Re: Long-form IF competition
David Fisher
news:xL-dnYOyHtxljm3a...@comcast.com...
>
> I've been thinking on and off for a few years about how to revive
> long-form IF. There's an obvious answer, of course - a competition for
> longish games. That answer is obvious because comps have become the
> primary
> engine of IF production.
>
> What's not so obvious is how you actually organize a long-form comp.
Just for interest --
I came across this old RAIF thread, which has some (not necessarily
relevant) thoughts about longer games. It starts off talking about
walkthroughs and the 2 hour comp game limit, then there is some stuff about
long games; after about post #32 (Lucian Smith) it stops talking about them:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.int-fiction/browse_thread/thread/5801cd8c82aa3376
This may have been mentioned already and I just missed it, but I was also
wondering how many people would want to enter a long form competition. If it
was limited to three or four entries, that might be a reasonable number for
judges to play ... and if more people wanted to enter, then the release
dates for each long form comp could be staggered by a couple of months (and
avoid any other competitions).
I would enter such a competition (there is Spring Thing, but there could
potentially be others too -- and Spring Thing games aren't actually required
to be long). I would rather release a long game during an "event" than by
itself.
Another thought -- since the goal really is to bring about longer works of
quality IF, and because the time to write long games is more unpredictable,
I would want the emphasis to be on games being completed rather than having
a strict deadline. Maybe a few months before the deadline, the authors could
be contacted, and if it was clear that a game wasn't going to be completed
on time there would be the option of (1) extending the deadline, if the
other entrants agree -- which there would be no obligation to do, or (2)
transferring the game to a later competition instead.
For that matter, the deadline could be set by mutual agreement between the
entrants, rather than being declared up front (the only restriction being
that it doesn't clash with an existing contest deadline).
So ... would anyone enter such a competition? (And can I join in too?) Just
to be concrete, assume the size of the game would need to be "comparable to
an 80s commercial IF game" (deliberately vague, but you get the idea).
(Or is Spring thing enough?)
David Fisher
David Fisher
news:12095534...@kangaroo.ozonline.com.au...
>
> So ... would anyone enter such a competition? (And can I join in too?)
> Just to be concrete, assume the size of the game would need to be
> "comparable to an 80s commercial IF game" (deliberately vague, but you get
> the idea).
Er, concretely vague ... or vaguely concrete ... or something.
Oh, dear. I don't think I can save that one ...
David Fisher
JDC
<davidfis...@australiaonline.net.au> wrote:
>
> Er, concretely vague ... or vaguely concrete ... or something.
>
> Oh, dear. I don't think I can save that one ...
So, one day many years ago (supposedly) a man and his son were
strolling through Princeton and the son pointed at a disheveled man
sitting on the curb staring into space. "Daddy," he asked, "what is
that man doing?" The father replied, "That's Einstein, son. He is
sitting on the concrete, thinking about the abstract."
Back on topic: Has anyone ever considered some sort of "rolling"
competition for longer games? By which I mean that there is no fixed
entry deadline, but rather submission is open until a certain number
(say 4 or 5) of entries are received, then they are released together
for a fixed judging period. Then the process repeats.
-JDC
Emily Short
> Back on topic: Has anyone ever considered some sort of "rolling"
> competition for longer games? By which I mean that there is no fixed
> entry deadline, but rather submission is open until a certain number
> (say 4 or 5) of entries are received, then they are released together
> for a fixed judging period. Then the process repeats.
At some point, now years ago, I seem to remember a discussion about
rolling-deadline anthologies, which would be a little like this: the
anthology would remain open until enough works were contributed; then
they would be given a webpage and maybe some prepared hints or
walkthroughs, and released together with a bit of splash. I think part
of the idea was that they'd be themed, too, so you could join a
mystery anthology or an SF anthology, and then the anthology
organizers could promote the collection of works specifically to
people who might be interested in that theme.
Not the same as a competition, I realize. And of course the
contributors who got their work in early would have to be patient
while waiting for enough other games to be written.
dott.Piergiorgio
> Not the same as a competition, I realize. And of course the
> contributors who got their work in early would have to be patient
> while waiting for enough other games to be written.
Whose is the main issue in a rolling competition or initiative....
Best regards from Italy,
Dott. Piergiorgio.
David Fisher
news:775e90be-2e8d-4eae...@t54g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...
>
> Has anyone ever considered some sort of "rolling"
> competition for longer games? By which I mean that there is no fixed
> entry deadline, but rather submission is open until a certain number
> (say 4 or 5) of entries are received, then they are released together
> for a fixed judging period. Then the process repeats.
