Thanks Tor! We’re still in the planning stages, but I definitely think having a distributable interpreter to give a unified feel to all the games would be a good idea. It would be easier for newbies, I think, and it would probably make installing and running the games easier.
Just FYI to all, we’re in the planning stages of this project now. I know we’re going to need more help, so if you’re interested in the idea of a quarterly IF subscription, featuring a few short (1 or 2 hour) games, feel free to let me know! I don’t mean to jump the gun, but hopefully soon we’ll be able to post an official request for submissions, and kind of lay out the plan to anybody who’s curious about the whole thing.
I’m interested. I’d withold asking me to participate until you can judge my writing ability (from my comp entry.)
However, I will enthusiastically offer my talents as a proofreader, editor, and beta-tester. I am confident in my abilities in those areas, since I basically majored in the first two. 
As soon as Merk, David Whyld and I have this planned out in enough detail to start to ask for submissions, you’ll see a post. Anybody who is interested, will be considered - we are creating guidelines on evaluating proposed games for inclusion, what kind of payment authors will receive, etc. There’s quite a bit of details to be worked out, but most are well underway.
I’ll give a little tidbit of information up front - before Merk gets the chance! 
We’re setting up a team of editors, consisting of those who have chosen to be partners in this venture. The editors have final say on what games will be included in the issues, and will perform quite a few of the duties editors have at a publishing house. Besides this, editors will also write games for the project. Other people participating with an occasional game here or there will get some reward for doing it; but for what the reward is, you will just have to wait. 
Look out for a future announcement with more details coming shortly.
The idea of basing a game on a popular TV series came up before … could someone refresh me on the issues of copyright ? Is it just the obvious thing (written permission required from the author / owner of the copyright ?)
… and are there any series / movies, etc. for which permission has already been given ? (Just me being hopeful )
(Reason for asking – my thoughts wander every so often to the idea of a game set in the Stargate universe. Plenty of scope for adventurous adventures).
I don’t know of any that have said, to the point, that they don’t mind it. That’s possbile – I’m just not in those circles. I think most “fanfic” gets away with it just because nobody really cares. There is a misconception that “not charging” makes it legal. It’s more that not charging makes it an even less attractive target to the copyright holder, unless its mere existence is felt to damage or dilute the original IP. Charging can also affect legal damages awarded in court. I’ve been fortunate never to have sued anybody over copyright infringement, so my knowledge of it is all theoretical – just what I’ve read about.
I usually refer people to this page, for one guy’s explanation of copyright myths:
templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html
For a commercial project like this, I wouldn’t want to take chances. Having authorized/licensed games based on existing IP like StarGate would be pretty darned cool, but I haven’t really considered investigating the possibility. None of us are expecting much (if any) profit, so working a licensing deal would probably prove impossible. I definitely wouldn’t want to publish games derived from copyright material, but what many people fail to realize is you can write a very similar story without infringing. You could make up a story about a network of gates connected by wormholes, and it could just as easily be like Hyperion as StarGate. But most people don’t want to do that. Piggy-backing off an established franchise means people will recognize the name, the character and settings, and be much more interested than if you had come up with something original.
But that’s big business. I mean, games that are movie tie-ins are common, surfing on the exposure the movie already gets. Lord of the Rings was a great movie trilogy, and it would stand alone in its own right, but Peter Jackson (and all involved) really had a leg up by being able to make Lord of the Rings, something people already know and like. When it comes to hobbyists, though, it’s more akin to leeching.
Hey! You’ve read your Dan Simmons, too. 
Well, I’ve read the Hyperion and Endymion duologies. I have “Hollow Man” but I haven’t read it. Recently purchased “Ilium” and “Olympos” (now that both are in mass market paperback), but haven’t read those either. Hyperion is one of my all-time favorite books. I also really like “A Fire Upon the Deep” by Vernor Vinge, and to a little lesser extent, “A Deepness in the Sky” (same author). My favorite, author, though is Jack Vance – Tales of the Dying Earth (especially Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel’s Saga), and the five Demon Princes books I especially like). My collection includes most of what Vance has published (except for his mystery novels) – just missing a couple books, I think.
Hmm. So you can probably set a game in someone else’s “universe”, but not use existing characters … and parodies are allowed. This kind of limits things.
(Sigh) oh, well …
Well, I’m nobody to say what a person can or can’t do. This kind of ties into the same topic from a few days ago. It’s probably not something I’d want to do unauthorized, but if I was ever in a position to do licensed work, it might be fun. Original stories in an existing world would be easier (to me) than faithfully adapting an existing story to IF.
I’ve read the Hyperion end Endymion duologies a couple of times by now - haven’t found other books by Simmons at the local library.
So you’ve read Vinge, as well? I liked A Deepness in the Sky more than A Fire upon the Deep (if I can remember which one is which… Deepness is the one where they explore that one planet while Fire is the one which starts out of the slow zone?).
Never got around to reading Jack Vance, thought… although I can spot a couple of his books in the library - The Moon Moth and The Dying Earth.
I’ve been through them only once. I have sooooo many books. I mean… like thousands. I have tons more I need to read.
Yep, that’s right. In A Fire Upon the Deep, they have galaxy-wide text newsgroups.
Vance isn’t for everybody, but everybody I’ve recommended him to, really like what they’ve read. The Demon Princes books are great. Tales of the Dying Earth too (although the first book, just called “The Dying Earth” is a collection of 6 stories and can be a little hard to get into at first). The Moon Moth is good. You’ll get an idea of what happens in The Demon Princes that way. It’s more a short story though. There are four books in the Planet of Adventure series that are pretty good. Let’s see. I’ve read The Blue World, Galactic Effectuator, The Languages of Pao… I’m not sure what else. They’re all good. I have several others I haven’t even read yet.
