XYZZYnews
Issue #14

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
HOLLOW VOICE
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Now that I've cleared out the New Year's Eve party
detritus -- the confetti is swept, the empty
champagne bottles tucked in with the recyclable
trash -- I'd like to venture forth with a 1998
proposition, not so much a resolution, for the IF
community: let's turn the now-yearly IF competition
into a biennial event, celebrated every two years
perhaps much like the Olympics are now.

The benefits are readily apparent: IF programmers
could have twice as long to fine-tune their entries,
investing more time in thoughtful writing, elegant
puzzle design, fleshed-out storylines, and better
bug-testing; more aspiring programmers would toss
their hats in the ring; while the rest of the IF
fans would have more time to enjoy and methodically
explore each new competition game -- savoring more
fully developed, memorable games instead of hurrying
through too many games that, while generally well-
conceived, were too rushed through development (to
meet competition deadlines) to prove really
enjoyable.

While many IF fans have more free time than I do --
and anyone who's stayed tuned this long for
XYZZYnews's uneven publishing schedule knows that I
haven't much to spare -- just as many face even
heavier demands from their work, family, school, and
other obligations. So let's give ourselves a
collective break...! Many of us took years to finish
Zork, Adventure, Trinity, and the other classic text
adventures. Why would we want to rush through 35
games (in this year's competition alone) in a couple
of hours or, at most, days each?

One of my real New Year's resolutions was to stop
shortchanging my personal Web site, and I'm glad to
say I'm acting on that one with some recent
improvements to the XYZZYnews home page: There's a
new and improved guestbook
(http://www.xyzzynews.com/guestbook.html), search
engine (http://www.xyzzynews.com/search/), and
subscription form
(http://www.xyzzynews.com/subscribe/). Let me know
what you think of the new features!

Until next issue, happy gaming!

Eileen Mullin
[email protected]

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
TABLE OF CONTENTS
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Contents:
    **Top 10 Picks for IF on the Web
    **Letters
    **The Effects of 'XYZZY' in the 1997
      Interactive Fiction Competition Games
    **Spot the IF Reference!
    **All That Erasmatazz
    **IF Roundtable: The Art of the Puzzle
    **Announcing the 1997 XYZZY Awards
    **Tales from the Code Front: So you want to
      write a text adventure authoring system...
    **Game Review: I-O
    **Bulletin Board: readers helping other readers

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
LEGALESE
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

XYZZYnews is published more-or-less bimonthly by
Bran Muffin Communications,
160 West 24th Street, # 7C, New York, NY 10011, USA.
Email: [email protected].
URL: http://www.xyzzynews.com/. Send all inquiries,
letters, and submissions to any of the addresses
above.

Contents © 1998 XYZZYnews. All rights reserved.
Published in the United States of America.

Electronic versions: There are currently three
versions of XYZZYnews made available online. One is
in ASCII and can be viewed with any text reader. You
can also download a .PDF file that mirrors the
layout of the print version. Use the Adobe Acrobat
Reader (available for Windows, Mac, DOS and Unix) to
view the .PDF file; no special fonts or linked
graphics are needed. You can obtain Acrobat Reader
by following the links from http://www.adobe.com/.
Thirdly, you can also read this issue online at
http://www.xyzzynews.com/xyzzy.14.html

Subscriptions: All electronic versions are available
at no cost. You can obtain either the ASCII or PDF
versions by FTPing to the
ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/magazines/XYZZYnews directory.
To be added to the mailing list, please write to
[email protected] and specify text-only or .PDF
version. The print version is $15 (U.S.) for one
year (6 issues) or $2.50 for a sample issue. For
print subscriptions outside the U.S. or Canada,
please email or write for rates.

All products, names, and services are trademarks or
registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Editor:
    Eileen Mullin
Associate Editor:
    Neil deMause
Contributors to this issue:
    Alan Conroy

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Issue #14 Top 10 Picks for IF on the World Wide Web
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Interactive Fiction Web Ring
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Lair/7152/

Hole in the Wall -- Interactive Fiction
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Meadows/3355/if.htm

HUGO interactive fiction authoring system home page
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Academy/5976/hugo.html

Zork Grand Inquisitor
http://www.activision.com/games/adventure/zgi/index.shtml

Megagame: Interactive Fiction
http://www.dgware.com/

ifMUD: A MUD Forever Voyaging
http://fovea.retina.net:4001

The Space Under the Window (Andrew Plotkin)
http://www.edoc.com/zarf/zplet/sutwin.html

The Adventure Market
http://spinndb.asfh-berlin.de/market/

Updated Infocom Bugs list
http://members.aol.com/graemecree/infobugs/index.htm

The World of IF
http://www.natcom.org/if/home.htm

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
LETTERS
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Programmers wanted

Readers: I've received a query from a Santa Monica-
based television entertainment company that is
looking for IF game programmers to possibly develop
an online adventure for their Web site. The company
is Rysher Entertainment (http://www.rysher.com/). It
produces and distributes such titles as Highlander:
The Series, F/X: The Series and Soldier of Fortune
Inc.

Excellent writing skills will count for a lot here.
The adventures should also be totally immersed in
the world of F/X, Highlander or Soldier of Fortune
Inc. -- they are looking for something that would
stand alongside the best episodes of the actual
series.

If you would like to toss your hat in the ring,
please contact:

    Eddie Camarillo
    Director, Marketing/Guy in Charge of Web Stuff
    Rysher Entertainment
    2401 Colorado Avenue, Ste. 200
    Santa Monica, CA 90404

----------------------------------------------------

Dear Eileen,

Hello! I wanted to say that I am a great fan of
interactive fiction and I think that this is a great
magazine to publish! I am 12 years old and in 6th
grade. I was introduced to Zork and The Colossal
Cave in fourth grade. I beat Adventure with a little
help from my mom, and beat Zork 1 and 2 alone.

At school we were getting old, small, cheap
computers that couldn't really handle any games that
my friends usually play. I loaded all of the Zorks,
and a few others. I think they are still on the
computers, and the kids really like them. Thank you
for printing all of the latest news and events in
the IF world!

    --Brian Wilt
    [email protected]

----------------------------------------------------

Hello, Eileen,

I started out playing Infocom games in the mid-'80s,
and have recently begun to reacquire the games via
the Activision collections. Here is something that I
discovered while playing Planetfall.

While inside the safety webbing (in the escape pod)
at the beginning of the game, it is possible to
retrieve both the towel and the kit buy typing "read
the towel" and "read the kit." The game will then
say:

>Read the towel
(picking it up first)

It then tells you what is written on the towel (or
the kit).

Trying to GET the towel or kit elicits a response to
the effect that you cannot reach the item from your
current perch.

    --Gary MacDougall
    [email protected]

----------------------------------------------------

Hi Eileen,

How about re-running your 'What XYZZY Does' column;
from issue (don't remember which, but the article
dealt with the competition entries of 1995)? I also
remember you urging authors to implement the magic
word in their games, and it seems your promotion was
very successful.

Nearly every new game has a cute response to XYZZY,
and it's become one of the very first commands I try
with each game. My current favorite comes from
'Apartment F209':

>XYZZY
Gee, grandpa. What was it like back then?

I believe it wouldn't take much time to compile a
list of those replies from the more recent games and
turn it into another 'Tales from the Code Front'
article.

    --Martin
    [email protected]

That's one of the most frequent requests I receive
-- and I'm obliging this issue with the answers to
"What XYZZY Does..." for the 1997 IF competition
entries. Enjoy!
    --Eileen

----------------------------------------------------

Dear XYZZYnews:

Hi, I saw your posting on XYZZYnews, requesting maps
for the mazes (alike and different.) My father and I
have mapped out these mazes in detail. I'm afraid I
don't have the maps in an electronic format right
now, but I can give you some hints to mapping them
yourself.

For the maze alike, drop an item on the floor in
each room. There are at least 12 rooms in this maze,
so you may have to carry several armloads worth into
the maze. To get out of the maze from the first
room, go up. All of the connections in this maze are
two-way. That is, if you can get to room B from room
A, you can get to room A from room B. However, the
passages are twisty, so the connections are often
"bent."

The maze different is more convoluted, but you don't
need to truck in loads of items to solve it. Each
room in this maze is, indeed, different. No two
rooms have the same exact description. The
descriptions are made up of three key words, in
various orders, for example:

You are in a little twisty maze of passages, all
different.
You are in a maze of twisting little passages, all
different.

Note how "maze", "passages", and "twisty/twisting"
change their order. The rest of the words just serve
to connect them, and make things more confusing :-).
Anyway, with three items, the number of possible
orderings is six. Since one of the items has two
forms ("twisty or twisting"), this doubles the
number, bringing it to 12. Note that all of the 12
rooms have exits in every direction (ten of them,
including up and down.) I'm not sure if all of the
room connections are two-way, but I think most of
them are. To exit the maze different is exactly
opposite of the maze alike.

Go down from the first room, to get to the West end
of the Long Hall.

I will try to make image files of my maps. Let me
know if you are interested in receiving them.

    [email protected]

----------------------------------------------------

Dear XYZZYnews:

Hi there... I just wanted to let you that like most
people who email you, I am hooked to XYZZYnews, it's
masterfully created and the content is equalled only
by its appearance. It is a fantastic idea to put up
PDF versions.

Also, I would really like to read some articles
about playing IF, such as advice about making maps,
perhaps a run through of some fictional puzzles to
help beginners, also advice on solving mazes etc.

Anyway, thanks a lot for making the magazine
available in the way it is, and please keep up the
good work!

    --Paul
    [email protected]

----------------------------------------------------

Dear XYZZYnews:
Hello, I was surfing when I came across your
XYZZYnews Web site, about Infocom adventure games.

I'm a big fan of these games from way back, when I
first figured out how to get into the white house.
However, I've looked and looked, and I can't find
the old games anywhere for sale. Would you know if
there is anyone that sells them anymore, or if there
would be any sort of way to get them?

    --Brian

Dear Eileen,

I've been a silent reader of your wonderful e-zine
since the first number.

I am an Informatic Sciences student here in Las
Islas Canarias in Spain. I am now 24 and I am a fan
of interactive fiction since I joined my life to
computers 12 years ago.

I really love writing and reading stories,
especially high-tech, mystery, horror, etc. Also I
like very much puzzles, so IF is perfect for me.

