XYZZYnews
Issue #16
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HOLLOW VOICE
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It's a good thing I never considered direct mail as a
way to make a living.
At times, I'm just terrible at holding up my end of a
correspondence. Gifts may languish for months before I
send out a thank-you note. And while I never mind
taking on freelance work, writing and sending the
invoice at the end is a chore I constantly dread.
That's why I owe David Dyte such a debt of thanks for
all his help with preparing and sending out the prizes
for the winners of the 1997 XYZZY awards. He
researched prizes for the winners -- we considered
trophies before deciding on medals -- then coordinated
everything from finding a vendor to do the work to
having the medals designed and inscribed to actually
mailing out the medals to all the winners. All I had
to do was write a check -- and even that took me
forever and a day! :-) So I'd like to take a moment to
publicly thank David for his invaluable assistance;
there will certainly be a seat of honor for him at
next year's online ceremonies!
One other interesting note I wanted to point out in
this issue's introduction is a cute Unix shell that I
understand has been around quite awhile but that was
new to me -- the Adventure Shell, available in C
source code by John Coker (see
ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-
archive/shells/advsh.tar.Z) This custom shell makes
using Unix a real adventure; you need to search for
and locate magical items that in turn enable you to
run programs and execute the other commands you want
to perform. Best of all is the "xyzzy" command that
returns the user to the home directory -- if that's
not intuitive, then I don't know what is. :-) A big
thanks to Urpo Lankinen for sharing this!
Until next issue, happy gaming!
Eileen Mullin
[email protected]
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Contents:
**Top 10 Picks for IF on the Web
**Letters
**Tales from the Code Front: Parlez-Vous Nalian?
**Book Review: Game Developer's Marketplace
**Reporter's Notebook: International Game
Developer's Network (IGDN) Conference
**Game Review: Spider and Web
**Bulletin Board: readers helping other readers
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LEGALESE
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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 (c) 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
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Thirdly, you can also read this issue online at
http://www.xyzzynews.com/xyzzy.16.html
Subscriptions: All electronic versions are available
at no cost. You can obtain either the ASCII or PDF
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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:
Lauren Meckler
Gillian Pilau
Lucian P. Smith
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Issue # 16 Top 10 Picks for
Interactive Fiction on the Web
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Cascade Mountain Publishing
http://www.cascadepublishing.com/
Guilty Bastards
http://www.geocities.com/hollywood/academy/
5976/guilty.html
The Explore Adventure Series
http://www.jump.com/joe/explore.html
You Be The Hero
http://t2.technion.ac.il/~site
Teaching and Learning With Interactive Fiction
http://k12s.phast.umass.edu/~desilets/
The 4th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition's
Website
http://www.ifcompetition.org/
Welcome to HTML-TADS
http://www.tela.bc.ca/tela/html-tads/
Bob Turkee's Interactive Fiction Link Page
http://www2.netcom.com/~bobturky/games.html
The Giant List of Classic Game Programmers
http://www.dadgum.com/glist/list.html
Inform for New Writers
http://www.placet.com/int-fiction/
[screen shot of the You Be The Hero site.]
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LETTERS
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In issue #14, I printed examples of references to text
adventure games discovered in non-IF materials sent in
by readers ("Spot the IF Reference"). The following
two letters provide some additional examples.
-- EM
Dear XYZZYnews,
Two more references to "a maze of twisty little
passages, all alike," only one of which I can quote:
From Taltos, by Steven Brust (pp.158-159):
"We made out way through the corridors of the Halls of
Judgment and well as we could, which wasn't very.
What had been a single straight, wide corridor had
somehow turned into a twisty maze of little passages,
all the same. We must have wandered those little halls
for two or three hours, getting more and more lost,
with none of us willing to admit it. We tried marking
the walls with the points of our swords, keeping to
the left-hand paths, but nothing worked. And the
really odd thing was that none of the passages led
anywhere except to other passages. That is, there were
no rooms, stairways, doors, or anything else."
There is a reference to the Maze somewhere in Terry
Pratchett's "Witches Abroad," but I lost the slip of
paper that I wrote it down on, and I've returned the
book to the library. Oops.
-- Howard Liu
[email protected]
Dear XYZZYnews,
There's a reference to Adventure in Larry Niven's
novel Destiny's Road.
One of the characters describes the ecological system
of the planet Destiny by saying "We seem to be in a
bunch of twisty little ecologies, all different."
Verrry hard to miss: made me almost fall out of my
chair laughing. :)
-- Allen Short
[email protected]
----------------------------------------------------
Infocom bugs, continued
Dear XYZZYnews:
Here's an interesting one from Infidel (off
Masterpieces):
>put all in pack
knapsack: You take the knapsack off and place it in
the cigarette pack. As
it settles in the cigarette pack, the cover flaps
open.
farewell note: There's no room.
cigarette pack: How can you do that?
>i
You are carrying:
A farewell note
A cigarette pack
The cigarette pack contains:
A knapsack
The knapsack contains:
A rope
A canteen
>version
INFIDEL
Copyright 1983 by Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
INFIDEL is a trademark of Infocom, Inc.
Release 22 / Serial number 830916
The Infocom Bugs List mentions the "container bug' in
Infidel -- putting the knapsack and the chalice in
each other at the same time makes them disappear. It
works with the knapsack and the cigarette pack too.
You can trigger it with the amusing sequence:
>put sack in pack. put pack in sack.
Shades of Dr. Seuss!
-- Joe
[email protected]
Dear XYZZYnews:
Suspended bug: Iris (the one who can see) can be used
to describe all rooms.
There was something that you plug in so that can see
the room that you are in. Anyway, have one robot
(e.g., Poet) plug in the device, then direct that
robot to follow another robot (e.g., Sensa), then move
Sensa. Poet will forget to unplug the device, and you
can then view the descriptions of all rooms, including
the ones that are in the section that requires the
wedge for access.
Perhaps stranger that such descriptions exist... or
have I missed something?
8^) p.
-- Peter Ferrie
Dear XYZZYnews:
I have found a bug in Spellbreaker which is not
listed on the bugs list:
If you have water in the bottle then casting tinsot on
any body of water except for the one in the Oubliette
will give the message "The water and bottle freeze and
shatter into a million pieces!" and destroy the bottle
even if the bottle is not in the same room or if it is
inside the closed zipper.
If that's not clear, here's a concrete example. At the
Enchanters' Retreat I dropped the bottle which
contained water. I then blorpled the earth cube and
went west then south to get to the Ruins Room. I then
cast tinsot on the water there and received the
message about the bottle shattering. Going back to the
Enchanters' Retreat I found that the bottle was gone.
I found this in version 87/860904 of Spellbreaker.
-- Paul
[email protected]
----------------------------------------------------
Second that emotion
Dear XYZZYnews:
I read both Neil de Mause's critique and Laura Mixon's
response.
I feel the difference in the emotion of her game
(which I have tried a bit) and "regular" IF is in the
way it is presented. The Erasmatron forces the emotion
on you like it was trying to say "Look here! Emotion!
