He has already started a thread called "OpenFate - an experiment" to try out some of these ideas, but I am sure he would appreciate whatever other feedback you might want to give him.
Here is an excerpt from the essay:
"All the interactive fiction which has been written, all of it, conforms to a conception of the relationship between the author and the reader that was natural within the Zork-paradigm, but fails to be natural outside of it. That conception is as follows: the author creates a world, creates rules for manipulating that world, and controls the generation of text by the work based on what happens in the world. The player explores this world, manipulates it in the ways which were allowed by the author, and reads the text the author has created. To use a metaphor, the author is the God of the fictional world, and the player is allowed to live out his life within it. The author has all the power, except as much as he deigns to give away.
"This means that if I, the player, dislike how the world works, or have a better idea, I am out of luck. I can only interact with the world in the ways that the author has provided for me. Now this is very natural if the world is a kind of puzzle which I have to solve: allowing the player to change the rules of the puzzle is going to take all of the challenge away. But if the world is not a puzzle, why not let the player tinker with the world itself? Or to say it a different way, why do we allow the player to play the piece, but not to play with the piece?
"Changing this would open up a vast new territory to explore. It would allow completely new ways of interacting with a piece of interactive fiction, new ways which would allow the player to freely use his creativity for the first time, and which would allow the player to be a real co-author for the first time. The player could change the work, add to it, rewrite it, improve it, or accept the voice of the author out of free choice."
I guess I have some reservations about this point of view.
> "This means that if I, the player, dislike how the world works, or have a > better idea, I am out of luck.
But that's largely true of any other art form as well. I mean, I'm sure you can find a gallery somewhere where they'll let you daub paint on the paintings -- but I very much doubt that any reputable artist would let his or her work be hung in such a gallery with the idea that more paint was going to be slapped onto the canvases.
It's true that jazz composers often write tunes that are used as bases for improvisation by others. This is an example of what you're talking about. But it's understood (or at least hoped) that the improvisers will be experts. Jazz players don't invite the audience up onstage to honk into the saxophone a bit! (At least, I hope they don't, and I don't want to attend any concerts where they do.)
The presumption -- and it's a very natural presumption -- is that the artist has devoted years to perfecting his or her skills, and is in consequence an expert, able to guide and control the work of art in ways that audiences will find satisfying. I see no reason why that presumption should be discarded in interactive fiction, or even questioned.
The reason it comes into question, I think, is because a well-written work of IF gives players the _illusion_ that they have a measure of control over the model world. But confusing the illusion with an actual divestiture of control is unlikely to be productive, in my view. To give another example, there are stage magicians who ask for "volunteers" from the audience, but always choose planted confederates. The magician who foolishly chose an actual volunteer in such a circumstance would bring on quick disaster.
> But if the world is not a puzzle, why not let the player tinker with the > world itself? Or to say it a different way, why do we allow the player to > play the piece, but not to play with the piece?
Because it's very unlikely to improve the piece, that's why. Anyone who has the skill set needed to improve it can go write their own game (and will likely be doing so).
> "Changing this would open up a vast new territory to explore. It would > allow completely new ways of interacting with a piece of interactive > fiction, > new ways which would allow the player to freely use his creativity for the > first time, and which would allow the player to be a real co-author for > the first time. The player could change the work, add to it, rewrite it, > improve it, or accept the voice of the author out of free choice."
Okay, let's say that as a player, I happen to want to create a verb -- "spungle." When I spungle an object, I want it to turn bright green, and I want its description to reflect that fact.
As the original author of the game, how exactly will you code that to allow the player to do it -- without knowing in advance what sort of actions your players may want to create?
I claim that this can only be done by asking the player to become a programmer -- to learn the entire syntax of the IF language used, and to be provided the source code of the game. In which case, she isn't a player anymore, she's a collaborator. There's nothing wrong with collaboration, of course. Collaborations can be very productive. But there's a huge difference between collaboration among artistic equals and allowing the player to muck around at random.
I, for one, would not want to collaborate with anyone who wasn't clear about the difference.
Of course people can just read the article, but for some more context for people who won't, two more quotes:
<blockquote>
Ideally, what we would like is that the player of an interactive fiction is engaged in a game of offering, accepting and rejecting in which she is allowed both to offer, and to accept and reject offers made to her. The radical way to achieve this is to turn the playing of interactive fiction from a private to a public activity. By using the combined creative and judging powers of the community, we can transform the playing of interactive fiction into a game of offering, accepting and rejecting that we play not with the program, but with the other players of the interactive fiction.
[....]
Suppose you are the author of a work, returning to it after a year. Many people have played it; a good number has been inspired to release some change. Two of them have even gone as far as to start a new version. You love one of them, but hate the other -- it completely fails to take into account the thematic content you so carefully placed! Let's rate it down. Oh, but this change is cute! Let's incorporate it into the official version...
In short, the admittedly radical changes I propose would completely alter the nature, not only of reading interactive fiction, but in fact of the interactive work itself. It used to be a model world frozen into binary code, playable again and again in the exact same way by ever new readers. But now...now it is something organic, something alive: something that changes as it is played, and that can take off in directions never envisaged by its author.
