French IF Comp 2013 is underway

According to Wikipedia, Portugal has 10,487,289 citizens, 95.4% of whom are literate (~10,004,874).
From the same source, Brazil has 201,032,714 citizens, 90.4% of whom are literate (~181,733,574).

This means that the literate Brazilian population is approximately 18 times as large as the literate Portuguese population.

There may be some other reason why people living in Portugal are more likely to engage in IF than people living in Brazil, but I wouldn’t immediately blame the literacy rate.

It’s a governamental lie. Trust me, population at large is highly illiterate. There’s even a term for it: functional illiteracy. Means people can read short messages or news, but not much beyond that. They have many problems interpreting what is written, even though they can read. Since they don’t understand what is written in the mail, they call you back by phone so that your soothing voice reading aloud the text can make them understand.

I’m brazilian BTW. And I wasn’t even talking about poor people, just my average coworkers.

Definitely. Which I think would be a shame, the same way it would be a shame if we had exclusively American IF and no british IF. But realistically, a Brasilian IF scene that would happen to also support a Portuguese IF scene is doable. The reverse, or just the Portuguese IF scene on its own, dream on.

Aaaaaaaand we’ve probably derailed the thread long enough. [emote]:)[/emote]

I didn’t realize you had direct experience here. Thanks for explaining.

Hi everyone,

A gentle reminder: if you want to vote for the French IF Comp, the time is now! The deadline is next Sunday (Feb 2nd), and the online form through which you can submit your votes is here: bit.ly/1dtASKT.

Thanks a lot !!

After reading Zarf’s French infocard, I was wondering: why does the French interpreter use verbs in the infinitive instead of imperative for its commands?

[s]Beats me. Same in italian. I guess the status quop is just different. Me, I always found the imperative to make more sense: I parse it as “Ok, now do this. Now do that.”

Could it be because of graphic adventures, like LucasFilm games? I would imagine having half the screen full of verbs in the infinitive (and yes, they would be in the infitive. Andar hacia porta, coger moneda, etc) would make gamers tend to translate that experience into IF the same way: this is the verb I want, and this is the noun I want.

Hooray for English ambiguity.[/s]

EDIT - Wow, I completely confused the infinitive with the imperative. Don’t even know what I meant anymore, so I’m out of this discussion.

In English I always see the verbs as imperative, but Infocom’s manuals explain it as an infinitive (saying that you should imagine a prefixed “I want to…” in front of the commands). Perhaps that’s the reason?

I can’t believe I forgot that. [emote]:P[/emote] Probably, yeah.

I always understood it as the answer to “What do you do?”, and that’s kinda how I explain it to people. But the French lib supports both infinitive and imperative [emote];)[/emote]

Wouldn’t that be first singular present indicative, then? (I think French has all of those distinctions, but I might be wrong.)

Italian seems to be more strict - some basic verbs are allowed both ways, I think - not sure - but in a lot of games, less-standard author-defined verbs are imperative only.

Also - big whoops, I’ve been arguing about them using the infinitive, making all the proper arguments, when I meant the imperative. I get seriously confused, mostly because my main IFing is in English where there is no such distinction. I’m outta here before my head explodes.

I6 libs support imperative, but I7 libs don’t. It should be possible to re-enable it with a new extension though.
Most of my I7 games involve new verbs, and it’s quite annoying to implement both imperative and infinitive forms.

I also consider it to be infinitive, even in English, like “I want to…”, "Try to… ", “what do you (or I) want to do” etc…

In English, I have always assumed that what the player types is in the imperative. This seems consistent with the style of asking another player to do something by giving their name, a comma, and some instruction. Also, I’ve seen in I7 code “players last command”, which implies imperative – not that it really matters.

The imperative makes sense in 2nd person games, but less so for others, so maybe it’s better to think of it as the infinitive (with the “to” implied), even in English.

I also think of the typed command as the imperative, but I think it makes more sense in first-person games.

It makes sense as a dialogue. (Heavily edited from clubfloyd’s Rameses transcript, and I spelled out “x mirror” so it was actually an imperative). The problem comes with the pronouns (“x me” instead of “x yourself”), but that’s there whether or not you see the command as an imperative.

In Inform 7 at least I think that “yourself” always means the actor, and “me” always means the player character. Thus “hit me” = “hit yourself” but “Bob, hit me” =/= “Bob, hit yourself”.

Wrong.

Are “yourself” and “me” just synonyms, then? I know that “Bob, follow me” and such work.

Since several people have requested a short extension to finish all the games, we’ve extended the deadline to Feb 15th! You now have two more weeks to play those four games!

Don’t forget: send them to ifictionfr at gmail dot com using the 3 scoring categories, or simply fill this form : bit.ly/1dtASKT

I’ve posted on the comp in a few different places. Thought I would post the links here.

Thoughts as they passed through my head while playing, in French:
ifiction.free.fr/taverne/viewtop … 537#p17537

Those same thoughts that passed through my head, in English:
allthingsjacq.com/intficreview_FrenchComp13.html

Things that could probably more appropriately be called reviews have been posted to each of the games’ IFDB pages (for three of the four… I feel like I need to play more of Trac before I do a real review of any sort. I turned in my votes before the deadline was extended; not sure if I’ll go back to give Trac another shot. Possibly, if I have some downtime.