No argument here either, just wanted to lay any confusion to rest. You aren’t privy to a couple of private conversations with members I’ve been having who’ve expressed concerns about this whole subject; my intention is not specifically to correct you directly.
5 Likes
Understood. Thank you for the clarification.
4 Likes
Sure, but once those people are using this forum and have accounts here, they can ask their non-adult Inform 7 questions in the main Inform 7 board, rather than on a separate forum’s I7 board. I imagine the AIF crowd still has non-obscene questions about things like “how do I use the Unsuccessful Attempt rulebook”, or could offer valuable insights on non-obscene threads about layered clothing.
The topics won’t spread beyond the locked category, but the users hopefully will.
6 Likes
Oh yeah; this forum has a reputation as being a place for the “old guard”, the descendant of the old Usenet groups rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction. But there’s also the IFMUD, which is even more old-guard-y (that’s still a thing, right? haven’t checked in on it in years), and then there are more recent groups forming on Tumblr and Discord that I have very little contact with. Years ago, when we instituted the Code of Conduct, some people who disliked our stance on Twine went off and made their own free-speech-centric Discourse forum, which I think has withered and died since then. And then there’s the AIF groups that we’re talking about now, apparently their old forum has shut down?
It’s really an iceberg!
7 Likes
They’re mostly holed up on a private discord server atm. Still extant, but in serious decline.
3 Likes
Exactly. That’s why pseudocode exists. “I want to award the player points every time they place this orange inside the fruit bowl…”
Then in the private forum that’s where they’d be free to discuss actual plot things that would normally need to be skated around in pubic.
7 Likes
I’m taking notes for when I need to have the birds-and-bees talk with my son.
11 Likes
I don’t have kids, but I’m to understand both birds and bees love fruit!
5 Likes
It’s very silly seeing a robin drunk out of his gourd because he ate too much fermented fruit flying around like those chubby silly little bumblebees that BONK! into everything in their path. It happened once at an old house in the suburbs we lived in, and I watched bemusedly as it sat on our windowsill for a bit. I often have windowsill visitors- of scraggly robins and pigeons looking to fluff up and warm up, but very rarely inebriated ones!
7 Likes
IFMUD is definitely still around. In fact, their Club Floyd very generously betatested various Comp games this last year. You should pop in and say hi, I’m sure they’d appreciate the surprise.
3 Likes
It’s true. I come here and I think to myself “This place needs more sleaze.”
3 Likes
I poke my head in every couple of weeks. But I think that, outside of ClubFloyd, it is entirely transitioned to “social MUD populated by people who met through IF ten or twenty years ago”.
5 Likes
I’m still fairly new to all the IF stuff but a place where I could perhaps discuss some of the games i’ve already been drawn too could be really fun! The opt-in option seems really smart too!! I’m all for this personally!
And oohh, clothing extension? perhaps I shall save that tidbit of information for a future project! (I really like dress up games actually.)
4 Likes
I try to start up IF conversations as much as I can when I’m there. Sometimes it takes, and I often learn something new at that point (a lot of quiet talent and knowledge there), and then sometimes there’s no appetite for it and it goes nowhere.
I suspect moving the XYZZY Awards off of IFMUD has had some unintentional side effects, but that’s just an opinion.
4 Likes
Looks like voting is starting to taper off on this thing. When are you planning on closing the poll? @HanonO
ETA: (Not rushing you, to be clear, just asking out of curiosity.)
3 Likes
Speaking of AIF, one thing I’m curious about is the split evolution of IF and AIF as a subgenre. I know full and well that Leather Goddesses of Phobos doesn’t quite qualify, but is that the only example of commercial AIF there is? As much as I dislike erotica in most cases, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt if I tried out some games from the early days, to see how things differed on implementation, writing, Etc.
2 Likes
The earliest one I know of is Softporn Adventure from Sierra in 1981. (Or rather On Line Systems which became Sierra later.)
5 Likes
I believe many elements of that may have been re-used in Leisure Suit Larry?
5 Likes
Now this is something I do know about. The majority of the elements (including puzzles) ended up in Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. For example, the puzzle with the hooker and the pimp, Fawn, Etc. I only know this because I perused the source code to Softporn's Turbo Pascal port back in the day, and I also recently watched a let's play of Larry Reloaded.
[mod edited to line-wrapping monospace]
3 Likes