing, not rendering to pixel
>accuracy and then smoothing (e.g. gaussian blur). The difference is the
>interpolation function; I believe Quickdraw is bilinear and Quartz is
>bi-quadratic.
There's more to it than that. Quartz snaps outlines and glyphs to subpixel
accuracy, QuickDraw doesn't. In the screenshots I showed, the word 'Tangled'
on the first line of text is 2 pixels longer when rendered by Quartz than
by Quickdraw. The total difference is enough to knock the word 'breath'
over the end of the line (around 4 pixels total difference).
The difference is also noticable when you look at places where two copies
of the same letters are rendered (eg the two 'e's in 'tree'). They'll be
different under Quartz, because subpixel accuracy is used throughout,
and exactly the same under Quickdraw, because it isn't.
Hmm, looking at the darkest pixels for an 'o' in each gives us:
**** **
* * * *
* * * *
* * * *
* * * *
* * * *
**** **
(Quickdraw) (Quartz)
If the only difference was the filtering algorithm, you'd expect the
darkest pixels to be the same (these being the pixels that are most
covered by the glyph), but they are not[1]. There are similar differences
on other curves and serifs are noticably wider under Quickdraw.
It's hard to tell without looking at the code, but if Quickdraw really
is doing supersampling[2], then it's doing it in a very bizarre way.
>I personally find that both to be blurry, and prefer my fonts without
>any anti-aliasing. The latest Zip Infinity V6 for OS X does allow you
>to use Quickdraw anti-aliasing, though.
Adjusting screen gamma helps a lot. Excessively dark grays seems to be
a feature of many anti-aliasing algorithms (assuming linear intensity
might be an easy assumption to make, but it tends to be wrong).
Andrew.
[1] The fact that Quartz positions glyphs on subpixels and Quickdraw
doesn't could be expected to make some difference, but I don't think
quite this much.
[2] It could well be a prefilter algorithm. But the only reason to use
one of those is if your samples are the size of pixels, which was my
original point.
OKB (not okblacke)
> Obviously, we have pretty different ideas of what's going on
> here, because you see this as a question of distributing a
> work of art which can be received equally by any number of
> people. So the group size doesn't matter to you. From my
> point of view, though, the context of the work is
> fundamental. I am not just writing; I am writing *for* --
> for this community, for people who have a certain
> background, in some cases for specific individuals.
<snip>
> It's true that some people have apparently enjoyed my stuff
> who came to it without a lot of prior knowledge of IF -- but
> I'm always faintly surprised to hear it. If the system
> switched to being one in which, instead of discussion of my
> work with peers, I received only fan mail from new players,
> I'd find that a trade down. I'd rather have honest critical
> and insightful reviews by one Paul O'Brian or one Duncan
> Stevens than quickie emails of vague approbation from a
> dozen or a hundred random people.
>
> I'm aware that there are people who review books, and that
> these people are sometimes insightful. Methinks it isn't
> the same. Many of the people in this community are fellow
> authors, people I sometimes critique in turn; they're fellow
> theorists; many of them are friends. Don't tell me that
> wouldn't change fundamentally if IF became a paying field.
I too treasure this atmosphere. It's incredible that we can have a group like this. Sure, we have
the odd troll, but we also constantly get posts from the most talented creators, the most appreciative
players, and the most insightful critics associated with the medium.
I do not, however, think that the creation of a commercial IF market would NECESSARILY
destroy our wonderful little world. Indeed, in a sense we already are a small, anomalous non-commerical
group occupying that tiny region where the commerically viable realms of books and computer games
overlap. I do feel certain that, if something called IF becomes commercially successful, it will be
substantively different from the kind of thing that is currently being produced. I don't think this has to
mean that it will elbow out the current community.
The film industry is huge and fabulously profitable, but in many cases the best movies come from
a separate arena of filmmakers who have little to do with Hollywood power plays and other popular-
magazine fodder. I think that, really, the existing IF community is an underground/indie community, and
it's just not meaningfully similar to what would be created by a commerical IF industry.
In other words, to put it bluntly, I personally would say that discussion of commerical futures for
IF is outside the scope of this newsgroup. What we talk about here is "how do I achieve such-and-such
effect in my work?" or "here is such-and-such a tool that may be helpful to authors" or "what do you think
of such-and-such technique in IF?" The questions that are being raised by this thread are entirely
different: "how much will you pay me to write IF?"; "how many copies of this game can I sell?"; "what is
the best way to go about putting IF on bookshelves in major retail outlets?" These latter questions are
valid, but they explore an entirely different domain than the former.
In short, I think this discussion has far more to do with business than with interactive fiction, and
this newsgroup is for discussion of interactive fiction. I'm not telling anyone to take it outside; heaven
knows we've got off-topic discussions up the wazoo already, and if this thread drags on I'll just do with it
what I did with those: ignore it. I think, though, that if meaningful discussion of these commerical-IF
issues is really wanted, a separate, specially focused forum would be more effective, since at the very least
the percentage of genuinely interested parties would be higher.
--
--OKB (not okblacke)
"Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path, and leave a trail."
--author unknown
kodrik
> ActionScript (for Flash 5) isn't too far behind....
I have found Action Script to be a huge leap forward and let me do almost
anything I wanted.
It made Flash a totally new product. As for a piece of IF with rich
multimedia content, I don't see what benefit you will get by using Director
over Flash.
Stuart Allen
> "kodrik" <kod...@zc8.net> wrote in message
> news:ubqmf5t...@corp.supernews.com...
> >..
> > Expect for the multiplayer aspect, remote play doesn't enhance the play in
> > any way
> >..
>
> What about being able to continue the same game from different machines
> without installing any software, but simply submitting login and password?
With JACL, and presumably any client-server setup, the game state is
saved on the server after every single move. By simply bookmarking the
game you can return to exactly where you left off each time,
regardless of where you are accessing from. Of course you are also
able to make named saves and return to them manually.
I have also tested playing JACL games via Nokia's WAP phone emulator,
and thanks to the SMS craze, Nokia has now brought out a quite small
and affordable phone with a complete qwerty keyboard. Personally I
think thin client is definitely going to be a big part of the future.
Most peoples complaints seem to be based around current network
technology, but this thread is titled 'The Future of IF', isn't it?
Stuart
Eric Mayer
wrote:
>
> I do not, however, think that the creation of a commercial IF market would NECESSARILY
>destroy our wonderful little world. Indeed, in a sense we already are a small, anomalous non-commerical
>group occupying that tiny region where the commerically viable realms of books and computer games
>overlap. I do feel certain that, if something called IF becomes commercially successful, it will be
>substantively different from the kind of thing that is currently being produced. I don't think this has to
>mean that it will elbow out the current community.
>
I commented on this, in effect, further up this thread but I can't
resist putting in my two cents again, because you're absolutely right.
As an example you can look at sf and the sf fan community which I was
long involved with. The fan community began back in the thirties as a
bunch of young people mostly interested in sf which was a despised
genre, available in pulp magazines but not even fit to put between
hardcovers. True, you coud make some money writing sf for the pulps
but it was far from the mainstream.
However, as sf fans started publishing fanzines they soon became more
interested in each other and their own community and their own
publishing efforts than they were in sf, and pretty soon amateur sf
became more or less verboten in fanzines produced by self styled
fanzine fandom.
Meanwhile sf moved into hardcover, then into movies, and today sf is
everyplace you look. The conventions started by sf fans, hungry to
meet others interested in the weird Buck Rogers stuff hardly anyone
knew or cared about, swelled in attendance, with fans of Star Trek,
Star Wars, etc. SF authors were on the bestseller lists!
