Tag: emily short

Glass by Emily Short [misc]

[This review appeared in issue #45 of SPAG. The issue was published on July 17, 2006.]

I’ve barely begun to explore the capabilities of Inform 7 (I7), partly because its appearance has rekindled my interest in actually playing IF. In that vein, I continue to explore the games that were released with I7 as “Worked Examples”. Having made my way through Bronze, Emily Short’s adaptation of Beauty And The Beast, I came next to Glass, in which she similarly adapts Cinderella. Actually, perhaps “similarly” isn’t the right word here — where Bronze was all about landscape and puzzles, Glass resides on the other side of the spectrum, focusing entirely on character and conversation.

There are other differences, too. Although both works are meant primarily as example I7 code, Bronze feels like a full-fledged game, while Glass plays much more like a demo, or perhaps an experimental comp entry. That isn’t to say that there aren’t interesting ideas embedded in Glass — there are, and I plan to discuss them — but the experience of playing it feels altogether more slight than solving Bronze. Not only is it simply a smaller game, it also demands less interaction from the player; “Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z.Z” is a valid walkthrough, though perhaps not to the best ending.

Those endings are important. Like some other short replay-cycle games, Glass layers on story elements by making less-than-optimal endings the most easily reachable. There aren’t a terribly large number of endings (another factor making the game feel a bit thin), but it’s unlikely that most players will reach the best ending first. Along the way, they’ll learn more about the motivations of each character, and in fact more about some hidden details of the game’s main scene.

This information in turn adds meaning to the rest of the paths to be found in the game. It’s a variation on the “accretive PC” model of knowledge I discussed in my review of Lock & Key on IF-Review. The difference is that the news gained through these sub-optimal endings doesn’t so much help the player better direct the PC or better solve the game, but it does lend additional drama to the other branches of the story. I suppose this game gives us accretive NPCs more than an accretive PC.

However, there are some tricks at work with PC knowledge, too. The player/PC knowledge divide is one of the thornier fundamental problems of IF — a player new to the game will almost inevitably know less about the character and game-world than the PC does, and both the game and the player often start out by scrambling to narrow the gap. There are some workarounds for this, amnesia being the more traditional and popular, while accretive PCs are a more recent innovation.

Glass has found another: base your game on a story with which the vast majority of your audience is already familiar. Bronze was an imaginative variation on Beauty and The Beast, but it neither shed a great deal of light on the original tale nor did it require much information about that tale from the player. Our familiarity with the base story helps us get up to speed on who the PC is, but it isn’t otherwise exploited. However, in Glass, the player must bring to bear knowledge from outside the game in order to reach the best ending. For anyone familiar with most any version the fairy tale, this gambit should work well, though perhaps not right away. Still, it’s an ingenious way of bridging the information gap between player and PC — I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of this strategy before. I suppose there are only a limited number of stories with which authors can assume widespread audience familiarity, and an even smaller number of those that aren’t still under copyright.

With this bridge in place, then, Glass is free to disconcert us a bit as well. For one thing, the player character has some rather surprising qualities (and that’s all I’ll say…), which are left for players to discover rather than being announced upfront. Not only that, the game’s take on the Cinderella tale is less than traditional. In keeping with many modern treatments of fairy tales, its approach to the story’s villains is a little more sympathetic, and its portrayal of the heroes is a little more ambivalent. I would have expected Emily Short to bring some subversive ideas to any fairy tale she touched, and she doesn’t disappoint here.

One more note: in the article I wrote for the long-awaited IF Theory book, I mentioned that it was hard for me to imagine how the basic component of landscape could be extracted from interactive fiction, since as soon as the first room description appears, the game introduces a concept of geographical location. Well, Glass is the game that breaks that model — it has no room descriptions whatsoever. That doesn’t mean it’s without a landscape, though. It’s just that instead of presenting a landscape of Place, Glass instead gives us a landscape of Concept. The NPCs traverse a conversational terrain with particular goals in mind, and at every prompt the PC can try to steer that travel to influence its destination. It’s a compact territory, but well worth exploring.

Damnatio Memoriae by Emily Short [misc]

[This review appeared in issue #47 of SPAG, in the “SPAG Specifics” sections. Note: that means there are SPOILERS AHEAD. The issue was published on January 16, 2007.]

Damnatio Memoriae is a tiny game, but it’s got plenty of quality. There are a few multiple-solution puzzles and the skeleton of a story built around an “accretive PC” model, where a winning playthrough only comes from the lessons taught by a few losing iterations. The writing is reasonably good, as one might expect from Emily Short, and the setting puts her considerable knowledge of ancient Rome to use. It takes hardly any time to play, and repays exploration with a surprising depth of implementation.

All that said, I think I made two mistakes in approaching DM. One was assuming that because it shares a universe with Savoir-Faire, the details of its magic system would be identical to that game. The other mistake was forgetting that this game’s raison d’etre is to be example code for Inform 7, not necessarily to be a complete and satisfying game in itself. Consequently, I found myself feeling disappointed by finding only anticlimactic, abrupt endings, and so turned to the walkthrough after winning but still feeling unsatisfied. From there, I became confused and frustrated by the way this game’s magic differed from that of S-F. These factors combined to make my playing experience less than fun.

It didn’t help that the first winning ending I reached was, I think, buggily incomplete. There was a “time’s up” message and a “You have won” message, but no connective material between them, which of course felt bare and anticlimactic. I’m assuming this was a bug, but there were a number of places in the game where logical connections felt missing. For instance, in a branch where I had killed Clemens, left him in the study, and ducked outside, I thought I’d hide under a pile of hay. Here’s what happened:

>hide
What do you want to hide under?

>hay
Without some decoy, they'll certainly look hard enough to find you.

What, the corpse of my doppelganger up in the study isn’t enough of a decoy?

I chalk these lacunae up to the fact that the point here is not to create a perfect, polished game but rather to demonstrate Inform 7 rules within the context of a nominally game-like structure. Also, despite the fact that this game is tiny, the number of possible interactions between objects makes for a plethora of implementation details, so it’s natural that without extensive beta-testing (as a full-fledged game would have received), some would be missed. As I said, I mistakenly entered the game with the wrong expectation about that, and in any case, I feel like I’m beginning to cross over into the uncouth practice of airing bugs in a review rather than privately to the author, so let me move on to a different topic: the functional differences between this game’s magic system and that of Savoir-Faire.

I had never played S-F to completion, so I prefaced my approach to this game by playing through its larger cousin. Savoir-Faire is a marvelous game, with an internally consistent magic system of linking and reverse linking that enables both its puzzles and its story. 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.

For one thing, Savoir-Faire disallows linking anything to the PC, saying, “Linking yourself is generally considered a very bad idea.” In DM, however, linking the PC is an important tool. This hurdle is easily cleared, but it leaves the player to figure out how linkages between people operate, and their operations are in fact rather counterintuitive. On top of this, DM also adds a new kind of linkage: slave linkage. The differences between the three types of links can be subtle indeed. Consider these three messages:

>link clemens to me
(first unlinking Clemens)
You build a mutually-effective link between Clemens and yourself.

>reverse link clemens to me
You reverse link Clemens to yourself (son of Julia and Agrippa, who died before you were born). While one of you lives, so does the other.

>slave link clemens to me
You build the link, enslaving Clemens to yourself. It is an expedient Augustus has been using for years: now any attempt upon your life will instead kill your slave.

On the face of it, these messages would seem to indicate that the regular link allows you to control Clemens, the reverse link causes harm to both when anything is inflicted on either, while the slave link transfers that harm from you to Clemens. However, a simple link doesn’t allow you to control Clemens. Instead, a regular link behaves in the way I expected a reverse link to act, and vice versa.

The other significant difference between S-F‘s linking and that in DM is that DM is much less consistent about disallowing linkages. In Savoir-Faire, you could depend on the fact that unless two objects had some sort of common quality, they could not be linked. Damnatio Memoriae is a little more capricious:

>link window to pitcher
The window is insufficiently similar to the painted glass pitcher of water for the two to be linked.

>link letter to pitcher
You build a mutually-effective link between the old letter and the painted glass pitcher of water.

I was able to understand the first result a bit more when I realized belatedly that there’s probably no glass in the window, but that still doesn’t explain how I can link the pitcher to a letter. Similarly:

>link pitcher to clemens
This would work better if the painted glass pitcher of water were a person.

>link vase to clemens
You build a mutually-effective link between the vase and Clemens.

I’m not sure how much these inconsistencies would have bothered me if I hadn’t just played Savoir-Faire, but that game sets a standard that Damnatio Memoriae fails to meet. Consequently, I felt a lot of annoyance at seeing solutions in the walkthrough that never would have occurred to me, since I was expecting DM‘s magic system to be more like that of S-F.

This is a whole lot of kvetching over a sample game, and in a way, it’s a nice problem to have: Emily’s work, even other samples like Bronze, is of such impeccable quality that I’ve begun to hold even her slightest output to what may be a ridiculously high standard. When a game like Damnatio Memoriae fails to meet that standard, I’m more disappointed than I would be in another author’s work, and linking (sorry) this game to one of her real masterpieces only aggravated the problem.

I guess all this is to say that I’d love to see other games set in the various historical periods of the Lavori d’Aracne universe, but I hope they’re created as games rather than as samples. That way, the focus can be on story and craft, rather than on teaching the features of a system. That’s my selfish desire as a player, mind you — no doubt when I’m working on learning Inform 7 I’ll wish just the opposite.

SmoochieComp reviews [misc]

[Also in 2001, I was asked to judge a minicomp organized by Emily Short. It was a SmoochieComp, themed around love and romance. Like PrologueComp, I’ve added names where authors submitted pseudonymously. Unlike PrologueComp, the entrants were proper games, albeit small ones.]

These SmoochieComp reviews are written in a similar style to my reviews of games from the Fall Competition, but their ratings are structured a little differently. Since the SmoochieComp doesn’t ask participants to rate the games on a scale of 1 to 10, I decided instead on a scale of one to five smooches, similar to the star scale used by many movie reviewers. Turns out most games huddled around the middle of that spectrum — the lowest rating I gave was two smooches, and the highest rating was four smooches. Still, the quality index was satisfyingly high, especially for a mini-comp, since these often tend to generate games that are playable in ten minutes and feel like they were written in thirty.

As I did for the Comp00 games I played, I’ve held onto the transcripts from my interaction with all SmoochieComp games (except Bantam, whose environment didn’t allow scripting.) I’ll happily send the appropriate transcripts to any author who emails me a request. I’ll probably delete all of these around March 15, so don’t delay.

Finally, these reviews are presented in the order in which I played the games. I ran a little randomizer to determine what this order would be, and strangely, what it came up with differed very little from alphabetical order, Oh well, that’s randomness for you.