We have determined emotion is important so we're going
to stick it in your face and base the entire game on
it."
Emotion works best when it's subtle and finds its way
into the readers' hearts through unexpected paths. The
emotion in Shattertown is predictable and completely
superfluous. If you want emotion in IF play Babel.
Shattertown is a noble attempt at best and a waste of
time at worst.
-- Lawrence Noc-Woon Kwong
[email protected]
----------------------------------------------------
Inquiring minds
Dear XYZZYnews,
It was a huge surprise to me that there are people out
there who still cherish the ol' text adventures, as I
thought everyone migrated to DOOM/QUAKE land...
A long while ago, I was putting the finishing touches
on a horror text adventure game (a real horror game,
not the cheezy "you see a ghost here" games). I was
writing for the PC DOS platform, but then Wolfenstein
3-D came out and killed the text adventures off.
What venues are out there for me should I decide to
dust off the game and finish it? Should I even bother?
Thanx loads!
-- Dave
[email protected]
As you might guess, I'll take issue with your blanket
statement that the Wolfensteins of the world have
killed off text adventures. I think you'll find a
willing crowd of play-testers for the asking on the
Usenet newsgroup rec.games.int-fiction. From there,
it's up to you how much you'll take their feedback
into account in creating a final version for general
distribution to the IF community. -- EM
Hi Eileen,
I've been reading XYZZYnews since number one, and I'm
a big fan of it, lots of nice interviews. Anyway, I'm
writing this because I was recently rummaging through
some old papers (old indeed, as I threw away some
copies of TRS-80 Magazine ;)) and discovered my
collection of NZT/Status Line. I think it is complete
(I have 22 issues), and I'm willing to scan them into
PDFs, and the if-archive seems an obvious spot where
they should go. Question is, you know if there are any
legal constraints ?
Thanks a lot. Keep the good work !
--Rafael Oliveira
[email protected]
I would assume that Activision currently holds the
copyright on these materials. You would need to ask
permission from the company before you could
legitimately reprint their material. -- EM
Hey Eileen,
I had worked with the Adventure Game Toolkit a while
back, and while digging through archives on the Net to
find it, I came across a link to your XYZZYnews site.
It is very nice, but I'm a bit confused.
What exactly is interactive fiction? Just any "game"
that employs only text, or is there more? I'm trying
to work on a browser-based game where many people can
all interact in a fictitious, self-running environment
-- and it's all text (and if I finish, it'll be free
for public access). Does this fit the definition?
-- Rod Jackson
[email protected]
Sure, your Web-based IF games still sounds like IF to
me -- and I've no doubt you'll find an eager audience
if you promote your game to rec.games.int-fiction when
you're done. -- EM
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TALES FROM THE CODE FRONT: PARLEZ-VOUS NALIAN?
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Lucian P. Smith (
[email protected]), author of The
Edifice, was awarded the 1997 XYZZY Award for Best
Puzzle for the game's language puzzle. In the
following article, he describes how he developed and
built this compelling feature into The Edifice's plot
and gameplay.
One of the better gaming decisions I've made in my
life so far was to set up the second level of The
Edifice so the player would have to learn a new
language. It seemed natural enough -- after all, what
characteristic of early human development is more
important than the ability to communicate with others?
This article attempts to trace that idea from its
initial spark to its final implementation. I'll
address the code in pretty general terms here, but
I've re-coded this puzzle as a separate module for
anyone interested in exploring it in greater detail
and uploaded it to GMD, where you should be able to
find it at:
ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-
archive/programming/inform6/examples/nalian.inf
Not all of the instances described below are in that
module, but all the tricky parsing is. If you have
additional questions after reading this article and
perusing the module, please feel free to e-mail me
directly.
Before introducing the new language in the game, it
was necessary to set up the proper context. All great
discoveries are driven by necessity, so I made the
scenario pretty basic: your son is sick, and needs
Feverleaf, which you can't find in the forest on your
own. Enter Stranger, who, the player should suspect,
might have some.
At this point, I could tell the player's goals were
going to be twofold -- first, they would have to
communicate to Stranger that their son is sick, and
secondly, they would have to discover Stranger's word
for 'Feverleaf', so they could ask for it.
But a language with just the words, 'son', 'sick', and
'feverleaf' would be pretty dull. At the opposite
extreme, I wouldn't want the player struggling through
a 5,000 word vocabulary just to find those three
words! So the vocabulary I chose had to be large
enough to be interesting, but not so large as to be
overwhelming. I also had to keep in mind that I'd have
to code up responses to every reasonable sentence the
player constructed, so I wanted to keep that number
within reason.
I turned to nouns first. The basic three pronouns were
a necessity; I decided that one word was sufficient
for he, she, and it, and also chose to ignore plurals.
'Son' and 'feverleaf' were necessities, of course, and
I included a few other items in the area --
'home/hut/house', 'weapon', and 'panther' (since I'd
given Stranger a panther skin to wear, it only seemed
logical that he would be proud of the fact that he
managed to kill it, and would want to tell the player
so.)
Adjectives were next -- 'sick' was one of the basics,
along with my, your, and his/her/its. 'Good' and 'bad'
seemed pretty basic, and I rounded those off with
'strange' (his probable adjective of choice for the
player), and 'dangerous' (his adjective of choice for
himself).
For verbs, I included 'give' and 'take'; these terms
seemed to be necessary for an exchange to take place.
If the player shows up with a weapon, Stranger gets
angry, so 'leave' and 'threaten' were logical next
choices. Once the player starts to communicate
fluently, 'understand' would seem to be important,
along with 'see' for good measure. Throw in 'is' with
'yes' and 'no', and I've created myself a rudimentary
language!
Creating the actual words was really rather fun. To
ease the translation process, I gave each part of
speech a common ending, with the exception of putting
a few different options in for nouns. This led to
logical connections between the words for 'I' and
'my', for example, further easing the player's task.
To keep the language even more consistent, I tried to
keep common words short, and I had fun with some of
the roots -- 'panther' and 'dangerous' have the same
root, for example, and the word for 'understand' comes
from the words for 'take' and 'I'.
For grammar, I kept it simple -- there is none. No new
word endings for different parts of speech, and no
significance attached to word order. This makes Nalian
a poor choice for creating complex sentences, but I
wasn't planning on doing that anyway.
At this point, I was ready to start coding. Since most
of Stranger's speeches would come from player input, I
first needed to figure out how to correctly parse
player input. Standard Inform parsing techniques were
wholly inadequate to the task at hand, so I turned to
the Inform properties 'grammar' and 'life'.
Unfortunately, I had to copy some code here, but this
wasn't terribly extensive. I got Inform to tell me
where the player's sentence began and ended, and set
up a loop to deal with each word of player input.
There were four possibilities for each word the player
typed, and all four needed unique responses: The word
could be Nalian, 'English' (understood by the parser),
gibberish (not understood by the parser), or
punctuation. The appropriate responses would be
recognition for the first, partial recognition for the
second, bewilderment for the third, and the last
should be ignored.
