That was my take as well. There was a lot of formally interesting stuff going on here; at the same time, the content was speaking most of all to people who knew community history pretty well and had been around it for years, and maybe that just wasn’t a large enough group to be sustaining. Certainly I felt like it was a harder sell to the kinds of people who only watch the IF community for really standout pieces – even though it was in some ways a standout piece.
Hm, I’m not sure about this. I think we have more people in the IF penumbra overall, so while there may be more people who aren’t coders, I don’t think that means we actually have fewer people who are. Romanticize R*IF how you like, it was really hard to find if you didn’t already know about Usenet and know it was there. It was a lot less likely that someone would just stroll into the community back then.
Please no.
Ha, no, not really; there were (and are) all kinds of non-mimetic things about games that were released. It was more that here we had this new question to ask about games, so it got used a lot on all sorts of things; and it was a useful way of looking at why certain puzzles felt out of place in certain stories, or why players got frustrated with particular puzzles when the world model didn’t line up with expectations brought from the real world.
But there was also a certain amount of “this is a trendy thing to talk about” and a certain amount of “we only have so large a critical vocabulary so certain things recur a lot”.
I think to some degree the critical vocabulary has been built up so people shy more from neologism (Well, I don’t, but people with a sense of proportion do).
It’s fair to say that the R*IF in the late 90s was making things up as it went along, but to people looking at it from the perspective of fifteen years later it looks very set in stone. Remember, there are people making games today who were born after Crimes Against Mimesis was written. Presumably when people being born today are making games they’ll be either recapitulating those discussions or overturning them.
It’s also true that an R*IF composed of 50 people might seem more active than a dispersed IF-altgames community that exists across several forums, one MUD, dozens of blogs, and the vastness of Twitter.
This is actually one of the reasons why I enjoy hanging out on the Quest site now…as straight up bad as so many of those games are, a lot of the authors and players are very young and seem to have no idea the rest of the IF community even exists or what any of the ‘standards’ of the genre are. They’re just doing what they feel like (and okay usually what they feel like is just slapping together a disorganized misspelled buggy mess…) but it’s interesting nonetheless to see all these people almost completely new to IF approaching it with a fresh perspective.
The forum community is tiny compared to number of people who just casually use the site, but they take writing and programming a lot more seriously, and even then there seems to be a much heavier lean toward RPG style games there than traditional IF. If anyone could ever get one of their huge projects off the ground and actually released I wonder if we’d start seeing a lot more in that style popping up.
That’s really the heart of what I was trying to get at in my original question. I wasn’t asking, “why aren’t IF games getting more reviews?” But my feeling is that the modern review environment, even for thoroughly reviewed IFComp games, isn’t very much of a discussion.
Look at the “IFComp 2014 Discussion” board. viewforum.php?f=32 There’s a good number of reviews there! I’d say that the majority of games and especially the majority of top-ranked games got a perfectly respectable number of reviews, not least from a few heroes who reviewed a huge number of games.
But those reviewers mostly weren’t having what I would call a conversation with each other about the games. Many of the reviews themselves received no comments at all, or maybe one comment/question/disagreement. PaulS’s thread started some discussion, but only once the thread turned away from reviewing individual games and toward broader themes.
Each reviewer posted their own review, perhaps linking to other reviews, but not really replying to them. It was a collection of monologues, not a dialogue.
And that makes perfect sense to me! When I read a good review, I usually feel like I have very little to say. Even if I disagree strongly, it feels rude/awkward to post a long disagreement in response to someone else’s personal subjective review of a game, especially in comments on someone else’s blog. I should really post my own review instead, if I want people to hear another opinion of a game.
My question is: Why wasn’t it always like this? Usenet wasn’t a collection of N people posting their personal reviews of a game without (much) replying to each other. They weren’t just arguing about IF Theory, either. It seems to me that they were talking with each other about particular games. They were talking with each other about Photopia.
Hunger Daemon got dozens of reviews, but in the postmortem thread, there were just a handful of replies, mostly saying, “Congratulations!” It deserved congratulations, of course, but I think it’s fair to say that we didn’t talk with each other about Hunger Daemon at all; instead, individuals expressed themselves publicly.