Not a bad idea ...
But there are some advantages to having a deadline, too. It can be more a
motivating thing to work towards, and can build up a sense of expectation in
the audience, too. Overall, I think I would prefer an announced (but
flexible) deadline if I was working on a long competition game.
David Fisher
StuartA...@gmail.com
<davidfis...@australiaonline.net.au> wrote:
> So ... would anyone enter such a competition? (And can I join in too?) Just
> to be concrete, assume the size of the game would need to be "comparable to
> an 80s commercial IF game" (deliberately vague, but you get the idea).
>
> (Or is Spring thing enough?)
>
> David Fisher
As you may already know David, I'm planning to enter my current WIP in
this years annual comp, but I have absolutely no idea how long it is
going to be in the end. I guess I've always just thought that
regardless of how long it turns out it will just be judged on the
first two hours of play. If anything that just motivates me to make
sure the game isn't too slow to get going, and that can't be a bad
thing.
I can appreciate that it may be less satisfying to play for two hours
and not see the ending, and that may adversely affect the game's
scores, but I certainly won't be intentionally making it at short game
that is guaranteed to be completable within two hours of play. Or is
that just bad form?
Stuart
Victor Gijsbers
> So ... would anyone enter such a competition? (And can I join in too?) Just
> to be concrete, assume the size of the game would need to be "comparable to
> an 80s commercial IF game" (deliberately vague, but you get the idea).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't the 80s commercial games big only
in terms of hours of being stuck, not in terms of total prose / plot
events / locations? The very fact that most of them fitted into the .z5
format seems to point in that direction.
(But do correct me if I'm wrong, because I never ever completed an
Infocom game.)
> (Or is Spring thing enough?)
I'm not quite sure why it wouldn't be? Why do you think it's not?
Regards,
Victor
Andrew Plotkin
> David Fisher wrote:
>
> > So ... would anyone enter such a competition? (And can I join in too?) Just
> > to be concrete, assume the size of the game would need to be "comparable to
> > an 80s commercial IF game" (deliberately vague, but you get the idea).
>
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't the 80s commercial games big only
> in terms of hours of being stuck, not in terms of total prose / plot
> events / locations? The very fact that most of them fitted into the .z5
> format seems to point in that direction.
They had less total prose. But the standards for how much detail to
implement, and how many off-topic and surprising responses to put in,
have expanded greatly in the modern era. So it doesn't mean there were
fewer locations or plot events back then. I'd say a typical Infocom
game had more of those than a typical IFComp entry (although IFComp
entries vary enough to make that statement pretty meaningless).
(I6 also has a lot more boilerplate library code than Infocom's setup.)
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
If the Bush administration hasn't thrown you in military prison
without trial, it's for one reason: they don't feel like it. Not
because of the Fifth Amendment.
David Fisher
<4819c6cc$0$14361$e4fe...@news.xs4all.nl>, Victor
Gijsbers<vic...@lilith.gotdns.org> wrote:
> David Fisher wrote:
>
>> So ... would anyone enter such a competition? (And can I join in too?)
>> Just to be concrete, assume the size of the game would need to be
>> "comparable to an 80s commercial IF game" (deliberately vague, but
>> you get the idea).
>
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't the 80s commercial games big only
> in terms of hours of being stuck, not in terms of total prose / plot
> events / locations?
OK, scratch that ... what about, at least several solid days' worth
of play?
(Help me out here ... how would you define a long game? If I recall, you
mentioned the lack of long games a little while ago ...)
>> (Or is Spring thing enough?)
>
> I'm not quite sure why it wouldn't be? Why do you think it's not?
Well, it's not necessarily not* ...
Perhaps some people might want to enter a competition explicitly
designed for long games, though (with a flexible deadline).
David Fisher
---
[*] Signature found in the RAIF archives (Fredrik Ramsberg):
I want to make it perfectly clear that I can't say I don't think
people who aren't avoiding using too many negations aren't putting
things clearly enough.
Emily Short
> >>> On 1/05/2008 at 11:34 pm, in message
>
>
> Gijsbers<vic...@lilith.gotdns.org> wrote:
> > Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't the 80s commercial games big only
> > in terms of hours of being stuck, not in terms of total prose / plot
> > events / locations?
>
> OK, scratch that ... what about, at least several solid days' worth
> of play?
The problem is that the amount of game that will reliably supply
"several solid days' worth of play" has gone way, way up (even leaving
aside the higher expectations for thorough implementation). As an
author, you can't really rely on the *puzzles* holding the player up,
because anything can be hurried through with hints or a walkthrough --
and if you don't provide those, someone else will.
