intfiction.org

I must confess I did found the original post (Schudspeer announcing himself the saviour of mankind and/or the IF community) quite Pudloan, even though it seems that wasn't Victor's intention. I guess that testifies to the quality of Jacek's trolling.

In hindsight it's easy to see that Victor did plant a clue to Schudspeer's identity: "schud speer" is Dutch (I think) – for "shake spear".

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Man ska inte tro allt man tänker.

Yeah, exactly. I downloaded the game and played it before seeing any response comments, and I did laugh and did not feel trolled. The game is dirty and a bit dark, but far from irreverent.

But I didn't guess it was Victor, though it seems so obvious in retrospect.

I honestly thought it was Adam Thornton, doing a Pudlo-esque turn for some reason.

The nature of the insanity is a few degrees from Pudlo's own apparent damage, and the writing is simply (much) better than Pudlo's attempts (even when adjusting for the character of the fictional author).

I never would have guessed Victor, though that's in part because (and I'm not proud of this) I haven't yet played enough of Victor's games, I think.

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Games, Fonts, and Font-Toys For Gamers - http://www.cumberlandgames.com

Given its supposed project, I was surprised the game's history neglects to mention Rybread's "Limp."

Nope!

Although I'm starting to get the sneaky suspicion that the entire IF community is like four people who've been doubling, trebling, and quadrupling roles to make me believe the cast is larger than it is...



I dunno. A friend of mine said that her friend is making a killing publishing 99 cent e-books on Amazon that are borderline porn "romance" pulp marketed to women.

Would people be repulsed if sexuality was sort of an optional "side quest" in an IF? I mean, if you try to dance on a table and it works, it's not like mimesis was broken or anything.

Depends what you mean by 'sexuality'. (I'm assuming it's not the HETERONORMATIVITY OFF command in Violet.) If you mean sexual content, most people are unlikely to be offended by that per se -- though of course a lot would depend on presentation, context and so on. If you mean pornographic sexual content... then you get into an area where most people have pretty specific tastes most of the time, and what floats A's boat is likely to leave B cold, deeply disturb C and make D laugh and point. So in that case, it's totally not about whether mimesis was broken or not: it's about whether you try kissing an NPC and unexpectedly find yourself playing a part in someone else's fantasy. So you'd have to fairly clearly signal what the player was getting themselves into, and that it was purely side-trek, and that's aside from the non-trivial issue of creating AIF that isn't kind of crap.

So: possible, but fraught with peril.

Certainly a question I've been pouring some hours into answering ...

I think IF is (potentially) an excellent medium for fun sexual fiction ... not necesarily "porn" in the sense of checklisty stroke-material, which is what the AIF community seems to fixate on ... and certainly not "serious erotic art" (which I consider wankery on a truly public scale; so often aggressively unsexy and navel-gazey to prove that it's Serious and Artistic) ... I mean something that is directly sexual in a celebratory way but that isn't specifically about ticking off anyone's fantasy-wank-script-checklist of explicit activities.

In simplified terms, I think what's normally labeled as AIF treats sexuality, implicitly or explicitly, as a burden to be managed (often with the attendant misogyny) rather than as a rocking awesome thing to be enjoyed and celebrated, and that one detail (or rather, the other end of that one axis) is the difference between AIF as it's generally known, and the games I'm working on.

With all the usual caveats about generalities.

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Games, Fonts, and Font-Toys For Gamers - http://www.cumberlandgames.com

Well I should hope so.

Yeah, just like the real thing: consent is key.

Edited to add: I really like what Ghalev's saying on the matter, too.

I've seen a number of people express an interest in this general direction of things, and I'm pretty much in favour. My main caveat is that this argument generally comes with a vagueness about whether the goal is "find a way to create IF Wankstoffe that's not astoundingly puerile and misogynistic" or "find a way to make IF about sex that's not primarily intended as Wankstoffe." I think it's kind of important to distinguish the two.