But, besides posting individual personal responses, what is there to say about Endless, Nameless? What would we ask each other? What’s there to argue about? What is there to agree about? If we were to discuss a particular game in detail, if we were to talk about IF, not in general, but a specific work of IF, what would we talk about?
What would we talk about if we talked about 80 Days? What would we talk about if we talked about With Those We Love Alive? What would we talk about if we talked about Coloratura?
My earlier rant aside, since it seems like all of those initiatives are now defunct, I’d be curious to know how they died off/failed. “IF-Review” is especially puzzling; did nobody want Mark’s $20?
I like the idea of the book club if only because the key thing to do at a book club is to bring questions for discussion. It’d be cool for some reviewer in the future not to produce their own review, but a set of questions for others to answer in a group.
Well, on the CoG forum it grew organically. There were so many WIP threads getting so many posts that it was obviously necessary. Not so, here, and I still think there are big structural reasons why.
Mostly true, though I do occasionally comment on someone else’s review or ref what other reviewers have said when I’m writing up my own. But you’re right, it’s not the most common thing.
If it helps, for future reference, you’re welcome to disagree in comments on my blog.
There’s more back-and-forth on ifMUD, too, especially while comps are actually in progress. But still, yes, I take your point.
What our various experiences were, in games with lots of different possible paths. Which puzzles and mechanics resonated with us and which didn’t, and why. The possibilities we saw in the craft and design. Thematic content: what we thought it was, what we thought the author was saying or asking, whether we agree, how we ourselves might respond to the questions asked.
Off the top of my head, and granting it’s been a couple years since I played:
Endless, Nameless raises questions about how communities work: is it better to ignore people who are apparently participating in bad faith, or is it better to fight back against them? How is a fruitful, constructive creative space built? How do we grow artistically without either burying or becoming obsessed with the creative past? Why are we bothering to build art at all? Besides, some of what it describes, it discusses in largely symbolic vocabulary, which would allow for some interpretive debate, if one were so inclined.
There’s so much content here I think one could start with some basic note-comparing. What happened in your favorite playthrough? What was the most effective moment for you, and why?
Did you solve the big mystery storyline? How did you feel about it being in there? (People have mixed reactions, so far as I can tell: I never did solve it, and I was slightly irked by that fact.)
What did you think of the characterization of Passepartout and his relationship with Fogg? Do you feel like Fogg was under-characterized? How did you feel about having limited-to-no power to change some of the bad situations you ran across during your journey?
What about the treatment of colonialism? Did you find it satisfying that an alternate history presentation gave additional power to cultures that, historically, did not have it?
Did it bother you, the fact that you could run out of time in real time if you spent too long looking at schedules? (This really bugged some people.)
How about the formal feature of structuring interactive story around what is effectively a boardgame mechanic? Is this something that only worked for this one game, this once, or is it something that could work again and for others? Would it have to be a journey? Are there other games that do something similar effectively?
Again, this is a piece very much about community, though on the darker side: it’s asking if community is even possible, if shared ethics can be anything but devastating, if the only way to relate to other people openly is on a purely individual basis. Also, perhaps, whether we’re willing to work in service of something possibly-horrible if that allows us to create beauty; and about whether both beauty and the terrible reside together on the far side of conventional normality.
It’s also a game with an intensely personal creative component: a lot of people did share the drawings they did on their arms and legs, but there is more that I could say about that mechanic if I really wanted to share with the whole world the details of where and what I drew and why and what it meant to me. (I don’t; my experience went someplace pretty dark. I emailed Porp privately about it. But some people might be into sharing with a larger group.)
Fear, song, the monstrous. Our different forms of color synesthesia. Comparison of the Twine and the parser versions. Why sometimes it’s so damn hard to communicate even when both entities are seriously trying. How seriously great it was that the game came with those accurate-looking ship-plan feelies.
I mean, it’s the same set of stuff we talk about in individual reviews, really; it’s just that back-and-forth can tease out more depth, sometimes, or alternative ways of looking at things.
In the Interactive Fiction Faction, we started a topic called “Work of the Week Wednesday” with the plan being for everyone in the group to vote on a game to play, play it for a week, then discuss it the following Wednesday. This came from discussion much like the above about getting more of a dialog about IF going.