I write you to congratulate for your wonderful e-
zine, keep releasing it!!! I want to ask you for
more info about three games from Infocom that don't
come with my CD of the treasures of Activision. They
are Arthur, Journey and Shogun. Where could I get
this games?, Everybody talks about them in SPAG and
XYZZYnews, but here in Spain is completely
impossible to see them!! :(

Best regards,
    --Rafael Velasco
    [email protected]

I have the same Web site suggestion for the both of
you: One online trading post for
buying/selling/trading interactive fiction games
I've learned about is called the Adventure Market
(http://spinndb.asfh-berlin.de/market/) --it's one
of this issue's Top 10 Picks for IF.
    --Eileen

----------------------------------------------------

Hello from a fan,

I am a graduate student at the Harvard Grad School
of Education in the Technology in Education program.
I am also a fan of Infocom who grew up on Zork.

I am writing a research paper on the development of
reading comprehension using interactive fiction and
thought I would introduce myself and ask for any
suggestions. I am aiming the educational audience at
4th-5th grade, as this is when I began playing and
looking up words in the dictionary. In contrast to
Moose Crossing at MIT, I am focusing on the "closed"
work of interactive fiction as a text unto itself.

If you could please suggest any newsgroups were you
feel this would be appropriate I will post there
right away. Thanks.

    --Erik Blankinship
    [email protected]

The Usenet newsgroup rec.art.int-fiction is the main
suggestion I have for you. Readers, please feel free
to chime in with additional suggestions!
    --Eileen

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Effects of 'XYZZY' in the 1997
Interactive Fiction Competition Games
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

See which of the enterprising IF programmers entered
in the 1997 IF competition coded in a special
response to the XYZZY command, a magic word from the
classic game Adventure.

The Effects of 'XYZZY'
in the 1997 Interactive Fiction Competition Games
See which of the enterprising IF programmers entered
in the 1997 IF competition coded in a special
response to the XYZZY command, a magic word from the
classic game Adventure.

-----------
Inform games
-----------

A Good Breakfast:
    A hollow voice sighs, exasperated.

A Bear's Night Out:
    A hollow voice says, "Obviously, you are in the
    wrong game." (pop-up window: Watch me pull a
    rabbit out of my hat! That trick never works. --
    Bullwinkle J. Moose and Rocky Squirrel"

Cask:
    That's not a verb I recognise.

Congratulations:
    That's not a verb I recognise.

The Edifice:
    You mutter a nonsense word and surprisingly,
    the Edifice trembles in response! Everything else
    goes silent, and for a moment, it sounds as if the
    Edifice might collapse! Finally, it stills, and the
    world returns to normal.

    You seem to have created a Word of Power.

Travels in the Land of Erden: In Quest of the Adventure:
    That's not a verb I recognise.

Friday Afternoon or, Escape from MicroSun:
    That's not a verb I recognise.

A Simple Home Adventure:
    That's not a verb I recognise.

Aunt Nancy's House:
    A hollow voice says, "Wrong game, pal."

The Family Legacy:
    Nothing happens. But you do feel like you have
    satisfied an irresistible urge.

Madame L'Estrange and the Troubled Spirit
    That's not a verb I recognise.

The Lost Spellmaker:
    A mystical hand, seemingly made of thousands of
    tiny sparkling stars, sweeps down from above.
    Before you can do anything, it prods you in the
    ribs, and a hollow voices echoes "It's not you!"
    The hand flies off again, quickly disappearing
    from sight.

Sins Against Mimesis:
    A hollow voice says, "Bite me."

A New Day:
    Stop living in the past, man!

Pintown:
    That's not a verb I recognise.

Phred Phontious and the Quest for Pizza:
    That's not a verb I recognise.

Symmetry: A Matter of Self-Trust:
    That's not a verb I recognise.

She's Got a Thing for a Spring:
    You feel an indescribable sense of deja vu, and
    the world seems to turn inside out.

    Darkness
    It is pitch dark, and you can't see a thing.
    (Editor's hint: Plugh will get you out)

Sylenius Mysterium:
    That's not a verb I recognise.

The Town Dragon:
    That's not a verb I recognise.

The Tempest:
    That instruction, that verb, doth elude me.

-----------
TADS games
-----------

The Obscene Quest of Dr. Aardvarkbark:
    I don't know the word "xyzzy".

Poor Zefron's Almanac:
    >>Foof!<<

    You are inside a building, a well house for a
    large spring.

    There are some keys on the ground here.
    There is a shiny brass lamp nearby.
    There is food here.
    There is a bottle of water here.

    You are able to take in your surroundings for a
    few seconds before a second >>Foof!<< deposits you
    back in Zefron's workshop. Apparently your feeble
    wizardly powers won't enable you to stay in that
    distant land for long.

    Zefron's Workshop
    You are in Zefron's workshop/bedroom at the
    top of the tower. (room description follows)

Babel:
    I don't know the word "xyzzy".

The Frenetic Five vs. Sturm und Drang:
    "Xyzzy!" you shout, rallying your troops to
    battle. They look at you like you're nuts.
    (if others are in the room)

    "Xyzzy!" you shout, but there's no one around
    to hear.
    (if no one else is there)

Glowgrass:
    I don't know the word "xyzzy".

Sunset Over Savannah:
    The word escapes your mouth like a gentle
    zephyr and swirls in the air around you. You can
    feel powerful forces gathering, like a static charge
    before a storm. You glance around in anticipation. A
    long moment passes, but nothing happens. You begin
    to fear that something has gone truly awry with the
    fabric of the universe.

Temple of the Orc Mage:
    I don't know the word "xyzzy".

VirtuaTech:
    A hollow voice announces that the XYZZY forum
    on the Virtua WorldNet is closed right now. How
    typical.

Zero Sum Game:
    ***You have died ***

Zombie! The Interactive Creepshow:
    Even that magic cannot help you here.

-----------
ALAN games
-----------

Leaves:
    'xyzzy'? That word is not understood.

-----------
AGT games
-----------

E-Mailbox:
    Eileen Mullin put you up to this, *didn't* she? :-)

-----------
Hugo games
-----------

Down:
    You can't use the word "xyzzy".

-----------
JACL games
-----------

Unholy Grail:
    Suddenly a magical white glove appears floating
    in the air before you, slaps you several times
    across the face, then disappears.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
SPOT THE IF REFERENCE!
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Send your IF references found in non-IF materials to
[email protected].

1.
Mars Pathfinder -- Welcome to Mars

PUBLIC INFORMATION OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Contact: Diane Ainsworth

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                October 9, 1997

PATHFINDER TEAM PAINTS AN EARTH-LIKE PICTURE OF
EARLY MARS

Mars is appearing more and more like a planet that
was very  Earth-like in its infancy, with weathering
processes and flowing  water that created a variety
of rock types and a warmer atmosphere  that
generated clouds, winds and seasonal cycles.

[...]

Despite recent communications problems with Earth,
the Mars  Pathfinder lander and rover are continuing
to operate during the  Martian days, when they can
receive enough energy to power up spacecraft
systems via their solar panels. The mission is now
into Sol 94, or the 94th Martian day of operations,
since landing on July 4.

"Everything that we have seen over the last 10 days
(with respect to communications) is like a twisty
little maze with passages all alike," said Jennifer
Harris, acting mission manager. "I am happy to
report that we have made contact with the spacecraft
using its main transmitter. We were able to confirm
that we could send a command to the spacecraft to
turn its transmitter on and then turn it off.

[...]

    --submitted by Martin Rundkvist
    [email protected]

2.
I found the following in "Quantum Leap: Prologue",
which explains the set-up before the series starts.
Sam's sort-of-girlfriend is is being pursued through
the tunnels behind Project HQ:

 The tunnels carried sound. She fancied she could
 hear Weyland still cursing and moaning, somewhere
 behind her. Sometimes it sounded close, sometimes
 far away. There were other sounds too, scutlings
 and scrapings and dripping.

 "You are in a maze of twisting turning passageways,
 all exactly alike," she muttered to herself. "Bring
 on the grues."

It seems that even though Ziggy is the most powerful
computer in the world, the Project staff still like
to play Zork (probably with a really cool
interpreter, though).

    --submitted by Neil Hobbs
    [email protected]



+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
ALL THAT ERASMATAZZ
Crawford's 'AI' game engine earns an erazzberry
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
by Neil deMause ([email protected])

For the last couple of years that I've been
following the interactive fiction Usenet newsgroups,
I've noticed occasional posts referring to the
Erasmatron, a supposed next-generation approach to
IF. The brainchild of Chris Crawford, author of such
Mac games as Balance of Power and Trust & Betrayal,
this Erasmathingy was promised to be a "computer
story generation system and method using a network
of re-usable substories," featuring "attribute-based
social simulation." It all sounded mildly
intriguing, even though my own tastes for quantum
leaps forward in IF development involve more
spellchecking and fewer games with dragons in them.

Still, I never got around to checking out the
Erasmagizmo, in large part thanks to my distaste for
firing up Netscape except in dire emergencies, like
a new Cecil Adams column. Then, one foggy
Thanksgiving eve, someone directed me to an article
in Wired magazine in which Crawford described an
interactive world where the plot runs free of its
author's mere imagining, a world populated with
characters equipped with 21 traits: Timidity,
Dutifulness, Magnanimity, Gullibility, Loyalty,
Enviousness, Pride, Love, Hunger, Insecurity,
Integrity, Lovability, Dominance, Competence,
Loquacity, Initiative, Greed, Libido, Sexiness,
Nurturance, Temper, and Joviality. (What, no bile,
melancholy, or spleen?) Also included were a series
of quotes from Crawford that ranged from the
grandiose ("A century from now, they'll look back on
us and laugh at our misconceptions even as they
mythologize our achievements.") to the bizarre
("We're at the nativity of a profound intellectual
revolution -- what a privilege!").

But hey, who am I to deny a visionary his
eccentricities? They laughed at Einstein, after all!
They laughed at the Marx Brothers! They even laughed
at Hitler, and boy, were they sorry! So, on the off
chance that Chris Crawford really was about to
launch an IF anschluss of epic proportions, I
visited his erasmatazz.com to download the first-
ever Erasmagame: Laura J. Mixon's Shattertown Sky.

Fortunately, I was at work at the time, with its T-1
line, because Erasmogoods are huge: more than 5 megs
for the stuffed game file of Shattertown Sky. That
the accompanying Erasmaganza interpreter clocked in
at a mere 400K was little consolation as I waited
for Stuffit Expander to gnaw its way through the
downloaded archive.

I eagerly double-clicked on the Shattertown Sky game
file; then I selected it again from Erasmaganza's
File menu. (Crawford, despite being a Mac-only
programmer, has apparently yet to learn how to make
an Erasmadocument open automatically when double-
clicked.) And entered into an interface straight out
of...WorldBuilder?