The first order of business was to check if a typed
word was in Nalian. After a brief unhappy experiment
with byte arrays, I turned back to the old mainstay of
IF programmers: objects, rooms, and containers. Each
Nalian word became an object, stored in a new
'LanguageRoom'. A container called 'Sentence' served
to collect player input -- any time a word-object was
matched, it got dumped into the 'Sentence' bucket --
the new repository of player input.
Gibberish words were easy to recognize -- I got a
value of '0' for any word not in the parser's
dictionary. English words were similarly simple -- any
non-zero value not caught by my earlier 'Nalian'
check.
With punctuation, however, I ran into a problem -- I
was getting '0' again. In addition, any attempt I made
to try to put punctuation 'words' into the dictionary
resulted in failure -- sometimes it even caused Inform
to not recognize commas and periods at all any more!
My solution for the contest was to hack the library. I
found that the routines 'FirstWord' and
'FirstWordStopped' were throwing away any punctuation
information they came across, so I changed this
behavior for my calls to these routines from 'grammar'
and 'life', being sure not to change the default
behavior for normal library calls. Even this turned
out to be inadequate, however. One of the bug reports
I received from participants in the 1997 IF
competition was that when the player tried to ask
Stranger questions in Nalian, Stranger failed to
understand them. This turned out to be because while
Inform separates commas, periods, and quotation marks
from the words they adjoin, it does not do this for
other punctuation. Hence, the input:
>SAY "NA BEN LALSE," TO STRANGER
gets separated as:
SAY " NA BEN LALSE , " TO STRANGER
and the input:
>SAY "NA BEN LALSE?" TO STRANGER
gets separated as:
SAY " NA BEN LALSE? " TO STRANGER
^^^^^^
Since 'lalse?' was different (to Inform) from 'lalse',
the parser was failing to understand the latter as
valid input. After a plea to the newsgroups, Torbjorn
Andersson kindly answered and told me I could use the
routine 'LanguageToInformese' -- a routine commonly
used for foreign languages! In this case, it was a
simple matter to convert question and exclamation
marks to periods, since I was ignoring punctuation
anyway.
At this point, I was able to flag English and
gibberish words, and had all Nalian words stored in
'Sentence'. Now came the hard part: coding responses
to the various sentences!
Examining the vocabulary to this point, I found that
Nalian had a 25-word vocabulary. Not too large, but
let's see: accounting for all possible three-word
sentences results in 25 times 24 times 23... 13,800
potential sentences! Yikes! Clearly, I was not going
to be able to code up 13,800 responses, so I had to
resort to more devious methods.
First of all, I set up responses for when there was
only one word in Sentence. 25 responses were a lot,
but manageable. Next, I reorganized the remaining
sentences, putting verbs first, then nouns, then
adjectives. For sentences with no verbs, I assumed an
implied 'is' between the noun and any adjectives in
the sentence (Sentences with nothing but strings of
nouns or strings of adjectives could be dealt with
with a simple response indicating puzzlement, and a
general clue as to how to better use Nalian; likewise
with sentences with more than one verb.) Since the
presence of the word 'is' now didn't mean anything, if
my routine found 'is' in the Sentence with other
words, it could just throw it out and start over. In
the same manner, the presence of the word 'yes'
wouldn't change the essential meaning of the sentence,
so I could throw that out, too.
So, with eight nouns and eight adjectives, that meant
only 64 responses -- some of which could be
concatenated, and some of which had to be expanded.
Nouns and adjectives which were crucial to
communicating the player's plight were singled out
(son, sick, feverleaf, and my) so that my routine
would assume the player's sentence was basically
correct if it contained the important bits of
information -- Stranger is, after all, working to
understand the player. However, to prevent abuse of
this concession, I made Stranger unable to understand
sentences that were more than five words in length,
complaining that he couldn't follow your terrible
accent all the way to the end. This allowed the
potential sentence "Yes, my son is sick," to be
understood, but not sentences of any greater length.
For sentences with one verb in them, I focused my
responses on one noun that followed. With my
reorganized sentences, this meant that Stranger was
more likely to pick up on certain key words than
others, if the player tried more than one. By leaving
them in, though, I could tailor certain responses to
acknowledge more than just two key words. For
sentences with only verbs and adjectives, I gave a
general response that essentially told the player that
his sentence didn't make much sense without a subject.
With six verbs and eight nouns, this meant 48 basic
responses here, some of which, again, were
concatenated, and some of which were expanded. (For
example, when the player used the word 'son', it was
important to check if the word 'my' was also used, to
distinguish the boy standing next to Stranger from the
player's sick child.)
Finally, I had to deal with the word 'no'. By this
point, I had already written the bulk of Stranger's
responses and was getting rather tired of it. This one
simple word opened up a whole new unwelcomed vista of
potential -- so I cheated. If the player used the word
'no' and a verb, Stranger took that as a command not
to do that verb, and just stood there. If there were
no other verbs in an otherwise reasonable-sounding
sentence, Stranger simply acted disinterested. This
was not ideal, but I really didn't want to code up
another 64 responses for the nouns and adjectives.
Even so, in the end this section takes up 52K.
In the setup above, I showed how I had to condense
Stranger's vocabulary so that the number of responses
I had to code up was manageable. In actually writing
the responses, however, I had to expand his vocabulary
conceptually so it could express everything I wanted
it to.
One trick I used was to use 'yes' as an emphasis word.
"I am dangerous," then, became "I am yes dangerous."
To de-emphasize like sentences, I'd leave out 'is' --
"I dangerous." 'good' became the embodiment of every
positive force in the universe, and 'bad' became the
opposite. Generally, every word became much more than
its original English counterpart.
Also, I tried to use a lot of body language. With this
context, individual words would be (hopefully) easier
to figure out. When the player spoke just one word, I
often had Stranger mime a response that illustrated
that word. I also decided that nodding meant 'yes' to
both of them, and shaking one's head meant 'no'. This
cleared up another problem I had had -- when Stranger
asks the player a question, how should I respond to
the Inform verbs 'yes' and 'no'? Printing out 'you nod
your head,' and 'you shake your head,' before giving
Stranger's response turned out to work nicely here --
and also meant I had to add three new verbs, "Nod
head," "Shake head," and "Shrug."
Finally, I had to code up responses to the player
showing Stranger things, or pointing at items. This
was almost laughably easy, with a mere dozen items on
that level. Unfortunately, this was where one of my
game-crashing bugs showed up, if the player showed
Stranger an unexpected item (like pointing in a
direction, for example.), due to the way I cross-
referenced the verbs 'Point' and 'Show' (If there was
no default response for one, it called the other, and
visa versa. Oops.)
