Default parser responses: how do they affect the gaming / authorship experience?
Dennis G Jerz
variable named "deadflag". Hypothesis: The name of this variable
encourages new authors to come up with antagonistic IF scenarios, in
which the PC must fight to survive. (I don't have my TADS manual with
me... what's the equivalent way to end a TADS game?)
Was the name "deadflag" suitably applied because IF authors had
already come to the realization that killing the PC was a convenient
storytelling shortcut? Is it a way to make the game world seem
responsive enough to recognize and respond to the player's desire to
make a radical change to the "ideal" narrative, but since the change
was fatal, it was short-lived, and hence required the programmer to
invest little time in order to implement it -- at least until such
time as we an instruct the Holodeck to improvise a story based on
parameters that we provide.
I've been collecting stories & interviews with Will Crowther. Most
people know that, during the time he created "Colossal Cave
Adventure," he was an avid caver in the 1970s, and also a D & D
player. I've also found references to him playing chess and posing
logic puzzles for the amusement of his companions, having a great
sense of direction, and being interested in natural language
processing.
Consider this: If Crowther's hobby was something other than caving,
would the history of gaming have included so many dungeon crawls?
If you're with me so far, and agree that this one decision that
Crowther made did affect the development of computer games for a long
time, then it's probably not too much of a stretch to suggest that
other decisions Crowther (and others) made in the history of IF, or
the decisions that the current generation of IF storytellers are
making now, may have tremendous unforeseen effects.
All the things that IF was good at doing in 1975 (manipulating
objects, language games), graphic computer games are still good at
doing. The things that IF was not good at -- the things that Crowther
didn't implement in his original simulated universe (complex NPCs,
dynamic plots) -- are still elusive.
Scott Adams says that when Adventure International began adding
graphics to their titles, fans wrote in to say, "The pictures I made
in my head were better than yours." A company that puts resources
into graphic and sound design can get richer game play that can be
generated dynamically. Plot is finite, and many a fine game has
gotten poor reviews due to low "replayability".
Yet the animators for Monsters Inc. worked in a complex simulated
universe that handled such things as the motion of fabric, the effect
of wind on hair, water absorption, etc. That meant that animators
didn't have to animate every ripple of fabric or lock of hair.
Monsters Inc. is, of course, a linear narrative.
Will plot-creation tools, or chatterbots with the complexity of
Galatea as NPCs, bring new audiences to games that have traditionally
expected a different kind of gameplay? Is "plot" a resource that can
be manipulated to this degree? I don't think many gaming companies
have much faith in that concept. I recently read a transcript of a
speech by the lead designer for Deus Ex, who noted that, in order to
advance the story, there were certain events that had to happen all
the time -- a particular alarm being triggered, for example. Gamers
often responded with hostility to that scripted plot point, since
elsewhere in the game it was possible for stealthy characters to
disable alarms.
When I was doing my English Ph.D., I heard quite a bit about
post-structuralism and the "death of the author," along with praise of
hypertext as a "writerly" genre -- a text that not only invited reader
participation, but demanded it. While I'm not sure how productive it
will be to apply those concepts directly to IF (it certainly wasn't
productive to apply those concepts to hyperfiction), the goal of a
game designer is generally to give more control to the player. In IF,
I think a more realistic goal is improved writing, that encourages the
player to behave in a way that will unlock the most aesthetically
satisfying narratives that the author has chosen to code.
I think that this means "authorship" will, in the future, be
democratized... shared among the members of a design team, and also
taken on by the players in future IF. Even solitary authors will use
software packages that reflect the experience of multiple designers,
playtesters, and upgrades driven by user requests.
(I haven't played "Majestic" yet... it sounds promising, but is it
really interactive? Or just a linear story dished out via faxes,
e-mails, fake web sites, chatbots, and phone calls?)
There's been much recent discussion on r*if on NPC interaction. Of
course the parser has gotten much better, but the core problems in IF
are still the same, and won't be solved by the Holy Grail of FPS and
MMORPG designers -- an ever more accurate simulation of physics.
Location, containment, proximity, illumination, etc. are being
developed with ever-further complexity, permitting players of graphic
action games to improvise solutions to problems that the designers
didn't foresee.
Along with textual IF's motions towards a more robust parser, we have
probably seen the expectations of the player rising
disproportionately. When the player expects to be able to perform
more actions, the player probably has more exposure to the game
world's default responses for actions that the designer didn't
foresee.
While a graphic game designer might tweak the gravity-simulation
subroutine, IF authors who want special textual effects will sometimes
painstakingly re-write the library files. "Ad Verbum" comes to mind
("No! Nibbling nappies not normal!"), as does any game that involves a
point of view other than second person present tense ("Muse") or the
tone of the narration ("Varicella"). The PC in chapters 1 and 3 of
"Fine Tuned" has a very different world view than the PC in chapters 2
and 4, and various default messages would have been inappropriate for
one or the other characters.
But what of the countless Inform games that include these gems, which
are part of the default library?
>take me
You are always self-possessed.
>examine me
As good looking as ever.
Is there a particular style to Inform parser responses -- a style that
influences the experience of writing such games?
Is the Inform parser really more polite and gentlemanly than the
Infocom parser? Does anybody find some of the Inform responses just a
bit too... precious? ("Real adventurers do not use such language."
[nudge-nudge, wink-wink.])
I find that at least some of the flavor of the original Advent is
affected markedly by the Inform behavior added to the game as part of
the 1993/4 port to Inform.
For example, ">enter building" should probably work, but since the
building object doesn't have the flag "enterable", you get the
standard Inform response, "That's not something you can enter."
(More on this at http://www.uwec.edu/jerzdg/orr/articles/IF/canon/Adventure.htm
)
The Crowther/Woods version would occasionally say something like, "I'm
not allowed to tell you any more about that, so I will repeat the room
description." In a similar situation, the 1994 Z-code version will
say something like "That's not a word you need to use in the course of
the game." In Return to Pirate's Island 2, Scott Adams has the
parser say something like, "This is terribly embarrassing, but I don't
understand the word 'X'."
But if someone were to play Kent Tessman's HUGO version of Adventure,
which was based on Graham Nelson's Inform version, which in turn was
based on Dave Bagget's TADS version, which was in turn based on Don
Ekman's DOS version, which was based on Wood's expansion of Crowther's
original, then... uh... I think I lost my train of thought while
trying to track down that geneology.
(See http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/e_downloads.html)
My point is that what is essentially the same game can change
markedly, based on the language used to create it. Roger Firth's
"Cloak of Darkness" website is an interesting case study.
Non-programmers who don't understand why the game can print out a
word, but not accept it as input, often find the experience disruptive
enough to damage their ability to enjoy the game. After I first
introduce IF to my students, I have them do a little fill-in-the-blank
coding exercise, and then the next time they play IF they are
generally much more appreciative of the work that goes into coding.
Scott Adams has predicted that within the next 5 years, there will be
sophisticated IF story generating tools on the market, designed with a
much lower learning curve. I think X is right when he suggested, in a
thread on commercializing IF, that story-generation tools will
probably play a large role.
While the Usenet community often laments what happened when
technologically naive AOL users began flooding the public newsgroups
that had previously "belonged" to the technological elites, the
Internet really emerged as a social force when it became accessible to
a wide range of people outside the traditional group of programmers
and researchers.
If that's the case, then it's probably safe to say that new IF authors
will probably lean very heavily on default responses. And if that's
the case, then the default responses, may affect the future of
interactive narrative as strongly as Crowther's decision to create an
underground treasure hunt.
Dennis G. Jerz
P.S.
As an amusing side-note, I was just re-reading "The Two Towers." In
the chapter "The Road to Isengard", Gimli the Dwarf and Legolas the
Elf argue about which are better -- forests or caves. Gimli has a
wonderful set of speeches about the wonders of exploring caves, about
how horrible it is to plunder their natural treasures. Considering
the function and fate of the dwarves in "Adventure," it would almost
seem the game advocates the Elvish world view.
Magnus Olsson
Dennis G Jerz <jer...@uwec.edu> wrote:
>In Inform, the programmer signals the end of the game by setting a
>variable named "deadflag". Hypothesis: The name of this variable
>encourages new authors to come up with antagonistic IF scenarios, in
>which the PC must fight to survive.
I don't think the *name* of the flag is very influential compared
to the fact that there are two default ways to end an Inform game:
by winning or dying; the default end-of-game messages are
"You have won" and "You have died".
But scenarios where the PC must fight to survive are IMHO rather
rare; death in IF usually seems to occur by walking into traps,
drinking poisonous potions, falling off cliffs and similar things.
--
Magnus Olsson (m...@df.lth.se, m...@pobox.com)
------ http://www.pobox.com/~mol ------
Adam Cadre
> The Crowther/Woods version would occasionally say something like, "I'm
> not allowed to tell you any more about that, so I will repeat the room
> description." In a similar situation, the 1994 Z-code version will
> say something like "That's not a word you need to use in the course of
> the game."
I believe that that message is reserved for when the player attempts to
use a word listed in the name field of the current room. Words that don't
occur in the game's dictionary at all produce the infamous "You can't see
any such thing." The same message is produced if the word *is* in the
game's dictionary but the object to which it refers is out of scope.
This was Graham's way of evading this little trick:
>EAT APPLE
I don't know the word "apple".
>EAT BANANA
You see no banana here.
(Player: "Ah ha! So there's a banana SOMEWHERE in the game!")
The problem with Graham's solution is that it assumes that everything the
player can see will be implemented, at least to the extent of producing a
"That's not important."-type message. So you end up with stuff like this:
>I
You are carrying a pair of gloves (being worn).
>LOOK AT MY HANDS
You can't see any such thing.
(Player: "Eeeagh! I have no hands! So where'm I wearing the gloves, on
my ears?")
Another problem with "You can't see any such thing." is that it appears
to be diegetic discourse -- ie, part of the story, rather than a
nondiegetic error message. Take the following exchange:
>EAT BANANA
You can't see any such thing.
To my mind, what has just happened in the story is that the character
in question has decided, "Hey, a banana sure would hit the spot," looked
around for one to eat, and sadly concluded, "Darn, it doesn't look like
there's a banana in this room." Me, I've come to prefer to make it fairly
explicit to the player that the command is erroneous, bracketing off the
response as nondiegetic:
>EAT BANANA
[That is not an object with which you can currently interact.]
This, by contrast, says, "Hey, player -- game here. You can't do that."
Nothing happens in the actual story. Now, some might call this an
unfortunate interruption of mimesis. But I tend to think of bracketed
messages as being essentially invisible: since they're not part of the
story I'm building in my mind as I play, they're less harmful than
messages which insert a lot of trying-to-find-objects-and-failing into
the story. Plus, it resolves this nicely:
>I
You're wearing a pair of gloves.
>LOOK AT MY HANDS
[That is not an object with which you can currently interact.]
(Player: "Hrm, not implemented. Okay, moving on then.")
I wouldn't take this approach to *every* game, but as LOCK & KEY will
attest, it is my preferred recourse as of January of '02.
-----
Adam Cadre, Brooklyn, NY
http://adamcadre.ac
joh
discussed on this group, so if that bothers you, read no further.
As a newcomer to IF, I've already considered many of the topics you
bring up. The angle I'm proceeding from, though, is "Is it worth my
while to get into this as an author, or am I better off spending the
time on noninteractive short fiction?" And what that boils down to for
me is solving this dilemma: "Is IF just a gimmick for taking a
traditional story, chopping it up, and making it 'fun' to read, with
the side benefit that the audience is less judgmental about some of
the standard criteria for other prose (e.g., if the gameplay is
original, the plot need not be)?"
Re the influence of "deadflag," I think A Change in the Weather
provides counterexamples here. You need not kill the character to end
the story suddenly and with finality. On the other hand, once any game
goes into an unwinnable state, you could argue that everything from
there on out is a slow loss.
[I've snipped a lot, without always marking where. Sorry.]
>>>>> "Dennis" == Dennis G Jerz <jer...@uwec.edu> writes:
Dennis> Consider this: If Crowther's hobby was something other
Dennis> than caving, would the history of gaming have included so
Dennis> many dungeon crawls?
If not that, then something similar, just because it's easiest to
implement either a constrained space or a relatively empty open
space. The raif thread on depth of room description is exploring this
topic and coming up with some interesting ideas.
Dennis> All the things that IF was good at doing in 1975
Dennis> (manipulating objects, language games), graphic computer
Dennis> games are still good at doing. The things that IF was not
Dennis> good at -- the things that Crowther didn't implement in
Dennis> his original simulated universe (complex NPCs, dynamic
Dennis> plots) -- are still elusive.
Isn't that just because they're harder? I mean, as far as I've seen,
nobody's programmed a really convincing human character, in IF or any
other branch of programming. And multiple plots mean a multiplication
of effort. It seems logical in most cases to spend that effort on
making one plot more satisfying.
Dennis> A company that puts resources into graphic and sound
Dennis> design can get richer game play that can be generated
Dennis> dynamically. Plot is finite, and many a fine game has
Dennis> gotten poor reviews due to low "replayability".
Here's the crux. If good prose is an important part of the IF
experience, you can't really have "dynamic" plots. You can only have
multiple plots. Unless you think Eliza generates good prose.
Dennis> Yet the animators for Monsters Inc. worked in a complex
Dennis> simulated universe that handled such things as the motion
Dennis> of fabric, the effect of wind on hair, water absorption,
Dennis> etc....
And they flubbed it just as bad as most big-budget studios that work
in a nonsimulated universe that handles the motion of fabric,
etc. Because the limit of their vision was to clothe a standard
Hollywood plot in wacky costumes.
Dennis> ... Gamers often
Dennis> responded with hostility to that scripted plot point,
Dennis> since elsewhere in the game it was possible for stealthy
Dennis> characters to disable alarms.
Dennis> .... In IF, I think a more
Dennis> realistic goal is improved writing, that encourages the
Dennis> player to behave in a way that will unlock the most
Dennis> aesthetically satisfying narratives that the author has
Dennis> chosen to code.
That's the other crux :) In a "game" we want control. In a "story," we
have to be led. In IF, I think we want a convincing illusion of
control, while still being led. At least, I think that's what I want.
Dennis> I think that this means "authorship" will, in the future,
Dennis> be democratized... shared among the members of a design
Dennis> team, and also taken on by the players in future IF. Even
Dennis> solitary authors will use software packages that reflect
Dennis> the experience of multiple designers, playtesters, and
Dennis> upgrades driven by user requests.
I've very often flirted with the idea of trying to organize a team of
writers for a story. I've never seen more than two authors' names on a
work of prose fiction, but look at TV shows like the Simpsons, which
uses the wide knowledge of a _lot_ of people to create an incredibly
densely textured story.
I'm running out of time to get ready for work, so let me just agree
that the standard responses from Inform are totally
distracting. Especially when you're just starting a new
game. Everything is fresh and new, until you try something that
doesn't work. Suddenly you feel like you're playing Curses again.
joh
J. D. Berry
> In Inform, the programmer signals the end of the game by setting a
> variable named "deadflag". Hypothesis: The name of this variable
> encourages new authors to come up with antagonistic IF scenarios, in
> which the PC must fight to survive. (I don't have my TADS manual with
> me... what's the equivalent way to end a TADS game?)
"Encourages" is too strong, but I would agree that it at least plants
the seed. I think most new authors already have in mind what they
want to do. If they're Doom oriented, they're already going the
death ending route. If, like Alan DeNiro with "Isolato", they have
a story concept in mind that they feel tranlates well to the medium,
they're not even thinking of a death ending (unless it truly fits
the story, obviously.)
> Was the name "deadflag" suitably applied because IF authors had
> already come to the realization that killing the PC was a convenient
> storytelling shortcut?
I don't think this was a storytelling shortcut. The deadflag then
was a combination of the philosophy of gaming at the time--kill or
be killed (chess and D&D, from your Crowther references)--and the purpose
of creating the games in the first place--they were fun diversions
designed to challenge (drive nuts) their colleagues. "Ha ha! I've stymied
you!"
While Crowther's prose is competent, I'm sure he wasn't after a
Nobel prize in literature. I don't think he was bypassing story,
because (just my speculation, of course) the story wasn't the point.
Noteworthy, too, was the computer's lack of memory. This affected
the story in many ways. The author hadn't room to write a complete
background on everything--the little things that gradually add up to make
today's IF a story experience.
> Is it a way to make the game world seem
> responsive enough to recognize and respond to the player's desire to
> make a radical change to the "ideal" narrative, but since the change
> was fatal, it was short-lived, and hence required the programmer to
> invest little time in order to implement it -- at least until such
> time as we an instruct the Holodeck to improvise a story based on
> parameters that we provide.
I think we're at the stage where authors are going
the less ideal narrative route, rather than the death route. Look
at Cadre, Short and Fischer games, for example. Sure, sometimes their
non-deaths are the "death" equivalent, but they always fit the situation
and story.
From your own words above, we are talking about a GAME world. The
Costikyan articles (via Brass Lantern (although the links aren't
working, currently)) on what makes a game a game are apporpriate here.
Taking from that, 1) there must be competition on some level, and 2)
there must be decision making. And it is here, I feel, where there
are shortcut temptations.
The danger of #1, above, is "OK, it's you the player versus me
the author." In #2, "OK, make a wrong decision and die." These
satisfy the GAME conditions, but they (may) seriously neglect the
STORY.
This again returns to the "NEW" author discussion. There's just
so much an IF author has to do. To a new author, way too much.
Integrating competition is complex. Incorporating
subtle decision-making is complex. Don't forget original storylines
and depth of world, too. Oh, and cool NPCs, please.
Thus, even if DEADFLAG were not the syntax, authors (especially
new ones) would still take this route. That's why I feel that
the "deadflag effect" is only a seed, not a full encouragement.
The seed will grow, but it's up to the author to shape its
future. There can and should be pruning.
> I've been collecting stories & interviews with Will Crowther. Most
> people know that, during the time he created "Colossal Cave
> Adventure," he was an avid caver in the 1970s, and also a D & D
> player. I've also found references to him playing chess and posing
> logic puzzles for the amusement of his companions, having a great
> sense of direction, and being interested in natural language
> processing.
>
> Consider this: If Crowther's hobby was something other than caving,
> would the history of gaming have included so many dungeon crawls?
>
As mentioned in other threads, a desolate, similarly
constructed landscape lent itself perfectly to the gaming style and
computer capacity of the 20th century. If Crowther didn't
write CC, someone else would have.
> If you're with me so far, and agree that this one decision that
> Crowther made did affect the development of computer games for a long
> time, then it's probably not too much of a stretch to suggest that
> other decisions Crowther (and others) made in the history of IF, or
> the decisions that the current generation of IF storytellers are
> making now, may have tremendous unforeseen effects.
>
Perhaps there's a gray area between the "natural progression"
(that is, SOMEONE would have done what X, Y or Z did, if X, Y or Z
hadn't) that I suggest above, and the "cause and irreversable effect
of X, Y or Z (that only they could have done)" that you do.
> All the things that IF was good at doing in 1975 (manipulating
> objects, language games), graphic computer games are still good at
> doing. The things that IF was not good at -- the things that Crowther
> didn't implement in his original simulated universe (complex NPCs,
> dynamic plots) -- are still elusive.
>
Elusively elusive. :)
I think they are do-able but for the time constraints placed
on humans.
> Scott Adams says that when Adventure International began adding
> graphics to their titles, fans wrote in to say, "The pictures I made
> in my head were better than yours." A company that puts resources
> into graphic and sound design can get richer game play that can be
> generated dynamically. Plot is finite, and many a fine game has
> gotten poor reviews due to low "replayability".
