Yes, we’ve gone off the original topic. On that, I agree completely with what you wrote in the first page of this thread.
Well, I hope to prove you wrong on all these points with Parchment one day. Unless the desktop terp adds a JIT. That wouldn’t be fair would it? [emote]:P[/emote]
I don’t see anyone objecting to the notion of having Javascript-based interpreters. So no explanations of why some people appreciate them are really necessary.
There are three reasons why I am asking for a rule to make games downloadable.
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Preservation. People’s (authors’) short-sightedness is well known. “Oh, great, I just need to click a couple of times here and my game is up and running on this website! I feel so great!” Then, six months later, that website is down and the author has either disappeared or, even more stupid, doesn’t even have a copy of her own game anymore. What then? Yes, you can say it was their choice, bad luck etc. Anyone working in a library would disagree with you there, though.
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Acessibibility. I guess this one is really obvious. While browser-based interpreters improve accessibility, too, as we have learned in this thread (locked down iOS devices, for instances), nobody can possibly deny that the ability to download, store and play a game locally is the basis of acccessibility.
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Not distributing a game is often the first step towards nasty stuff.
a) It could be spyware embedded into the website: If I let some random website execute scripts on my machine, how do I know they don’t also have illegal stuff like “Google Analytics” (or worse) on there?
b) It could be some stupid DRM attempt. It has already happened, folks – these people launch jDosbox (Java-based MS-DOS emulator) in a browser in order to run an interpreter inside. The actual game file is obscured in four steps in order to make it as hard as possible to get it. Obviously, in order to keep control of the games. Asking the guys for the games themselves, they denied my request. Of course, when I told them I had downloaded them anyway (the games were hidden in an ISO compliant block device image which was referenced in the emulator configuration file), they did not protest anymore, which would have been pointless. Nevertheless, as I said, they tried.
And the question is whether the IF Comp should be open to such (or more intricate) attempts. Yes, it is the authors’ choice whether to do something like this or not – but it is the competition’s “owner’s” choice whether to allow it in the competition or not. Personally, I am appalled and I don’t want the central event of the community, one of the few events which does get any attention outside the usual circles to shed such a questionable light on the community.
(On a sidenote, I am of course aware of the possibility of embedding spyware/whatever in a locally executable game. Which is why I frown at them, too. However, I would assume that running a game in the controlled environment of an interpreter which I have compiled myself is safe enough.)
The rules state “playable with no strings attached”. This is a good rule. The question is: What is its interpretation in a world where even openly commercial games are not so much financed by sales anymore, but rather by user data? Should the IF “community” be “open” in the sense of “anything goes” or “open” in the sense of “we promote open playability without any strings attached”?
Unless I’ve misread them, the comp rules make no claim to be some kind of manifesto of community ideals, so conflating community ideals with comp rules seems counter-productive.
Whether they claim to or not, they probably are de facto. Whatever the IFComp requires of its entries, that’s pretty much the kind of IF we’re going to get. I daresay that’s partly why long-form IF is so rare (inherent difficulty aside).
I doubt that the IFComp is responsible for the rarity of long-form IF – if you look at the list of finalists for the best game XYZZY, over the past few years you’ll see several long-form non-IFComp games, which I’d hardly expect if the norm were that a good game was an IFComp-style game. Doesn’t inherent difficulty seem like a more plausible explanation? The IFComp may be drawing people who otherwise wouldn’t write games to write shorter games rather than longer ones, but I suspect such people are more likely to write shorter games anyway. If anyone wants to write a long game for a comp, there’s always the Spring Thing.
But if comp rules do de facto express community ideals, then I think Hannes’s proposal would be disastrous. If we are to permit only downloadable games, and frown on locally executable games that aren’t run on interpreters – well, then we’re stuck with the formats supported by the interpreters that you can compile yourself, forevermore. And those of us who can’t verify the interpreters for ourselves will be left trusting that the authors of the interpreters aren’t malicious, anyway.
This thread is pretty long, but I think Hannes’ proposal was just that the games should be downloadable, not that we should frown on executables. As I understand it, all three of the games in IFComp 2012 that didn’t provide files for download could easily have done so, just by shipping the HTML+JS in a zip. They wouldn’t be playable in Gargoyle, but they would be playable in a web browser by double-clicking, which I think satisfies the goal of archivability, within reason.
Wayyy back at the beginning of this thread, it seems like most people agreed with this:
Anyway, the time is upon us. There are three games in IFComp 2012 that provided no downloadable files (“Howling Dogs,” “Living Will,” “Gilded Youth”) and three games that are not playable online (“The Island”, “Irvine Quik & the Search for the Fish of Traglea”, “The Sealed Room”).
As I understand it, it should be straightforward for all of the web-only games to fix their problem in an in-comp update by just uploading their HTML+JS to the archive. And for the TADS/ADRIFT games, they each have an easy-to-use web-export tool that the authors can use to make their games playable online.
