Score inflation is common just about everywhere (see: jokes about how IGN only rating a game 96 means it must be terrible). Actually, I’ve been pleasantly surprised that the IF community still seems to use “three stars” to mean something like “an average but unexceptional effort, worth a play.”
There’s probably also a bias in that games known to be good get more plays, and hence more reviews.
Playing Inside the Facility… this is the most fun I’ve had making a map in ages!
It’s also an interesting coincidence that both Stay? and Toby’s Nose are much larger than they seem at first.
Quick poll (join FIFP Fans to participate):
4 posts were split to a new topic: IFDB “malicious voting”
I want to put in a good word for Stay?, which seems to have an interesting backstory and which I found to be much better than its initial appearance would suggest. (It presents as a Harry Potter-like, but that’s a bit of a fakeout.)
The high-level structure and planning that went into the game shows some real skill in design, and even though I’ve never been very interested in choice-based formats, this was one of those games that draws you in enough that you stop thinking about the particular interface. If you’re turned off by its self-description as a “dating sim” (as I was), then rest assured that the game is complete even if all of that is consistently bypassed. It’s one of the top choice games I’ve played.
EDIT: I assume everyone already knows how good Toby’s Nose is. The “crossover” moment (realizing how far Toby’s “smell-o-vision” will go) is one of the highlights of my experience with IF, the kind of thing that justifies the medium over regular prose.
This was one of those WOW moments for me, too. It took me an embarrassingly long time to tweak to it, but it was so, so satisfying. A truly great limited parser game.
Quick poll (join FIFP Fans to participate):
You know, it’s funny… your comment made me realize that the “limited parser” aspect really doesn’t stand out in my memory for any limited parser game. It just becomes a background feature of the interaction. What stands out is the story/puzzles/general writing.
Agreed. But I can never stop marveling at those authors who manage to do SO much with so little. The excellent writing and story are inseparable from the mechanism, and the mechanism is so brilliantly simple and yet so deeply implemented that you forget how difficult it is to do all that (which is yet another example of how genius it is-- you can’t hear the gears spinning because you’re too immersed). The Wand is like that too. Why isn’t that game in this playoff? I mean, I know it isn’t here because it didn’t hit the top 60-something, but it’s insane that it didn’t.
OK – the refereees have called time! Round 1 for Division 3 is done.
It looks like there was no late scoring, so the changeover should be pretty quick…
EDIT What a great segment! There are actually three significant upset victories, for Inside the Facility, Slouching Toward Bedlam and The Spectators. I’m pleased to announce that Daniel Ravipinto (@peccable), whose game beat a defender that was 45(!) places higher in the seed rankings, has agreed to an interview; the questions have been sent, and answers will be posted here as soon as we hear back.
The final standings for this segment are now up, along with the summary of the matches. Division 4’s Round 1 is already underway.
I’m also pleased to announce that Arthur DiBianca (@dibianca) has agreed to an interview in response to his game’s upset victory, so there will be two author interviews posted here as soon as the answers arrive.
Additionally, in honor of her second upset victory, @AmandaB has agreed to a future interview to take place during Round 2. Stay tuned…
The mobile camera team finally caught up with Arthur DiBianca, and he was kind enough to answer a few questions for the audience…
[EDIT: One more answer added – sorry it got skipped the first time.]
Q: You are one of the most well-known authors who specialize in “limited parser” works. What attracts you to this format, and why do you prefer it to the traditional parser style?
AD: I’m pretty lazy. With the traditional open parser, people can type all kinds of things, and you have to handle so many possibilities. Too much for me. But also, hopefully, people who don’t have a history with this kind of game have an easier time getting into it.
Q: Why do you prefer to use a parser interface even when it would be feasible to implement a game using a choice-based or graphical system?
AD: I would say “keyboard interface” instead of “parser interface”. Inside the Facility doesn’t really parse anything. (And if you played the browser edition, it’s just click-or-touch.) But Twine games feel fundamentally different to me – you don’t have a fixed set of commands, for example.