>
> Yet the animators for Monsters Inc. worked in a complex simulated
> universe that handled such things as the motion of fabric, the effect
> of wind on hair, water absorption, etc. That meant that animators
> didn't have to animate every ripple of fabric or lock of hair.
> Monsters Inc. is, of course, a linear narrative.
>
A thought-provoking paragraph, indeed.
The "automated" world of Monsters Inc. was still defined at some
level by humans. If I took their tools to develop my own Pixar
rip-of^H^H^H^H^H^H translation movie, it would still have the Monsters
look and feel. Of course, I could redefine the physics of
the world, change some of the libraries...
Well, you see what I'm getting at (you mention plot-creation
tools below).
Extrapolate to game-design tools, you'd get Doom clones, Myst clones,
etc...
Extrapolate to current IF tools (and your theory), you'd get
Cave Crawls where death ended the story at every turn.
Thus, we could have an IF tool that mirrored the Monsters inc.
abilities. But after the first few games, send in
the clones. They'd be slick-as-snot clones, but they would
still bore us if there wasn't Quality (as Pirsig defines it
in "Zen...").
It always comes down to author originality and how he/she
creates entertainment (in its many forms) artistically.
> Will plot-creation tools, or chatterbots with the complexity of
> Galatea as NPCs, bring new audiences to games that have traditionally
> expected a different kind of gameplay? Is "plot" a resource that can
> be manipulated to this degree? I don't think many gaming companies
> have much faith in that concept. I recently read a transcript of a
> speech by the lead designer for Deus Ex, who noted that, in order to
> advance the story, there were certain events that had to happen all
> the time -- a particular alarm being triggered, for example. Gamers
> often responded with hostility to that scripted plot point, since
> elsewhere in the game it was possible for stealthy characters to
> disable alarms.
>
Again, this is where human creativity and TIME come in to play
With both of those elements, that alarm situation could have been
alleviated. There's always the subjective factor, though. There's
going to be SOMEONE that doesn't like it, however you do it.
> When I was doing my English Ph.D., I heard quite a bit about
> post-structuralism and the "death of the author," along with praise of
> hypertext as a "writerly" genre -- a text that not only invited reader
> participation, but demanded it. While I'm not sure how productive it
> will be to apply those concepts directly to IF (it certainly wasn't
> productive to apply those concepts to hyperfiction), the goal of a
> game designer is generally to give more control to the player. In IF,
> I think a more realistic goal is improved writing, that encourages the
> player to behave in a way that will unlock the most aesthetically
> satisfying narratives that the author has chosen to code.
>
"Control" is a tricky word, anyway.
I fully agree with you about improving the writing.
> I think that this means "authorship" will, in the future, be
> democratized... shared among the members of a design team, and also
> taken on by the players in future IF. Even solitary authors will use
> software packages that reflect the experience of multiple designers,
> playtesters, and upgrades driven by user requests.
Sure. I don't think there's any way to avoid this. It's the
time issue, again.
My first recommendation to a new IF author is "change the stock
responses to reflect your world." Mimesis is made or broken when the
the player doesn't follow the script. "Oh no, I just got slapped
from the girl I touched" versus "Oh, I'm just playing a game."
> But what of the countless Inform games that include these gems, which
> are part of the default library?
>
> >take me
> You are always self-possessed.
>
> >examine me
> As good looking as ever.
>
> Is there a particular style to Inform parser responses -- a style that
> influences the experience of writing such games?
>
> Is the Inform parser really more polite and gentlemanly than the
> Infocom parser? Does anybody find some of the Inform responses just a
> bit too... precious? ("Real adventurers do not use such language."
> [nudge-nudge, wink-wink.])
>
Right. They won't fit too many games. I think of them as place-holders.
This is a good place to emphasize beta-testing. Having a diverse
group of testers can find these trouble spots and you can
minimize these barriers.
> After I first
> introduce IF to my students, I have them do a little fill-in-the-blank
> coding exercise, and then the next time they play IF they are
> generally much more appreciative of the work that goes into coding.
>
:) Yes, although this is true with just about any craft.
For example, children baking their first cake learn, "wow, what a lot
of work."
> Scott Adams has predicted that within the next 5 years, there will be
> sophisticated IF story generating tools on the market, designed with a
> much lower learning curve. I think X is right when he suggested, in a
> thread on commercializing IF, that story-generation tools will
> probably play a large role.
>
I still stand by what I said, above. The products will be more
sophisticated, but there will still be the same ratio of Quality.
> While the Usenet community often laments what happened when
> technologically naive AOL users began flooding the public newsgroups
> that had previously "belonged" to the technological elites, the
> Internet really emerged as a social force when it became accessible to
> a wide range of people outside the traditional group of programmers
> and researchers.
>
> If that's the case, then it's probably safe to say that new IF authors
> will probably lean very heavily on default responses. And if that's
> the case, then the default responses, may affect the future of
> interactive narrative as strongly as Crowther's decision to create an
> underground treasure hunt.
And when they do rely heavily, they will produce the same mediocre
stuff. And those who realize it takes a certain "caring" (OK,
enough with the motorcycle maintenance stuff!), will put the extra
efforts in.
>
>
> Dennis G. Jerz
>
Great post, Dennis.
>
> P.S.
>
> As an amusing side-note, I was just re-reading "The Two Towers." In
> the chapter "The Road to Isengard", Gimli the Dwarf and Legolas the
> Elf argue about which are better -- forests or caves. Gimli has a
> wonderful set of speeches about the wonders of exploring caves, about
> how horrible it is to plunder their natural treasures. Considering
> the function and fate of the dwarves in "Adventure," it would almost
> seem the game advocates the Elvish world view.
Perhaps there's one IF tool to bind us all? ;D
Jim
Peter Seebach
>variable named "deadflag". Hypothesis: The name of this variable
>encourages new authors to come up with antagonistic IF scenarios, in
>which the PC must fight to survive. (I don't have my TADS manual with
>me... what's the equivalent way to end a TADS game?)
I disagree - it's just that, if you aren't dead, why shouldn't you be allowed
to keep playing?
-s
--
Copyright 2001, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / se...@plethora.net
$ chmod a+x /bin/laden Please do not feed or harbor the terrorists.
C/Unix wizard, Pro-commerce radical, Spam fighter. Boycott Spamazon!
Consulting, computers, web hosting, and shell access: http://www.plethora.net/
Magnus Olsson
Peter Seebach <se...@plethora.net> wrote:
>In article <792c6202.02010...@posting.google.com>,
>Dennis G Jerz <jer...@uwec.edu> wrote:
>>In Inform, the programmer signals the end of the game by setting a
>>variable named "deadflag". Hypothesis: The name of this variable
>>encourages new authors to come up with antagonistic IF scenarios, in
>>which the PC must fight to survive. (I don't have my TADS manual with
>>me... what's the equivalent way to end a TADS game?)
>
>I disagree - it's just that, if you aren't dead, why shouldn't you be allowed
>to keep playing?
Because the story is over? Or because you've lost the game?
I understand your point, but I think this depends on where the game is
on the simulation/story scale, i.e. how much control the author wants
over the player.
Passenger Pigeon
> In Inform, the programmer signals the end of the game by setting a
> variable named "deadflag". Hypothesis: The name of this variable
> encourages new authors to come up with antagonistic IF scenarios, in
> which the PC must fight to survive. (I don't have my TADS manual with
> me... what's the equivalent way to end a TADS game?)
I tend to agree with Magnus in that the more influential fact is that
the two default ways to finish a game are winning and dying.
> Consider this: If Crowther's hobby was something other than caving,
> would the history of gaming have included so many dungeon crawls?
>
> If you're with me so far, and agree that this one decision that
> Crowther made did affect the development of computer games for a long
> time, then it's probably not too much of a stretch to suggest that
> other decisions Crowther (and others) made in the history of IF, or
> the decisions that the current generation of IF storytellers are
> making now, may have tremendous unforeseen effects.
>
> All the things that IF was good at doing in 1975 (manipulating
> objects, language games), graphic computer games are still good at
> doing. The things that IF was not good at -- the things that Crowther
> didn't implement in his original simulated universe (complex NPCs,
> dynamic plots) -- are still elusive.
Powerful points.
> When I was doing my English Ph.D., I heard quite a bit about
> post-structuralism and the "death of the author," along with praise of
> hypertext as a "writerly" genre -- a text that not only invited reader
> participation, but demanded it. While I'm not sure how productive it
> will be to apply those concepts directly to IF (it certainly wasn't
> productive to apply those concepts to hyperfiction), the goal of a
> game designer is generally to give more control to the player. In IF,
> I think a more realistic goal is improved writing, that encourages the
> player to behave in a way that will unlock the most aesthetically
> satisfying narratives that the author has chosen to code.
Yes.
> I think that this means "authorship" will, in the future, be
> democratized... shared among the members of a design team, and also
> taken on by the players in future IF. Even solitary authors will use
> software packages that reflect the experience of multiple designers,
> playtesters, and upgrades driven by user requests.
How this follows I don't see. Writing careful enough and effective
enough to shunt the player unconsciously in one direction seems least
likely to result from committee. The latter point, though, seems
obvious.
> (I haven't played "Majestic" yet... it sounds promising, but is it
> really interactive? Or just a linear story dished out via faxes,
> e-mails, fake web sites, chatbots, and phone calls?)
The latter, except in that you can interact with other humans, who will
be unhelpful, and could probably be identified by their ability to
understand what you are talking about, should you feel the desire to
find out who's part of the game and who's not.
> There's been much recent discussion on r*if on NPC interaction. Of
> course the parser has gotten much better, but the core problems in IF
> are still the same, and won't be solved by the Holy Grail of FPS and
> MMORPG designers -- an ever more accurate simulation of physics.
> Location, containment, proximity, illumination, etc. are being
> developed with ever-further complexity, permitting players of graphic
> action games to improvise solutions to problems that the designers
> didn't foresee.
Emily Short's simulationist work actually could lead to puzzles with
unintended solutions, and her conversational systems similarly could
pave the way for "neural net" NPC simulations which could display
emergent behavior; that is, sophisticated unprogrammed behavior arising
from simple programmed principles.
The problem is that, in a field tending towards leading with writing and
creating predefined stories, an unintended solution is called a bug.
Simulationist libraries are, obviously, enormously important for
simulations, but fiction is not simulation, it's narrative with cultural
realism. Neural nets and the like perhaps are more hopeful, but at low
levels of development and complexity the same objections apply; an NPC
who thinks for himself is unlikely to be helpful in plot development,
doing pernickety things like not going into the haunted house alone.
> Is there a particular style to Inform parser responses -- a style that
> influences the experience of writing such games?
>
> Is the Inform parser really more polite and gentlemanly than the
> Infocom parser? Does anybody find some of the Inform responses just a
> bit too... precious? ("Real adventurers do not use such language."
> [nudge-nudge, wink-wink.])
I can only speak for my own experiences; in my case, the answer to the
first question is a resounding yes. Even a one-room game, to my eye and
pen, would require rewriting of library messages to eliminate the by
turns flip and quaint "flavour" redolent of Curses (unsurprisingly,
since they share authors). While I certainly appreciate the original
responses, they would be inappropriate, I feel, for my writing.
You may note, though, the mild preponderance of Inform games which
correspond surprisingly in tone to the Inform default messaging; a
surprising amount of what might be termed high farce can be found in the
IF archive. Is this a result of unconsciously following the leader, or
does it perhaps result from the peculiar ability the IF writer has to
trap not merely the characters but the audience itself in ludicrous
situations, even as the protagonist?
> While the Usenet community often laments what happened when
> technologically naive AOL users began flooding the public newsgroups
> that had previously "belonged" to the technological elites, the
> Internet really emerged as a social force when it became accessible to
> a wide range of people outside the traditional group of programmers
> and researchers.
>
> If that's the case, then it's probably safe to say that new IF authors
> will probably lean very heavily on default responses. And if that's
> the case, then the default responses, may affect the future of
> interactive narrative as strongly as Crowther's decision to create an
> underground treasure hunt.
>
>
>
> Dennis G. Jerz
How very interesting.
The existence of default responses allows new authors to begin their
artistic process immediately, without carefully redesigning all their
tools to fit their personal preferences, just as the existence of MIDI
sequencers allows any bored college student to create techno music. A
committed and determined artist in both cases, though, will eventually
reach of their own the desire to redesign and customize their tools to
adapt them to the work they plan or prefer to create. It seems to me,
then, that the future-shapers, and thus the future, will follow their
own particular path regardless of the messaging they are supplied with
to start. It is interesting to contemplate the fate of interactive
nations hanging in the balance with a precious backtalking parser, but
"That's not how life works"; or so I contend, anyway.
--
William Burke, passeng...@email.com if you say so
"Many people include in their signatures contact information, and perhaps
a joke or quotation." -- Simon Fraser Go Slugs!
http://www.passengerpigeon.net (not com, not org)
Andrew Plotkin
> In article <792c6202.02010...@posting.google.com>,
> jer...@uwec.edu (Dennis G Jerz) wrote:
>> In Inform, the programmer signals the end of the game by setting a
>> variable named "deadflag". Hypothesis: The name of this variable
>> encourages new authors to come up with antagonistic IF scenarios, in
>> which the PC must fight to survive. (I don't have my TADS manual with
>> me... what's the equivalent way to end a TADS game?)
> I tend to agree with Magnus in that the more influential fact is that
> the two default ways to finish a game are winning and dying.
But I also think that the design of the Inform library is an *effect*
of this fact, not in any way a cause of it.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
* Make your vote count. Get your vote counted.
OKB -- not okblacke
>variable named "deadflag". Hypothesis: The name of this variable
>encourages new authors to come up with antagonistic IF scenarios, in
>which the PC must fight to survive. (I don't have my TADS manual with
>me... what's the equivalent way to end a TADS game?)
>
>Was the name "deadflag" suitably applied because IF authors had
>already come to the realization that killing the PC was a convenient
>storytelling shortcut?
I'm not sure of the causal relationship between the death/win model of
game-ending and the you-could-die-at-any-moment model of game design, but I
think that they're both very prevalent, and in most cases undeservedly so.
The death/win model could be useful, I think, but I get the impression
that most modern IF employs it unconsciously. I can certainly envision games
built around a binary concept of win or loss, but I have yet to play a game
which made me feel like it used the death/win model purposefully to further
such a concept.
The danger's-lurking style of gameplay is less acceptable to me, in that
it materially disrupts the player's experience of the game. To be sure, a
well-designed game will not have instant-death rooms and the like, but I think
an even more well-designed game will cut down on the death altogether. In many
cases, death seems to applied as the "stick" (as in carrot/stick): "BAD player!
BAD! That's NOT the path to victory!" I find this tedious. The message can
be conveyed just as clearly without burdening the player with the chore of
constant SAVE-ing and RESTORE-ing. In general, I think each game endpoint
should be well-thought-out and important enough to be an endpoint, as opposed
to just a premature exit.
For what it's worth, note that I personally have not written a single game
with exactly 2 end-states, although have written 2 games with 0 end-states, 2
with 1 end-state, and 2 with 3 or more end-states.
>Is there a particular style to Inform parser responses -- a style that
>influences the experience of writing such games?
I think so.
>Is the Inform parser really more polite and gentlemanly than the
>Infocom parser? Does anybody find some of the Inform responses just a
>bit too... precious? ("Real adventurers do not use such language."
>[nudge-nudge, wink-wink.])
You're darn tootin' there is. I'm of the opinion that, for pretty much
every game, the author should review every single library message to see if it
fits the game, and change those that don't. It seems to me that most of the
default Inform responses are appropriate only for an abstract adventure game,
and very few are going to feel right in almost any specific game.
For what it's worth, I did this in all my games except Lomalow. (I even
did it in the Comp0xters, although there it was a blanket decision to leave all
the messages unchanged.). I can guess why it's often not done -- it's a lot of
work. The library messages file for Sittm is 1/4 the size of the source code
for Lomalow in its entirety.
And hey -- this is an interesting topic! Thanks for starting up a good
old-fashioned honest-to-goodness discussion.
--OKB (Bren...@aol.com) -- no relation to okblacke
"Do not follow where the path may lead;
go, instead, where there is no path, and leave a trail."
--Author Unknown
Alexandre Owen Muniz
> Consider this: If Crowther's hobby was something other than caving,
> would the history of gaming have included so many dungeon crawls?
Yes.
First, because everyone who wrote a fantasy game would still have read
Tolkein.
Second, because an underground dungeon or cave is inherently an
excellent solution to the problem of how to keep a player on the map.
When I play a game set in an outdoor setting, I'm always trying to
wander off, and the best that a game can tell me to keep me from doing
so is to say, "Nah, the vegetation is too thick that way," or "Nah, it
doesn't look like there's anything interesting over there." Physical
barriers like cliffs can be sprinkled in, but putting physical
barriers everywhere is highly unrealistic. In a game set underground
there is a very good reason you can go only where the author wants you
to go: all other directions are solid rock! For this same reason
buildings and space stations are common in games.
I do think Crowther may have set a standard in the amount of
naturalism with which caves in games are depicted. (Even if that
standard was mostly ignored.)
I know that you've done a good bit of scholarship on Crowther and
Adventure, and it's certainly appreciated, but perhaps your proximity
to the subject is causing you to overestimate its influence.
**Owen
Adam Thornton
Passenger Pigeon <passeng...@email.com> wrote:
>The existence of default responses allows new authors to begin their
>artistic process immediately, without carefully redesigning all their
>tools to fit their personal preferences, just as the existence of MIDI
>sequencers allows any bored college student to create techno music. A
>committed and determined artist in both cases, though, will eventually
>reach of their own the desire to redesign and customize their tools to
>adapt them to the work they plan or prefer to create. It seems to me,
>then, that the future-shapers, and thus the future, will follow their
>own particular path regardless of the messaging they are supplied with
>to start. It is interesting to contemplate the fate of interactive
>nations hanging in the balance with a precious backtalking parser, but
>"That's not how life works"; or so I contend, anyway.
However, this is precisely why any Adventure-Builder sorta system which
allows for quick-and-easy creation of IF *MUST* have the ability to rip
off the covers and start rebuilding the engine, to mix a metaphor.
Anyone sufficiently "committed and determined" must not find that the
tool puts an implacable roadblock in their way.
Adam
Andrew Plotkin
> jer...@uwec.edu (Dennis G Jerz) wrote in message news:<792c6202.02010...@posting.google.com>...
>> Consider this: If Crowther's hobby was something other than caving,
>> would the history of gaming have included so many dungeon crawls?
> Yes.
> First, because everyone who wrote a fantasy game would still have read
> Tolkein.
> Second, because an underground dungeon or cave is inherently an
> excellent solution to the problem of how to keep a player on the map.
I disagree -- I think a lot of what's "obvious" about it is only long
habit.
Tolkien didn't write any dungeon crawls. The caves in _The Hobbit_ are
one dark orc lair, one dark Gollum lair (with lake), and one dark
dragon lair (with hoard). They're quite vaguely described -- there's
absolutely nothing like Crowther's detailed cave system, with its
dozens of rooms, hundreds of passages, mazes, pits, chasms, ravines,
crawls, etc.
The Mines of Moria are somewhat clearer, and they have a chasm (with
bridge), but it's one piece of a huge story -- whose primary attribute
is that it has *so many* settings. And it's still much smaller, on its
own, than even Zork 1.
You just couldn't do a dungeon crawl without including all the cave
tropes that Crowther used -- you'd run out of stuff.
Now, if Crowther hadn't been a caver, I'm not sure what other hobby
could have led to _Adventure_ being created at all. (I'm presuming
that there would have been such a game, and it would have had the
detail and richness of the Colossal Cave game -- otherwise it would
have fallen into the same obscurity as Hunt the Wumpus, and we would
have no field of IF today.)