And now, on with the reviews…

1981 by Adam Cadre as A.D. McMlxxxi

Urgh. This game puts me in a tough spot. It’s a small piece, with an important twist, and it’s very difficult to talk about without spoilers. In fact, most of the things I can think of to say about it necessarily involve spoiling the surprise. However, I am committed to writing this entire review without giving away the secret — we’ll see how it goes. 1981 puts you in the shoes of an apparently lovelorn young man who has cashed in some stock money to travel to the college town where the girl of his dreams resides. At the outset of the game, you stand outside her dormitory, decked out in new jacket and new boots, clutching a sheaf of poems you’ve written for her and trying to get up the nerve to walk up to her door. At this point, the game teeters on a fine line, and the player can’t be sure whether it’s going to tip towards a cute story of shy college sweethearts or towards a Moment-of-Hope-like tale of unrequited affection.

As soon as you go to the door or read the poems, 1981 careens over the precipice into a tale that not only deals with unrequited affection, but the darker themes of obsession and even insanity. The game gets these themes across in lots of different ways, from the subtle to the blatant. For the latter, we have the poems, which teem with disturbing images and buckets of adolescent angst. Lines like “Regardless of the laughter of children/ I cannot continue to pretend/ I cannot continue to live” sound like a teenager trying to imitate The Cure, but other poems mention psychiatric visits and murder, clueing us in that something that something more serious than pimply puppy love is at stake here. On the more subtle side, there’s the first room description:

New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven. The worst place on earth. The town is dirty and industrial, the students are sloppy, everything is horribly expensive. And you had to cash in $3600 of your stock to get here. But it was necessary. Four years at this place is enough to ravage anyone. You have to rescue her, your first true love.

Her dormitory lies to the north.

The game’s encapsulation of all New Haven into a few desultory, derogatory sentences demonstrates the PC’s creepily jealous disdain for the world surrounding his would-be lover, and his contrasting focus on her dorm building reveals his single-minded obsession.

From this point forward, 1981 straitjackets the player into its plot, offering no choices at any point, or at least not any which allow any alteration of the storyline. This lack of interactivity gets particularly chafing when the PC is such a disturbed and disturbing individual, but the PC’s nature also offers a rational justification for such linearity. If Alex in Rameses suffered from Social Anxiety Disorder, the PC in 1981 is in the grips of full-blown psychosis. The writing and pacing of the game, as well as the elements it includes, deftly outline the boundaries of this illness, and the effect is chilling. By putting the player into such a twisted mind, 1981 sheds valuable light on its subject; standing beneath that light is a deeply uncomfortable experience — even more uncomfortable than trying to write an entire review of the game without giving away its secret.

Rating: Four smooches

August by Matt Fendalheen

In the “about” text for August, the author claims that he learned Inform and coded the game in the space of seven days. Usually this is the sort of thing I dread hearing at the outset of a game, since it almost always signals that the experience I’m about to have is will be an unpleasant one. Indeed, the game’s own notes profess it to be “a horrid, malformed, wretched, crud-eating wreck of a failure.” With this kind of pep talk, it was hard to keep my hopes high, but when I started playing, I was pleasantly surprised. The game is written in a florid High Fantasy tone, but the writing worked for me, and I found it rich and involving rather than overblown and annoying. In addition, I came across no outright bugs in the coding, which was a relief. Finally, the character interaction… well, I’ll get to that in a minute. Let’s just say that if the author learned Inform and wrote this game in seven days, it must have been one hell of a week. Then again, perhaps those claims were just meant to keep my expectations low so that I would find the game’s achievements all the more impressive. If so, it worked. Hooray for the Low Expectation Theory.

The game’s story is of a warrior lord, Hakuin Ikthanadar, returned home from a great victory in which he killed the most dangerous enemy of the realm. He is attending the annual Feast of August in order to fulfill a promise he made to his beloved Rosalyn, and as the game begins we find him searching the revel for signs of her. As time progresses, August deftly unfolds more information about the victory, the enemy, the feast, and Rosalyn herself, mixing flashback, dialogue, and description to weave its story. I was pretty impressed with the way this was done, and the most impressive part was the centerpiece of the game, an extended conversation with a key figure in the plot.

The game uses the standard ASK/TELL conversation model, and the instructions warn that subjects should be limited to one word — “ASK CATHBAD ABOUT UNDERWEAR will get you somewhere… while ASK CATHBAD ABOUT HIS UNDERWEAR will not.” I was ready for this to feel pretty restrictive, especially when the questions I had were very difficult to encapsulate in just one word. However, I frequently had the uncanny sensation that even though my language was amputated, the game was able to figure out exactly what I meant. For example, I wanted to ask the person why she had come to the feast, but all I could type was ASK HER ABOUT WHY. Imagine my pleasure when the game displayed this text:

You extend your arm, keeping her distant in the motion of the dance.
“Why did you come here?” you ask. “I doubt you were invited.” Or welcome.
“I go where I will.” she states, lifting her chin defiantly. “If these perfumed cattle object to my presence, they can leave.” She swings about, pulls herself close to you again.

Even better, when she returned the question, I was able to TELL HER ABOUT ROSALYN, and the game understood exactly what I meant. I’m not sure whether the game’s ability to predict what I was thinking came from its precise coding or its precise writing, but every time it happened, I was made very happy.

Sadly, for every time something like that made me happy, there were two times that the game disappointed me. None of them were crashing disappointments, but each one made it a little easier to believe that the game really was done in a week. Something is described as happening to the east when I know it’s actually to the west. Something is mentioned about the PC’s right hand that is really about his left hand. Its/it’s errors. Sometimes August can’t even seem to make up its mind about how the names of its own characters and places are supposed to be spelled. Basically, the game just needs a good round or two of proofreading and betatesting, because even though it’s solid at its core, its surface is badly lacking in polish. In the author’s lengthy introduction, he implies that he’s ready to write this game off as a failure and move on to his next piece of work. I hope he reconsiders, at least enough to clean up the basic errors in August, because once it’s been refined a little, this will be an enjoyable work of IF with some extremely satisfying moments.

Rating: three and a half smooches

Even Bantams Get The Blues by Eric Mayer

If there was some kind of meta-competition for writing games that fit into as many parameters as possible from past mini-comps and themed releases, Even Bantams Get The Blues would make a perfect entrant. This is a Frogger-style game about a lovesick chicken (with no inventory) who must cross a road to find emotional release. See what I mean? It’s got the chicken from the ChickenComp, the Frogger theme from the IF Arcade, and of course a bit of romantic backstory so that it actually fits into the SmoochieComp. I’m not sure if the lack of inventory was an intentional reference to that mini-comp, but the chicken certainly isn’t carrying anything (well, not really, anyway). All it needs is a toaster, a dinosaur, a dragon, and some aliens to complete the picture. Ironically, the romantic element feels pretty tacked-on, so the game’s least significant element is the one that pertains to the comp in which it was actually entered, but hey, I’m not complaining.

Unlike the other two SmoochieComp games I’ve played so far (1981 and August), this one is pretty lightweight (or should I say bantamweight?) There is very little freedom available, even less than in the original Frogger, really — this chicken can’t even change direction. The game only allows travel to the north, so cars and trucks can’t be dodged by backpedaling or sidestepping. Then again, the Frogger element is completely deterministic, so winning is still pretty easy once you’ve recognized the pattern.

However, there are some pleasures to be found beyond the simple task of conquering the road-crossing ordeal. For one thing, Bantam offers a LITERARY mode alongside its default ARCADE mode. This mode offers plenty of fun little Easter eggs; for example, if you type “X ROAD” in ARCADE mode, you get an extremely terse key to the game’s ASCII graphics:

A road ... trucks == cars +.

However, in LITERARY mode, “X ROAD” yields this:

The four lane highway. before you is a breathtaking sight, a vast smooth expanse of night-black asphalt, flecked in spots with some trace of mineral that sparkles with a star-like effulgence in the brilliant sunlight blasting down from the cloudless blue dome of the overarching heavens.

And it goes on like that for an extremely long paragraph. Actually, I should say that there are Easter eggs to be found in both modes, and part of the fun is seeing the differences between them — the sensation reminded me a bit of the differences between the two modes of alien speech in Stephen Granade’s Arrival. The game also suggests that there are several ways to win besides crossing the road, though I didn’t find any of them. (I did find some amusing ways to lose, though.) Bantam probably won’t occupy your attention for too long, but it’s good fun while it lasts, and if you’ve enjoyed a mini-comp in the past few years, it’s probably got something to appeal to you.

Rating: three smooches

Pytho’s Mask by Emily Short

Believe it or not, here’s another large, impressive Inform game that the author claims was written in a week. Like August, the other game in this category, Pytho’s Mask takes place in a fictional kingdom, at a large gathering whose purpose is to celebrate a cyclical occurrence. The party in Pytho’s Mask is called The Celebration of the Night of the Comet, and the astral event it marks occurs only once every hundred years. When it does, the forces of stability in the kingdom are at their weakest. This concept is of a piece with the astronomical imagery used throughout the game: the king represents the Sun, and he is served by a Moon Minister and an Earth Minister. What’s more, he is currently being eclipsed by a mysterious illness that could allow insurgent forces to exploit his Comet-induced vulnerability. The PC is charged with investigating the illness and protecting the king.

The setup worked wonderfully for me, and the writing was, predictably, a pleasure to read, infused as it was with Short’s gift for evoking dazzling scenes through terse, elliptical language. The use of such fundamental symbols as the Earth and the Moon felt a bit reminiscent of books like Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale, and as in that book, the imagery helped give the setting a magical feel without explicitly invoking any particular supernatural occurrences.

The other important thing about Pytho’s Mask is its experimental conversation system. The game eschews the ASK/TELL interface that Short employed so effectively in Galatea, opting instead to offer a menu-based system… with a twist or two. The first innovation is that all of the menu options reside in the status line, and all players need do at the prompt is to type the letter (A, B, C, D, etc.) corresponding to their selected menu item. This removal of menus from the main window makes the transcript read a bit more like a dialog, though it does divorce the entries at the prompt from all context. The other unique aspect of the conversation system is that if none of the menu options offered seem right, the topic can be changed. As the game explains it:

So for instance if your options listed at the moment are all vapid remarks about fashion and you would rather say, “Pass the Stilton, please,” you might try >TOPIC CHEESE. >TOPIC does not cost a turn to use, so you can explore a number of topics if you’re looking for something specific to say.

The great strength of this system is that it combines the freedom and openness of the ASK/TELL system with the more realistic dialogues permitted by menu-based systems. This combination makes it powerful, but as Spider-Man says, with great power comes great responsibility, and this game doesn’t always live up to its responsibilities. Several times, I found myself presented with options that seemed inappropriate, if not downright nonsensical, and from time to time the replies fit this description as well. Moreover, there were instances when the conversational menus didn’t seem to keep up with the plot; when I encountered the masked man after he had already confessed his identity to me, one of my options was “Are you going to tell me who you really are?” “Not yet,” he said. Indecisive fellow.