But the core community of fanzine fans has remained primarily
interested in publishing fanzines, which refer to sf only
peripherally, if at all. Now folks who go to cons will call themselves
fans, trekkies will, those mainly interested in designing costumes,
filk singing, Dorsai, whatever...all call themselves fans -- but their
interests are different and most are not even really aware of fanzine
fandom which continues on, not much larger or different in outlook
from when it began.
I agree, that even were IF to explode commercially it would not affect
the people who still wanted to do what this group does now -- it is
just that you'd have a whole bunch of people running around at huge
conventions swinging fake lanterns or something that everyone in the
original IF community would have to disavow. Even though we'd be
outnumbered 100 to 1 and the kids swinging the plastic lanterns at
cons would call themselves us and the newspapers covering the cons
would believe them.
> In other words, to put it bluntly, I personally would say that discussion of commerical futures for
>IF is outside the scope of this newsgroup. What we talk about here is "how do I achieve such-and-such
>effect in my work?" or "here is such-and-such a tool that may be helpful to authors" or "what do you think
>of such-and-such technique in IF?" The questions that are being raised by this thread are entirely
>different: "how much will you pay me to write IF?"; "how many copies of this game can I sell?"; "what is
>the best way to go about putting IF on bookshelves in major retail outlets?" These latter questions are
>valid, but they explore an entirely different domain than the former.
>
Sounds familiar. When I was publishing a fanzine I had to often
explain to people who wanted to contribute reviews of sf books or
movies that, sorry, this is an sf fanzine, and so, we don't talk about
sf :)
Adam Thornton
Jim Aikin <kill_spammers@kill_spammers.org> wrote:
>Don't hold me to these numbers. I could be off by a factor of ten in
>either direction. But if you only saw a prospect of making $5,000 for a
>year of evenings and weekends programming a work of IF that you could be
>truly proud of, would you do it?
>
>For some reason, I don't think that's a very tough question.
I don't know.
If I were going to realize $5,000 I think I'd rather give it away.
Although if fewer people would see it if I gave it away than if I sold
it I'd probably rather sell it.
If I were doing it for money I'd feel like I had to do it. And maybe I
want to do something else with my evenings and weekends.
Adam
kodrik
> without installing any software, but simply submitting login and password?
I see this as an accessibility advantage, but it doesn't change the gameplay
> If a web application does all I need than I prefer running it online
> anytime. I understand there's a big difference between having a steady
> flat rate (which should become more common by time) or paying by minutes.
A lot of people are like you, the number of people playing zork online is
the proof.
> Also of course the connection should not suddenly break and loose the
> player's game data.
Even if the connection breaks, you game data should be safe. With my system
as well as other since the connection is not constant anyway.
DarrenH
Flash was the "vector" platform, but with ActionScript any reason for me to
go back to Director has all but vanished! Cheers, D
"kodrik" <kod...@zc8.net> wrote in message
news:ubrs9os...@corp.supernews.com...
nils barth
> Rikard Peterson <trumg...@bigfoot.com> wrote:
>> Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> wrote in
>> news:a9k1v3$5p6$2...@reader1.panix.com:
>>> hey, I can contrive to get Glulx games into Barnes&Noble, you just
>>> have to get the MP3 support working... Okay, I'd spend a year
>>> writing a Glulx game, and do the MP3 work in the cracks. But it
>>> would get done. :)
>
>> Wouldn't Ogg Vorbis be better?
As far as I know,
it's legal to playback MP3 and Ogg Vorbis, and it's legal to
encode Ogg Vorbis, but Fraunhofer (a German company that
holds some patents about MP3 -- I think they developed the
format) claim that it is *illegal* to distribute MP3
encoders or to sell MP3s w/o paying them a license fee.
I'm no expert in this, but:
(1) It's completely safe (barring hidden patents that
everyone's missed) to have Ogg Vorbis playback in an
interpreter, to encode Oggs, and to distribute games for
free or commercially that include Oggs.
(2) It's probably safe to have MP3 playback in an
interpreter, but it's probably unsafe to sell games with
MP3s in them.
At current IF audience size, I don't think anyone's going
to sue IF authors for selling games w/ MP3s w/o licenses,
but if you're planning to hit big-time, you should
certainly use Ogg.
--
nils
email: USER@HOST
where USER is n8c649hnti001 and HOST is sneakemail.com
Jim Aikin
> As far as I know,
> it's legal to playback MP3 and Ogg Vorbis, and it's legal to
> encode Ogg Vorbis, but Fraunhofer (a German company that
> holds some patents about MP3 -- I think they developed the
> format) claim that it is *illegal* to distribute MP3
> encoders or to sell MP3s w/o paying them a license fee.
Do you have a link to a statement of theirs on this subject? Because
what you're saying sounds wrong. Yes, you have to license the encoder
from them, but the audio software I use all the time includes an mp3
encoder; I don't have to license it, because the software manufacturer
already did. But it would be ludicrous for Fraunhofer to suggest that
they had a copyright license interest in any file created using their
encoder.
Unless/until I see a statement from them confirming that they really
think this, I'll assume you misunderstood.
--Jim Aikin
Jim Aikin
> For some people it's a question of privacy, but that doesn't
> bother me that much.
Privacy vanished about 30 years ago. But that doesn't mean it's not
worth a little effort to resist the encroachment of the Wintel tentacles
into your private files.
> I think that for me it's more beacuse I like to
> "have it". I also prefer paper manuals to a PDF on the CD. Then there
> is the stability of things (by which I don't mean bugs). I don't want
> to suddenly be forced to upgrade something (hard- or software) to run a
> computer program that ran fine yesterday.
Plus, what if you're playing a game online, and you're halfway through,
but their server is down today so you can't play? Or what if, far worse,
the company that created the game stopped paying its ISP bill and the
site has been permanently deleted?
That's the dark underbelly of online gaming -- and online everything
else. What's online is only there as long as someone maintains it. When
MicroSquish releases a browser update, your company might have to run
around recoding your site so that your users can still have access to
your game. If I have a CD-ROM game, on the other hand, I've got it in my
hot little hands. Your company can go up the spout, and I'll be sad
because you won't make any more games, but it won't affect THIS game,
for which I paid money.
I will never pay a fee for access to an online service, for this precise
reason. Can you say "dot-com bubble"?
--Jim Aikin
Jim Aikin
> What "it"? It would have been a *different thing*. The infuriating
> difficulty, the way that people shift their behavior subtly in reaction to
> you -- those are unique to the medium. You could stick all the linear
> text into a book, but it wouldn't be the same.
You're right, of course. I overstated my case. There are also effects
one can achieve quite easily with conventional fiction that can't be
achieved in IF. I could make a long list of them. The point I was
groping toward was that I think Varicella has the makings of a perfectly
swell comic novella. Or a comedy movie, for that matter.
With respect to the infuriating difficulty, I'm probably in the
minority. I don't care for infuriating difficulty. In fact, that's one
of the main problems I have with IF as a genre, both personally and
philosophically. On a philosophical level, I have to question the value
of any art form that is explicitly designed to frustrate and mystify its
audience. Of course, mystery novels do that -- but all you have to do is
keep reading, and sooner or later the frustration goes away. Agatha
Christie didn't sell paperbacks with pages that would stay glued
together until you figured out whose footprints were in the garden.
> And I don't think it's unreasonable to wish a group to remain small if the
> extreme growth of that group would change its nature. I went to a college
> that I think was fantastic, and I wouldn't want to deny such an experience
> to anyone who desired and was suited for it; on the other hand, part of
> what made it fantastic was the 6-person seminar in the prof's living
> room. Taking the enrollment from 1400 to 14,000 would change that pretty
> drastically.