Your point about caves restricting movement is true, but that could
have come out quite differently, while still being IF. If the
archetypical IF game were a walk in the wilderness (a la _The Hobbit_,
or most of _Alice in Wonderland_ or _The Wizard of Oz_ for that
matter), we would have paths. Perhaps a genre convention of getting
lost if you stray from the path, or being unwilling to do so, or
quickly stumbling into some annoying (but non-fatal) fate.
> I do think Crowther may have set a standard in the amount of
> naturalism with which caves in games are depicted. (Even if that
> standard was mostly ignored.)
Ignored, or badly imitated.
Eric Mayer
>In Inform, the programmer signals the end of the game by setting a
>variable named "deadflag". Hypothesis: The name of this variable
>encourages new authors to come up with antagonistic IF scenarios, in
>which the PC must fight to survive. (I don't have my TADS manual with
>me... what's the equivalent way to end a TADS game?)
>
>Was the name "deadflag" suitably applied because IF authors had
>already come to the realization that killing the PC was a convenient
>storytelling shortcut? Is it a way to make the game world seem
>responsive enough to recognize and respond to the player's desire to
>make a radical change to the "ideal" narrative, but since the change
>was fatal, it was short-lived, and hence required the programmer to
>invest little time in order to implement it -- at least until such
>time as we an instruct the Holodeck to improvise a story based on
>parameters that we provide.
>
I really think this is over analysis. Avoiding death is
probably the most popular plot of all time, and with good reason
seeing what an important part remaining alive plays in most of our
lives. Now if people who had decided to write games didn't often have
their PCs avoiding death, there would be an anomally worth analyzing.
I might add that this is not only true of what some might call
popular literature either. For example I've just been rereading some
Joseph Conrad and his protagonists and other characters are always
avoiding death or failing to do so. The possibility of death is just a
very compelling element in a story for both authors and readers.
Always has been and always will be, regardless of the medium involved.
Of course, artists also, from time immemorial, have tended to
imitate what's gone before. So if the best early example of a computer
adventure game features lots of ways to die then that naturally
becomes a model of what that sort of game should be for people who are
inspired and want to produce something in the same vein. But that is
hardly a revelation.
The fact that death happens to obviate the necessity to
endlessly expand the game into multiple stories depending on the
player's choices (if that is what is meant) is certainly interesting
and conveniant but, I would think, a happy coicidence given the
popularity of stories about fights to survive.
--
Eric Mayer
Web Site: <http://home.epix.net/~maywrite>
"The map is not the territory." -- Alfred Korzybski
Sean T Barrett
I note that, w.r.t. deadflag, I almost always change the
message from "You have died" to "You have lost", assuming
the game allows losing at all (most of mine do not).
I have suggested before that we should have multiple default
library message sets, since changing all of them is too much
work for very small games (e.g. minicomp games), and it
doesn't seem like it would be too much work, but nobody's
ever followed up on it. I've also had to rewrite them
all several times, enough that I've published a document
designed to help people who are changing ALL library
messages--http://nothings.org/games/if/lm.txt
With respect to cave crawls, I've also suggested in the past
that many of the properties which seem inherent to IF are
really accidental properties derived from history. The choice
of which things we simulate (rooms, containers, doors, locks)
tops my list.
>Yet the animators for Monsters Inc. worked in a complex simulated
>universe that handled such things as the motion of fabric, the effect
>of wind on hair, water absorption, etc. That meant that animators
>didn't have to animate every ripple of fabric or lock of hair.
>Monsters Inc. is, of course, a linear narrative.
Just a general-purpose correction here: computer animators do not
work in simulated universes. What you see on the screen is generally
a set; things are not happening offscreen; often characters are
rendered independently of the background and composited, rather than
being rendered in the combined scene. They had *tools* which would
run simulations of cloth and hair, but these simulations didn't
constitute a universe; the animator might attach the clothes to a
body and animate that body and even have the simulation run automatically
to animate the cloth, but there's generally no sense of a single
coherent universe; e.g. in a typical animation package the cloth and
the hair would not interact correctly.
3d computer GAMES do generally have a simulated universe, of course;
the analogy between 3d games and movie CGI maps reasonably well onto
IF and fiction written with a word processor.
SeanB
Dennis G Jerz
> In rec.arts.int-fiction Alexandre Owen Muniz <mun...@xprt.net> wrote:
> > jer...@uwec.edu (Dennis G Jerz) wrote in message news:<792c6202.02010...@posting.google.com>...
>
> >> Consider this: If Crowther's hobby was something other than caving,
> >> would the history of gaming have included so many dungeon crawls?
>
> > Yes.
>
> > First, because everyone who wrote a fantasy game would still have read
> > Tolkein.
> > Second, because an underground dungeon or cave is inherently an
> > excellent solution to the problem of how to keep a player on the map.
>
> I disagree -- I think a lot of what's "obvious" about it is only long
> habit.
>
> Tolkien didn't write any dungeon crawls. The caves in _The Hobbit_ are
> one dark orc lair, one dark Gollum lair (with lake), and one dark
> dragon lair (with hoard). They're quite vaguely described -- there's
> absolutely nothing like Crowther's detailed cave system, with its
> dozens of rooms, hundreds of passages, mazes, pits, chasms, ravines,
> crawls, etc.
>
> The Mines of Moria are somewhat clearer, and they have a chasm (with
> bridge), but it's one piece of a huge story -- whose primary attribute
> is that it has *so many* settings. And it's still much smaller, on its
> own, than even Zork 1.
If I may play devil's advocate here... consider the last three
chapters of "The Two Towers" ("The Stairs of Cirith Ungol", "Shelob's
Lair," and "The Choices of Master Samwise") include interactions with
inventory management, NPCs, and focuses on a choice of how to continue
the quest. (Spoilers for those who haven't read this book, the middle
of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.)
Sam deiciding to wear the ring, NPC interaction (of a sort -- Sam
learns plot points by overhearing 2 guards talking, etc.), having to
choose between following Frodo's body or continuing with his quest.
Dennis G. Jerz
Andrew Plotkin
> Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> wrote in message news:<a12aq6$43p$1...@news.panix.com>...
>>
>> one dark orc lair, one dark Gollum lair (with lake), and one dark
>> dragon lair (with hoard). They're quite vaguely described -- there's
>> absolutely nothing like Crowther's detailed cave system, with its
>> dozens of rooms, hundreds of passages, mazes, pits, chasms, ravines,
>> crawls, etc.
>>
>> The Mines of Moria are somewhat clearer, and they have a chasm (with
>> bridge), but it's one piece of a huge story -- whose primary attribute
>> is that it has *so many* settings. And it's still much smaller, on its
>> own, than even Zork 1.
> If I may play devil's advocate here... consider the last three
> chapters of "The Two Towers" ("The Stairs of Cirith Ungol", "Shelob's
> Lair," and "The Choices of Master Samwise") include interactions with
> inventory management, NPCs, and focuses on a choice of how to continue
> the quest. (Spoilers for those who haven't read this book, the middle
> of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.)
I agree with your examples, in a rough way, but I don't understand how
it's a reply to what I said, or to your original contention about
Crowther and cave-crawls.
(One could cast the entire LOTR trilogy as a guess-the-verb puzzle. :)
DROP RING. "I don't know how to do that." THROW RING. "What do you
want to throw the ring into?" VOLCANO. "You see no volcano here...")
L. Ross Raszewski
>In article <792c6202.02010...@posting.google.com>,
>Dennis G Jerz <jer...@uwec.edu> wrote:
>>In Inform, the programmer signals the end of the game by setting a
>>variable named "deadflag". Hypothesis: The name of this variable
>>encourages new authors to come up with antagonistic IF scenarios, in
>>which the PC must fight to survive.
>
>I don't think the *name* of the flag is very influential compared
>to the fact that there are two default ways to end an Inform game:
>by winning or dying; the default end-of-game messages are
>"You have won" and "You have died".
detect is death; if you've just reached a stopping point but not won,
there's often no reason you couldn't just go back and reach the wining
conclusion (or, if there is a reason, it may be difficult for the
program to track this)
Adam Thornton
Sean T Barrett <buz...@TheWorld.com> wrote:
>I note that, w.r.t. deadflag, I almost always change the
>message from "You have died" to "You have lost", assuming
>the game allows losing at all (most of mine do not).
Once upon a time and place, the Death Message of Fashion was, uh,
(called, of course, with GOSUB 50000):
50000 FLASH
50010 PRINT "YOU ARE ";
50020 FOR I = 1 TO 100
50030 PRINT "DEAD! ";
50040 NEXT I
50050 PRINT
50060 RETURN
Thank goodness *that* meme didn't take.
Adam
Kevin Forchione
news:a129pe$6g9$1...@news.fsf.net...
> However, this is precisely why any Adventure-Builder sorta system which
> allows for quick-and-easy creation of IF *MUST* have the ability to rip
> off the covers and start rebuilding the engine, to mix a metaphor.
> Anyone sufficiently "committed and determined" must not find that the
> tool puts an implacable roadblock in their way.
Welcome to TADS 3!
--Kevin
GV
[...]
> >I
> You're wearing a pair of gloves.
>
> >LOOK AT MY HANDS
> [That is not an object with which you can currently interact.]
>
> (Player: "Hrm, not implemented. Okay, moving on then.")
>
> I wouldn't take this approach to *every* game [...]
What about LOOK AT SDFGSG?
Dennis G. Jerz
news:a12ka7$hlu$1...@foobar.cs.jhu.edu...
Good point, but why is Inform set up so that death is so easy to detect?
I'm curious... I also wonder about stuff like why do I shut down Windows by
clicking the Start button, and why do I eject my disk on a Mac by dragging
it to the trash can?
What do you mean by "go back"? Do you mean "type undo"? Or, without erasing
the game's memory of the narrative dead-end you took, turn around and try
something else? What if those dead-ends were morally signfiicant choices
(give the Ring back to Gollum and go back to the Shire).
--
Dennis G. Jerz, Ph.D.; (715)836-2431
Dept. of English; U Wisc.-Eau Claire
419 Hibbard, Eau Claire, WI 54702
------------------------------------
Literacy Weblog: www.uwec.edu/jerzdg
Dennis G. Jerz
news:a11ilh$4a5$1...@news.lth.se...
> In article <792c6202.02010...@posting.google.com>,
> Dennis G Jerz <jer...@uwec.edu> wrote:
> >In Inform, the programmer signals the end of the game by setting a
> >variable named "deadflag". Hypothesis: The name of this variable
> >encourages new authors to come up with antagonistic IF scenarios, in
> >which the PC must fight to survive.
>
> I don't think the *name* of the flag is very influential compared
> to the fact that there are two default ways to end an Inform game:
> by winning or dying; the default end-of-game messages are
> "You have won" and "You have died".
>
> But scenarios where the PC must fight to survive are IMHO rather
> rare; death in IF usually seems to occur by walking into traps,
> drinking poisonous potions, falling off cliffs and similar things.
In such cases, then the "fight" isn't against any NPCs, but rather against
the limitations of the story. It's still a fight, in a kind of poetic sense,
isn't it?
--
Dennis G. Jerz, Ph.D.; (715)836-2431
Dept. of English; U Wisc.-Eau Claire
419 Hibbard, Eau Claire, WI 54702
------------------------------------
Literacy Weblog: www.uwec.edu/jerzdg
Dennis G. Jerz
news:a11jtp$8kk$1...@drizzle.com...
> Dennis Jerz wrote:
> > The Crowther/Woods version would occasionally say something like, "I'm
> > not allowed to tell you any more about that, so I will repeat the room
> > description." In a similar situation, the 1994 Z-code version will
> > say something like "That's not a word you need to use in the course of
> > the game."
>
> I believe that that message is reserved for when the player attempts to
> use a word listed in the name field of the current room. Words that don't
> occur in the game's dictionary at all produce the infamous "You can't see
> any such thing."
Right. That's why Adventure repeated the room description when the player
tried to interact with part of the scenery.
[Excellent examples deleted.]
>
> >EAT BANANA
> You can't see any such thing.
>
> To my mind, what has just happened in the story is that the character
> in question has decided, "Hey, a banana sure would hit the spot," looked
> around for one to eat, and sadly concluded, "Darn, it doesn't look like
> there's a banana in this room." Me, I've come to prefer to make it fairly
> explicit to the player that the command is erroneous, bracketing off the
> response as nondiegetic:
>
> >EAT BANANA
> [That is not an object with which you can currently interact.]
Good point. I seem to remember a scene in Hitchhiker's Guide, when Ford
whispers advice to the player, explaining how to look up stuff in the guide.
The narrator of Adventure frequently addresses the player directly ("With
what, your bare hands?"), which handles the problem of how to handle the
interruptions efficiently. Does the need to hide this bit of informatin
(whether the object is "not here" or "not anywyere" (as "For a Change"
phrased it) invoke the necessity to involve the narrator in the action, thus
leading to the gentle mocking of the player's efforts that characterized the
generic Infocom narrator? Few IF authors are going to be as comfortable as
Adam when it comes to making conscious choices regarding innovations, while
being fully conscious of the effect that a particular interface modification
will have on the aestheic impact of the narrative.
I found it rather maddening, for instance, to deal with "say yes" "yes"
"answer yes" and "tell NPC yes". Once I figured it out, I was more
comfortable putting a few yes/no interations in the game world, but when I
first tried it, I used the old technique of (Question? Y|N), which I found
disruptive when it was an NPC asking the question, not the game itself.
I must say that, as a player, I do appreciate knowing which word is the one
causing the problem. The response for "Put X on Y," for example, doesn't
differentiate whether there is no match for X or no match for Y. While
thinking of myself as an author, I didn't want to give too much away.
[...]
Dennis G. Jerz
news:87g05n8...@hammurabi.foo.bar...
> I'm sure I'm going to hit a lot of things that have already been
> discussed on this group, so if that bothers you, read no further.
>
> As a newcomer to IF, I've already considered many of the topics you
> bring up. The angle I'm proceeding from, though, is "Is it worth my
> while to get into this as an author, or am I better off spending the
> time on noninteractive short fiction?" And what that boils down to for
> me is solving this dilemma: "Is IF just a gimmick for taking a
> traditional story, chopping it up, and making it 'fun' to read, with
> the side benefit that the audience is less judgmental about some of
> the standard criteria for other prose (e.g., if the gameplay is
> original, the plot need not be)?"
>
> Re the influence of "deadflag," I think A Change in the Weather
> provides counterexamples here. You need not kill the character to end
> the story suddenly and with finality. On the other hand, once any game
> goes into an unwinnable state, you could argue that everything from
> there on out is a slow loss.
Good point. But Plotkin has shown in many ways that he's completely
comfortable making changes to the default game world, in order to achieve
some effect. Since the learning curve for playing IF is steep enough, I'm
very interested in hearing what aspects of the programming model encourage
or discourage certain kinds of stories/gameplay.
To posit another random thought... if Inform came with a default "diagnose"
verb, then perhaps more gamers would try to expand the RPG elements of Zork.
If Inform came with a spellbook simulation library, then spellcasting games
would be easier.
The original authors of Zork published an IEEE article about what they
called a Fantasy Roleplaying Simulation system... idea was that if there was
only one thing in the inventory tagged as "weapon", and the player typed,
"attack NPC," the game would automatically equip the weapon and use it.
> If not that, then something similar, just because it's easiest to
> implement either a constrained space or a relatively empty open
> space.
Good point. I noticed in the early graphics games that lots of games
continued to be set in dark places, so that the graphics designers were
excused from rendering anything more than 3 or 4 "tiles" away. "Lands of
Lores" had a pleasant variation on this, by setting a few scenes in
mist-shrouded areas, so that distant objects faded to white.
> Dennis> [...] The things that IF was not
> Dennis> good at -- the things that Crowther didn't implement in
> Dennis> his original simulated universe (complex NPCs, dynamic
> Dennis> plots) -- are still elusive.
>
> Isn't that just because they're harder? I mean, as far as I've seen,
> nobody's programmed a really convincing human character, in IF or any
> other branch of programming. And multiple plots mean a multiplication
> of effort. It seems logical in most cases to spend that effort on
> making one plot more satisfying.
Could be. Eliza was a simple program that offered some fairly complex
interaction possibilities, but I suppose in the mid 60s there just wasn't
the critical mass of players who decided they wanted to improve the model.
But IF isn't all about plot.
> Dennis> A company that puts resources into graphic and sound
> Dennis> design can get richer game play that can be generated
> Dennis> dynamically. Plot is finite, and many a fine game has
> Dennis> gotten poor reviews due to low "replayability".
>
> Here's the crux. If good prose is an important part of the IF
> experience, you can't really have "dynamic" plots. You can only have
> multiple plots. Unless you think Eliza generates good prose.
What do you mean, unless I think Eliza generates good prose ? :)
>
> Dennis> Yet the animators for Monsters Inc. worked in a complex
> Dennis> simulated universe that handled such things as the motion
> Dennis> of fabric, the effect of wind on hair, water absorption,
> Dennis> etc....
>
> And they flubbed it just as bad as most big-budget studios that work
> in a nonsimulated universe that handles the motion of fabric,
Good point! I never thought of it quite that way before.
[...]
> That's the other crux :) In a "game" we want control. In a "story," we
> have to be led. In IF, I think we want a convincing illusion of
> control, while still being led. At least, I think that's what I want.
The willing suspension of disbelief. Coleridge. Right on.
[...]
>
> I'm running out of time to get ready for work, so let me just agree
> that the standard responses from Inform are totally
> distracting. Especially when you're just starting a new
> game. Everything is fresh and new, until you try something that
> doesn't work. Suddenly you feel like you're playing Curses again.
>
Hmm. Has anybody put much thought into advice for how to systematically
revise the default responses for tone? I'm sure the DM4 chapter on
non-English would provide all the technical details (which really amounts to
editing a file, though that could cause problems in the event of a library
update). But what about other languages besides Inform? How extensible are
they?
Dennis G. Jerz
news:ff102855.02010...@posting.google.com...
I imagine also that, like Scott Adams, whose games are so textually sparse
that they're hardly ever mentioned in literary studies of IF, despite the
new ground they broke by expanding IF into new genres, the original games
may have had texutal limits to deal with. A significant number of people
were probably also playing games on printer terminals, which probably led to
the "brief" command... but in Inform games, "brief" is the default mode.
Personally, I think that people who would rather get less information should
have to ask to turn off the stuff they don't want. A new player (and a new
author) is probably not going to think of something like setting lookmode.
(Again, I'm being specific to Inform.)
>
> I think we're at the stage where authors are going
> the less ideal narrative route, rather than the death route. Look
> at Cadre, Short and Fischer games, for example. Sure, sometimes their
> non-deaths are the "death" equivalent, but they always fit the situation
> and story.
We do have good models. Absolutely.
[Ref to Costikyan deleted]
> Taking from that, 1) there must be competition on some level, and 2)
> there must be decision making. And it is here, I feel, where there
> are shortcut temptations.
>
> The danger of #1, above, is "OK, it's you the player versus me
> the author." In #2, "OK, make a wrong decision and die." These
> satisfy the GAME conditions, but they (may) seriously neglect the
> STORY.
Even if good authors manage to avoid obviously awkward compomises to handle
the above ploarities, those authors are going to be affected by the
conditions that shaped their game worlds. For instance, the PC in Galatea
comments on the title character's limited conversation ability. That's part
of the storyline.
> This again returns to the "NEW" author discussion. There's just
> so much an IF author has to do. To a new author, way too much.
> Integrating competition is complex. Incorporating
> subtle decision-making is complex. Don't forget original storylines
> and depth of world, too. Oh, and cool NPCs, please.
>
> Thus, even if DEADFLAG were not the syntax, authors (especially
> new ones) would still take this route. That's why I feel that
> the "deadflag effect" is only a seed, not a full encouragement.
