Welcome, distinctive patron of the arts. You, too, are part of the show!
This thread is for audience commentary on the first episode of Season One for Iron ChIF. If you’d like to cheer, crack jokes, make observations or ask questions, please do – that’s what this thread is for! Your questions and comments will be brought to the attention of the episode’s cast.
Keep an eye out for these key dates:
Sun Feb 22 – development period begins
Fri Feb 27 – development period ends, finished games released for play
Sun Mar 01 – judges’ scoring announced, audience voting begins
Tue Mar 03 – audience voting ends, winner declared
As you may remember from the pilot episode, for Iron ChIF your votes will determine which competing chef prevails. The judges’ scoring reflects their combined expert opinion, but it will be used to determine the winner only in the event that the audience vote yields a tie.
Those of you who are official Tasters are encouraged to put on your Taster flair to show support for the chefs who are putting themselves through the wringer for your entertainment and edification. If you’re not yet an official Taster, you can sign up at any time via the group page.
Looking forward to participating in this! It’s nice to have a casual event to follow along with in this slow time of the year without competitions. The two games last year were fun to play and to follow along their creation with.
This makes it sound like raif and rgif were two separate communities, possibly embroiled in some sort of permanent Sharks-vs-Jets type rivalry. Tantalising though that image is, the participants in the two groups were largely the same. raif was the authoring group, largely covering the same topics as the “authoring” and “technical development” categories of this forum, and rgif was the players’ group, covering the “playing” and “competitions” categories.
Yeah, I also feel like people used the acronym ‘r*if’ more than ‘raif’ (or ‘rgif’), simply because you’d want to talk about discussion on ‘the newsgroups’ as a whole. For IFComp, for example, you’d talk about the development of your game (and programming questions you had) on raif, and then the game reviews would come out on rgif.
Fun fact: we actually stole raif (though maybe not rgif? I think?) from its original charter, which was to talk about the development of ‘interactive fiction’ in terms of the nascent web-based interactive fiction, which consisted of stuff like ‘what if I wrote a bunch of vignettes, and let the user read them in a random order?’, or more generally ‘hypertext fiction’. The takeover was before my time, and wasn’t hostile or anything; it was just that people who were writing parser games started chatting on the little-used newsgroup since it seemed apropos, and eventually that became the dominant discussion topic. My vague recollection of that lore is that it happened within a year or so of the newsgroup’s creation.
Yeah, I think the shift was pretty much immediate, from my understanding (I only started lurking in earnest around the turn of the millennium, though, so I’m one further generation removed from you!)
The group rec.arts.int-fiction was founded by Adam Engst, a student at Cornell University, in 1987, with the intention of discussing the then-hot topic of hypertext fiction created with products such as Apple’s recently released Hypercard. Usenet being the un-moderated environment that it is, though, many took the new group’s definition of IF to match Infocom’s rather than Apple’s, and began initiating discussions of text adventures. Engst:
I fought the battles to keep the newsgroup talking about writing for some time, but at the time, there simply weren’t enough people to back me up and slowly I lost interest in posting the same rebukes over and over again as new users appeared and wanted to know how to do X in Zork. I imagine this corresponded with the time that I become more busy with school and work and whatnot. In fact, given when I started the newsgroup and when I graduated, it probably didn’t have very long discussing what I wanted discussed. And people were always more into the game aspects of things.
Thus rec.arts.int-fiction became a central gathering point for text adventure aficionados despite its founder’s best “serious” intentions.
By 1992, the decision had been made to form a second newsgroup, rec.games.int-fiction, in order to separate the discussion of playing games from writing them.
r*if was definitely part of the argot, and I definitely remember it being kinda annoying to try to follow conversations across both groups, because in practice the divisions between writing/tech and playing/reviewing aren’t always super sharp in practice.
I very much enjoyed @lpsmith’s challenge, but now I can’t let it go without combing through it to check how many classic IF references are in there. There’s a couple I immediately recognise:
Triage Mk I references Slouching Towards Bedlam (although it’s Triage Mk III there)
The mason jar containing a battery is from Curses
The useful rock is puzzling me; I thought it was from @lpsmith’s own game The Edifice but I just checked and it looks like the rock there is referred to as “Rock”. Then I wondered if it was For A Change but that rock is referred to as “a smooth stone (humble and true)”
Yeah. I have a dark confession, which is that I normally don’t enjoy communication effected via simulated parser transcript. But this was hilarious, capturing every stupid frustration which can multiply in this medium, multiplied by the air of exaltedness of the imaginary game.
Oh great, ex-judge (me) accidentally posts second post in wrong thread
What I said was, regarding Ryan’s ‘I’ll have to think about it,’ … Look at that sass! Makes me wonder if Ryan’s going to come on like a favoured heel wrestler.
Veeder picked up the gauntlet, smelled it, and shrugged. Let’s hope the pure chutzpah of that move didn’t reduce the challenger to a panicked nailbiting mess huddled on the Stadium floor…