A reasonable analogy, though as I said in another part of this thread,
all analogies (including mine) are suspect.
> Obviously, we have pretty different ideas of what's going on here, because
> you see this as a question of distributing a work of art which can be
> received equally by any number of people. So the group size doesn't
> matter to you. From my point of view, though, the context of the work is
> fundamental. I am not just writing; I am writing *for* -- for this
> community, for people who have a certain background, in some cases for
> specific individuals.
Your point of view is as valid as mine -- perhaps moreso. I applaud
anyone's dedication to an art form that has a small but dedicated
audience. (Poetry, for instance.)
> So however much IF paid, I don't think I could, or would want to, give it
> more time than I do now. The only difference being paid would make would
> be that I would be richer.
I agree with most of what you said. But as Bessie Smith (I think it was
Bessie Smith...) said, "Honey, I been rich, and I been poor, and rich is
better."
> Yes, I realize it's not like that for everyone. I have no children to
> feed, nor any cats either.
Will you marry me? ;-) I'm a pushover for intelligent women who don't
have cats.
> Anyway. That's the last I'll say about this, since my opinion shakes out
> to being mostly about me and the way my mind and emotions work, and has
> nothing to do with economics or marketing or any of the practical things
> of interest here. I apologize for the personal manifesto; the accusation
> of selfishness made me want to explain.
Sorry if it came off as an accusation. What I'm trying to do, I suppose,
is find out how other people in the group feel about all this. I really
value your insights. For _all_ of us, it's mostly about ourselves and
the way our minds and emotions work.
--Jim Aikin
Zem
Eric Mayer
> With respect to the infuriating difficulty, I'm probably in the
> minority. I don't care for infuriating difficulty. In fact, that's one
> of the main problems I have with IF as a genre, both personally and
> philosophically. On a philosophical level, I have to question the
> value of any art form that is explicitly designed to frustrate and
> mystify its audience. Of course, mystery novels do that -- but all you
> have to do is keep reading, and sooner or later the frustration goes
> away. Agatha Christie didn't sell paperbacks with pages that would
> stay glued together until you figured out whose footprints were in the
> garden.
I like easy puzzles myself. But that is because I'm no good at puzzles and
I like puzzles I can solve, and who doesn't? A fellow who sets orienteering
courses for people to navigate through the woods put it well when he said
people want a "doable challenge." If they go out on the course and it is
too hard for them to complete then that's a bad experience, but if they
complete the course, but it didn't test them a bit then they feel they
haven't accomplished anything. And isn't that the same when it comes to IF
puzzles? The trouble is, whether IF or orienteering, what one person sees
as a doable challenge another will find too easy or hard. Of course, at
some level, this is true of regular fiction, where some readers might be
more able or inclined to grapple with everything you've tried to put into
the story while others might just want to skim the surface, but with
regular fiction, you get to keep turning the pages. As a writer, I don't
like the idea of a reader being blocked from completing the story.
Then too, is IF really fiction, or is it a game? To me, as soon as the
slightest puzzle intrudes, especially one that threatens, even slightly, to
prevent the reader/player from reaching the end of the story, then it feels
like a game. Because, after all, you have a win or lose situation (reaching
the end of the story or not) which you'd never have in a book. I'm not
saying this is bad. Without some gaming aspect how is IF different from
regular fiction, except being more awkward to read?
I have never solved a mystery novel. Don't even try hard. Which is not to
say I have no interest in the mystery element. I enjoy admiring how the
detective pieces everything together!
--
Eric
http://home.epix.net/~maywrite/
======================================================================
"Who does not see that I have taken a road, in which, incessantly and
without labor, I shall proceed so long as there shall be ink and paper in
the world? I can give no account of my life by my actions; fortune has
placed them too low; I must do it by my fancies." Michel de Montaigne
======================================================================
David Keller
"Georgina Bensley" <ge...@duke.edu> wrote in message
news:Pine.GSO.4.44.02041...@carr3.acpub.duke.edu...
>
> Getting games into B&N might be tricksy considering how hard it already is
> to get *books* into the stores... But what about small, invidually owned
> (possibly used) bookshops? What sort of hoops does one have to go through
> to get a small shop to carry a product? Anyone have experience here?
Sounds like your targets would be specialty shops. Used books and
collectibles. Books and games. Comics, collectibles and games.
Underground/alternative comics and collectibles. Games/toys. Head shops.
Shops that will accept items for sale on consignment should be much more
amenable to experimentation than others. An initial low price to encourage
fairly mild curiosity buys and establish a base for your product might be
useful. Or it might be harmful. I mention that for what it is worth with
no guess as to which is more likely in this instance.
Taking "a small shop" literally, it helps a lot to have some sort of
relationship with an owner, staff member or someone else who has such a
relationship. A shop with an owner or employee who has an interest in or
fond memory of IF would be more inclined to take a chance (especially with
consignment items). Or an owner who is just open to, or likes, innovation.
Proven good sales from a single shop can be persuasive when approaching
other shops.
****I'd tend to look for a books, collectibles and oddities shop that
accepted items on consignment where the items in stock suggested a number of
patrons would be interested in IF. Preferably one where I was a patron and
had a casual relationship with the proprietor. Collectibles with a
nostaglia link might be a good sign depending on the age and special
interest groups the nostalgia seemed to be linked to. It would be good if
the shop was loosely linked to other shops in some manner such as being
listed in the freebie Used Bookstores of Orange County pamphlet by the cash
register (owners of such stores tend to communicate with each other and be
willing to direct people to other shops that carry items they don't in
response to inquiries; that's a big plus).***
***If I did manage to get an IF game stocked in a store I'd pay careful
attention to my local newspaper and see if I could think of a way to
interest some staff writer in possibly writing about it if I thought that
writer would be likely to write something I'd want published. Best bet
would be one of the weekly columns in what is called the Accent section most
days of the week. That's sort of the society, health, fluff, trivia,
charity, local interest, entertainment that does fit the Show section and
comics section. Next likeliest for my paper would be Weekend Show. Serious
potential for this to backfire though. And the times when a staff writer
would be most interested in your game probably won't be known to you until
after the article or column has been published and the writer's interest is
gone.***
If I had an IF game I'd try to get my start by offering it as a consignment
item to Altair-4. If Nix was still in business that would be worth a try
also. No idea what your local counterparts would be. Oh, I'm writing from
an urban Southern California perspective.
I'm not writing from experience, except that I've had an independent
alternative/underground comic store agree to accept something from me on
consignment. The store has a very liberal policy about that as the owner
wishes to encourage and help new authors/artists in the field and make a
wide selection available to his customers. As my collaborator never
finished the artwork so we could deliver the comic to the store I can't
report any results.
David K
Knight37
> But if you only saw a prospect of making $5,000 for a
> year of evenings and weekends programming a work of IF that you could be
> truly proud of, would you do it?
>
> For some reason, I don't think that's a very tough question.
It's not a tough question for me. There's no way I'd give up a year's worth
of weeknights and weekends for $5000. Not even doing IF, heck I probably
wouldn't even do that if I were being paid to play games during that time,
even though that's a pretty good chunk of that time's allocated use
already.
Now, $50,000? I might could be tempted, but only if it were a sure $50,000,
not a "maybe" $50,000.
--
Knight37
"When a man lies he murders some part of the world.
These are the pale deaths which men miscall their lives.
All this I cannot bear to witness any longer.
Cannot the kingdom of salvation take me home?"
-- Metallica "To Live Is To Die"
Terence
"Jim Aikin" <jai...@musicplayer.com> wrote in message
news:f904a017.02041...@posting.google.com...
> I'm wondering how other IF authors see the future of this genre. Not
> in a technical sense (more sophisticated parsers, etc.), though that's
> always an interesting topic, but in a broader sense.