(Or to put it another way, I spent all this time learning Inform 7 and now you want me to learn Twine?)
Q: How much of the map of Inside the Facility was designed around the puzzles, and how much was just to fill up the squares? Are there any rooms that are there just for atmospheric purposes, or does each one have a significant function? How long did it take you to put the entire game together?
AD: The original notion was to have a directions-only interface. So that meant a lot of rooms would be required. But I hate mapping, so I decided to make a template you could print on a sheet of paper. 13x10 seemed to fit pretty well. But then, yeah, I had to come up with 130 rooms. Probably it could have been more compact! But it also leaves more space for silliness. As I recall there aren’t many rooms that are absolutely useless, but maybe a few.
I think the game took about five months to write.
Q: You have 16 games listed on IFDB. Which one(s) are you most proud of and why?
AD: Skies Above. I like the concept, and it was pretty challenging to write. Everyone should play it until their fingers fall off, which will occur after about 15 minutes.
Q: What was your first exposure to interactive fiction? What about it motivated you to start making your own?
AD: My first adventure games were Cranston Manor and Microsoft Adventure, circa 1982. You got to sit at a computer and explore these little worlds – it was awesome!
Q: Nearly all of your published works were written in Inform 7. What in particular convinced you to make it your primary authoring tool, and have you ever considered trying others?
AD: I discovered the Inform 7 IDE around 2012-2013, and it seemed like an ideal tool. I’ve never felt the need to look into anything else. I have learned a little Javascript for the Vorple features, though.
Q: Inside the Facility is slated to face Andrew Plotkin’s Spider and Web in Round 2 of the tournament. Is there anything you would like to say to fans in advance of the match?
AD: “I can handle double digits, but if I lose by triple digits I’m going to take it personally.”
This past week, for me, was extremely busy. I was only able to cast votes for 2 of the matches, and only because I had already played two of the 4 games involved in those matches. I was already very familiar with Spider and Web and Slouching toward Bedlam. Spider and Web is one of my favorite IF games ever, basically.
I eagerly attempted Violet in good faith. I loved the narrator for Violet, Violet. I despised the all-too-self-reflective protagonist character. But this game was extremely well done, I loved how it continues to change the responses despite the repetitive failure of the player and protagonist to. just. write. something. There was definitely a hint of sadness, a hint of sympathy, and a whole heaping helping of disgust against the protagonist. The game, the fiction, was finely crafted, unique, and full of funny moments from the point of view of the audience.
Violet is similar to Spider and Web in that the player clearly doesn’t know as much about what is going on as the protagonist, and pulling that information out of the characters of the game takes a bit of time, patience, and retrying after failed attempts. I feel the key to enjoying these games is to try thinking about anything and everything, try not to let your frustrations get the better of your thinking, and continue to persevere when it feels as if you are stuck – the situation may change even if you’re doing the same or similar things.
After that I decided to give Will Not Let Me Go a try. A cry. A lot. This game changed me. This game is, well, it’s not a game, that’s for sure. It’s a work of art. It’s a masterpiece of interactive fiction. And yes, it is very interactive, even if it’s more or less a linear story. The skillful way that author Stephen Granade presents the story from the point of view of the victim of Alzheimer’s Disease gives the reader a tiny glimpse of a first-hand experience of the disability. I literally cried as Fred’s life slipped away from him.
Because, you see, my paternal grandfather died of Alzheimer’s Disease when I was 11 years old. And my grandmother lived just as Virginia lived, for most of my childhood. Making huge sacrifices to be her husband’s caretaker. Yes, of course, she loved him. And she did her best, but her love for the man didn’t make it easy for her. I remember going with her to drive around looking for my grandfather when he escaped the nursing home on more than one occasion. I remember wondering how he could not remember our names. I remember how he would get so upset because his emotions overrode his thinking. As a kid, I just didn’t get it.