So, with all this analysis, have we discovered why
this puzzle was so popular? Probably not. The analysis
points to areas where it could have gone wrong, but
not to the essence of what made it fun. Having not
solved it myself, I am in the unique position of
knowing the ins and outs of the puzzle intimately, but
not having ever directly experienced it. I didn't even
know if someone *could* solve it, or what paths they
were more likely to take if they did! However, as best
as I can figure from talking to people, I think the
basic reason it was fun was that it let the player
figure out a system, and then manipulate that system
to produce a desired result. Making the system
interesting and responsive were essential, but the
basic concept is inherently intriguing, I think. I
could be lalse, but that's the way I unen it.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
BOOK REVIEW
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Game Developer's Marketplace: The Definitive Guide to
Making
It Big in the Interactive Game Industry
by Ben Sawyer, Alex Dunne, and Tor Berg
Coriolis Group Books, 1998. US$49; Can$69.99
728 pages, includes CD.
ISBN: 1-57610-177-0
Anyone who's harbored idle fantasies about creating
the next Myst would probably be drawn to this title
while browsing at Barnes & Noble. None of the topics
covered in Game Developer's Marketplace focus
specifically on designing text adventure games or the
history of such games, unfortunately -- despite the
tome's hefty length -- but it's useful for gaining
valuable insights about the the industry as a whole,
especially if you're considering computer game
development as a career choice.
The book is divided into four major sections; the
first, focusing on the planning basics of game design
and a brief history of computer game and video game
companies, is of the broadest interest to all
fledgling game programmers. So, even if you consider
game development more of a time-consuming hobby than a
potential career choice, you'll find useful tidbits in
these first seven chapters. Of these, chapters 5
through 7 will be the most interesting for interactive
fiction fans considering game development for fun and
(possibly, but not probably) profit.
Chapter 5, "Refining Your Design,"tries to come up
with some simple answers to questions like "What makes
a game successful?" Its discussion of problem-solving
and the role of puzzles in a game is good food for
thought; while you may not come away with any earth-
shattering insights, it will probably help you better
consider your audience's needs and interests when you
plan your game's puzzles along with their overall
difficulty and various outcomes.
I turned to Chapter 6, "Storytelling, Design Details,
and Interface Design," right away because of the
title. The focus on graphical game interfaces is
annoying -- for IF-only developers, anyway! -- but the
chapter does touch on some good issues that any good
programmer worth his or her salt should consider.
These range from how well a work of fiction can be
adapted to an interactive game to how to give your
characters depth.
Chapter 7 is devoted entirely to tips for successful
game design. This is the only chapter where I found a
specific mention of text adventures; it also touches
on all kinds of other specific game genres and gives a
very general overview of the design challenges of
each.
In the second major section of the book, the authors
turn their attention to how one can gain financially
from an interest in computer games -- namely, how to
get a job with a big-name entertainment company or how
to pursue venture capital to fund your own startup. I
liked the job-hunting tips in Chapter 9 the most; this
practical advice would apply to just about any
industry, but the chapter also includes capsule
descriptions for the many different staff positions
that play a role in developing a commercial computer
game -- many of which, I have to admit, were new to
me.
The third major section is a bit scattered, but is
meant to address market research and legal issues that
affect game development, from the demographics of game
players to intellectual property rights. Finally, the
resources section in Part IV -- listing software
utilities and contact information for game publishers,
among other tidbits -- is reproduced in electronic
form on the book's enclosed CD.
The book's overall tone comes across as very casual
and laid-back, a friendly approach that -- like a lot
of other Coriolis Group Books -- could stand to use
much more tightening and editing, but which makes for
an easy read.
-- Lauren Meckler
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: International Game
Developer's Network (IGDN ) Conference
by Lucian P. Smith (
[email protected])
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
During the weekend of March 13th, I attended the
International Game Developers Network (IGDN)
Conference in Austin, Texas. What follows is what I
learned and observed from that experience. I highly
recommend that if you ever get a chance to go to one
of these things -- a smaller conference, like this one
was -- go for it! It's truly fascinating, and you'll
learn a lot about the computer gaming industry.
---------------------
General impressions
---------------------
Informal. These people are not your corporate types.
The "old hands" in the industry were dressed nicely,
but nobody wore a suit. The majority of those under 30
wore T-shirts. The name tags had your first name
emblazoned in a huge font, underneath which was your
last name, in a much smaller font. Under that it
either had your company affiliation, university
('Rice', in my case), or your lunch choice (which had
me temporarily wonder if I was getting a particularly
bland lunch.) Nary a 'sir' or a 'mister' was to be
heard for the duration of the weekend.
Young. The old hands I spoke of earlier were few and
far between, and comprised maybe 10 to 20 percent of
those in attendance -- and I'm including everyone who
looked like they were much over 30 in this category.
I'd guesstimate the average age at maybe 27, the
median at 25. However, there were precious few
"newbies" like myself there. Most of these people had
been in the business for years and knew the trade.
Male. The males outnumbered the females maybe 10 to 1.
Interestingly, this ratio seemed to extend across all
age groups; the number of women in the industry
doesn't seem to have changed much over the past few
decades. Even more noticeable was the lack of racial
diversity; I think I may have seen one black person
and a couple of Hispanics out of about 300 in
attendance.
Unsettled. As people talked about their jobs, I began
to realize just how volatile the gaming market is.
People seem to work at one company for maybe one to
five years before moving on; whether this was by
choice or by force was harder to determine. There
seemed to be an inordinately large number of small
bands of people who would form small companies, create
a game, and then try to get some big-name publisher to
pick it up. I also heard about a conference called
Computer Game Developers Conference where people with
the games find the people with the money, and from
there try to get funded for the year ahead.
---------------------
Issues of the day
---------------------
The most frequently voiced concern I heard at the
conference was the complaint that the market is being
driven by clones, and that the more creative and
unique games aren't being funded. The other hot topic
under discussion was what to do about online games. In
addition, many people were wondering about gender-
inclusive gaming -- why this was so rare, and how to
encourage it.
While I heard much discussion on how to deal with
these issues, I didn't hear any that were
wholeheartedly endorsed by the crowd at large. I heard
plenty about direct publishing, and general
acknowledgment that the Internet could change the
publishing industry, but no one ventured further to
say how that might play itself out. It seemed that
just about everyone had ideas about online gaming, but
no one could point to any that have worked really well
yet or even to the satisfaction of those involved.
There is money being made in these endeavors, but
nothing seems to have emerged as an industry standard
yet. It seems obvious what people are doing wrong, but
it is still unclear how to do things right. Whoever
does, though, is likely to make a lot of money. Gender
issues in games weren't resolved either, but I'll talk
more about that later.
-----[sidebar]-----
Hear for yourself!
Several of the speeches given at the IGDN conference
in March, and described in this article, are available
for audio playback online. You'll need the RealAudio
plug-in (available from
http://www.real.com/).
Chris Crawford's talk is at:
ftp://www.kesmai.com/audio/crawford.ra
and Jim Dunnigan's is:
ftp://www.kesmai.com/audio/dunnigan.ra
-------------------
So now, on to the speakers...
