intfiction.org

/registers an account as Joan Josephs

Adam thornton's interview is one of the most substantial. He raises four important points. 1) Writing IF is only slightly more rewarding than masturbation. 2) IF will never again be commercially sustainable. 3) We have consumed all the puzzle-space. 4) Infocom's prose was pedestrian but unemberrassing, and that is something we should all aim for.

I disagree with 1) and 4) and agree with 2). Adam must be using some pretty awesome masturbation techniques, because if he gets anywhere near the rush of writing IF when he's jerking off, he definitely ought to share his onanistic talents with the rest of us. 2) is self-evident. Why buy bottled tap water when you can turn on the tap for free? 3) is the most interesting point. Adam argues that all the possible puzzle schemes have been exhausted already during Infocom's hayday. This is the most pessimistic prognosis of the future of IF, much more so than 1). I vehemently disagree with 4). I don't know what Adam was thinking when he said that.

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And yet bottled tap water sells a lot, even in places where the water in the tap is of the same, if not better, quality.

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Oh, thanks, I got completely mixed up.

Then I have to say that it seems to me as though, in this particular case, madducks was rather out of order, even if Pudlo is a known troll...

Although I agree with this, it's a self-fullfilling prophecy - this sort of thinking leads to no commercial IF ever being tried. Crowther might just as well have said "Meh, why bother? I'll just take people to see the Mammoth cave". Right now, commercial IF seems impossible, because we don't have - as we once did - quality people churning out quality games at reasonable prices (ok, not always reasonable) with quality packaging.

The real reasoning is probably less like "why buy bottled tap water", and more like "it would cost so much to bottle the tap water and to sell it, it's best just not to". Not financially viable. But I wish it were, if it would bring us back to the days where you got Wishbringer stones that glowed in the dark and cut-out sundials. Hey, "Heavy Rain" shipped with an origami. I *loved* that.



Agreed. I once read somewhere something like this: while Mahler and a student of his were walking along a beach, the student said that all the great melodies had already been composed. At which point Mahler pointed to the see and said "Oh, look. There's the last wave."

Mind you, if by puzzle scheme one means "use X on Y", then yeah, it's pretty much the raw basics. But what of it? There's enough window-dressing on it to be inventive all the time.



Not wanting to presume to know his mind, I can hazard a guess. Infocom's prose *was* rather pedestrian by today's standards - a result of, as we know, very limited text space (I shan't venture into whether the Infocom crew would have written beter prose otherwise). However, it worked startingly well.

That's because we have IF as a novel, and IF as a game. And while IF as a novel may work best with very good prose, IF as a game benefits from being a bit pedestrian. You have a world model; you have a player that goes around that world doing things, experimenting. It helps to be pedestrian.

Having said that, if you can manage not to be too flowery, too purple; if you can write in an appealing style that isn't overblown; if, in other words, your prose doesn't harm the gaming experience; then yes, it would be best to go for it. After all, Infocom's prose might have been pedestrian, but it wasn't without style, it wasn't without a particular brand of humour.

I went and rewatched Adam's interview to catch exactly what he said regarding the exhaustion of puzzles (as this is the most interesting point). He says this:



On a broad brush level he's right. Puzzles tend to fall under broad schemata: go find something to proceed; manipulate combinations until the right one is found; navigate these rooms/menus/card catalogues. However, on the level of fine detail there are an endless ways of achieving innumerable goals. And it is these details that matter for the player. For one thing, there is in an infinite number of possible things to fetch in a fetch quest, but for any given story there's only going to be so many things that make sense in the context of that story.

Also, one might wonder whether new kinds of puzzle aren't more plentiful than Adam makes out. Sure the matter changing machine in Metamorphoses and the use of tactical items/equipment in Kerkerkruip are both about manipulating combinations, but like the supposed Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, it is so broad a characterisation of the puzzles to be essentially meaningless (or at least, very unhelpful).


Oh and as for point 4, I think I'm with Adam here: the prose in the infocom games I've played (and I've by no means played them all) is functional: it mostly tells you what is where. It gives you the information you need to move around and solve puzzles without being particularly outstanding in and of itself. I'm willing to admit though that there may be infocom games I haven't played with prose that fails to be basically functional.

Functional. Thank you, that's the mot juste.

I'm on a iPhone so I'll be' brief. I think the games going to be apps for iOs will bring a new renaissance to PAID if.

Yeah, especially since you have to pay for the iThingamajig first. And they don't come cheap.

I think one could argue the same thing about stories in general too, though. There are only so many story archetypes, and yet we have countless actual retellings of those few core stories. As long as those retellings carry their own character, we enjoy hearing them anew.

Regarding selling IF, I'm sure this has been rehashed a thousand times, but I think the biggest obstacle at this point is that it's a digital medium. So like any other digital media, most people would still find a way to get it for free. And since the scene is small, that translates to a rather low number of people who will buy a game. I think the two best ways would be the limited edition package (you can download it for free, but if you pay you get nice packaging and a mountain of feelies) or the pay-what-you-want or donation-based system (you can download it for free, but you can also have an easy way to get some money into the pocket of the author). I love the latter model but has anyone actually tried it yet? Even if everyone started using Flattr it could be a good start...

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Grotesque: an interactive fiction library manager for Linux
PyIFBabel: a Treaty of Babel library for Python