Are there any other interactive fiction fora you could recommend? (Preferably more active than this one.)
Pete,
There is always the ifMUD but I can’t really say its more active than this forum since IF isn’t really talked about much there (as far as I can tell, anyway). There is #intfiction on the Freenode IRC network. I can’t really say it is more active than this one either, but at least you can have realtime conversations and we do talk about IF.
Besides those, I don’t actually know of any others so I hope someone responds with a surprise 
Wouldn’t we be on the more active one if it was around?
There are forums for Twine, Quest, and ADRIFT linked in the “Other Development Systems” section. I haven’t looked to see how active they are.
ADRIFT’s forum is, um, dead in the water. Quest’s forum goes through ebbs and flows but is generally more active. I’m not sure about Twine’s forum.
It’s not just that this is a very quiet place, but the few discussions that are taking place tend to be pedestrian. There’s a review section, but you won’t find many reviews there – mostly hint requests. I’m sure this forum is a great reference for someone who wants to find out how to code a spray can, but what I was looking for was more a discussion about the poetics of interactive literature.
The above is a link to the kind of discussion I was hoping to find here.
You can also find a lot of reviews at IFDB (ifdb.tads.org), though I don’t know that many of them run heavily to poetics.
The Choice of Games forum averages about 100 posts a day. forum.choiceofgames.com/ But it’s mostly discussing choice-based IF. I’d say the majority of our users have never played Photopia, or perhaps any parser-based IF at all.
Why not at least try starting a discussion of what you want here? Maybe we’ll go with it.
Neil
Photopia might actually be an excellent candidate for conversion from the parser to a choice-based interface. It would lose very little.
Funny, I often hear Photopia presented as an example of a game where that would be impossible. Especially the scene with the feathers.
The word “feathers” required spoiler tags?
Given that
they aren’t revealed until halfway into the scene, and the impact of the scene depends on their sudden revelation and what you can do with them, yeah.
(Though I suppose just knowing the word isn’t that much of a spoiler, since you won’t know what scene it is until it happens, especially if you don’t know all the stuff I just said… aw gosh, I should probably spoiler-tag it to make sure.)
Anyway, I agree with Dan; that scene would be greatly diminished in choice-based form. Also the possible interaction where (this really is a spoiler)
you can type “stop” as you drive into the intersection. It gains its power from the fact that you want to do it, even though it’s futile, and the game recognizes and handles this desire; but if it were presented as an explicit choice you can button on it would be mawkishly manipulative.
There’s kind of a catch-22 with discussing stuff. If you’re a player, you feel sort of like a bum asking “Why can’t someone write a game like this?” and if you’re an author, you don’t want to spoil what you’ve written beyond asking for technical help.
I wish there were more places, too. I didn’t know about the choiceofgames forum. And I know there are private groups dedicated to writing and playing games.
Most importantly, though, as Neil said–you can help make things more active, whether it’s writing a review on IFDB or checking out the other places. You don’t need permission to. Once someone reviews a game on, say, IFDB, other people often follow.
There’s a lot of interesting topics archived from the old newsgroup rec.arts.int.fiction or whatever it was called. I don’t have the link to the curated archive, I apologize.