---------------------
Keynote speaker: Alex St.John
---------------------
Alex worked for Microsoft for many years before
leaving to join the gaming industry, so he had a
slightly different perspective to share with us.
What are companies? Are they their hyped product? Or
are they the hype? What really endures -- any one
given product, or the process?
One half of all applications running on personal
computers at any given time are games. This should
translate into incredible leverage for the gaming
industry -- but it doesn't. Entertainment doesn't
leverage anything, at least not in the manner of Word,
Lotus, and others, with their continual upgrades,
which you pay money for.
Leverage comes in the form of platforms. Why do we run
games on top of existing operating systems, which are
designed to do tons of extra things we don't need? Why
not model the arcade games?
The main point is this: Game companies right now live
or die by their latest product. This is no way to run
a company. If we want to keep some of our leverage
from our last product, we need to find a better way to
keep customers.
---------------------
Roundtable: Gender-inclusive games
---------------------
Richard Garriot wasn't around to talk about "Ultimas:
Past, Present and Future" (he was busy dealing with
his Ultima Online class-action lawsuit), so I decided
to stop by this roundtable, with facilitator Sheri
Graner Ray. Sheri is the president of Sirenia
Software, and was described as "one of the pioneers in
the field of designing girls' games." Sirenia Software
apparently hasn't produced any games yet -- I did
mention the gaming market was volatile, didn't I? --
but she used to be director of product development for
Her Interactive and produced three games there,
including "The Vampire Diaries." Previously, she
worked with Origin on the later Ultimas, among other
games. Most of the examples she gave were from her
experiences with U7:Serpent Isle, although she did
talk briefly about why vampires appeal to female
players.
A recurring refrain in this roundtable was, "Females
represent 52 percent of your potential market. Why not
pay attention to those aspects of your game design
they feel is important?"
The first thing she said was: Males are visually
stimulated, females are emotionally and tactually
stimulated. Attach electrodes to guys and show them a
car chase scene with no context, and they react.
Females won't. Put a kidnapped child in the front car
and a mom in the back car, and the females will react
too -- and not just because of the mother/child
relationship. Give a gun to the woman in the back, and
the females will cheer along as she shoots at the
kidnappers. Violence, excitement, flashy graphics,
whatever -- a female will tend to be bored rather
quickly unless a reason is given. She quoted the line,
"A woman needs a reason for violence, a guy only needs
a place." (I had heard the line elsewhere applied to a
different subject, but no matter.)
Her most controversial statement -- to me, at least --
was that people don't want to role-play people of a
higher social status than they are. Conversely, people
don't mind playing people of a lower social status. In
U7:SI, there were a variety of characters you could
choose between. The females invariably picked female
characters. The males picked anyone. There were also
interesting divisions along race lines: Blacks picked
black characters, while whites picked anyone. The
largest demographic group that chose to play the black
female character? White males.
I'm not sure I agree with this, although it's an
intriguing hypothesis. The observed behavior is what
it is, but I'm not sure it implies what she thinks it
implies. As my wife pointed out to me in a discussion
we had later, it may be that when a guy plays a girl,
he doesn't have any problem playing her 'like a guy' -
- she becomes a tomboy, is all. The female, on the
other hand, doesn't want to play a guy like a girl;
she would want to play him like a guy, and this would
take more effort than she wants to expend in something
that should be entertainment.
There are other reasons I'm not sure I buy the 'higher
social standing' argument. There are, of course, many
scenarios where the player plays someone of a much
higher social standing than they are. Kings,
emperors... even an active and respected member of a
community. This doesn't seem to have any bearing on
anyone's comfort level with role-playing that
character. Or consider the issues with the tables
turned -- imagine a game set in a matriarchy, for
instance. I may be alone here, but in this setting, I
would suddenly feel awkward playing a female of any
social ranking, let alone one of high status. I would
imagine females would have no problem playing those
characters. Likewise, in this same society, I think
females wouldn't have problems playing a male, while
males would feel compelled to play the male. It's hard
to pinpoint where this awkwardness comes from,
however. It may be that I feel instinctively that the
social rules of behavior would be different in this
society, and that I would be lost trying to play 'like
a female' within it. This feels close, but I'm not
sure I've pinned this down yet.
Other things that tend to be more important to female
players: exploring relationships between people and
their environment. Exploring alternative pathways of
resolution. Finding endings that are mutually
beneficial to the parties involved.
It turns out that both boys and girls play the same
computer games up until the age 8 or 10, at which
point the boys continue on (to games like 'Doom', more
than likely), while girls tend to stop. As time goes
by, females are socialized to never consider using
computers for entertainment, but only for work. Sheri
conducts a lot of surveys where she asks women
questions like, "What would have to be in a computer
game before you would buy it?" All too often, she'll
get the response, "I work with computers all day. Why
would I want to be on them more, in my free time?" If
you think about this, this is dumb. Ask a TV studio
exec if she caught the latest Seinfeld episode, and
she won't say, "Ugh. I work with TV all day. Why would
I want to watch it in my spare time?" It's a
completely different experience. But females have been
indoctrinated to associate using computers only for
work.
Other trends: Males tend to approach conflict
resolution mano-a-mano, strength vs. strength. Females
try more to resolve conflict through compromise and/or
manipulation. A female player will try to work out a
happy ending for someone, not even necessarily her own
character; she can be willing to sacrifice her own
character if she knows the fortune of another
character they care will take a turn for the better.
One disclaimer: Sheri told us, about halfway through
one of her talks on this subject that usually someone
will say, "But isn't that just good game design?"
Bingo. The trends outlined above are not universal, by
any stretch of the imagination. By incorporating into
your design aspects that will appeal to the
stereotypical female, you appeal to a huge swath of
males, as well. If you can do both well, you only
serve to widen your game's appeal.
---------------------
Brian Moriarty: 'Entrain'
---------------------
[Note: Unlike my other write-ups of the conference
speakers, here I've largely reported Brian Moriarty's
speech verbatim -- as far as my illegible notes and
faulty memory could allow, of course.]
"Hi, my name is Brian Moriarty. Welcome to the
premiere of my '98 rant."
Brian's talk was the only multimedia presentation I
saw. Throughout the duration of his talk, he showed a
video accompanied by a deep, rhythmic music. He
started off by explaining what was in the video.
First, he showed us the final scene from 'The Great
Train Robbery,' in which a man lifts his gun, points
it at the audience, and fires. The next scene was from
'Duke Nukem' and showed a guard approaching the
player, getting shot, and then writhing around on the
ground. After that, the video went into a continuous
loop, with one second of the Train Robbery shot, and
one second of Duke, each second punctuated by a silent
gunshot.
Entrain (en tran'), v.t. 1. To carry along. 2. To
trap. From MF 'entrainer' = en- + 'trainer' to drag,
trail.
When Brian was in the fifth grade, he went with his
class on a field trip to visit a small restored town.
While most of his class went off in one direction, he
wandered instead across the street into a little shop.
