[SPAG] Issue #47 is here
Jimmy Maher
Issue #47 is here at last. Subscribers should already have their
copies. The rest of you can go to the usual place... i.e., see my sig.
ARTICLES IN THIS ISSUE ----------------------------------------------------
Editorial
IF News
A Eulogy for Star Foster by Daniel Ravipinto
A Timeline of the French IF Community by Eriorg
An IF Competition 2006 Rant / Review Package by Valentine Kopteltsev
INTERVIEWS IN THIS ISSUE --------------------------------------------------
Adrien Saurat
JB
Eric Eve
Nolan Bonvouloir
Emily Short
REVIEWS IN THIS ISSUE -----------------------------------------------------
The Apocalypse Clock
Aunts and Butlers
Beam
Delightful Wallpaper
Ekphrasis
An Escape to Remember
Floatpoint
Game Producer!
Green Falls
The Journey of the King
Labyrinth
Last Resort
Pirate Adventure
The Reliques of Tolti-Aph
The Tower of the Elephant
SPECIFICS
=========
Damnatio Memoriae
Thank you to everyone who contributed! The review index pages will be
updated by this weekend, for those looking to link to individual reviews.
--
Jimmy Maher
Editor, SPAG Magazine -- http://www.sparkynet.com/spag
Thank you for helping to keep text adventures alive!
Eriorg
> Issue #47 is here at last. Subscribers should already have their
> copies. The rest of you can go to the usual place... i.e., see my sig.
Thank you! I think it's a very good SPAG issue, but I might be slightly
biased, since I published articles in it...
I noticed a small mistake: in SPAG Specifics, there's a warning about
spoilers for "The Baron", but the game spoiled is actually "Damnatio
Memoriae".
You wrote:
> Also included is an introduction to the French IF community, hopefully first
> of an ongoing series of articles about the other IF communities.
Do you mean that you contacted members of other (maybe Italian,
Spanish, German, Russian, and so on) IF communities about this?
And maybe these articles could be the starting point for a new chapter
about non-English IF communities in your book about the history of IF
("Let's Tell a Story Together")?
Emily Short
Eriorg wrote:
> Jimmy Maher a écrit :
> > Also included is an introduction to the French IF community, hopefully first
> > of an ongoing series of articles about the other IF communities.
>
> Do you mean that you contacted members of other (maybe Italian,
> Spanish, German, Russian, and so on) IF communities about this?
That would be excellent. I very much appreciated the introduction to
French IF and would enjoy reading similar articles about other groups.
Jimmy Maher
> Jimmy Maher a écrit :
>
>>Issue #47 is here at last. Subscribers should already have their
>>copies. The rest of you can go to the usual place... i.e., see my sig.
>
>
> Thank you! I think it's a very good SPAG issue, but I might be slightly
> biased, since I published articles in it...
>
Thank you!
> I noticed a small mistake: in SPAG Specifics, there's a warning about
> spoilers for "The Baron", but the game spoiled is actually "Damnatio
> Memoriae".
Damn! (Hee hee) Thanks, I have one other correction as well for the
issue. I'll revise it soon.
> You wrote:
>
>>Also included is an introduction to the French IF community, hopefully first
>>of an ongoing series of articles about the other IF communities.
>
>
> Do you mean that you contacted members of other (maybe Italian,
> Spanish, German, Russian, and so on) IF communities about this?
Well, I will be. :) I know WHO to contact, anyway, and do hope to turn
this into a regular series. Thanks for getting things started!
> And maybe these articles could be the starting point for a new chapter
> about non-English IF communities in your book about the history of IF
> ("Let's Tell a Story Together")?
Yes indeed, possibly. I'll do a fairly significant revision at some
point this year, and perhaps this can be a part of that.
DJ Hastings
> I noticed a small mistake: in SPAG Specifics, there's a warning about
> spoilers for "The Baron", but the game spoiled is actually "Damnatio
> Memoriae".
Another mistake: In my review of Delightful Wallpaper, I said:
First, there is a single right use for each intent, and you can tell
from your notes whether you've got it right or not.
Zarf contacted me and informed me that this is incorrect. There are
multiple uses for the intents that can lead to a winning ending; I just
didn't run into any of them on my playthrough. Sorry about that.
-DJ
Andrew Plotkin
>
> Another mistake: In my review of Delightful Wallpaper, I said:
>
> First, there is a single right use for each intent, and you can tell
> from your notes whether you've got it right or not.