Sure enough, that's what it looked like. The same
multiple text and graphics windows, the same cramped
type and impenetrable menus (inventory as items in a
pull-down menu?) as that late, unlamented '80s-era
Mac game development system. The ErasmaGUI, though,
has one significant difference: where WorldBuilder
made at least a passing attempt at parsing English
commands (generally responding with such helpful
prods as "Huh?" and "What?"), the Erasmafoozle
dispenses entirely with typed input, offering only a
single window with multiple-choice options like "I
exit" or "I coolly greet Poot." On very special
occasions, it spits forth a mouthful of text, then
leaves you with a single highlighted phrase on which
to click: "(Do nothing.)"

This left the detailed post-apocalyptic dystopia
crafted by Mixon largely beyond my reach -- though
the game clearly displayed "Gramma Mara is asleep on
her mattress, snoring lightly, her so-precious
handgun cradled in the crook of her arm," I had but
a single button to click: "I dig around for a clean
pair of pants and shirt, and put them on."

I dutifully clicked. Instantly, there appeared
before me the cartoon head of Gramma herself,
wrinkles menacingly ablaze.

I screamed.

The interactivity of Erasmaworks, it soon became
clear, is concentrated in one narrow arena:
character emotions. The options for dealing with
Granny were limited to three variations on "hello,"
with different inflections: "I coolly greet Mara,"
"'hello there, Mara!'" "'Hi, Mara,' I say glumly."
(I picked the last of these; Gramma obligingly bared
her teeth. I screamed again.) Once I had dispatched
Granny, I went on to meet a series of Shattertown
denizens, all presented in that same Mike Judge-
meets-Thunderbirds-Are-Go! perspective, all equally
uninterested in anything beyond whether I was being
(check one) surly, indifferent, or flirtatious.
After a few rounds of insults (one character, the
eponymous Doc, went so far as to call me a "dog
dummy"), I finally managed to pick a fight with a
local lowlife named Oliver. Things quickly
escalated, until I finally took out poor Oliver with
a knife to the gut -- whereupon I was presented with
the provocative option "I remove the Nothing from
Oliver's body and stuff it in my bag."

There was more to Shattertown Sky -- the random-
sounding stories told by the characters when I
stopped pummeling them long enough to listen ("Cat
asked Aaron for help. 'What happened?' he asked. She
replied, 'I've been injured.' 'Perhaps we can work
something out,' he told her, 'if you make it worth
my while.'"), the madly ticking clock that spun out
of control in the corner of the screen, to no
apparent end. But to be honest, by this point I was
laughing so hard I could barely type straight, so I
mercifully put the Orgasmotron (damn, I *knew* I'd
slip and type that) out of its misery. While a good
deal of the blame must be laid at the feet of
Mixon's, er, colorful writing style, the E-tron
itself is a major part of the problem: when your
only options are a prepackaged set of emotional
signifiers, it quickly begins to feel like an
animatronic Choose Your Own Adventure book -- hey,
even Monkey Island at least let you pick stuff up.
Chris Crawford's new gizmo may yet find a niche in
the panoply of game development systems, but one
thing is clear: the revolution will not be
Erasmatized.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
IF ROUNDTABLE: THE ART OF THE PUZZLE
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

One subject that crops up perennially on the
interactive-fiction newsgroups is puzzle design.
Just how do I come up with these nefarious beasties?
is a frequent cry. In the interests of furthering
humankind's understanding of the lowly puzzle, we've
gathered together three accomplished IF authors --
Adam Cadre, Lucian Smith, and Andrew "Zarf" Plotkin
-- along with XYZZYnews contributing editor Neil
deMause, in the IF MUD's Specious Lobby to hammer
out The Art of The Puzzle.

NEIL:  How about we start by introducing ourselves
for posterity?

ADAM:  Greetings, posterity. I'm Adam Cadre. I wrote
I-0, and, even more impressively, Lost Anaheim
Hills. I'm currently at work on Pantheon, which I'm
targeting for late '98.

LUCIAN:  I'm Lucian Smith. I found IF again by
randomly searching the net for "XYZZY" a couple
years ago, and found XYZZYnews. I wrote some
invisiclue-like hints for So Far, and just entered
this year's competition with The Edifice.

ZARF:  Hi. I'm Zarf. You may remember me from such
transcripts as "Zarf eats the XYZZYnews awards
alive" and "Zarf says 'Yo.'" I'm currently working
on something but it's not done yet.

NEIL:  And as for me, I'm Neil deMause, author of
Lost New York (LNY). So the reason we're here is
because there's been a fair amount of talk on the
newsgroup about puzzle design. One, how to make the
puzzles seem natural to the game play. And two, how
to make puzzles that are both fair and challenging.
Let's start with the first one.

ADAM:  Well, to immediately start talking about
myself, most of the puzzles in I-0 didn't have an
independent genesis. I'd create a location -- either
on paper or in code -- and then think, okay, what
would logically be in such a location? From there,
I'd make puzzles out of the materials at hand. I
don't think I ever thought, "Hey, I've got a great
puzzle idea!" and then struggled to figure out how
to fit it in.

LUCIAN:  For my game, the plot *was* the puzzle. For
example, for the second level of the Edifice, I
thought, "OK, in this scenario, the player will have
to learn someone else's language." The rest of the
details fell in around that. The sick boy was a way
of creating a more personal motivation for the
player to solve the puzzle.

ZARF:  Even more so, for me. Since So Far is pretty
much pure surrealism, I didn't *have* a plot in mind
originally. I had a theme, and was co-inventing
puzzles and scenes and events all at the same time.
Plus, of course, part of the theme is that the
player doesn't quite understand how it all fits
together.

ADAM:  I suppose that leaves LNY, which featured
both intricate puzzles (goats and gumballs) and a
strong sense of place. Which came first?

NEIL:  Well, LNY is a weird hybrid. I started out
with the assumption that IF games were based around
puzzles, so I wrote a whole bunch of puzzles around
a time travel theme. But what I was really
interested in doing was telling a story about the
history of New York and forces of change and
"progress," I suppose.

I mean, I'm looking to move more towards less
puzzle-centric games myself. But then I look at
people like Zarf, and they have no problem creating
puzzle-centric games that don't seem contrived.
What's your secret? You just smarter than everyone
else? (And I include Lucian in that, too.)

ZARF:  I never thought of I-0 as being *less*
puzzle-based than So Far. I think maybe I do better
at turning the normal plot-incidents of a story into
"puzzles" -- that is, things that stand out in the
player's attention. At one point, I posted "A puzzle
is a mechanism for focusing the player's attention."
Start with that. But they already were plot elements
where the player has to act. Where the *protagonist*
acts. I try to invest that into the player.

ADAM:  Yeah, it does sound like we're talking about
different types of animal here. An all-encompassing
thought exercise like the language puzzle in The
Edifice seems quite different from a lock-and-key
eureka-type puzzle, like how to survive the scorpion
in I-0.

ZARF:  Oh, no, they're the same thing.

ADAM:  Are they? Hmm.

NEIL:  Yeah. Just levels of complexity, no?

ZARF:  Levels of complexity, importance in the
overall plot, importance in the overall thematic
effect.

NEIL:  Lemme focus for a sec on a slightly different
issue: What *purpose* does a puzzle serve? For
example: One of the things I like most about playing
IF is the thrill of discovering new regions. I've
sometimes compared it to the tricks that Frederick
Law Olmsted used in park design: make an artificial
bend in the path, or a tunnel to pass through, and
then once you're past it -- bang! a seemingly
endless vista! It's not endless, of course, but you
can use trickery to make it look endless, at first.
    The problem, then, is how to keep the player
from rushing through the entire park at once. The
solution: puzzles. You'll notice that virtually all
the puzzles in LNY involve finding the next plaque
to the next time period. Each one you solve gets you
the payoff of a new vista to explore. But I guess
I'm wondering if that's the only way to structure a
work of IF...

ADAM:  I'm not so sure you necessarily need lock-
and-key-type obstacles for that, though. Here's an
alternative model... Think of a map of North
America. Say that to see all there is to see, the
player needs to visit, say, the 40 largest cities on
the map. The obstacle there may be no less than the
fact that travelling from Houston to New York means
you're traveling away from Los Angeles.
    So converting that back to IF terms, we're
dealing with plot branches.

ZARF:  OK, I think you're wrapped up in a subset of
possible IF stories -- those which are travel
stories. If the player's motivation is to see over
the next hill, the anticipation and struggle are
getting to the top of the hill.
    Most generally, the goal is the *next thing* --
that's next in the static fiction sense. In a book,
pacing is controlled by both simple page count and
the nature of the writing (intensity, complexity of
action in a scene, etc.). I have much less control
over that, but I can make the climactic scene come
sooner or later by making the player do more or less
to get there.

NEIL:  But isn't that what we were just saying?
Puzzles serve to slow the player down by making them
do more, thus controlling the pacing? The only other
alternative is daunting amounts of text to read, no?

ZARF nods.

ADAM:  What types of motivations could a player
have? There's the thrill of seeing new places and
things. That of solving a problem...

ZARF:  Rescue the princess, find a good book, eat
lunch...

NEIL:  Motivations for the player, or the PC?

LUCIAN:  I think the two are intertwined. It can be
very hard to separate them. For The Edifice, the
overall motivation is simply human nature. And, in a
story about the beginnings of man, this is not
inappropriate. I make a very light reference to that
in that the only way to get an "extremely content"
rating from the game is to walk away from the
Edifice at the beginning.

ADAM:  On the other hand, I do think that PC
motivation and player motivation can be separated.
The player always chooses to subject herself to the
frustrations a game inevitably provides, but the PC
may well be happier just going home, or just playing
volleyball.

NEIL:  But, Adam, I could say the opposite: the PC
only has the game goal to live for, whereas I may
very well decide to go watch TV instead. Motivating
the PC is worthless if you don't motivate the
player, too.

LUCIAN:  And I think one of the main purposes of a
puzzle is to involve the player in the story more. I
remember Gareth Rees talking about his
Christminster. He said that the purpose of his
'darkness' puzzle was essentially to give the player
something to do while Wilderspin told his story.
This is along the right lines, I think, although for
better integration, solving the puzzle should
advance the plot on its own.

NEIL:  Well, maybe I'm unusual, but I don't solve
puzzles because I like solving puzzles. I solve
puzzles to get the payoff, whatever that might be.

ADAM:  I think we've wandered into the question of
where the pleasures of a text lie. In IF, overcoming
an obstacle should be rewarding, but also, the
obstacles should themselves be somewhat pleasurable,
or the player *will* go watch TV. Or just use the
walkthrough without even trying the puzzle. Which I
often do.