</blockquote>
The first thing I thought of reading the essay was Aaron A. Reed's "For Whom the Telling Changed", where the game presents a storyteller's circle with the listeners having some apparent control over how the storyteller relays the tale. Victor's proposal essentially turns this game into a model of IF authorship, and I find this proposal so compelling not in the least because it (a) leverages many of the strengths of this digital medium and (b) at the same time brings us back to the storyteller's circle, back from what some would say is a brief and sadly ill-conceived detour into the cul-de-sac of heroic auteurship.
One thing I'm still wrestling with is Victor's point that by "using the combined creative and judging powers of the community, we can transform the playing of interactive fiction into a game of offering, accepting and rejecting that we play not with the program, but with the other players of the interactive fiction". It seems reasonable that not all players will participate in this part of the game. How will their experience compare to the player that does participate? Will the non-participant in collaborative IF (collaborative fiction -- CF? Or maybe it's time to lose these acronyms altogether!) see essentially no difference in their experience? On the surface, perhaps no, but fundamentally of course the experience will be totally different, because the rules have changed. There is no expert auteur as JIm says in this model, rather we abandon that expert by thrusting the game into the sphere of collaboration, and you lose an essential part of the game if you do not participate. How can the model engage the player who does not participate? Does it take the 'moderate' approach, and will this satisfy?
I played "Figaro", and indeed it is amusing. The interesting thing about it for me is that I found the 'meta game' no more of an intrusion than figuring out in other games which noise makes which box turn on and off, or which key fits in which door -- in other words, I wonder if the collaboration does not become a puzzle itself, or rather, a toy (I prefer the latter term). However we would not want only to amuse, and from playing other games ("De Baron" and "Fate" of course among them) I don't see any reason the 'moderate' approach can not trigger other emotional sensations as well.
Recently I also got turned on to new RPGs (some of them Victor mentions in a footnote) like "Polaris" and "Shock:" and so maybe I'm a sucker for this sort of thing. And I'm not against the auteur. But I think it's clear these two modes of IF, of the auteur and of the audience -- both the spectators and the moment where the spectator gains admittence to the royal chambers to speak their mind -- can coexist.
On May 1, 6:07 pm, "Jim Aikin" <edi...@musicwords.net> wrote:
> The presumption -- and it's a very natural presumption -- is that the artist > has devoted years to perfecting his or her skills, and is in consequence an > expert, able to guide and control the work of art in ways that audiences > will find satisfying. I see no reason why that presumption should be > discarded in interactive fiction, or even questioned.
> The reason it comes into question, I think, is because a well-written work > of IF gives players the _illusion_ that they have a measure of control over > the model world. But confusing the illusion with an actual divestiture of > control is unlikely to be productive, in my view.
> > But if the world is not a puzzle, why not let the player tinker with the > > world itself? Or to say it a different way, why do we allow the player to > > play the piece, but not to play with the piece?
> Because it's very unlikely to improve the piece, that's why. Anyone who has > the skill set needed to improve it can go write their own game (and will > likely be doing so).
> > "Changing this would open up a vast new territory to explore. It would > > allow completely new ways of interacting with a piece of interactive > > fiction, > > new ways which would allow the player to freely use his creativity for the > > first time, and which would allow the player to be a real co-author for > > the first time. The player could change the work, add to it, rewrite it, > > improve it, or accept the voice of the author out of free choice."
> Okay, let's say that as a player, I happen to want to create a verb -- > "spungle." When I spungle an object, I want it to turn bright green, and I > want its description to reflect that fact.
> As the original author of the game, how exactly will you code that to allow > the player to do it -- without knowing in advance what sort of actions your > players may want to create?
> I claim that this can only be done by asking the player to become a > programmer -- to learn the entire syntax of the IF language used, and to be > provided the source code of the game. In which case, she isn't a player > anymore, she's a collaborator. There's nothing wrong with collaboration, of > course. Collaborations can be very productive. But there's a huge difference > between collaboration among artistic equals and allowing the player to muck > around at random.
> I, for one, would not want to collaborate with anyone who wasn't clear about > the difference.
On May 1, 9:07 pm, "Jim Aikin" <edi...@musicwords.net> wrote:
> As the original author of the game, how exactly will you code that to allow > the player to do it -- without knowing in advance what sort of actions your > players may want to create?
By simulating the entire universe? :-P
By building the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Mark II?
By skipping the computer entirely and acting as a plain old game master?
None of these could be called IF anymore. Your own suggestion to arm the player with the game author's tools would make for... hmmm... a single player MUD? Still not IF. Certainly not as we understand it today.
On May 2, 3:07 am, "Jim Aikin" <edi...@musicwords.net> wrote:
> The presumption -- and it's a very natural presumption -- is that the artist > has devoted years to perfecting his or her skills, and is in consequence an > expert, able to guide and control the work of art in ways that audiences > will find satisfying. I see no reason why that presumption should be > discarded in interactive fiction, or even questioned.
