Interactive Fiction Reviewers Wanted...
pet...@hotmail.com
interactive fiction, I've found many useful resources. However, my one major
disappointment with the world of IF is that there seem to be as many games as
there are players. There are hundreds of games sitting on ftp.gmd.de, free
to anyone who wants to play them, but the only content you'd be able to find
concerning most of these games on the web would be limited to a few sentences
on a review page. I like Inform games and contest winners as much as the
next guy, but it seems like hundreds of games are brushed under the rug and
ignored by all while only a few here and there receive any attention and real
hype. My experience playing IF tells me that this discrepancy is not
entirely justified. Not all the best known games are the best...heck, I'd
even go so far as to say that not every single word of Graham Nelson's
necessarily qualifies as fine art.
My point in writing all this is not to wind anyone up. I hope to be able to
provide a solution to this problem, with the aid of a few newsgroup readers.
My idea is to form a group of 8-10 folks who will play the heck out of one IF
game a week, and then individually review said game on an as of yet
unestablished web site. In order to encourage idea exchanges between
reviewers, I'd also like to form a mailing list for just the members of the
reviewing group, so that they may share their thoughts concerning the game of
the week as they get more and more accustomed to the game. That's the idea,
anyway. I'm not necessarily going to go to all the work of setting all this
up unless some folks are really interested in this.
If you are interested, then just drop me a line(my email address is
pet...@hotmail.com). You don't have to be a brilliant writer or reviewer to
join - just somebody with opinions. You should be somewhat experienced
playing interactive fiction(and should know how to use the various
interpreters). As I see it, the focus of the site would be on
shareware/freeware games easily obtainable by all, but commercial games could
be included, too, if enough of us owned copies of the game in question. If
you're REALLY interested in this, I'll let you design the web page if you
really want to. I've got plenty of other projects to work on...not exactly
pining away for more hours to waste my time. However, I don't want anything
too elaborate. It would be more important just to have a site up and running
than it would be to have all sorts of neat bells and whistles. Heck, it
could be Lynx enhanced, for all I care.
So, what do you fine folk think?
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
Sam
--
That is all
*Click*
pet...@hotmail.com
> SPAG and XYZZY e-zines do reviews don't they?
>
Assuredly they do, and that is not all! There are several other IF review
sites out and about. It wasn't a shortage of reviews sites that sparked my
idea; it was the type of material the existing sites tended to review, and
the way they presented their reviews that. If you want a three line
description of most of the games on ftp.gmd.de you can simply head over to
Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive and browse to your hearts
content. You might it find very useful. But, on the other hand, how much
does a three line review really tell you about a game? You have to
completely trust the reviewer's judgement on games, or waste a lot of time
downloading hundreds of games to see if he was right after all. It also
seemed to me that most sites shyed away from older games and new works by
independent programmers not using TADS or Inform. I was unable to find a
site that supplied detailed, opionated reviews of all the various types of
interactive fiction...or one that even tried to. The known and the unknown,
the old and the new, AGT and BASIC games right along with Informers! I'm
quite aware that no matter how many folks respond to my request that it isn't
feasible to review every game out there. No! Only a few each month.
However, I would like those few put out each month to be about the most
useful and interesting reviews you'll ever find concerning the great wide
world of interactive fiction. Reviews with an emphasis on variety, and a
lack of regard for trends. Now, is that crazy or what?
Lelah Conrad
message to rgif something like this:
Subject: [IF Reviewers' Game of the Week] The Roadrunner by I.M.
Wiley
(In the body of the message give the deadline for submission of the
reviews and where to send them. You could provide the location of the
game file, and the reviewing website url.)
Then, people could do one some weeks and not others.
Overall, this seems more doable to me than the competition, where we
get a zillion games all at once. I know some people seem to handle
this well (like all of our illustrious, dedicated, diligent regular
comp reviewers) but your idea might provide a year round venue for
less ambitious folks (like me!)
Lelah
David Cornelson
news:37585f1...@news.nu-world.com...
> I like your idea. It would be helpful if you posted each week a
> message to rgif something like this:
>
> Subject: [IF Reviewers' Game of the Week] The Roadrunner by I.M.
> Wiley
>
Well - if I ever get the damn thing working - reviews could be accessible
from http://www.iflibrary.org - but there's the catch - it's broke - and I
haven't had time to fix it. I have one volunteer that may get it up to speed
though.
