Years ago I started taking my IF essays and collating them into one big book called Learning from the Best of Text. I was a professor at the time and planned on publishing it for academic rewards, so I started adding references and citations to everything and polishing the formatting.
I stopped in 2017 or so due to the tediousness of adding everything, but I received an IFTF grant earlier in the year to finish the book (and to post the IFComp summaries that I have been doing).
I’m wondering about what content should go in the book, now, and thinking of paring it down a bit. In 2017, when I did most of the work, I had only been involved in IF for 2 years, and so I included literally all my essays I had written up to that point. Here’s the current table of contents (I’ve only ‘fixed’ up to Slouching Towards Bedlam):
It’s the last section, ‘additional essays’, that I’m thinking of axing or reducing. I have a lot more essays now (like fifteen or more ‘Author Highlights’ essays) that I don’t plan on adding, so these ones kind of stick out. Paring them out would make this a stricly historical and chronological work.
But, I’m doing this with IFTF money paid for by you, the members of this forum. So I do feel like you should have some input. All of my essays are already available online, this is just a convenient compilation. What would you like to see in it?
I’m primarily interested in the opinions of people who care at all; if you have no interest in IF history or this book, feel free to say so, but that will not help me at all with this question.
One thing of note: it’s focussed around the best games, which is easily found via comp winners. There’s seemingly no mention of works by the best authors, as controversial as that might be. I don’t think I could point to an Emily Short game that isn’t excellent, although not all of them were “the best” at the time. (Edit: although maybe the Author essays is what covers this)
In general fiction people have a canon of authors that are reliably good at their craft. Curating that list is controversial but usually only in completeness.
On a totally different note: how lumpy are the distribution of games in terms of platform, length, etc? The best Adrift games likely highlight something interesting about that type of IF, but may be unlikely to win a comp by sheer numbers.
I only ask since it’s easy for me to add infinite work to your plate
I kind of petered out because I felt bad for people who missed out. If I start it up again my next one was going to be Hanon. Amanda Walker is someone who’s produced a large enough body of award winning work that I could write about. The issue is that there’s not much to talk about unless a)the person had some development over time (so the story is interesting), b)they had a a lot of games, and c)the games attracted a lot of attention (so people know what I’m talking about). I just fear the day when someone says they felt bad or quit IF because I didn’t write an article about them. But maybe I’ll compile them into a ‘volume 2’!
(oh, I see you edited your post, so you know what I’m talking about).
Most popular in each platform could be fun. The interesting thing about Adrift games is that the most popular ADRIFT games are nothing like the normal ADRIFT games; they’re often multiple choice.
I’m going to look for the distribution and edit this post once I figure it out.
Parser-based: 21
Inform 6 (11)
Inform 7 (7)
TADS (2)
Hugo (1)
Choice-based: 5
Ink (1)
Twine(2)
Choicescript:(2)
List of Games:
Inform 6:
So Far
I-0
Spider and Web
Varicella
Being Andrew Plotkin
All Roads
Savoir Faire
Slouching Towards Bedlam
Blue Chairs
Vespers
Lost Pig
Inform 7:
Blue Lacuna
Aotearoa
Counterfeit Monkey
Superluminal Vagrant Twin
Wizard Sniffer
Zozzled
What Heart Heard of, Ghost Guessed
TADS:
Elysium Enigma
According to Cain
Hugo:
Cryptozookeeper
Ink:
80 Days (commercial)
Twine:
Birdland
Bogeyman
Choicescript:
Creme de la Creme
Vampire: The masquerade: Night Road
I think these names are all out of sync due to some kind of spreadsheet copy-paste accident. Otherwise, please introduce me to the work of Victor Groover.
The more the better, from my view, but if it’s about finishing something in a reasonable time-frame, then splitting it into two volumes isn’t a bad idea.
I like the Additional Essays, though you could hold off on some of the sections (like Design Decisions) until you’d made more essays in the series.
So the section of essays you said you were thinking about cutting did also seem to me to be pretty interesting, however you could probably just do a short page or two commentary with instructions on how to find the details of them online. The book then would hopefully drive traffic to the site where you want to permanently host that content. Keep in mind that the content should probably reside somewhere that will likely survive in the case of your death or unexpected disappearance. One purpose of books is that they outlive the author, after all.
I think this looks like 2 books: a history book (all the comps) and a practice book (the additional essays). Why smash all this together when you can narrow the focus of two projects?
It doesn’t purport to be about anything because I haven’t written an introduction yet. What it currently is is many of these essays collected and polished: https://www.ifwiki.org/Mathbrush
The main purpose is for people to have collected. The draft has already been used in a couple of university courses (including one at the University of Puget Sound) and a few other professors have expressed interest in using it.
I do realize that this may sound completely uninteresting to you. If that’s the case I’d be happy to start a separate thread; this thread’s purpose is to get advice from people who do want the book on what they’d like to see in it.
I think there’s some good advice there (you talked yourself down in calling the tips boring), but I agree for a collection it doesn’t quite work as a conclusion. I suppose you’ve got two different ways you could sum up:
author-focused advice on how to place well in the competition (which is what you did before)
player-focused synoptic overview of the history of the competition and its trends
#1 would mirror the conclusion for the XYZZY segment, so you’d probably want to avoid repeating yourself.
I was going to suggest this in my earlier post, but I noticed the “Additional Essays” section was only about 45 pages long, and wondered if that was sufficient to merit a different collection.
Either way, I’m certain I would read this work, @mathbrush. Having it in one volume (or two) makes it easier to read for me (I can put it on my Kindle and read anywhere).
Brian said he was thinking about more in-depth articles about various authors, etc, so if he wanted to do that they would probably go in volume 2. But you’re right-- as it stands that would be pretty small.