> The seed will grow, but it's up to the author to shape its
> future. There can and should be pruning.
I just sort of picked deadflag as a starting point, but I'm sure there are
others. Which ones do you see?
[...]
True, but you'd also need to duplicate the way the characters do a
double-take, or the timing of the physical comedy.
[...]
> > Gamers
> > often responded with hostility to that scripted plot point, since
> > elsewhere in the game it was possible for stealthy characters to
> > disable alarms.
> >
>
> Again, this is where human creativity and TIME come in to play
> With both of those elements, that alarm situation could have been
> alleviated. There's always the subjective factor, though. There's
> going to be SOMEONE that doesn't like it, however you do it.
True.
[...]
Thanks! It may take me a while to reply to everyone's posts... but I'll
certainly take to heart all the responses in this thread.
Dennis G. Jerz
> In article <3c348979$0$79557$3c09...@news.plethora.net>,
> Peter Seebach <se...@plethora.net> wrote:
> >In article <792c6202.02010...@posting.google.com>,
> >Dennis G Jerz <jer...@uwec.edu> wrote:
> >>In Inform, the programmer signals the end of the game by setting a
> >I disagree - it's just that, if you aren't dead, why shouldn't you be
allowed
> >to keep playing?
>
> Because the story is over? Or because you've lost the game?
>
> I understand your point, but I think this depends on where the game is
> on the simulation/story scale, i.e. how much control the author wants
> over the player.
>
Bingo. After I gave the last red page to the guy in the red book, and then
restored and gave the last blue page to the guy in the blue book, Atrus
suggested that I could wander around in the Myst world if I wanted to. Why?
The story was over.
But in Daggerfall, I think I only tried following the over arching plot for
a few game-months, and then veered off on my own quest. Very different
modes of gaming.
In something like Photopia, where the game environment is secondary to the
story, the environment changes radically in order to account for plot
developments. As Mr. Wu says in "Herbie The Love Bug," "When story comes
to last page, close the book."
(Unless you've got the Star Trek computer to synthesize stories for you.)
DGJ
Dennis G. Jerz
news:passengerpigeon-F5...@news.la.sbcglobal.net...
> In article <792c6202.02010...@posting.google.com>,
> jer...@uwec.edu (Dennis G Jerz) wrote:
>
> > In Inform, the programmer signals the end of the game by setting a
> > variable named "deadflag". Hypothesis: The name of this variable
> > encourages new authors to come up with antagonistic IF scenarios, in
> > which the PC must fight to survive. (I don't have my TADS manual with
> > me... what's the equivalent way to end a TADS game?)
>
> I tend to agree with Magnus in that the more influential fact is that
> the two default ways to finish a game are winning and dying.
>
OK... I suppose my point would still be the same if the flag were
"liveflag", but what if it were "story_done" or "plot_advancing"? Would
that influence the way people planned and created IF?
[...]
> > I think that this means "authorship" will, in the future, be
> > democratized... shared among the members of a design team, and also
> > taken on by the players in future IF. Even solitary authors will use
> > software packages that reflect the experience of multiple designers,
> > playtesters, and upgrades driven by user requests.
>
> How this follows I don't see. Writing careful enough and effective
> enough to shunt the player unconsciously in one direction seems least
> likely to result from committee. The latter point, though, seems
> obvious.
A committe might be more open to extensive beta-testing... if nobody "owns"
a story, perhaps a committee would be more tuned in to what the beta-testers
want to do, and giving it to them. That's exactly the reason why it seems
that the real innovation in interactive storytelling is happening with the
dedicated amateurs, rather than the deep-pocketed corporations.
[...]
> Emily Short's simulationist work actually could lead to puzzles with
> unintended solutions, and her conversational systems similarly could
> pave the way for "neural net" NPC simulations which could display
> emergent behavior; that is, sophisticated unprogrammed behavior arising
> from simple programmed principles.
>
> The problem is that, in a field tending towards leading with writing and
> creating predefined stories, an unintended solution is called a bug.
Not quite... it's a bug if there's no way to adjust the storyline to account
for that unintended solution. Careful plotting and abstracted plot elements
would help.
> Simulationist libraries are, obviously, enormously important for
> simulations, but fiction is not simulation, it's narrative with cultural
> realism.
True. But IF is neither simulation nor fiction. What's right for IF, as we
know it now, and as we imagine it could be in the future?
> Neural nets and the like perhaps are more hopeful, but at low
> levels of development and complexity the same objections apply; an NPC
> who thinks for himself is unlikely to be helpful in plot development,
> doing pernickety things like not going into the haunted house alone.
True, but it would open up new realms of interactive possibilities. Think
of a RPG-style campaign game, where, as your exploits grow, stories of your
deeds start getting told in taverns and around campfires, and your repuation
spreads thus. In such a game, interacting with story-spinning NPCs might be
quite rewarding. (Think of it... if AI advances to the point where it's
possible for the computer to improvise story elements, why shouldnt NPCs
have access to the same abilities?)
[...]
>
> You may note, though, the mild preponderance of Inform games which
> correspond surprisingly in tone to the Inform default messaging; a
> surprising amount of what might be termed high farce can be found in the
> IF archive. Is this a result of unconsciously following the leader, or
> does it perhaps result from the peculiar ability the IF writer has to
> trap not merely the characters but the audience itself in ludicrous
> situations, even as the protagonist?
Yup, that's pretty much my point. I suppose also, it's easier to create a
goofy world, like the NPCs of Starship Titanic, which only rarely
"understand" you, but frequently respond with in-character, humorous
responses.
[...]
> The existence of default responses allows new authors to begin their
> artistic process immediately, without carefully redesigning all their
> tools to fit their personal preferences, just as the existence of MIDI
> sequencers allows any bored college student to create techno music.
Good analogy. Karaoke IF, anyone?
[...]
> It is interesting to contemplate the fate of interactive
> nations hanging in the balance with a precious backtalking parser, but
> "That's not how life works"; or so I contend, anyway.
Interactive nations? I wasn't thinking about "I Have No Mouth and I Must
Scream" here. :)
>
> --
> William Burke, passeng...@email.com if you say so
> "Many people include in their signatures contact information, and perhaps
> a joke or quotation." -- Simon Fraser Go Slugs!
> http://www.passengerpigeon.net (not com, not org)
--
Dennis G. Jerz
news:oU4Z7.2039$MK.21326@rwcrnsc54...
Kevin, or someone, please expand on this! I have some idea of what you
mean, but I'd like to see someone else's take on TADS, since mine will be
too colored by the first IF language I learned..
Dennis G. Jerz
> I agree with your examples, in a rough way, but I don't understand how
> it's a reply to what I said, or to your original contention about
> Crowther and cave-crawls.
>
Er... sorry for being vague. I meant that those chapters of LOTR come even
closer to being a dungeon crawl. I also happened to have just read those 3
chapters this weekend.
Dennis G. Jerz
news:3c34b0e9...@newsserver.epix.net...
[Overanalysis deleted]
> I really think this is over analysis.
Well, it generated some good discussion, which I think makes it worthwhile.
> Avoiding death is
> probably the most popular plot of all time, and with good reason
> seeing what an important part remaining alive plays in most of our
> lives.
I'm reminded of the Brooke Shields quote: "If smoking kills you,then you've
lost a very important part of your life." :)
Sure, survival plays an important part in adventure stories, and war epics
and the like... but I don't think that the Brontes or Jane Austen felt that
day-to-day survival was all that central to the stories they were writing
about.
> Now if people who had decided to write games didn't often have
> their PCs avoiding death, there would be an anomally worth analyzing.
> I might add that this is not only true of what some might call
> popular literature either. For example I've just been rereading some
> Joseph Conrad and his protagonists and other characters are always
> avoiding death or failing to do so. The possibility of death is just a
> very compelling element in a story for both authors and readers.
> Always has been and always will be, regardless of the medium involved.
Of course, but see Bruntiere's definitions of literary conflict:
a.. the individual vs. fatality (that is, a fight for survival)
b.. the individual vs. social law (justice, morality, etc.)
c.. the individual vs. another person
d.. the individual vs. himself
e.. the individual vs. "the ambitions, the interests, the prejudices, the
folly, the malevolence of those who surround him"
http://www.uwec.edu/jerzdg/ORR/handouts/Style/crisis-vs-conflict.htm
>
> Of course, artists also, from time immemorial, have tended to
> imitate what's gone before. So if the best early example of a computer
> adventure game features lots of ways to die then that naturally
> becomes a model of what that sort of game should be for people who are
> inspired and want to produce something in the same vein. But that is
> hardly a revelation.
True, but by what definition is it "best"? My point is that early
computer games featured survival and exploration, which just happened to be
important themes in Crowther's gaming and caving life. I'm not so much
announcing the "deadflag" hypothesis for its own sake, but rather hoping to
see what people think of it.
Thanks, Eric.
Dennis G. Jerz
news:20020103131521...@mb-ba.aol.com...
> And hey -- this is an interesting topic! Thanks for starting up a
good
> old-fashioned honest-to-goodness discussion.
It's the least I could do, after all I've gained from these newsgroups.
--
Dennis G. Jerz
news:GpDrA...@world.std.com...
> I have suggested before that we should have multiple default
> library message sets, since changing all of them is too much
> work for very small games (e.g. minicomp games), and it
> doesn't seem like it would be too much work, but nobody's
> ever followed up on it. I've also had to rewrite them
> all several times, enough that I've published a document
> designed to help people who are changing ALL library
> messages--http://nothings.org/games/if/lm.txt
Ah! I had thought there was such a document out there. Will check it out
tomorrow.
--
Dennis G. Jerz, Ph.D.; (715)836-2431
Dept. of English; U Wisc.-Eau Claire
419 Hibbard, Eau Claire, WI 54702
------------------------------------
Literacy Weblog: www.uwec.edu/jerzdg
>
L. Ross Raszewski
>"L. Ross Raszewski" <lrasz...@loyola.edu> wrote in message
>news:a12ka7$hlu$1...@foobar.cs.jhu.edu...
>> On 3 Jan 2002 12:26:25 GMT, Magnus Olsson <m...@df.lth.se> wrote:
>> >I don't think the *name* of the flag is very influential compared
>> >to the fact that there are two default ways to end an Inform game:
>> >by winning or dying; the default end-of-game messages are
>> >"You have won" and "You have died".
>>
>> Which is, in turn, because, in general, the easiest fail-state to
>> detect is death; if you've just reached a stopping point but not won,
>> there's often no reason you couldn't just go back and reach the wining
>> conclusion (or, if there is a reason, it may be difficult for the
>> program to track this)
>
>Good point, but why is Inform set up so that death is so easy to detect?
>I'm curious... I also wonder about stuff like why do I shut down Windows by
>clicking the Start button, and why do I eject my disk on a Mac by dragging
>it to the trash can?
Because death is a simple binary state. YOu are either dead or you
aren't. It is probably impossible to determine with total accuracy
"you can't win from here", in the general case. It's not a matter of
"Death is the default way to end the game in a nonwin-condition", but
"As long as the PC isn't dead, there might be a chance for him to pull
this off".
>
>What do you mean by "go back"? Do you mean "type undo"? Or, without erasing
>the game's memory of the narrative dead-end you took, turn around and try
>something else? What if those dead-ends were morally signfiicant choices
>(give the Ring back to Gollum and go back to the Shire).
I mean, backtrack and try something else. Suppose the player has missed
a criticial event. Perhaps this means the game is over, but there's
no generic way to know this; the author may know that in *this
particular instance*, the game is now unwinnable, and the player has
lost, but it's possible that there might be another way around it. If
the player has died, however, the system can be sure (barring
reincarnation) that the player really has lost the game.
Kevin Forchione
news:a12mt5$mbk$1...@wiscnews.wiscnet.net...
> "Magnus Olsson" <m...@df.lth.se> wrote in message
> news:a11ilh$4a5$1...@news.lth.se...
> > In article <792c6202.02010...@posting.google.com>,
> > Dennis G Jerz <jer...@uwec.edu> wrote:
> > >In Inform, the programmer signals the end of the game by setting a
> > >variable named "deadflag". Hypothesis: The name of this variable
> > >encourages new authors to come up with antagonistic IF scenarios, in
> > >which the PC must fight to survive.
> >
> > I don't think the *name* of the flag is very influential compared
> > to the fact that there are two default ways to end an Inform game:
> > by winning or dying; the default end-of-game messages are
> > "You have won" and "You have died".
> >
> > But scenarios where the PC must fight to survive are IMHO rather
> > rare; death in IF usually seems to occur by walking into traps,
> > drinking poisonous potions, falling off cliffs and similar things.
>
> In such cases, then the "fight" isn't against any NPCs, but rather against
> the limitations of the story. It's still a fight, in a kind of poetic
sense,
> isn't it?
Conflict is probably more conotatively accurate than fight.
However, it seems more appropriate to me to view "death" as another "reward"
in the process of solving a puzzle. The death of an actor may be a narrative
device, but the death of the PC is generally not viewed that way, but in
conjunction with failing to accomplish a given task.
--Kevin
Peter Seebach
Dennis G. Jerz <Jer...@uwec.edu> wrote:
>Good point, but why is Inform set up so that death is so easy to detect?
Because "the game has ended" is a very useful state to have the game
intrinsically aware of.
-s
--
Copyright 2001, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / se...@plethora.net
$ chmod a+x /bin/laden Please do not feed or harbor the terrorists.
C/Unix wizard, Pro-commerce radical, Spam fighter. Boycott Spamazon!
Consulting, computers, web hosting, and shell access: http://www.plethora.net/
OKB -- not okblacke
>It's not a matter of
>"Death is the default way to end the game in a nonwin-condition", but
>"As long as the PC isn't dead, there might be a chance for him to pull
>this off".
Although not necessarily mandating death, this still assumes a win/lose
situation. Personally, I don't think there's a lot of difference between "You
have died" and "You have lost" and "You have been dumped" and "You have been
fired" (all meaning "bad ending"), any more than between "You have been
decapitated" and "You have been disemboweled" and "You have been strangled".
Also, I don't get the impression that death is intended to be a "default
way to end the game in a nonwin-condition". I haven't played much IF where
death is used to "clue the player in" that they can't win. (Admittedly, I
haven't played a whole lot of IF.) More often it simply indicates a slight
misstep, a minor straying from the path to victory. Indeed, under most
nonwin-conditions, the game continues.
>>What do you mean by "go back"? Do you mean "type undo"? Or, without erasing
>>the game's memory of the narrative dead-end you took, turn around and try
>>something else? What if those dead-ends were morally signfiicant choices
>>(give the Ring back to Gollum and go back to the Shire).
>
>I mean, backtrack and try something else.
I find this application of death distasteful. (I can't wait for that to be
quoted out of context.) The use of death as a stimulus designed to make the
player restore or undo annoys me. I don't like saving and restoring. I like
playing the game.
--OKB (Bren...@aol.com) -- no relation to okblacke
"Do not follow where the path may lead;
go, instead, where there is no path, and leave a trail."
--Author Unknown
OKB -- not okblacke
>revise the default responses for tone?
For tone? I think that's a matter of the writing, not of any programming
tricks. In both an apple from nowhere and Stick it to the man, I rewrote every
single library message except the non-sentence ones (like "(first taking the
onion)") and some of the meta ones. The coding was simple: a big
LibraryMessages before routine with a bunch of switch (lm_n) blocks. The tough
part was coming up with ways to say the same thing but have it sound different.
Adam Cadre
That is most definitely not an object with which you can currently
interact. In that it doesn't exist and all. But the reason I like
this phrasing is that it doesn't *specify* that the object doesn't
exist, and so is equally applicable to unimplemented scenery. So
if the player tries >TOUCH MY UVULA, you're basically saying, okay,
without getting into the question of whether you've got one or not,
you're not allowed to play with it, so try something else. And
similarly, without getting into the question of whether there's
a sdfgsg around or not, there's not one that you're allowed to
do anything with, and that's all you really need to know.
-----
Adam Cadre, Brooklyn, NY
http://adamcadre.ac
Watch out, Amazon! http://adamcadre.ac/content/books-for-sale.html
Magnus Olsson
>news:a12ka7$hlu$1...@foobar.cs.jhu.edu...
>> detect is death; if you've just reached a stopping point but not won,
>> there's often no reason you couldn't just go back and reach the wining
>> conclusion (or, if there is a reason, it may be difficult for the
>> program to track this)
>
>Good point, but why is Inform set up so that death is so easy to detect?
With all respect, Dennis, but I think you're putting the cart before
the horse here.
The purpose of deadflag in Inform isn't really to detect death, but
to detect the end of the game; the logic is that if deadflag is
different from zero at the end of the game, then the game has ended,
and the value of deadflag indicates which end-of-game message should
be displayed.
Now, Graham chose to implement only two end-of-game messages,
corresponding to a win or a PC death. But I'd say that there's nothing
in the design of Inform to make "death easy to detect". What there is
is an assumption that the most common way of losing the game would be
death.
Why? I suppose you'd have to ask Graham, but the convention was surely
firmly entrenched long before Inform and goes all the way back to
ADVENT. I suppose one way of reasoning would be that only the PC's dying
would put a definite end to the game; even if the player has put the game
into a completely unwinnable state, as long as the PC is alive the game
could just as well allow him to thrash about for a while.
>What if those dead-ends were morally signfiicant choices
>(give the Ring back to Gollum and go back to the Shire).
I think this is a good example: in a (hypothetical) LOTR game, where
you play Frodo, should giving the ring to Gollum, or Boromir, or
Saruman for that matter, be implemented, and if it is, should doing
so end the game (since Frodo will probably be able to do nothing of
consequence after that)?
But it must be noted that Inform does not prohibit or even discourage
this; it just requires the game author to read the DM a little to find
out how to replace the "You have died" message with, say, "The fate of
the world is out of your hands."
But you have a point, albeit a rather weak one. I suppose that if I
had been able to go back in time and influence Graham's design
decision, I would have asked him to have at least three default
end-of-game messages, viz. "You have won"/"You have died"/"You have
lost"; or perhaps just one: "Game over".
Richard Bos
> Adam Cadre
Well, from a computer's limited world-knowledge, there's very little
difference between a sdfgsg and an earlobe.
Richard
Richard Bos
> jer...@uwec.edu (Dennis G Jerz) wrote in message news:<792c6202.02010...@posting.google.com>...
>
> > Consider this: If Crowther's hobby was something other than caving,
> > would the history of gaming have included so many dungeon crawls?
>
> Yes.
>
> First, because everyone who wrote a fantasy game would still have read
> Tolkein.
Nitpick: nobody reads Tolkein. A lot of people have read Tolkien,
though, and enjoyed his books thoroughly.
Yes, it's just a typo, but it bugs me that so many people can't even
spell _his_ name correctly.
Richard
Magnus Olsson
>In article <a12n6k$mc2$1...@wiscnews.wiscnet.net>,
>Dennis G. Jerz <Jer...@uwec.edu> wrote:
>>"L. Ross Raszewski" <lrasz...@loyola.edu> wrote in message
>>news:a12ka7$hlu$1...@foobar.cs.jhu.edu...
>>> Which is, in turn, because, in general, the easiest fail-state to
>>> detect is death; if you've just reached a stopping point but not won,
>>> there's often no reason you couldn't just go back and reach the wining
>>> conclusion (or, if there is a reason, it may be difficult for the
>>> program to track this)
>>
>>Good point, but why is Inform set up so that death is so easy to detect?
>
>With all respect, Dennis, but I think you're putting the cart before
>the horse here.
>
>The purpose of deadflag in Inform isn't really to detect death, but
>to detect the end of the game;
(snip)
Hmm. It seems I got my logic confused a bit here; the rest of my
post discusses different things from what I'm responding to.