If you need a place to put reviews - I already have a fairly extensive
database of the games and authors online. The database includes a spot for
reviews - I just need to get the form for that working.
Let me know and I could help by putting the game you select on a "Game of
the Week Review Page".
Jarb
- yes yes - so I overreacted - i'm still here - sheesh...
Magnus Olsson
>> SPAG and XYZZY e-zines do reviews don't they?
>
>Assuredly they do, and that is not all! There are several other IF review
>sites out and about. It wasn't a shortage of reviews sites that sparked my
>idea; it was the type of material the existing sites tended to review, and
>the way they presented their reviews that.
What do you think is wrong about the way SPAG presents its reviews?
This is not a flame, but a serious question: any input on how to make
the 'zine better is appreciated (though I reserve the right not to act
on it :-)).
>But, on the other hand, how much
>does a three line review really tell you about a game? You have to
>completely trust the reviewer's judgement on games, or waste a lot of time
>downloading hundreds of games to see if he was right after all.
This is, in my experience, just as true for 500-line reviews as for
three-line ones. Reviews are subjective; that's their nature.
>It also
>seemed to me that most sites shyed away from older games and new works by
>independent programmers not using TADS or Inform. I was unable to find a
>site that supplied detailed, opionated reviews of all the various types of
>interactive fiction...or one that even tried to. The known and the unknown,
>the old and the new, AGT and BASIC games right along with Informers!
In that case, I think that you either haven't looked very carefully at
SPAG (which, BTW, is a 'zine, not a site; there is a SPAG web site
(http://welcome.to/spag) but SPAG isn't the site and the site isn't
SPAG), or you have very high standards.
SPAG does publish "detailed, opionated" [sic] reviews of all the
various types of IF (as long as it's text based - but what you're
writing above gives me the impression that's what you mean). But SPAG
depends entirely on what people submit - SPAG doesn't have a will of
its own, and doesn't have a staff of reviewers from whom to commission
reviews of particular games. I suppose people tend to write reviews
about games that have touched them in some way - be it positively or
negatively.
>I'm
>quite aware that no matter how many folks respond to my request that it isn't
>feasible to review every game out there. No! Only a few each month.
>However, I would like those few put out each month to be about the most
>useful and interesting reviews you'll ever find concerning the great wide
>world of interactive fiction. Reviews with an emphasis on variety, and a
>lack of regard for trends. Now, is that crazy or what?
No, not crazy, just very ambitious.
And what do you mean by "regard for trend"? That people only review
the new games because the old ones aren't trendy enough? I suspect
there's a different reason: people only have so much time for playing
and reviewing IF, and with so much (relatively speaking, of course)
new stuff out there, it's only natural they'd want to try the new
releases first.
--
Magnus Olsson (m...@df.lth.se, zeb...@pobox.com)
------ http://www.pobox.com/~zebulon ------
pet...@hotmail.com
> What do you think is wrong about the way SPAG presents its reviews?
> This is not a flame, but a serious question: any input on how to make
> the 'zine better is appreciated (though I reserve the right not to act
> on it :-)).
Oh, there's certainly nothing wrong with SPAG; it is a fine resource. There
are in fact many fine web sites devoted to IF, too. However, I couldn't find
exactly what I was looking for in any of them, hence the idea to create a new
site. As for SPAG, you said it: it's a zine. It is a timely publication
that is most interesting when read soon after an issue's initial release. As
a storinghouse for reviews, I find it pretty inefficient. Sure, you can go
through the mountains of text archived on the web site, but it is quite hard
to find a particular game review. The game review section makes it only
slightly easier: huge pages again that are not so easy to wade through, and
not all the issues are indexed yet, which means you might still have to look
through the volumnious archives! Why isn't there a search function? The way
SPAG reviews are presented do differ in a number of ways compared to what I
had envisioned. SPAG reviews are(usually...I have seen some exceptions)
written by single reviewers who follow a uniform standard of rating games, as
opposed to my idea of a site that insists upon multiple reviews per game,
with the style of rating and reviewing left completely up to the individual
reviewer.
> This is, in my experience, just as true for 500-line reviews as for
> three-line ones. Reviews are subjective; that's their nature.
True, but I think it is more illuminating and reliable to hear more than one
person's opinion, subjective though every review may be. Certainly multiple
reviews could provide a better, clearer understanding of the subject game to
the review readers.