Inside, he saw walls and walls of antique clocks, and
an old man behind the counter. "Notice anything
strange?" the man asked him, smiling. Brian looked
around carefully, but couldn't figure out what the man
was talking about. "All the clocks are ticking at
once." Astonished, Brian listened, and found it was
true. "How'd you do that?" he asked, impressed by the
trick. The old man shook his head. "I didn't do
anything. The sound of the ticking teaches them to
beat in time." Wondering, Brian watched and listened
to the steady "tick, tick, tick, tick, tick," for
another minute. Then he realized something else. It
was about five minutes before four in the afternoon.
Slowly piecing it all together, he asked the man, "If
they're all ticking together...does that mean they all
chime together, too?" The man smiled. "Stick around.
The place fills up." Sure enough, within the next few
minutes, the place began to fill with tourists,
including (fortunately) his own tour group. And sure
enough, on the hour the clocks exploded together in a
wondrous cacophony of chimes, bells, and music.
That's entraining. But this describes not only the
entraining of the clocks to each other, but also of
the tourists to the clocks! The town itself pulses to
the rhythm of the clocks in that shop. Brian imagined
for us a frontal wave of effect from that epicenter of
entrainment, from the bakery across the street filling
up with people ordering coffee and danishes a few
minutes after the hour, to the rush on the bathrooms a
predictable time beyond that, either or both of which
could become entraining events of their own,
perpetuating the wave an unpredictable distance from
the clock shop.
But back to the video, which, along with Brian's
steady voice, had been entraining us and pulling us
into the talk. Brian's original idea for his talk was
spurred by a particular game whose effects had pulled
him in very unwillingly. "You write games, don't you?
Why do you people put out games like Postal?"
Out of an urge to answer that question, he had planned
a lovely diatribe: He would show examples of movies
from the '40s, culling examples that showed that era's
propensity to show violence for violence's sake. He
would compare that to today's computer game offerings,
catering to similar tastes and appeal. Then he would
show how movies evolved past that, taking violence out
of the spotlight, and enabling the industry to create
wonderful works of art. In a dazzling final montage of
video, he would show great scenes from Casablanca,
Citizen Kane, Star Wars, and other great movies, and
say that computer games had that same potential for
greatness.
But first things first: the spectacular video montage.
He worked up his two-second loop, and sat down to
watch it. And started to think. And think. And he
realized that what he had to say, at its basic form,
was nothing more than snobbery.
But why does 'Postal' and its ilk bother him so much?
Are players touched by the violence, or does it pass
on by? What is the job of the gamewright?
Rhythms and patterns exist in all games, if you watch.
Watch someone playing a game sometime. Not the game
itself, lest you be sucked in, but the player, and the
space around him or her. Watch the rhythms emerge, and
how the player and the game interact. It will become
clear that a game is really an entrainment engine. The
job of the gamewright, therefore, is to reinforce
patterns, and dampen dissonance.
Once you get into multi-player games, the job becomes
more difficult. Like a phase-locked loop, multiple
oscillators must all be entrained to the same phase.
You must therefore give lots of feedback, generated
from the game itself and from the other players, to
teach the gamer how to play the game. The goal is fun,
and shared intelligence.
[At this point during Brian's talk, the constant 2-
second video began to change. The pulsing remained the
same, but the picture began to shrink, slowly,
eventually revealing behind it a turning kaleidoscope
whose sections were those same two images of gun
shots.]
Brian's wife, unlike Brian himself, may easily be
classified a baseball fanatic. One day, she convinced
Brian to go with her to a game because the Monkees
were going to perform beforehand. What he found was
one of the most astonishing examples of a multi-player
game he had ever seen. Not on the field, mind you, but
in the stadium itself.
Many stadiums and franchises have claimed to have
started the craze known as the "wave," but legend has
it that it was started by a fan known as "Crazy
George" Henderson. Crazy George was known for dressing
up wildly, and getting the fans to cheer just as
wildly. One day, he managed to get the entire 22C
section to stand together at once, and cheer. As they
sat down again, section 22B stood up and cheered. 22A
was soon to follow, as the newly-born wave crashed
down towards the field, and proceeded to sweep around
the stadium, all the way back to section 22C -- who,
of course, stood up and cheered again, restarting the
cycle.
Why is the wave fun? We're wired for it. Are fans
particles or oscillators? "I call them: Customers!"
Violence in games is like dissonance in music. It can
be a valuable tool, if used correctly.
Brian and his wife have had tickets to the Boston
Symphony Orchestra. Generally, they played a lot of
old standbys -- Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and so on.
One day, they had on the program, "Symphony no. 1, by
Schnitlie," who turned out to be a Russian composer.
This was its premiere performance in the United
States, and Schnitlie himself was in the audience.
They started off with something traditional -- Handel,
maybe. Then the conductor raised his baton for the
beginning of Symphony no. 1.
What followed, as one reviewer noted the next day, had
only happened once before in the Boston Symphony
Orchestra Hall, when Stravinsky's "The Rite of
Spring" had premiered some 50 years earlier. As wave
after wave of unadulterated Russian angst poured out
of the orchestra, wave after wave of horrified
Bostonians fled the hall for the safety of their cars.
This was no traditional piece, of course. At one
point, the entire percussion section went on strike,
and held up picket signs. And the cacophony was rather
intense.
By the end of the piece, maybe 50 Bostonians remained;
Brian and his wife were among them. They gave the
orchestra and Schnitlie a standing ovation -- Brian
not so much for the piece itself, but for the effect
it had had on the Boston cognoscenti.
[By this point, the shrinking picture had given way
entirely to the turning kaleidoscope, centered on a
pulsing white light in the middle.]
But now think about "The Rite of Spring." The
cacophony was just as intense for those first
listeners, but today it is an accepted part of the
standard symphony repertoire, and we have learned to
appreciate the dissonance. And why? Because
Shostakovitch used his dissonance with integrity. And
once we understood it, it added an intensity it could
not have had otherwise.
When we put violence in our games, do we use
integrity? It's useless, if we have no justification
for it.
[Here, the kaleidoscope itself disappeared, leaving
only the pulsing white light in the middle of the
screen.]
Those who criticize violence in computer games don't
really know what all that exposure to screen violence
will do to people. But we don't know either! There
simply isn't evidence that clearly shows the effects.
But all multiplayer games are lessons in how to get
along. And therefore, we must use violence with
integrity.
---------------------
Chris Crawford: Demi-languages for non-techies
---------------------
Many of us know or have heard of Chris Crawford; for
the past six years of his life, he's been working on
the "Erasmatron," a designing engine used to create
interactive worlds filled with people who interact on
a much higher level than most games. Although I
personally have not been able to get his Erasmatron to
work on my Mac, a recent review of 'Shattertown Sky'
in XYZZYnews (see issue #14) was, shall we say, less
than favorable. I heard him talking to someone before
his talk, and he said (of the Erasmatron), "Well,
we've sold three units..." Shattertown Sky, while an
interesting experiment, does not seem to be bringing
in the customers, at least not yet. But for all that,
he has an amazing amount of material on his Web site
(
http://www.erasmatazz.com/), much of it insightful.