Here are two reasons:
1. This presumption has been successfully questioned and discarded in contemporary roleplaying games. Any group of moderately intelligent and creative persons can tell a great and gripping story together. Of course, such a story would lose much of its power when written down and read like a static story, but this is because roleplaying and reading static fiction are entirely different activities with different criteria of excellence. Why wouldn't the same hold for reading static fiction and interacting with IF? You mention a jazz concert, and mention that you don't want to attend a concert where anyone can chime in with the musicians. Sure--but that's because you are thinking of "attending a concert". There is, however, a popular activity called a "jam session", in which amateur musician are often asked to participate. Will they make better music? No. But you're not supposed to be a passive audience at a jam session: you're supposed to participate! It's a different kind of activity, with different standards of excellence.
2. Look at the interactive fiction community. How many people who play IF have also written it? I don't know the numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if the answer is 50% or more. In practice, then, the audience/writer distinction doesn't exist in interactive fiction--and that is classical IF.
Also, your example of the painter doesn't hold water. Because IF is an electronic medium, you can change a work without destroying it. You can have people tinker with a piece and yet lose nothing. It is a win- win situation.
> Because it's very unlikely to improve the piece, that's why. Anyone who has > the skill set needed to improve it can go write their own game (and will > likely be doing so).
I don't understand this argument. Is its structure: "Anyone who is good enough to do A could also do B, and therefore should do B and have no time left for doing A."?
> Okay, let's say that as a player, I happen to want to create a verb -- > "spungle." When I spungle an object, I want it to turn bright green, and I > want its description to reflect that fact.
> As the original author of the game, how exactly will you code that to allow > the player to do it -- without knowing in advance what sort of actions your > players may want to create?
On May 2, 1:59 am, "David Fisher" <d...@hsa.com.au> wrote:
> There was only a single entry in the Innovation Comp, which was from Victor > Gijsbers - making him the automatic winner. Congratulations!
Thanks, but of course it's a bit disappointing. I was hoping that other people would have more readily implementable ideas. Now the competition risks creating the illusion that innovating IF requires extreme changes. :/
> He has already started a thread called "OpenFate - an experiment" to try out > some of these ideas, but I am sure he would appreciate whatever other > feedback you might want to give him.
Not really, actually. OpenFate is, if people wish to join it, a classical collaborative open source effort. It's not nearly as radical as anything I wrote in the essay. :)
"Victor Gijsbers" <V.Gijsb...@let.leidenuniv.nl> wrote: > On May 2, 1:59 am, "David Fisher" <d...@hsa.com.au> wrote:
>> There was only a single entry in the Innovation Comp, which was from >> Victor Gijsbers - making him the automatic winner. Congratulations!
> Thanks, but of course it's a bit disappointing. I was hoping that > other people would have more readily implementable ideas. Now the > competition risks creating the illusion that innovating IF requires > extreme changes. :/
Oh, well. That's OK - people are free to enter these things or not, as they like.
>> He has already started a thread called "OpenFate - an experiment" >> to try out some of these ideas, but I am sure he would appreciate >> whatever other feedback you might want to give him.
> Not really, actually. OpenFate is, if people wish to join it, a > classical collaborative open source effort. It's not nearly as radical > as anything I wrote in the essay. :)
Well, how about "as a small step in that direction"? :-)
I read Victor's paper. I want to read it again with my critical analysis hat on, but here are my initial thoughts at the concept overall.
I actually like the idea. One way I've learned various IF systems is by taking existing works and "re-imagining" them by re-coding them with largely the same elements, but changes here and there. I found that not only did this help me learn the language but ... and here's the relevant part ... it helped me think about how to tell a story better. (At least in my opinion.) I found ways I could change the narrative structure, or the person-viewpoint, or the tense, or remove something that was a puzzle and instead make it a situation, etc.
This all may speak to one aspect Victor mention's in the paper: "A player might create new objects; change rules; add new dialogue options; and so forth. All these actions change the game itself." Now, in my case, how much I changed "the game itself" (as opposed, I guess, to some aspects of the game) depended very much on what I was doing. I never changed the ending or the key paths to get there, but I clearly could have.
From the paper, I definitely agree with this line:
"To change the figure, we are still much more captive in the Zork-paradigm than we are generally aware of. As I see it, the two - not unrelated - changes that are most necessary are the following:"
I'm not sure I agree that option (2) in the paper is a *necessary* aspect to getting away from the "Zork-paradigm" but I do think it's a sufficient way to do so. It's one way among a few, that is.
However ...
I see more of an emphasis on creating stories that reflect situations and that utilize narrative effectively to allow the reader/player a more varied experience while dealing with the work of fiction. As I re-read Victor's paper, I think part of what the idea (2) speaks to is just a more extended idea of what I've been looking at.
My ideas centered around the ideas of others before me: allowing for clever forms of narrative variation and the management of the dramatic structure of the game in a more conscious way than has been done in most works of text-based IF that I've seen. (This does get to point (1) of the paper a bit because I think puzzles have defined the genre to a large extent, as has an almost exclusive focus on second-person viewpoint.)