>
The question itself would appear to be something of a monomer. There is NO
future for IF in any form of commercial sense. You can spend all the time in
the world setting up business models, financial plans and marketing
techniques - but the plain and simple fact of the matter is that it will be
time wasted. There is no 'captive audience' waiting to be satisfied.
The future of IF is rooted in its past. The original companies (Infocom,
Level 9 et al) were successful for a short time because of the hardware then
available. Computers had miniscule power compared to today's high-tech
monsters. There were no graphics, hard drives, CD's or sound-cards - so what
else was there to do but 'play' text games?
Making a virtue out of necessity is all well and good when there is no
alternative, but looking at IF as a commercial proposition today is a
concept that simply does not stand up to analysis. No company has made
money, and no individual a decent living from releasing an IF product since
the mid-to-late eighties.
Don't get me wrong - I like IF (good). I play IF (badly), and I even try to
write IF (worse). But the 'window of opportunity' (pun) has long passed into
a golden twilight from where there is no return.
WAP phones, Text messaging, and third generation mobile technology may on
the face of it resemble the state of computer performances of the late
seventies/early eighties - with one exception. There IS an alternative. Many
alternatives.
Entrepreneurs who see IF as a vehicle for profit making enterprises are in
for a big disappointment. IF fans, writers and artists will nevertheless
carry on regardless.
Terence
Paul Drallos
This is my first post here, and I whole-heartedly agree with your post.
I'd lke to add a few things:
Graphics and multi-media are the first step of a slipery slope that will
surly kill IF. It is exactly what killed IF once already. First, we
get a little music, and some pictures, then what? We improve it by
adding some video, and a point and click interface, and then we're back
to the graphic adventures and IF is dead.
The appeal of IF is the absence of multi-media. Or to put it another
way, the multi-media of the mind, generated by text only. Also, the
accessability to the games on Palm computers is a large reason for IF's
continued popularity. That and, as you say, the innovation that is
possible because the games don't have to sell.
However, if someone wants to amke a very popular IF game that can be
sold, I can think of one way to approach it.
Stephen King tried to sell a novel over the internet, chapter by
chapter, but I believe it didn't work out too well. However, if someone
would team up with a well-known and popular author, and release an
original novel by this popular author in IF form only (the author would
work closely with an experienced IF writer), probably a large number of
copies could be sold for a modest price. The publicity from both the
involvement of the well-known author, and (to the general public) the
novelty of the IF approach, would be sure to make news and draw interest.
But the puzzles could not be very challanging, because it would be too
much work for the inexperienced player/reader. It would have to be
targeted at *readers*, not game players. It would be a means of giving
readers a never before experienced relationship with a book.
-Paul
kodrik
> chapter, but I believe it didn't work out too well.
Many view it as a success:
"Riding the bullet" was downloaded more than hald a million times and the
firs chapter of "The Plant" was downloaded more than 150,000 times, and
about 76 percent paid for it (used an honor system to pay $1 for the
chapter).
Paul Drallos
>"Riding the bullet" was downloaded more than hald a million
>times and the firs chapter of "The Plant" was downloaded more
>than 150,000 times, and about 76 percent paid for it (used an
>honor system to pay $1 for the chapter).
OK. I stand corrected and I'm happy to hear that.
It also supports the idea that a substantial number of people are
willing to pay for a fiction download if it is produced by a well known
author.
So if, (and that's a big 'if') somebody wanted to open up IF to a
broader, paying audience, it could probably be done through
collaboration with a popular author and a good IF writer/programmer.
Maybe this is something Stephen King would be interested in trying.
Or maybe Tom Clancy or John Grisham, or somebody like that.
I bet it would sell like hot cakes if one of them released a new book in
the form of IF (Z-machine compatible, of course.)
Andrew Plotkin
> "Jim Aikin" <jai...@musicplayer.com> wrote in message
> news:f904a017.02041...@posting.google.com...
>> I'm wondering how other IF authors see the future of this genre. Not
>> in a technical sense (more sophisticated parsers, etc.), though that's
>> always an interesting topic, but in a broader sense.
>>
> The question itself would appear to be something of a monomer. There is NO
> future for IF in any form of commercial sense. You can spend all the time in
> the world setting up business models, financial plans and marketing
> techniques - but the plain and simple fact of the matter is that it will be
> time wasted. There is no 'captive audience' waiting to be satisfied.
I don't understand what you mean by a "captive audience" in this
context. I understand "captive audience" to mean a group of people who
feel they have no choice but to buy your product (for whatever
reason). That certainly isn't required for a product to make money.
> Making a virtue out of necessity is all well and good when there is no
> alternative, but looking at IF as a commercial proposition today is a
> concept that simply does not stand up to analysis. No company has made
> money, and no individual a decent living from releasing an IF product since
> the mid-to-late eighties.
You are stating your conclusion here, as if were a proof. How many
people have tried? Have they covered every possible approach, or have
they all tried similar things?
Here's *my* analysis: I believe I could make $3000 by releasing a
shareware Inform game, $20 a copy, and advertising it only on this
newsgroup. (This is in line with other shareware attempts -- see
discussion about Stephen Granade's _Losing Your Grip_.) I also believe
that this newsgroup only contains a small fraction of the people in
the world who would be interested in such a game. (We get as many new
arrivals today as we did in 1995. "Oh, I didn't know people still
wrote those!) Usenet is a small and obscure corner of the Internet.
Nobody who doesn't already know about the modern IF movement is going
to do the Web research to find the game, get it set up, and play it.)
Conclusion: a game that could reach the wider audience could hit a
decent revenue -- tens of thousands of dollars. Several authors
coordinating their efforts could bring in an order of magnitude more
money than that -- say a hundred thousand dollars.
There is no wall of impossibility there. It's all business planning:
figuring out how to advertise such a thing and manage the enterprise.
I have no illusions about that -- it would eat money at nearly the
rate it comes in, and that *after* a large initial investment. I would
expect, in the end, to make a couple of dollars per copy, not the $19
per copy I'd make by the self-published shareware route.
And people still make money writing books. Many of them *don't* make
"a decent living at it". That's not what I'd shoot for at first.
kodrik
> Or maybe Tom Clancy or John Grisham, or somebody like that.
>
> I bet it would sell like hot cakes if one of them released a new book in
> the form of IF (Z-machine compatible, of course.)
Stephen King said he is going to stop writing altogether.
As for the other ones, it seems writing a piece of IF is a lot more work
than writing a book, even if you have someone else code it for you. Not
only do you have to write a story but you have to break up the world in
objects and write for each one. Also, a famous author still makes more
money with a paper book than with a digital book. It will be hard to
convince an author to work more for less.
Another problem is the current interpreters, the interface they provide at
this point is sub-standard compared to what people expect from a product.
In a book, it is not important to have a picture on every page but it is
important to have a nice cover and a good format for the text.
I don't think it is the case with IF: The install needs to be a click, the
launching needs something more than going straight to a command line, and
the interface needs more elements than just a line to type your text. It
has to look like a real program. Text editors look better than IF today,
and they both only convey text, I'm not saying a text adventures should add
graphical elements to the story, but the design of the interface is very
important.
I think a potential market would be an autho who is guaranteed shelf space
on major bookstore and he adjoins a CD to his book with a small IF game
joined to it in the same context as the content of his book that promotes a
larger IF game that people can buy. It doesn't have to be a top seller
author but one who is popular enough to be sold but who coul also benefit
from the interest his book will generate by being a two in one poduct.
Now think of this product that is supposed to be a teaser, think of people
who are paranoid about command lines, and think of the current interface IF
games use. It won't require much to enhance these, but I hope you see it is
needed.