NEIL:  I don't even bother to finish games that
don't have a clear payoff. This can be either the
threat of nuclear holocaust, or characters I care
about -- either one will do. But otherwise, the
first hard puzzle and I'm out of there. I don't even
bother with a walkthrough. I only use walkthroughs
for games I like that I get irrevocably stuck in.

ADAM:  This may also be a factor in why so much IF
has a comedic tone. If a game is funny even while
I'm banging my head against the wall, I'll keep
playing. If not, I'm probably gone.

ZARF:  Well, I like discovering clever puzzles, so
there's *some* motivation to finish a game with no
clear payoff. On the other hand, I've never seen a
game without a clear payoff -- except mine, and I
had my own reasons. Any idiot can threaten nuclear
holocaust.

LUCIAN:  So, I think what we're saying is that there
should be two parts to any given puzzle. To use my
language puzzle as an example again, since I'm
familiar with it, saying that the sick boy was "just
a detail" was misleading, before. There's the puzzle
itself, and its relation to the story.

ADAM:  And yet the Edifice language puzzle is an oh-
so-rare example of a case where I found myself
addicted to the puzzle just because it was
interesting.

NEIL:  We seem to be meandering into the second part
of the conversation: What's a good/fair puzzle?
Maybe we could start with the opposite: What makes a
*bad* puzzle?

ZARF:  A bad puzzle requires you to be in telepathic
communion with the author. We all know that rule. A
bad puzzle is one where, when you figure out the
answer -- or look it up -- you're annoyed instead of
pleased. And a combination lock made of soup cans is
a bad puzzle.

ADAM:  And I can think of an example of the last of
these -- have we all played 'A Good Breakfast'? This
is an example of a game that's interesting, that has
interesting puzzles -- but the puzzles themselves
are really unmotivated. For instance, a combination
lock made of rotating gnomes, just to get back in
your house.

ZARF:  The cute robot toy?

ADAM:  You need a spoon. How do you get a spoon? You
play Lights-Out with a robot. Who, if you win,
unexpectedly gives you a spoon. The puzzles and the
stories are tangentially related at best. That's a
problem.

NEIL:  Deus ex puzzle.

ADAM:  Exactly.

ZARF:  It's tricky, because I *liked* all those
elements. And the author can get away with one of
them (any one), because of whimsy.

NEIL:  Well, here's the problem with trying to
define "good" and "bad" puzzles. As Lucian will
attest, when I found out the proper solution to the
darkness puzzle in So Far, I just about had a
conniption. Yet many other people say it's their
favorite puzzle. And I get the same
complaints/compliments on my games, too. What some
people love, others hate.

LUCIAN:  There's a difference between puzzle
elements and puzzle solutions.

NEIL:  So as an author, how do you judge what's
good? Just your own personal reactions?

ZARF:  Yes, no, and let me back up. :) The
"tangentially related" problem is, I think, a
conflict between the focus point of the story and
the focus of the player. You-the-player stuck and
frustrated and yelling at a bunch of gnome statues
that are preventing you from getting in the front
door. If that were a short story, going in the front
door would rate one sentence. Or, if it were weirdly
locked like that, it would be a major part of the
story in a way which didn't make it into AGB.
    I cheat heavily by setting up stories where a
major part is the protagonist wandering around,
trying to understand confusing things Many many IF
works do the same thing, of course.
    You can make IF where you're in control and
confident, but you have to structure the puzzles to
take that into account.

LUCIAN:  There's definitely a difference between
'satisfying' and 'pertinent'. A satisfying puzzle is
one that you are pleased with yourself for solving.
A pertinent puzzle relates it to the plot as a
whole. You might be pleased with yourself for
winning "Lights Out," but that doesn't make it
pertinent.

ZARF:  Unless it's satisfying because you solved it
by understanding its relationship to the plot as a
whole. Then they're the same thing again.

NEIL:  It sounds to me like bad puzzles fall in
three categories: the unfair, the unsatisfying, and
the, er, impertinent. Am I leaving anything out?

LUCIAN:  The too hard, the too easy, and the too
weird? Shall we talk about "hard" vs. "easy"
puzzles, then?

ZARF:  Hard vs. easy is too subjective. We can
sometimes agree on fair vs. unfair, but almost never
on hard vs. easy.

NEIL:  Unfair = requires telepathy, right?

ZARF:  Yes.

ADAM:  Here's another issue that just occurred to me
regarding the fairness issue: what kinds of
cognition, for lack of a better word, do IF puzzles
incorporate? For instance, how often do we encounter
puzzles that require knowledge of the world or
culture? (Didn't Graham have a puzzle that requires
familiarity with Proust?).

ZARF:  About Proust, no, I don't think so. I'm
pretty sure he put in clues for the culture-
ignorant. You may be thinking of his "deliberate
guess-the-verb" puzzle.

NEIL:  This is mostly an implementation issue, I
think. Or at least partly so. Locked door puzzles
are easy because there are libraries for them.

ADAM:  Is it really unfair for a puzzle to test your
knowledge of baseball, but fair to test your command
of logic? Or are these just different kinds of
games, and player beware?

LUCIAN:  I was able to create an interaction-with-
people puzzle (the selfsame language puzzle) only
because I was able to limit the playing field--the
Stranger had a complete vocabulary of about 21
words. Even with that limitation, that code still
took up about a third of the game.

ZARF:  Well, yes, they're different types of games.
But the level of logic in existing IF is really
within the grasp of just about all the literate
audience. Whereas I don't know Proust *or* baseball.

NEIL:  Define "literate."

ZARF:  Capable of reading science fiction. OK, I'm
judging by myself. Of course the prevalence of SF
and fantasy in IF is not a coincidence -- similar
target audiences. Ditto, why there's a lot of puzzle
plotting in SF and fantasy.

NEIL:  Whereas I know plenty of people who know
baseball, but couldn't solve a logic puzzle to save
their life.

ZARF:  Can't solve which logic puzzles? The formal
knight-and-knave puzzles? Those are a minority. Are
you talking about people who can't solve Lights Out
or the brown-eyed rock puzzle in Spellbreaker?

NEIL:  I know a very smart person, for example, who
was unable to get past the first puzzle of System's
Twilight. The tree thing. It requires a certain kind
of thinking -- which is I think what Adam was trying
to point out.

ZARF:  OK, that's a large class of puzzles that I
wouldn't hesitate to put in IF, but which would give
people trouble.

NEIL:  Basically, anything that's fair game in Games
magazine tends to be seen as fair game in IF.

ZARF:  Hypothesis: we don't spend enough time
inventing *easy* puzzles. Discuss.

NEIL:  Easy puzzles are too hard to design!
Seriously. It has to be easy enough for anyone to
solve, yet hard enough to be satisfying. That's a
damn hard line to walk.

LUCIAN:  I think we might be able to define a new
classification here -- "kind" and "unkind." A kind
puzzle will take your attempts at solving it, and
push you in the right direction. An unkind puzzle
will wait for you to solve the whole thing before it
lets on that you're on the right track.

ZARF:  Implementation detail.

LUCIAN:  Exactly. And that's important!

ADAM:  Okay, so what makes a puzzle involving aside
from difficulty?

NEIL:  It should be fun to do. No setting a hundred
levers to different positions.

ZARF:  The canonical uninvolving puzzle is "find a
key in the living room which unlocks a door in the
hall." That's easy, but there's more to it than
that.

NEIL:  It should have an obvious payoff. Either
intrinsic or extrinsic to the puzzle itself. The
problem with the "find the key" puzzle is that it's
no fun looking for the key, and a door in itself
isn't that exciting.

LUCIAN:  But if you *made* it fun to look for the
key, it would suddenly become OK.

NEIL:  Right. Put the key just out of reach, guarded
by, er, a tree sloth. And have intriguing noises
coming from behind the door. And suddenly it's not
so bad a puzzle.

ZARF:  No. The noises and the tree sloth make it an
interesting *situation*, but the puzzle itself adds
nothing. What you've done is added a potentially
interesting get-the-key-from-the-sloth puzzle.

LUCIAN:  Layers of complexity.

NEIL:  Babel fish.

ZARF:  If, however, the solution to *that* is to
find some sloth chow, then again the players will
say "gosh, the sloth chow puzzle." A puzzle can be
easy and satisfying, on its own, if it reveals
something interesting or makes you think of
something in a new way. The harder puzzles don't let
you win until you've thought of it; an easier
version might show it to you as a side effect of
winning."

NEIL:  Whereas if it's to learn something about
sloths (say, that they're distracted by copies of
the National Review), then to tune the TV to a
picture of William F. Buckley, it's a more
interesting puzzle?

ADAM:  That reminds me of the Reagan puzzle in
Bureaucracy.

ZARF:  How about the slide projector from Curses?
The puzzle proper is to put a two-inch picture into
a two-inch slot. But the context makes it
interesting, even though it's not particularly
tricky by itself.

LUCIAN:  One trick in conventional fiction is to
show the end before you get there. This can be in a
flash-forward, or by, say, showing you the murderer
in scene 1 and telling you he's the murderer. The
interesting bit then becomes 'How will the detective
catch the murderer?' You can do the same thing with
your puzzles to make them more interesting. If you
dangle a gold key just out of reach, and have a gold
door somewhere, you become very interested in
getting the gold key. If instead, you saw a sloth,
got him to move, and suddenly found a key in his
lair, it isn't as tantalizing as it could have been.

ZARF:  Good. Anticipation is part of it, yes.

NEIL:  Having Vogon announcements blaring in your
ear, to make you desperate for the fish. If it were
just an "every time you solve one puzzle, we'll give
you another" thing, it'd be far less engaging. It'd
be damn annoying, in fact. The announcements are
key; they provide urgency.

LUCIAN:  Showing you the fish was essential to that
puzzle. If it had been "something flies past you,
and you don't see what it is.", it wouldn't have
been quite as engaging.

ADAM:  Would this be the time to bring up narrowness
and width? As in, how does it affect our assessment
of a puzzle if it's A Thing To Do as opposed to The
Only Thing You Can Do? How do we ameliorate the
frustration factor of the latter, and make the
former compelling?

NEIL:  Provide entertainment.

ZARF:  My problem with the Only Thing You Can Do is
that it limits the *solutions* to the stuff
available, and therefore it can't be interesting to
figure out which stuff is relevant.

NEIL:  You mean, the player just gets to make a list
of objects they have, and try one at a time?

ADAM:  Or knows that everything needed is at hand
(or lost) and that no further exploration will help.

ZARF:  In the worst cases, yes. And if you *solve*
something that way, it's not satisfying. Brute force
never is.