> And what do you mean by "regard for trend"? That people only review
> the new games because the old ones aren't trendy enough? I suspect
> there's a different reason: people only have so much time for playing
> and reviewing IF, and with so much (relatively speaking, of course)
> new stuff out there, it's only natural they'd want to try the new
> releases first.
Well, it's only natural that experienced game players be most interested in
what's new, as they've already spent time with the older games. But I can
think of five or six excellent text games easily just from the past three
years that have gotten very little publicity, and, alas, no mention from SPAG
readers, either. Instead, I keep seeing the same games reviewed over and
over again on different sites(and, er, zines too), and I do get a little
tired of it.
Playing IF is just a hobby for me, but I take what I enjoy pretty seriously.
I try to taste everything that is out there, and measure what it is I like
in different games. I certainly measure games on a individual
basis...statements like "this game is not up to regular Inform standards"
make no sense to me. How can, say, Inform have standards? The quality of
Inform games is dependent upon the work of the game programmers. The author
may have a good base to work from, but where he/she take it is completely up
to them. But here we have a prime example of trends in the world of IF:
people begin to assume that(just an example) Inform games are the best around
because a few of them in particular have been so ecstatically reviewed, and
they begin to play solely those. They become comfortable with Inform, and
they don't branch out. This I don't think is a good thing, but could
anything else be expected?
With all that said, I do think SPAG is a commendable zine. I should take
back my previous statement that "nobody even TRIES" to cover the wide world
of IF. SPAG does. But the zine format it is in is completely different from
most review web sites that I'm familiar with. I don't really consider the
two formats to be that closely related.
pet...@hotmail.com
> I like your idea. It would be helpful if you posted each week a
> message to rgif something like this:
>
> Subject: [IF Reviewers' Game of the Week] The Roadrunner by I.M.
> Wiley
>
> (In the body of the message give the deadline for submission of the
> reviews and where to send them. You could provide the location of the
> game file, and the reviewing website url.)
>
> Then, people could do one some weeks and not others.
>
> Overall, this seems more doable to me than the competition, where we
> get a zillion games all at once. I know some people seem to handle
> this well (like all of our illustrious, dedicated, diligent regular
> comp reviewers) but your idea might provide a year round venue for
> less ambitious folks (like me!)
>
I think that is a really excellent idea! I realize too that a lot of people
would rather share some brief commentary on certain games instead of writing
out lengthy reviews of them. Thus, in addition to the reviews, we could also
setup a comment page on each game.
pet...@hotmail.com
> Well - if I ever get the damn thing working - reviews could be accessible from http://www.iflibrary.org - but there's the catch - it's broke - and I haven't had time to fix it. I have one volunteer that may get it up to speed though.
This might be a workable plan. I'm in no hurry to get the site up and
running(it's still in a planning stage!), but how long do you think it'll
take before www.iflibrary.org is back on its feet?
Incidentally, I originally planned the choice of game of the week to be
alternated between a number of different folks. Let's say that I choose the
game of the week for the first week of every month. As webmaster of
iflibrary.org, David would logically choose the GOTW for the second week.
That leaves us two weeks open...any volunteers?
Dugan Chen
> [on SPAG]
> Sure, you can go through the mountains of text archived on
> the web site, but it is quite hard to find a particular game
> review. The game review section makes it only slightly
> easier: huge pages again that are not so easy to wade
> through, and not all the issues are indexed yet, which
> means you might still have to look through the volumnious
> archives! Why isn't there a search function?
Just do what I do: download every issue and then use grep.
Jonadab the Unsightly One
> This is, in my experience, just as true for 500-line reviews as for
> three-line ones. Reviews are subjective; that's their nature.
Yes, indeed. After reading Zarf's glowing review of The Last Express
I went and downloaded the demo... and was distinctly unimpressed with
everything about it. So I would conclude that reviews are indeed
subjective.
-- jonadab
Username in email address is dyslexic; correct to jonadab
Marnie Parker
I realize I am piping in late, but I am catching up with posts I missed during
my "vacation".
I have been hoping someone would do this for YEARS. Too many games never seem
to get reviewed at all.
Sorry, I can't help you personally as I am a poor reviewer.
Doe :-)
-----------------------------
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IF Art Gallery - http://members.aol.com/iffyart/gallery.htm
"I can live for two months on a good compliment." Mark Twain