Oh? What do you have in mind? “Click here to download Gargoyle; click here to download the game” is not even remotely close to one or two clicks; not to mention the conceptual hurdle of understanding what an interpreter is. And you can’t do it at all on iOS.
It’s multiple clicks the first time you ever do it, then one or two afterward. PDF documents and Flash work the same way, and people seem to grasp the concept.
That’s surprising, since you can on other mobile operating systems. How far out of our way should we go to make up for the inadequacies of a single platform?
I’ve never thought that people are incapable of installing IF interpreters, but I do think they’re too lazy.
And browser based IF is making it even more ubiquitous. As much as I appreciate what Textfyre and Jimmy Maher have done, Amazon won’t let me buy King of Shreds and Patches, and even if they did I could only play that one game. But Parchment works on my Kindle! And hopefully in the not too distant future I will get offline support in Parchment meaning it will be a full-fledged interpreter and playing won’t need to be limited to one session.
Nathan, if you want to help get Parchment working on your browser, please check your error log and create a bug at the parchment bug tracker code.google.com/p/parchment/issues/list
The issue with installable interpreters is that it’s an extra step. For someone who has never played an IF game before or may not play one again after they try my game, that extra step could be the difference in whether they play my game or not.
Do I supply a link for downloading the blorb of the game? Certainly. But I do want to have it web-playable for people who don’t want to install the interpreter.
Personally, I care that I don’t have a file sitting around on my desktop (or elsewhere in my directory system) after I’m done playing the game. But this may be as idiosyncratic as any other view, so I’m not going to project it onto anyone else.
I don’t think I’m projecting an idiosyncrasy of mine when I say people like playing IF on the web, though. I can’t say exactly what it is about it that people like, but I think that a lot of people will try out IF they can play on the web when they won’t dive into downloading an interpreter, for some reason or another. Most of this is a second-hand impression from the folks who’ve done work with web interpreters and see how people like to play them, but there’s also comments like this, from someone who later became committed enough to review the IFComp for that site:
Also, there’s this page. Finding a browser that works with Twine is a lot less of a pain in the ass than navigating through that.
And imagine getting sent there if you’re just starting in IF! Here’s a genre you’re not sure you’re even into, and you have to download some program, exactly which one depends on a lot of gobbledygook like glulx and blorb and z-code, and then download another file to actually play the game, and you’re not even sure you want to do this. That’s why I didn’t start playing until I found something I could play on the web, back in 2007 or 2008. (OK, possibly projecting personal idiosyncrasies again.) Maybe most people who are visiting IFDB for their playing needs can just click to play in their interpreter, but there are a lot of people who don’t visit IFDB.
(I suppose that to get real stats we could look at how often the “Play online” button gets clicked on IFDB as opposed to the “download” button – though again, that’s already selecting for aficionados.)
OK, so hosting games on the web is great for outreach. Cool. But that’s no reason to go web-only. Most of the entrants in this comp could have done that, and thankfully have chosen not to. I’m saying we ought to encourage them and discourage the web-only option.
Sure, but I don’t think that most people are taking Gargoyle-ready story files and withholding them in favor of web-only play. The web-only games I looked at were in Twine (which releases as a webpage or pages – not sure what the underlying machinery is), Undum (which again releases as a webpage, I’m pretty sure powered by Javascript) and Vorple (which is a brand-new system which only works as a webpage, and which may draw on stuff that’s on the web). Better to go both ways if you can, but the web-only games are being determined partly by their development systems.
This argument is just based on a misconception. We didn’t start deploying web interpreters because we lacked multi-platform interpreters. We’ve had multi-platform interpreters for a decade now, and single-app (“run all major IF game formats”) interpreters for a good chunk of that. (I see Zoom deployed TADS/Hugo/Glulx support in 2007, for example; Gargoyle was 2008?)
The point was (and is) zero-friction game-launching for people who do not want to think about setting up software. That means one click, and yes, in a frame with a back button and an address bar. Because that’s maximum familiarity. (It also means you can blog it, tweet it, bookmark it, RSS-feed it… whatever people do in the Web please-don’t-kill-me-for-using-the-word-ecosystem.)
If you don’t want to use a web interpreter, that’s great; but this forum contains a disproportionate number of you people! Don’t make the mistake of imagining you’re the common case.
And as mattw said, nobody’s demonstrating a desire to withhold downloadable (or archivable) versions.
It’s true that the process of getting an IF interpreter is less smooth than getting Adobe Reader or Flash, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Sure. You can do all that with PDFs too, though, and passing around the original PDF (or a link to it) is generally more useful than passing around a pile of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that’s been generated from it.
If I’m not going to be using a PDF a lot, I read it in my browser, and Flash stuff usually runs in my browser too. So unless the difference has to do with behind-the-scenes stuff that doesn’t make much difference to me as a user, this looks like it just makes the case for running IF in my browser.
Everyone loves Javascript [emote];)[/emote] github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/
PDF.js has a download button in the top corner. It would probably be worth having one of those for Parchment, for those who don’t realise that the file is in the URL.
Having a prominent download button implies that I’m looking at a cheap web preview (however polished) of content that is really best downloaded. That may well be true for a plain-jane game that has been uploaded primarily to provide convenient, one-click access for players. But if I were the author of A Colder Light or Guilded Youth, where the web presentation is a value-add, I wouldn’t want people even thinking about the downloadable file.
EDIT: My point being that a download link should be configurable by the author. And maybe it should be placed less prominently than the top corner of the page.
–Erik
Indeed - as a result of how the Reader and Flash plugins are designed. Not because the author of the PDF took the time to convert it to HTML, or to install a special JavaScript PDF viewer on his site.
I’d say more specifically that it makes the case for turning Frotz and friends into browser plugins.
Oh yeah, that would be awesome. If that’s what you’ve meant all along I take back everything I said where it looked like I was arguing with you!
Some people love porting things to JavaScript to make a statement or because they like solving technical puzzles. Others love serving and surfing the web from their Commodore 64s for similar reasons. But I don’t think Adobe Reader, Apache, or WebKit will be forgotten anytime soon.
Well, not all along… give yourself some credit. [emote]:)[/emote]
Why would a browser plugin be better than a click-to-play web page?
It instantly supports every game, from every site, with no extra work from the author or site owner. It can produce save files that can be shared with other players and interpreters. The player is guaranteed access to the original story file in case he wants to play offline, use another interpreter, copy it to his phone, etc. Complicated I7 games will likely run faster in a native interpreter.
Both Flash and a PDF viewer comes preinstalled if you buy a Mac or Windows computer. No normal user ever has to install anything for that.
(That said, I do like to download and run things locally, just like you and Peter. But for IF to be web playable is a great thing. I don’t think its value is overestimated.)
Not necessarily - I have a name-brand laptop and IIRC I had to install at least one of those.
I think its value needs a separate thread, apart from the question of whether it should be mandated for the comp. There seems to be a lot of muddying of these two very-very-different topics 