NEIL:  How do you avoid that, though? At some point,
every game can devolve into Only One Thing To Do.

ZARF:  If there's lots to do, there is the potential
to make that connection between apparently unrelated
things.

LUCIAN:  The Edifice would be a very different game
if you had to finish the first level before you
could get to the second. Which I considered. And
which I rejected as I thought about how much fun it
would be to play if I did ;-)

ADAM:  The red-herrings issue goes back a bit to the
first thing I said: if you create objects to fit the
setting rather than just making what the player will
need, the herrings take care of themselves. One of
the things that bug me in games is encountering,
say, a salad shooter, and knowing that the reason
it's there is because I will need to come up with
some innovative way to use a salad shooter in the
future.

LUCIAN:  For my game, I tried to make the "herrings"
tangentially related to the puzzles. For the most
part, they weren't there to solve the puzzles, but
they could be used to give the player/PC clues about
the correct solution. For example, all you really
*needed* to solve the language puzzle was about five
words. But all the rest were there to provide a
context, and to encourage the player along a path.

ADAM:  I'll throw in a random observation here on
puzzle genesis. Since my current project is still
quite plot-centered, a lot of the opportunities for
puzzley-type things has come from my own
implementation of them.
[At this point, the MUD promptly crashed. Adam,
Lucian, and Neil regrouped the next day, with Zarf
joining in a bit later.]

ADAM:  Okay, here's an example. In my current
project, there's a vehicle I have to make. The
process of figuring out how to implement it ended up
seamlessly transmuting into a puzzle: how will the
player make it work? This is another variation on
the "found puzzle" phenomenon I mentioned at the
top.

NEIL:  "Found puzzle" as in puzzles that derive from
the story, right?

ADAM:  Right.

LUCIAN:  I think that good responses to wrong
solutions are extremely important. In the stimulus-
response that is IF, you, the game author, are
providing stimuli to the player, who responds by
typing in another command. Every default response or
"I don't understand that." response when the player
was trying something serious is a mark against you.
Every unique response when the player is trying
something goofy is a mark in your favor, and
encourages further typing.
    The animal puzzle in So Far is a good example.
Even though there's only one correct way to do
things, there are many interesting ways of failing,
all of which help your conceptualization of the
situation until you finally solve the puzzle. I
tried to guide people along this same course in my
"invisiclues" -- I told the player to do many wrong
actions, hoping that the responses they got would
help them enough so that they wouldn't have to come
back to the clues again.
    Maybe this tells us something else, too -- a
good puzzle in IF is a puzzle for which there is
more than one potential solution.

NEIL:  I have a game in the early stages of design
where the whole plot hinges on gaining knowledge
about something. Think of it as a whodunnit, even
though it isn't. My problem: Short of an ACCUSE
verb, or buttons to push indicating what the player
knows, how can I tell when the player has figured it
out? More generally, my question is: How does one
design a knowledge puzzle?

ADAM:  So I take it it's not a matter of revelation
-- you have to figure out when the player has pieced
it together in her head?

LUCIAN:  I think that if the plot hinges on this
knowledge, there should be some physical way for the
player to manifest this knowledge. I think you'll
need to figure out what your plot's equivalent of an
"accuse" verb is.

NEIL:  It's the Clue problem, though. How do I stop
the player from ACCUSING salesman, ACCUSING cat...
ACCUSE MR. MUSTARD WITH THE CANDLESTICK. No, that's
not it. ACCUSE HIM WITH THE LEAD PIPE...

LUCIAN:  How to prevent brute force?

NEIL:  That's part of it.

LUCIAN:  Have too many options?

NEIL:  I think the greater problem I'm pointing to
is: It's possible to design a puzzle to determine
whether the player knows the answer to a question.
But not if they understand WHY it's the answer. The
final puzzle of LNY, for example, is solvable
without understanding it.

LUCIAN:  A small number of options with a variety of
ways to combine them works. For example (again!) my
language puzzle could certainly eventually be solved
by brute force. Well, half of it, anyway.

NEIL:  You can see how this artificially hamstrings
what puzzles are available, though, right?
Ultimately this reduces knowledge puzzles to a game
of Mastermind.
    Let's go back to Clue. Sure, you can make the
puzzle more difficult by forcing the player to
determine the murderer, murder weapon, location, and
time of death, if you so choose.

LUCIAN:  That's an example of combinations. Some
rooms, some people, some locations, buttons of
possible groups of three.

NEIL:  But that isn't the same thing as requiring
the player to figure out the motive and the M.O.

LUCIAN:  But for motive, wouldn't you be saved by
the fact that you had tons of options?

NEIL:  But how do you let the player explain a
motive? It's a parsing problem. Here's another
example: Exercise: Translate TO SERVE MAN into IF.
    I had enough troubles with GUIDE, TAKE ME TO
AUSTRALIA in MacWesleyan. If you think I can code a
game to understand WARN LEADERS THAT BOOK IS A
COOKBOOK, you're nuts.

ADAM:  You want to make sure the player stops the
aliens for the right reason And not just because "I
know the aliens are bad. Aliens are always bad!
Screw the book puzzle!"

LUCIAN:  I'd find a way to abstract the knowledge
into a concrete form. A written translation of the
man pie recipe, for example. Then you can SHOW
RECIPE TO PRESIDENT or whatever.

NEIL:  There are major guess-the-verb pitfalls here.
But I guess that's unavoidable.

ADAM:  At some point you'd need the player to be
able to enter the word "cookbook" somewhere. You'd
just need to find a way to make that as simple as
possible.
    >TELL GUARD ABOUT COOKBOOK
    If you put TELL PREZ ABOUT BOOK, it'd reply,
"Yeah, aren't those aliens sweet?"

LUCIAN:  Tapestry will have Morningstar react
differently if you refer to him by a certain name.
If you referred to the book as a "cookbook," that
could also work.

ADAM:  >TELL PREZ ABOUT COOKBOOK would elicit, "Oh
my God! We gotta stop 'em!"

LUCIAN:  Well, you'd have to allow for TELL PREZ
ABOUT BOOK OF RECIPES, and whatnot. Abstraction is a
key, though. Find a way to represent the knowledge
in a simple form, and make that form obvious to the
player.

ADAM:  That brings up something else...the fact that
experienced IF players know that there are only
about 20 commands that are ever likely to do
anything.

NEIL:  SHOW PICTURE OF CHEATING WIFE TO HUSBAND.
See, Gumshoe tried to do a knowledge puzzle. And it
was clunky as all get-out.

LUCIAN:  As opposed to ACCUSE WIFE OF SLEEPING
AROUND.

NEIL:  The more complex or abstract the puzzle, the
more different player inputs you're going to have to
account for. There's an inherent conflict in player
expectations. They expect things to work like
they've always worked, and yet they also expect new
puzzles that they've never thought of before.
There's a fine line between "Ick! Guess-the-verb
puzzle!" and "Cool! A game that recognizes a new
verb!"

ADAM:  Right. Here's what I'm envisioning: Game
starts. Before long, the player's up against a
puzzle. An experienced player will try three or four
"standard solutions," then if those don't work, sit
back and think. "Hmm...what am I missing?" A novice
player is more likely to try ten things the parser
doesn't understand, and get frustrated. How to
"pitch" a puzzle to both audiences?

NEIL:  All the more reason to have as many working
non-solutions as possible.

LUCIAN:  Right. For example, I implemented "use" in
my game, just because my novice beta testers were
trying it.

NEIL:  It almost seems like a puzzle's fairness or
enjoyability has less to do with how to solve the
puzzle, than with how the game lets you *not* solve
it.

LUCIAN:  Essentially, I told them, "Don't use 'use'.
Try other verbs." But at least it was a response.
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced
that working non-solutions are essential to a fair,
kind, and enjoyable puzzle.

ADAM:  It's important that players be given an idea
of what current IF tech just can't handle. The
problem is, most players won't sit through an
instruction book. So insinuating it into the game
would be a real plus.

LUCIAN:  I remember someone's idea on r.a.i.f a
while back where if a player got a certain number of
"I don't understand" responses in a row, the game
would say, "Okay, you seem to be new at IF..." Not
the best as it stands, but it's a good start.

ADAM:  I've had friends who've never touched a
computer game of any kind play I-0, and I found
myself having to serve as a second parser,
translating what they wanted to do into IF-ese.
Otherwise, they'd type things like GO BACK SOUTH. Or
GO NORTH AGAIN. Maybe even just making the player
conscious that IF-ese exists would be good.

LUCIAN:  But now we're talking about kind parsers,
and not kind puzzles.

NEIL:  I think even leaving out beginners, though,
it's a problem to introduce new puzzle-solving
methods. Has everyone here played Plundered Hearts
at least, oh, three-quarters of the way through? I'm
trying to remember now: What's the puzzle with the
spices?

LUCIAN:  BLOW.

NEIL:  Right. Is that a nifty extension of the verb
set, or an unfair puzzle?

ADAM:  Depends. To an experienced IF-er, that's
outside the standard set of tools. To a novice, it's
no more out there than anything else.

ZARF:  My immediate thought is "give the player a
fan, too." If the player has made a breeze in the
past, it becomes a known tool. And "blow" is a valid
alternate solution.

LUCIAN:  I think it depends on how the game reacts
to the standard verb-set. For example, what happens
with the verb THROW?

ADAM:  In I-0 there's an avoidable micro-puzzle to
which the solution is APOLOGIZE. That's one of
Graham's supplied verbs. Still, it's out there.

ZARF:  I always turn off most of the sorry, curse,
etc., verbs -- precisely to avoid confusing the
player.

ADAM:  THROW AT comes up with the bizarre response:
You miss. In Inform, at least.

NEIL:  TADS, too.

LUCIAN:  No, I meant in this specific example. What
happens if you try THROW SPICES instead of BLOW
SPICES?

NEIL:  Don't remember. Obviously, it's a good place
to put a hint in the right direction. If this is a
problem with physical puzzles, the problem is
tenfold with knowledge puzzles. What if, instead of
BLOW SPICES, the player has to TELL LUKE THAT LEIA
IS HIS SISTER? The player starts with TELL LUKE
ABOUT LEIA. "What about her?"

LUCIAN:  I think that in the Luke/Leia case, you
should have a good response to TELL LUKE ABOUT LEIA.
Like, "What do you want to tell him about her? A),
B), C),...."

NEIL:  But multiple choice ruins it, if the player
needs to figure it out themselves. TELL LUKE THAT
LEIA WAS DISSING HER SISTER. "She is? No way!"

ZARF:  If you're going to bring in a keyword system,
you're going to have to tell the player and then put
in a lot of work to make it playable.

