intfiction.org

Kind of my view. I don't mind them being there, but if it bugs other people I won't miss them too much.

Having said that, I think posts about gameplay and interactive narrative are still relevant to IF even if they're not specifically about IF.

I actually love seeing those slightly-non-IF posts. Sometimes they're about game design. Infinite Adaptive Mario is an experiment on adaptive difficulty, and that's always interesting - mayube not so for IF, but for game design, as a whole, and who knows where it might lead. I love seeing the brasslantern twitter, because I do care what telltale is releasing and don't feel like checking ITS site every month, not when Grenade does me the favour of twitting about it.

Change its name from PlanetIF if you must, I agree sometimes there's not so much IF. But don't change the content. I'm glad to see I'm not the only person to enjoy the non-IF posts so much.

Quoted for agreement. As Ron (I think) said, it's not like there's so much stuff coming through planet-IF that I can't just ignore the stuff I want to ignore. (That goes for the brasslantern twitter, too -- that was just an expression of my preferences, not a request for axing if other people like it.)

I do wonder why some of the posts are up. The narrative and game design stuff is welcome, but it's not like there's no other feeds for technical game stuff out there. It doesn't bug me that much, honestly, and if other people are cool with the Mario level generators (only for download!), then that's fine. On the other hand, I wonder if there are more game design reflection posts/blogs that we could accumulate. Someone's out there right now blogging about story structure in games that allow free movement, and I'd like to see it, even if it's aimed at FPS and not IF.

Oh yeah, those Brass Lantern twitters bother me too. If something isn't worth writing a paragraph or three about, it isn't worth the time. If I wanted release schedules for commercial games, I'd go to the publisher's RSS/twitter feed. A release schedule is not about story in games even if the game that's being released might be.

@Peter: Mario levels generators aren't "slightly-non-IF". They are extremely non-IF. And difficult to ignore because they are huge and insert all manner of pictures. Grr. The twitter feeds may be all but unreadable due to the punctuation, but at least they're short.

My favorite blog is Critical Distance. It might be worth adding, as it is someone taking the time to collect (and link to) above-average blog posts on design & narrative from around the net.

I know nothing of "pipes" but prefer we fix what we've got if possible. (Oh, my memory is bad too. Can we not view old posts on the Planet?)

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Blog at Gamasutra :: Programmer's Guide to Inform 7 :: Seattle I-F

I forgot to say that I read planet-if in a browser on a laptop, so people who read it other ways might find extraneous chaff more annoying. I can definitely see how the Mario stuff might be worse on other platforms. (Could one solution be to have Planet IF chop off everything it posts, or do things not work that way? Or just to ask nicely that GTA set up a truncated feed?)

I don't recall saying that it was. I recall saying that many things were, and I recall saying that the mario generator was an interesting experiment in game design, even if not apparently usable in IF.

Funny. I could see something like that being a great addition to my WIP.

Answering to everyone really:

It would be better to "fix" Planet IF but as has been shown in this topic everyone has very different ideas about how to fix it. I'm going to continue working on the IF Dwarf Planet and if I'm the only one who uses it that's okay. I think that it's easier to follow two feeds than ignore half of one.

Pipes also has a few advantages. Those who are really committed could clone and customise it themselves. I think it also lets us do far more advanced filtering than a planet would, which will be good for those blogs which don't tag things reliably.

Just to add to the diversity of opinion, I also enjoy seeing a wider range of stuff on planet IF. I think restricting ourselves to "pure IF" (whatever that means) would cut us off from a wider range of opinion in the larger game design, game theory, and experimental narrative worlds. I'd much rather waste a few seconds determining that an article is not of interest to me than have never gotten the chance to see all the fascinating tangentially-related-to-IF articles I've encountered on Planet IF.

(Full disclosure: I'm currently doing interactive narrative work with the EIS lab at UCSC, whose blog is among the accused.)

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Aaron Reed - Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 - Smarter Parser