And now as a middle-aged adult, I wonder whether or not I might not have the first stages of the disease. I wonder how much of my forgetfulness is just natural aging or if it’s something worse. I constantly work puzzles, do challenging brain activities, and take vitamins for mental acuity. l do it all with the absolute terror that I might have this insidious disease. And I am so damn afraid that I might hurt my wife by one day becoming an insurmountable burden for her. And I refuse to do that to her. Absolutely refuse.
So yes, it might not have been the most fun, but for me, the most impactful of Round 1 Division 3. I do very much hope I never forget Will Not Let Me Go.
-virtuadept
I didn’t get to play any new-to-me games from this division either, so I wasn’t able to vote in many matches, but I just wanted to say that Repeat the Ending is one of my favorite works of IF. The mechanics, the meta aspects, and the story all work together to create an amazing experience that I absolutely loved.
When our mobile camera team knocked on Daniel Ravipinto’s door at his home, he was surprised to hear about the tournament and pleased to learn that Slouching Toward Bedlam had won its first match. He took the time to answer several questions in depth, for which we are very grateful…
Q: Slouching Toward Bedlam is a landmark in large part because of its extremely novel core concept – one that it can be argued is supremely suited to interactive fiction. What was/were the seed idea(s) that went into your original inspiration?
DR: Honestly, there was more than a little serendipity involved. I approached Star with the idea of writing a piece of IF together with nothing more than: “I want to do something weird and steampunk set in London.” I’d just gone on a vacation to England and had wandered around the city and the imagery and sense of it – the weight of all of that history – was still fresh in my mind. I’d seen a hospital that had been a hospital for hundreds of years.
Everything else derived from that opening idea. We did research and found little facts like the original panopticon plan for Bethlehem Hospital, the place’s own strange and tragic history, the statues set atop its entrance and as we went on, everything just began to fall into place.
The elements of steampunk technology, language-as-virus, and secret societies derive from what we’d read and were reading at the time. There’s HP Lovecraft in there, obviously, but also some Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Alan Moore. We bounced ideas off each other, wrote transcripts of what we thought a player’s interactions might look like and it just grew from there.
Q: How long did you and Star Foster work on the game? At what point in the development process did you decide to fold what are normally considered “extra-diegetic” functions into the game itself? Was that idea there from the start or did it come about later?
DR: Gosh. It’s so long ago now, but I remember that it was on a really tight schedule. We wrote and designed for a long time and then Star went on a trip only to return to find I’d implemented most of the base game in a flurry of panicked activity. Originally we’d envisioned the game as a chance for her to learn how to code IF but unfortunately my worries threw that right out the window.
The strangeness in the text from the Logos’ interference as well as the save/restore interface clearly had influences from games like Suspended, Bad Machine, and LASH. Once we’d introduced the idea of multiple characters becoming unstuck in time, the parallel to the IF interface seemed obvious.
The idea of you-not-being-you was there from the very start, I recall. I wrote a version of the opening text that we knew should not include the word ‘you’. This is an office, filled with things. You as a player have no context from before the moment the phonograph begins playing, and so we just let you – like the character – assume things about your identity. We also played with the idea of IF protagonists and the gap in knowledge from their players – the strangeness of a doctor wandering around his own office, asking about things he should obviously already know.
Another element in the design was we knew that conceptually we were biting off more than we could chew in a two-hour game. The world and the backstory contained within it were of necessity larger than the slice that the player had access to.
There’s a fair bit of what Andrew Plotkin once coined as “wedge-chocking”, or closing off options which are extraneous to the plot. We wanted Bedlam and London to feel real and large, but we didn’t have the time (either in terms of development or actual player playtime) to allow you to go anywhere, hence things like the fact that you can only access one hallway of the panopticon, or that the cab can only take you to a few, important places.
The final design came at an intersection of all of the above desires: something replayable, but short, that felt large in scope but with only a small playable portion, and – as I’d asked for in the beginning – weird and steampunk set in London.