LUCIAN:  ...and that's where you need natural
language parsing.

NEIL:  But still, how's the player to know that they
need to use LEIA and SISTER in the same sentence?
Especially given that games are usually limited to
TELL X ABOUT Y.

ZARF:  The only way I can think of is to use the
system so heavily that by the time the player gets
there, it's obvious.

LUCIAN:  Seriously, in order for this to work with
present technology, you'd need to have some method
of abstracting that knowledge into something
concrete. A pendant with their family name. A DNA
code analysis. Whatever.

NEIL:  That's really clunky. It's back to SHOW PHOTO
TO HUSBAND.

LUCIAN:  Well, that's what level we're at, as far as
I can tell.

ZARF:  Nobody cares about clunky. As long as there's
a clear solution, people will accept it as "The
parser didn't suck."

ADAM:  Well, you know my answer. Ask/tell must be
burnt down. Or maybe not that extreme, but still.
    See, here's a problem. Take TELL LUKE ABOUT
SISTER as an example. You sort of have to trust that
no player will try that until she knows what it is
that a mention of SISTER translates to in the game.
And that means that somehow you've got to keep
players from trying stuff like TELL LUKE ABOUT
BUTTERSCOTCH.

ZARF:  "You don't know anything about Luke's sister"
-- well-known hack in knowledge puzzles.

LUCIAN:  Also, I don't think it's as clunky if, in
response to SHOW PHOTO TO HUSBAND, the game
responds, "'Sorry, Mike,', you tell him, 'I'm afraid
your wife is sleeping around.' Incredulous, he
denies it, until you show him the picture,and he
can't help but acknowledge it."

ADAM:  Y'know, Balance of Power had a notice on the
title page: "People who play this game without
reading the manual are wasting their time." Include
a message of that sort, and in the manual, say TELL
doesn't just mean "ramble on about X."

NEIL:  Zarf, the problem with your solution is that
it requires that the player perform a certain task,
flaggable, to find out that Leia is Luke's sister.
You can't code the player's brain to trip a flag.

ZARF:  Well, that's how I'd set up that kind of
plot.

NEIL:  How does that differ from FIND KEY TO OPEN
DOOR, then?

LUCIAN:  It doesn't. But that doesn't make it a bad
puzzle.

NEIL:  FIND LEIA'S BABY PICTURE TO SHOW TO LUKE.

ZARF:  That's not a command, that's a description of
some plot events.

NEIL:  Sorry. Lower-case it.

ZARF:  It becomes a known puzzle, yes, but the
content is interesting.

LUCIAN:  All games are Space Invaders. But some
games are more Space Invaders than others. All
puzzles are lock-and-key. But some puzzles are more
lock-and-key than others.

ZARF:  And more likely the interesting point was the
scene where you found out, or got the evidence, or
whatever. The evidence itself is just something you
grab as a reward.

NEIL:  This seems to be directly at odds with Adam's
solution. Zarf and LP suggest bringing the puzzle
within conventional commands. Adam wants to tear up
TELL entirely.

ADAM:  Yeah, well, now that I've perfected my
conversation interface, Ask and Tell are ashes in my
mouth. Or something.

ZARF:  Not to drop any spoilers, but the "about"
text of my half-done game says "To simplify the
problem of dialogue in interactive fiction, the
'tell' and 'ask' commands are not used in this game.
Your conversational options are limited to 'yes,'
'no,' and saying nothing at all." Except that
*really* that turns out to be... not entirely the
case...

ADAM:  I think what we're getting at here is: set
your own ground rules. It's not that hard. Your game
doesn't have to incorporate everything every other
game has.

NEIL:  But give the player lots of warning what the
ground rules are. And lots of tolerance for
disobeying them.

ZARF:  I certainly don't stick a TELL X ABOUT Y
puzzle at the end; that would suck.

NEIL:  Well, but also: If you're going to require
the use of the verb SIGNIFY in the endgame, you
might want to mention it two or three times earlier
in the game.

ZARF:  Have the player use it casually, early in the
game, with lots of cueing.

LUCIAN:  I put in a new, necessary verb in Edifice.
And no one's complained yet, so I suppose that's
good.

ADAM:  Er, I did. That was when I had to hit the
walkthrough.

LUCIAN:  Well, whether it worked or not, I tried
both to include as many synonyms as I could, and
also imply the verb indirectly as part of the
"functional non-solutions."

ADAM:  I'm wondering about the prompt now. One of
the big arguments in favor of the prompt is that it
provides the illusion that you can type anything you
want -- not just pick from a menu of 12 verbs. Yet
that illusion is so far from the truth...

NEIL:  That illusion is what puts bread on our
table. So to speak.

ZARF:  The truth is *also* far from a menu of verbs.
There is a consistent IFese. But I know we've done
this on the newsgroup.

NEIL:  So what have we determined about puzzles?

ADAM:  Puzzles. Burn them down!

ZARF:  It's better to find a can without a can
opener than a can opener without a can.

ADAM:  >OPEN PARROT

LUCIAN:  Well, in a whispered conversation with
Adam, I remembered that I actually added *two*
necessary verbs, one of which he got, and the other
of which he didn't. The first one, on the first
level, I provided much more context. More synonyms,
more implications. The second, on the third level,
didn't have nearly as much context, and I agree that
the verb was probably harder to come up with.

ZARF:  I would have gone off on my rant about "any
good puzzle can be done with standard verbs. Except
NPC puzzles." Except I liked the Edifice puzzle
you're talking about.

ADAM:  I'm troubled by the whole notion of
'standard' anything. At least regarding IF.

ZARF:  Be troubled; we've got standard IFese.

ADAM:  Any game could be someone's first game. You
can say that "we've got standard IFese," but "we"
who have it are mostly in this room.

ZARF:  Many games have the standard intro to IF
built in. Even the rest could just say "See the
standard intro to IF first."

LUCIAN:  A sample transcript should be able to
overcome most of the problems with that. I've come
up with three things we've said.
    * Use the environment.
    * Provide working non-solutions.
    * Provide ample context and warning.
    Any others?

ZARF:  Err on the side of easy. (He said, waiting to
be struck dead for hypocrisy.)

LUCIAN:  Be kind to your players.

ADAM:  "Use" the environment? I thought we weren't
supposed to use "use." Oops! I used it!
    I think the only thing I'd add is this: IF is
different things to different people. To write a
game I like, emphasis on LP's point one is
paramount. But other people won't much care. So the
upshot is: to an extent, how you approach your
puzzles isn't a matter of "good" or "bad," so much
as: what type of game are you writing?

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Announcing the 1997 XYZZY Awards
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Now that the voting for the 1997 IF Competition is
at last at an end, it's time to get down to ... more
voting! That's right: the 1997 XYZZY Awards are upon
us. And unlike the Competition, all games released
in 1997 are eligible for these "IF Oscars," and
everyone is eligible to vote.

ELIGIBILITY: All IF games released for the first
time during the year 1997 are eligible for the 1997
XYZZYs. Whether it showed up on a web page or in
some obscure subdirectory of GMD, it's on the list.
(See below.)

VOTING: Anyone is eligible to vote. You may not vote
twice. Voting by dead people, fictional characters,
and inanimate objects is strictly prohibited.
Authors may not vote for their own games, nor may
they threaten, cajole or otherwise intimidate their
friends into voting for their games. While it is
suggested that you play as many of the eligible
games as possible before casting your ballot, we're
not going to get ridiculous here.

CATEGORIES: There are ten XYZZY categories this
year: Best Game, Best Writing, Best Story, Best
Setting, Best Puzzles, Best NPCs, Best Individual
Puzzle, Best Individual NPC, and the two newest
categories: Best Individual PC and Best Use of
Medium. In the "individual" categories, vote for a
particular NPC, PC, or puzzle; in the rest, vote for
the game as a whole. Vote once in each category,
then stop.

DEADLINE: All ballots must be returned to
[email protected] by February 1, 1998. Ballots
arriving after that date will be used as cat litter.

And now, on with the voting:
BEST GAME: ________________________________________
BEST WRITING: _____________________________________
BEST STORY: _______________________________________
BEST SETTING: _____________________________________
BEST PUZZLES: _____________________________________
BEST NPCs:      ___________________________________
BEST INDIVIDUAL PUZZLE: ___________________________
BEST INDIVIDUAL NPC*: _____________________________
BEST INDIVIDUAL PC: _______________________________
BEST USE OF MEDIUM**: _____________________________

*NPC stands for "non-player character"
**This award is meant to honor proficiency in use of
the parser, default messages, and so on. In the
words of Kathleen Fischer, who came up with the name
for it: "I would give the award (whatever we call
it) to the game that reduces the number of "You
can't see any such thing." and "You can't do that."
to a bare minimum. The game should offer some clever
reason why I can't burn down the forest with my
match and handle me taking water from the stream 100
times with grace. The parser should understand me
within the context of the game and the grammar must
be complete enough that I don't have to play "guess
the verb". If the game describes a pile of garbage
in the room I expect it to be prepared for me to
try to get it, eat it, or push it out the window.
The window, by the way, should be either openable,
locked, or "It's not that kind of window" and not
"That's just scenery". I know you are saying "But I
can't code all my objects". I'm just saying this is
an award... and if somebody goes to that much effort
they should get some credit for it!"


Eligible games:

A Bear's Night Out
A Good Breakfast
A New Day
Apartment F209
Aunt Nancy's House
Babel
Baltimore:24
Bedlam
Breath Pirates
Candy
Cask
Caso Cerrado
Coming Home
Congratulations!
Down
E-Mailbox
Everybody Loves a Parade
Friday Afternoon or: Escape from MicroSun
Glowgrass
Heist: The Crime of the Century
House II
Interstate Zero
Kook U
Leaves
Lost Anaheim Hills
Madame L'Estrange and the Troubled Spirit
Magic Realms: The Sword of Kasza
Mercy
Mystery Science Theater 3000, Adventure 102, Reel 1:
    A Fable
Myth
Oskar und der Tod v1.1
Papa wird vermisst
Phred Phontious and the Quest for Pizza
Pick up the Phone Booth and Die
Pick up the Phone Booth and Die, Part 2
Pintown
Poor Zefron's Almanac
Sea of Night
She's Got a Thing for a Spring
Shivani, Ciudad del Mal
Sins Against Mimesis
Sunset Over Savannah
Sylenius Mysterium
Symmetry
Temple of the Orc Mage (level one)
The Acorn Court
The Chronicles of Aarbron
The Edifice
The Family Legacy
The Frenetic Five vs. Sturm und Drang
The Garden
The Hollywood Murders
The Incredible Erotic Adventures of Stiffy Makane!
The Lost Spellmaker
The Mad Bomber
The Obscene Quest of Dr. Aardvarkbarf
The Space Under the Window
The Tempest
The Town Dragon
The Unholy Grail
The Zuni Doll
Travels in the Land of Erden
Tryst of Fate
VirtuaTech
Zero Sum Game
Zombie!
Zork: The Undiscovered Underground

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
TALES FROM THE CODE FRONT:
So you want to write a text adventuring authoring
system...
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Many a programmer who has played Adventure, or any
of the Infocom games has considered writing their
own adventure game; some even consider writing an
authoring system. In this article, author Alan
Conroy ([email protected]) discusses how he
developed an adventure authoring system named
Adventure Builder and the issues involved with
writing your own.