So the only way to guarantee a long play time is with very substantial
content to *read*: in other words, creating something that verges on
being a novel.
Aaron A. Reed
> >>> On 1/05/2008 at 11:34 pm, in message
>
I was thinking about IF taxonomies a while ago, and the only sensible
measure of length I came up with was "the amount of time the author
wants you to spend with the game." So, you might define a long-form
competition as "Works requiring more than 4 hours of play" (or
whatever number you chose). As a judge in such a competition, you
could expect roughly 4 hours of entertainment, possibly more, from an
honest approach to the game (i.e. not just playing along with the
walkthrough).
I like the idea of a long form competition, but I'm not sure there are
enough long-form games being released to support one.
--Aaron
J. Robinson Wheeler
> On May 2, 3:45 am, "David Fisher" <David.Fis...@efs.mq.edu.au> wrote:
>
> > OK, scratch that ... what about, at least several solid days' worth
> > of play?
>
> The problem is that the amount of game that will reliably supply
> "several solid days' worth of play" has gone way, way up (even leaving
> aside the higher expectations for thorough implementation). As an
> author, you can't really rely on the *puzzles* holding the player up,
> because anything can be hurried through with hints or a walkthrough --
> and if you don't provide those, someone else will.
I remember being (in a way, pleasantly) surprised when I released
First
Things First and intent players such as yourself were able to make
their
way to the end in one sitting. A long sitting, but still one sitting.
I also remember taking a couple of weeks or more to hack my way
through Mulldoon, and then at the end thinking, "Darn, that wasn't
nearly long enough." Reminds me of the little introductory note by
Tolkien in some Lord of the Rings editions where he apologizes
that it's too short. If it's engrossing, it's going to seem short, I
think.
> So the only way to guarantee a long play time is with very substantial
> content to *read*: in other words, creating something that verges on
> being a novel.
I was trying to plan some IF that seemed to have a novel-sized
amount of plot, at least it seemed to me. I think I should radically
revise my notions of how much scenery I need to implement, or
find a clever way to satisfy that without killing myself. Or just
write a novel's worth of text, I guess. What is that, fifty to a
hundred thousand words?
Oh boy.
--
J. Robinson Wheeler
http://raddial.com/if/
Adam Thornton
J. Robinson Wheeler <j...@jrwdigitalmedia.com> wrote:
>I was trying to plan some IF that seemed to have a novel-sized
>amount of plot, at least it seemed to me. I think I should radically
>revise my notions of how much scenery I need to implement, or
>find a clever way to satisfy that without killing myself. Or just
>write a novel's worth of text, I guess. What is that, fifty to a
>hundred thousand words?
>
>Oh boy.
I don't mean to plunge you into the pits of despair, but:
My WIP is just about 110,000 words now.
It's, oh, a novelette's worth of plot.
Of those 110,000 words, probably, I dunno, I'm guessing here, but maybe
30,000 are displayable to the player, and on any single playthrough the
player might see, oh, perhaps 10,000 of them.
Adam
hari...@gmail.com
> I was thinking about IF taxonomies a while ago, and the only sensible
> measure of length I came up with was "the amount of time the author
> wants you to spend with the game." So, you might define a long-form
> competition as "Works requiring more than 4 hours of play" (or
> whatever number you chose). As a judge in such a competition, you
> could expect roughly 4 hours of entertainment, possibly more, from an
> honest approach to the game (i.e. not just playing along with the
> walkthrough).
I'm a very green newbie in the IF-writing world. In fact, I probably
haven't played them seriously since I finished playing through
Infocom's A Mind Forever Voyaging, on an IBM PCjr. So I have NO idea
how long a player spends on these things, these days. As someone
said, walkthrus just chop all the time out of it.
My first IF project is now 8000 words in Inform7. I have almost all
the mechanics down, and 25% of the storyline. If I had to guess, then
I would expect it would be seen as a morsel that an experienced IF
player could plow through in an hour or less. I did leave plenty of
hints, as I want my daughter to be able to play it.
But after reviewing a couple Infocom titles, the complexity of my
project easily falls between Zork I and Planetfall. Would Planetfall
be seen as a "long form" today? There were plenty of hints in that
one too... and I finished Planetfall in a weekend the first time
around without walkthrus or even a circle of friends to lean on.
S. John Ross
> be seen as a "long form" today?
I'm still in the middle of my first play of Planetfall and I
definitley consider it long-form (in terms of gameworld size alone, it
-- like most Meretsky work -- has a very large room-count that takes
some patience to map completely), but my definition of the term is no
more useful than anyone else's ... It's not deeply implemented by the
standards the IF guys use (though it's plenty deep enough for my
tastes) but it's more ... broadly implemented, I guess. Not deep, but
plenty wide.