To me, it often seems like writing IF is done without conscious reflection of what has made other story-telling media so effective. Part of that probably is due to the "Zork-paradigm" mentality. I think if we saw the above kind of effort being put into games -- meaning more actual story-telling ability, with an understanding of and usage of various elements that make other storytelling media so successful -- then perhaps an idea of co-authorship could fall out of that naturally.
Or is it the reverse? Will a co-authorship focus allow for better story-telling? An intriguing possibility and not one I had considered.
The hard part is that different people have very different story-telling abilities, just as we see with filmmakers and novelists and screenplay writers. I see this kind of thing having the potential to produce games that are very different in their style of presentation. That can be jarring. (If Stephen King and Dean Koontz wrote a book together, that might not be so jarring for a reader who might not even be able to tell who wrote which parts. If Stephen King and I wrote a book together, it would be very jarring. My parts would probably stand out like a sore thumb. A good example of this in fiction is when Arthur C. Clarke teamed up with Gentry Lee. Fans didn't like those novels because the differences in storytelling were so evident.)
Another hurdle I see is that while I can see how this might be interesting for authors, I'm not sure I can see how or why it would be interesting for many players as opposed to a game that was not written in the co-authorship mode. In other words, how would a player operationally tell they are dealing with a "co-authorship game"? If they can't, then to what extent are they really co-authoring? To this topic, the paper says:
"What is distinctive about this transcript is that the piece offers the player several potential ways the game world might be. These are presumably taken from a finite list, so the player has only limited control, and only where the game author has decided to give her that control. This would still constitute a significant break with current interactive fiction, where the result of an action is always determined by the author, and where the game-world is always conceived of as already being determined at the start of the game."
I'm not sure I see the "significant break." Those elements are *still* built in. They are *still* a finite list determined by either one author or many and the overall concept is *still* determined from the start. That's why I'm trying to figure out how such a game would be operationally distinguishable (to a player) from a game that wasn't built on this co-authorship model.
In any event, I think Victor's experiment is interesting. I want to think more about the implementation ideas. One thing I could see immediately is something like an "ifUnit" element (think Junit, Nunit, etc), which is a way to have "tests" (maybe rule-based tests) that are always run for any proposed change (or set of changes). These could be "consistency tests" of a sort for the world model, either relative to one version (from one author) or as a whole with all the versions of the world. That's a bit off-the-cuff on my part. It just sprang to mind immediately as I read the paper.
I think this transcript is an example of the 'moderate' (i.e. achievable now with current tools) approach, not an implementation of the ideas in the main part of the article, but I had basically the same question -- what is the experience for the player that does not participate in the 'meta-game' of offering ideas, and accepting and rejecting ideas? Does the experience reduce to the 'moderate' approach?
One key difference between this model and something like a contemporary RPG is that everyone at the table playing an RPG will contribute within the system framework of the game -- indeed, if they do not contribute, they are not playing the game. However in this model of IF it is not required that everyone contribute, and I suspect that not everyone picking up such a game will contribute -- it's been seen time and time again in virtual worlds for example that not all players are content creators.
On May 2, 5:50 am, "Jeff Nyman" <jeffny...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Another hurdle I see is that while I can see how this might be interesting > for authors, I'm not sure I can see how or why it would be interesting for > many players as opposed to a game that was not written in the co-authorship > mode. In other words, how would a player operationally tell they are dealing > with a "co-authorship game"? If they can't, then to what extent are they > really co-authoring? To this topic, the paper says:
> "What is distinctive about this transcript is that the piece offers the > player > several potential ways the game world might be. These are presumably taken > from a finite list, so the player has only limited control, and only where > the > game author has decided to give her that control. This would still > constitute a > significant break with current interactive fiction, where the result of an > action is > always determined by the author, and where the game-world is always > conceived > of as already being determined at the start of the game."
> I'm not sure I see the "significant break." Those elements are *still* built > in. They are *still* a finite list determined by either one author or many > and the overall concept is *still* determined from the start. That's why I'm > trying to figure out how such a game would be operationally distinguishable > (to a player) from a game that wasn't built on this co-authorship model.
> 1. This presumption has been successfully questioned and discarded in > contemporary roleplaying games. Any group of moderately intelligent > and creative persons can tell a great and gripping story together.
Having participated in writers' workshops with people who were moderately intelligent and creative and yet were entirely unable to put together "a great and gripping story" in repeated attempts although it was their avowed intention to do so, I find your assertion unpersuasive. But perhaps your standards for what constitutes a great and gripping story are, shall we say, more relaxed and forgiving than mine. I thought the most recent Tony Hillerman novel was boring, and he sells a lot of books.
> You mention a jazz > concert, and mention that you don't want to attend a concert where > anyone can chime in with the musicians. Sure--but that's because you > are thinking of "attending a concert". There is, however, a popular > activity called a "jam session", in which amateur musician are often > asked to participate. Will they make better music? No. But you're not > supposed to be a passive audience at a jam session: you're supposed to > participate! It's a different kind of activity, with different > standards of excellence.
Having participated, over the years, in too many jam sessions to count, I can testify first-hand that the level of music-making is (a) in direct proportion to the abilities of the individual players, and therefore (b) generally abysmal. Yet people DID sit around and listen to us, nodding their heads and seemingly enjoying the music. My conclusion: Most people wouldn't know good music if it hit them over the head.