We put this topic aside as IFography took off, but anyone is welcome to adopt it among their writing groups or what-have-you. Just a thought to throw out there.
Personally, if a game gets to me in such a way that I absolutely want to talk about it, I used to write a review. Now I still do, except that it’s at IntFic, which allows for some conversation. (example: intfic.com/t/praising-the-m … legacy/123). I like this format better. It’s not unlike a blog post, or a review you can comment… but the very fact that it’s in a forum encourages people to talk about the game.
I rarely, these days, have anything much to add - the games that I really like have all been covered already - but when I do I enjoy doing it. Similarly, in the postmortem for Chlorophyll - which dfabulich correctly pointed out as a way in which we DO have discussions about games nowadays - I made sure to explain how immersed I felt in the game world, and how that reflected in my gameplay.
I feel like the IF theory club filled a real gap, and perhaps we need to once again prod people about reviving it; perhaps on a medium more welcoming to newcomers than the IFMud…
I’d be interested in doing (and/or reading, but I also want to set one up) a roundtable with IF authors and/or reviewers, sort of like what XYZZY News used to run.
I’d have liked to have joined the IF Theory Club sometimes, but anything that happens in real time is hard for Australians to get to. I don’t know that there’d be enough interest from folks in Oceania/Asia to sustain an alternative timeslot Theory Club - it sounded like the American/European one barely got enough participation sometimes. But I feel like a real-time discussion is less intimidating and lower pressure to contribute to. Plus it’s just fun to hang out sometimes.
I’m typing this on a virtual iPad keyboard so it won’t be wonderful . I wrote it when there were no posts in this topic, so it’s free of topic peer pressure. Some’s also been obviated or disagreed with, but too tiring to edit this way. So it’s just my free thoughts.
Re Adams comment, my time ‘here’ only begins in 2010, in which time I’ve felt there’s been a disproportionately large amount of if theory talk relative to the amount of if game material generated. But that’s not the same as talk focused on particular games (a new game now is reviewed way less than a new game from years ago. Except if it was in a comp, and even then, reviews mostly stop after the Comp. more flippantly, one cannot be the Beatles of if now. A lost pig etc was the Beatles, and so keeps being reviewed.) my personal interest is in talk that starts with a specific game, over theory that mentions games, but that part is just me.
there is now more material per se with cyoa and twine sharing the same space but coming out much faster than parser games. I think the critical culture came from the parser people, and was probably overkill of a kind they were maybe lucky to have. I see Adam was part of that situation and obviously he notices its absence.
Other ideas: the much vaunted ‘people would rather write if than play it’. If that’s trueish , it’s a problem whose scale has increased with the increase in material. But I think it’s particularly untrue for cyoa.
The now abundant post Mortems do play to the above authorly idea. I mean, if you read those, there is probably more mAterial to help an author solve problems they have yet to encounter than ever before. They are great at that. I stopped reading them both because that’s not what I need at the moment, but also, I am least interested in what people say about their own game right after they have made it. In terms of interpretation or insight, I don’t think they’Ve got Perspective at that point. I’d rather talk about it myself or read others interpretations. Buuuut peeps have also pointed out the post morts spur general discussion.
Good on int fix factions output and spag, as terribly named as the latter is.
Agree re emerald and Australians. Eg Xyzzy was at 530 am on Monday for me. No chance! And don’t call spring thing ‘fall fooferall’ for us because we don’t even say fall, we say autumn! And I don’t know what they say in the other southern countries!
Anyway, because of your idea emerald, I may be up for it.
The IF Book Club was a private discussion, right? Has anybody done a public book club on the forum? (I’m guessing the answer is, “Yes, and it fell apart”?)
I think with regard to parser-IF, the thing that fans of the form are looking for is surprise: either some tricky cool fun mechanic, or dead-awsome finesse of the implementation. Part of that is the author essentially can build the world to work the way that they want it to. When you start a parser game, you never quite know what to expect with regard to what you will be doing, or how you will be interacting with the game world. In COUNTERFEIT MONKEY the gimmick is how you can tear apart words (and thus the landscape) and mix it up seemingly as you please. Most of Zarf’s stuff plays with the experience in surprising meta ways or finesse and breadth of gameplay (HADEAN LANDS). I think this is also why parser games can take so long to write - the author practically needs to re-invent the world.