>
> Zarf contacted me and informed me that this is incorrect. There are
> multiple uses for the intents that can lead to a winning ending; I just
> didn't run into any of them on my playthrough. Sorry about that.
But, as an author, I want to think about how players come to this
incorrect conclusion.
(DJ and I talked about this a bit in email, but I want to put it forth
as a case study in game and hint design.)
To quote further from the review:
> First, there is a single right use for each intent, and you can
> tell from your notes whether you've got it right or not. Thus,
> there's no need to think carefully about how the intents will affect
> each other, because you can deal with them one at a time.
>
> The second problem is that it's not at all clear how exactly the
> intents will work until you get it right. So my procedure for
> solving the puzzle was to find an intent, make a guess as to where
> it might be used, go there and try using it randomly until something
> fit, and repeat. This did not make for a satisfying puzzle.
What actually happens is that the notes begin with a fragmentary
(half-composed, as it were) version of *a* winning arrangement. As you
place each intent on a person, the corresponding verse becomes
complete. It does this whether you've gotten onto a winnable track or
a dead end; but the complete verse only matches the fragment in that
one winning case. If you find a different winning arrangement, you
wind up with a verse which is not consistent with the original
fragments.
So DJ didn't experiment with the different arrangements, so he never
picked up on the patterns of what's consistent with what. From my
point of view, he was playing directly from the hint file (which is
less satisfying by definition). But of course from *his* point of
view, he was looking at the available information and taking the most
direct route through the game.
(Question: did anybody else have the same experience with _Wallpaper_?
I don't remember any such descriptions from the post-Comp reviews, but
I might have forgotten one, and of course not all players posted
reviews.)
This points up an inconsistency in _Wallpaper_ which I had not
noticed. In part 1, the notes are an observational aid. They reveal
changes to the world which you might otherwise overlook. In a sense
they spoil a puzzle (noticing the changes, and also figuring out what
actions are connected to what changes) but it's a puzzle that I chose
to spoil, because I figured it would be tedious to pore over all the
room descriptions and experiment with every pair of doors. The "real
puzzle" of part 1 (sneer quotes used deliberately -- I am not the
final arbiter of that!) is *using* the map connections to reach new
areas. And the notebook doesn't tell you anything about that.
But in part 2, the notebook is a mix of initial orientation,
atmosphere, and hints. I'm happy with the first two functions, but the
third obviously has the capacity to go wrong. The player may not even
be *expecting* hints, and therefore may think of the notebook as
providing primary information rather than "last resort" information --
this is how I'm interpreting DJ's experience. Even if that doesn't
happen, it's providing hints (to the "real puzzle") whether the player
wants them or not. Which is tacky.
So how did I get here? Well, I had in mind a different failure mode: a
player who plops down some intentions, runs out -- that is, runs down
a dead-end path of the state diagram -- and doesn't realize that each
intention can be used in multiple ways. So he doesn't try pulling some
out and using them differently. (This is *also* a failure to
experiment, but for a completely different reason.) In that case, I
figured he'd look at the notes, realize that his complete verses
weren't matching the fragments, and try a different arrangement.
But, when I spell it out like that, maybe it's not a likely case.
(Who's going to look at the notebook and *remember* what it looked
like at the beginning of part 2? And if you're pulling intentions off,
you've probably already gotten the idea that they should be
experimented with.)
And designing for an imaginary player is always an uncertain business.
So, what do you (real :) players think? Are you more likely to get
stuck by Route One or Route Two? What specific value did the notebook
have for you in the second part of the game? Would it have been
equally valuable if the fragmentary notes were *not* hinty?
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
If the Bush administration hasn't thrown you in military prison
without trial, it's for one reason: they don't feel like it. Not
because of the Fifth Amendment.
JDC
Andrew Plotkin wrote:
> So DJ didn't experiment with the different arrangements, so he never
> picked up on the patterns of what's consistent with what. From my
> point of view, he was playing directly from the hint file (which is
> less satisfying by definition). But of course from *his* point of
> view, he was looking at the available information and taking the most
> direct route through the game.
>
> (Question: did anybody else have the same experience with _Wallpaper_?
> I don't remember any such descriptions from the post-Comp reviews, but
> I might have forgotten one, and of course not all players posted
> reviews.)
