Just dealing with this as a curiosity – I don’t think this is a fair comparison. IF has been mostly a hobby endeavor for the last 15+ years. You can hardly say the same thing for professional game development and book publishing.
I’ve read quite a few interviews with successful novelists who indicate that they don’t read much fiction, so I think that there is definitely a hint of it in that world. There’s also an unquantifiable (though probably not insignificant) bias effect, in that accurate self-reporting is biased toward low-stakes endeavors like IF: the (wo)man of letters, for example, will find it pretty difficult to admit that he or she doesn’t read as much as he/she “ought” to. There is just too much pressure to be well read, to know your tools, to keep up with the social milieu. A gauge of this is the fact that discussion of the phenomenon of pretending to have read something is extremely common in the literary world.
–Erik
George and Ghalev both have good points.
I often like playing IF more than I like writing games for a living. Nothing is as much fun when it’s your job.
I rarely like playing IF as much as I like writing IF as a hobby. Lots of IF is not that great, and finding the good stuff takes time.
For me, at least, there’s another issue which is more or less orthogonal to fun. I also play IF because the best stuff leaves me with better long-term value than most other forms of entertainment. That is, I still think back frequently to my favorite IF games of the last few years – especially Make It Good, most of Victor Gijsbers’ work, a couple of images in Shadow in the Cathedral, the last couple chapters of Blue Lacuna. They all left me with some striking experience, question, idea, or image that I have thought about over and over since I stopped playing.
That’s more than I can say for most of the entertainment I’ve consumed in that period – almost any commercial game, most indie games, most of the Hollywood movies and genre books and television shows. There are a few exceptions – Batman: Arkham Asylum, Tale of Tales’ frustrating but memorable non-games, and my favorite episodes of Dr Who all had pieces that I think about frequently after the fact. I’m actually drawing a blank on any movie I’ve seen in a theater in the last two years that had that effect on me.
So, yeah. There’s a high likelihood, for me, that a given piece of IF will not be fabulous. But once those games are eliminated, there’s also a better than average probability that I’ll get something of lasting value from playing.
I may be unique in this.
In my own native gaming industry (pen-and-paper RPGs and hobby board/card game publishing) I hear it constantly. It’s why, when I did my stint as an editor at Steve Jackson Games, one of the first things I did there was haul Steve and company back to the gaming table at my place … approximately 100% of the in-house staff at SJG were, at that point, almost avowed non-gamers, working from memory as it were. And it’s not limited to that particular company; editors, writers, designer and line developers from virtually every publisher I’ve worked with (dozens of them) have expressed the same general sentiment.
In some cases it seems to be a matter of a geeky kind of nitpick syndrome … they can no longer really enjoy the games of others because they can’t turn off the part of their brain that picks it apart in an editorial way, they just sit there criticizing it and bemoaning how much better it could be (I don’t have this impulse with game design, but I do with typography, and it’s a pain).
In my days as a computer-game journalist (editor at IE/Strategy Plus), I heard it from computer game developers. Outside of gaming, I’ve also heard it from multiple novelists, a filmmaker I know, and a career musician (who is, to be fair, also a music producer, and I think he suffers from that same can’t-stop-picking-it-apart thing).
My experiences in this matter are every bit as anecdotal as yours, but there they are.
There is a skip button. Right-click. (Or ctrl+click or two-finger-click if you’re on a Mac.)
I’ve said a lot of this before. So once more, and then I’ll let it go:
Lots of IF authors have creative exposure in at least one other medium, and sometimes in several. IF authors include novelists, short story authors, filmmakers, screenwriters, and people who work professionally in one or another part of the game industry.
There was a certain amount of insulation from other playing and reading communities ten or fifteen years ago, but I’d say that is much less true now, and that that insulation was never exactly because IF authors were unaware of the techniques of other media. When it existed, I think it was more about the fact that hobbyist IF started out as an exercise in nostalgia and only gradually moved away to explore new directions.
When it comes to the specific techniques you mention, a lot of them are known, are used, and indeed in some cases have been discussed as a matter of craft for at least the last fifteen years.
So, I guess I continue to be interested in your work in theory, but in practice have trouble using it or even responding to it in a way that would feel like I was being receptive.
Possibly you have great insights into how things could be applied that none of the rest of us have thought of. Maybe you’ve got a load of intriguing data about what people have responded to.
But you’re the only person who has seen any of the raw data, and it’s very hard to analyze what it all means without feedback on specific games, without knowing what questions were asked, and so on. As a general rule, I also tend to think it’s much more useful to ask playtesters about their experience than it is to ask them to suggest improvements. But either way, whatever you’re asking them, we don’t have access to the particulars, and it’s hard to know what to make of your reports without that information.