A number of little warts like this tarnish what would otherwise be an outstanding game. Some, such as those described above, were continuity problems, while others came down to a lack of robustness in the interface. The worst of these was an unfortunate guess-the-syntax problem at a critical moment, which rather wrecked my immersion in the game’s climax. Finally, Pytho’s Mask occasionally shares a problem which plagued Short’s acclaimed comp game, Metamorphoses: there are a couple of moments where the game executes a series of unprompted “hit any key” pauses, and since I’m usually already typing the next action, I would end up startled to discover that reams of text were flowing by me unexpectedly.

Still, these blemishes are probably attributable to the fact that the game was done in a week, and even with them, Pytho’s Mask is immersive and highly entertaining. There are a couple of wonderful swashbuckling moments, and the PC’s propensity for sneaking around, bribing servants, pumping NPCs for information, and getting into romantic entanglements made for an immensely enjoyable playing experience overall. If you’re the impatient type, it won’t be a big problem for you to dive into Pytho’s Mask as it stands. However, if you’re a fan of Emily Short, or if you want the best playing experience possible, I’d advise you to wait. Short has an excellent reputation for fixing bugs and adding improvements to her games, and once this one has received that treatment, it will be a terrific slice of romantic adventure.

Rating: four smooches

Sparrow’s Song by J.D. Berry

What becomes apparent is that J.D. Berry has a talent for creating fictional universes. Sparrow’s Song is the third game he’s entered in a competition, and it’s the third time he’s given us a fresh, interesting setting, replete with its own culture, people, and idiosyncrasies. His Comp99 entry, Jacks Or Better To Murder, Aces To Win, revolved around a rigidly hierarchical religion of Berry’s devising, one in which Machiavellian scheming was the norm and the highly-ranked PC was always on guard against assassination attempts. The Djinni Chronicles, from Comp00, contained an intricate magic system to explain the motivations and capabilities of magical spirits summoned from bottles, lamps, and suchlike.

Now we get Sparrow’s Song, with another new set of characters and situations. Some of the stuff is fairly standard-issue fantasy: the PC is Baron of a sorta-medieval keep, and in his travels may encounter nymphs, rocs, or the occasional pegasus. However, the predictable elements are spiced with some intriguing personal relationships and a refreshing lack of ethereal elevation in the dialogue. Take, for example, your servant’s response when asked about a treaty:

“Where’s you head today, Kellen? The Ronqons? You know, the giants that live in those mountains over there? The giants who have strangled overland trade for the past, oh, 500 years? Yeah, those. If you agreed to their terms of peace, you were supposed to have that treaty to them today. I guess it’s water under the bridge now, Baron von Pocket Veto.”

The game is entirely unafraid of such anachronisms, and as a result much of the dialogue (typos aside) escapes the stale feeling of some fantasy games. On a similar note, did I mention that this game can be really funny? This game can be really funny.

In case you’re worried that there isn’t some funky new system to experiment with, never fear. It’s just that this time the system isn’t part of the setting, it’s part of the interface. That’s right, it’s yet another new approach to conversation. Similar to Pytho’s Mask, this game’s system allows the player to choose the topic of conversation, in this case by typing the topic followed by a question mark, such as “love?” However, Sparrow’s Song streamlines the idea somewhat, eliminating the element of multiple-choice lists, and instead simply taking the topic and running with it. Topics aren’t addressed to any particular person; rather, conversation is directed at whoever happens to share a location with you. Handily, the game makes sure that you’re never with more than one conversation-worthy entity at a time. There are also plenty of times when the game will simply reject a suggested subject, saying something like “You’re not so dense as to bring up THAT topic.”

Finally, the verb “TOPICS” is provided, which will always bring up one to three possible topics, and also functions as a kind of just- barely-a-hint-system. Sometimes this scheme worked perfectly, especially when an NPC mentioned a topic I’d never heard of (like “Ronqons”) and I was able to say “Ronqons?” at the prompt. That interaction felt much more natural than most NPC conversation in IF, mainly because I was able to type exactly what I would have said if I were really in the situation. The rest of the time, it alternated between feeling like an abbreviated ask/tell system (where I’m able to just type “TREATY?” instead of “ASK ARCTOS ABOUT TREATY”) and feeling like a more focused version of the Lomalow “ask me something twelve times to hear all I have to say about it” system. The pleasant writing relieved the tedium of these latter moments somewhat, but only somewhat. On the whole, the conversation system felt like a noble experiment that garnered mixed results.

The same can be said of the story in general. The initial hook is great: you awake to find a sparrow sitting at your windowsill. After regarding you for a few moments, the sparrow begins to sing, and in that magical song it communicates to you that there is someone who loves you, and that she sent this sparrow to reveal her feelings. The song touches something pure and deep inside you, and you find yourself instantly in love with the person who sent the sparrow, pledged to finding her and beginning a life together. From this promising beginning, the game fans out to encompass several different NPCs, each of whom can help you in varying ways, many of which overlap or constitute decision points. One thing that’s clear is that there are multiple paths through the game, and perhaps multiple endings as well.

I was only able to complete one path, since the other two I found both led to a puzzle I was unable to vanquish, so I only found one ending. That one felt rather abrupt and unsatisfying to me — it failed to tie up several loose ends from the plot, and it also seemed to leave the protagonists in a rather precarious situation, with not much hint of how they would move beyond it into some kind of peaceful denouement. I wonder if Berry simply ran out of time to implement the more gradual buildup he might have been planning, and was forced instead to tack on a quick-and-dirty closure. Whatever the reason, my relationship with Sparrow’s Song felt, in the end, like a love affair that began tenderly and showed great potential, but finished bittersweet.

Rating: three and a half smooches

Dead of Winter by Gunther Schmidl as Christina Pagniacci

Dead of Winter is a tiny game, an interactive vignette, really. The basic plot is that a mysterious being known as The Ice Queen has kidnapped your boyfriend Saul, and you want to get him back from her. She sends you on a quest that encompasses maybe half a dozen locations, and when you return, you find out whether or not your efforts were successful. There are a few decision points along the way, but it wasn’t particularly clear to me how the decisions related to which ending I got. Some paths where I made what would seem to me to be some wrong choices ended up with what appeared to be a winning ending, while the path that seemed most right led straight to an ending that felt quite suboptimal. Then again, even the “winning” ending had a sneaky little twist at the end, so it’s hard to say which ending is really the better one. The twist had some punch to it, but felt a little overly familiar at this point, similar devices having been used in other recent games. Also, it was a little confusing that the twist was only used in one of the endings, since it tries to impose a retroactive perspective shift on the entire game.

There were a number of pleasant things about Dead of Winter. It was entirely free of bugs, as near as I could tell, which is always a big plus. In addition, the writing was grammatically correct, something that makes a game feel more immersive to me. Finally, the game employs some special effects with timed display and colors in its title sequence. These effects definitely help to set the mood — I first started playing in WinFrotz, but quickly switched to DOS Frotz and was happy I did, since the black and grey color scheme selected by the game deepened the general atmosphere of chill and desperation.

Dead of Winter is over almost as soon as it begins, so perhaps it’s understandable that I didn’t feel particularly grabbed by it. It’s a sketch rather than a full painting — sparse descriptions, short plot, few objects and unresponsive NPCs. On the whole, it felt like a first attempt at writing IF, and assuming that the author’s name isn’t a pseudonym, a first game is probably what it is. As such, it’s not an unsuccessful effort. When I reached the end, I didn’t want my ten minutes back. In fact, I was looking forward to the author’s next effort, with hopes that it has a little more meat on its bones.

Rating: three smooches

Second Honeymoon by Roger Ostrander

Here is a SmoochieComp game that doesn’t implement the verb “kiss.” That about sums up Second Honeymoon, a well-intentioned effort that fails due to sparseness of implementation, dull design, and multiple errors. For a sample, consider this excerpt from the game’s opening text:

You’re a successful computer programmer, enjoying his fifteenth year of marriage to a wonderful woman. […] You announced your plans to your surprised wife two days ago: a secluded lakeshore cabin, away from the hectic rural life you usually lead.

Unless the PC is a programmer for a big farming outfit, or is telecommuting somehow, I’m thinkin’ that last sentence wants to be about his hectic urban life. Stuff like this is scattered throughout the game. There’s a room description that mentions an exit to the north, but attempts to go that way meet with no success. Conversely, there’s a room whose description never mentions the important fact that there’s an exit to the east. I only found it due to my obsessive-compulsive playing style, which entails trying every single direction in every single room (a style, I might add, that evolved as a response to games such as this one.)

It’s not that this is a terrible game. It’s sweet, and has its heart in the right place. But after playing all the other games in the SmoochieComp, I’ve come to expect a little higher standard of writing and coding, and I’m looking for a plot a little more interesting than the one this game gave me. Basically, the idea in Second Honeymoon is that you’re getting ready for a vacation with your wife, and you need to go around the house and get some various items to take with you, like your camera, your swimsuit, etc. Visiting some places, or performing some actions, will remind you of other items you need. When you’re finished packing, you win. Probably the neatest part of the game is that it maintains a dynamic packing list that keeps track of items added and items fetched. It’s similar to the list carried by the PC in the first part of Firebird, though a bit less slickly implemented.

If you’re beginning to think that Second Honeymoon is one of those games that asks you to wander around a suburban house (the layout of which is very probably modeled on the author’s own home) and do fairly quotidian things, give yourself a gold star. There’s really only one puzzle to solve, and that one so trivial that it shouldn’t slow down anybody who’s ever actually lived in a suburban house. Really, pretty much all of the items you’re looking for will be just laying around on the floor waiting for you when you enter the right room. Then all you do is scoop them up and give them to your wife, who serves as this game’s equivalent of the Zork trophy case. That’s about all she does, too — asking her questions or trying to be affectionate with her will get you nowhere. If what I’ve described sounds like your cup of tea, give Second Honeymoon a shot. If not, why not put some effort into your real-life relationships?

Rating: two smooches

PrologueComp reviews [misc]

[In 2001, I was asked to be a judge for a minicomp called PrologueComp, whose concept was that the entrants wouldn’t write games — just the text lead-ins that open games. The entries were limited to 2001 characters, either ASCII or HTML. There were 23 entries, and I didn’t review them all — just the ones I was assigned. I made an ordered shortlist to rank the pieces against each other. Also, there are a few “editorial” interjections by David Myers, who ran the comp. For this reprint, I’ve also added author attributions, which were absent in my original text (since I didn’t know who the authors were!)]