My memory has gone as to how I arrived at this, but I didn't realize
that there were multiple solutions either. I may have been using the
walkthrough too much, but I think I was also specifically trying to
fill in the initial notebook fragments. Looking back at my notes, I see
that I wondered whether the resulting "poem" was original or not, so I
clearly didn't realize then that there were other possibilities.
Perhaps this was because I treated the notebook in the first part as a
list of things to figure out (as in, these are the things that you will
need to know to get through here), so I tended to treat it as a a list
of things to do in the second part.
Replaying this has been on my IF to-do list since the end of the comp,
but that won't help me answer your questions :).
-JDC
Emily Boegheim
> But in part 2, the notebook is a mix of initial orientation,
> atmosphere, and hints. I'm happy with the first two functions, but the
> third obviously has the capacity to go wrong. The player may not even
> be *expecting* hints, and therefore may think of the notebook as
> providing primary information rather than "last resort" information --
> this is how I'm interpreting DJ's experience. Even if that doesn't
> happen, it's providing hints (to the "real puzzle") whether the player
> wants them or not. Which is tacky.
My attitude was certainly that the notes indicated the One True Way to distribute
the intentions. I remember that during the first part, the PC would sometimes notice
and note down things that I hadn't figured out yet. So I ended up with the idea that
the PC was an extremely bright individual (smarter than I?) and had some very
definite plans for this house. My part, I supposed, was simply to help him carry out
these plans, not to start coming up with fancy ideas of my own.
Emily
u...@mail.ru
"""Andrew Plotkin wrote:
> What actually happens is that the notes begin with a fragmentary
> (half-composed, as it were) version of *a* winning arrangement. As you
> place each intent on a person, the corresponding verse becomes
> complete. It does this whether you've gotten onto a winnable track or
> a dead end; but the complete verse only matches the fragment in that
> one winning case. If you find a different winning arrangement, you
> wind up with a verse which is not consistent with the original
> fragments.
>
> So DJ didn't experiment with the different arrangements, so he never
> picked up on the patterns of what's consistent with what. From my
> point of view, he was playing directly from the hint file (which is
> less satisfying by definition). But of course from *his* point of
> view, he was looking at the available information and taking the most
> direct route through the game.
>
> (Question: did anybody else have the same experience with _Wallpaper_?
> I don't remember any such descriptions from the post-Comp reviews, but
> I might have forgotten one, and of course not all players posted
> reviews.)
As far as I remember, I used the notepad in part 2 like this: when I
put an intention, I'd look up what changed in the notepad. When I
noticed there were names changing in the original verse (that happens
if you, say, try to poison someone else than originally suggested by
the notepad), I'd think of it as an indication of making something
wrong, and would roll back (by means of UNDO or RESTORE). I certainly
wasn't inclined to experiment with alternative solutions - to a no
small degree because of the two hour limit (I wanted to complete the
game within it). Thus, I never had a chance to find out there might be
another winning path.
> So, what do you (real :) players think? Are you more likely to get
> stuck by Route One or Route Two?
Well, as I said I've never been aware a Route Two exists... until I've
read your post;).
> What specific value did the notebook
> have for you in the second part of the game?
Mainly hints/guidance. A certain entertainment value was also
present;).
> Would it have been
> equally valuable if the fragmentary notes were *not* hinty?
Since I'm not sure how one could make the notes not hinty, and what
they'd look like if they were(n't), I just can't answer this question.
I think it'd probably be an entirely different gaming experience.
Valentine
Michael D. Hilborn
> Hi, folks...
>
> Issue #47 is here at last. Subscribers should already have their
> copies. The rest of you can go to the usual place... i.e., see my sig.
>
Just wanted to say thanks for putting this issue together. The
interviews are great (I always enjoy reading what authors have to say
about their work and others), and I learned about a few new sites that
are out there.
--MDH
Andrew Plotkin
>
> Andrew Plotkin wrote:
> > (Question: did anybody else have the same experience with _Wallpaper_?
> > I don't remember any such descriptions from the post-Comp reviews, but
> > I might have forgotten one, and of course not all players posted
> > reviews.)
>
> My memory has gone as to how I arrived at this, but I didn't realize
> that there were multiple solutions either. I may have been using the
> walkthrough too much, but I think I was also specifically trying to
> fill in the initial notebook fragments.
