Draft version of my IF history textbook, Learning from the Best of Text (released)

General IF Community Resources
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I’ve finally finished a full draft of my textbook, Learning from the Best of Text.

Its origin is described in the Foreword:

This book was conceived in 2017 as a way to collect all my essays on the history and theory of interactive fiction into one convenient location. At the time I was a university professor, and hoped to make this an academic publication that would help with the tenure track.

I left academia, however, and wrote quite a few more essays than I had originally included. I found that adding citations for each game, like I originally intended, took far too long.

Eventually, though, in 2023, the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation announced a microgrants program to fund projects useful to the IF community. I applied for one, and began working on the book again.

After writing several new essays and writing some Python programs to automate citations, I’ve finally been able to finish the book. It’s a work in progress still, so feel free to suggest corrections!

As it mentions, it is still a work in progress. That’s where I could use help! This is a 250+ page book with almost a thousand citations, which were mostly automated. This books is likely riddled with minor typos or possibly larger errors.

I’ve gone through each chapter a couple of times, but I’d love to get some help.

The best help possible would be for people to look themselves up! If you’ve ever placed third or higher in IFComp or won an XYZZY best game award, you are in this book; searching yourself and checking what I said about you would be a great help.

Other than that, if you happen to read this and note any errors, let me know!

I don’t know how much feedback I’ll get. I asked for help on the Choice of Games forum on the last chapter but none was forthcoming (so it has many unsourced reviews which I’ll be working on during this draft period).

So, if no one is interested in helping here, that’s okay by me as well; I imagine the people most likely to help would be those who might use this book in a classroom setting (just pointing out any flaws that make it a bad match there) or people who are in the book. It’s been used in classes twice before, if I recall.

Thanks for everyone’s help! This book is about you! It’s about the intfiction/IFComp/XYZZY community.

Thanks!
LearningV1.pdf (1.5 MB)

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Based on DMs I’ve added ‘backcitations’ to the citations to allow readers to click back to where they started (which I guess makes this a choice-based IF game with a web of hyperlinks. Just not a very fun structure).

LearningV2.pdf (1.5 MB)

I look forward to seeing which citation is mentioned most often (probably Counterfeit Monkey).

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Thanks for including Cygnet Committee! The in-game audio is a bit more important than the video (since it’s how you interact with the game) so you might want to add that in.

Looking forward to thumbing through the rest of this. Is there any chance of an EPUB/MOBI version for e-readers?

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Changed it to “contains live action archival black and white footage in addition to numerous sound-based puzzles, a distinctly unusual combination in IFComp.”

I’m using Latex/Biber so if there’s a package that converts to epub (or a general site that turns pdf to epub) then I can definitely convert; if not, I’m out of luck.

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I’ve released a V3 with all the changes suggested by my DMs and replies here so far (except for fixing one image), including two major changes:

  • Rewriting all numbers less than 100 into text form rather than numerical form
  • Changing single quotes around words and quotations into ‘smart quotes’ instead of right-sided quotes

I used regex’s for these and found at least two weird things they did, which I fixed, so hopefully they didn’t cause too much trouble.

LearningV3.pdf (1.5 MB)

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Version 4 fixing numerous typos in the prologue/Usenet section found by @alyshkalia.

(there’s no need to start reading a new version if you already started an old one, unless the bugs you’ve found were mentioned in my description of new version).

I’d usually wait for more content to do a new version but this was at the very beginning and pretty embarassing.

LearningV4.pdf (1.5 MB)

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I’d be happy to help read, but I can’t manage the PDF format. I can only read now with great difficulty, due to neurological disease. And rely on ebooks with gargantuan fonts. And setting my favoured IF interpreter to humungous font too!

If an ePub or Mobi version is produced I’d be all in though. Googling I found a bit of useful info online. But it would probably be best if @mathbrush did the conversion from the original TeX or LaTeX.

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Oh and trying a text search in the PDF (though I can’t read much more than that) many thanks for mentioning my game Napier’s Cache! :slight_smile: I would very much like to read the rest of the book, and would give you critical constructive feedback :wink:

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Okay, I have been able to convert it to epub using pandoc. It loses all references and citations, but preserves the text itself.

I made a github page so I could put a link (intfiction doesn’t support epub downloads):
https://github.com/brirush84/IFTextbook/releases/download/v4/learning.epub

Let me know if it works!