Because of this, I think people are reluctant to give out details of works in progress. I know the game I want to do has elements that I’d much rather the player discover on their own. Imagine how much less effective COLORATURA would be if Lynnea Glasser had discussed it for months previous to IFComp and everyone knew going inthat they were an alien creature who sang colors to affect people’s moods.
Choice of Games’ audience and primary gameplay is built on co-creation. The player often gets tremendous say in the backstory and the direction of their character and often of their companions. Is your ogre friend’s sexual orientation and choice of gender pronoun really important to the story? Most often–no, not really, but you can choose it anyway because that is important to much of their audience. Writing in ChoiceScript, in contrast with Inform is dead simple. The documentation is three webpages of moderate length and then two supplemental advanced pages. You can read the entire documentation in twenty-five minutes if you want. I’ve read lots of the I7 documentation and while it is possible to read all of it…most people don’t. It’s similar to how most people don’t read the Bible straight through, and always find new things in it they hadn’t discovered (hypothetically, if it had the documentation search field that the I7 IDE does). While there are CS coding discussions and questions in the forum, most problems are nowhere as finicky as I7 solutions. When you play/read a CoG title, you know you might be doing miraculous things in the plot, but you’re not actually going hands-on with it…you will be clicking radio buttons to make choices every couple of paragraphs and not playing guess the verb or discovering later on “Oh, there is a way to get out of this maze…” Obviously this approach works, and a lot of people find it less off-putting than hands-dirty parser fiction.
So I think that’s why CoG people are deliriously chatty about their in-progress games. They want and need to know what input the player might have, and solicit it during the writing. One of the current lengthiest threads is about a game where you can play one of about a dozen monster archetypes, many of them with male and female variations, and then this character plays out high school drama. I think this author has been writing her game for nearly a year and is still on the first day. She’s lamented how she’s “writing sideways” making the path so wide and so customizable that there’s no forward movement. But she gets so much input on her game that it’s unlikely she’ll stop. The community even voted on a new TITLE for her game when she needed it.
It would pretty much require someone to step forward, declare that they were organizing for a while, and set up a plan about where to host.
One of the several reasons I stopped was that it didn’t seem in its original form to be a great fit for what we needed – I kept getting feedback that people felt too daunted to talk, or like they didn’t know enough background to follow discussion.
Something that was focused on specific games that had been played by everyone in advance – more like a book club – might be more successful; we tended to have our best discussions as post-mortems of various competitions, which gave a clear set of parameters for what people should know in advance, and also encouraged authors of those games to show up.
If one weren’t doing competition post-mortems per se, and one wanted a little more comparison/cross-game discussion than you get from going over just one game, then maybe something built around concept lists? Like the leader could put together an anthology post selecting 3-6 related games (depending on their length), about a month in advance. On the one hand that means there’d be more to play; on the other hand, it takes the burden off specific games. Like, if a book club this month is discussing a book you hated too much to finish, you probably won’t go; if there’s a selection of short stories, it’s more likely that at least one of them will have interested you, and you also have the option of talking about why some of them worked for you better than others.
Buuut this is basically random brain-storming.
Oh! Which also reminds me of Victor Gijsbers’ recent thing of playing games and posting about them here. That’s discussion too! (Though I’m slightly afraid that he may have gotten stuck near the end of Savoir-Faire and that I’m the reason he hasn’t carried on lately…)
One of the interesting questions to me is why these haven’t been superseded by new questions–which you touched on in your comments about new frontiers, I guess. To toot my own horn, with Terminator one thing I was trying to do was to show that movement and description in a continuous space was at least technically possible, but you have to design the game around them. But making this interesting will probably have to wait on a better version of Terminator with slightly improved descriptions and no obnoxious every turn bugs (and this relies on perhaps not fun updating work like making sure my code plays nicely with Daniel’s updated extensions).