A couple of comments:

  • Spoilers — it’s hard to worry about spoilers for something that takes two minutes to read, but I’ll try.
  • Quality level was really pleasantly high. Short list decisions weren’t easy.

[Editor’s note: Paul’s shortlist rankings are at the end of this document.]

Comments for COMPULSION by Aris Katsaris

When all I’m reading is a prologue, you don’t have much time to hook me; you’d better do it fast. One of the best techniques for this is to float an intriguing idea, something I want to investigate further. That’s just the approach taken by Compulsion, and it works beautifully. The genre is science fiction, which is perfect for the kind of “big idea” hook used here. Some kind of mind-control technology has been introduced into the military of the 24th century, and we see the societal debate about it through a series of box quotes. Normally I’m not a big fan of one box quote after another, especially at the beginning of a game, but this game doesn’t overdo the technique (there are three), and the last one provides a nice punch to lead into the main character’s POV. Once we get there, we get terse, driving sentences and fragments, setting up an urgent situation very nicely. There are stumbles here and there — a general is named “Ira Asimov”, evoking Isaac Asimov to no focused purpose, and some of the punctuation is absent or misplaced (“Less than a hundred of them you are betting.”) [Editor’s note – likely due to the fact that the author used all 2001 of his bits], but overall this is a very strong beginning.

Comments for HOWL by Randall Gee

It’s funny, but in a very compressed format like this, tiny things start to seem really significant. Take, for example, formatting. When I read monospaced text on a computer screen, I prefer for it to be left-aligned, and for the paragraphs to be separated by blank lines. When it’s indented, as it is in Howl, I find it all runs together and feels more difficult to read. But even if it were reformatted, I don’t think Howl would do much for me, despite my abiding interest in wolves and werewolves. The conversation that opens the story feels stilted and cliched, and the punch that the last sentence was supposed to deliver fell flat for me, perhaps in part because I had begun to skim over the irritating formatting at that point. The sentences in the opening room description are almost insistently flat, which deflates whatever emotional impact the beginning might have had. If I encountered this opening in an actual game, I’d certainly keep playing, but with the hope that things would improve.

Comments for UNFERTH by Jamie Murray

When I was teaching writing, I found that there were certain styles I could recognize from miles away. One of these was the “I have swallowed a thesaurus” style, where things were never pretty but “resplendent”, and “brobdignagian” instead of big. Another was “adjective-o-rama”, where no noun was happy without some intensifying descriptor. Usually these styles were the outgrowth of some well-meaning teacher’s advice about word choice or vivid description, taken to an extreme. With clauses like “sooty cobbles and their hobbling troupes of leprous pigeons,” Unferth appears to suffer from both syndromes. The ironic thing is that although these techniques are presumably meant to make the writing more vivid and intense, they actually result in prose that is murkier (due to inappropriate adjectives — can raindrops really be “laurel-tinted?”) and choppier (due to the necessity of consulting a dictionary for every third sentence.) I have a healthy vocabulary, but even after reading the Unferth prologue several times I have only the vaguest idea of what’s going on, and I’m not particularly inclined to investigate further.

Comments for TROUBLE IN PARADISE by Sean T. Barrett

This prologue starts out in the hard-boiled mystery mode, with the detective talking to the femme fatale, and is so reminiscent of the opening to Dangerous Curves that it’s hard to avoid comparison to that game. Trouble doesn’t have nearly the panache with words that marked DC, and consequently I was feeling a little let down by it. What it does have, however, is a little surprise, a genre-blending trick that makes the whole thing seems much fresher. This surprise is handled well; it’s obvious enough by the end of the prologue, but on rereading it’s clear that the hints were there all along. However, by the time the story is rolling, it’s actually someone besides the PC who is performing immediate action — the prologue doesn’t suggest anything in particular for the PC to do as the game begins. Perhaps this might have been more effective if recast from the point-of-view of Raphael, the henchman. Nonetheless, I’d look forward to playing this game further, if only to see more of the fun surprises that happen when genres collide.

Comments for THE MADNESS OF CROWDS by Top Changwatchai

In my notes on Compulsion, I remarked that the dictates of this competition leave precious little time to get the reader interested. Compulsion overcomes the problem with a Big Idea, and uses the natural genre of that technique, science fiction. TMOC uses a related trick: the Big Question. And wisely, the prologue embeds that technique in its home genre, the mystery. TMOC‘s application of the technique isn’t quite as skillful as that in Compulsion — there isn’t quite the sense of immediacy — but it was plenty good enough to get me very interested. There were a few things I wasn’t crazy about, like the abundance of InterCapped company names (“CreAgent”, “ComTrust”, etc.) and the inconsistent line spacing, [Editor’s note – I believe the author was going for a larger break right before and right after the title block, but could not properly simulate this because he’d run out of his 2001 bytes that way] but these were offset by some clever choices. Starting in the POV of the murder victim and jumping to the detective as our PC sets up a lovely bit of dramatic tension, albeit of a type that is rather difficult to handle in interactive fiction. In fact, I’d be curious to see how an actual game would handle giving crucial information to the player that the PC lacks. Perhaps this could only be a prologue, but even at that, it’s quite a good one.

Comments for WITHOUT WINGS by Robert Masella

Something that I’ve found interesting about the entries in this competition is how much they vary in their “IFness.” Some, like Compulsion, feel as if they had to have been lifted from an IF game — they give us the traditional intro, banner, initial room description, and prompt. In fact, Compulsion uses the additional convention of box quotes to reinforce the feeling that we’re definitely dealing with computer-assisted prose here. I tend to find these prologues the more compelling of the lot — they really give me the feeling that a piece of interactive fiction is beginning, and trigger those mechanisms in my brain that slide into identification with the PC and immersion in the game world. Then there are those prologues, like Unferth and The Madness of Crowds, that give us intro and banner, but no room description. These types of prologues stand or fall on the setup of their initial questions and on the quality of their writing, because by omitting the initial room description and prompt, they force us to imagine just where the game places us to begin with. And then, at the other end of the spectrum, there are prologues like this one, which are indistinguishable from the first few paragraphs of a short story, albeit one written in the second-person voice. This approach is hardest of all to pull off, and Without Wings just doesn’t make it. The setup needed to be extremely interesting in order to give me that IF hook, and the cliched parade of mental patients, full moon, drifting mist, and chittering horrors had me detaching right away. I guess it’s a combination of factors: the genre’s not particularly my cup of tea, this particular instance of it didn’t feel fresh, and the feeble, possibly-deluded PC was difficult to identify with. I probably wouldn’t read a short story that began like this, and what’s here just doesn’t feel much like a game.

Comments for PASSING ON by Ulrich Schreitmueller

Wow! This one was easily the biggest knockout of the samples I was assigned. For one thing, it’s one of the few entries that uses the HTML format of the contest to its advantage — the black background and the varying shades of text work to excellent effect. The faded grey text is perfect for the modernist technique of presenting suggestive, evocative word-fragments to evoke a dreamlike and semi-conscious state, while the brighter white text takes a more straightforward narrative tone. The interplay between the two sets up a highly compelling scenario, an immediate task to accomplish, and moves us smoothly into the first room description. That room description is excellent, using several senses (including the non-physical) to create a place that isn’t really a place, but rather a mental state. And then that final sentence — both chilling and exhilarating, not to mention an excellent spur to action. I also appreciated that the subtitle “A Prologue”, which is not only literally true for this entry, but feels like it would be perfectly appropriate even if this really were the beginning of a game. All in all, a bravura performance in a tiny space. Well done!

Comments for FADE OUT by Marc Valhara

A while ago (hell, I don’t know — maybe it was several years ago), somebody floated the idea of an IF game formatted like a screenplay. At the time, I remember being less than enthusiastic about the idea — I wasn’t sure just what advantage the format would bring. Now, as proof of concept, we’ve got Fade Out, which might be the prologue to that hypothetical game. To be honest, it still seems like a stylistic gimmick to me, but gimmicks have their place. Based on my extremely limited knowledge of screenplay convention, this one seems to deviate a little in some specifics, but that’s probably not such a bad thing, given the screen constraints that real IF would be working under. The one advantage conferred by the screenplay format is that it provides a legitimate excuse for such plodding text as “A wooden deck is to the north. A hallway is to the east, and a kitchen is to the west.” Many IF writers have puzzled over how to include such necessary information without its clunkiness detracting from their other writing, and this format provides just such a mechanism. Aside from that, though, it didn’t feel any more vivid than regular prose written in a “cinematic” style. The story itself provides an interesting beginning, and definitely made me want to keep playing, although I’d still view the screenplay gimmick with skepticism.

Comments for “untitled – judged as heidger.html” by Scott Forbes

Like Without Wings, this entry provides neither banner nor room description, giving us instead three basic paragraphs of fairly generic setup. The premise in this entry doesn’t really give any indication as to where the game is going, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing in a real IF game. However, this is not a real IF game, just a three-paragraph prologue, and in these circumstances, leaving the PC’s situation so dull and open does little to draw me in. Sure, it’s clear enough that something’s going to happen, but the range of things that could happen is so vast that until something more specific comes along, there isn’t much drama there. In fact, if I were a betting man, I’d venture that this is the actual prologue to somebody’s WIP, snipped and entered into this comp on a whim, and its failure in this context serves to prove that not all good prologues stand on their own. Sometimes, a prologue just does some basic work of setting up a character and situation, and it’s the first section of the game that actually gets the ball rolling. (I’m chuckling now, thinking of what the beginning of LASH would look like if entered into this comp — very short, and very dull.) That’s a perfectly acceptable way of structuring an IF game, but it doesn’t have much to offer as a set piece on its own.

[Editor’s long note – Actually, it is possible that I was thinking about LASH subconsciously when designing this contest, and so I want to correct Paul’s modesty. In part, I was envisioning the question of what makes some comp entries irresistible and others easily avoided. The conclusion I came to was that sometimes the prologue determines whether the player is hooked or not. I recall thinking beyond just prologues and further about games where there is not much prologue material, but there is a readme.txt or an ANNOUNCE on usenet which tells what the setting/motivation of the game are going to be. ::These comments were written before the announcement that we may, in fact, soon witness TrailerComp.::

This is rarer with comp games, which don’t often have such extra material that doesn’t reside directly in the game file. More generally, that would be termed “feelies”, though the term has gotten pretty loose from the original intent, which generally used to mean pictures or other non-text material that accompanied and buttressed the game, rather than introducing it. My memory may be failing me, but I seem to recall LASH having either a readme.txt or a usenet ANNOUNCE which greatly piqued my interest about the game concept. Frankly, without that prologue-ish material, I don’t know if I would have played LASH.