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Thank you! The ePub is loading fine in my Mac ePub viewers. I have sent it to my Kindle and am just waiting for it to appear there (Amazon can be slow transferring at times). Will update in a mo hopefully.

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It’s working on my Kindle :slight_smile: See pic below. Only slight downside is there’s a faint colour backdrop, which makes it redraw with a bit more work on each next page. But that isn’t an impediment for me reading. I will devour it over the next week and get back to you!

IMG_8201
IMG_82013024×4032 2.15 MB

Alt text for above picture. A Kindle Paperwhite with a very large font view of Mathbrush’s new book. So good.

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I’ve gotten through a small chunk of the book. It’s very approachable … I was expecting something a lot dryer when you said ‘textbook.’

Question about this:

The puzzles are natural from the PC’s point of view; there was an old saying that bad games stopped the protagonist with ‘soup cans in the pantry’, but when your PC is a hungry foody, it makes sense to stop the play with dried beans in the cell.

I don’t know this meme/idiom too well, by “stop” do you mean “lead into a puzzle as an obstacle”? I’m guessing that from the start of the sentence and this Tvtropes page.

If it’s not just me, it could use a little more explanation in text, I guess.

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Yeah - the reference is to the 7th Guest, where you’re exploring a haunted mansion, but at one point to make progress you need to solve a puzzle with letters written on a bunch of different soup cans (in fairness, the game is structured as a bunch of random self-contained puzzles in each room of the mansion so in context it’s not quite as bizarre as it seems - like in a Professor Layton game where a sympathetic witness won’t tell you what they saw unless you solve a puzzle about moving matchsticks or whatnot).

But yeah the explanation could be a little clearer for those unfamiliar with the reference - maybe something like “games were sometimes criticized for requiring unmotivated actions like fiddling with soup cans in the pantry to progress, but when you’re a foodie…”

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well, being basically an history book, I can’t excuse me from this ßtesting. (V4)

a minor point is that cited IF works outside the chronological sections should be dated.

e.g. chapter 2.1: perhaps isn’t a bad idea adding the year first released of the many IF works cited there…

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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I actually don’t know what to call it. I’m not looking to make money off of it, and my original reason for doing it was academic cred back when it mattered. My current reasons are because it places a lot of information in one small place and because putting it in book form is an impetus to improve the essays.

Thanks for the soup cans suggestion! I’ll work on that.

That’s the main reason I did the citations. You can click on them to see what year the game was made, and click back. I can also change the citation style so every citation lists the author and year; I think it would look ugly, but it’s very easy to switch on my side, so I could do another version like that later on in addition to the main version.

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That kind of makes sense. I wasn’t completely clear on whether it meant a jarring shift in surface presentation or a lack of flow from exploration-to-puzzle game mechanics.

(@mathbrush’s paragraph suggests the first but the second is also implied by the fact that puzzles stops the player as opposed to just being a weird detail).

Looking up the example in the 7th Guest where you have to pass through the kitchen … you could have exactly the same password puzzle and present it with a rigged bookcase in a bedroom, which plays better into genre cliches. However, this would be been just as arbitrary in terms of mechanic.

It looks like some of the complaints on Tvtropes lean toward Moon Logic Puzzle and difficulty complaints so I guess there is some overlap.

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You are kind of spoiled for choice in trying to analyze the flaws in 7th Guest, it’s true.

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The ePub version works very well on my Kindle Scribe.

I will see if I find anything that needs correcting.

Thank you!

PS. I would be willing to purchase a hard copy or pay for an ePub version if it goes that direction.

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I think some sites allow for on-demand printing and shipping of books, so I could do something like that for people who want physical copies.

For digital, though, my grant proposal included keeping the book free, and I already got paid for doing this through the grant, probably more than I would have if I sold it commercially (I couldn’t see getting more than $300 or so from this and the grant was for $500).

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Okay, here is version 6 (I may have skipped one?)

I moved the Usenet prologue to the middle of the book, as it was a rushed chapter never meant to be part of the book so I’m basically hiding it. I updated many things in it on Hidnook’s suggestion. There are several other people’s suggestions as well, including Wade Clarke.

Onno Brouwer pointed out over a hundred typos in Chapters 1-6 which should hopefully now be fixed.

I haven’t fixed the soup cans thing yet!

LearningV6.pdf (1.5 MB)

Epub version link:

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