It has a lot to do with play-style, too. I don't play games to finish
them; I play to play, and try to _avoid_ advancing the plot for as
long as possible to explore each stage as it unfolds (or, for entirely
nonlinear games, explore each area or thing or whatever ...). The idea
of "solving" a game is, to me, a bit of a downer (unless I sense
enough replay value to immediately go back to the beginning and start
again ... I've played LGoP a half-dozen times now and still look
forward to the next one) :)
With Planetfall, my approach is being challenged a fair bit by the
hunger elements and whatnot, so I end up using entire multi-hour play
sessions as "non-save exploratory sessions" where I know going in that
this isn't the "real" version of my play-through. But the fact that
I'm able to do that _at all_ is one of the things that sets most
Infocom titles apart from many (or probably most) modern ones. So
that, i would think, is at least a real difference. With what I
consider a "short-form" game, it's often literally impossible to play
for more than 2-3 hours without resorting to repetition. With a game
like Planetfall, I do at least have the option of spending long
stretches of hours exploring the scenery and playing with the items
and trying different things out, without repeating any specific action
of interest.
(and a proviso: I dig the short-form too, these days, but as the
history of IF is happening all at once to me in real-time, I do find
myself leaning toward the longer games as a general preference).
hari...@gmail.com
> It's not deeply implemented by the
> standards the IF guys use (though it's plenty deep enough for my
> tastes) but it's more ... broadly implemented, I guess. Not deep, but
> plenty wide.
So, having been away from IF and not broadly experienced in "modern"
IF stories versus my sheltered Infocom upbringing, I'd like to know
more about what you refer to something being broadly or deeply
implemented. Attention to rich prose in every action? Attention to
fiddly or fussy or flexible game physics? Attention to multiple
"unintended" or alternative purposes for a given thing? Attention to
covering every imaginable ASK FLOYD ABOUT TROT question? Or something
else?
S. John Ross
> So, having been away from IF and not broadly experienced in "modern"
> IF stories versus my sheltered Infocom upbringing,
No spoilers, please; I'm still in the middle of my own sheltered
Infocom upbringing :)
> I'd like to know
> more about what you refer to something being broadly or deeply
> implemented. Attention to rich prose in every action? Attention to
> fiddly or fussy or flexible game physics? Attention to multiple
> "unintended" or alternative purposes for a given thing? Attention to
> covering every imaginable ASK FLOYD ABOUT TROT question? Or something
> else?
Well, it's not something I've given a lot of thought to :) But
basically I think I mean:
Broadly Implemented = Lots of Rooms, Lots of Objects, Lots of
Characters, Lots of Scenes
Deeply Implemented = Lots of ways to interact with, read about,
combine, toy with, and influence the above
To use a simplistic example, a broadly-but-shallowly implemented game
might have 100 rooms and each room might have from 1 to 12 items or
NPCs in them, but the items and NPCs would be implemented only far
enough to perform their basic story functions, plus maybe a few extra
responses here and there for chuckles.
The equally simplistic counter-example (narrowly-but-deeply) might be
a room with only a half-dozen rooms and a dozen items and NPCs all
told, but with enough reactions, combinations, scenes and
possibilities implemented that you could spend as much time finding
out different text written about one pencil as you might spend
exploring fifteen of the more shallowly-implemented rooms.
In terms of playing time, each game could provide an equal number of
raw hours of enjoyment and exploration, so I don't consider the deep/
shallow/broad/narrow thing to be directly part of whether a game is
"long form," I was just observing that in Planetfall's case in
particular, there's a relatively expansive setting to explore, which
in that particular case, is one of the reasons it's very much a long-
form game (at least for me) ... even though the particulars of the
setting aren't deeply implemented by the standards the IF guys use (at
least so far as I understand them, since I'm very much not an IF guy
myself). There are, for example, quite a lot of rooms that serve no
apparent function other than to _establish_ how large the location is,
to give it a sense of scale and emptiness and abandonment (at least so
far ... I haven't finished yet, so I'm on shaky ground and I'd rather
not dance) :) Anyway, they do that job really well - and no other.
As a player, I find I enjoy both kinds of games as well as games that
fall somewhere in the implied spectra between those extremes on the
graph ... as long as both games provide plenty to do, it doesn't much
matter to me if the "plenty to do" is distributed geographically,
temporally, conversationally, or any alchemical blend of those or
other ways ...