You also do not share examples of your proposed techniques in practice – even in the form of a small experiment. It doesn’t have to be a full game. Even just releasing a sample piece and saying, “this is what we’re talking about, so you can see how it differs from execution you’ve seen so far” would help a lot with identifying what you have in mind.
When you say things like “explain why the NPC is here” or “use dialogue to characterize the player” or “sketch the player/NPC’s motivation” or “provide incidental dialogue” or “describe spaces cinematically”, my mind fills with examples of these things already happening in existing IF:
- the large-scope games in populous landscapes like Make It Good, Blighted Isle, King of Shreds and Patches, etc. that are full of characters with very clear reasons for being where they are; the highly scripted NPCs in games like She’s Got a Thing for a Spring, where the NPC has a whole program of activities and plans going on
- the unique styles of talking that define characters in Robb Sherwin’s and Adam Cadre’s work, or in Party Foul, Lost Pig, Violet, Broken Legs, Treasures of a Slaver’s Kingdom…
- the extensive incidental dialogue in Child’s Play; the sidekick commentaries provided by characters in the Frenetic Five games, by Aloysius in Fine Tuned, by any number of reactive NPCs
- the use of dialogue options (those offered and those rejected) to express character in Rameses; to express motivation in some of Victor Gijsbers’ work
- the pacing of a number of games where the story keeps rolling forward while the player has a chance to intervene, rather than waiting on player action, and where dialogue and other interaction types – even taking inventory – are used to help pace that progress out; J. Robinson Wheeler has done this a lot, especially in Centipede and Being Andrew Plotkin, and written about his techniques for designing this type of scene by writing a transcript first
- from the same source, Wheeler’s writing on creating a visually-imagined space, not to mention a host of games with strong visual writing. To grab just a handful of strong visual memories from IF games: the auto-apothecary in Shadows in the Cathedral; the fluttering pigeons and shadow in All Roads; the beaches of Worlds Apart; the cold-berries in Dreamhold; the abandoned official buildings in Anchorhead, with nothing visible beyond the pebbled glass in the windows; the windsong tree in Blue Lacuna; pretty much all of the latter half of Shade…
These are not only things that have been presented by IF authors but have been discussed by reviewers and players and in many cases brought up repeatedly in craft discussions.
So do these examples not in fact correspond to the techniques you are recommending? If not, why not? Would you implement the same technical concepts differently? Do you actually mean different techniques than I think you mean, and is that the source of miscommunication? Are we talking at cross-purposes because IF has developed a separate set of terminology for these things, which is not the vocabulary you expect from screenwriting conversations?
Without an example or targeted critique of existing work, it’s impossible to tell.
Even more bewildering to me is the claim that IF authors are not trying to create an “experience.” Of course we are. In fact, I’m not sure how we could avoid it. Any encounter between player and game is an experience. I have an idea in my head of what I want that experience to be like, which is the core vision behind any project I design. Perhaps you mean that IF authors do not focus on some aspect of the player experience that you think is important? But without more detail, I’m totally at a loss for what to do with that kind of feedback.
The plot treatment for your redesigned Trinity is an exception. I disagreed there about what would be useful to make a good story, but I felt like I did at least understand what you were arguing for, because I had specifics to work with.
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Re. dialogue design, again, no: it’s not the case that these choices are always made by default without any consideration. There are lots of experiments in other design choices than ASK/TELL or menus, and lots of discussion of pros and cons, going back more than a decade. Certain choices have become especially common because they allow rapid-moving scenes (menus) or because they facilitate dialogue tied to exploration (ASK/TELL), but there are other possibilities, and we continue to see new experiments. 'Mid the Sagebrush and the Cactus deals with dialogue as a negotiating counterpoint to violence, for instance.
I can tell you why I sometimes (but not always) design dialogue to be deeper and less forward-moving than you describe: I am trying to convey interactively the idea of a character with interiority, one who can be significantly affected, pleased or hurt or annoyed, by the player’s actions. This is not a challenge that exists particularly in non-interactive art forms, because all the protagonists and antagonists have their being in the same way. You might choose to use a limited first- or third-person viewpoint that only shows one person’s inner monologue, but even then, the divide between the people whose thoughts are known and those whose thoughts are unknown is much less severe than the divide in interactive narrative between the characters with player-animated purpose and the characters who only exist as they respond to and support the player’s experience.
So most of my most thickly-implemented characters are designed around this concern, the desire to make them feel responsive and give the sense that there is some person there, a personality that can be interactively tested out. This is a very fragile illusion still; it won’t withstand a player who wants to break it. My only hope is to support the player who does want that illusion and is willing to play along.
That’s part of what Galatea was trying for – not to tell a specific story, but to explore the idea that if you treat someone receptively, you will get more from the encounter, and to do so in a way that plays on existing preconceptions about what IF NPCs can do. (Preconceptions that existed in 2000. Galatea polls much worse among the IF community now than it did ten years ago; maybe people have gotten more discriminating, but I suspect part of the reason is that what it does is no longer surprising.)
