Non-Competition Games

Try ‘platformers are inane and pixel art is ugly’ if you really want to stink up the room where indie gamers are involved. (It’s hyperbole in my case, sort of. But still.)

What’s with the pressing need to impress non-IF gamers? To me, that’s like being in a hip-hop band and insisting that people who aren’t into hip-hop listen and appreciate what you’re doing. [emote]:?[/emote]

…which hip-hop has constantly adapted to do, which is why it’s a global phenomenon rather than just a niche thing that a handful of black New Yorkers are into.

(I’m not saying that IF is likely to work in a similar way. But that was basically the worst possible analogy with which to make your point.)

Thanks for your input, maga. Once again, I need to actually spell out my point word-for-word since my bad analogy confused everyone so much. Too bad I’m high enough not to care to actually do it this time.

Plenty of people are interested in IF when I talk to them about it. They’re not generally gamers, but then why is gaming particularly relevant? (When I look on Twitter I often see people saying of interactive fiction that it’s “not really a game”. So what?) There are lots of people out there who are interested in the intersection of storytelling and technology, and those are the people we should be talking to.

A lot of my friends are budding novelists, some have been published by niche publishers. I find it interesting that my free to play story games have collectively had more reviews and reads than their more conventional novels. It doesn’t pay any bills, but I find it pleasing to think that people might still play my games in decades time. Do people think that interactive fiction will become more widely known in the future or less?

Not ‘impress’. Try ‘reach’. It’s not that I care extra about the out-group’s opinions; I just would like to see the in-group expand to contain more of the out-group. Ideally, all of it. 8)

Yeah, well put! So that to me says transmedia. Why don’t we see more transmedia types in here?

Man, I wish I knew the answer to that. Almost certainly something called ‘interactive fiction’ will become more widely known, but what will it look like? Will it even resemble at all these types of games or even a game I’d like to play? In the future, will I have to say ‘text adventure’ because if I say ‘interactive fiction’, everybody will immediately think of something very popular that’s completely different? If we knew the answer for certain, I bet there would be a lot less acrimonious jockeying for position. 87

Interesting point about the view numbers versus budding novelists.

Peter Pears has a good line on this (which should appear if/when another SPAG is published) when he says that we have interactive fiction is a very young medium and we have the privilege to be around and shape its development. Young novelists and poets of the standard mold don’t really have that benefit. Exposure to an audience is only a secondary thing for me: like the Oulipo and the Pataphysicists, I want to experiments with new forms of literature and interactive fiction is one way of doing that.

Hmmm… I’m imagining a nightmare future where in thirty years everyone reads e-books with audioscapes and bio-feedback and Amazon have copywrited the phrase ‘interactive fiction’ and through the plutarchy has made independent text games illegal but an underground network of aging enthusiasts trade hard disks in abandoned warehouses…

…and whatever happened to that collab IF universe? [emote]:D[/emote]

@Laroquod, I agree that text games can be a hard sell in indiegamesland, but on the other hand some writers who got started there (Pacian? Christine Love? Mousechief perhaps? Though I guess his games aren’t strictly IF, but they’re basically text games) now have their stuff regularly covered by indie press. I don’t think Pacian entered a compo until his 4th or 5th game. porpentine started showing works all over the place (including, but not limited to, IFDB) long before entering a comp.

Interesting that you should mention that because I have a long screed of opinions to type about that very thing. 8) It was actually pretty difficult to get interpreted IF into the App Store due to rules against emulation, and they had to make specific exceptions for interactive fiction. If there were a major established corporate player trying to commercialise ‘interactive fiction’, would Apple have broken its own rules to allow in Frotz with its huge library of free games? Frankly, I don’t think so. All they had to do was not answer complaints to prevent it – something they are extremely good at. I think the only reason they loosened their emulation restrictions is that people complained, AND it didn’t really hurt their interests to fix it, because these are free communities that currently aren’t stepping on many plutarchs’ toes – but this state of benign neglect seems unlikely to last. There are going to be a LOT of DRM wars – we are not even into the thick of them, most like – and ‘interactive fiction’ (whatever that refers to) is probably going to end up being one of the biggest hot potatoes in play. Just wait until the ebook makers realise there are too many players in the space for many to differentiate themselves very effectively, and then suddenly interactive ebooks (they’re a thing) are going to be pushed. Hard. It will be awful, totally without good gameplay principles, and much more like a novelty item, but, like 3D in the theatres, even though nobody in their right minds will really want it, it won’t really matter a whit because publishers will start to premier titles exclusively in crapware. Shortly afterward, almost every clueless former street publisher is going to be writing letters (well, more letters) to Apple complaining about why the hell is a bunch of their potential ‘audience’ (and they will claim us, all of us, as their own audience) is routing around paying what’s naturally owed. They could easily crush our whole community, commercially, without ever noticing that not a single one of us is likely ever to buy their products, regardless of whether they outlaw ours. When we complain, people will say, ‘Nobody is forcing you to buy Apple.’