I've participated in jam sessions with people who could barely play. It's a painful and annoying process. If that's your model for IF, count me out.
Victor Gijsbers writes: > > He has already started a thread called "OpenFate - an experiment" to try out > > some of these ideas, but I am sure he would appreciate whatever other > > feedback you might want to give him.
> Not really, actually. OpenFate is, if people wish to join it, a > classical collaborative open source effort. It's not nearly as radical > as anything I wrote in the essay. :)
I'm going to risk that "not really, actually" was intended to introduce a clarification of what OpenFate is about, and not to discourage feedback. :)
The way I7 is set up, it's already very much like the author is a player. Indeed, there's little aesthetic or affective difference between I7 and the TADS dungeon diggers. Thus I think the substantial suggestion of your paper is to provide more concrete narrative structures, rather than the "blank page" that authoring systems strive to provide.
I'm glad to see someone thinking about developing the genre. I wish I shared your optimism about the untapped creative richness of the community. I don't know if a community *can* be sufficiently sophisticated. Instead I would say that you've hit upon an interesting structure for artistic production, but I think the interest of the productions themselves would be that they were produced in an interesting way, and that the works considered of themselves wouldn't gain much intrinsic value. You're as well off exploring IFMud, which, by the way, nobody ever does.
David Fisher wrote: > There was only a single entry in the Innovation Comp, which was from Victor > Gijsbers - making him the automatic winner. Congratulations!
> You can download his 10 page essay "Co-authorship and Community" and a short > sample game here:
Okay, having now had time to play this: I suspect this particular technique works well for a short game, but would be quite hard to develop into a novel-length implementation. Leaving aside the combinatorial horrors of having to code up three inventories for the player, multiple NPCs for each major role, etc., etc., etc., the options in this example work as options because the scenario is so constrained. We have already had the setup, we know why the player is in the trunk, and now we are in a somewhat contrived spot where everything we can reasonably do will effectively help characterize the PC or the scene. If there were a more detailed situation, I think it would be much harder to do this kind of thing. (Also that the player might run out of patience with it. I'm not sure how I'd feel about a game where I was constantly having to make all the choices about everyone's motivations and purposes. A few carefully selected choices? Sure. But there are times when an excess of choice actually makes one feel less powerful and the individual options less significant.)
I also found that being able to choose my inventory (revenge weapon, or comedy object?) made less of a difference than I expected; it was a lot like being able to choose an action, namely whether to attack or fool around. The available possibilities within the world have just been delimited a bit differently. So I'm curious: how did other people feel about this? Did it seem like a different kind of freedom than one usually has in IF, or just a reshaping of an old one?
I do continue to like the effect of getting to pick my PC's moral stance, though.
Jim Aikin wrote: >> 1. This presumption has been successfully questioned and discarded in >> contemporary roleplaying games. Any group of moderately intelligent >> and creative persons can tell a great and gripping story together.
> Having participated in writers' workshops with people who were moderately > intelligent and creative and yet were entirely unable to put together "a > great and gripping story" in repeated attempts although it was their avowed > intention to do so, I find your assertion unpersuasive. But perhaps your > standards for what constitutes a great and gripping story are, shall we say, > more relaxed and forgiving than mine. I thought the most recent Tony > Hillerman novel was boring, and he sells a lot of books.
No, I actually don't think we disagree here. I don't know Tony Hillerman, so I can't comment on that specifically, but I am very critical in my reading habits. What I'm saying is that different activities come with different standards of excellence. I suppose that a storyteller could keep his audience enthralled with a story that would fail dismally when written down as a transcript of what he said. I know that I have participated in emotionally engaging and very successful roleplaying sessions that would have made pretty bad stories when transcripts of what we said would have been written down. The suggestion is that an interactive fiction in which the player is a co-author might not need the kind of skills that great fiction needs.
Whether that is the case or not, is, of course, something that remains to be seen. :)
> I've participated in jam sessions with people who could barely play. It's a > painful and annoying process. If that's your model for IF, count me out.
Yes, but where the jam session analogy breaks down is that in electronic, web-based media we have very powerful tools that allow a community to rate submitted content. I don't know how easy it is to think of a combination of a jam session and Wikipedia, but there you are. I have two paragraphs about this role of the community in my essay, and they're there for a reason.
Victor Gijsbers wrote: > What I'm saying is that different > activities come with different standards of excellence. I suppose that a > storyteller could keep his audience enthralled with a story that would > fail dismally when written down as a transcript of what he said. I know > that I have participated in emotionally engaging and very successful > roleplaying sessions that would have made pretty bad stories when > transcripts of what we said would have been written down. The suggestion > is that an interactive fiction in which the player is a co-author might > not need the kind of skills that great fiction needs.