The interiority focus is not always what I want, of course. So Glass is written around a fast-moving dialogue that the player can at best break the flow of, where conversation is very limited; Floatpoint offers limited conversation where encounters are timed to be only a few turns long and implementing only discussions relevant to what is immediately happening; Mystery House Possessed does some keyword matching in order to allow a looser style of NPC communication because I was going for a much more simulationist feel and wanted to step away from the idea that the world was honed towards a single solution. And that’s just a survey of some of my own decisions; I suspect other IF authors could offer a list of their own.
Ah, thanks very much. I’ll turn on the subtitles and give it another try.
Back on topic, I think it’s kind of funny that classes that have a lot of screenwriters in them came up with the idea of reading the dialogue aloud and using visuals.
Just as long as you recognize that as a significant form of success, it’s still good news 
Yes, writing interactive fiction is more fun for me than playing interactive fiction.
However, running a tabletop game is more fun for me than playing in someone else’s game, and being in a play is more fun to me than watching someone else be in a play, and singing is more fun for me than going to a concert, and writing poetry is more fun for me than reading someone else’s poetry. That isn’t to say that playing tabletop, going to theater, going to concerts, and reading poetry aren’t fun - but, with rare exception, I want to be on the creative side instead of the experiential side. It’s just the kind of person I am.
I thought that was pretty much universal? At least for the performing arts. It certainly is the case for me as a musician.
I was hoping I was the only one who enjoys writing IF but doesn’t have much interest in playing it. (I used to when I was a teenager, but don’t much anymore.) In my experience, there is usually a good ratio of users to makers, or too many users; for instance, at college you could throw a stone and hit half a dozen people who wanted to be in your D&D campaign, but you’d need to be a very good shot to hit even one person who wanted to DM. Pity that this doesn’t seem to be true for IF.
This has been a fascinating thread. To some extent, though, I think we may be coming down a little hard on ourselves. IF is still a nascent form. When it comes to film, or novels, or comics, there are so many subcultures, that whatever my tastes (and I do have fairly particular tastes), I will find a whole community of people dedicated just to exploring that avenue.
In IF, there are typically only one or two authors exploring any particularly ‘style’ at one time. So, if I really enjoy a particular type of IF story, no matter what it is, it’s not like I’m going to find even five other authors exploring the same type of fiction in IF, with the same sorts of values or priorities or general theory and approach to art. (And I’m saying this having been somewhat clued out of the scene for like a decade and returning to find it advanced but not much changed in this way.)
If is still at the stage where it is mostly interresting (in a blanket fashion, if I had to say) in the sense that it is still a wide open field and many experiments are done, and they are often firsts, or close enough to being firsts that they’re still interesting.
It’s the flip-side of the coin. Nascent mediums are more exciting perhaps to be explored from the point of view of a potential creators looking for what other groundbreakers are doing.
I think it’s a wonderful medium in the sense that everyone practising is conducting some sort of an experiment, and that is something perhaps you can say of the best novelists or filmmakers but it definitely doesn’t rule field. In IF, experimentation rules the field. It’s like an entire community of experimental short film makers. Ever spend a lot of time watching indie short films? A lot of crap surrounding a scattering of mindblowing gems that really make you reconsider the form.
This is what IF is like everyday – part of why I love it. And I do enjoy playing – very much so, and I’m not very picky about puzzle-vs-story or about old forms vs. new. I’m much more excited when something different is being tried. The moment of discovery for me playing is almost as great as if I had thought it up and implemented it myself.
I do admit though that before I had got it back into my head to jump back into an attempt at authoring for the virtual machine, my playing had tailed off quite a bit. It wasn’t unheard of that I would play, but I would play only in pairs and we ended up playing a lot for nostalgia, because that tends to happen when you’re playing with another near-40-year-old and you’re trying to pick a game to play (or play again). My choices were not so much my own then as I have made sure they are, now, so I’m playing more interesting fare now that authorship is in the picture.
That was also the case when I got into filmmaking. I started watching a much better class of film, and it made me a better artist. (Probably even a better person.)
I believe many more of the differences between the way IF and film/etc are experienced are attributable to general consequences of media positioning, age, and maturity of the form, and far fewer of them are attiributable to anything intrinsic about interactivity or the command line, than is generally assumed.
Paul.
in true IF spirit, I’ll shoot first and read later all the rest of the thread. 
Indeed IF seems to grow far more authors than audience. I do enjoy playing more, but only perhaps because not being a native english speaker I feel my own shortcomings when trying to actually author something up…
OTOH, I can’t help but think your study is biased. As I understand it, you give classes to screenwriters, right? They approach IF biased on their cinematic taste: visual/descriptions first, linear progression. How much better would multibranching/dialogue IF fare with literature majors? How about your typical gaming crowd? I’m quite sure more gamey puzzle-heavy IF would find more bearing with them.
