Yeah, me too.
My only fear is that I’m overlooking something and separating them would make things far worse. Segregation is what I fear, but other things also.
Yes, sorry Hanon. Was just joking. Live and animation give same result, it’s more similar to TADs vs Inform, imo.
I have to disagree on this – even a static medium doesn’t go one way, because everyone interprets it differently. Unless you’re strapped to a chair like the guy from Clockwork Orange. 
I think choice based games have gone beyond this by creating many branches that can result in failure states. Whether or not you can undo the failure state or go back via branching doesn’t really matter – the actions of the player still got them into either a winning or failure state, and the the player still has to determine how to reach the most optimal ending.
Good points. And, full disclosure, I’ve only played like 2 choice games this year. I guess I was hypothesizing.
Animation and live action give the same result, but the methodology is different enough that there is a separate Oscar for animation.
Ah! ok, now I get your point.
So, yes, it’s acceptable to have one prize at the IFComp but add technical prizes during the Xyzzies. Is this what you mean?
I disagree. Hyperlink games are IF. Parser games are IF. They deserve to compete against each other in an IF competition.
To be fair, let’s broaden my brush just a little. If we were to create a national video game awards show, a la the Grammys or the Oscars, then undoubtedly we could have IF games up against AAA blockbusters for Best Game. And given a panel of discerning judges who vote on content and not how the media is consumed or what type of games they prefer to play or whether they use a keyboard or a controller, I think Counterfeit Monkey could give Assassin’s Creed Whatever some good competition.
If you want to create your own Parser Awards, like the Country Music Awards, then by all means. If we want to add smaller categories for the Xyzzy’s to culminate into a Best Overall, that’s a discussion to have. But IF Comp should be IF Comp.
It think it’s fair. Ok.
First, I don’t want to see IFComp split into categories. It’s never had them, except for the first year, and then – yes – everybody agreed that having TADS and Inform categories was silly.
The XYZZYs are a fuzzier case. We’ve avoided having content or prose-genre categories like “best comedy” or “best mystery”. We do have technical awards (“best use of medium”, now “best use of innovation” and “best technological development”) but these have been careful to avoid specifying what kind of innovation or technology we “ought” to laud.
I won’t support adding a parser category to the XYZZYs just because it doesn’t fit into IFComp. That’s not a sufficient argument.
There is no purely rational resolution to this, because this is community identification. Busterwrites just said:
That is the entire space of the discussion, really.
(Long digression about the R&B/Hip-Hop charts deleted. Sorry. I won’t subject you.)
This is a fairly new idea. Non-parser games were not a common part of this comp until recently. The term “interactive fiction” has mostly been used in the way Infocom used it. We’ve traditionally rejected the compositional definition of IF (“all fiction that is interactive”), and the expansion to include non-parser games is a big shift. I understand now that a lot of the community is interested in both forms together, but it feels like few commenters are even acknowledging that this is a change.
IF isn’t dead.
Parser games aren’t dead.
The IFcomp doesn’t represent ‘the state of IF’ nor even ‘the state of parser games’. The short format required to enter is not even parser games’ strong suit so the IFcomp has never even been the best showcase for parser games. The IFcomp could die tomorrow and I doubt it would affect the evolution of parser games at all. In fact, it might help by removing such a central focal point for silly debates over whose art form is ‘dying’ or somehow no longer relevant.
Every artist always thinks that their chosen medium is the most relevant and other forms miss the mark in some way. They may even think other forms are dying. That’s very natural for an opinionated artist - that’s why they chose that medium in the first place - but it is almost always wrong, and it’s always unhelpful to spread these notions. The less arrogant artists do not try to dictate to others what mediums they should work in, what perspectives they should adopt, what ideologies they should support, what sorts of characters they should use, etc, etc, etc
That’s true, but they’ve been in the comp since 1998. The majority of IFComps have had at least one non-parser entry.
What you can say is that this community has identified as being primarily about “stuff like Infocom”. And it’s the “primarily” that has changed, not the hard boundaries.
I don’t want to start or continue a debate about GamerGate on intfiction.org (and toward that end I am laying aside any objections to the alleged relevance of Zoe Quinn), but I just have to address the misapprehensions about GamerGate’s attitude to interactive fiction. I have supported GamerGate and its stated goals since September 1st. I have been involved in the hashtag everyday, made a lot of new friends and met a lot of interesting people. Some of you here may find those people “disgusting” for whatever reason, but that’s neither here nor there and I don’t want to argue about it here.