Q: The original release was in 2003. Supposing that you were to have the same inspiration today, is there anything that you would change about the story?
DR: There are weaknesses in the design that seem obvious to me, some twenty years on.
One design principle I have come back to again and again is something I heard from Jordan Mechner, designer of Karateka and Prince of Persia: “What is the player doing?” Not their character, not the world – the player. Often games open with huge cutscenes where your character is doing all sorts of interesting things and the answer to Mechner’s question of what the player is doing is “watching a movie.”
The answer to that question for a lot of Slouching is “reading”. There’s a ton of writing in the game and while I’m very proud of it, the first thing you come across is a slightly-interactive cutscene in the form of a very long journal played on a phonograph. In the archives are a set of files. In Clive’s room is another journal.
Lore and backstory are all well and good. They give context to the player’s actions and, in the course of Slouching, they give meaning to their final decision. But I hope that if I re-did such a game now, I’d find a better way to integrate the story and the gameplay.
Then again, perhaps not. Even the Myst series drowns the player in journals. One of my favorite game stories – Marathon – is presented as a bunch of text in terminals.
It’s funny because I recently played a mainstream game – Paradise Killer – that had a very familiar design. You wander a space, learn the facts and details of a mystery and at the end you make a decision (or in the case of PK, a set of decisions) that define what you think happened and who should be punished. Even though it’s implemented as a fully-3D environment, a lot of the investigation is performed by talking to NPCs or through text descriptions. What was I mostly doing? Reading.
Q: The game is at first glance set in the late Victorian era, but there are obvious technological differences between it and real history. Was the intent of creating an alternate history solely to allow the insertion of “futuristic” technology for the era, or did you have other goals in mind? If the former, was there anything specific that kept you from moving the setting to a later era?
DR: It literally came out of ‘weird and steampunk’. We both liked the genre and I had re-read Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine at some recent point. There were also some of the serendipities I’ve mentioned. Bedlam’s original panopticon plan, for example, was fun to implement. The archives would obviously exist, but what’s the weirdest way we could build them out?
There were also elements that were completely original and we just wanted to include. I’d had an idea for an NPC companion from something I’d seen in the opening cutscene of a 1997 Playstation game called Elemental Gearbolt: a piece of luggage that floats behind a character that only shows up in a framing story. This became a little black box on wheels – Triage, who ended up becoming one of the most popular parts of the game.
Triage, in fact, saved a part of the design. I’d put all this work into building this complex cypher that I somehow expected players to sit there and decode. Star looked me right in the eye and said “No one is going to do that.” She was absolutely right, of course, but I really, really, liked the idea of the puzzle.
Triage ended up saving it. The cypher ended up being the reason for having Triage in the game.
Q: The game is often lauded for its wide variety of qualitatively distinct endings depending on the choices made by the player. Did you have all of the endings worked out in advance as part of the original story concept, or did some emerge while writing, coding and/or testing? Why did the two of you consider it important to provide such a large number of endings? Were there any endings that you considered but didn’t make it into the game?
DR: We tried to be as complete as possible. That idea of allowing the player to end the game in any way that seemed valid seemed important to us. So we tried our hardest to work out how many ways the story could end.
We covered a lot of bases. Any way that the player could end up dying had to be covered, and we specifically put in some to give that as a hint to a way of ‘solving’ the issue of the Logos. We kept track of the spread of the disease and who was infected, which created a whole bunch of variants.
The only one we didn’t catch, if I remember correctly, was the window. One of our testers – someone who didn’t really play IF – almost immediately typed “jump out window,” while playing around with what the parser could do. And that revealed one of the deepest possible endings to the whole thing.
Q: After winning 1st place and the top Miss Congeniality award in the Comp, the game went on to win both Best Game and Best Story in that year’s XYZZY Awards. It has subsequently been featured in the Interactive Top 50 of All Time across multiple editions spanning from 2011 to 2023. Have you been surprised at the way your game has developed into a touchstone of the form?