In other words: there’s all kinds of audiences for IF and each one like them for different reasons. Or, more likely, don’t like at all… 
I could wash your mouth out with soap. Assuming you type with your mouth, which would be odd.
I’ve been a bit busy at work so I apologize that I couldn’t reply to everyone who replied to me.
The last class was. Prior to that two classes were composed almost solely of novelists and a few stage play writers. Prior to that, however, most of my classes were simply filled with people who liked games and who liked to read, but who were not novelists, screenwriters or anything else. Prior to that – going back to the original classes – they were composed largely of game programmers or people who wanted to be game programmers.
That being said, none of this is meant to dismiss your observation: bias in study. There is an inherent selection effect that I’ve worked to overcome in all cases, but that still leaves a lot of room for bias that I have to be mindful of.
Very true. On the other hand, what I’ve found is that many audiences tend to not respond textual IF and I’ve always wanted to get more behind why that is. (Even when audiences do respond to textual IF, they rarely “come back for more” as it was. They are often interested enough for a quick diversion but “repeat customers” and value-on-return metrics suggest that textual IF can’t sustain an audience that isn’t already predisposed to it for various reasons.)
What’s been interesting to me is that textual IF focuses on the written word for storytelling and on a game-playing experience. Gamers and readers are two major, huge audiences. Yet the overall audience for texutal IF has been and continues to be small, relative to those two arenas. Writers I’ve worked with (both established and otherwise) are often intrigued by the potential of textual IF, but are often heavily turned off by the mechanics of how textual IF has to be created as well as the perceived (if not actual) lack of cross-pollination of textual IF writing with different forms of writing, such as for stageplays, screenplays, novels, etc.
yep, no doubt music is the most inaccesible of arts, too abstract for most people’s tastes without lyrics to give them some meaning. People like music because it makes them dance, find sex partners, celebrate events, rarely they like music by music itself. And those who are most likely to like music, the ones in the known of its language, syntax and idioms, musicians, are often more interested in the plain act of playing than in the music itself. Guess it’s up to a few composers and obsessive geek’s to truly appreciate enjoy music by music itself…
Regarding the rest of the discussions, all I heard is the same old arguments about the text interface and they always come down to this: people don’t like reading, so you put some images there, some voice-overs and some links to be clicked so we can all go one further step down into Idiocracy, playing fun, shallow, puzzleless linear games with full stereo while inhaling some fun drug…
When I say ‘experiment’, I don’t think I mean what you think I mean. For example, the new Battlestar Galactica was an experiment. One which hugely failed in the end and proved itself quite wrong in its own conclusions, but that’s besides the point I am trying to make, which is that abstract or plotless stories are not the only experimental forms. Star Wars was a huge experiment.
far less bias than what I would have imagined…
However, I don’t think game programmers or wannabes would be that enthusiastic about IF. You talk someone about game programming and you imagine all the excitement of modern day 3D action games – even cellphones these days are able to bring all that flash! Tell them instead they should work their way through the old medium the very first mainframe games trailed and it’s a severe let down…
Novelists and stage play writers would play elitist about the whole enterprise I would guess, perhaps wrongly.
It’s not enough to be either a gamer or a reader, you’ve gotta be both. Unfortunately, I’m afraid most of your typical mainstream gamers are not that much of a reader…
It does not explain all, of course. I’d love to tell it’s just all the juvenile text adventures, too much plain trash, too few serious attempts at true interactive storytelling rather than either too much text and few interactions or short descriptions and much too puzzles. But in the end, most people just don’t come back because their novel or gaming fix are already too crowded with more flashy and hyped stuff for them to bother…
How many people come back to 19th poetry after graduating? How many people truly enjoy classical music concerts other than for taking a nap or to look bright among their peers? And those 2 are far more mainstream than IF…
It was the first most visceral reaction on entertainment TV to the events of 9/11. First miniseries felt just like a punch in the stomach, camera was just as nervous as in the live streams of the incident. So, mankind is attacked and almost dizimated by a bunch of soulless robots and find, under the guidance of an initially warmonger Captain, the road to salvation, the Promised Land of the ancestors of Mankind, Earth. Warring Politics and Religion in one go.
The ending was fitting. The only way for peace is by learning to coexist in the same world with your enemies, not wiping out one another.
quite possibly the best remake ever. Not only for its excellence itself, but also because the original was way too corny…
I hope that’s true
Suffice it to say that, the way I use the word, absolutely nothing I ever do (publicly) with IF will be experimental, and that’s a promise
I keep those urges to private moments when nobody’s looking.
Well, duh. I didn’t think you meant THAT