Yes, I think this is true. Most IF and RPG experiences I've enjoyed would make mediocre short stories at best, but I'm not sure that's entirely a condemnation (though people here sometimes use it as such). There are good movies that would make bad novels, too. (Of course, it's well-known that plenty of novels make bad movies. Somehow, though, the assumption seems to be that if a novel can't be turned into a movie well, it's because the movie form is inferior, and if a movie can't be turned into a good novel, it's again because movies are inferior, and that conversion into "real" literature has simply exposed the flaws and feebleness of the original. My point here is that written literature tends to be considered the yardstick by which all other forms of storytelling get measured. While I think it's quite legitimate to ask ourselves what aspects of static literary craft we could usefully apply to IF, I also think it's a bad idea to assume that the requirements of one medium will be identical to those of another.)
Preaching to the choir, I know. Still... a lot of what would be "wrong" with my favorite IF, if transferred to short story format, has to with pacing and narrative structure. Sometimes plot threads don't get tied off in a given playthrough. Sometimes things are repeated, or I get stuck working something out and the story doesn't progress for a while. This can be a good play experience even if it's a bad written experience. (It's also possible for IF to be paced badly *as IF*, but that's not what I'm talking about here.) And I think this points at a fundamental difference in the way the two media handle exposition. You talk about wanting to get away from puzzles and exploration; I can sympathize to an extent, but I also think these elements have more of a function even in literary IF than you're giving them credit for, as an interactive format of exposition.
One of the things people have most often told me they liked about Floatpoint was the computer database system. I originally designed it with the intention of creating a *good* research puzzle -- one that was experientially a bit like doing real research, which would feel fun in the same way and which wouldn't simply require boundless patience from the player reading every entry in a book (for instance). In its final form, I'm not sure whether to describe this as a puzzle or not: it was a mechanism that interactively dispensed expository information, in a way that encouraged creative associations on the part of the player. In one sense it needed to be solved -- that is, the player needed to look up enough things to understand the major choices of the game. But there was no one single piece of information that needed to be extracted from it, and (from the way players talk about it) many of them seemed not to have perceived it as a puzzle.
I bring this up largely because I think the kind of IF you want to write, in which the player explores moral or thematic issues rather than solving a game, still has room for -- in fact, still needs -- some elements that might seem to you to derive from the Zork paradigm. It's possible for a very short story to consist almost entirely of choices, but a longer one also needs some passages of development and discovery, to lend weight to the moments of decision.
Those passages can be implemented in such a way that they don't feel like they rely on contrived or mechanized puzzles, and so that they are not challenging and/or don't often get the player stuck; but they will still require some of the same techniques that go into good puzzle design, such as doling out information to the player in response to his exploration, concealing some information until other information has been found (and perhaps used), and so on. We lose some of the structure and pacing that goes into expository passages in written literature, but we make up for it by letting the player/reader control the focus: after all, part of the point of concern for structure and pacing in printed text is to keep the reader interested and to make sure he learns all the relevant pieces of the story in an order that makes sense. If we have an interactive mechanism for exposition, then the challenge of keeping the reader interested becomes different: we have to lay clues about what he might want to follow up on, and then we have to provide enough information on the topics that he chooses to pursue, and we have also to guarantee that he misses nothing critical.
As I said, when you look at it this way, the design of interactive exposition begins to feel like puzzle design again -- even if it is not your intention ever to let your reader get stuck.
Emily Short writes: > Okay, having now had time to play this: I suspect this particular > technique works well for a short game, but would be quite hard to > develop into a novel-length implementation.
"Novel-length implementation"?! What the heck?! IF is of the order of flash fiction. There are no novel-length works of IF. *Of course*!
They say in the movie industry that screenplays can at best capture short stories. Filming a novel means reducing it to a story or expanding the movie to a mini-series. IF is much more compressed than a movie.
I can only assume Short somehow considers herself a novelist, despite the fact that she's been writing shorter-than-short fiction, no pun intended.
Other than that, I guess Short's point is that the shorter the game, the easier it is to customize. DUH.
Last night I tried "The Baron" for myself. It may not have earned high marks in the Spring Thing, but I actually quite...I suppose the word *enjoyed* might not be the word here, since the story - just as advertised - turns out to be quite a disturbing tale indeed, but it was certainly a unique and interesting take on interactive fiction, breaking the "action - reward" model nicely: I felt guilty killing the she-wolf, felt compelled to listen to the gargoyle's story, etc. I had my suspicions early on as to the true nature of the, ahem, "protagonist"...the game only openly admitted it once in my playthrough, but it was still a nasty shock as the pieces fit together.
Perhaps the mentality behind the game's design can be put to use in a better implementation of the idea behind Figaro. Maybe it's because I have been a fan of console gaming for far longer than I have been a fan of IF, but there are certain mechanisms by which Figaro's idea of allowing the player to direct what happens might be made a bit less obvious: instead of the game leaping out at you every turn asking you how you want to play the game, instead the machinery of the game silently watches as the player makes his decisions and adjusts what transpires accordingly. "The Erudition Chamber" does this by judging how the player solves puzzles: in a more literary work, this would be judged more subtly.