All I want to say is, these people don’t hate interactive fiction. I have been clear about my love of text adventures from the moment I joined, and never received a drop of pushback or disdain. On the contrary, I have received many inquiries about it from people who loved the old text adventures and are fascinated with the things I tell them about the state of the art. Far from being against IF, GamerGate is actually a fantastic recruiting opportunity for IF, if you can stop focusing on whatever part of its history you find so personally horrifying.
Some GamerGaters do ridicule Twine, but most don’t. (Just like here! Imagine that.) There are even plenty of Twine developers among us. When somebody in GamerGate ridicules the tool itself instead of whatever art they found boring or disagreeable that was created with that tool, I politely explain to them that the tool should be distinguished from the art itself, and point out that interesting things have been done with Twine. This too has yet to cause any pushback or argument.
If you don’t like GamerGate on some feminist grounds or whatever, that is fine, I am not really going to argue against you about that here. But I think it is doing IF itself a disservice not to point out that there is a huge pool of gamers out there all congregating in one place who are actually very open to IF and text adventures, many of whom skew older and have nostalgic memories of parser games, and right now they are looking for any sympathetic devs to support. They are thirsty for sympathetic devs. They are really not picky about who you are or what type of game you make.
Happy comping! 8)
Paul.
Which is precisely what you just did. You opened that door wide, made claims I don’t agree with, and said I shouldn’t argue with them.
I do agree, however, that this thread and this forum is not a place for GamerGate. Others are free to go back on topic, or we can lock this up.
I didn’t mean that you can’t disagree. I just meant my intention is not to argue over it but to inform people that there IS actually a place for and even a love of old-school IF in that community. That’s pretty relevant in a thread titled ‘IF is dead’ wouldn’t you say?
I too was guilty of it earlier, but let’s agree from here forward not to talk GamerGate. Explaining why would only fuel the discussion, but if curious for my reasoning, please PM me. There are reasons.
Yes agreed.
I resisted the temptation to de-lurk earlier, and I’m glad, because other people have said what I wanted to say far more eloquently than I would have.
I can’t resist making one comment, though. In general I find policing the boundaries of what is or isn’t art, or what is or isn’t a particular genre of art, fairly tedious. But in this case it feels to me even sillier than usual, because the boundary here, relative to other arguments of this type, is so thin and mist-like. It’s the narcissism of small differences.
You can draw boxes around “clicking a hyperlink” vs. “typing words into a parser” but the act is still reading text, touching one or more fingers on a set of input rectangles in a certain order to communicate some kind of intention back to the game world, in text, which responds with more text. The aesthetics are different, the space of possibility is different, but those differences are mostly a result of convention, or of the technical choices and limitations of a platform.
I’m not wild about the film metaphor because in live-action vs. animation, you’re always going to have the distinct physical acts of pointing an optical camera at real people vs. drawing lines or geometry, whether by hand or mouse. Even with that hard distinction, though, motion capture hybridizes techniques across the boundary. “Parser” versus “choice” has even less of a hard distinction, and future technology is going to hybridize the two in even more confusing ways.
Future IF environments may contain a mix of elements that folks today would consider oh, absolutely, definitively parser, or definitively choice. And then we can argue about whether a given system is “real” parser or “real” choice. Won’t that be fun?
I’m still lost as to whom may ever have expressed what platform is to be considered art or to whom may ever have told anybody to use a specific format. Can’t find the posts, can some body point me to those?
While, on the opposite, I rekon having seen, many, demanding certain contents to be put in works or others to be Avoided.
Ah! And while we are at it: looks like in other spaces (namely on Twitter) people are arguing around how bad it is that a certain person is posting here. Not bad for an “all inclusive forum”, uh?
This is a clusterfuck and it’s growing increasingly tiresome and disheartening.
Normally I hate this line of argument, but I think it’s fair given the cries of IF IS DEAD: If you don’t like that there are too few parser games and/or parser stories out there, then write one. Make it good. (Make it like Make It Good, if you want. That would be one way of going about the matter.) Make it big and ambitious and terrifyingly well-written. Make it polished and well-designed. (Find a collaborator, if you want.) Make it longer than two hours if you want, considering in half a year there’s a competition expressly designed for that. Make it good enough that it inspires five more like it, and then those five might in turn inspire more, everything building upon the last. That’s how the comp took off in the first place, and the only thing preventing it from maybe happening again is you, YES, YOU.
(and me. back to work.)
I interpreted certain lines of argument that way on both sides, as when people want to remove one from a comp or when people predict that one medium is dying, I feel it is a way of telling people not to use it. I can accept that I may have overstated that and sorry about that.
Let me take a wild guess. 87