Paul Drallos
writing a book. But the fact that writing IF is hard work doesn't
defeat the fact that IF pieces are still being written. And they're
being written with no expectation of making a profit.
I would bet that there are a lot of IF writers who would be thrilled to
work with, say, Tom Clancy or someone like that to develop a new IF
adventure. Look at it this way: If you're an IF writer, and you are
going to write an IF game anyway, why not let Tom Clancy do some of the
work for you?
I don't see any problem with the interface. I use Frotz, WinFrotz and
PilotFrotz. I do most of my playing on my Palm-Pilot. In either case,
installation could not be easier. WinFrotz is a stand-alone executable.
It'll run anywhere you put it. PilotFrotz is just as easy.
If you want to jazz up the interface a little, you could borrow some of
the features from PilotFrotz. Are you familiar with that? It has a
compass rose, up,down, enter, and exit map that comes up when you tap
the left side of the screen. Just tap NE, and NE is entered on the
command line. Tapping the right side brings up a list of frequently
used commands - look, examine, open, put, take, etc. Also, tapping any
word on the screen will automatically write it on the command line. One
can play quite a while without having to manually enter any text. Is
that the sort of thing you mean?
I think a full-fledged novel (especially Tom Clancy novels) are too long
for IF. But a short novel or extended short-story would be ideal.
Maybe one of these prolific authors have ideas for some stories that are
too short to release in their usual style but would benefit from an
IF treatment of it.
I also thing the puzzles should be fairly obvious. At least at first.
Otherwise, people not used to IF will get very quickly frustrated. It
should be as relaxing as reading a book, but more engageing because of
the interaction. It could work. The biggest problem is finding an
author that would be willing to `sacrifice' a short work that probably
wouldn't get published anyway because it isn't epic enough.
It could still make an IF of epic proportions.
Terence
"Andrew Plotkin" <erky...@eblong.com> wrote in message
news:a9uqpe$idv$1...@reader1.panix.com...
> Terence <D...@not.reply> wrote:
>
> > "Jim Aikin" <jai...@musicplayer.com> wrote in message
> > news:f904a017.02041...@posting.google.com...
> >> I'm wondering how other IF authors see the future of this genre. Not
> >> in a technical sense (more sophisticated parsers, etc.), though that's
> >> always an interesting topic, but in a broader sense.
> >>
>
> > The question itself would appear to be something of a monomer. There is
NO
> > future for IF in any form of commercial sense. You can spend all the
time in
> > the world setting up business models, financial plans and marketing
> > techniques - but the plain and simple fact of the matter is that it will
be
> > time wasted. There is no 'captive audience' waiting to be satisfied.
>
> I don't understand what you mean by a "captive audience" in this
> context. I understand "captive audience" to mean a group of people who
> feel they have no choice but to buy your product (for whatever
> reason). That certainly isn't required for a product to make money.
>
It is not a requirement - it is a necessity for IF publishing.
To a certain extent, today's Nokia WAP phones and their like are the
equivalent of the TRS80/Pet/Apple computers of yesteryear. We all brought
these (expensive) 'toys' fiddled around with BASIC for a while, typed in the
listings from Practical Computing - and searched high and low for
something - anything that would run on them for at least five minutes
without crashing. Home computing was a hobby, not an enterprise. And we were
a captive audience. People could not not make money.
In those days, software - any software (game/utility/application) was sucked
off the shelves faster than it could be produced. The market was there, but
no product. Fifteen year old kids became multi-millionaires overnight
releasing stuff that today even a five-year old would turn it's nose up at.
Millions of computer were sold each year - and all these computers (users)
needed software to run on it. That was your captive audience. Home computing
became a business. And publishers were only limited by the state of the
technology to what software you could produce. That is why IF games and IF
companies grew so fast. Quality and content did not matter so much as did
getting a box an a shelf.. The golden era of IF was just a short and brief
interlude that filled a need.
Today, the big Teleco's have paid billions for the third generation
licences, the phone makers have started to roll out the WAP phones,
consumers are being persuaded to upgrade to them. But what can you do on
them (besides make calls that is)? This time, it's not the users who are
searching to pull the software off the shelf, but the providers who are
scratching around to push the product onto the consumer (at a price of
course).
In this instance, it is the provider who has taken on the role of the
captive audience. They have to make their billions in licence fees back
somehow. And just like those early computers, WAP has no high-res graphics,
had limited memory and miniscule storage - and hey, guess what, text
messaging (oops, text games) is the perceived El-Dorado. Simple in
technological terms, extremely profitable in network usage. Get the punter
to pay for interactive text messaging, interactive Space Invaders,
interactive Tetris - interactive anything; just get them interacting! It is
the Teleco's who are stuck with the technology and nothing to do with it -
an exact mirror of the late seventies/early eighties. Can IF be repackaged,
remarketed and re-invigorated?
Not likely, I would say, but what's the alternative - Unreal Tournament on
WAP? That is even more unlikely. But, you gotta push the product -
shareholder price to support remember! A drowning man will clutch at any
straw, no matter which way the wind's blowing, so you will no doubt see an
attempt being made to bring IF to the masses. But unlike earlier times, the
masses are not the ones starved of entertainment. There are far too many
alternatives and choices available for your entertainment dollar now.
> > Making a virtue out of necessity is all well and good when there is no
> > alternative, but looking at IF as a commercial proposition today is a
> > concept that simply does not stand up to analysis. No company has made
> > money, and no individual a decent living from releasing an IF product
since
> > the mid-to-late eighties.
>
> You are stating your conclusion here, as if were a proof. How many
> people have tried? Have they covered every possible approach, or have
> they all tried similar things?
Well, I can't prove my conclusion unless I cover every approach as you say,
but I would make the point that IF as an acquired taste. That is not being
elitist or snobbish - it's a fact of life. Almost nobody I know appreciates
or understands my interest in this subject."It's boring" is the typical
response, or "very nice - carry on". What the hell, I find Tomb Raider
boring myself, so - different strokes for different folks. I suspect that
its something to do with what games you first encountered.
>
> Here's *my* analysis: I believe I could make $3000 by releasing a
> shareware Inform game, $20 a copy, and advertising it only on this
> newsgroup. (This is in line with other shareware attempts -- see
> discussion about Stephen Granade's _Losing Your Grip_.) I also believe
> that this newsgroup only contains a small fraction of the people in
> the world who would be interested in such a game. (We get as many new
> arrivals today as we did in 1995. "Oh, I didn't know people still
> wrote those!) Usenet is a small and obscure corner of the Internet.
> Nobody who doesn't already know about the modern IF movement is going
> to do the Web research to find the game, get it set up, and play it.)
>
Yeah, you could possibly make $3000.00, and probably Graham Nelson, and
perhaps one or two others who are well-known (group loyalty?).You and Graham
Nelson are the exceptions that test the rule, not prove it. But, just like
'Once and Future King', I would wait until you released your offering as
freeware eighteen months down the line instead of contributing to your
coffers. That's not and indication of my stinginess either, but a reflection
of the number of games that I've actually successfully completed (seeing as
you asked - two; Deadline and Philosophers Quest).
> Conclusion: a game that could reach the wider audience could hit a
> decent revenue -- tens of thousands of dollars. Several authors
> coordinating their efforts could bring in an order of magnitude more
> money than that -- say a hundred thousand dollars.
>
Shareware does not make any money nowadays either. GPL has seen off that
business model. There are too many choices open to consumers today. Any
software you can purchase, there is an open source alternative that is
equal, if not better that the one you would be expected to pay for. If I
started to play every game in the Archive, it would be ten years or more
before I would have to even consider putting my hand in my pocket (well, for
my wallet anyway). Not to mention Underdogs.org with all the 'classics'
freely available too.