Below is the actual LASH startup text (as opposed to the readme/ANNOUNCE), for readers wondering about what Paul meant by “very short, very dull”:

LASH -- Local Asynchronous Satellite Hookup
An interactive utility for communicating with your MULE robot
New users should type "HELP".
Release 11 / Serial number 000806 / Inform v6.15 Library 6/7

DISCONNECTED
Type "CONNECT" to link to your MULE robot.
Type "HELP" for help.

>

Author’s own words: “Not exactly the world’s most gripping prologue.” ]

[Paul’s note from 2024: I think David is thinking of the announcement I posted to rec.games.int-fiction when I released the game.]

Comments for THE BOOK OF THE DEAD by Greg Ewing

This prologue does an excellent job of suggesting what the game will probably be like, and this works both for it and against it. On the plus side, the setup is quite clever and original — I’m strongly intrigued by the idea of “an interactive foray into the myths and legends of Ancient Egypt,” and would be quite excited to play such a thing. The notion that the action will begin after the PC dies is a nifty one — I’ve never played Perdition’s Flames, so I’m not sure how closely this game might parallel it, but I was always tickled by the idea of starting with “*** You have died ***”. On the less positive side, however, what seems clear is that at the beginning of this game, you’ll be forced to select a limited number of resources from some larger group of them, and which resources you select will determine your success later on in the game. I hate when games do this, because there is really no way of knowing which resources will be needed until you run into the puzzles. Saying “you will have to choose wisely” implies a level of context that is simply not available to me at the beginning of a game — in situations like this, I invariably find that what seemed like wise choices at the time turn out to be woefully insufficient, and that short of reading the author’s mind, I had no way of anticipating the problem. So I’d play on with hope of seeing more of this game’s interesting setting, but dreading its structure all the while.

Comments for CATHARSIS by Kevin F. Doughty

I found this prologue pretty unsatisfying, though it might work if it was attached to an actual game. On its own, though, it just doesn’t give me enough information to go on. Part of the problem is that it’s disjointed — it hardly gets started with its narrative voice before it’s interrupting itself with a journal excerpt. Then the journal excerpt stops, and we get a title and room description. Consequently, instead of a smooth introduction, this prologue feels as if it can’t make up its mind what approach it wants to take. Another factor is the absence of any substantive information about the character and setting. We can piece together that the PC is a traveler, and that the world is dark, maybe post-apocalyptic, but that’s about it. When I read “The children here are still burning things,” the implication of the “here” was that the PC was from somewhere else, but the prologue never tells us where that is, or where “here” is. What’s more, it never tells me who I am, how I ended up in my current situation, or why I should care about it, instead dumping me unceremoniously into a cellar. Again, this might work in a real game, where this information could be gradually revealed, but in this format, that information is not forthcoming. Also, what does catharsis have to do with anything? There’s no evidence that the PC is in any particular pain, and we’ve seen no other characters, so it would seem there’s not much of an opportunity for catharsis to occur. Finally, there’s the writing, which had several nice moments but overall felt rather awkward and affected. When I see a phrase like “this state of existence cruelly named ‘survival'” in a character’s journal, I can accept it as an example of that character’s melodrama and inarticulateness. But when the narrative voice itself is using clumsy phrases like “heightened the impact of its meaning”, I have to believe that there is a general problem with the writing. I’d keep playing this game, but I’d expect it to be the product of a beginning writer, and hope to find some gems in among the problems.

Comments for YOU: TENSE, ILL by Alexandre Owen Muñiz

There was a bit of debate among the judges as to what the title of this entry actually is, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s You: Tense, Ill. I love this title, because it does so many different things in such a tiny space. It reinforces the information in the introductory paragraphs about how the PC has been damaged by its foray through a dishwasher. It serves as a diagnostic report on the PC’s initial condition. And finally, the pun on “utensil” cracks me up, and lets me know that this game is going to approach its subject matter with a healthy dose of humor. [Editor’s note: you could be right. However, when I asked the entrant to view his entry to make sure that I’d gotten the display ok, he did not comment on my choice to list it on the main page as “A Gardenburger of Forking Paths”] The “forking paths” pun and the play on Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” serve a similar purpose, and I enjoyed them quite a bit. The premise at work here is clever and interesting — I adore the notion of aliens observing us by taking the shapes of ordinary objects. What’s clear, though, is that this is no ordinary PC, and that its range of action is going to be extremely limited, to say the least. The prologue does a wonderful job of letting us know what must be done, but the PC is so unusual that I’d venture the traditional IF interface would need to be adapted in order to accommodate it. It’s not the prologue’s job to explain these interface changes, but I was a little dismayed by not seeing a “first-time players should type HELP” sort of message. You can be sure that “help”, “info”, and “about” would be the first few things I’d try anyway, and that if those weren’t productive, I’d be completely at sea about where to even begin this game. In those circumstances, my glee at the good stuff this prologue does would probably turn into irritation at the more important things it doesn’t do.

Comments for THIRTEEN CARDS, WELL SUITED by Denis Hirschfeldt

Here’s another prologue that presents us with a highly unusual PC, and only provides the barest of hints as to that PC’s nature. Setups like this make me nervous, because I worry that I’ll lack the context necessary to enjoy the game. Having an unusual PC is well and good, but when that PC has special powers, unusual modes of action, and highly unusual goals and viewpoints — all of which this PC seems to have — then I want the game to give me enough context or instruction about these things so that my first hundred moves don’t consist of blindly flailing about, hoping to hit on information that the PC already knows. This prologue doesn’t give me much indication that the information is forthcoming, which is worrisome. It does have two great strengths, though: its writing and its level of intrigue. By the time I got to the end of this prologue, I really wanted more, and that’s a good thing. I found the viewpoint character highly intriguing, and the hints of the major conflict were delivered in a very compelling manner. The prose itself was excellent — “From within the fire” provided a wonderful “whoa!” moment, and the details are well-chosen. Some of the sentences, especially the first, are so dense and elliptical that they recall Emily Short, which is pretty much always a good thing. If this were a story, I’d be hooked. As an IF game, it’s got me both hooked and worried that the crucial exposition won’t come soon enough, if at all.

Short list rankings:

1. Passing On
2. You: Tense, Ill
3. Compulsion
4. Thirteen Cards, Well Suited
5. The Madness of Crowds
6. Trouble in Paradise
7. The Book Of The Dead
8. Catharsis

howling dogs by Porpentine [XYZZY]

[I originally reviewed this game for the XYZZY Awards, as part of a project to review all the 2012 nominees for Best Writing. howling dogs took home the Best Writing award, which shows you how out of step I apparently am with that year’s voters.]

IFDB page: howling dogs

So it turns out there’s this unfortunate consequence to not paying attention, which is that you don’t know about stuff. Case in point: there is someone called Porpentine, who has written a number of IF games in different formats, as well as poetry, fiction, essays, and various other work. I had never heard of her prior to opening this game, probably because I am pretty detached from the IF scene nowadays. In any case, she apparently has quite a fan base, or at least this game does, judging from its 5 XYZZY nominations, including one for Best Game. However, I am sorry to say that I am not among its fans.

Part of this comes down to taste. I’ve mentioned in the past that I have trouble relating to games that get too abstract. When metaphor piles upon metaphor, with nothing concrete underpinning them, the whole thing tends to kind of slide off me. When the base scenario is a futuristic metal cube (or hamster cage, or something) with no exit and no explanation of why you’re imprisoned there, and we launch from that into (for instance) hallucinatory dreamscapes of invasion by it’s-not-clear-what, or maybe you’re the one doing the invading (it’s not clear), while inanimate objects and landscape features talk to you, only to be interrupted by a sub-hallucination of a tranquil tea party… well, my mind starts asking why I should care, and what is the point exactly? I know there are people who really dig this kind of thing. I’m just not one of them, despite my nagging feeling that this distaste will prevent me from hanging out with the cool kids.

That’s not to say that I need metaphor-free quest plots where everything is spelled out in big block letters. Some of my very favorite writers can be so bizarre and elliptical that it is sometimes almost impossible to detect what they’re on about — Emily Dickinson, Tori Amos, and Stevie Nicks come to mind. Yes, these are writers of poetry and lyrics, where perhaps a great remove is easier to tolerate, but I’ve enjoyed many a surreal IF game too — Blue Chairs, For A Change, Shrapnel, and so forth. I think it comes down to trust. I can let my mind and emotions fall backward into some pretty strange territory as long as I trust that I’m in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing. Unfortunately, my trust was immediately blown, right out of the gate, by this game’s opening text:

One morning at dawn the nurse shook him awake because his sobs were being heard in the next room. Once he was awake he could hear that not only was the patient next door but the two hundred dogs kept in the hospital courtyard for use in the laboratory had also been threatened by his sobbing and clearly were howling still

I looked at this and thought, “Best writing? But… it’s incoherent!” Even setting aside the fact that the total lack of commas makes the whole thing feel extremely plodding, it’s just nonsensical. Taking out some of the extraneous stuff, I get this sentence: “Not only was the patient but the dogs had also been threatened.” It simply does not parse.

Then a bit more of the passage revealed itself, and I saw that it was not by Porpentine at all, but rather by someone called Kenzaburo Oe. Since I was disengaged from the story anyway at this point, I googled the name to see if he is a real person. Yep, he’s a real person who, uh, seems to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Say wha? Now I was really confused. Maybe it made sense in the original Japanese, and was badly translated? After further googling I determined that no, it made sense in the original English, before it was mangled. Here’s Oe’s original sentence, from his novella The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away:

Once he was awake he could hear that not only the patient next door but the two hundred dogs kept in the hospital courtyard for use in the laboratory had also been threatened by his sobbing and clearly were howling still

If I boil this one as I did the other one, I get: “Not only the patient but the dogs had also been threatened.” That’s a sentence that works just fine, because it doesn’t have an errant “was” inserted between “only” and “the”. The entire passage is Oe’s work, except for the “was”, which I have to assume came from Porpentine. He Himself is about someone who (maybe) has cancer, so perhaps the idea here is that the “was” is the cancer that infects the sentence? It certainly kills the thing stone dead. Having left the story almost immediately to do this much research, I was not inclined to be so charitable. To me it seemed like a fundamental error, one which bespoke a basic disinterest in comprehensible language, coming as it does in the crucial first sentences of the game. While the rest of howling dogs did in fact parse (well, most of it), I didn’t find much to contradict that belief.

Take, for instance, the description of the central room, one of the most frequently repeated passages of the game:

A room of dark metal. Fluorescent lights embedded in the ceiling.

The activity room is in the north wall. The lavatory entrance, west, next to the trash disposal and the nutrient dispensers. The sanity room is in the east wall.