To reply directly to what Ross and Dennis wrote, rather than to
my confused impression fo fwhat they were discussing :-), it's
not Inform that's set up to easily detect death; it's just that
the death of the PC is normally a certain show-stopper.
Of course, there are exceptions; interestingly enough, both ADVENT
and Zork I offer resurrection of dead PC's, so PC death does not
end the game directly. In the case of ADVENT, I think this may have
something to do with the fact that mainframe version of the game
enforces a time delay before you can restart a game, so offering the
player a chance to continue after the death of the PC would be a
nice gesture towards the player.
Magnus Olsson
>news:a11ilh$4a5$1...@news.lth.se...
>> In article <792c6202.02010...@posting.google.com>,
>> Dennis G Jerz <jer...@uwec.edu> wrote:
>> >In Inform, the programmer signals the end of the game by setting a
>> >variable named "deadflag". Hypothesis: The name of this variable
>> >encourages new authors to come up with antagonistic IF scenarios, in
>> >which the PC must fight to survive.
>>
>> I don't think the *name* of the flag is very influential compared
>> to the fact that there are two default ways to end an Inform game:
>> by winning or dying; the default end-of-game messages are
>> "You have won" and "You have died".
>>
>> But scenarios where the PC must fight to survive are IMHO rather
>> rare; death in IF usually seems to occur by walking into traps,
>> drinking poisonous potions, falling off cliffs and similar things.
>
>In such cases, then the "fight" isn't against any NPCs, but rather against
>the limitations of the story. It's still a fight, in a kind of poetic sense,
>isn't it?
Yes; but once we're over on the metaphorical plane, the actual death
of the PC isn't as important anymore - it's more a matter of winning
or losing.
And here I think you have a point: Inform makes an assumption that
a piece of IF is a game which can be won or lost, and where the
player by default is assigned a score. Come to think of it, I think
the notion of score is at least as influential as the notion of death
in making authors think in game-like terms.
The gme aspects of IF have been criticized before on this newsgroup,
but then the discussion has mostly been on the micro-level, regarding
puzzles and so on. But I think it's more important what's going on on
the macro-level: is the entire work seen as a game that can be won
or lost, or as a work of art to be experienced?
Of course, there are many examples of IF that are works of art at the
same time as having the game nature. But I think the idea that a piece
of IF should have a score and a winning ending may have made authors
more reluctant to write, say, the IF Art Show type of works.
Magnus Olsson
>"liveflag", but what if it were "story_done" or "plot_advancing"? Would
>that influence the way people planned and created IF?
In this case I don't think so; the actual name of the variable carries
very little persuasive power compared to the actual default messages.
However, I've seen cases where the name of a variable or a system
command was very suggestive of what it did, in a way that didn't
really map to reality. For example, suppose that, rather than writing
deadflag = 1;
you had to write
KillPlayer(1);
to end the game. Would that give authors the idea that the only way
to end the game would be to kill the PC? Perhaps, though I doubt it.
Here's how my brain works in cases like this: I'm influenced by the
*behaviour* of the Library - if it had been very hard to change the
"You have died" message, I might be more inclined to include death in
my games.
And it is, of course, essential that the Library *allow* default
behaviours to be changed, or otherwise we might have situations like
in GAGS (IIRC) where all NPC's would develop unnaturally large teeth
and bite you, or, less drastically, games where all doors *must* have
a lock and a key.
I'm also influenced by the way the DM, and other authors, discuss
things. For example, what the Inform library calls doors really don't
have ot be doors, but they can be any kind of obstacle that have to be
traversed to move from one location to another (the bridge in "Troll
Bridge" is a door from a programming point of view). If the DM talked
exclusively about (Inform) doors as (real-world) doors, this would
perhaps limit my games (the DM doesn't, of course).
But the actual names of variables and so on matter very little,
because once I get to the stage of actually doing something to
deadflag, I will have read about it in the DM and would know that it
is possible to change the default behaviour of the game.
To summarize, terminology matters a lot, but documentation overrides
terminology.
What matters much, much more are genre conventions, such as "every game
I've played had a score and endings where the PC died".
Magnus Olsson
Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> wrote:
>In rec.arts.int-fiction Alexandre Owen Muniz <mun...@xprt.net> wrote:
>> jer...@uwec.edu (Dennis G Jerz) wrote in message
>news:<792c6202.02010...@posting.google.com>...
>
>>> Consider this: If Crowther's hobby was something other than caving,
>>> would the history of gaming have included so many dungeon crawls?
>
>> Yes.
>
>> First, because everyone who wrote a fantasy game would still have read
>> Tolkein.
>> excellent solution to the problem of how to keep a player on the map.
>
>I disagree -- I think a lot of what's "obvious" about it is only long
>habit.
>
>Tolkien didn't write any dungeon crawls. The caves in _The Hobbit_ are
>one dark orc lair, one dark Gollum lair (with lake), and one dark
>dragon lair (with hoard). They're quite vaguely described -- there's
>absolutely nothing like Crowther's detailed cave system, with its
>dozens of rooms, hundreds of passages, mazes, pits, chasms, ravines,
>crawls, etc.
(snip discussion of other caves in Tolkien).
I don't think the dungeon crawls entered IF directly from Tolkien,
or any other literary source, but rather from gaming, most notably
D&D. Of course, ADVENT was an important precedent here, but if dungeon
crawls hadn't been popular elsewhere we might have seen a few dungeon
crawl works of IF (ADVENT, Zork, a few more) and then authors would
have turned to other genres.
This of course leads to the question where the dungeon crawls in
D&D and other games came from.
D&D was inspired by Tolkien (most notably in the concepts of races)
and Jack Vance (magic, of which Tolkien has very little) but perhaps
mostly by Fritz Leiber (the notion of adventuring party, the thief
class). None of these authors have written very much about dungeon
crawls.
Perhaps it's just that dungeon crawls make good game settings, and
that a number of successful games used it at the time IF took off.
Daryl McCullough
>Me, I've come to prefer to make it fairly
>explicit to the player that the command is erroneous, bracketing off the
>response as nondiegetic:
>
>>EAT BANANA
>[That is not an object with which you can currently interact.]
I looked up the word "diegetic" with the online dictionary
"dictionary.com". It didn't give me a definition, but it did
helpfully suggest the 10 most popular websites.
For those not up on film terminology (it seems to be mostly
used in discussing films, although it can apply to books and
IF as well)
diegetic sound : sound in a movie that comes from (or is meant to
come from) a source internal to the story on screen. So the sounds
of people talking, the sounds of gunfire, etc. are all diegetic
sounds (from the Greek word "diegesis" meaning story, or something
like that).
non-diegetic sound : sound in a movie that comes from a source
external to the story. A voice-over narrator, background music,
etc.
>>I
>You're wearing a pair of gloves.
>
>>LOOK AT MY HANDS
>[That is not an object with which you can currently interact.]
One problem with this is response is that it may be misleading
in a case where the object *can* be interacted with, but through
a different synonym. Of course, the author should try to anticipate
all synonyms that the player would be likely to try, but the players
will always find another one.
--
Daryl McCullough
CoGenTex, Inc.
Ithaca, NY
Daryl McCullough
>Good point, but why is Inform set up so that death is so easy to detect?
I don't think it is so much that it is easy to detect, but that
it requires special treatment (restarting the game).
Matthew Russotto
Daryl McCullough <da...@cogentex.com> wrote:
>
>For those not up on film terminology (it seems to be mostly
>used in discussing films, although it can apply to books and
>IF as well)
>
> diegetic sound : sound in a movie that comes from (or is meant to
> come from) a source internal to the story on screen. So the sounds
> of people talking, the sounds of gunfire, etc. are all diegetic
> sounds (from the Greek word "diegesis" meaning story, or something
> like that).
>
> non-diegetic sound : sound in a movie that comes from a source
> external to the story. A voice-over narrator, background music,
> etc.
Though some movies will screw with you by having background music that
is later revealed to be audible to the characters.
--
Matthew T. Russotto mrus...@speakeasy.net
=====
Dmitry is free, but the DMCA survives. DMCA delenda est!
"Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in pursuit
of justice is no virtue."
Peter Seebach
Matthew Russotto <russ...@wanda.pond.com> wrote:
>Though some movies will screw with you by having background music that
>is later revealed to be audible to the characters.
I believe there was a very good example of this in _So I Married an Ax
Murderer_.
Peter Seebach
>Of course, there are many examples of IF that are works of art at the
>same time as having the game nature. But I think the idea that a piece
>of IF should have a score and a winning ending may have made authors
>more reluctant to write, say, the IF Art Show type of works.
I dunno about that. I do know that it took me a while to realize that I
really wanted to have a separate score for "interesting tidbits" from the
one for "winning the game" in my game, although I haven't implemented it yet.
David Thornley
>In article <a12aq6$43p$1...@news.panix.com>,
>Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> wrote:
>>In rec.arts.int-fiction Alexandre Owen Muniz <mun...@xprt.net> wrote:
>>> jer...@uwec.edu (Dennis G Jerz) wrote in message
>>news:<792c6202.02010...@posting.google.com>...
>>
>>>> Consider this: If Crowther's hobby was something other than caving,
>>>> would the history of gaming have included so many dungeon crawls?
>>
>>> Yes.
>>
>>> First, because everyone who wrote a fantasy game would still have read
>>> Tolkein.
Not relevant, as pointed out elsewhere.
>>> Second, because an underground dungeon or cave is inherently an
>>> excellent solution to the problem of how to keep a player on the map.
>>
>>I disagree -- I think a lot of what's "obvious" about it is only long
>>habit.
>>
Yes, but the habit is from D&D. People have talked about how a dungeon
crawl is good at limiting players, but this was not lost on early
D&D players.
>This of course leads to the question where the dungeon crawls in
>D&D and other games came from.
>
I should ask one of my friends, who was part of the Greyhawk circle
(the second D&D campaign - Blackmoor was the first). He may have
some memories.
>D&D was inspired by Tolkien (most notably in the concepts of races)
>and Jack Vance (magic, of which Tolkien has very little) but perhaps
>mostly by Fritz Leiber (the notion of adventuring party, the thief
>class). None of these authors have written very much about dungeon
>crawls.
>
Correct.
>Perhaps it's just that dungeon crawls make good game settings, and
>that a number of successful games used it at the time IF took off.
>
To nitpick, they make easy game settings. It's easy to write up
a dungeon and write monsters and treasures in it, and back then we
thought it was a lot of fun. Heck, I still think so, although I
find that it has been computerized as roguelike games. Putting
some sort of plot in these games is hard, and the players are
likely to break out of it anyway.
--
David H. Thornley | If you want my opinion, ask.
da...@thornley.net | If you don't, flee.
http://www.thornley.net/~thornley/david/ | O-
Kevin Forchione
news:3c356cc0....@news.tiscali.nl...
You think that's annoying, most people can't pronounce mine correctly.
--Kevin
L. Ross Raszewski
>But you have a point, albeit a rather weak one. I suppose that if I
>had been able to go back in time and influence Graham's design
>decision, I would have asked him to have at least three default
>end-of-game messages, viz. "You have won"/"You have died"/"You have
>lost"; or perhaps just one: "Game over".
Note: AGT has all of these, or at least three. I think.
However, if the standard library provided only a "Game Over" message,
I think *that* would have influenced game design a lot more than "the
flag that signals end-of-game is caled "deadflag"".
Dennis G. Jerz
news:a14gm...@drn.newsguy.com...
> Dennis says...
>
> >Good point, but why is Inform set up so that death is so easy to detect?
>
> I don't think it is so much that it is easy to detect, but that
> it requires special treatment (restarting the game).
>
But... does this business of asking the author to deal with "deadflag" bring
the concept of "death" to the forefront of a beginning author's mind?
--
Dennis G. Jerz, Ph.D.; (715)836-2431
Dept. of English; U Wisc.-Eau Claire
419 Hibbard, Eau Claire, WI 54702
------------------------------------
Literacy Weblog: www.uwec.edu/jerzdg
> --
Dennis G. Jerz
OK, this is starting to cast some light onto things... I'd forgotten about
the time-delay thing. My approach to any interactive story is very
different if there are limitations on my save-and-restore ability. In
Advent & Zork there's a tension between "death" and "game over", and Magnus
has presented one possible historical reason for it.
I'm not so much arguing that there is anything "wrong" with the default
responses that Graham offered... but I am finding it fruitful to examine
what possible effect this choice has on stories using Inform. (I'm thinking
"chicken and egg" rather than "horse before the cart," but at least I'm
pleased to know that my horse isn't dead and being beaten on... the horse
and cart are presumably both going somewhere.)
--
Dennis G. Jerz, Ph.D.; (715)836-2431
Dept. of English; U Wisc.-Eau Claire
419 Hibbard, Eau Claire, WI 54702
------------------------------------
Literacy Weblog: www.uwec.edu/jerzdg
Magnus Olsson
Kevin Forchione <Ke...@lysseus.com> wrote:
>You think that's annoying, most people can't pronounce mine correctly.
So how do you pronounce it? "Four-key-oh-neh"?
Dennis G. Jerz
Yes, that's what I think I was getting at. The world of IF is finite and
knowable, in a kind of comfy, deterministic, late-19th-century "Evertyhing
that can be invented has been invented" kind of way.
> player by default is assigned a score. Come to think of it, I think
> the notion of score is at least as influential as the notion of death
> in making authors think in game-like terms.
Good point. I confess I didn't pay much attention to "score" in my first
release of Fine-Tuned, possibly because I don't pay much attention to it
when I play IF.
> [...] I think the idea that a piece
> of IF should have a score and a winning ending may have made authors
> more reluctant to write, say, the IF Art Show type of works.
Very likely! What do the art show authors think?
David Thornley
Dennis G Jerz <jer...@uwec.edu> wrote:
>In Inform, the programmer signals the end of the game by setting a
>variable named "deadflag". Hypothesis: The name of this variable
>encourages new authors to come up with antagonistic IF scenarios, in
>me... what's the equivalent way to end a TADS game?)
>
It's more of a tradition thing, I'm sure. Graham Nelson designed
Inform to write Infocom-type games (and "Curses" is certainly one
of the great games in the Infocom tradition). It was easy to die
in early Scott Adams games, too.
>Consider this: If Crowther's hobby was something other than caving,
>would the history of gaming have included so many dungeon crawls?
>
As mentioned elsewhere: yes, due to the influence of Dungeons and
Dragons.
>If you're with me so far, and agree that this one decision that
>Crowther made did affect the development of computer games for a long
>time, then it's probably not too much of a stretch to suggest that
>other decisions Crowther (and others) made in the history of IF, or
>the decisions that the current generation of IF storytellers are
>making now, may have tremendous unforeseen effects.
>
I think you're exaggerating the effects of individual decisions,
myself. Early Inform users generally wanted to write games like
Infocom's. Certainly what Infocom did was very influential,
and if they'd done things differently (and the later Infocom
games show a lot of experimentation) probably things would have
evolved differently.
>All the things that IF was good at doing in 1975 (manipulating
>objects, language games), graphic computer games are still good at
>doing. The things that IF was not good at -- the things that Crowther
>didn't implement in his original simulated universe (complex NPCs,
>dynamic plots) -- are still elusive.
>
In other words, what was hard then is still hard.
The advantage of text IF over graphic IF is that it's simpler.
Partly this means that it has to concentrate more on being fun
to play (an unfortunately large number of graphic games have been
short of gameplay, which is fine for games like Myst where looking
at the pretty pictures and listening to the sounds was most of
the game) and takes fewer supporting resources.
Not to mention that graphic IF can't do everything text IF can:
consider "DROP CLOAK". Try implementing that in a graphics game!
>Scott Adams says that when Adventure International began adding
>graphics to their titles, fans wrote in to say, "The pictures I made
>in my head were better than yours." A company that puts resources
>into graphic and sound design can get richer game play that can be
>generated dynamically. Plot is finite, and many a fine game has
>gotten poor reviews due to low "replayability".
>
Y'know, I liked the movie "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"
better than "Lord of the Rings". Aside from the wonderful Quidditch
game, I think the big difference is that the Harry Potter movie
looked much more real than LOTR, due to its subject matter. It's
a whole lot easier to put a realistic Hermione on the screen than
a realistic Galadriel.
Now, graphics and sound can make a richer gameplay experience, but
they typically will create a more limited one. If it requires
that much more work to branch the plot, the plot is less likely to
get branched. It's *hard* to generate realistic things dynamically,
and that applies to prose and pictures.
>Yet the animators for Monsters Inc. worked in a complex simulated
>universe that handled such things as the motion of fabric, the effect
>of wind on hair, water absorption, etc. That meant that animators
>didn't have to animate every ripple of fabric or lock of hair.
>Monsters Inc. is, of course, a linear narrative.
>
Now, envision trying to branch the plot and allow inventory management,
without losing the quality of the graphics.
>Will plot-creation tools, or chatterbots with the complexity of
>Galatea as NPCs, bring new audiences to games that have traditionally
>expected a different kind of gameplay? Is "plot" a resource that can
>be manipulated to this degree?
Not with any tools I'm even remotely aware of. Plot requires reasoning
and creativity, and computer programs aren't good at that. Expressing
it in graphics involves generating realistic scenes on the fly, and
expressing it in prose involves generating good prose on the fly.
It's not going to happen soon, anyway.
>game designer is generally to give more control to the player. In IF,
>I think a more realistic goal is improved writing, that encourages the
>player to behave in a way that will unlock the most aesthetically
>satisfying narratives that the author has chosen to code.
>
In a more simulationist environment, such as a role-playing game,
the player will find far too many things that the author/GM
did not foresee. Some of these will screw up any intended plot.
A human GM can keep going by making things up.
>I think that this means "authorship" will, in the future, be
>democratized... shared among the members of a design team, and also
>taken on by the players in future IF. Even solitary authors will use
>software packages that reflect the experience of multiple designers,
>playtesters, and upgrades driven by user requests.
>
Um, I think it valuable that certain art forms can be created by
one person acting alone, since that allows a great deal of
experimentation. Moreover, solitary authors are using software
packages more or less as you described. If you think them
insufficient, well, they haven't gotten major corporate or
research funding.
I strongly support the idea of IF systems being in an extensible
sort of language, so that it is possible to start fiddling with
boilerplate and extend it slowly. Ideally, this would be a set
of macros in Common Lisp, but TADS and Inform do a reasonable
job already.
>Along with textual IF's motions towards a more robust parser, we have
>probably seen the expectations of the player rising
>disproportionately. When the player expects to be able to perform
>more actions, the player probably has more exposure to the game
>world's default responses for actions that the designer didn't
>foresee.
>
Which means more demand for the author to foresee actions. Many of
them are now on notice that, if there are cows in the game, somebody
is likely to blow on them.
>While a graphic game designer might tweak the gravity-simulation
>subroutine,
Does any graphic IF-type game even have a gravity simulation?
>Scott Adams has predicted that within the next 5 years, there will be
>sophisticated IF story generating tools on the market, designed with a
>much lower learning curve. I think X is right when he suggested, in a
>thread on commercializing IF, that story-generation tools will
>probably play a large role.
>
I don't think so.
For an IF story generator to be sophisticated, it has to be able
to handle enough things that it will wind up with a programming
language, whether an adaptation of a current one, a new one carefully
designed, or an ad hoc collection of disparate elements.
If this programming language is something tacked on to some other
base, such as Python added to a point-and-click system, people
aren't going to use it, and the works created will almost exclusively
be based on the point-and-click.
Therefore, we're left with stuff like what we've got now: specially
designed programming languages that you write the whole work in.
I don't see any improvement beyond, say, Visual Inform or a TADS
Wizard or something like that.