> There is no wall of impossibility there. It's all business planning:
> figuring out how to advertise such a thing and manage the enterprise.
> I have no illusions about that -- it would eat money at nearly the
> rate it comes in, and that *after* a large initial investment. I would
> expect, in the end, to make a couple of dollars per copy, not the $19
> per copy I'd make by the self-published shareware route.
>
Once you advertise your potential commercial offering (and the links to the
interpreter, this group and so-on) newbies will not stay green for very
long. It's not a case of making money, its a case of making enough money to
keep your head above water. I don't think it can be done. It has been said
in other messages in this thread that a commercial product, no matter how
utopian, raises expectations on behalf of the consumer, duties on the behalf
of the consumer and conflicts of interest between both, that you too
acknowledge, eat up resources. Making money may not be the most difficult
part of the enterprise, but keeping hold of it surely will be.
> And people still make money writing books. Many of them *don't* make
> "a decent living at it". That's not what I'd shoot for at first.
>
No arguments there, but the original question implied a commercial 'future'
for IF authoring. Anybody with the drive and ambition to go down that road
would be better off looking elsewhere for their fame and fortune.
Andrew Plotkin
> "Andrew Plotkin" <erky...@eblong.com> wrote in message
> news:a9uqpe$idv$1...@reader1.panix.com...
>> I don't understand what you mean by a "captive audience" in this
>> context. I understand "captive audience" to mean a group of people who
>> feel they have no choice but to buy your product (for whatever
>> reason). That certainly isn't required for a product to make money.
> It is not a requirement - it is a necessity for IF publishing.
> In this instance, it is the provider who has taken on the role of the
> captive audience. They have to make their billions in licence fees back
> somehow. And just like those early computers, WAP has no high-res graphics,
> had limited memory and miniscule storage - and hey, guess what, text
> messaging (oops, text games) is the perceived El-Dorado.
Why are you focussing on phone-style devices? I never thought that was
the only way to sell IF -- I barely know anything at all about that
world.
> Well, I can't prove my conclusion unless I cover every approach as you say,
> but I would make the point that IF as an acquired taste.
So are science fiction and coffee.
>> Here's *my* analysis: I believe I could make $3000 by releasing a
>> shareware Inform game, $20 a copy, and advertising it only on this
>> newsgroup. (This is in line with other shareware attempts -- see
>> discussion about Stephen Granade's _Losing Your Grip_.) I also believe
>> that this newsgroup only contains a small fraction of the people in
>> the world who would be interested in such a game. (We get as many new
>> arrivals today as we did in 1995. "Oh, I didn't know people still
>> wrote those!) Usenet is a small and obscure corner of the Internet.
>> Nobody who doesn't already know about the modern IF movement is going
>> to do the Web research to find the game, get it set up, and play it.)
> Yeah, you could possibly make $3000.00, and probably Graham Nelson, and
> perhaps one or two others who are well-known (group loyalty?).You and Graham
> Nelson are the exceptions that test the rule, not prove it. But, just like
> 'Once and Future King', I would wait until you released your offering as
> freeware eighteen months down the line instead of contributing to your
> coffers.
That is entirely a tangent to what I'm saying.
Notice that I *haven't* released a shareware text adventure. I don't
plan to. It's a dead-end route.
>> Conclusion: a game that could reach the wider audience could hit a
>> decent revenue -- tens of thousands of dollars. Several authors
>> coordinating their efforts could bring in an order of magnitude more
>> money than that -- say a hundred thousand dollars.
> Shareware does not make any money nowadays either.
Shareware makes a couple of thousand dollars these days. That's not no
money. It's still irrelevant to my argument; I don't recommend the
shareware model for IF.
> GPL has seen off that
> business model. There are too many choices open to consumers today.
How many GPL text adventures are there? Five? You are distracting
yourself with license details. The question is finding consumers who
want to pay.
> Any
> software you can purchase, there is an open source alternative that is
> equal, if not better that the one you would be expected to pay for.
What is the open-source alternative to _Spider and Web_? This is a
serious question. Ignore the fact that _Spider and Web_ is freeware;
you asked for open-source alternatives.
> If I started to play every game in the Archive, it would be ten
> years or more before I would have to even consider putting my hand
> in my pocket (well, for my wallet anyway). Not to mention
> Underdogs.org with all the 'classics' freely available too.
If you started to read every available work of science fiction in
chronological order, it would be ten years before you had to shell out
more than a buck per book. Plenty of used-book stores out there.
But no, that's irrelevant too, because there's an *unlimited* amount
of free amateur fiction on the Web. It's literally being written
faster than you can read it.
Why have neither of these facts destroyed the book-publishing
industry?
>> There is no wall of impossibility there. It's all business planning:
>> figuring out how to advertise such a thing and manage the enterprise.
>> I have no illusions about that -- it would eat money at nearly the
>> rate it comes in, and that *after* a large initial investment. I would
>> expect, in the end, to make a couple of dollars per copy, not the $19
>> per copy I'd make by the self-published shareware route.
> Once you advertise your potential commercial offering (and the links to the
> interpreter, this group and so-on) newbies will not stay green for very
> long. It's not a case of making money, its a case of making enough money to
> keep your head above water. I don't think it can be done.
I think it can be done. As long as we're arguing about the direction
of a thin profit margin, neither of us can prove the other wrong -- it
is neither inevitable nor impossible.
> It has been said
> in other messages in this thread that a commercial product, no matter how
> utopian, raises expectations on behalf of the consumer, duties on the behalf
> of the consumer and conflicts of interest between both, that you too
> acknowledge, eat up resources. Making money may not be the most difficult
> part of the enterprise, but keeping hold of it surely will be.
Damn straight. A commercial publishing venture *inherently* creates
different expectations. A publisher that fulfils those expectations
will make money. And they do.
If it was *easy* -- if I knew how to do it -- I would have started
five years ago.
>> And people still make money writing books. Many of them *don't* make
>> "a decent living at it". That's not what I'd shoot for at first.
> No arguments there, but the original question implied a commercial 'future'
> for IF authoring. Anybody with the drive and ambition to go down that road
> would be better off looking elsewhere for their fame and fortune.
Fiff. Of course I'd make more money (for myself) if I spent those
hours doing contract programming on some damn tedious project. Who
cares?
kodrik
> licences, the phone makers have started to roll out the WAP phones,
> consumers are being persuaded to upgrade to them. But what can you do on
> them (besides make calls that is)? This time, it's not the users who are
> searching to pull the software off the shelf, but the providers who are
> scratching around to push the product onto the consumer (at a price of
> course).
>
> In this instance, it is the provider who has taken on the role of the
> captive audience. They have to make their billions in licence fees back
> somehow. And just like those early computers, WAP has no high-res
> graphics, had limited memory and miniscule storage - and hey, guess what,
> text messaging (oops, text games) is the perceived El-Dorado. Simple in
> technological terms, extremely profitable in network usage. Get the punter
> to pay for interactive text messaging, interactive Space Invaders,
> interactive Tetris - interactive anything; just get them interacting! It
> is the Teleco's who are stuck with the technology and nothing to do with
> it - an exact mirror of the late seventies/early eighties. Can IF be
> repackaged, remarketed and re-invigorated?
>
> Not likely, I would say
And why is it unlikely?
If an engine like IFonline can handle loads of players server based and
handle speech input, as well as other specialized inputs, it will answer
the demands of mobile providers for the users: a game that uses air time
and that exploits the format of their device.
In that scenario, you wouldn't sell each copy of your game but more likely
license it to an operator and it will generate more than a few thousand
dollars.