So far so good with the first part — two terse Emily Shortesque sentence fragments sketch a grim, depressing cell. Their sparseness is in keeping with the spartan accommodations. However, things start to go wrong in the second part. Two rooms are described as “in” walls. In? How can a room be in a wall, when it’s walls that define rooms? The image I got was of an indentation in the wall, though when I followed the leads, the game treated them as separate locations. That suggested to me that although the use of the word “in” had to be intentional (it happens twice, after all), it was not used to create a pervasive effect as much as to inject alienating and unfamiliar diction for its own sake.

Between these two sentences is another fragment, but this one doesn’t work nearly so well as the first ones. The short appositive and the long prepositional phrase that follow the subject had me waiting for a verb. “The lavatory entrance, yes, yes… what about it?” Then I thought perhaps that this was a case of a word wrongly removed rather than wrongly inserted. “The lavatory entrance is west…” would have worked just fine. It was a little bit funny that the lavatory is the only space grand enough to rate an actual entrance, rather than just being “in” the wall, but I don’t think the humor was intentional. For that matter, I found very little humor of any kind in howling dogs. This is a dour game, which is fine as an artistic choice, but puts further pressure on the language to live up to the apparently Very Serious intentions behind it.

So that I don’t spend this entire review excoriating and picking apart the game’s writing, I will note that there were some striking parts. As I said, I’m not much for the highly abstract, but when the action neared the ground, I found it pretty compelling. The murder scene is gripping and dramatic — I particularly liked the detached observation about the knot. The advice on how best to be assassinated was clever, and did a good job of cueing the right word in the “giant wodge of text” scene. I’ll note, though, that it’s only thanks to the “howling dogs spoilers” text file that I knew there was such a thing as a “right word” in that scene, which suggests that the game’s design fails to stand up on its own. I certainly would have given up on it without that file. For that matter, it led me to the “correct” ending (the one that isn’t marked “false terminus”), which was my favorite part of the game, particularly the “gap” effect.

That scene was the closest I came to an emotional connection with howling dogs, but by that time it was far too late — I had already checked out. I could cite many more places where the writing falls down, but I think I’ve made my point, so instead I’ll end by stepping out of my prescribed area, because I think this is important. Game designers, if you want to make a game with a repetitive structure, in which progress depends on returning again and again to the same mechanic, DO NOT frontload that mechanic with arbitrary, unrewarding actions. When I found out I had to follow the whole “nutrient dispensers” path each and every time I wanted to see the next scene, I groaned aloud. Long ago, Graham Nelson wrote a Bill of Player’s Rights, one of which was “Not to need to do boring things for the sake of it.” howling dogs really should have heeded that advice — tedium adds neither fun nor gravitas to a story. In fact, I could say the same thing for layers of abstraction and self-consciously serious prose.

Bee by Emily Short [XYZZY]

[I originally reviewed this game for the XYZZY Awards, as part of a project to review all the 2012 nominees for Best Writing.]

IFDB page: Bee

Because it uses the Varytale format rather than the more traditional parser-based approach, Bee has the opportunity to inject writing into the choice mechanism itself, and Emily Short uses this opportunity to the fullest. The choices in Bee tell us something about its PC in a way that the “>” prompt cannot. More than that, they give us clues about how we are shaping the PC. Take, for instance, the choices that appear after the PC’s father complains about having to drink chocolate milk in public school, even when he was forbidden chocolate for Lent:

The world isn’t always on our side.
Bet the other kids made fun of Father.
Having to drink chocolate milk is a pretty whiny thing to complain about.

The first option steers toward a PC who is earnestly trying to absorb her parents’ lessons and reflect them back, both to show them that she has done so and because she honestly believes it. It also reinforces the barricaded quality her family has adopted, with the good and true people on one side of the wall, and “the world” on the other. The second option reveals a PC whose immediate response is compassion. However, it also highlights her liminal place as an adolescent. (L I M I N A L, an intermediate state, phase, or condition.) She’s advanced to the age where her parents have become fallible, and she can impose upon herself uncomfortable thoughts of them as children, subject to childhood torments and humiliation.

The third option, on the other hand, takes her adolescent quality in a different direction, finding the ridiculousness in her father’s complaint. In this direction, we see her separating from her parents by opposing them rather than awkwardly pitying them. And her (very funny) response of “I hear that Roman Christians were also forced to drink chocolate milk in the arena” gets a predictably chilly reception.

Other choices are noteworthy for they way they seem to be having a conversation with each other — “Possibly Lettice is not the sharpest. / Then again, she’s your only natural ally.” Some passages where there is only one choice available (at least, based on the particular attributes of my playthrough) still used that choice to provide a moment of reflection and pacing for the prose. (e.g “Ah, rhetorical terms. Now you’re on familiar ground.” in the “Are you a feminist?” scene.) Finally, I was struck by the presence of certain choices greyed-out, with reasons attached. We see this during the spelling bees — the better a speller the PC is, the more options are greyed-out — but also in more character-building ways:

While you work you make up stories in your head.
About how even Cinderella got away.
About how you were switched at birth. A bit hard on your parents, perhaps.
About becoming a designer and making more stylish clothes.
About becoming so wealthy that you could have servants.

With action-based choices, this is more or less the equivalent of the “You don’t want to do that” type of parser message from a traditional IF game. Here, however, it conveyed a slightly different message: “You don’t want to THINK that.” Thus, even as the available choices let us know how we’re shaping the PC, the game also shows us how we cannot shape her, but might be able to in a different narrative context, say if annoyance with her parents has pushed her limits.

Of course, to an extent it’s true that the choices in any style of IF game shape the character, but what’s different about Bee is that the voice of that shaping is the same as the voice of its response. It’s similar to the trade-off that happens between menu-based conversations and ASK/TELL style: the former restricts player choice, but gives greater characterization in exchange. Sometimes this trade-off is well worth it, especially in games where the prose is its own reward.

That’s certainly the case with Bee. Most every passage of the game is a pleasure to read, and a few are nothing short of sublime and beautiful. As usual for Short, she accomplishes a great deal with subtlety, understatement, and concision. Her trademark sentence fragments are sparser here than in her parser-based games (probably due to the lack of room descriptions), but used to good effect where they appear. Where she outdoes herself is in characterization. The prose feels deeply inhabited by the main character’s point of view, in a way that is clear-eyed enough to let us understand some of the things she does not, but also authentic enough that it generates sympathy not only for her situation but for those around her who create that situation. In an admirable effect, characters who start out as caricatures reveal more depth and complexity as the PC gets to know them better, just like in real life.

I could go on and on about how much I loved the writing in this game, and how I found it not just remarkably accomplished but sometimes quite moving. Instead, I’ll just nominate three more favorites, to stand for entire categories:

1) Bits of poetic diction: “You imagine what it would be like to stand in the middle of a haboob, your skin scoured by grains of sand, eyes stinging, barely able to breathe; and then, if you lived through it, dust in every crevice. If you were not killed, you would be completely sanded down, polished, perfected.”

2) Well-chosen details: Describing the documentary about North Korea to Jerome, we get a clear echo of the PC’s own dilemma: “But it wasn’t girly at all. It was like everyone being in an army. All the time.”

3) Satisfying emotional development: I followed many branches of the story, and greatly enjoyed the range of possibilities it allowed, providing a greater holistic view of “the truth” in that particular fictional world. However, I still think my favorite moment is when the PC runs away from home to find Sara. She’s confronted with things that are beyond her ken (but not ours), and must face the reality of her situation, but is comforted in a poignant, crystalline moment:

“So what am I supposed to do now?” you ask.

“Get ready,” she says. “The way I used to think of it was, I was in a chrysalis. I read things and I watched movies and looked things up on the internet, and I learned things that made me ready to break out as soon as I had wings.”

“Caterpillars are almost completely dissolved in the chrysalis,” you say. “The liquids break down their bodies into a nutritional soup. The butterfly is pretty much a different animal.”

“Yeah,” she says. “That sounds right.”

Understated, heartfelt, brilliant, and utterly beautiful, not to mention a wonderful culmination of a very long buildup. Yeah, that sounds right.

PAX East Part 4: Saturday They’ll All Be Back Again [Misc]

[I originally posted this on my other blog, >SUPERVERBOSE, way back when it was on livejournal. It’s the fifth in a series of posts about my visit to PAX East 2010, which was life-altering in a good way. I’ve cleaned up the text ever-so-slightly and the links ever so much more.]
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Compared to Friday, Saturday was pretty low-key. Then again, it’s not fair to compare anything to Friday. I let my exhausted self sleep in, then showered, packed up, etc. I met my friend Ruth Atherton for lunch, along with her partner Yigal and their adorable boy Natan. I’ve known Ruth since our freshman year of college at NYU — over 20 years ago now! — and it was wonderful to spend some time with her again.

Ruth dropped me at the Hilton, and I stopped into the IF Suite, where the PAX SpeedIF efforts were well underway. I opted out, given that 1) I didn’t bring my laptop to the suite, 2) it’s been years since I actually wrote any IF code, and 3) I didn’t want to spend my PAX time heads-down coding anyway. So it was off to the convention center, where I undertook my next mission: a present for Dante! I checked out a Boston souvenir store in the Prudential Center and picked up a cute little Boston ball, to use as a backup if I couldn’t find anything in PAX itself. But I did — his own bag of dice. He’s often wanting to play with my dice, so now he’s got his own. (He was quite delighted with these gifts when I brought them home, and as he often does, he immediately turned it around on me. “Pretend that you are Dante and I am Daddy! Dante, I brought you some presents! A Boston ball, and your very own bag of dice!”)

After a quick trip to Trader Joe’s for some trail mix and water, I took the time to explore the rest of PAX, but between the incredible crowds and my own lack of motivation, I didn’t really hook into anything. I wasn’t up for boardgaming with strangers, nor did I fancy standing in line for a chance at console, PC, or handheld games. And of course the panels were out of the question — you had to arrive at least 30 minutes early to have a crack at getting into any panel, and none of the panels at that time were terribly interesting to me anyway.

So back to the IF suite I went. I hung out and chatted with various people, and even skipped dinner so that I could spend more time in the ambiance. (That’s where the trail mix comes in.) There were a few people I missed — I would have loved to hang out with Stephen and Rob a bit more, for instance — but I really enjoyed the various people I talked to. I think part of the connection-missing may have had to do with the fact that while I have a cell phone, it is a creaky 2005 pay-as-you-go model with no internet access and the clunkiest of texting capabilities. Normally, this does not bother me at all, but sometimes during PAX weekend I felt like an timebound mortal in a Kage Baker Company novel, looking on in blissful ignorance while all around me the immortals communicate telepathically. It probably also wouldn’t hurt to hang out on ifMUD more than once every two years.

All part of the thawing process, I suppose. While I wasn’t musing on that, I also kept an eye out for newbies and visitors. I hooked several people up with IF swag and talked to them about the medium and the community, which felt great. Extended social exertion like that is a bit out of my comfort zone — I’m an introvert by nature — but I liked helping with the IF outreach mission.