For example, the classic SNES title Mother 2, a.k.a. "Earthbound", finds an excuse to ask the player for his/her real name: in the finale of the game, that same name is given as the person who deals the final blow to the evil Gyiyg (pronounced "geeg", and called Giygas in the U.S. version). More recently we have the game "Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne" for PS2, wherein the player's alignment has a dramatic effect on the endgame. A major aspect of gameplay is recruiting monsters - referred to as "demons" in the context of the game, but in fact based upon figures from mythologies and religions from around the world - to join your party and fight alongside you. Some of these demons will pose you questions about your worldview and join your party if they like your answer: your answers to these questions will affect your alignment, although you will not know what your alignment truly is until the endgame, when it becomes set in stone. You may choose to align with one of the three Reasons vying to remake the world in their image, you may choose to defy them all and restore the world to the way it was, or you may choose to defy your fate completely and break the cycle of reincarnation. The only gameplay difference between the paths is which end bosses you fight. (There is also one other path you can choose, but following it is mainly a matter of battling your way through an incredibly difficult dungeon.)
On May 2, 8:36 pm, Ryusui <TheRyu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Perhaps the mentality behind the game's design can be put to use in a > better implementation of the idea behind Figaro. Maybe it's because I > have been a fan of console gaming for far longer than I have been a > fan of IF, but there are certain mechanisms by which Figaro's idea of > allowing the player to direct what happens might be made a bit less > obvious: instead of the game leaping out at you every turn asking you > how you want to play the game, instead the machinery of the game > silently watches as the player makes his decisions and adjusts what > transpires accordingly. "The Erudition Chamber" does this by judging > how the player solves puzzles: in a more literary work, this would be > judged more subtly.
Ryusui captured my thoughts about how I'd like to see a Figaro-style game. I don't know the canon well enough to know if anything along those lines have been done, but what was implemented in Figaro was horribly mimesis-breaking for me.
What I understand of Victor's broader ideas about collaboration make me think of Atlas Games' "Once Upon a Time" storytelling game. Every player has a half-dozen cards that may be characters, locations, objects, events - all straight out of stereotypical fairy tales. They also each have one or two resolutions. The point of the game is to tell a story that includes all of the cards in your hand, then concludes in one of your resolutions. Other players can interrupt you and try to take the story off in their own directions.
How I'd mimic this in single-player IF would be to try creating a large cast of characters and objects, with something like RAP behind them. The game starts with a random subset of them active, and another random subset given to the player; the player can stop action and introduce one of the things she holds, or replace one of the active things in the world, or trade in one of the things she holds for a random thing out of the cast, trying to control the conclusion of the story.
> Emily Short writes: >> Okay, having now had time to play this: I suspect this particular >> technique works well for a short game, but would be quite hard to >> develop into a novel-length implementation.
> "Novel-length implementation"?! What the heck?! IF is of the order of > flash fiction. There are no novel-length works of IF. *Of course*!
> They say in the movie industry that screenplays can at best capture > short stories. Filming a novel means reducing it to a story or > expanding the movie to a mini-series. IF is much more compressed than > a movie.
> I can only assume Short somehow considers herself a novelist, despite > the fact that she's been writing shorter-than-short fiction, no pun > intended.
> Other than that, I guess Short's point is that the shorter the game, > the easier it is to customize. DUH.
Doc, I'm glad you're around to point out what people say as opposed to what they plainly mean. Without you I might not even *notice* that kind of petty little crap! I suppose your point is -- well -- I suppose your *point* is that you've stuck something *too thorny* up your ass and only pointless snark can relieve the pain for a moment.
I can only assume you consider yourself an editor, despite your demonstrated inability to find the errors your own posts here are riddled with.
> Emily Short writes: > > Okay, having now had time to play this: I suspect this particular > > technique works well for a short game, but would be quite hard to > > develop into a novel-length implementation.
> "Novel-length implementation"?! What the heck?! IF is of the order of > flash fiction. There are no novel-length works of IF. *Of course*!
I don't know how much text there is in The Mulldoon Legacy, but it's got to be a lot closer to a novel than to flash fiction. I could name other long games, but that's the one that leapt to my mind.
> On May 2, 7:27 pm, steve.bres...@gmail.com wrote:
> > Emily Short writes: > > > Okay, having now had time to play this: I suspect this particular > > > technique works well for a short game, but would be quite hard to > > > develop into a novel-length implementation.
> > "Novel-length implementation"?! What the heck?! IF is of the order of > > flash fiction. There are no novel-length works of IF. *Of course*!
> I don't know how much text there is in The Mulldoon Legacy, but it's > got to be a lot closer to a novel than to flash fiction. I could name > other long games, but that's the one that leapt to my mind.
> -- > Daphne
There's a difference between having a lot of content and detail and having a lot of *story*. I relate to you my observations of a recent XBox 360 game entitled "Crackdown" ("Riot Act" in some countries): the game deals with a futuristic crimefighting agency tasked with ridding a city of its three major crime gangs. This core task can be accomplished in a matter of hours and comprises the only real "story" the game has: "these are the city's crime bosses; kill them all and you win". However, the game is set in a massive city full of detail: much of it is pure window dressing, but there are numerous bonus tasks and special accomplishments. Seeing absolutely *everything* the game has to offer can take days, if not weeks. (Somebody even posted a video on YouTube of something the game designers likely hadn't intended: it's possible to create a "dumpster tank", or "skiptank" as they called it, by throwing a dumpster - an easy task for the game's superhuman crimestoppers - on top of a vehicle.)