Even better, there is a product base: games offered today for free made by
other engines like Inform or Tads can be licensed for wireless gaming on an
engine like mine.
These games don't compete against each others because they serve different
markets. So, if an engines satisfies the requirements of a mobile operator,
he can then look at the current products in Tads and Inform, and
contract/license the authors to port and customize a version for the
celular mobile market.
The US wireless game market is at its infancy right now but if you look at
more mature markets like Japan, there are more than 2.5 million subscribers
to wireless games and other entertainment related content in Japan.
It is a real market and there will be ways in the short future to reach
these markets with IF.
In 2001, revenue from wireless gaming was only $124 million, but because 3G
network is finally being widely adopted in North America, it is expected to
grow to $4.4 billion by 2006.
Why do you think it is unlikely that IF can have a rewarding place in this
market?
kodrik
> work with, say, Tom Clancy or someone like that to develop a new IF
> adventure. Look at it this way: If you're an IF writer, and you are
> going to write an IF game anyway, why not let Tom Clancy do some of the
> work for you?
I agre with you but that's not what I was saying. What I was saying and
that Tom Clancy will have no interest in doing it: more work for less
money, even with help from an IF coder.
> If you want to jazz up the interface a little, you could borrow some of
> the features from PilotFrotz. Are you familiar with that? It has a
> compass rose, up,down, enter, and exit map that comes up when you tap
> the left side of the screen. Just tap NE, and NE is entered on the
> command line. Tapping the right side brings up a list of frequently
> used commands - look, examine, open, put, take, etc. Also, tapping any
> word on the screen will automatically write it on the command line. One
> can play quite a while without having to manually enter any text. Is
> that the sort of thing you mean?
I realized with php zork that novice IF user rather click on things that
type them while IF veteran find the IF button an annoyance.
Why go hit the inventory button when you can just type ">i"? Because people
not used to command line click to do anything, even to copy and paste.
People must be able to click on a maximum of things without sacrificing the
interface (how do you do that?), regardless if it's faster to type (like
directions).
I haven't seen PilotFrotz but it sounds like it is addressing the problem.
On top of having a fully clickable interface, you need to have a customized
interface and skin for each game to make them feel like a complete game and
not jut a product. And finally, you need a designed entrance screen where
you can choose to create a new game, open an old one and see some extra
material like a preface. Today, games feel like plug-ins to an engine, they
need to give the illusion of a complete.
> I think a full-fledged novel (especially Tom Clancy novels) are too long
> for IF. But a short novel or extended short-story would be ideal.
> Maybe one of these prolific authors have ideas for some stories that are
> too short to release in their usual style but would benefit from an
> IF treatment of it.
>
> I also thing the puzzles should be fairly obvious. At least at first.
> Otherwise, people not used to IF will get very quickly frustrated. It
> should be as relaxing as reading a book, but more engageing because of
> the interaction. It could work. The biggest problem is finding an
> author that would be willing to `sacrifice' a short work that probably
> wouldn't get published anyway because it isn't epic enough.
I would think the ideal would be a medium author that is going to have his
book published and slide a CD in the cover with an IF version of part of
his work that explores other avenues his character might have taken.
It will bring extra promotion to his book so it might get him interested
and it will be great promotion for IF in general.
Ally
news:uc72tre...@corp.supernews.com:
> I realized with php zork that novice IF user rather click on things
> that type them while IF veteran find the IF button an annoyance.
> Why go hit the inventory button when you can just type ">i"? Because
> people not used to command line click to do anything, even to copy and
> paste. People must be able to click on a maximum of things without
> sacrificing the interface (how do you do that?), regardless if it's
> faster to type (like directions).
> I haven't seen PilotFrotz but it sounds like it is addressing the
> problem.
>
> On top of having a fully clickable interface, you need to have a
> customized interface and skin for each game to make them feel like a
> complete game and not jut a product. And finally, you need a designed
> entrance screen where you can choose to create a new game, open an old
> one and see some extra material like a preface. Today, games feel like
> plug-ins to an engine, they need to give the illusion of a complete.
While I have no illusions whatsoever (well, a _few_ mabbe :) about ever
selling IF, and while I actually am rather content with the ivory-towerish
nature of today's IF community--not that I consider myself a part of it
yet--I (*exhales*) have to agree.
I mean, _I_ know that quite a bit of work goes into an IF masterpiece, and
that grafted-on layers of "cruft", however attractive, won't save a subpar
game, but I still find the starkly minimalist "console" look off-putting
(I admit I'm way more visually oriented than most IFers (== I do like
ASCII art *g*))
However. Clickable commands are a no-no to me, at least on machines with a
"real" keyboard (or speech recognition, should it ever become feasible.)
You should and _have_ to "say it in your own words" to get through a piece
of IF--that's part of IF's appeal after all, one of its distinguishing
features. Offer uninitiated newcomers a stripped-down point-and-click
interface to the parser, and they will use _that_ instead, missing out on
a lot, and ultimately getting less out of text-based IF than they would
out of a LucasArts game, which, after all, has gameplay/mechanics that
actually match such an interface.
Not that I haven't played with a mouse interface myself. So I'm a
hypocrite. Anyway. It should be possible to make the text _itself_ look
neat-but-not-overly-"gamey". Just ask an enthusiastic typographer or
graphic designer. Or compare yahoo.com to a website that _doesn't_ look
horrible. Using Flash as a front-end, this won't be a technical issue for
you. I digress, obviously.
Back to "buttons". My current TADS framework has a graphical button bar
for all the meta/setup commands, a second button bar for available help
topics, and a permanent inventory banner, all of which have "close"
gadgets so experienced players may get rid of them should their presence
distract or annoy them.
This approach, I feel, would provide a somewhat richer look-and-feel
without compromising or downplaying the text interface as it's only the
"meta" stuff that's been separated from the actual story/gameplay (I never
actually use the clickable exits display while debugging; with your hands
on the keyboard, what's faster than typing "n" or "d"?)
To get to the point, I believe it'd be worthwhile to know which mistakes
beginners are likely to make, and to work on making them non-mistakes
rather than teaching newcomers more IF-ese than they are willing
to swallow. Since the text parser is the main interface to the story/game,
making it more forgiving seems more sensible to me than adding buttons for
take, look and open. (Kodrik, are your phpZork and Ritual logs "public"?
May I take a peek?)
I'd like to be able to do rollovers in TADS, though. And a pretty
automapper, but I'm not the explore-this-giant-map type, so it's not much
of an issue with me. Oh, and multimedia TADS should be ported to Linux
some day *sigh*
>> I think a full-fledged novel (especially Tom Clancy novels) are too
>> long for IF. But a short novel or extended short-story would be
>> ideal. Maybe one of these prolific authors have ideas for some stories
>> that are
>> too short to release in their usual style but would benefit from an
>> IF treatment of it.
>>
>> I also thing the puzzles should be fairly obvious. At least at first.
>> Otherwise, people not used to IF will get very quickly frustrated.
Yah. (_I_ still get frustrated very quickly.)
>> It
>> should be as relaxing as reading a book, but more engageing because of
>> the interaction. It could work. The biggest problem is finding an
>> author that would be willing to `sacrifice' a short work that probably
>> wouldn't get published anyway because it isn't epic enough.
>
> I would think the ideal would be a medium author that is going to have
> his book published and slide a CD in the cover with an IF version of
> part of his work that explores other avenues his character might have
> taken. It will bring extra promotion to his book so it might get him
> interested and it will be great promotion for IF in general.
