That’s a great way of dismissing all the other participants. You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you? Well, that’s the problem.
Ice Cream Jonesy is a well-established handle of Robb Sherwin.
Jason,
Thank you for the documentary, and for uploading the extra content. I was very pleased to find it, and I’ve been enjoying going through it.
Jacek,
I suspect that you don’t even know what you’re talking about. That’s the problem. I’ve been listening to your vitriol for a long time now, and there really is no pattern, besides there are certain people that you just don’t like, and other than that your targets tend to be whatever gets the community’s attention at the moment. There are no coherent underpinnings of a real aesthetic or philosophy beneath your ravings. You are just a troll, and honestly, not even the best one we’ve had.
Can this thread be locked?
I did wonder about that. When I started reading this, I cringed a bit - Pudlo wasn’t being his usual rotten self, certainly not so much to deserve the Rickardson responses.
Then it dawned on me that it might be a sock puppet, and it all made sense. If arguing against a sock puppet, lash out with that and remain as civilised as possible.
Shame that Robb got dragged into it.
When will you people learn that IF is important and I am not? There are so many things in those interviews that I’d love to discuss with you guys, only if you would stop obsessing about me. So how about a Jacek-free week? How about for once discussing IF instead of me?
No doubt I should take Pudlo’s advice and just let this go, but I think you’ve mixed up the posters a bit. Rickardson only posted once on this thread, to say that madducks and Jonesy were Pudlo sock puppets – which is a pretty good indication that they aren’t. The rude responses are mostly coming from madducks, who I’m pretty sure is not Pudlo (in fact I think I know who he is, but I also don’t care).
Regarding Jacek’s first point about the absent-interviewer technique: I did find it a bit confusing at first. Watching the interviews consisted in part of trying to guess what the respondents were responding to. Of course, this is because these aren’t interviews-for-publishing, but rather interviews-for-editing.
I haven’t watched all of them, but the ones I have watched tend towards quite an autobiographical style: typically the respondent will start by talking about how they got into interactive fiction. Can anyone point me to any of them discussing more craft based topics?
[size=85](Incidentally, ‘Peter Rickardson’ is a clear inversion of Rikard Peterson: Trumgottist on the forum. I feel fortunate that my own name is immune to spoonerism.)[/size]
/registers an account as Joan Josephs
Adam thornton’s interview is one of the most substantial. He raises four important points. 1) Writing IF is only slightly more rewarding than masturbation. 2) IF will never again be commercially sustainable. 3) We have consumed all the puzzle-space. 4) Infocom’s prose was pedestrian but unemberrassing, and that is something we should all aim for.
I disagree with 1) and 4) and agree with 2). Adam must be using some pretty awesome masturbation techniques, because if he gets anywhere near the rush of writing IF when he’s jerking off, he definitely ought to share his onanistic talents with the rest of us. 2) is self-evident. Why buy bottled tap water when you can turn on the tap for free? 3) is the most interesting point. Adam argues that all the possible puzzle schemes have been exhausted already during Infocom’s hayday. This is the most pessimistic prognosis of the future of IF, much more so than 1). I vehemently disagree with 4). I don’t know what Adam was thinking when he said that.
And yet bottled tap water sells a lot, even in places where the water in the tap is of the same, if not better, quality.
Oh, thanks, I got completely mixed up.
Then I have to say that it seems to me as though, in this particular case, madducks was rather out of order, even if Pudlo is a known troll…
Although I agree with this, it’s a self-fullfilling prophecy - this sort of thinking leads to no commercial IF ever being tried. Crowther might just as well have said “Meh, why bother? I’ll just take people to see the Mammoth cave”. Right now, commercial IF seems impossible, because we don’t have - as we once did - quality people churning out quality games at reasonable prices (ok, not always reasonable) with quality packaging.
The real reasoning is probably less like “why buy bottled tap water”, and more like “it would cost so much to bottle the tap water and to sell it, it’s best just not to”. Not financially viable. But I wish it were, if it would bring us back to the days where you got Wishbringer stones that glowed in the dark and cut-out sundials. Hey, “Heavy Rain” shipped with an origami. I loved that.
Agreed. I once read somewhere something like this: while Mahler and a student of his were walking along a beach, the student said that all the great melodies had already been composed. At which point Mahler pointed to the see and said “Oh, look. There’s the last wave.”
Mind you, if by puzzle scheme one means “use X on Y”, then yeah, it’s pretty much the raw basics. But what of it? There’s enough window-dressing on it to be inventive all the time.
Not wanting to presume to know his mind, I can hazard a guess. Infocom’s prose was rather pedestrian by today’s standards - a result of, as we know, very limited text space (I shan’t venture into whether the Infocom crew would have written beter prose otherwise). However, it worked startingly well.
That’s because we have IF as a novel, and IF as a game. And while IF as a novel may work best with very good prose, IF as a game benefits from being a bit pedestrian. You have a world model; you have a player that goes around that world doing things, experimenting. It helps to be pedestrian.
Having said that, if you can manage not to be too flowery, too purple; if you can write in an appealing style that isn’t overblown; if, in other words, your prose doesn’t harm the gaming experience; then yes, it would be best to go for it. After all, Infocom’s prose might have been pedestrian, but it wasn’t without style, it wasn’t without a particular brand of humour.
I went and rewatched Adam’s interview to catch exactly what he said regarding the exhaustion of puzzles (as this is the most interesting point). He says this:
On a broad brush level he’s right. Puzzles tend to fall under broad schemata: go find something to proceed; manipulate combinations until the right one is found; navigate these rooms/menus/card catalogues. However, on the level of fine detail there are an endless ways of achieving innumerable goals. And it is these details that matter for the player. For one thing, there is in an infinite number of possible things to fetch in a fetch quest, but for any given story there’s only going to be so many things that make sense in the context of that story.
Also, one might wonder whether new kinds of puzzle aren’t more plentiful than Adam makes out. Sure the matter changing machine in Metamorphoses and the use of tactical items/equipment in Kerkerkruip are both about manipulating combinations, but like the supposed Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, it is so broad a characterisation of the puzzles to be essentially meaningless (or at least, very unhelpful).
Oh and as for point 4, I think I’m with Adam here: the prose in the infocom games I’ve played (and I’ve by no means played them all) is functional: it mostly tells you what is where. It gives you the information you need to move around and solve puzzles without being particularly outstanding in and of itself. I’m willing to admit though that there may be infocom games I haven’t played with prose that fails to be basically functional.
Functional. Thank you, that’s the mot juste.
I’m on a iPhone so I’ll be’ brief. I think the games going to be apps for iOs will bring a new renaissance to PAID if.
Yeah, especially since you have to pay for the iThingamajig first. And they don’t come cheap.
I think one could argue the same thing about stories in general too, though. There are only so many story archetypes, and yet we have countless actual retellings of those few core stories. As long as those retellings carry their own character, we enjoy hearing them anew.
Regarding selling IF, I’m sure this has been rehashed a thousand times, but I think the biggest obstacle at this point is that it’s a digital medium. So like any other digital media, most people would still find a way to get it for free. And since the scene is small, that translates to a rather low number of people who will buy a game. I think the two best ways would be the limited edition package (you can download it for free, but if you pay you get nice packaging and a mountain of feelies) or the pay-what-you-want or donation-based system (you can download it for free, but you can also have an easy way to get some money into the pocket of the author). I love the latter model but has anyone actually tried it yet? Even if everyone started using Flattr it could be a good start…