It seems clear to me that if he wants to sell the
Erasmatron in high quantities, he'll need a much
better gaming environment than he has now. And he is,
indeed, working on such a beast, based on Arthurian
legends (so Whizzard better get "Avalon" out soon ;-))
which might fit the bill.
But enough of that. What he talked to us about didn't
quite fit with my concept of "game design," which was
what this track was supposed to be about, but it was,
nonetheless, interesting.
His philosophy seems to be that if you want to create
games which are also works of art, you will need to
create a bridge between the "two cultures" -- the
science/ engineering folk, and the arts/humanities
folk. To illustrate this point, he said, "If I say,
'The ides of March are upon us!' what do you say?"
There were scattered replies of "Uh, Julius Caesar?"
He shook his head sadly, grinned, and said, "'Aye,
Caesar, but not gone.'" Hmmmm.
These two cultures, he says, have been wed in shotgun
marriages between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, with
less-than-stellar results. What he proposes is a new
way of looking at programming languages, one that
abandons the whole sense of being general purpose, and
which "tricycle-izes" the language -- makes it into a
toy. That's what he's done with the Erasmatron, and
that's what he told us we could do, too.
What follows are the specific points he told us about
what his language did to make it more accessible to
artists.
* No data typing. There's no generic data for the
user to type -- they get numbers, then specific things
to work with (like "actors" and "rooms").
* No compound data structures. I took no notes on
this, maybe because I don't know what compound data
structures are in the first place.
* No looping or branching (!). Well, this is only
partially true. There are structures in the language
that loop and branch, but the user doesn't have to
know this. There are built-in functions like "Pick the
best actor that ______" that loop, and there is a
"script" that branches, but the concepts are opaque to
the artist.
* No subroutines. None that the artist can program or
get to, at any rate.
* A New Lingo. Instead of using the phrase "the array
of characters," the program has a "cast." Instead of a
"database," it has a "history book." These terms make
the artist more comfortable with what they're working
on.
* A "break with tradition." Why do we compile things?
Because we used to take punch cards down to the
librarian, who would feed them into the computer
later. But there's no need to do this; the Erasmatron
"compiles" continuously, since we have plenty fast-
enough computers.
* An intuitive interface. It's impossible in the
Erasmatron to get syntax errors -- it's all done with
mouse clicks. Chunks of code are clicked on and copied
over to where they need to go by the programmer, and
come with default arguments. If something is
"unspecified," it gets a special screen syntax -- it's
underlined; the only thing on the screen that looks
like that.
* No acronyms. Spell everything out; you've got the
space.
* Use type styles, fonts, sizes, etc. to communicate.
Underlining has already been mentioned; other things
are true here, too, like coloring actors' names one
color and "events" another. Sound is also used in
certain special instances.
* Sniffers, scanners, and testers replace the
standard debugger. These routines are running all the
time to check for errors. In the "rehearsal," run-time
errors are avoided by "poisoning" invalid choices, but
the programmer is notified what happened. Should a
player come across an invalid choice, they would never
see it.
So there you have it: how to make your own Erasmatron
in 12 easy steps. It's certainly an interesting idea,
but I remain unconvinced. Frankly, I don't see
anything in there that couldn't today be replaced by a
team of two -- one programmer and one "artist." In
fact, that's what is happening in the industry right
now. With that, too, you get the advantage of being
able to change the "default" behavior, which you
simply can't do with the Erasmatron. (Well, not unless
you're Chris Crawford.) While I applaud the effort to
"chunk" certain aspects of programming, I still think
there should be a way to get at the lower levels of
the language if need be. Inform, frankly, is an
excellent example, and I believe TADS to be, too. You
can program in Inform all your life and never need to
put in "Tetris," but it's still there if you need it.
There are precedents for forcing one's creativity down
tightly-constrained channels (the symphony and the
sonnet being two good examples of this), but
eventually you'll need to break the conventions if
you're to come across a Beethoven. And the Erasmatron
makes no allowances for these types.
But I'd be happy to be proved wrong.
---------------------
Jim Dunnigan: 'What Computer Game Designers Forgot'
---------------------
Many years ago Jim Dunnigan founded SPI, a war-gaming
company that was extremely popular in its heyday. I
believe he now works for a computer gaming company,
while collaborating with the military on war games on
the side. I missed the first part of his talk, since
that was when I finally cornered Brian Moriarty and
got him to sign my Trinity map, so I'll start with a
few things he said that I jotted down as I was getting
into the swing of his talk.
* "Games have about the half-life of snow."
* Wargames are a niche market.
* The next pattern: the game as a movie.
* Non-violent games have a bigger potential market.
* Interest vs. fun
* A formula isn't enough.
At this point, Jim started talking about 'Rapid
Application Development'. This means you churn out a
bunch of game prototypes and follow up on the ones
that go over well. At SPI they had a monthly magazine,
part of which was a new war game. This meant they had
to come up with new concepts on a regular basis! Jim
was able to put together a game in a day, and had to a
few times when someone else backed out at the last
minute, and a deadline loomed. He told us not to use
the Hollywood model -- we're forgetting the game part.
We have to keep people entertained within the
interactivity.
As part of the Rapid Application Development rubric,
we shouldn't be afraid to steal ideas. At SPI, they
had a big Sears' catalog-type book in which were
compiled the various rules they had developed for all
their games. So there was a section on movement, a
section on terrain types, a section on conflict
resolution, and so on. So, if someone was having
trouble coming up with interesting movement patterns,
all they had to do was flip to the appropriate section
of the book.
We should also do extensive analysis of all our
projects -- especially the failures, if only so we
don't repeat the same mistakes the next time around.
Jim listed some possible areas the industry hasn't
explored yet, which do well in the book market:
historical detective novels, historical romances, and
soap operas. And another piece of advice: don't put
all your eggs in one basket -- develop those
prototypes, and go from there. Try to avoid the
Hollywood model, which is driven by fear.
Based on Jim's talk about Rapid Application
Development, I have a great job opportunity for all
you IF programmers out there. Find a likely game
company (remember, new ones start up all the time) and
convince someone that your skills would be perfect for
game development. With the ability to quickly and
easily develop a game or two in all text, massive
amounts of time and money won't need to be spent on
graphics in the create/test/refine cycle that most
adventure games need to go through. Or, if adventure
games don't go through such a cycle (and certainly
some games out there seem like it), convince them how
much better their games will be if they can be easily
tested at first! Tell 'em Jim Dunnigan sent you.
FYI, Jim Dunnigan has his book, "The Complete Wargames
Handbook" online at
http://www.hyw.com/Books/WargamesHandbook/Contents.htm
Chapter 5, "The History of Wargames" includes a
fascinating section on the history of SPI.