I thought about approaching the creators of my once favourite comic (which
is author-owned, has a strong internet presence, and an active fan base),
but I doubt I could pull it off just now, so I didn't. Anyway, maybe
something/someone that/who is a little "closer" than Tom Clancy could be
more open to such an experiment. Not that I'd know, I never sold anything
to anyone and won't be trying any time soon I suppose.
~Ally
Terence
Yes, but not for the author. Don't forget, the Teleco's have to make back
the billions they spent on obtaining the wireless frequencies, and for
building up the networks. Teleco's are like the publishing/music/film
industries - cross subsidy ensures that artists are (and will remain) at the
bottom of the food chain.
>
> Even better, there is a product base: games offered today for free made by
> other engines like Inform or Tads can be licensed for wireless gaming on
an
> engine like mine.
> These games don't compete against each others because they serve different
> markets. So, if an engines satisfies the requirements of a mobile
operator,
> he can then look at the current products in Tads and Inform, and
> contract/license the authors to port and customize a version for the
> celular mobile market.
Yes, but you provided the answer yourself, "an engines satisfies the
requirements of a mobile operator". The demand for the product is from the
Teleco's only. There is no pent-up hungey starving mass just waiting to
spend all their hard earned entertainment dollars on IF. This
community/group satisfies whatever consumer demand is 'out there'.
And even if the Teleco's did stimulate a hidden depth that has lain long
dormant, how long do you thing it would take for these latent adventures to
use those self-same mobiles to discover *here*? About ten minutes if that.
Consumer are not stupid.
> The US wireless game market is at its infancy right now but if you look at
> more mature markets like Japan, there are more than 2.5 million
subscribers
> to wireless games and other entertainment related content in Japan.
> It is a real market and there will be ways in the short future to reach
> these markets with IF.
> In 2001, revenue from wireless gaming was only $124 million, but because
3G
> network is finally being widely adopted in North America, it is expected
to
> grow to $4.4 billion by 2006.
"Is expected" is not the same as 'Will do'.
>
> Why do you think it is unlikely that IF can have a rewarding place in this
> market?
Because it's a dumb idea that's why.
You can but a novelty item outside the Vatican that has the bible printed on
the back of a postage stamp. It really is printed there. And you get a
special magnifying gadget to read it on. But that's all it is - a novelty.
WAP phones are the same, only (barely?) decent enough to chase an obscure
red dot across a miniscule fuzzy screen. I think the call it Nascar Rally
Minellium or something like that. It is not a rewarding *experience* to play
IF on a mobile device. Hell, it's barely adequate an a palm or on a pocket
PC.
For the price of a quality mobile or handheld device you can pick-up a
second had laptop and have the full desktop experience with less hastle an
no outrageous online costs to stump up for. You may be able to lead a horse
to water - but you shouldn't expect it to *pay* to drink it.
Terence
>
> > "Andrew Plotkin" <erky...@eblong.com> wrote in message
> > news:a9uqpe$idv$1...@reader1.panix.com...
>
> >> I don't understand what you mean by a "captive audience" in this
> >> context. I understand "captive audience" to mean a group of people who
> >> feel they have no choice but to buy your product (for whatever
> >> reason). That certainly isn't required for a product to make money.
>
> > It is not a requirement - it is a necessity for IF publishing.
>
> > In this instance, it is the provider who has taken on the role of the
> > captive audience. They have to make their billions in licence fees back
> > somehow. And just like those early computers, WAP has no high-res
graphics,
> > had limited memory and miniscule storage - and hey, guess what, text
> > messaging (oops, text games) is the perceived El-Dorado.
>
> Why are you focussing on phone-style devices? I never thought that was
> the only way to sell IF -- I barely know anything at all about that
> world.
>
All the 'usual' business models have shown to be less than a success where
IF is concerned - and mobile telephony is seen as an untried emerging
market.
In the last couple of months, a number of individuals have cavassed this
group on the feisability of licencing IF for this technology. It's seen as
'the next big thing' as as I've alredy mentioned (above) - a potential
'hook' to sell their third generation telephony to the masses. Neccessity,
as they say, is the mother of innovation.Yet my perspective on this is, that
flogging a dead horse is not going to make it go any faster.
> > Well, I can't prove my conclusion unless I cover every approach as you
say,
> > but I would make the point that IF as an acquired taste.
>
> So are science fiction and coffee.
>
Yes, but like 'game' is a generic term, so is 'tea' and 'coffee'. IF is a
specialised form of gaming, just as much as Kauai Black Mountain is a unique
coffee and Nilgiri Kodanaad a fine black tea. Just like these beverages are
not supermarket brands, neither is IF a mass market product.
Open source refers to the the interpreter to run the games on. Individual
games themselves are largely machine independent. Each port of an
interpreter however 'belongs' to the individual who coded the machine
specific part of the particular engine.If you are going to sell a game, you
cannot expect the consumer to hunt down his own specific interpreter for
whatever his wishes to run it on, you have to include that as part of the
package. And in doing so, you will have to acknowledge in one form or
another, the intellectual property rights of that individual.
Unless of course, you are going to write you own interpreter too.
This raises another issue. how many ported interpreters are you going to
include on each CD? Which particular ones? And are you going to expect each
purchaser to determine which one of the many are specific to his machine,
install it, and then load the game?
Don't forget, mass market consumers will simply want to put the CD in and
go. Yes, you could 'sell to this group only', but that's hardly valid
business plan for the 'future of IF'.
Well then, it's how you define a thin profit margin. If you managed to sell
150 games at $20.00 a throw, you would make $3000.00. That does not sound
like too difficult a proposition does it? But that's gross turnover.
Materials cost, advertising cost, packaging cost, support costs,
return/refund costs, (not to mention taxes) - they all mount up. And, unless
it's a one-off experiment, you have to produce a winner time and time again.
One sub-standard release, or failed product, and your thin profit is wiped
out forever.
> > It has been said
> > in other messages in this thread that a commercial product, no matter
how
> > utopian, raises expectations on behalf of the consumer, duties on the
behalf
> > of the consumer and conflicts of interest between both, that you too
> > acknowledge, eat up resources. Making money may not be the most
difficult
> > part of the enterprise, but keeping hold of it surely will be.
>
> Damn straight. A commercial publishing venture *inherently* creates
> different expectations. A publisher that fulfils those expectations
> will make money. And they do.
>
Yeah Publishers make money. Retailers make money. But very few authors do. A
publisher is a spread-better. A retailer is a comodity broker. Publish ten
products, Nine fail in the market, one is a success. The one success
subsidises the production of the other nine failures, and either way, puts
money in the publishers and retilers pockets. The one successful
author/musician/artist gets their cut (after 'expenses'), the retailer
returns unsold copies, and the merry-go-round starts again. The other nine?
Well better luck next time.
A self publish approach means that you are outside the publisher/retailer
loop. That's why 'nich market', 'independent' and 'home-produced' are synoms
for non-commercial.
> If it was *easy* -- if I knew how to do it -- I would have started
> five years ago.
>
> >> And people still make money writing books. Many of them *don't* make
> >> "a decent living at it". That's not what I'd shoot for at first.
>
> > No arguments there, but the original question implied a commercial
'future'
> > for IF authoring. Anybody with the drive and ambition to go down that
road
> > would be better off looking elsewhere for their fame and fortune.
>
> Fiff. Of course I'd make more money (for myself) if I spent those
> hours doing contract programming on some damn tedious project. Who
> cares?
Nobody, but the point of the original question was, is there a commercial
future for IF? The answer is no!
But that is not what we are in it for, either as players or producers. It's
a hobby pure and simple. Yeah, if you want to treat it as work, you may
(possibly) make some pocket money out of it, but work is what you do in the
day to feed your body. It's what you do in your spare time that feeds your
mind.