But of course, the same thing with the Windows app store, since they are basically following Apple’s lead. Heck, even the former Android Market is closed up some from where it started: how much further will that go. I don’t trust Google, either. I don’t want to focus only on Apple as if they are just that much extra eviller than everyone else. They are just the ones taking the lead on this, because they can. If Microsoft had tried to take the lead on curtailing user freedoms, they’d have been eaten alive. Just like ‘only Nixon could go to China’, only Apple can slip on the velvet cuffs, because whatever they do, there are like ten thousand commentators saying, ‘Apple knows what they are doing. Trust Big Brother.’ Microsoft doesn’t have that kind of blind trust (anymore), so they don’t get to be on point on this, but if you notice, every single anti-user-freedom move Apple makes, Microsoft is not far behind…

Anyway, it’s not exactly a conspiracy because the desires of legacy publishers to control everybody’s computer are talked about quite openly, it’s just that currently few people take them seriously, but that could easily change if we let them attain a position where they have any kind of financial leverage in the digital space. Legacy publishers cannot really be safely trusted with anything for at least a generation – basically, at least until the current generation of leaders is all retired or dead. ‘Legacy players’ even now includes the entire AAA video game industry – although it didn’t used to include those companies, because most of those companies learned in the 80s that anti-piracy didn’t work, with floppy disks. And smart people at those companies stopped trying to inconvenience pirates (which they never actually successfully did – since pirates don’t try to mainatain a publically legal front, they are the only ones not hurt by DRM and laws supporting it), and took a different approach and removed DRM from all floppy disks. Almost the entire games industry did this. Ah, those were the heady days when logic and the truths of what is possible vs. what is totally impossible, were things that had actual sway in the world.

Of course, that was before video gaming became the most lucrative entertainment industry on the planet. Then all of those sensible lessons of experience went completely out of the frickin’ window. So that’s why I do not hold out too much hope for freedom in computing in the near term, and I do not take the ‘standard & practices’ of today for granted. Instead I look to what all of these major corporate powers are trying to legislate. What is being added to these easy-to-overlook international treaties like ACTA and TPP, so that your government can tell you when they turn the screw a little tighter, that they are merely ‘complying with international obligations’ – obligations that they forced upon all the other nations just so they could say that. 8)

IMO, anyway. I really don’t see what’s going to prevent this scenario besides way more people getting alarmed about it. Certainly it’s not going to be benevolence on the part of Apple or any major computing player that is going to prevent the closing of this frontier. It will be us: only us, right? So prepare to fight. 8)

Hmm, interesting. But they both ended up in comps, in the end. I wonder if this is a data point against ‘comps are taking over IF’ or a data point in favour of it. But your point is taken: some great recent new authors have released outside of comps and it’s not like they languished in obscurity. (Well, they did, but not more than everyone else.) Thanks. 8)

I don’t believe this is correct: the rules restrict Apps from downloading arbitrary code and running it, not emulation itself.

code.google.com/p/iphonefrotz/wiki/FrotzMain

@Dannii I was actually aware of that, but I don’t really care enough about Apple’s regime to split those kinds of hairs. I don’t think it’s a difference that is important to my point. But thanks for the correction of detail.

Shouldn’t that be Jamaicans? It grew out of the Jamaican MC/DJ scene in the 70s and was imported with Jamaican immigrants to NYC soon after.

Sort of depends on who’s telling the history, and at what point you want to call it hip-hop, and so on. (There’s obviously a distinction between toasting and rapping, but not one that would have been obvious at the time.) Many of the key figures were of Caribbean origin, but a lot of the central developments took place in the Bronx. Point stands, regardless.

I don’t think epic games are released into the competitions. Except for Spring Thing, all the competitions encourage smallness. Most comps are about the very small, and IFComp is medium-ish with its 2 hours-of-playing voting rule.

If your game is hyperlink based and without a parser, that’s an easier sell (to an outside IF audience). Plus most hyperlink games are short. If it’s playable online, that’s an easier sell. If it doesn’t require an interpreter, that’s an easier sell. Even if a game ticks none of these boxes, if an author feels they can stand by the game’s quality and seriously want to try a wider reach, I suggest they do a press release. I always feel self-consciously highfalutin when I bring this up, but I note that this channel remains almost entirely unused in IFdom, while indie platforming games announce themselves by press release every 5 seconds. So long as your message is tailored for the people you do think may want to play the game, some relevant aggregators are likely to announce it on their site.

For a quick example of an IF game that reached far with press in spite of numerous holes in the product, there’s Cypher (cabrerabrothers.com/). Their own parser, which was full of holes - admittedly the game also has graphics - a nice presentation and press release. Plus they were selling it. (For money!)

  • Wade

Wade, thanks for the incredibly useful tips.

No worries.

I also wrote a post about doing press releases on this site a couple of years ago. Handily, all the sites I mentioned in it are still going, too:

<a class=“postlink-local” href="Promoting an IF game with a press release - #2 by zarf

  • Wade

If by “release” you mean “upload to a poorly-known personal website” and by “short” you mean “extremely short,” then I do! Sometimes. [emote]:)[/emote]

That sounds like the winning strategy, to me. It’s more or less what I do – I tried to structure my time properly to get a game out for the most recent Comp, and had to back out after the intent to enter. Which was embarrassing, of course, and not something I’d like to repeat. My new plan is not to Intend to Enter unless I could practically ship the game by then. Since there’s a Comp every year, it’s a plenty leisurely schedule.

Love the presentation! Bookmarked.

This too.