>While the Usenet community often laments what happened when
>technologically naive AOL users began flooding the public newsgroups
>that had previously "belonged" to the technological elites, the
>Internet really emerged as a social force when it became accessible to
>a wide range of people outside the traditional group of programmers
>and researchers.
>
True, and the traditional people still meet in odd corners like Usenet.
However, the use of the Internet that made a social difference was
qualitatively a lot different. I don't think email changed much
of anything, although it is convenient, but rather the Web. By
this analogy, the stuff produced by the wave of new authors using
any sufficiently simplified authoring system is going to be
qualitatively different, and in this case I'd say not for the better.
>If that's the case, then it's probably safe to say that new IF authors
>will probably lean very heavily on default responses. And if that's
>the case, then the default responses, may affect the future of
>interactive narrative as strongly as Crowther's decision to create an
>underground treasure hunt.
>
I'd agree with the last sentence, with the caveat that I don't think
Crowther's decision was as influential as you do. I would assume
that new authors do lean on default responses, and old authors too,
although probably to a lesser extent.
Dennis G. Jerz
> In article <a12r6h$bmg$1...@wiscnews.wiscnet.net>,
> Dennis G. Jerz <Jer...@uwec.edu> wrote:
> >OK... I suppose my point would still be the same if the flag were
> >"liveflag", but what if it were "story_done" or "plot_advancing"? Would
> >that influence the way people planned and created IF?
>
> In this case I don't think so; the actual name of the variable carries
> very little persuasive power compared to the actual default messages.
>
> However, I've seen cases where the name of a variable or a system
> command was very suggestive of what it did, in a way that didn't
> really map to reality. For example, suppose that, rather than writing
>
> deadflag = 1;
>
> you had to write
>
> KillPlayer(1);
>
> to end the game. Would that give authors the idea that the only way
> to end the game would be to kill the PC? Perhaps, though I doubt it.
>
That kind of change would certainly make the influence of the procedure's
name more effective.
The idea that computer terminology affects the way computers are used is not
new. Cynthia Selfe is a humanities scholar who has argued that the
preponderance of terms such as "kill", "crash" and "bomb" makes computer
programming an inherently violent system, which is culturally consistent
with the military environment in which the early computers were developed. I
don't particularly have a problem with those terms, but when I heard her
make these claims at a conference years ago, I thought they had some merit.
I wonder what she'd say about terminology such as "child" and "parent",
"populating" a database, or "spawning" or "aborting" processes?
--
Dennis G. Jerz, Ph.D.; (715)836-2431
Dept. of English; U Wisc.-Eau Claire
419 Hibbard, Eau Claire, WI 54702
------------------------------------
Literacy Weblog: www.uwec.edu/jerzdg
[...]
> But the actual names of variables and so on matter very little,
> because once I get to the stage of actually doing something to
> deadflag, I will have read about it in the DM and would know that it
> is possible to change the default behaviour of the game.
Experienced programmers, who are used to creating their own procedures and
naming them however they wish, are probably far less susceptible to the
influences I'm describing. But, to borrow a phrase from Neal Stephenson,
the programmers on this group are Morlocks, who are in control of the
technology; but most people in the world are Eloi, who are perfectly happy
not knowing how their computers work, so long as they can live their lives
peacfully and happily. AOL depends upon the Eloi. Heck, many people
remember Adventure or Zork because they could play it, use it, understand it
early on during their relationship with computers; it was something that
appealed to both geeks and mundanes, in a way that, say, Wumpus or the early
Star Trek did not.
The decisions that went into creating the Microsoft Word default resume
template have strongly affected people's assumptions about what makes a
"good" resume. Before I started specifically warning students about what I
thought was weak about the default Word resume template, nearly half of my
students would use that template (unmodified) for their resume homework.
>
> To summarize, terminology matters a lot, but documentation overrides
> terminology.
>
> What matters much, much more are genre conventions, such as "every game
> I've played had a score and endings where the PC died".
But isn't that a chicken-and-egg thing... if I am right, and something about
the inner workings of the language encourages people to write such games,
then the fact that many games in a particular genre is secondary to the fact
that it was the nature of the language that shaped our expectations of the
genre.
[Maybe the horse *is* pulling the cart, but backwards and very slowly?] :)
Dennis G. Jerz
> Perhaps it's just that dungeon crawls make good game settings, and
> that a number of successful games used it at the time IF took off.
This is undoubtedly a factor. Caves offer a convenient sense of containment
and controlled entrances and exits.
It's probably hard to plan a campaign if all the wooded areas are laid out
like the forest in Adventure. (Even then, Tolkien does have a forest
controlling the direction of a party's travel; the disappearance of elven
rings leading the party deeper in, etc.)
Dennis G. Jerz
news:kOlZ7.6784$aH2.3...@ruti.visi.com...
> Magnus writes
> >Perhaps it's just that dungeon crawls make good game settings, and
> >that a number of successful games used it at the time IF took off.
> >
> To nitpick, they make easy game settings.
Okay, but are they easy simply because we've seen so many of them that we've
internalized the conventions?
Dennis G. Jerz
> However, if the standard library provided only a "Game Over" message,
> I think *that* would have influenced game design a lot more than "the
> flag that signals end-of-game is caled "deadflag"".
Can we resolve this as simply as saying that the variable "deadflag" is
misleadingly named, since its conventional output, as experienced in most
fnished games, no longer involves death?
Still, that means that authors have to make a conscious choice to move the
output away from "death". Note that the Inform routine that produces
end-of-game messages is, in fact, called DeathMessage().
Dennis G. Jerz
If one takes "IF-type" very broadly, then Deus X might count. But I'm
speaking less of anyspecific, existing games or systems, and theorizing
about how interactive storytelling might change in the future, when many
more libraries are available.
The average programmer could probably implement "drop cloak" fairly easily,
but if the average programmer had to implement "light candle then put it in
the green box" (being careful to check the scope of all object, whether the
green box is open, etc.), then that programmer would have that much less
time to deal with story issues. Since Inform programmers already rely
heavily on library routines, my point is to fast forward to the time when
the simulation of 3D worlds is easy enough that we can simply do what they
do on Star Trek -- ask for a Victorian drawing room setting, with a butler
and a cheery fireplace. I think we'll have those kinds of tools long before
we'll have tools that will permit people to ask for the computer to generate
character interaction. So, I think that there will be a class of
interactive storytellers who are grateful that the simulated world libraries
free them from having to deal with issues related to physics and gravity, so
that they can instead spend their time working on story, character, etc. Of
course, the simulationist technology will be driven by people who want to
build and play with things (for industrial purposes as well as personal
creativity).
>
> For an IF story generator to be sophisticated, it has to be able
> to handle enough things that it will wind up with a programming
> language, whether an adaptation of a current one, a new one carefully
> designed, or an ad hoc collection of disparate elements.
Depends on your meaning of sophisticated, and dependson the level of
resolution you expect the system to provide you with. But the simple fact
that there are wizards and VInform and the like means that people more
quickly learn what it's like to play around in a simulated world of their
own creation. If this experience is satisfying, and worth the initial
effort, then more people will probably continue. 30 years ago I doubt
anybody thought that people would be making home videos with the level of
quality possible today. In fact, "professional" TV has changed so that
there are more "amateur-style" teleproductions out there, since the quirks
and "flaws" of amateur video have become so commonplace that it's no longer
necessary to pay for expensive video production in order to attract audience
to certain types of TV shows. (Yes, those shows are low on the level of
artistic quality, but the main product of TV is the attention span of
people, sold to advertisers, not the TV shows used to attract "eyeballs".)
>
> If this programming language is something tacked on to some other
> base, such as Python added to a point-and-click system, people
> aren't going to use it, and the works created will almost exclusively
> be based on the point-and-click.
>
> Therefore, we're left with stuff like what we've got now: specially
> designed programming languages that you write the whole work in.
> I don't see any improvement beyond, say, Visual Inform or a TADS
> Wizard or something like that.
>
> >While the Usenet community often laments what happened when
> >technologically naive AOL users began flooding the public newsgroups
> >that had previously "belonged" to the technological elites, the
> >Internet really emerged as a social force when it became accessible to
> >a wide range of people outside the traditional group of programmers
> >and researchers.
> >
> True, and the traditional people still meet in odd corners like Usenet.
> However, the use of the Internet that made a social difference was
> qualitatively a lot different. I don't think email changed much
> of anything, although it is convenient, but rather the Web. By
> this analogy, the stuff produced by the wave of new authors using
> any sufficiently simplified authoring system is going to be
> qualitatively different, and in this case I'd say not for the better.
See above, my reference to TV.
>
> >If that's the case, then it's probably safe to say that new IF authors
> >will probably lean very heavily on default responses. And if that's
> >the case, then the default responses, may affect the future of
> >interactive narrative as strongly as Crowther's decision to create an
> >underground treasure hunt.
> >
> I'd agree with the last sentence, with the caveat that I don't think
> Crowther's decision was as influential as you do. I would assume
> that new authors do lean on default responses, and old authors too,
> although probably to a lesser extent.
OK, that's fair enough. I'm certainly not trying to change anyone's
opinion, but I'd be happy to keep circling around until we find out what the
core issue is.
Kevin Forchione
news:a14tuh$11f2$1...@wiscnews.wiscnet.net...
> "L. Ross Raszewski" <lrasz...@loyola.edu> wrote in message
> news:a14rit$o7q$1...@foobar.cs.jhu.edu...
> > However, if the standard library provided only a "Game Over" message,
> > I think *that* would have influenced game design a lot more than "the
> > flag that signals end-of-game is caled "deadflag"".
>
> Can we resolve this as simply as saying that the variable "deadflag" is
> misleadingly named, since its conventional output, as experienced in most
> fnished games, no longer involves death?
>
> Still, that means that authors have to make a conscious choice to move the
> output away from "death". Note that the Inform routine that produces
> end-of-game messages is, in fact, called DeathMessage().
Hmmm. What you seem to have hit on is a single artifact of the "game" side
of interactive fiction. Others have pointed to scoring, and the turn-count
display would qualify as well. These are the most obvious elements of IF
development systems that elude to the zero-sum, game aspect of IF.
But your implication is that the connotative value of the library dictates
the approach taken by authors, especially impressionable newbies, to
game/story development. The next step then, if we assume that this is so, is
can this connotative value be controlled and directed toward producing IF
that conforms to a particular perspective (i.e. life-affirming,
environmentally-friendly, etc.)
On a practical note, compatibility will prohibit the renaming of such a
basic library element, but the use of wrapper functions would allow you to
package the Inform library to provide any psychological slant you wish. It
is, after all, the psychology with which one approaches a task that makes
all the difference.
For example, suppose we want newbies to adopt a writer's personna:
storyFinis(val) // cool
{
deadflag = val;
}
Using constants for val would make it even more conducive:
PLAYER_HAS_EXPIRED 1
PLAYER_HAS_WON 2
LIFE_AFFIRMATION 3
ENVIRONMENTAL_FRIENDLY 4
WARM_AND_FUZZY 5
You would then want to direct newbies to the use of these functions,
probably by packaging them as a library extension. Although this may sound
like a work-around, it's more akin to a layer that buffers the user from the
"harsher" realities of the system, just as browsers do for the internet.
--Kevin
Andrew Plotkin
> "Daryl McCullough" <da...@cogentex.com> wrote in message
> news:a14gm...@drn.newsguy.com...
>> Dennis says...
>>
>> >Good point, but why is Inform set up so that death is so easy to detect?
>>
>> I don't think it is so much that it is easy to detect, but that
>> it requires special treatment (restarting the game).
> But... does this business of asking the author to deal with "deadflag" bring
> the concept of "death" to the forefront of a beginning author's mind?
The author has to deal with an Initialise() routine as well, but this
has not led to an unusual number of Americans writing Inform games
which are set in the UK. :-)
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
* Make your vote count. Get your vote counted.
D. Jacob Wildstrom
Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> wrote:
>The author has to deal with an Initialise() routine as well, but this
>has not led to an unusual number of Americans writing Inform games
>which are set in the UK. :-)
OTOH, it has resulted in a number of Americans writing Inform games
which don't compile on the first pass. <g>
+--First Church of Briantology--Order of the Holy Quaternion--+
| A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into |
| theorems. -Paul Erdos |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Jake Wildstrom |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
Matthew Russotto
Dennis G. Jerz <Jer...@uwec.edu> wrote:
>
>The idea that computer terminology affects the way computers are used is not
>new.
Which says little about its merits.
>I wonder what she'd say about terminology such as "child" and "parent",
>"populating" a database, or "spawning" or "aborting" processes?
Since they're not consistent, she'd ignore them as not fitting with her
thesis.
Kevin Forchione
news:a14t8l$rp4$1...@wiscnews.wiscnet.net...
> The idea that computer terminology affects the way computers are used is
not
> new. Cynthia Selfe is a humanities scholar who has argued that the
> preponderance of terms such as "kill", "crash" and "bomb" makes computer
> programming an inherently violent system, which is culturally consistent
> with the military environment in which the early computers were developed.
I
> don't particularly have a problem with those terms, but when I heard her
> make these claims at a conference years ago,
And could explain the ruthlessness of today's business community :)
>I thought they had some merit.
> I wonder what she'd say about terminology such as "child" and "parent",
> "populating" a database, or "spawning" or "aborting" processes?
Death and sex...
> Experienced programmers, who are used to creating their own procedures and
> naming them however they wish, are probably far less susceptible to the
> influences I'm describing. But, to borrow a phrase from Neal Stephenson,
> the programmers on this group are Morlocks, who are in control of the
> technology; but most people in the world are Eloi, who are perfectly happy
> not knowing how their computers work, so long as they can live their lives
> peacfully and happily. AOL depends upon the Eloi.
The thing that makes me chuckle though, is that no matter how much we might
package it to be Eloi-friendly, the Morlock is still the master. It's the
old "give a man a fish..." barb.
> The decisions that went into creating the Microsoft Word default resume
> template have strongly affected people's assumptions about what makes a
> "good" resume. Before I started specifically warning students about what
I
> thought was weak about the default Word resume template, nearly half of my
> students would use that template (unmodified) for their resume homework.
So they traded one model for another. But unless they learned how to discern
when a model better fits the datum then they're simply slaves to the new
model. Ironically, having the MS model provided a counter-example that some
of them might then develop an abstract understanding of what a model is.
> But isn't that a chicken-and-egg thing... if I am right, and something
about
> the inner workings of the language encourages people to write such games,
> then the fact that many games in a particular genre is secondary to the
fact
> that it was the nature of the language that shaped our expectations of the
> genre.
Well... what is it that informs one's view of the world, eh? We may say that
we have a concept ... an idea. We formulate that idea into concrete
expression. We then act upon this expression, either building upon it, or
arguing against it. This interplay then forms the basis for another concept.
And like any structure, once it has expressed, it is *this* structure, and
not *another*. It has limitations, connotations, implications. The
limitations channel one into doing certain things, and not others; the
connotations bring a certain psychological resonance to the venture, a
certain outlook on life, we may say; the implications form the seeds of what
we may build upon it, and lay the seeds of what the new idea will look like.
Now, the history of IF goes back to the computer game, which is itself a
computer program. And all IF are computer programs, whether written in TADS,
Java, BASIC, or HTML, consisting of control logic, i/o, and data
manipulation. And here we have limitations, connotations, implications. Take
for instance the "select" statement, what would it mean to an author if this
were renamed to, say perhaps "transition"? And already we are thinking,
where would this lead?
So we rename "select" the seemingly more authorial "transition" and similar
changes to other language elements, and suddenly we are speaking this new
language of IF, much as movie-making has its own language. Now we have
separated ourselves out, so to speak, from this old way of speaking, and we
are something different, new, original. We can't use the old forms .... they
belong to the *other*. Teenagers do this all the time.
The trouble is that humans have a common biology, a common psychology, a
common psyche. And so the structures that we build bear the "genes", if you
will, of their parents, and eventually ... as every child knows, comes at
last to resemble the father or the mother. Sigh. And we thought we were so
different! So the pendulum swings. And with each generation we think somehow
the past did not manage to do such marvelous things - and yet humanity
changes slowly, oh so slowly.
Now. Suppose we attempt to create a model, create a structure, that is ...
neutral. It has no limitations, no connotations, no implications. Well, what
is this thing? What does it do? And if we have this thing, we look at it and
we say it is not alive! It has no breath of life in it. It is a language of
symbols, of abstractions. Still, we have failed, we have not escaped! Even
this has limitations, connotations, implications.
So again, we have estranged the newbie, the uninitiated. They come to this
model and they say it is unintuitive, that it is difficult, a foreign
language. They want simplification, they want it to resemble what they are
familiar with. So we give them an interface, we hide what we are doing from
them, give them a shiny covering to hide the workings of the motor. We say,
push here, and it will do this; pull here, and it will do that. And they
love it!
As time passes they begin to build their lives around the structure. The
clever ones say to themselves, now I have this structure, and look, this
other thing makes it easier to use the structure. We have cars, suddenly we
have automotive garages. Industries build up around the structure. The model
has become a fact of life. Functionality gives way to entertainment. People
move to the suburbs.
But the children, raised in their comfortable suburban homes, living the
great ideal - as they say, familiarity breeds contempt. And they become
restless. They look for a new model, look for a new language, new
limitations, connotations, implications. The clever ones pull off the shiny
metal cover, supe up the engine, maybe jack up the backend. They are free of
the old tyranny!
And so the story goes...
--Kevin
David Thornley
a convention, we have to be exposed to it multiple times.
While some of the original D&D games were not set in a dungeon,
many were. Book 3 of the original three-book set of D&D had more
support for dungeon crawls than anything else, and the brief
transcript was of a dungeon crawl. (The support for outdoor
adventures was limited to a suggestion to use the board of the
AH game "Outdoor Survival" and a set of monster encounter tables.
The problem with that, I think, is that there was no support for
varying difficulties; a party that wasn't sixth level or so had
no business leaving town.)
Back then, we happily drew meaningless dungeons on graph paper
and mostly rolled randomly for monsters and treasures. I don't
know what other gaming groups did, but it does seem to have
caught on.
David Thornley
>but if the average programmer had to implement "light candle then put it in
>the green box" (being careful to check the scope of all object, whether the
>green box is open, etc.), then that programmer would have that much less
>time to deal with story issues.
However, there's a difference between text and graphical IF here:
the level of detail necessary and what has to be generated. In
text:
>L
You are in an example room.
>I
You are carrying:
A cloak
>DROP CLOAK
Dropped.
>L
You are in an example room.
There is a cloak here.
In graphics, we have a picture of a room. We have to decide where
the cloak should go, then draw it realistically. This is not going
to be easy to do any time soon.
Since Inform programmers already rely
>heavily on library routines, my point is to fast forward to the time when
>the simulation of 3D worlds is easy enough that we can simply do what they
>do on Star Trek -- ask for a Victorian drawing room setting, with a butler
>and a cheery fireplace.
Sure.
Now, we run into a problem with anything out of the ordinary. We
can have a Victorian drawing room with butler and cheery fireplace,
and presumably an ability to shift through various ones and alter
them. Given the computrons and some neat programming, we can
change some things dynamically and have other things change to match
(for example, changing the chair color to look better as we change
the wainscoting).
How do we do the "tank" area of Doc Smith's Directrix? The Isolato
Incident? So Far? Rl'yeh? Elrond's house? There will always be
things that I can imagine, and describe in words adequately for my
purposes, but can't portray visually, unless somebody has already
decided to done it for me (and, in some cases, not even then).
Moreover, a simulationist world positively cries out for details
that just aren't there. I didn't notice the bareness of the rooms
in "Deadline" until I started searching them, and the bareness then
suggested to me that I was on the wrong track. In a simulationist
graphical game, either the rooms would jar from the beginning or
I wouldn't have a clue that searching rooms wasn't going to work.