--------------------------------------
The genesis of Adventure Builder
--------------------------------------
When I was in high school, I played nearly every
game on the HP 2000 system that users at my school
and others in the area could dial into. I wrote a
couple simple games of my own -- battleship, card
games, and the like. In the summer of 1978, just
after I had graduated, a former teacher of mine
began managing the district's new minicomputer. The
three high schools in our district now had their
very own DEC PDP-11/70 running RSTS/E. I spent some
time at the computer center as a guest, playing with
the computer while they worked the bugs out of the
new system.

That summer I was introduced to Adventure, an early
port of the original that had me instantly hooked.
Imagine! A computer game which understood typed
English commands! True, it only understood one or
two-word commands and had an extremely limited
vocabulary, but compared to anything else up to that
point it was a revolution.

I played Adventure whenever I could that summer, and
in the fall I started taking evening classes at a
community college while working as an EKG
technician. They had a dial-up terminal in a back
corner that sat unused in the evenings, so I dialed-
in to the PDP-11 with a guest account and continued
to play Adventure. By the next year, I hadn't yet
solved it -- two puzzles still had me stumped. Most
of my high school buddies who had played Adventure
were at colleges out of state and there were no such
things as Invisiclues, so I was on my own. The
thought of writing my own game had also firmly taken
root and I had begun preliminary coding in BASIC.

Then I moved to Washington to attend Seattle Pacific
University. Some of my high school buddies were
already there, and I found several other new friends
who had played Adventure through to the end. That
first quarter at SPU, I finally got all 350 points
in Adventure. Now I could consider some serious
coding for my own game. SPU also had a PDP-11
computer, so my game -- such as it was -- required
no rewriting. In 1980 I took a Pascal course and for
the course project decided to write a complete
specification of my game from a programming
standpoint. This included deciding what data
structures I was going to use, the basics of the
parser, and converting what little I had written
into Pascal. This was the beginning of the Quest
game.

I continued to work on Quest on my own once the
course was over. By this time, TRS-80 computers were
in vogue and were soon showing up all over campus.
After I gained access to the university's one TRS-80
Model II with a FORTRAN compiler, I decided to
convert Adventure to run on that platform. I had to
type all of the source code and text in by hand
before I could even deal with compatibility issues
between PDP-11 FORTRAN and TRS-80 FORTRAN. Of
course, before I could finish that -- I still had
grades to consider -- one of the university's
administrative departments repossessed the Model II,
and I never saw it again.

About that time I learned about adventure games for
Apple computers created by companies like
Broderbund, Adventure International, and Sierra On-
Line. The Apple games had the same limited parsing
ability, but included low-resolution graphics that
accompanied the text. Shortly thereafter, TRS-80
Model III computers could be found all over campus
and I decided to earnestly start coding Quest for
that platform. I converted my Pascal code to BASIC
-- the only programming choice I had for that
computer -- and tried to squeeze it into 64K along
with the BASIC interpreter and the TRSDOS operating
system. I made enough progress that I let other
people play Quest on a trial basis and used their
input to refine my design and ideas about adventure
games.

Then someone installed DUNGEO (Dungeon) on the
academic minicomputer and I was hooked all over
again. Here was a parser that understood much more
complicated input than any other adventure game! In
short order I ran into the shortcomings of Dungeon,
but found it such an improvement over everything
else that I was willing to forgive all. There were
many times that I played the game with several other
students at the computer lab, trading hints until
the early morning hours until we had solved the
mysteries. Suddenly, Quest seemed pale and
insignificant by comparison. It was no use trying to
improve it, the 64Kb memory limit and the
limitations of BASIC and TRSDOS made it pointless to
continue.

So, once again I converted Quest, this time to
BASIC-Plus-2 (a BASIC compiler) on the PDP-11. With
the 128Kb memory limit and the ability to do
overlays, I was free to make a decent game along the
lines of Dungeon. At this point (about 1981), I
began to wonder if I couldn't create a library of
routines that could be used by any number of games,
enabling any programmer to create adventure games on
the PDP-11. This new goal, plus my desire to finish
Quest, fueled my work for the next two years. Even
with overlays and data caching, the memory limits
were a real thorn in my side. I spent half of my
time trying to figure out how to change the overlay
structure to allow me to compile every significant
enhancement.

In 1983, I purchased a DEC Rainbow computer (8088)
with a huge 5 MB hard disk and 256 KB of memory! And
it only cost $3,600. My dream of text adventures for
the masses was much closer. Still, it seemed
unlikely that many people were going to buy systems
of that caliber for that price, so I continued to
work on PDP-11 Quest. It was around this time that
the Zork series was released by a new company called
Infocom. These games only required a 2-sided floppy
and 256K of memory. I could run them on my machine
at home! I was a college graduate by then and busy
working as a system administrator; what little time
I had outside of work was spent on other projects,
not Quest.

Finally, in 1987 two important things happened.
First, I got married. I had introduced my fiancee to
adventure games, and she loved them. I had made some
converts to adventure games over the years, but she
was the most enthusiastic. Second, I was laid-off
during a series of downsizings. So we both decided
that I would work full-time on Quest as long as we
could afford to financially -- she worked part-time
and I did some consulting to stretch it out to six
months -- and Conroy & Conroy Company was born. I
decided to consider the previous nine years as
research and development, with Quest as the
prototype and write from scratch in Turbo Pascal V3
on MSDOS (version 2.11 at that time). This gave me
the chance to completely separate the Quest game
from the engine. Since I didn't want anyone to have
to buy Turbo Pascal or any other compiler to use
Quest or to write games, I wrote a simple compiler
based on the Sirius language (which I had been
refining even longer than Quest) and integrated it
into what now was the Quest Adventure Authoring
System Version 1.0. Since I had an integrated
interpretive run-time system, it was easy to
integrate the engine and the programming language
more tightly than a more conventional approach would
have made possible.

This was during Infocom's heyday, and I knew that
Quest would have to let people write better games
than the Infocom ones in order for it to sell.
Fortunately the years of messing with parsers let me
write a parser far better than what Infocom had back
then -- in retrospect, this wasn't all that great of
an accomplishment, but I felt good about it at the
time. A few big games had been written by then; for
example, Time Zone for the Apple was huge -- ten
diskettes instead of the normal two. Not to be
outdone, Quest allowed 8,191 rooms (called nodes),
and up to 4,095 unique items. Users needed 640Kb of
memory to run such a large game, but by that time,
most DOS machines had over 1MB. However, I could fit
a standard Infocom-size game in 256KB of memory.
Quest came with the game I had been working on all
these years as a demonstration of the authoring
tool's abilities. I even included the entire
original Adventure game as part of the larger Quest
game. I sold a couple of copies and got a review or
two in various newsletters, but the money certainly
wasn't rolling in.

So in early 1988 I had to go back to work. Conroy &
Conroy was still alive and well, but I wasn't
putting the same hours. I made various improvements
and bug fixes, until reaching Quest V1.2 in about
1993. Most of the improvements were in making the
authoring system's interface less "techie."

Over time, my target market had changed from game
companies to anyone who wanted to write a text
adventure game. Quest had come a long way since the
TRS-80 days, but even with V1.2 it was still too
techie for a general audience.

By this point, though, text adventures were
considered passé by the general public, and Infocom
was no more. I had not made enough money to even
cover a portion of the time I put into Adventure
Builder. I made the Quest demo game available as
freeware, but that failed to drum up any business
either. The prospects for Quest seemed rather bleak.

So why did I continue? Partly because of the
encouragement of my wife, Annette. She was working
on her Masters degree in education -- specifically
language acquisition. According to her, text
adventure games were exceedingly useful in building
language skills (both comprehension and composition)
in limited-English students. By now she has
completed her Ph.D. and still maintains that this is
so. The second reason I didn't give up is that I
personally still believed that text adventure games
were unsurpassed in the game software world in their
ability to engage your imagination. If only they
could be made more popular with the current video-
oriented generation...

In 1994 I began work on a major upgrade to Quest.
First, I decided to change the name to Adventure
Builder. It was too confusing to have the authoring
system and the demo game named the same. Next, I
created a Windows GUI version of the authoring
system, another step towards making the authoring
system easier to use, although the DOS command-line
interface remained available for people who didn't
use Windows --and at the time, that was most people.
The new version was Adventure Builder v2.0, which is
still the current version. The next version, 2.1 is
underway, but it will likely be a few years before
it sees the light of day.

--------------------------------------
Why did it fail?
--------------------------------------
So, with such an awesome product at such an early
date, why wasn't it more successful? I think the
major reason is that I am not a marketer; I'm a
programmer. The first of several mistakes I made was
in the pricing (I was charging $99). I came from the
DEC computer world, where all software you purchased
came with 12 months of free maintenance, including
free updates of any software that came out during
the 12-month period), with renewal for a relatively
low price. I carried this philosophy forward into
the PC market thinking that people would love the
novelty of decent support. I also learned the hard
way that many industry magazines were interested in
printing a decent review only if you were willing to
fork out hundreds of dollars to advertise in them.

A second problem was that the target market was
relatively small. More people wanted to play
adventure games than write them. But I wrote
Adventure Builder because that is what I wanted to
write. There were other minor reasons too, I think,
but the combination of writing what I wanted rather
than what the market demanded, plus the inability to
market it in the first place, is explanation enough.

So why didn't I write games instead of an authoring
system? I was really more interested in the
authoring system, and I'm not that great of a game
author. If you play Quest, you will see that it
doesn't have much over Zork I as far as plot or
NPCs.

What about the Internet? Until this year, I didn't
have Internet access. I was pleasantly shocked to
find a thriving, if small, gaming community online.
And though Adventure Builder might have been the
first commercial text adventure authoring system
outside of the game companies, it certainly is not
the only one now. If I had Internet access ten years
ago, things might have been different -- or they
might not have. The current popular authoring
systems all have (at least) one major advantage over
Adventure Builder: support for multiple platforms.
It is unlikely that Adventure Builder will support
platforms other than DOS and Windows.

