wtf does that even mean
Holy crap, I’m actually dying right now. XD
I’d remembered there was endless A tier drama on rec.arts.int-fiction because it was completely unmoderated, but the trolling they were able to put up with and just shrug off as a matter of course back then was wild.
For instance I just read some terrible X-Files fanfic that an incredibly well respected IF author wrote like 20 years ago, that a recurring troll dug up and linked on RAIF as part of his never ending war with her. And there was just no way for anyone to remove anything or stop this guy, because newsgroups were from a time when people innocently didn’t believe tools for censorship were needed among mature egalitarian adults.
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It think it was a way to say “interactive puzzle fiction game.” They had INTERLOGIC ™ trademarked for a while.
So, “Deadline” and “The Witness” were interlogic mysteries, “Infidel” and “Seastalker” were interlogic adventures, and “Zork” and “Enchanter” were interlogic fantasies.
They decided they liked “interactive fiction” better after a while.
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do you remember the dude who invented blogging
(also, one time i found a very famous hollywood director on raif, as well as the guy who founded snopes)
My first react when I saw this thread topic:
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The internet back in the Wild West era was a pretty entertaining place honestly. Before it became the thing for everyone to maintain themselves as a public figure with every word scrutinized and the constant knowledge that all our worst moments would be archived forever. Feels a little sad sometimes that we all grew up to be so boring and responsible…but that doesn’t stop it from being hilarious those moments you can go searching back and see these very public figures just being big dumbasses like the rest of us.
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that post you fear is coming back in style
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I’d been lurking on this thread, but got pinged when my infamous old thread got linked. I’m still a hidebound parser-only fan, but let me be clear. I’m stoked about this comp! There are more than 30 parser games this year! It’s no skin off my nose that the games I’m not interested in are doing well. The games I like are doing well too! There are more ways than ever to make a Z-code game, and I hail the resurgence of TADS. Everyone has their own tastes and preferences, and the comp has something for everybody. I see no need for a split.
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I just found the “Beginner’s guide to interactive fiction” posted to rec.arts.int-fiction in 1990. Both adventure games and hypertext fiction are mentioned frequently.
Here’s an interesting section:
There are many forms of Interactive Fiction, but the one thing they have in common is that the reader is allowed some degree of interaction with the story. When we talk about IF in this notes group, we usually are talking about computer-based works of fiction. A traditional book is not interactive - you just read it from front to back, and get the same experience every time. Pick-a-path books, however, are interactive; this is probably the lowest form of IF. One goal of IF developers is to take advantage of the flexibility of the computer to facilitate the creation of new forms of entertainment.
Adventure games are an early form of computer-based IF. They are Subjective IF, that is, the player has an influence on the “plot” of the story. The reader can influence events via his choices about what to do next, the ordering of his actions, etc. In Objective IF works, the reader has some influence on the presentation of the story, but not the content. Consider a hypertext-based story, where you can ask for more information on a given person or plot event, but you cannot influence the flow of events. StorySpace and InfoComics are two examples of objective interactive fiction.
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The lowest form of IF, just squatting there with a bone through its nose scorching chunks of mammoth meat over the fire.
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Ha! Good reconnaissance. See, before I said “a parser game has a world model and the parser”, I thought reasonably hard, now, to distil that summary. And Nick Montfort typed the same sentence in the 2011 topic. I’ve no doubt others typed it earlier, independently, as well. People can and will come up with the same ideas independently of each other when they share some circumstances.
Wade
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I’d actually go as far as to say that “a parser game has a parser.” That’s it. You could easily make a CYOA using parser input, just like a hypertext game can have a world model.
Granted, most parser games do include a world model thanks to the engines and libraries already having it defined for them, but it’s not like they’re entirely dependent upon one another. I bet you could disable the parser in Inform and make a game that played entirely through links that fired off commands.
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Okay here’s an interesting side case: Detectiveland and other games of that generation of Robin Johnson’s Versificator engine have a parser-like world model but no parser. It’s all links.
But wait, that’s not actually true! Underneath that link system is an entire parser engine that the links pass commands to.
So it’s a real parser shielded behind links with a parser-like world.
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I attempted to do something similar to that, but after a lot of time invested in it, I realized that it was a lot of work that goes completely unseen. In fact, the end result actually looked worse to me than faking it with conditional statements and flags because I had better control over the output.
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I’m curious about the extent to which “world” can be distinguished from “state.”
Naively, many demarcation attempts in these conversations distinguish parsers from CYOAs by proposing that CYOA’s lack “state”…there’s no “notepad” or “tracker” keeping track of properties. (I think this distinction is obviously pretty silly because lots of classic CYOA’s track state).
Skybreak has no objects, nor does it have room connections. There is a large and fairly complex “world”, but substantially all of the world is variables…of course, all any world is is variables if you think about it.
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I think that classifications don’t have any real existence, and it’s all a tool for organizing human thought, and should be discarded when not useful.
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To me, it’s like the difference between practical effects and green screen in movies. If you can’t tell the difference, does it matter? Sure, practical effects are cooler, but at the end of the day… who cares, ya know? The viewing experience is what matters, not the behind the scenes.
Infocom definitely popularized “interactive fiction”, but it was apparently coined by one Robert Lafore.
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I don’t think we should slide all the way to “it’s all the same”, which tends to be the lazying result of any topic like this that goes forever. Let’s take a non-detailed step back and remember some basic differences. If I compile a default Inform game, put a table in a room and an apple in another, I can go around taking and or leaving the apple in any room, eat the apple or do other things. They’ll have default responses but they’re doable. Depending on how I set the table, I could drag it around and stand on it in any room, etc. This is already a high degree of world modularity that CYOA won’t do out of the box, and isn’t suited to do if you build it up… but (a) it’s also a thing a CYOA primarily isn’t interested in doing because it has other strengths and (b) back in the parser game, it will need to be put some use to have its effect. We don’t help ourselves with all these "isn’t necessarily different"s. There are default degrees of difference that are real. We can say we can get a parser game and make it all choices (I was writing an extension that does this) or build up a big world model in a CYOA game and then be inundated by too many clickable links and lists, but these aren’t the core strengths of either model, are they?
-Wade
Is there any actual point to this amount of hair splitting though?
I think the vast majority of players are going to consider typing commands to be the most significant detail that defines a parser game.