New Themes for IF
Hazard Suit
My acquaintence with IF doesn't go that far back, but I always see
pattern emerge - themes, setting that are overused (Cave :-) ) and
settings that aren't. I'm just curious what theme everybody would like
to see in an IF game...
On second thoughts, why not do this thread like this:
I'd like to see an IF game about...
Jim Aikin
...and you're hopin' I'll be sharin' all o' me spiffy ideas, now, are ye?
But seriously, my experience as an artist has always been that ideas are
cheap and plentiful. The problem is not coming up with a good idea. The
problem is developing a good idea into a finished work. That requires
immense labor!
IF has certain predilections, owing in part to the need to limit the size of
the environment. It's surely no accident that the game that started it all
was set in a cave. Space station: easy. City: hard.
In IF, the setting is a sort of implicit antagonist, so the choice of
setting dictates the nature of the story more completely than one would
expect in conventional fiction.
Within those parameters, the sky's the limit. From ancient Egypt on, any
setting you can think of could be turned into a great game!
--JA
villagedweller
I agree with Jim that the theme is less important than the
implementation. IF tends to rely on strangely underpopulated and stable
environments; this is less noticeable when the place or the narrative
supports that sort of setting.
Moving away from this, however, would mean that experienced IF players
would find that many of their problem-solving strategies would be
useless. Things changing usually is a clue; in the real world, things
frequently change in ways that have no impact on us at all. Most of the
people in the real world are unimportant to our actions; in IF they're
almost certainly important. So, a more vibrant setting might not be
well received.
A.P. Hill
A KungFu Action Theartre game
A game where you have to make a Cave, like you are a coalminer.
A Western
A Original Series Star Trek game
and maybe a Violent Kill Little People game, ( after seeing Oliver's
Travels as a kid, I use to fanatasize all the possible ways of harming
small people, putting on top of ceiling fans, throwing fetch to a dog,
dishwasher....)
Happy Holidays!
A.P. Hill
Autymn D. C.
Adam Thornton
A.P. Hill <aph...@altavista.com> wrote:
>A game where you have to make a Cave, like you are a coalminer.
That's a fun idea.
>A Western
Played the example Hugo game, _Spur_? It's good.
>A Original Series Star Trek game
Was _Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country_ too next-generation for
you? Kirk is teaching at Starfleet Academy when it starts, but I will
grant that the uniforms (and font) are basically TNG.
Adam