--------------------------------------
Why write your own authoring system?
--------------------------------------
This question might be be rephrased as "Why would
anyone write their own authoring system anymore?"
After all, there are numerous authoring systems, the
market is small, and no one in this field is likely
to get wealthy because of it. Nevertheless, I think
there are still good reasons for writing your own
authoring system.

Nothing will teach you more about adventure game
theory than writing your own authoring system. As a
game writer who uses an authoring tool, you don't
need to concern yourself with file formats, the
internal workings of parsers, object interaction
engines, compilers, interpreters, linkers, or
debuggers. But as you write an authoring tool, many
or all of these things must come together or no game
can be written. Knowing this kind of detail about
the underlying system can make you more adept at
writing games. It will hone your programming skills.
It will call upon a wide range of knowledge domains.
In other words, you will learn a lot.

Perhaps your strengths don't lie in the area of game
writing -- I, for one, am more of a "tools" person
than an "application" person. Writing an authoring
system allows me to write an application that is a
tool. It will give you great appreciation for the
accomplishments of authoring tools such as Inform,
Hugo, and maybe even Adventure Builder.

Despite the lack of both fame and fortune, I don't
consider the last 19 years of effort on adventure
games to be a failure. I had fun. I learned more
from that effort than I learned in my years at the
University -- that's no reflection on SPU. Finally,
it's given me the confidence to know that I can pull
off the next generation of adventure game software I
write. Fame and fortune would have been nice, but
they were never the motivating factors for what I
did.

--------------------------------------
How do you start?
--------------------------------------
You can learn a lot about how a successful authoring
tool works by studying the inner workings of someone
else's parser. The same holds true if you plan to
develop a compiler or interpreter. There is a lot of
source code readily available on the Internet for
your perusal. You should also seek out opportunities
to talk to those who have already created their own.
Check out various game magazines, such as XYZZYnews.
One good introduction to adventure game authoring
issues is an article by Infocom's Dave Lebling in
Byte magazine, Volume 5, Number 12 (December 1980)
-- your local library should be able to help you
locate a copy.

Expect to spend roughly equal parts on the game
itself, the parser, and the rest of the program. In
Quest V1.0, the parser was 30% of the executable in
size, but took about 50% of the development time due
to the complexity of interpreting commands in
English.

Don't be daunted by the size of the task. If I had
known that Adventure Builder would be ten years in
the making, I probably would not have even started
it. However, at each stage of the process, I had a
better system than before. You can implement your
improvements in phases: Do a very simple parser on
the first round and concentrate instead on how
objects interact in your world. Once that's done,
get a simple demo game working and then add a better
parser, then an interpreter, then allow save and
restore, and so on. Immediate feedback from your
efforts will encourage you. After all, you're doing
this for fun, aren't you?

Consider working with someone else, especially if
their interests complement yours. Perhaps they will
work on the interpreter while you work on the
parser, and so on.

Good programming skills are a given, as is keeping a
goal in mind. You should have a good sense of what
you want the finished program to do before you
start. Next, spend some time designing it before you
begin programming. Don't overlook your target
audience. If the authoring system is solely for your
use, a fancy user interface may not be necessary. On
the other hand, if (like me) you wish to allow non-
technical people to write games, you will need to
invest time in designing the authoring system's user
interface. Finally, seek out constructive criticism
on both the authoring system and your game. This
could be done in many ways, from asking friends to
review your software to having official beta
testers.

--------------------------------------
Conclusion
--------------------------------------
I hope I've encouraged a few of you to experiment
with your own authoring tools. If you have questions
about adventure game theory and existing authoring
tools, you can post them in rec.arts.int-fiction and
most likely find someone with an opinion on the
issue. If you would like to get a copy of Adventure
Builder, go to
http://www.accessone.com/~conroy/ab.html. The
documentation may be of particular interest since
the authoring tool source is currently unavailable.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
GAME REVIEW
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I-O
release 4
Parser: Inform
Author: Adam Cadre ([email protected])
Requires: Inform run-time interpreter
Response to the XYZZY command: "A hollow voice says
'Fool. But you're cute, so that makes up for it.'"

SEX.

Okay, now we've got that out of the way.

There are many reasons for the incredible popularity
of Adam Cadre's Interstate Zero (or I-0, as it's
better known) when it hit ftp.gmd.de earlier this
year. It has an engaging lead character (Tracy
Valencia, a free-spirited college student on her way
home for her 18th birthday), a tantalizing setting
(out of gas in the middle of the most desolate
stretch of the desert state of Dorado), and a level
of detail that sets new standards for interactive
fiction (if Tracy's car doesn't have an alternator
implemented, it's only because she doesn't know what
one is). But mostly, it's got sex. In I-0, as in
real life, you can try to boink whoever you like
(yourself included, which is often the handiest
option), though like in real life, you may not
always like what it gets you into.

When Cadre made the decision to make I-0 understand
the word "undress," he should have realized that
everyone who played the game would spend most of
their time doing just that: undressing in the middle
of a highway, in a convenience store, in a fast food
restaurant. Nudity, apparently, is even more of a
temptation to IF players than a cigarette lighter --
give them the opportunity, and they'll try it
everywhere.

And more power to 'em. But once the thrill of
flashing motorcycle cops has worn off, there's a lot
more to I-0 than just dirty fun. Cadre, an English
grad student at Duke University with one unpublished
novel to his credit, has created an enjoyably
immersive world that cleverly sends up some typical
characters in the Great American Desert. Though a
relatively small game in terms of locations -- Cadre
claims to have written the entire thing in six
weeks, which must be some kind of record -- there
are plenty of things to play with along the way (no,
not yourself -- we're done with the sex part of this
review, thank you very much) and a couple of
alternate paths to take that give I-0 great
replayability value.

Add some of the most accomplished writing you'll
find anywhere in IF, and you've got a whole lot of
fun in store for you.

That depth of detail, however, can cause problems
for unwary players. If you're used to games with
room descriptions that run down every usable item in
a nice, happy list, forget about it -- I-0 is likely
to just show you a car, and leave it to you to
figure out that it has a steering wheel, a trunk, a
glove compartment. The only "puzzles" in I-0, in
fact, rely on exactly those sorts of challenges: not
so much figuring out what Item A to fit into Slot B,
as deciding what course of action to take when
confronted with a difficult situation. If you find
yourself stuck in I-0 (as I did several times),
rather than searching your inventory, you'll be
better off wracking your brain for the answer to the
question, "What would I do in this situation?"

With one glaring exception (involving a timed escape
path that opens without the player being notified --
don't be afraid to revisit old locations to see if
anything has changed), all of the challenges are
fair and relatively easy to puzzle out. Some even
have multiple solutions, with different options
depending on whether you'd rather have Tracy use her
wits to escape her predicament, or her wiles.

I know which option you'll choose, though. You're so
predictable.

--Neil deMause

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
BULLETIN BOARD
Readers helping other readers
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Here are some queries I've received recently from
readers looking for hard-to-find games, or who are
in need of specific help. If you can help answer
any of these requests, please don't be shy about
chiming in with an answer!  -- EM

----------------------------------------------------

I've bumbled into XYZZYnews for the first time, and
my world is a better place! An IF fan of old (I even
wrote a high-school research paper on the subject),
I haven't played a text adventure in (wow) two years
-- but that's soon to change!

One question has been bugging me for a long time:
has any slobbering Infocom fan compiled a history of
Zork? I know that a Zorkian encyclopedia was
included with Return to Zork (the real reason why I
bought the game), but has anyone done a full
historical, zoological, geographical, and
metaphysical gazette of the GUE Universe (or would
anyone be insane enough to try)?

Thanks!
    --Adam
    [email protected]

----------------------------------------------------

I am wondering if you can help me find information
about an old text adventure called Asylum.

It came out during the period when these games were
popular. I remember several ads running for the game
and I believe this is the correct title, however it
*has* been a few years since its release. Note: it
didn't stay around long either...

If it's any help, the premise was you are a nut in
an asylum and had to get out. I don't remember any
details other than the player was insane and
believed that if they looked up a piano would fall
on their head. Naturally, if LOOK UP was entered, a
piano would actually fall and kill the player.
Strange, eh?

I almost feel like I could solve one of life's great
mysteries if I could only verify that it existed!
(LifeBonusPoints: if I can play it on my PalmPilot).

Please let me know if you can help. Thanks in
advance!

    [email protected]

----------------------------------------------------

Just recently dug out the old Infocom collections
and thought about some of the old C-64 text games. I
had (and still have) one called Amnesia by Thomas M.
Disch on Electronic Arts. Seemed pretty nice
although I never got far. Have you ever seen a
translation for Macs (or even IBM)? E-mail with any
info. Thanx.

    [email protected]

----------------------------------------------------

I am writing to you in the hope that you can steer
me to a source which might help me locate a copy of
a program marketed in the mid 1980's by Activision
called Alter Ego. Specifically, I am trying to
locate a PC version of either the female or male
edition of this program.

I tried Activision's Web site and also tried e-
mailing directly to them, but they were of no help,
merely telling me, which I already knew, that they
discontinued the product years ago.

I also tried a few sources which I found searching
the web, but I'm pretty unsophisticated in such
searches and in any event was unsuccessful. If you
can help in any way to point me in the right
direction, I would be very grateful. Thanks.

    --Robert Friedman
    [email protected]

----------------------------------------------------

I have recently downloaded the new text adventure,
Zork: The Undiscovered Underground. It's quite fun,
but I'm stuck. I've figured out how to keep the
lantern lit, get the lenses, talk to the statues and
find the bug spray, but what I can't figure out is
what to do with the red lens, or at least I think it
will be the red lens, but really any of the lenses
in general. Does anyone know what to do with the red
lens? If not, how about the costumes, how do you
know which one to wear? The read.me says there are
hints on the home page, but all I can find is a
document with the goals of the game, no real hints.
Thanks for any help.

    --David
    [email protected]

----------------------------------------------------

I'm just curious. Do you know where to direct me to
find somewhere to check online getting a missing
piece for Infocom's Quarterstaff?

I bought the game when it came out (even still have
the poster and stuff) but it had a stupid little
wooden coin that you needed to cast certain spells
and interpret things. It was small and therefore
easy to lose which I did a few years ago.

I thought you might be able to direct me to an
Infocom site or something where I could ask about
this. Maybe I could find someone to e-mail me a scan
of one.

Love your newsletter! And thanks.

    --Peter Nelson
    [email protected]

----------------------------------------------------

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