That mission was the subject of the informal panel at 7:00. That panel featured Andrew Plotkin, Jason McIntosh (aka jmac), Chris Dahlen (gaming journalist), and John Bardinelli (of JayIsGames). It was moderated, in an endearingly prolix style, by Harry Kaplan. (I should mention here that Harry was quite helpful in getting me connected with the pre-PAX discussion, and was particularly welcoming to me in the suite. Also, he’s apparently the cousin of Paul Fishkin, who founded Stevie Nicks’ record company! Remote brush with fame!) Harry would make a discursive, intentionally provocative statement, and ask the panel to respond, offering the lead to a different panelist for each question. The discussion often expanded beyond the panel and into the room, which was great, because the room was packed (seriously, packed) with very smart people.

I am terrible at reconstructing discussions, so I’m not going to try to do it here. Much. I will say that I was particularly struck by the way Emily framed the problem of IF’s learning curve. The parser, she said, makes a false promise, strongly implying by its openness that it is able to handle anything the player throws at it, which is simply not true. Lots of people would like to see IF respond by expanding the range of actions and phrasings that the parser can understand, but Emily disagrees. She could do a much better job than I of articulating this, and probably does so somewhere, but essentially she argues that expanding the parser is a blind alley, because it never eliminates the false promise issue, and creates a ridiculous implementation headache. Even if the game could legitimately understand a much wider range of commands, coding meaningful responses to that radically expanded command set is a misuse of our energies. Instead, she suggests that we embrace IFese while finding ways to help games gently nudge players in the right direction when it seems that they’re struggling to speak IFese to the parser. She did some work toward this in City Of Secrets, and Aaron Reed apparently does even more in Blue Lacuna. She points to Façade as a cautionary example of what happens when you try to go the other direction.

After the panel, there was a bit more chatter, and then it was time to for SpeedIF contestants to turn in their games. I had no laptop, but Juhana Leinonen very kindly let me use his to play Sarah Morayati’s Queuelty, which I found quite enjoyable.

More chatting, more hanging out, but eventually, sadly, it was time for me to go. There would be more events on Sunday, but my flight left early Sunday morning — I hadn’t wanted to take undue advantage of Laura’s generosity with the childcare, so I kept my trip to two days. I’m sorry to have missed Sunday, though. From what I read [in a livejournal that has since been deleted and purged, even from the Wayback Machine — 2022 PO], it was great.

The rest is uninteresting travel details, except for this revelation, which traveled home with me: it has become painfully, unmistakably clear that working every night and weekend is ruining my life and blocking me from doing the things that actually make me happy. The truth is that nobody ever told me to do that (well, with some exceptions) — it’s just that I’m so overwhelmed all the time, so behind all the time, that I feel like I have to do that in order to have a remote chance of success at work. But keeping my head above water there has come at the cost of drowning the parts of myself I treasure more. So I’m going to stop doing that.

I’m going to try, anyway. It’s rather shockingly hard to draw firm boundaries around work when they’ve been obliterated for so long. I’m taking it one day at a time. I’m on Day 6 now, and even in the last week I’ve been able to produce these blog entries, which would have seemed ridiculously out of reach a few weeks ago. That makes me happier than I’ve been in quite a while.

PAX East Part 3: Do You Like Movie? [Misc]

[I originally posted this on my other blog, >SUPERVERBOSE, way back when it was on livejournal. It’s the fourth in a series of posts about my visit to PAX East 2010, which was life-altering in a good way. I’ve cleaned up the text ever-so-slightly and the links ever so much more.]
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In the afterglow of the panel, intentions were formed in the direction of dinner. Boston residents Dan Schmidt and Liza Daly kindly guided us to a fabulous sushi restaurant: Samurai. Delicious food, wonderful company, beer — what’s not to love? Only one thing, it turns out: the place was too small to accommodate the 12 of us at one table, so Emily, Rob, Dan, and Liza ended up at their own table beyond earshot of ours. And we got split up just as I was in mid-sentence with Emily: “I think some topics that didn’t get touched in the storytelling panel were–”

(For the record, the rest of the sentence was “integrating hints adaptively into the story in a way that feels seamless, and exploring PC emotion — how and whether to convey it.”)

After dinner, we paid the check (or rather, Stephen paid the check and we paid Stephen) and headed back towards the convention center to get in line for GET LAMP! Then, confusion ensued as we realized we’d inadvertently left behind Christopher Huang and Sam Kabo Ashwell. We went back, they weren’t there, we milled, we shivered, we went back to the convention center and found that they were in line ahead of us. It was like a French farce, only huge and freezing cold.

Anyway, we hung out in line for a while, then made our way into the “theater” — really just another convention center room with a projection screen set up. We got seats in the back, but the point is: we got seats. Others in the room ended up against the walls, on the floor, etc. There weren’t enough chairs, but everybody got into the room, which is a decidedly good thing. Jason was contemplating a second showing if they’d had to turn people away, but that showing would have started around midnight.

And now, a discursive aside about GET LAMP. About four years ago now (actually, now that I look at it, exactly four years ago today [“today” in this case being April 2, 2010, the day I originally posted this piece –2022 PO]), I got an email from somebody I’d never heard of, a guy named Jason Scott. He claimed to be a filmmaker, working on a documentary about IF. He wanted to know if he could interview me. I checked out the website, and he looked legit — for one thing, he’d already completed one such project, a huge multi-episode docu about BBSes. So I told him I’d be delighted to talk IF with him sometime.

Then, nothing until January of 2007, when I suddenly got notice that Jason would be in town in a few weeks, and did I still want to be interviewed? I sure did, so on a snowy Saturday night we met inside my deserted workplace (this was back before everybody at my job was working weekends) along with Robb Sherwin (who was apparently the guy who gave Jason my name — thanks Robb!) and his girlfriend Dayna. Jason set up his camera and asked questions. I blathered for 90 minutes, wondering if any of this was remotely usable. Then Jason took us out to dinner at an excellent French restaurant. All in all, not a bad night at the office.

Jason interviewed a bunch of other people throughout 2007, and then GET LAMP seemed to go dark for a while. Work continued sporadically, but it was hard to see what the endpoint would be. But last year it caught fire again. Jason lost his job and rather than look for another one, he ran a Kickstarter project to raise $25,000, and damned if he didn’t do it, and even go beyond. To me, that was a huge statement about the confidence and trust he’s built in the community of people around him. He used the money to pay living expenses while he finished GET LAMP, with the result that he was able to premiere it at PAX East. What he showed wasn’t the final cut of the movie, but rather a 70-minute “mix” tailored to the PAX audience. The whole shebang is going to be a 2-DVD set, with boatloads of bonuses, games (including my own), and even a branching path at one point in the movie. Heh. He’s sending me a copy, because I was an interviewee — a very classy move, according to me.

So that brings me back to PAX. What I can say about the movie I saw is this: I loved it. Yes, there were a few pieces that needed some technical polish, and a couple of spots that made me cringe a bit, but overall, WOW. It conveys what’s special about IF with such passion and cleverness, and it brings in some angles that feel fresh. It’s touching, it’s funny, it’s very effective at conveying information, and it’s quite entertaining. Also, it’s 70 minutes of very smart people discussing something about which I care deeply, so it’s pretty much made for me.

Top 5 terrific things about GET LAMP

1. Egoboo. Yes, okay? It was quite gratifying to see myself managing to speak somewhat coherently about IF in the clips that featured me, and I felt quite honored to be placed in a context alongside people whom I hold in very high esteem.

2. Insight. A lot of thoughtful people had a lot of thoughtful things to say. Some of them I’ve heard a thousand times already, but they’d feel fresh to somebody for whom this was a new subject. Others felt fresh to me too. One example that sticks out: Jason Shiga observing that when you’re a kid, you don’t get to make a lot of choices. You don’t decide where to live, where to go to school, how to spend much of your time. When you’re in that situation, having a game offer you control of the story you’re in can be a very satisfying feeling indeed.

3. The section on blind players. Jason very astutely taps into the subculture of blind IF players, for whom this is one of the only feasible genres of computer game available. One of his subjects, Michael Feir, was somebody I kept in contact with when I was editing SPAG. Michael was the longtime editor of Audyssey, a gaming zine for the blind. Anyway, this section of the film had some wonderful pieces to it. I loved the woman who observed that one of the skills IF helps you build is mental map-making, and suggested that playing IF has made her more confident when she’s exploring an unfamiliar place. And Austin Seraphin is great, cracking that when a game tells him, “It’s pitch dark. You can’t see a thing,” he just thinks: “So what does that matter?”

4. Infocom. Dave Lebling, Steve Meretzky, Mike Berlyn, Stu Galley, Marc Blank, Brian Moriarty, Amy Briggs, et cetera. These names lit up my teen years so much they may as well have been rock stars. This movie had fantastic footage of each of them, telling great stories from the company’s heyday and offering perceptive opinions about the form in general. What a pleasure it was to see their faces, hear their voices, and get to know them a little better.

5. Explanatory power. I am very, very accustomed to getting befuddled stares when I talk about interactive fiction. I love that such a compelling visual text exists, that can introduce the subject to somebody new with both the intellectual clarity and the emotional weight it deserves. I’m very hopeful that it’ll bring a fresh wave of enthusiasm into the IF community itself, and that I can use it with my friends and family to shed some light on my ongoing fascination.

The best part of all, though, wasn’t so much the film itself as the moment it created. Jason sums it up: “this had, by dint of using my film as the stone in the stone soup, become the largest assembly of interactive fiction folks in history. Creators, players, and legends were going to assemble on PAX East, and make it something very, very special.” That’s exactly what happened, and nothing exemplified it more than the panel after the film:

* Dave Lebling (Zork, Enchanter, Spellbreaker, The Lurking Horror)
* Don Woods (Adventure, need I say more?)
* Brian Moriarty (Trinity, Beyond Zork, Wishbringer)
* Andrew Plotkin (So Far, Spider And Web, Shade)
* Nick Montfort (Twisty Little Passages, Ad Verbum, Book And Volume)
* Steve Meretzky (A Mind Forever Voyaging and so many other great games that just the thought of typing them out exhausts me.)

Again, Jason will release the footage at some point, so I’m not going to try to recap the panel. Suffice it to say that it was an unbelievable confluence of talent and history, a great discussion of IF, and oh by the way Meretzky is FREAKING HILARIOUS. Stephen later asserted that Steve Meretzky must be on every panel, everywhere, from now on. I quite agree.

After the film, I got to shake the hands of some legends and thank them for the huge positive impact on my life. We toddled on back to the suite, buzzing. The conversation there felt infused with joy; it glowed in the dark.