So I assume that, like most ambitious projects such as, all this went nowhere?
A lot has been discussed in a private board, including a name for the company/project, pricing, distribution, frequency, etc. Most of us involved were working on IFComp entries during the discussion, and this kind of died away after a while. Well, I shouldn’t say “died” – I still think it’s a good idea – just we didn’t take it to the next step.
David Cornelson is giving commercial IF a go:
groups.google.com/group/rec.game … 748d1c9165
Sounds kind of similar to what we’d been discussing, in our ideas for serial-IF. Sounds like he’s getting pretty organized about it, too.
Even though a few people have given a commercial IF venture a try in the last ten years, I think it’s not a coincidence that we’re seeing multiple discussions about commercial IF today. I know it makes me sound like a online marketing hack to say it, but currently the technologies of creation, delivery, and play (I hate to use the words ‘production and consumption’) are converging fast enough that, like with sales of CDs by indy bands and POD books by authors unpublished by mainstream press, a commercial IF venture is becoming more and more practicable. Looking at the new casual game and indy game portals (like Manifesto for example) that have started recently, I’m actually a little surprised it hasn’t happened sooner.
Granted, the hurdles of creating a business structure, website, delivery tools, media player(s), etc. for a new start-up are high, but once a couple of ventures get off the ground and establish the infrastructure, I think there might be a rapid increase in IF games for sale.
As I think more about this from time to time, I think free IF is what will ultimately hold commercial IF back. I’d like to think that great games will sell, and there’s a market outside the community, but there are just some obstacles posed by the wealth of free IF that it would probably end up being a hard sell.
I’m not suggesting free IF go away by any means. Just thinking out loud here.
If the creation of Interactive Fiction was still restricted to commercial development, I think there certainly would be a market, even today. Not everybody who plays free IF today would pay for IF if free IF didn’t exist, but I think some would. It would be the only way to get it. Technology today is such that anybody can create IF now, and distribution is electronic. Back then, even dial-up BBS’s were uncommon (if available at all).
Plus, I’m starting to wonder if commercial IF can be written better than the best free IF. I realize it wouldn’t have to be – it just has to be something people want, which isn’t available for free – but would people want commercial IF when they’re looking at it as “game versus game” rather than “free games in general versus specific commercial games”?
The idea that commercial IF can reach a different market is great at first. If it takes off, though, I would expect free IF to begin cutting into that. To keep the market interested – a market of people who hadn’t known of IF before but will undoubtedly find the free stuff now – I think the content would really have to be special.
Then again, not everybody would download and play free IF anyway. If there are distribution connections (man, if you could sell IF at bookstores, I bet you’d strike gold), maybe the people who’d pay wouldn’t care if there was a free community or not. It’d be convenient to pick up the latest game and install it – less convenient to learn the in’s and out’s of the community, download an interpreter, find a good game in the archive, etc. It’s easy to forget that not everybody is computer savvy, or even inclined to work at it.
The Westfield Chandler thing is interesting. I think serial IF is a good idea, but I’m not completely convinced that having “world designers” is the way to go. He’s going about it more as a publisher might, contracting out to have specific games written. To me, that’s no fun. I’d rather write in my own worlds and develop my own scenarios – and partner with others who are doing the same, like we talked about here.
Something I posted on the Adrift forum today on the same subject:
That’s probably going to be the major sticking point: “if I can get free IF games, why should I pay for them?” No doubt if software companies gave away games like Half Life 2 and Oblivion completely free of charge, any other companies trying to sell similar games wouldn’t be in with a chance.
Yep, that’s the dilemma. People buy video games because the kinds of video games they want aren’t free. Those kinds of video games rarely can be free, due to the expense involved to create them.
IF is still something that can be free because the expense to write a game is nothing (i.e., when I write IF, I’m donating my own time to the project). I think your example is exactly right. If “free” was the norm in video games, and HL2 or Oblivion were pretty much the same as some existing free games, then it wouldn’t matter to most people (I would think) that the free games aren’t the specific same games as HL2 or Oblivion. The free ones – although not HL2 or Oblivion – would be just fine. It would be the difference between paying $0 or paying $50, when the games are “the same” on a general level.
But how can we innovate commercial IF when very little (if anything) we do couldn’t be cloned in the free community anyway? It seems like a lost cause trying to write games that are better than free games, because the nay-sayers will find fault in them regardless. Even if the nay-sayers were wrong, it’d only take a couple free games to come out that offer the same innovations, and that’s likely to happen.
As for pleasing the nay-sayers, I think that if a person is set against an idea, they’re going to justify disliking the result. I rarely ever see “I expected this to be bad, and wow was I wrong.” It’s always like “I expected this to be bad, and sure enough, it was.”
So… hmmm. I don’t think my latest thoughts contradict the idea we had for short “multi-game” or “serial” IF. I never thought it would be a huge success – just something that might be fun and lead into more. It’s the “leading into more” part that seems more doubtful, as I think about it. I wouldn’t want to go the Malinche route with slight-of-hand to hide the free community, yet I’d like to keep viable whatever commercial market we could reach.
Maybe David C. has exactly the right idea, going for professional packaging (right?) and distribution (right?) and advisors and contracted development. Maybe the trick would be in getting commercial IF out there, promoting it, building the market. The world is made up of many kinds of people. Some may buy IF, but wouldn’t be bothered to find or care about free IF. Maybe that’s the market he’s going for.