DR: Very much so.
The awards it won were, I think, a bit of a shock for both of us. It had been a labor of love and we hadn’t really thought much beyond getting it done on time and out for the competition. Everything that’s happened since then has been ever more of a surprise.
For me, also, the game has become very important with how interlinked it is with Star’s memory. I feel as if I and the rest of the world were cheated terribly by her loss. I think sometimes of all the things she might have written or made and how happy I would be to read or play them. And all that beyond the mere chance to spend more time with her.
The fact that there’s this one part of her creativity that has gone on makes me very happy.
Q: Most everyone who writes interactive fiction hopes for a result as good as yours. What advice would you give to aspiring authors? In your opinion, what is it about Slouching Toward Bedlam that gives it such broad appeal?
DR: I suppose there’s two parts to this – what would make good interactive-fiction (or really any game or interactive experience) and what would make good art, period.
Good IF is rigorously thought through. Who is the player? What are they experiencing? What can they do? Have you tried covering as many seemingly minor interactions as you can think of? What can they look at? Has this minor description become a red herring? Does each part make them more curious to keep playing or can you drop it?
A lot of good game design is simply iterating through playtesting. Get an ugly, quick, but feature-complete prototype as quick as you can and test, test, test. Listen to the people who play your game and hear what they’re trying to tell you. Writing in general – but most particularly game writing and design – is creating software for the variable hardware known as the human brain. Different people will bounce off your work differently. Try to learn from that.
Be prepared to change things and be more than willing to kill your darlings. IF is fantastic for this. No cutscenes to render, just type some more text. Your tests will not be the beautiful experience you imagined in your head. That’s fine. Maybe that thing could never exist in the real world.
From the other side of things, I am of the opinion that art – like people – is at its best when it knows what it is.
Have a thesis. An idea. A point of view. Have something to say. There’s been so much art – interactive and otherwise – that I’ve experienced, gotten to the end of, and gone “…and?”
Even if you find people disagreeing with what you’re saying, at least say something.
I think perhaps the reason Slouching works as well as it has is that it sets up what I hope is an interesting mystery and then supports you as well as it can through. There are strange things to see, places to wander. There’s a whole world implied just beyond the range of where you can go, with its own history and horrors.
And then, in the end, I think it does what the best of interactive fiction – whether literally a piece IF, or a TTRPG, or a video game – does. It asks: given this particular set of constraints and events, what will you do? And then it tells you the consequences.
Twice now, competing works by Amanda Walker have beaten the odds and won upset victories. After some time to come up with a new round of questions, our mobile camera team paid a visit to her in the bleachers during Round 2, where she was kind enough to answer several more questions…
Q: So far, your “contestants” have been among the most notable ones in the tournament, with both Of Their Shadows Deep and The Spectators winning upset victories in Round 1. Are you surprised?
AW: Yes. Very.
Q: Despite some initial hesitation about the tournament as an author, you’ve been an active participant as a fan since early on. What, if anything, do you see as the value of this event beyond just fun? What are your thoughts on friendly competition in general?
AW: It’s great to be prodded to play some of these games that I’d never played. There’s a reason why all of these are rated so highly.
In general, what’s not to love about friendly competition? Nobody really loses.
Q: These interviews (which only began as a result of your generosity, magnanimity and graciousness after the first segment) are one of the most popular aspects of the tournament. The draw seems to be that everyone is interested in hearing the perspective of those whose works stand out in such a large field (over 13,000 works according to IFDB). When you think of your favorite games, what are the features that most impress you about a work as an author, and do they differ from those that draw you as a player?
AW: I think the features that attract me as an author and a player are largely the same thing. It’s just that when you start writing/coding and realizing how bloody hard it is, you have more respect for the author who pulls all that magic out of their hat when you have a sense of what’s under the hood.