The unfairly-maligned PS1 classic "Legend of Mana" would be an example of a game with plenty of content *and* story: appropriately for the topic, the game world begins as a blank slate. The player builds the world, one location at a time, by placing "artifacts" he/she obtains on the landscape grid. The story is non-linear, but can mostly be divided into three, non-exclusive paths: clearing any of the three will allow you to reach the game's final confrontation, but you can complete as much or as little of the other stories as you'd like before progressing into the endgame. How much you accomplish does not affect the ending, but each individual story is a fully-realized plotline in and of itself.
I believe Legend of Mana, despite being a critical failure (although nonetheless a cult classic), is very much relevant to the discussion at hand. There's easily enough story in the game for a novel, rather than merely a novella. One of the three storylines involves a decision very much reminiscent of Mr. Gijsbers' work, where two potential allies come to a deadly impasse: both are former friends of the episode's villain, but while one wishes to try and save him from his destructive path, the other wants revenge at any cost. You can side with either, or you can side with neither: whoever you choose against will die in the confrontation, and if you choose to join neither one, one of the two will die in the battle while the other will go on ahead to face the villain and die in his attempt to infiltrate his fortress. Whichever choice you make, the story progresses regardless: the only thing your choice affects is who, if anyone, survives the story's conclusion, and thus is available for you to recruit into your party afterward (a matter of personal preference rather than combat advantage). If you have a little extra money to spare, it might be worth your while to purchase a Playstation of some description (all three are capable of playing Playstation 1 titles) and search the bargain bins at your local game stores for a copy; copies of the game can also be found on eBay for as little as 20 U.S. dollars.
> I don't know how much text there is in The Mulldoon Legacy, but it's > got to be a lot closer to a novel than to flash fiction. I could name > other long games, but that's the one that leapt to my mind.
We're not talking about word count, but narrative complexity. Many works of IF are "long" enough to be novels, if you count the characters in the source code. I mainly wanted to point out how tortured is the phrase "novel-length implementation" -- and how obvious is the point that more narrative complexity means more work for those electing to work on the narrative.
On May 2, 11:30 pm, Emily Short <emsh...@mindspring.com> wrote:
> Okay, having now had time to play this: I suspect this particular > technique works well for a short game, but would be quite hard to > develop into a novel-length implementation. Leaving aside the > combinatorial horrors of having to code up three inventories for the > player, multiple NPCs for each major role, etc., etc., etc., the > options in this example work as options because the scenario is so > constrained. We have already had the setup, we know why the player is > in the trunk, and now we are in a somewhat contrived spot where > everything we can reasonably do will effectively help characterize the > PC or the scene. If there were a more detailed situation, I think it > would be much harder to do this kind of thing.
Absolutely. The format used in Figaro would have to be carefully dosed (I'm not _quite_ sure this is English idiom) in order not become both overwhelming and bewildering in a larger game.
The combinatorial explosion, though, might not be as big a problem as you imagine. Since, as authors, we already create a model world which has many possible states apart from the one it is currently in, smart choices of what to simulate might prevent a combinatorial explosion. (For instance: the fact that our authoring systems model containment means that we can create containers and give the player a choice as to put what into what without facing a combinatorial explosion.)
> I also found that being able to choose my inventory (revenge weapon, > or comedy object?) made less of a difference than I expected; it was a > lot like being able to choose an action, namely whether to attack or > fool around. The available possibilities within the world have just > been delimited a bit differently. So I'm curious: how did other people > feel about this? Did it seem like a different kind of freedom than one > usually has in IF, or just a reshaping of an old one?
Objects in IF are usually tools, which makes them little more than means to an action. This _need_ not be the case though: choosing whether you are carrying a bunch of red roses, an expensive ring or two tickets for a football match to your date might help you to characterise the protagonist. (Especially if all of them have the same effect on your date, and _especially_ if the characterisation of your date will depend on the present you choose to have with you.)
On May 3, 7:38 am, Victor Gijsbers <V.Gijsb...@let.leidenuniv.nl> wrote:
> Objects in IF are usually tools, which makes them little more than > means to an action. This _need_ not be the case though: choosing > whether you are carrying a bunch of red roses, an expensive ring or > two tickets for a football match to your date might help you to > characterise the protagonist. (Especially if all of them have the same > effect on your date, and _especially_ if the characterisation of your > date will depend on the present you choose to have with you.)
It seems that some of these choices could be presented without asking the question directly. For instance, rather than asking the player in Figoro what inventory item he is carrying, you could have a scene of the PC preparing to conceal himself, and a number of objects available (axe, etc.) and see which he takes (prod him to take one, if necessary). I'm curious if, and to what extent, you find the direct questioning more effective than something like this. I suppose it could change the narrative structure somewhat, but perhaps if you jumped to a short "flashback scene" when the player takes inventory, wherein the player has the option of selecting his inventory item, this would have much the same narrative effect.
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