Here, Emily Boegheim <emily.b...@gmail.com> wrote:
> My attitude was certainly that the notes indicated the One True Way
> to distribute the intentions. I remember that during the first part,
> the PC would sometimes notice and note down things that I hadn't
> figured out yet. So I ended up with the idea that the PC was an
> extremely bright individual (smarter than I?) and had some very
> definite plans for this house. My part, I supposed, was simply to
> help him carry out these plans, not to start coming up with fancy
> ideas of my own.
Here, u...@mail.ru wrote:
> As far as I remember, I used the notepad in part 2 like this: when I
> put an intention, I'd look up what changed in the notepad. When I
> noticed there were names changing in the original verse (that happens
> if you, say, try to poison someone else than originally suggested by
> the notepad), I'd think of it as an indication of making something
> wrong, and would roll back (by means of UNDO or RESTORE).
Well, it's always heartening to find out that people have been playing
a different game than the one you thought you wrote. :)
But some of them disliked that game whereas others liked it. So I have
completely mixed impulses about whether I should change it. It's very
likely that if I hadn't provided hints, fewer players would have
finished the game. That's always the case, but I'd still like it to
be clearer that these *are* hints. (And, now that it's out of the Comp
environment, new players won't feel the time pressure that u...@mail.ru
described.)
I suppose the Way Too Much Work solution is to *not* give hints
initially -- make the fragmentary verses vaguer. But if the player
manages to get stuck -- that is, if there is no way to place another
intention without first removing one -- *add* further notes to the
notebook, suggesting alternatives.
This is... too much work, for the moment. (I didn't set up the game
to allow constraint-checking outside of the player's actual moves.)
It's the best idea I've got, however.
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
If the Bush administration hasn't shipped you to Syria for interrogation, it's
for one reason: they don't feel like it. Not because of the Eighth Amendment.
u...@mail.ru
> Well, it's always heartening to find out that people have been playing
> a different game than the one you thought you wrote. :)
>
> But some of them disliked that game whereas others liked it.
Uhm, that's the case for virtually ANY game. You, with your experience,
should have known this already;).
But, judging by the way it ranked in the Comp, we who liked it were in
vast majority;).
> So I have completely mixed impulses about whether I should change it. It's very
> likely that if I hadn't provided hints, fewer players would have
> finished the game. That's always the case, but I'd still like it to
> be clearer that these *are* hints. (And, now that it's out of the Comp
> environment, new players won't feel the time pressure that uux...@mail.ru
> described.)
I think you shouldn't. Because it's a) clearly very much work, and b)
not worth it.
> I suppose the Way Too Much Work solution is to *not* give hints
> initially -- make the fragmentary verses vaguer. But if the player
> manages to get stuck -- that is, if there is no way to place another
> intention without first removing one -- *add* further notes to the
> notebook, suggesting alternatives.
>
> This is... too much work, for the moment. (I didn't set up the game
> to allow constraint-checking outside of the player's actual moves.)
> It's the best idea I've got, however.
An easier way would be to just include an ABOUT section in the game
that'd tell the player there are multiple solutions. Maybe it's not as
elegant, but it's effective enough.
Valentine
Mark Tilford
>
> So, what do you (real :) players think? Are you more likely to get
> stuck by Route One or Route Two? What specific value did the notebook
> have for you in the second part of the game? Would it have been
> equally valuable if the fragmentary notes were *not* hinty?
>
> --Z
>
I was using the notebook heavily in part 1, but somehow didn't even
think to try it in part 2.
Mark Tilford
Re one comment on DM / SF:
I was under the impression that linking to Pierre in particular would
have been a bad idea. (Remember the reason why Pierre could perform the
lavori d'Aracne.)
Emily Short
That's part of it, but I had other reasons as well. (I chatted with
Paul some by email about this, so I'll just reproduce what I told him:)
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
P
A
C
E
Paul wrote:
> However, the logic of linking in Damnatio
> Memoriae parts ways with S-F in several areas, so I found it a disadvantage to
> have S-F so fresh in my memory as I played DM.
Yeah, though this is entirely intentional. The idea is that the
underlying metaphysics of what happens with linking is quite
complicated, and people in different ages mastered different aspects of
it to different degrees. (The feelies for S-F go into more detail about
this, but they're hardly required reading.) Then, too, while Pierre is
decent at using links, it's clear even in S-F that he is not as fully
trained as the Count and Marie, and that there are all sorts of things
that he is unable to do. So the combination of different training and a
different set of cultural knowledge and taboos about the Lavori explain
the differences between S-F's system and the one in DM.