Am I right in thinking that our tiny minority of people who care about such things should: 1) email the authors, asking them to provide additional files in a subsequent update, and 2) give them a low score until/unless they update?
(Maybe the ALAN game should get an exception, because there’s no convenient way to webbify it?)
Is this the right thing to do, or am I just being a jerk? (I’m definitely going to write the authors; I mean the voting part.)
That’s up to you to decide. There are a number of ways that you can punish games that do stuff you disapprove of; in descending order of severity:
- Give them a 1. (Personally, I don’t like to do this except for games that are utterly broken or unambiguously trolly. But protest-votes are definitely an important part of the Comp ecosystem. It’s sort of jerky, yes, but jerkitude can serve valuable functions. Up to your conscience.)
- Don’t play or score them. One of the big reasons to enter the Comp is to get more people to play your game, so getting fewer players is a disincentive. (This only really works if there are lots of people who follow suit.)
- Play and score them, but don’t write reviews. (Only works if you’re writing reviews. This is the MO of a number of reviewers for games that don’t credit any betatesters, for instance.) You can do this the classy way (never mention their existence) or the passive-aggressive way (in your game list, strikethrough the game’s name. Make a review post for the game, but say ‘SINCE THIS GAME IS WEB-BASED SCUM I SHALL NOT BE REVIEWING IT.’ The one-line review ‘Not IF.’ is the minimalist equivalent.)
Actually, Sargent argues precisely the opposite in The Evolution of Short Works: From Sprawling Cave Crawls to Tiny Experiments, an article in the IF Theory Reader. Shorter Evolution of Short Works: making shorter games on an annual cycle was primarily driven by the Comp. You may not agree, but the comp’s organiser is definitely of the opinion that the Comp is, if not precisely a manifesto about how IF should be made, then practically speaking a very major influence on it.
Well, I was thinking of this:
I take it that this means that, if you’re concerned with spyware and malware, you don’t want to play local executables either, unless they’re sandboxed files that run in interpreters. In fact, in at least one case that I can think of a homebrewed downloadable game had some malware issues.
Downloading the HTML + JS so the game can run in your browser wouldn’t address this issue, would it? The JS could still run scripts you might not want. I don’t really understand the technical aspects of it (for instance, I don’t really know whether I used “sandboxed” correctly in the previous paragraph).
I was under the impression that this is not the case – TADS games have to be specially compiled for web play, and online play only exists for games in ADRIFT 5, not ADRIFT 4.
maga – noted, thanks.
One difference is that everyone would be able to check the source code, and though everyone wouldn’t do that, chances are at least one person would, and so any problems could be spotted.
But there’s little such a page could do, other than open up popup windows to porn or rick roll you or something.
Campbell’s web runner plays the games I wrote in ADRIFT 4.
Personally, I’ve written the authors of Guilded Youth (comment on his blog) and Living Will (e-mail), asking them for offline versions. I intend to take no further action (like voting 1 - that feels extreme).
Theoretically, if enough people who care about it do the same thing (at this time a grand total of two) then the authors would realise the demand for it and agree to release an offline version. Insofar as that’s even possible in the case of Guilded Youth.
WebRunner can play ADRIFT 4 games. The only caveat is that it converts them on the fly to ADRIFT 5 format, and there are possibly a few slight differences between the two (I’m trying to eliminate all of these, so if anyone finds any, please let me know). If you are curious, you can play Duncan’s game online here. Please note though, that games played using a v5 interpreter should not be used as a basis for voting in this competition in case there are any differences that would make a material difference.
Thanks for the clarifications, Campbell and Dave. I think this still means that the authors of ADRIFT and TADS games have good excuses for not providing web-playable versions, since the web players might not work as intended out of the box. Also, howling dogs has submitted the downloadable files as I understand it, and Guilded Youth is in Vorple which currently can’t play offline, so The Living Will seems like the only game that has an easy fix for online/offline play and hasn’t provided it.
Given that interpreters for Glulx, Z-Code, Tads, Alan, Hugo, Adrift 4 and probably many more are available as portable source code, I don’t see the harm in that, personally. To make matters completely clear, though, I’m not asking for a rule to ban proprietary formats. I’m asking, in specific, for all games to be publicly archived and, in extension, for a modern-day interpretation of the rule #3:
I am willing to give authors the benefit of the doubt as far as they should be allowed to enter games in strange formats. I will not play them myself (and, for the record, that means “not rated” from me, not “1”), but as long as their is no indication of their software attempting any foul play, fine. If there is, however, and that includes collection of personal information about the players, for example, I think they should be banned from the competition – because this is really the new breed of commercial products. Actually a much more evil breed, because most players will not even know what they’re getting into.
Hey guys, have added a offline download of Guilded Youth for those who prefer that:
nomediakings.org/games/guilded-y … ation.html
That has easy access to the source code for anyone who wants to see how we implemented the Vorple library via Inform 7.