I think we'll have those kinds of tools long before
>we'll have tools that will permit people to ask for the computer to generate
>character interaction.
Depends on several things, including what you think of as "those kinds
of tools". If you're talking about graphic libraries where you can
drop the toolbox and cat, and then put the cloak on them, it's going
to be a while.
So, I think that there will be a class of
>interactive storytellers who are grateful that the simulated world libraries
>free them from having to deal with issues related to physics and gravity, so
>that they can instead spend their time working on story, character, etc.
Right. I'd like to have stuff like that. On the other hand, the
simulation ability is at best orthogonal to story and character.
Give the player enough freedom, and the player will trash the story
and leave the characters reacting inappropriately. In Metamophoses,
the simulationism worked because of the great restrictions and
sparseness of the environment, and in role-playing games it works
because the GM is able to react and rethink things, and also because
a broken RPG session is a lot less serious than a broken commercial
computer game.
>> For an IF story generator to be sophisticated, it has to be able
>> to handle enough things that it will wind up with a programming
>> language, whether an adaptation of a current one, a new one carefully
>> designed, or an ad hoc collection of disparate elements.
>
>Depends on your meaning of sophisticated, and dependson the level of
>resolution you expect the system to provide you with.
My meaning of sophistication is that the game can vary significantly
from the standard world model. TADS and Inform are sophisticated
in this regard, as can be seen from Rematch and Metamorphoses, to
name two. If the game is confined to a standard world model, it
becomes stereotyped. For example, in TADS the standard verbs to
find hidden things are "look under", "look behind", and "search",
so you can simply apply these things to all available objects and
find anything hidden, unless the author has designed a hiding
mechanism of his or her own (in fact, one is given in the manual
for finding an airline ticket in a newspaper).
Now, it isn't necessary for a system to be sophisticated in this
sense in order to produce good games, but the games will possess
a certain mandatory sameness, and there will be games that
simply cannot be written in a given non-sophisticated system.
But the simple fact
>that there are wizards and VInform and the like means that people more
>quickly learn what it's like to play around in a simulated world of their
>own creation. If this experience is satisfying, and worth the initial
>effort, then more people will probably continue.
Right. This still leaves the hard parts of story and character.
Currently, people can get word processors with all sorts of neat
features, including spelling checkers, grammar checkers, thesauri,
and so forth. Has this made people write more than they used to?
The wizard/visual stuff is going to make it easier to implement
the author's house and cat, but I don't know (a) how much more it's
going to do, and (b) how many more plotless houses I can take
being entered into a comp.
To go back to Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month", in making an IF
work there are two sorts of difficulties: the essential, which are
concerned with design, writing, characterization, and so forth; and
the accidental, which are concerned with getting TADS and Inform and
Hugo to carry out your thoughts.
30 years ago I doubt
>anybody thought that people would be making home videos with the level of
>quality possible today.
It is a lot cheaper and easier to record video than it was thirty
years ago (when the technology was the 8mm movie). This is good, but
AFAICT it hasn't changed much except for home video, and made it easier
to do low-budget TV shows (which is something of a merging of talent
and skill with technology).
Dennis G. Jerz
news:ZtnZ7.3175$Sf2.15916@rwcrnsc52...
Well, I'm not particularly interested in arguing that IF should aim not to
damage the player's self-esteem, or anything like that. I'm certainly not
advocating that anybody change anything. I suppose that, if it sounds
somewhat silly to argue that IF *should* encourage warm fuzziness, then it
is somehow significant to note that certain programming structures do seem
to encourage a certain type of user experience. As you note, many users
will be completely insulated from the internal structures that define the
public game-playing experience. Back when you essentially had to be a
programmer in order to play a computer game, the connections between
invisible structure and external display were unimportant. Part of the fun
of playing IF is testing the limits of the parser (and the limits of the
programmer's ability to predict what silly things gamers will try to do).
Dennis G. Jerz
news:u3c4jtc...@corp.supernews.com...
> In article <a14t8l$rp4$1...@wiscnews.wiscnet.net>,
> Dennis G. Jerz <Jer...@uwec.edu> wrote:
> >
> >The idea that computer terminology affects the way computers are used is
not
> >new.
>
> Which says little about its merits.
>
> >I wonder what she'd say about terminology such as "child" and "parent",
> >"populating" a database, or "spawning" or "aborting" processes?
>
> Since they're not consistent, she'd ignore them as not fitting with her
> thesis.
There's a long and ideologically powerful line of thought that argues that
any hierarchial or ordered system is sexist because it descends from a
masculinist world view. One might say that these terms, related to
object-oriented programming, are "objectifying" natural relationships
(kinship) and natural entities (the tree metaphor). While I can't say I
agree fully with the conclusions she and some other have drawn from her
observation, I think her observations about the connection between language,
interface, and user perception are valid.
Dennis G. Jerz
That may be because, right now, language is the best interface we have.
If you could somehow create a tone by selecting a bunch of objects -- a
gothic steeple, a glass-and-steel skyscraper, and a picture of a foggy
seascape, and then had the computer use those images to modify your standard
setting according to various attributed presented in the pictures. That way,
people who aren't as articulate as you would still be able to communicate
stylistic desires, in such a way as to assist a computer improvise story
details. For example, you throw a bunch of objects in the room, and the
computer improvises the idea that a neighbor wants to borrow something from
the PC. What kind of a person would want to borrow that particular prop on
the mantel? IF the prop is an antique clock, then the person who wants to
borrow it is probably not a cyberpunk, but perhaps more likely to be a
slightly tweedy English professor.
Who will come up with the tools that will allow a storyteller to tap into
the computer's power to improvise at this level? How will the interface and
programming choices being made now affect the kinds of stories told 30 years
from now?
>
[...]
> Depends on several things, including what you think of as "those kinds
> of tools". If you're talking about graphic libraries where you can
> drop the toolbox and cat, and then put the cloak on them, it's going
> to be a while.
I've got time. We can still talk about these tools before they show up. If
enough people talk about them, then somebody's creativity may be sparked,
and we might get those tools a little faster.
>
> So, I think that there will be a class of
> >interactive storytellers who are grateful that the simulated world
libraries
> >free them from having to deal with issues related to physics and gravity,
so
> >that they can instead spend their time working on story, character, etc.
>
> Right. I'd like to have stuff like that. On the other hand, the
> simulation ability is at best orthogonal to story and character.
> Give the player enough freedom, and the player will trash the story
> and leave the characters reacting inappropriately.
OK, but some of the same tools that generate plot could also generate
in-character responses to unscripted stimuli. Maybe you write a few hundred
lines of dialogue, and during a beta-testing phase, the computer generates
suggested lines of dialogue, which the author can accept or reject according
to the needs of the plot or the author's understanding of the characer. You
educate the character to know what kinds of responses are appropriate to the
story you want to tell, so that a particular character who's designed to be
the antagonist may always be more likely to antagonize whatever the PC wants
to do. Say you script a break-up between the PC and an NPC who's supposed
to be the PC's significant other. If, in one game session, the PC wants to
go out to eat, the NPC wants to say home. If the PC wants to stay home, the
NPC wants to go out. If it's important to the plot that the PC and the NPC
get separated, then the trigger can be anything -- the PC forgets to shut
the refrigerator door, or whatever. The important thing (in a game that's
supposed to focus on relationships) is not the physical things in the
simulated space, but in the values that the NPCs are supposed to assign to
your itneraction with those things.
[...]
>
> Now, it isn't necessary for a system to be sophisticated in this
> sense in order to produce good games, but the games will possess
> a certain mandatory sameness, and there will be games that
> simply cannot be written in a given non-sophisticated system.
Agreed. In a text game environment, textual varition is extremely
important.
> Right. This still leaves the hard parts of story and character.
> Currently, people can get word processors with all sorts of neat
> features, including spelling checkers, grammar checkers, thesauri,
> and so forth. Has this made people write more than they used to?
Absolutely. But it's because the gimmicks have distracted them from doing
the self-conscious proofreading that told the would-be authors of a
generation ago that they draft they had was crap, and that they should keep
working on it rather than start a new document.
> The wizard/visual stuff is going to make it easier to implement
> the author's house and cat, but I don't know (a) how much more it's
> going to do, and (b) how many more plotless houses I can take
> being entered into a comp.
There may be more such plotless houses, but more people who have it within
them to be good IF authors will be encouraged to move beyond the "simulation
of my apartment" mode. There will definitely be a higher percentage of
crummy games than great games, but the good ones will soon bubble to the
top, just as the cookie-cutter "Here's my kewl web page" sites are basically
ignored by Google. Yet it's the "kewl web page" authors who are helping to
swell the ranks of visitors at the best sites.
[...]
> It is a lot cheaper and easier to record video than it was thirty
> years ago (when the technology was the 8mm movie). This is good, but
> AFAICT it hasn't changed much except for home video, and made it easier
> to do low-budget TV shows (which is something of a merging of talent
> and skill with technology).
The content of TV shows has changed drastically, though. After the writers'
strike in the early 1990s, you had tons of shows built around stand-up
comedians who brought with them their own material, as well as COPS and
America's Funniest Home Videos, Real World. Most of these started as a
direct result of the TV exectuives needing something to fill air space with.
Daryl McCullough
>
>In article <WfmZ7.7900$MK.117934@rwcrnsc54>,
>Kevin Forchione <Ke...@lysseus.com> wrote:
>>You think that's annoying, most people can't pronounce mine correctly.
>
>So how do you pronounce it? "Four-key-oh-neh"?
I would think it would be pronounced "Keh-vinn".
Daryl McCullough
>While some of the original D&D games were not set in a dungeon,
>many were. Book 3 of the original three-book set of D&D had more
>support for dungeon crawls than anything else, and the brief
>transcript was of a dungeon crawl. (The support for outdoor
>adventures was limited to a suggestion to use the board of the
>AH game "Outdoor Survival" and a set of monster encounter tables.
>The problem with that, I think, is that there was no support for
>varying difficulties; a party that wasn't sixth level or so had
>no business leaving town.)
>
>Back then, we happily drew meaningless dungeons on graph paper
>and mostly rolled randomly for monsters and treasures. I don't
>know what other gaming groups did, but it does seem to have
>caught on.
I've tried in the past to start up a discussion about the
relationship between interactive fiction and role-playing
games, but I got few "bites". Maybe I should try again.
To me, the big question is: How is interactive fiction
different from a role-playing game? It seems to me that
a work of interactive fiction is basically the same as
a role-playing game, except for two differences:
1. A computer program acts as a stand-in for the "dungeon master".
2. It is typically for one player.
Are those the only root differences? Other differences exist,
but they seem to be consequences of these differences, or else
are just conventions that were adopted at some point that are
not intrinsic to the respective media (if that's the right word).
joh
Dennis> If you could somehow create a tone by selecting a bunch of
Dennis> objects -- a gothic steeple, a glass-and-steel skyscraper,
Dennis> and a picture of a foggy seascape, and then had the
Dennis> computer use those images to modify your standard setting
Dennis> according to various attributed presented in the
Dennis> pictures. That way, people who aren't as articulate as you
Dennis> would still be able to communicate stylistic desires, in
Dennis> such a way as to assist a computer improvise story
Dennis> details.
I'm trying to imagine the game that results, and I can't help but
imagine a totally wooden universe. I can see how a computer can
construct this scene, but until a computer can understand a human mind
in a way that even humans currently can't, I don't see how a computer
can make it aesthetically interesting.
Dennis> For example, you throw a bunch of objects in the
Dennis> room, and the computer improvises the idea that a neighbor
Dennis> wants to borrow something from the PC. What kind of a
Dennis> person would want to borrow that particular prop on the
Dennis> mantel? IF the prop is an antique clock, then the person
Dennis> who wants to borrow it is probably not a cyberpunk, but
Dennis> perhaps more likely to be a slightly tweedy English
Dennis> professor.
Why not have the computer generate a player to play the game, too? :)
Seriously, though, at this point, how much is left for the author to
do? Just outline a plot for the computer to improvise around? Plots
are such a small part of good literature; I think that very few could
make for a rewarding experience used this way.
Dennis> Absolutely. But it's because the gimmicks have distracted
Dennis> them from doing the self-conscious proofreading that told
Dennis> the would-be authors of a generation ago that they draft
Dennis> they had was crap, and that they should keep working on it
Dennis> rather than start a new document.
Well, postmodernism and the profit-making strategies of publishers
have a good deal to do with that, too.
>> thirty years ago (when the technology was the 8mm movie). This
>> is good, but AFAICT it hasn't changed much except for home
>> video, and made it easier to do low-budget TV shows (which is
>> something of a merging of talent and skill with technology).
Dennis> The content of TV shows has changed drastically, though.
Dennis> After the writers' strike in the early 1990s, you had tons
Dennis> of shows built around stand-up comedians who brought with
Dennis> them their own material, as well as COPS and America's
Dennis> Funniest Home Videos, Real World. Most of these started
Dennis> as a direct result of the TV exectuives needing something
Dennis> to fill air space with.
But consider shows like Homicide that intentionally went for a
professionally nonprofessional look. They have some similarity to
current IF projects: their creators chose to use an older, less
glamorous interface. It's interesting to note, too, that Homicide fell
victim to its own popularity: after a couple of interesting seasons in
which the mostly unglamorous characters blundered around in a morass,
solving nothing, they hired on a bunch of unconvincing, but beautiful,
new stars and went to a typical "solve one crime per episode"
format. Suddenly it had nothing to set it apart from any other cop
show. Which is when I tuned out.
joh
Matthew Russotto
joh <j...@bigblueheron.com> wrote:
>
> Dennis> The content of TV shows has changed drastically, though.
> Dennis> After the writers' strike in the early 1990s, you had tons
> Dennis> of shows built around stand-up comedians who brought with
> Dennis> them their own material, as well as COPS and America's
> Dennis> Funniest Home Videos, Real World. Most of these started
> Dennis> as a direct result of the TV exectuives needing something
> Dennis> to fill air space with.
>
>But consider shows like Homicide that intentionally went for a
>professionally nonprofessional look.
Homicide did not have a nonprofessional look, professional or
otherwise. It wasn't the standard Hollywood look, but it wasn't
intentionally amateurish either. There are some which are, though
the obvious examples are animated -- "Beavis and Butthead" and the
"The Powerpuff Girls" come to mind.
>glamorous interface. It's interesting to note, too, that Homicide fell
>victim to its own popularity: after a couple of interesting seasons in
>which the mostly unglamorous characters blundered around in a morass,
>solving nothing, they hired on a bunch of unconvincing, but beautiful,
>new stars and went to a typical "solve one crime per episode"
>format. Suddenly it had nothing to set it apart from any other cop
>show. Which is when I tuned out.
I tuned out when they did the stroke thing.
Xiphias Gladius
> OK, this is starting to cast some light onto things... I'd forgotten about
> the time-delay thing. My approach to any interactive story is very
> different if there are limitations on my save-and-restore ability. In
> Advent & Zork there's a tension between "death" and "game over", and Magnus
> has presented one possible historical reason for it.
For what it's worth, I see "deadflag" as not referring to the death of the
*player*, but the death of the *game session* as a computer process. If
"deadflag" is non-zero, that is, true, then the interpreter ends the game
and shuts down.
And the concepts of "killing processes" and so forth predate text
adventures, I believe, and I'm sure predate Inform.
- Ian
--
"We could watch THE PRISONER and then watch TELETUBBIES!" -- my mother
L. Ross Raszewski
>
>
>There's a long and ideologically powerful line of thought that argues that
>any hierarchial or ordered system is sexist because it descends from a
>masculinist world view. One might say that these terms, related to
>object-oriented programming, are "objectifying" natural relationships
>(kinship) and natural entities (the tree metaphor). While I can't say I
>agree fully with the conclusions she and some other have drawn from her
>observation, I think her observations about the connection between language,
>interface, and user perception are valid.
I had it insisted at me in one of my honors classes, that the idea of
a linear narrative, or, indeed, a nontraditional narrative, which is
nonetheless ordered by some directing principle (that is, narratives
which either follow a temporal or logical sequence), is fundamentally
masculine, and those which do not are fundamentally feminine, as men
are more concerned with organizing and ordering things. These female
narratives, she continued, are actually more true to life, because
real life isn't a linear progression in time sequence.
I thought long and hard about this, then brushed my teeth, got up out
of bed, died, was born, and entered the classroom.
Sean T Barrett
>I've tried in the past to start up a discussion about the
>relationship between interactive fiction and role-playing
>games, but I got few "bites". Maybe I should try again.
Since I've posted about this at least twice before, I'll
just post a pointer, even though it's not strictly
on-topic to your specific question.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=G7F8GI.F7M%40world.std.com
SeanB
David Thornley
Daryl McCullough <da...@cogentex.com> wrote:
>thor...@visi.com (David Thornley) says...
>
>>Back then, we happily drew meaningless dungeons on graph paper
>>and mostly rolled randomly for monsters and treasures. I don't
>>know what other gaming groups did, but it does seem to have
>>caught on.
>
>I've tried in the past to start up a discussion about the
>relationship between interactive fiction and role-playing
>games, but I got few "bites". Maybe I should try again.
>
>To me, the big question is: How is interactive fiction
>different from a role-playing game? It seems to me that
>a work of interactive fiction is basically the same as
>a role-playing game, except for two differences:
>
> 1. A computer program acts as a stand-in for the "dungeon master".
> 2. It is typically for one player.
>
>Are those the only root differences? Other differences exist,
>but they seem to be consequences of these differences, or else
>are just conventions that were adopted at some point that are
>not intrinsic to the respective media (if that's the right word).
>
give the whole picture, and in any case (2) is something of a
consequence of (1); it's still easier to write single-player computer
games than multiplayer.
One large difference is that a work of IF has to be presented as a
finished product and can't be adapted on the fly. While coming up
with a RPG world can be a lot of work, it can be done incrementally
and in response to player feedback. This isn't the case with
IF, and so the work necessarily is very front-loaded, without much
interaction with players.
Another difference is that IF players get bored with aimless
random encounters, whereas early RPGs thrived on them. (Anybody
remember random monster checks?) These sorts of things have
survived into the computer game world as roguelikes and first-
person shooters and such, with much streamlined interfaces.
Combat is more awkward in IF, and lacks the physical satisfaction
of rolling the dice to see what happens. I don't know why, but
combats in RPGs are usually fun, and combats in IF are usually
at least a little tedious.
These combine to make IF much more plot-driven than RPGs usually are.
Kevin Forchione
> In article <WfmZ7.7900$MK.117934@rwcrnsc54>,
> Kevin Forchione <Ke...@lysseus.com> wrote:
> >You think that's annoying, most people can't pronounce mine correctly.
>
> So how do you pronounce it? "Four-key-oh-neh"?
4-shown
It's been through Elis Island and all.
--Kevin
Daryl McCullough
Sorry, I don't know if it is your URL or my browser, but that link
doesn't work for me.
Daryl McCullough
>Daryl McCullough <da...@cogentex.com> wrote:
>>To me, the big question is: How is interactive fiction
>>different from a role-playing game? It seems to me that
>>a work of interactive fiction is basically the same as
>>a role-playing game, except for two differences:
>>
>> 1. A computer program acts as a stand-in for the "dungeon master".
>> 2. It is typically for one player.
>I don't think looking at the root differences by themselves will
>give the whole picture, and in any case (2) is something of a
>consequence of (1); it's still easier to write single-player computer
>games than multiplayer.
>
>One large difference is that a work of IF has to be presented as a
>finished product and can't be adapted on the fly...
>Another difference is that IF players get bored with aimless
>random encounters, whereas early RPGs thrived on them...