This maybe is connected with the simulation stuff–it seems to me that simulation can be cool in some contexts, but the game has to be set up to let it be cool (so that the mechanics of the game require simulation), and the really difficult part is not actually doing the simulation but reporting the results in prose in an interesting and informative way. Which I feel like we’ve discussed a few times, but maybe not so much in this forum, ironically.
I also think that in the last 10 years or so the relationship to the IF community with the broader game design community is much different. Some of those difficult craft/theoretical problems that spurred discussion in the late 90s-early 00’s seem to be more internalized in a wider range of story-based games now. I’m sure there are exceptions and I’m looking at this from an outsider’s perspective in terms of the actual gaming industry, but I remember recently looking at some game-designing craft essays on Gamasutra from, say, around 2008, and they were pretty…rudimentary, or even short-selling what storytelling in gaming could even be. Feels much different now; in GDC it seemed like they had a ton of IF-related discussions, or at least things of interest to IF-ers. And so that theoretical/craft discussion now is out there, but it’s much more diffuse.
It’s also, well - Usenet, in a time before blogging was a thing, really encouraged people to write treatises and essays at one another. Blogs and social media have scattered that conversation, atomised it. The volume of opinions that someone produces about a given game might very well not have changed that much (time to write permitting), it’s only that now it’s spread across their blog, twitter, various forums, muds, face-to-face meetups, various private conversations happening in several different places. “Back in the day” all that got funnelled into Usenet.
One thing that occurred to me – I do have some thoughts I might want to develop into a piece of “theory” writing, but short of asking people who’ve been around longer and who watch the conversation more closely than I, I have no idea about prior art on the subject. I don’t know how much of this theoretical discussion has moved into academia or to places like GDC, but that has an effect of rarefying those discussions; I have no access to academia and very limited access to GDC. And so it’s very difficult from my position to gauge whether I have actual insight to contribute or if I’m just rephrasing something that someone wrote about in 2007. I don’t know if others feel the same way.
However: Those conversations on Usenet were very rarefied as well, as is easy to forget. Usenet was a very exclusive club by the standards of today’s open internet.
What we probably all want from the community is the affirmation that our creative and critical efforts are real. Why make IF? Why review IF? It strikes me that Cadre’s comment implies an equality between reviewers and artists that must have been unique.
Trying to review through all the games in a comp is extremely difficult. When you played a game you never enthusiastically enjoyed multiple times and took notes in order to write a good review and that review seems to go unnoticed, the personal sense of burn out is probably similar to what Cadre described.
The hard truth is that not all games – and not all reviews – are equally worthy. In 2012 when I was still in community college, I gave a speech about IF in one class, and I mentioned the IFDB. Moments later a classmate was looking at the IFDB on his laptop, and he remarked uncomfortably about the most recent reviews featured prominently on the home page – reviews of some rant game about burning the Koran. Seriously? Is burn-the-Koran game as worthy as discussion as So Far or City of Secrets? Is it a totally legitimate example of a real IF game? Does its author have the right to call him/herself a game designer merely because his/her rant game was released in the same informal and noncommercial community environment that Andrew Plotkin and Emily Short have written in for years?
I don’t believe in industry approval as the mark of authenticity. A real novelist is someone who has written a novel-length fictional narrative, even if it is never published. A real game designer is someone who has designed real games. A real reviewer is someone who has written real reviews. But quality matters, and taking responsibility for our content matters. I won’t call myself a game designer or a fiction writer even though I’ve dabbled in writing IF, because I don’t feel that my efforts were sufficiently real. I’m very aware that I’ve contributed to others’ burn out due to my irresponsible requests for help for projects that I didn’t have the motivation to see through and due to the poor quality of the “games” that I have released in comps and forced people to play.
Imposter syndrome. We shouldn’t be ashamed to take credit for what we have made, when we know that we have been responsible and thorough. I have striven to be a real reviewer, because I think reviewing is a way that I can legitimately add value, when I’m on my best form. Am I a real reviewer? Am I a games journalist? Can I mention my old SPAG reviews on my resume?
Before submitting a crappy game to a competition or passing off a snarky reply to a misguided rant as a real “review,” we should consider whether we are really adding value, or whether our content is more likely to contribute to the collective burn out and disillusionment.