In particular, our hero in DM is considerably more reckless than Pierre
-- his life and his work are in immediate danger, after all. What's
more, he has learned his magic from the examples of people like
Augustus, Livia, and his mother Julia, who would probably have been as
daring and ruthless in employing the Lavori as they were in every other
aspect of their lives. The idea of using another person as a kind of
involuntary reverse-voodoo-doll, absorbing all the damage to your
system, is a fairly inhuman one and might have been abandoned under the
influence of the early church, or at the point where slavery as such
became less common; though there are still shadows of this idea in the
way the Count makes use of Pierre to save Marie from drowning. (On the
other hand, it's obvious that the Picture of Dorian Gray slipped
sideways into our universe from one where the Lavori operate...)
Second point of backstory: Agrippa Postumus is especially skilled in
using his art for textual manipulation in a precise and scholarly way.
In S-F we see related texts affecting one another when reverse-linked,
but Pierre lacks the skill to make any important use of this, and there
it's basically an easter egg. By contrast, Agrippa Postumus has spent
years and years on the (presumably delicate and arduous) task of
linking manuscripts together to remove errors in the text and to
produce translations. It may be a little self-indulgent of me to invent
a branch of magic whose purpose is to do classical scholarship, but we
all have our own strange daydreams.
In any case, what this means for the play of the game is that he's able
to link any written object with any other -- which is why he can link
up the letter, the painted vase, the real vase, etc.
It's possible that the game doesn't do a good enough job of getting
these points across, obviously. It wouldn't be particularly hard, I
imagine, to add some extra messages when the player first links things
together, if you feel that more explanation would make the game feel
more solidly thought-out or accessible to S-F players.
Emily Short
I also used it very little in part 2. And I enjoyed part 2 more, but on
the first playthrough I only got so far as to tell that there was minor
flexibility in the intention placement, and didn't try major
alternative approaches.
Mike Snyder
news:1169526493.4...@38g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>
> I also used it very little in part 2. And I enjoyed part 2 more, but on
> the first playthrough I only got so far as to tell that there was minor
> flexibility in the intention placement, and didn't try major
> alternative approaches.
I used it a lot in both parts.
I realize now that the game never actually told me that alternate intentions
were wrong, but I too had concluded that the partial intentions in the
notebook were the One Right Way. I noticed that I could make this change at
times by using the "wrong" intentions with the "wrong" people. If I had to
guess at why I thought it was wrong, it *might* be because I thought the
poem as a whole wouldn't make sense or read right in those cases.
I have transcripts, but I haven't looked back at them. To Andrew: If you're
interested in one player's experience with the intentions, I can email them
to you.
---- Mike.
Reiko
Emily Boegheim wrote:
> My attitude was certainly that the notes indicated the One True Way to distribute
> the intentions. I remember that during the first part, the PC would sometimes notice
> and note down things that I hadn't figured out yet. So I ended up with the idea that
> the PC was an extremely bright individual (smarter than I?) and had some very
> definite plans for this house. My part, I supposed, was simply to help him carry out
> these plans, not to start coming up with fancy ideas of my own.
>
> Emily
This is also how I saw the notebook. Although, I remember a post by
Emily Short saying that in the first part, the notebook seemed more of
an aid to knowing what we *would* know if we were really in the house.
We might be able to tell which doors opened which passages by hearing
them move and knowing which passages were in which directions, for
instance. So I didn't really think the PC was necessarily that much
smarter than the player. I thought it was a great way to simulate the
puzzle by giving us the information we couldn't get by just reading the
text.
Anyway, in the second part, I actually had no idea intentions could be
removed. I didn't end up experimenting with that at all. For the most
part, I was able to figure out what the fragments meant and fulfill the
winning arrangement, although since in one (or two?) cases, there was
more than one intention per death, I needed a little help. I remember
one case where I thought I could have been wrong about where I put the
intention, because for the poisoning the drink one, I had a choice of
three drinks to put it in. I think the game accepted the first one I
put it in, and I eventually came to a winning ending. I don't remember
if the stanza for that one matched the fragments or not, so I don't
know if I just chose the "correct" one by luck, or if I ended up
finding an alternate ending or not. (How many winning combinations are
there?) But I didn't have any idea at the time that there were
alternate solutions. There were many places the game wouldn't let me
put intentions, so I thought it would keep me from doing it wrong at
all.
~Reiko