>Combat is more awkward in IF, and lacks the physical satisfaction
>of rolling the dice to see what happens. I don't know why, but
>combats in RPGs are usually fun, and combats in IF are usually
>at least a little tedious.
>
>These combine to make IF much more plot-driven than RPGs usually
>are.
Okay. I agree with all these points. But then the question comes:
what is *better* (from the point of view of the player) about IF
than a RPG? The above points seem to be about why IF doesn't work
as well as an RPG for many things.
What makes IF more fun than an RPG?
For one thing, the fact that the "dungeon master" is a computer
program rather than a human necessarily constrains the game and
makes it less open-ended. People often complain about the
limitations of a program, in that it can't handle major
player-initiated plot changes (while a good human dungeon master
*can* handle such things) but I really think that that might be
an *attraction* of a work of IF. After a few hours, it's over.
There is a sense of closure, of accomplishment, that you can't
get from a completely open-ended RPG.
Along the same lines, I think the limitations of a computer
program tend to make the game experience into a kind of puzzle
or challenge. It's a box that you have to figure out how to
open to get to the prize inside. If the player doesn't do
the right thing, then the game experience is boring (or at
least unsatisfying). Role-playing games have much
less of a puzzle aspect to them, because the dungeon master
will tend to improvise if the players seem stuck in a rut.
Finally, I think that people prefer to play IF than RPG
because it is more solitary. You don't have to organize
a game. You can play in the wee hours of the night in the
privacy of your own home. If you take can't figure out some
puzzle, there is nobody to witness your failures. If you
want to try some off-the-wall action, there is nobody to
groan and complain about your delaying the game. The dungeon
master never gets tired of playing until you do.
Sean T Barrett
>Okay. I agree with all these points. But then the question comes:
>what is *better* (from the point of view of the player) about IF
>than a RPG? The above points seem to be about why IF doesn't work
>as well as an RPG for many things.
>Finally, I think that people prefer to play IF than RPG
>because it is more solitary. You don't have to organize
>a game. You can play in the wee hours of the night in the
>privacy of your own home. If you take can't figure out some
>puzzle, there is nobody to witness your failures. If you
>want to try some off-the-wall action, there is nobody to
>groan and complain about your delaying the game. The dungeon
>master never gets tired of playing until you do.
I believe adventures to be one of two divergent strains
of computer games whose existence was born of the desire
to "put the gamemaster into the computer" for all of the
above reasons.
That desire is no longer the motivation, although the
benefits given above are still valid.
SeanB
[The link I posted earlier works fine in Netscape 4 and
lynx; it is a perfectly normal everday google groups link.]
Adam Thornton
>because it is more solitary. You don't have to organize
>a game. You can play in the wee hours of the night in the
>privacy of your own home. If you take can't figure out some
>puzzle, there is nobody to witness your failures. If you
>want to try some off-the-wall action, there is nobody to
>groan and complain about your delaying the game. The dungeon
>master never gets tired of playing until you do.
Of these, it's the "don't have to organize a game" that is the kicker.
I try to play pen-and-paper RPGs when I can. I GM for a group of six
players, plus or minus.
We just took a two-month break because the holidays intervened and
getting a quorum together was just about impossible. Today was the
first time we've played since well before Thanksgiving. The problem
gets worse with more players; needing to get n players around a table at
once gets harder as n!; now, if you don't mind a certain lack of
continuity, you can make this (n-k)!, but the basic problem remains.
For all of that, I find pen-and-paper roleplaying vastly more satisfying
than CRPGs, and more satisfying in general than IF, although IF (for me
anyway) scratches a different itch, closer to reading a book than to
roleplaying.
The only CRPG that I've really *liked* from a role-playing
standpoint was _Planescape: Torment_. It wasn't like having a good GM,
but it was at least like being in a sort-of plot-driven game, rather
than, well, Rogue or Diablo. Or even Nethack, although its more-varied
gameplay and more-complicated plot elevates it above most roguelikes in
my estimation.
Of course, the joy of face-to-face roleplaying is largely that it's
freeform acting, and the players *can* surprise you. Until the AI
problem is solved, CRPGs simply cannot compare.
In short, the CRPG takes little or no preparation time, it has no
logistics to coordinate, is a solitary activity, and, although it can be
quite pleasant, really can't hold a candle to the real thing. If I may
make a rather crude but disturbingly accurate analogy, in my experience
CRPG:RPG::masturbation:sex.
Adam
Daniel Dawson
<21wZ7.7542$wa.4...@bin6.nnrp.aus1.giganews.com>, written by Xiphias Gladius
<i...@eris.io.com>. It says:
>For what it's worth, I see "deadflag" as not referring to the death of the
>*player*, but the death of the *game session* as a computer process. If
>"deadflag" is non-zero, that is, true, then the interpreter ends the game
>and shuts down.
Except, of course, that the author may implement reincarnation or something
along those lines, in which case the game session continues. But then, I guess
that sort of device isn't used much.
>And the concepts of "killing processes" and so forth predate text
>adventures, I believe, and I'm sure predate Inform.
Well, yeah. UNIX was first developed in 1969, and I'm sure they had the kill(1)
command from the beginning.
--
Daniel Dawson
dda...@nospam-altavista.net (remove 'nospam-' to send mail)
Sean T Barrett
>Of course, the joy of face-to-face roleplaying is largely that it's
>freeform acting, and the players *can* surprise you. Until the AI
>problem is solved, CRPGs simply cannot compare.
Well, yes, until the AI problem is solved, we probably can't
write the game where you play dungeonmaster and the players
are controlled by AIs, and they surprise you. (Well, actually
I've had computer players find surprisingly optimal solutions,
but they weren't a surprise in terms of being an entirely
different direction of solution than expected.)
If you just want the human player of a CRPG to surprise the
authors, it's been done already, plenty of times; simulation
allows for a fair amount of improvisation and unexpected
solutions. (E.g. see Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Thief.)
In the right setup this CAN be a surprise of kind, not just
quantity; e.g. three-card-combinations in Magic the Gathering.
SeanB
Magnus Olsson
>new.
I'm not claiming that it doesn't, just that in this particular case
(deadflag), there are other, much more powerful effects (those of
genre conventions and the library's default messages) that mask any
effect the variable name may have.
>Experienced programmers, who are used to creating their own procedures and
>naming them however they wish, are probably far less susceptible to the
>influences I'm describing.
But Inform programmers aren't working in a vacuum, even if they are
complete newbies to programming.
>Heck, many people
>remember Adventure or Zork because they could play it, use it, understand it
>early on during their relationship with computers; it was something that
>appealed to both geeks and mundanes, in a way that, say, Wumpus or the early
>Star Trek did not.
I'm not sure the analogy holds; Wumpus and Star Trek are from an era
where "mundanes" weren't very likely to come into contact with them.
And I don't think very many mundanes had any contact with the
mainframe versions of ADVENT or Zork/Dungeon either.
But I think the sociology of early computer gaming would be an
interesting area of resarch: at what point *did* computer games change
from being an activity of hackers and programmers and move into the
mainstream? At what point did it become socially acceptable for an
adult to buy a new computer just to be able to play the latest games?
>The decisions that went into creating the Microsoft Word default resume
>template have strongly affected people's assumptions about what makes a
>"good" resume. Before I started specifically warning students about what I
>thought was weak about the default Word resume template, nearly half of my
>students would use that template (unmodified) for their resume homework.
I think the analogy of that would be the Inform Library's world model,
not the naming of its internal variables; in this case, the fact that
the world model by default implements character death but no other losing
endings.
>> To summarize, terminology matters a lot, but documentation overrides
>> terminology.
>>
>> What matters much, much more are genre conventions, such as "every game
>> I've played had a score and endings where the PC died".
>
>But isn't that a chicken-and-egg thing...
In this case, it's pretty obvious that the egg (the genre conventions)
came before the chicken (the Inform library), because there were
adventure games for years and years before there was Inform, and it is
an established fact that a desing goal of Inform was to write
Infocom-like games.
>if I am right, and something about
>the inner workings of the language encourages people to write such games,
>then the fact that many games in a particular genre is secondary to the fact
>that it was the nature of the language that shaped our expectations of the
>genre.
In this particular case, the genre conventions did come first. It's
not much to argue about. However, in general you're right (so I really
think we should drop the deadflag example).
And I have a feeling that if you really want to see this kind of
mechanism in action, you should focus on the earlier AGT and GAGS
communities, because with these systems, being less flexible than
Inform, their limitations did more to form genre conventions.
And I'm sure there are similar mechanisms at work with Inform, but
on a more subtle scale; it's just that I can't think of any good
examples right now.
Warning: rant about Cynthia Selfe follows. I've moved it to the end
to avoid poisoning the mood of the factual remarks above.
> Cynthia Selfe is a humanities scholar who has argued that the
>preponderance of terms such as "kill", "crash" and "bomb" makes computer
>programming an inherently violent system, which is culturally consistent
>with the military environment in which the early computers were developed. I
>don't particularly have a problem with those terms, but when I heard her
>make these claims at a conference years ago, I thought they had some merit.
From your summary, she sounds more like a crackpot.
And her hypothesis sounds like total nonsense, making me wonder
where she gets her knowledge of the computer industry and of military
techicians (apart from the fact that people working in the military
labs in the 1940's were to a large extent civilian academics, military
technical personnel normally exhibits behaviour and values very far
from the stereotypical view of what soldiers are like).
>I wonder what she'd say about terminology such as "child" and "parent",
>"populating" a database, or "spawning" or "aborting" processes?
For some fun, ask one of the fundamentalists currently occupied burning
copies of "Harry Potter" what they think of terminology such as
"daemon". I'd get you'd get as much sense out of them as out of Selfe.
And, yes, I've read fundamentalist tracts that sounds quite reasonable
and seemed as if the had some merit - as long as one didn't think
about what they were saying.
I've also read writings of respected scholar or scientists where they
sound like total crackpots or as if they're on some weird political
agenda (though usually not in peer-reviewed publications), so I'm not
suggesting that Selfe is a crackpot or a bad scholar in general.
--
Magnus Olsson (m...@df.lth.se, m...@pobox.com)
------ http://www.pobox.com/~mol ------
Magnus Olsson
Daniel Dawson <dda...@nospam-altavista.net> wrote:
>Well, yeah. UNIX was first developed in 1969, and I'm sure they had the kill(1)
>command from the beginning.
Incidentally, this is a case where terminology had me confused for
a long time. The "kill" command in Unix is really very badly named,
because it's used to send all kinds of signals to processes, not just
to kill them. For example, doing "kill -HUP" on a daemon will usually
re-initialize it, not kill it.
Matthew Russotto
>command from the beginning.
Probably derives from a MULTICS command called
"Terminate_this_process_pretty_please" :-)
Daryl McCullough
>SeanB
>[The link I posted earlier works fine in Netscape 4 and
>lynx; it is a perfectly normal everday google groups link.]
Hmm. I'm bilingual: Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator
(I'm not sure if Communicator is the same as the regular Netscape
under the hood, or not). The link doesn't work with either of those
for me. I get this message
The requested URL /groups was not found on this server.
(In Netscape Communicator)
The page cannot be found
(In Internet Explorer)
As far as "perfectly normal everyday google groups links", they
almost *never* work for me. I must be doing something wrong
(but how many ways *are* there to click on a link?)
Richard Bos
> buz...@TheWorld.com says...
>
> >SeanB
> >[The link I posted earlier works fine in Netscape 4 and
> >lynx; it is a perfectly normal everday google groups link.]
>
> Hmm. I'm bilingual: Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator
> (I'm not sure if Communicator is the same as the regular Netscape
> under the hood, or not). The link doesn't work with either of those
> for me. I get this message
FWIW, it works perfectly under Netscape 3.01. Perhaps one of the fancy
features of the newer browsers is getting in the way of actually using
it?
Richard
Rikard Peterson
news:a1ccq...@drn.newsguy.com...
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=G7F8GI.F7M%40world.std.com
(that's the one your'e talking about, right?) works just fine for me.
(And of course it doesn't matter which browser I use - Opera, IE and
Netscape all show the same page.
If for some strange reason you still can't get the page, a google search
for the message <G7F8G...@world.std.com> should find it.
Larry Smith
I would have guessed "Forchy-oh-nee" Guess I've
seen too many re-runs of "The Godfather".
--
.-. .-. .---. .---. .-..-. | Wild Open Source Inc.
| |__ / | \| |-< | |-< > / | "Making the bazaar just a
`----'`-^-'`-'`-'`-'`-' `-' | little more commonplace."
home: www.smith-house.org | work: www.wildopensource.com
David Thornley
>In article <a1avja$ht$1...@ddawson.ddawson>,
>Daniel Dawson <dda...@nospam-altavista.net> wrote:
>>Well, yeah. UNIX was first developed in 1969, and I'm sure they had the kill(1)
>>command from the beginning.
>
>Incidentally, this is a case where terminology had me confused for
>a long time. The "kill" command in Unix is really very badly named,
>because it's used to send all kinds of signals to processes, not just
>to kill them. For example, doing "kill -HUP" on a daemon will usually
>re-initialize it, not kill it.
>
typing "kill -9"?
Matthew Russotto
David Thornley <thor...@visi.com> wrote:
>In article <a1c6g7$glv$1...@news.lth.se>, Magnus Olsson <m...@df.lth.se> wrote:
>>In article <a1avja$ht$1...@ddawson.ddawson>,
>>Daniel Dawson <dda...@nospam-altavista.net> wrote:
>>>Well, yeah. UNIX was first developed in 1969, and I'm sure they had the kill(1)
>>>command from the beginning.
>>
>>Incidentally, this is a case where terminology had me confused for
>>a long time. The "kill" command in Unix is really very badly named,
>>because it's used to send all kinds of signals to processes, not just
>>to kill them. For example, doing "kill -HUP" on a daemon will usually
>>re-initialize it, not kill it.
>>
>Am I the only one who gets a certain visceral satisfaction from
>typing "kill -9"?
Unfortunately, it doesn't accept usernames.
David Thornley
>In article <a14t8l$rp4$1...@wiscnews.wiscnet.net>,
>Dennis G. Jerz <Jer...@uwec.edu> wrote:
>>Heck, many people
>>remember Adventure or Zork because they could play it, use it, understand it
>>early on during their relationship with computers; it was something that
>>appealed to both geeks and mundanes, in a way that, say, Wumpus or the early
>>Star Trek did not.
>
>I'm not sure the analogy holds; Wumpus and Star Trek are from an era
>where "mundanes" weren't very likely to come into contact with them.
>And I don't think very many mundanes had any contact with the
>mainframe versions of ADVENT or Zork/Dungeon either.
>
The least technical people I knew then who had access to computers
seemed to like Wumpus. (I'm not so sure about Star Trek, but
Star Trek would normally appeal more to techogeeks anyway.)
>I think the analogy of that would be the Inform Library's world model,
>not the naming of its internal variables; in this case, the fact that
>the world model by default implements character death but no other losing
>endings.
>
Agreed.
>And I have a feeling that if you really want to see this kind of
>mechanism in action, you should focus on the earlier AGT and GAGS
>communities, because with these systems, being less flexible than
>Inform, their limitations did more to form genre conventions.
>
>And I'm sure there are similar mechanisms at work with Inform, but
>on a more subtle scale; it's just that I can't think of any good
>examples right now.
>
However, Inform has never existed in isolation. When Inform
appeared, there was already a high-quality development system,
TADS, and Inform has generally lived in the same community as TADS.
Therefore, I'd think that subtle biases would have to be common to
both Inform and TADS, making the definition of an Inform variable
trivial.
There is a certain drive to break conventions, or at least make
fun of them ("Space Under the Window", "Spider and Web", "Shrapnel",
"Rematch", "9:05", and "Aisle" come to mind as examples), so if
there are such pressures they'd have to be pretty subtle.
>
>Warning: rant about Cynthia Selfe follows. I've moved it to the end
>to avoid poisoning the mood of the factual remarks above.
>
>> Cynthia Selfe is a humanities scholar who has argued that the
>>preponderance of terms such as "kill", "crash" and "bomb" makes computer
>>programming an inherently violent system, which is culturally consistent
>>with the military environment in which the early computers were developed. I
>
>And her hypothesis sounds like total nonsense, making me wonder
>where she gets her knowledge of the computer industry and of military
>techicians (apart from the fact that people working in the military
>labs in the 1940's were to a large extent civilian academics, military
>technical personnel normally exhibits behaviour and values very far
>from the stereotypical view of what soldiers are like).
>
Actually, I'd expect the "kill" terminology to come from such people.
The veterans I've known never seemed to want to use such language,
but people associating with the military without being part of it
seem to.
There have been at least isolated problems with such terminology,
particularly as computers are used by the more naive. I've heard
of people terrified by the fact that their computer had committed
an illegal operation, or frightened by the bomb icon.
>And, yes, I've read fundamentalist tracts that sounds quite reasonable
>and seemed as if the had some merit - as long as one didn't think
>about what they were saying.
>
I've read stuff that seemed unreasonable until I did think closely
about the subject, then took it seriously. I think she's on to
something, although not necessarily as important as she thinks she is.
>I've also read writings of respected scholar or scientists where they
>sound like total crackpots or as if they're on some weird political
>agenda (though usually not in peer-reviewed publications), so I'm not
>suggesting that Selfe is a crackpot or a bad scholar in general.
>
Sometimes I find it fruitful to push an idea as far as it will go,
until somebody slaps me down. The path to knowledge is not always
straight.
David Thornley
Daryl McCullough <da...@cogentex.com> wrote:
>In article <vgHZ7.7157$aH2.3...@ruti.visi.com>, thor...@visi.com says...
>
>>finished product and can't be adapted on the fly...
>
>>Another difference is that IF players get bored with aimless
>>random encounters, whereas early RPGs thrived on them...
>
>>Combat is more awkward in IF, and lacks the physical satisfaction
>>
>>are.
>
>Okay. I agree with all these points. But then the question comes:
>what is *better* (from the point of view of the player) about IF
>than a RPG? The above points seem to be about why IF doesn't work
>as well as an RPG for many things.
>
>What makes IF more fun than an RPG?
>
to limit that question somewhat.
>For one thing, the fact that the "dungeon master" is a computer
>program rather than a human necessarily constrains the game and
>makes it less open-ended. People often complain about the
>limitations of a program, in that it can't handle major
>player-initiated plot changes (while a good human dungeon master
>*can* handle such things) but I really think that that might be
>an *attraction* of a work of IF. After a few hours, it's over.
>There is a sense of closure, of accomplishment, that you can't
>get from a completely open-ended RPG.
>
There is also the acceptance of the more limiting things. If I
come up with a different idea on how to do things in a RPG, I'm
often going to be pestering the GM to find out what happens, whereas
in IF I just accept it and go on (although sometimes feeling
annoyed that the author didn't think of it).
>Along the same lines, I think the limitations of a computer
>program tend to make the game experience into a kind of puzzle
>or challenge.
To put it another way, IF tends to have "right answers", unlike
RPGs.
>Finally, I think that people prefer to play IF than RPG
>because it is more solitary. You don't have to organize
>a game. You can play in the wee hours of the night in the
>privacy of your own home.
Or on my PDA wherever, for that matter, for moments at a time.
If you take can't figure out some
>puzzle, there is nobody to witness your failures.
I think the fun of playing "Paranoia" is that you're expected
to die anyway, so there's not the same pressure to do things
right and win.
One other thing to consider is the amount of preparation. It's
common to spend more time preparing one IF work than I would
spend in preparing a role-playing campaign. This theoretically
makes the IF a more complete and polished work. Theoretically,
I suppose one could get the same effect from a published module,
but I've never found one that thought quite like I did, so there
was always the discrepancy between the published stuff and the
stuff I had to make up myself.