Q: Which three works of IF do you consider to be the most inspirational as an author, and why? Are there any particular passages of prose or segments of interaction that you admire in those works? If so, which ones and why/how? Are there any specific lessons that you’ve learned from them?
AW: I could not possibly pick only three. Each of my projects has inspiration and I’m pretty good about crediting those. And there are many games whose inspirational drives I have not yet hooked to a story or a mechanism. I’ll say that FIFP has added a new one to my inspirations list (it has also totally borked up my top ten list): Midnight.Swordfight. That game is freaking magic.
Q: Who are your favorite prose authors, and why? Have you ever considered writing just plain books?
AW: I have so many favorite novel writers. Larry McMurtry, Edith Wharton, NK Jemisin, Charles Dickens, Shirley Jackson, Richard Adams, Jane Austen, Adrian Tchaikovsky, John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut, Octavia Butler… I could go a really long time here.
I’ve never considered writing just books. I’m not sure I could.
Q: What drew you to the period setting of The Spectators? How much research did you do in preparation for writing it? Are there any specific sources for research that you would recommend? Are there any books or films with a similar setting that you would recommend as entertainment?
AW: I didn’t choose that period actively. The poem “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning was the entire inspiration for the game. The poem gave me the entire framework, including the historical setting. The poem was based on real people, although general consensus seems to be that it’s a scurrilous slander of Duke d’este. I researched things I needed to be reasonable like inventions, artists, foods, types of servants and the map of the actual castle. But although I like the time period I’m certainly no expert.
Q: Your work Fairest seems to draw on a number of Grimm Brothers fairy tales that are relatively obscure. How were they chosen? Why did you decide to use elements from these and not others? Are you interested in fairy tales in general?
AW: I have always loved and hated the Tales, since I was very young. Most of the best ones, in my opinion, got overlooked by Disney, thankfully, and for the very good reason that they’re simply horrid. I wanted to use a lot of lesser-known Tales instead of just retreading all the ones with all the baggage. I didn’t use my very favorite tale-- The Juniper Tree– because it’s so awful that I couldn’t find any way to make it funny. I’m sure I’ll have this dysfunctional relationship with them until I die.
Q: You’ve written quite a few works in a short period of time; you must have lots of story ideas. What is it about a particular idea that compels you to sit down and start writing?
AW: If I knew the answer to that I’d be a happier person. No idea why some stories click sometimes and others don’t. There’s some really good ones in a drawer in my brain that for whatever reason just aren’t gestated enough yet to be born.
Q: You have in the past been a biology teacher. Just as the freedom of combination of biochemical substances and their interaction allow many different forms of life, so does the freedom of combination of code instructions and their interaction allow many different forms of interactive fiction. Do you see the different types of IF as falling under a kind of taxonomy? If so, how would you describe it?
AW: Before I started writing games, I used to categorize them more than I do now. Now I mostly see them in 2 camps: those who experiment and take risks and those who don’t. That doesn’t equate to quality; a lot of cool experiments don’t work and a lot of old standard games are fantastic.
Q: As I understand it, the first IF you ever played was Zork, and the second The Wizard & The Princess. What was it about those first experiences that hooked you as a player? At what point did you decide that you wanted to become an IF author?
AW: I was 9 or 10 when Dad brought home Zork. I knew instantly, that second, that I wanted to do that. It only to took forty years to get to the finish line.
Q: Would you be willing to share your best chili recipe? If not, what’s the best one that you’re willing to share?
AW: I think the secret to good chili is lots of fresh ginger. Some kind of ground meat, beans (I also put lentils in mine, which is probably considered treason in Texas), tomatoes, chili powder (I sometimes use curry powder instead-- also treason), garlic, peppers of every sort depending on your spice tolerance, onions. It really helps the flavor if you caramelize your onions and peppers slooooowly with garlic and ginger before adding them to your big pot. I never measure anything. I do it all according to what’s in the fridge and what my whimsy says that day.