It’s hard to explain what this day meant to me. It was one of the best days I’ve had in years and years. Jason said to me later, “This weekend is like one big hug for you, isn’t it?” He’s not wrong. It was emotional, even more so than I expected, to be a part of this gathering — Rob called it the “IF Woodstock.” I tried to say so in the suite, though I’m not sure how articulate I was. I felt filled with love, for interactive fiction, for the IF community, and specifically for these people who shared this experience with me. It was vivid, elevating.

After the party broke up, I grabbed a taxi back to my hotel (the T had long since closed), and before I went to bed, posted this on Facebook:

Back when I was active in the interactive fiction community, and also going to conferences for work, I used to daydream about an IF conference where we’d have bunches of key people from the past and present, panels about various aspects of the form, face time with all these people I just knew as words on a screen, etc…. Today said: “I’ll see your dream, and raise you an IF movie!”

PAX East Part 2: There’s More At The Door [Misc]

[I originally posted this on my other blog, >SUPERVERBOSE, way back when it was on livejournal. It’s the third in a series of posts about my visit to PAX East 2010, which was life-altering in a good way. I’ve cleaned up the text ever-so-slightly and the links ever so much more.]
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After some suite chat, 2:00 rolled around, which was the time PAX was officially supposed to open. So a large contingent, myself included, headed con-wards. My first and most lasting impression of PAX is: PEOPLE. People, people, and also, more people. Behind them are other people, who block your view of the people already inside, and if you turn around, you can see a long line of people, stretching back farther than you can see. I feel like if I’d missed my plane, I could probably have walked a couple of blocks from my house in Colorado and gotten in line for the PAX keynote with Wil Wheaton. Good lord, there were a lot of people.

Serious luck was on my side, as I had Rob Wheeler along to act as my Virgil through the utterly overwhelming and confusing human ocean that was the PAX entrance. He’d attended the Seattle PAX the previous Fall, and had also scoped out the scene beforehand to pick up his Speaker badge. (More about that later.) He helped me navigate my way into a long entrance queue, along with Sarah Morayati, a very friendly (and talented, I later discovered) woman who came on the scene in the last few years.

Meeting Sarah was my first taste of a feeling that was to get very familiar over the next couple of days. I am, I discovered, Unfrozen Caveman IF Guy. It’s as if I’ve been in suspended animation for the last five years, and I thawed out at PAX, like Captain America looking up at the Avengers and thinking, “Who are you guys?” When Dante was born in 2005 (and really, a little before, as we were preparing for his arrival), I withdrew pretty thoroughly from the IF scene. I handed SPAG over to Jimmy Maher, I pretty much stopped writing reviews, I stopped reading the newsgroups, and I stopped visiting ifMUD. There have been exceptions here and there — my review of 1893, for instance, or my work with Textfyre — but for the most part, I have been absent. It turns out that a lot can happen in five years! I’m excited but a bit overwhelmed at how much there is to catch up on.

Speaking of overwhelming, when the line finally moved into the convention proper, we quickly heard that we wouldn’t make it into the keynote. We connected up with Stephen, and headed into the expo hall. This is about the point when sensory overload started attacking my brain cells, making it impossible for me now to retrieve my memories of who was where when. I know there was a group of us, and we met up with another group, and Mark Musante was there, and Jacqueline Ashwell was there, and Iain Merrick was there, and Dan Shiovitz was there, other people I don’t know very well were there, and probably lots of others I do but everything is blurring together because have I mentioned that good god there were a lot of people?

In the expo hall, there was also a lot of noise and sound. Wait, make that A WHOLE GODDAMNED LOT OF NOISE AND SOUND!!! And people. Of course. We watched Rob play Dante’s Inferno, which apparently involves Dante kicking lots of ass and not, as someone pointed out, fainting a lot, the way he does in the book. We watched Stephen play some game that involves falling and is impossible to Google because its name is something like “AaaaaAAaaaAAAAaaAAAAAa!!!!” We saw lots of booths and bright colors and LOUD SOUNDS and so forth. You get the idea.

After some time, I went with a subgroup of people to attend a 4:00 panel called “Design an RPG in an Hour.” It was crowded! I ended up leaning against the back wall. The panel was more or less like improv comedy, except take out the comedy and put in its place boilerplate RPG elements. What will our setting be? What is the conflict? Who are the protagonists and antagonists? What are their special traits? (i.e. What will their stat categories be?) It was pretty well-done, albeit dominated by what Stephen accurately termed “goofy high-concept stuff” from the audience. For instance, the guy shouting out “talking dinosaurs!” got a round of applause. I was happy to be there in any case, because there was a 5:30 panel on IF that would be in the same room, so I figured we’d stake out the good seats.

Now, this is a very cool thing. Some IF community folks pitched the idea of a PAX panel called “Storytelling in the World of Interactive Fiction,” and to our general delight, the PAX organizers made it part of the official con schedule! Going to this panel was one of the main reasons I wanted to come to Boston. So when it became apparent that PAX enforcers would be doing a full room sweep to prevent the very camping behavior I was counting on, it was time to make a new plan — and apparently, there was quite a line forming. So we snuck out before the panel ended to get in line.

And my goodness, it’s a lucky thing we did. When I first saw the room, I couldn’t imagine how we’d fill it with people wanting to hear about IF. But after we took our seats (which were quite good), people started to flow in. And then more came. And then more. The chairs: filled. The walls: filled. The aisles: filled.

THEY WERE TURNING PEOPLE AWAY.

I get chills again as I write it. I mean, I’m very sorry for the people who got turned away. I met several of them over the course of the weekend, and they were quite disappointed. But holy shit, what hath PAX wrought when we can cram a huge room with people interested in our medium, with tons more hoping to get in? It was stunning, absolutely stunning.

The panel itself was great. It consisted of some of our best: Emily Short, Andrew Plotkin, Robb Sherwin, Aaron A. Reed, and Rob Wheeler moderating. I won’t try and recap the panel, except to say that it was wonderful to hear sustained, intelligent, live discussion of IF. The charming Jenni Polodna, another arrival during my years on ice, wrote some very thorough notes about it, and Jason Scott filmed it, so you’ll probably be able to see it yourself sometime. Which, if you were one of those turned away, might help a bit.

All I know is that at the end, I felt like I had a whole lot of games I needed to play.

Top 10 IF games to play if you’ve been in suspended animation for the last five years

1. Blue Lacuna by Aaron A. Reed

2. Violet by Jeremy Freese

3. The games of the JayIsGames IF Comp

4. Lost Pig by Admiral Jota

5. Make It Good by Jon Ingold

6. De Baron by Victor Gijsbers

7. Alabaster by a Emily Short and also a whole boatload of people.

8. The Shadow In The Cathedral by Ian Finley and Jon Ingold. [Hey, one I’ve played! I was even a tester for it!]

9. Floatpoint by Emily Short

10. Everybody Dies by Jim Munroe

PAX East Part 1: The Suite Life of Zarf & Co. [Misc]

[I originally posted this on my other blog, >SUPERVERBOSE, way back when it was on livejournal. It’s the second in a series of posts about my visit to PAX East 2010, which was life-altering in a good way. I’ve cleaned up the text ever-so-slightly.]

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There were further travel adventures after the plane arrived — I found my way to the subway without any trouble, and got off at the right stop, but it was dark and raining, and I was quite disoriented. Lucky for me, there appeared on the horizon a lovely Au Bon Pain with free wireless access. I ducked in and got my bearings over a delicious lemon danish & chocolate-dipped shortbread. Mmmmm… empty calories. Also, let’s hear it for the Internet — it was so great to 1) figure out the right path to my hotel via Google Maps, 2) write Laura to tell her I’d made the plane, and 3) look up sunrise tables to figure out when I’d have a little light on my side.

Armed with this information, I walked to my hotel as the sun rose, and asked them if there was any way I could pretty please get into a room early so I could grab a nap before proceeding with the rest of my day. Unfortunately, they’d been sold out the night before, so they didn’t have any rooms open that early. They took my phone number and suggested I grab a leisurely breakfast — they’d call me when something opened up. The rain had turned to snow at that point, so I opted to stay within the hotel. They had a cafe with a nice (albeit hotel-expensive) breakfast buffet, so I camped out up there for the next couple of hours until they finally called me with the good news.

Got a room, got into bed. Blessed sleep.

At 12:30 I arose, cleaned up, figured out my train path, and headed over to the IF hospitality suite. This was a room in the Hilton arranged by Andrew Plotkin (aka Zarf) on behalf of the People’s Republic Of Interactive Fiction (a Boston-based IF group) to be a welcoming space for PAXies interested in IF. They printed up friendly fliers and everything (click images for larger versions):

Photocopy - the front side of a flyer advertising "The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction" Hospitality Suite at PAX East 2010, listing various IF-related events at the con and in the room.

Photocopy - the back side of a flyer advertising the IF Hospitality Suite at PAX East 2010 - a faux IF transcript about finding the suite.

When I got there, I was pleased to find that it was pretty crowded! Not only that, it was full of people I’d known online for more than 15 years! Zarf was there, of course — we’d never met, although we’ve been in the same community since 1995. Also there was the estimable Stephen Granade, another guy I’ve known since the very beginning but never been face-to-face with. A few people I’d met at an IF gathering several years ago, so I wasn’t completely overwhelmed with face-to-name energy, but still, it was pretty amazing.

Top 5 awesome things about the IF suite

1) The swag! Robb Sherwin put together a great IF promotional CD (this, but updated with newer stuff) to give out to visitors. There was also a nifty postcard, with art on the front and a handy how-to on the back. Plus: badge ribbons, stickers, buttons, and nametags!

2) The food! Zarf & co. were kind enough to provide lots and lots of chips, M&Ms, and soda, and others brought delicious treats as well. Across the hall, Ben Collins-Sussman and Jack Welch even provided beer! Woo hoo!

3) The energy! At any given moment, there were usually two or three conversations going — newbies connecting with veterans, different subsections of the community interconnecting, people getting acquainted who had never really met before. People talked about IF, and also about their lives, what was happening at the conference, and what was for dinner that night.

4) The special guest stars! Don Woods, co-creator of the original Adventure, came to an IF panel and chatted with folks. I got to hang at the edge of a conversation between Emily Short and Steve Meretzky, so I got to thank the latter for his work, which has meant a lot to me over the years. Especially A Mind Forever Voyaging. Wow. Jason Scott hung out for a while doing his larger-than-life, bursting-with-anecdotes thing. It was a bit like a bunch of indie bands hanging out together, and then occasionally Paul McCartney or Robert Plant might drop by.

5) The people! I suppose this is a superset of the previous one, but holy cow, this room was PACKED the entire weekend! There was something really special about this locus of passion and force about IF. I loved talking to people who were new to the scene. I loved talking to people who had become community celebrities in the time I’ve been out of the loop. I loved talking to people I’ve known for years from the other side of a screen. I loved being in that room.