---------------------
Personal: Conversation with Brian Moriarty
---------------------
Since I knew Brian Moriarty was going to be at the
conference, I came prepared -- I brought my Trinity
map (from the LTOI II packaging, unfortunately -- I
never had the original) and a certificate I had
designed for him to sign as a prize for the IF
Competition
(
http://www.bioc.rice.edu/~lpsmith/ruby.jpg). I was
way nervous, and I might have chickened out had I not
brought the certificate with me. After all, I couldn't
deny someone else his signature! So, after stalling
through lunch and then losing him afterwards, I jumped
at the opportunity to corner him when I saw him later,
fearing he would disappear completely if I lost him
again.
Brian was... grumpy. There's really no better
adjective for it. When I told him I wrote text
adventures, he said without hesitation, "I'm sorry."
He grumped about Cornerstone, he grumped about
adventure games today, he grumped about the low
quality of my LTOI map. (I am now the proud owner of a
brown map saying "There are better maps! -- Brian
Moriarty") Still, underneath the grumpiness was a
great deal of kindness. He offered to mail me a "real"
copy of the map, and took my name and address. And,
sure enough, a few weeks later, I received a package
from him in the mail. He hadn't been able to find any
individual copies of the Trinity map, but, by way of
compensation, he sent the original maps from
Wishbringer and Beyond Zork instead, both signed. Do
you see me complaining? No, you do not.
Brian wasn't much of a conversationalist, and neither
was I, but fortunately there was someone else there to
whom I am eternally indebted, who kept the
conversation up and going. A few of the topics that
came up:
* Had Infocom kept going, one thing Brian would have
wanted to see improve was the parser. As good as it
got, it could never pass the "Here, sit down and type
something," test.
* Another dream of Brian's was the all-sound game. He
doesn't believe that even now the technology exists to
create it, though. One problem he sees is that if
you're physically sitting in front of the computer,
there's a big monitor staring at you, and you simply
can't have it black -- there's too much expectation
built up around it for that to work commercially.
* He firmly believes that Cornerstone killed Infocom.
The games were still selling, but Cornerstone lost so
much money that the company as a whole could no longer
support itself.
* As Infocom was being dismantled, some scavenging
went on. Details omitted to protect the guilty ;-)
Brian now works at Mpath Interactive
(
http://www.mpath.com), and although he didn't talk
specifically about any particular projects he was
working on, I've since discovered that he was Dani
Bunten Berry's boss before she passed away recently.
(Brian has set up a Web page memorial for her at
http://www.mpath.com/dani/) She had been working on
updating her classic game Modem Wars to be playable
over the Internet; I presume this project is still
underway. Overall, I found Brian to be a fascinating
character, and was glad I was able to meet him.
---------------------
For more info...
---------------------
In addition to the URLs provided in this article, you
may want to check out the IGDN Web site at
http://www.igdn.com/. There you'll be able to find
information about upcoming IGDN events in Los Angeles,
Dallas, and San Francisco. It looks like I'll be able
to go to the Dallas event this year, too, so expect
another report from me around November or so!
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
GAME REVIEW: Spider and Web
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Spider and Web
release 4
Parser: Inform
Author: Andrew Plotkin (
[email protected])
Requires: Inform run-time interpreter
URL:
ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-
archive/games/infocom/Tangle.z5
Response to the XYZZY command: "That's not a verb I
recognize."
Intrigue. Spy versus spy. Secret hiding places and
surprise endings.
If you can figure out how to get to them, that is.
Andrew Plotkin's "Spider and Web" has a bang-up
beginning sequence, an interesting give-and-take
format with a major NPC, and an intriguing story-
within-a-story plot that can't be described well
without spoiling the surprise -- but ultimately, I
was frustrated by the lack of straightforward
playability in this game.
While the game's turning point has a wonderful "Aha!"
quality to it, it's a point that I never would have
gotten to without relying heavily on a walkthrough
solution. And although the descriptions are expansive,
the characters' dialogue believable, and the plot is
richly complex, I was left feeling that I could have
done without some of these features if only I could
have really played more of the game for real, without
outside intervention.
The game's beginning does a great job of drawing the
player into character -- and helping to solve the
initial puzzles for you. Your character is a spy who
has slipped unseen into an enemy headquarters. As the
game's opening unfolds, you discover that you've been
caught, and the moves you make are being recounted, in
a sense, for an interrogator who demands the details
of your break-in. Although you, the player, are seeing
these rooms and puzzles for the first time, within the
game's narrative the interrogator seems to await your
description of how you overcame certain obstacles --
even if you have no idea yet how you might have done
so. If you take a false step, the interrogator may
interrupt you with a crisp counterpoint on why that
move wouldn't be feasible, then warn you not to try to
deceive him -- although at this point you're probably
just curious to know how to solve the problem that he
wants you to confirm you've solved. The interrogator
also manages to offer many hints on certain steps that
you should or shouldn't take before proceeding, which
is impressively interwoven into the NPC's dialogue
without appearing too obvious.
As the gameplay progresses, you acquire objects that
may help you later, play cat-and-mouse with a series
of guards, and -- probably -- spend an inordinate
amount of time learning (or trying to learn) to
operate a toolcase filled with devices that may be
used in conjunction with one another to bypass alarms
or get you out of a jam.
You may find, as I did, that the initial novelty of
conversing with the interrogator quickly wears off.
Your character's responses -- no matter whether to a
pointed question or a long-winded, half-rhetorical
monologue -- are limited to "yes" or "no." Although it
surely would have been a programming nightmare to
account for a larger vocabulary, it strains credulity
to see the impassioned speeches the interrogator gives
in response, so to speak, to your barely maintained
half of the conversation.
I enjoyed the aspect of trying to figure out what my
character was supposed to do, given that a certain
amount of activity was already assumed to be a
foregone conclusion. Your exact mission is trickier to
determine as you near the end of the game. Once you
enter the enemy laboratory proper, you can either
seize the secret papers and destroy them on the spot,
or take them with you as you make good your escape.
Why dying is a certain failure, you can also wind up
with an ending where you "fail to make a difference" -
- namely, by failing to acquire the secret papers and
doing something with them. No points are awarded in
this game for solving puzzles.
At one point, your character's survival depends on
split-second timing as you need to enter rooms and get
out successfully. Saving your game every few moves is
the safest way to navigate this dangerous section, but
playing too safe throughout the game isn't
recommended; you could wind up missing out on
important events that move the plot along and will
help the story make better sense.
Much of the game's cleverness is best enjoyed after
you've experienced the plot's major twist -- and
which, again, I think is next-to-impossible without
outside help -- and you realize the significance of
text that was puzzling the first time it appeared.
While enjoyable after the fact, its prose and clever
set-up made for good reading but not, ultimately, for
a very satisfying game-playing experience.
-- Gillian Pilau
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
BULLETIN BOARD
Readers helping other readers
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Below are some new 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
Dear XYZZYnews,
Do you have any information on how to complete
Microsoft Adventure once you have all the treasures
and you must exit through
