Just download VLC, and you have something that can play practically anything. Or download Gargoyle and you don’t have to worry about what a .gblorb is - just play it.
But in order for it to be that simple, people have to both know about and want to use the one-in-all solution. Otherwise people will just say “I clicked on your link, and it didn’t work”. That’s a reply I’ve received after uploading some music files in m4a format and told my colleagues.
Yes, this analogy is useful. I was going to say the same thing about foobar2000 for Windows users: an elegant, simple, low-weight media player that’ll handle just about any file type and has extensive community support. That’s our Gargoyle.
I’m a bit worried by this idea that increased use of mobile devices is reducing accessibility to glulx. I love the extra space and functionality that format affords, and it’s a shame it’s not currently as widely supported. I assume people are working on this? Not that I’m in any position to make criticism. I, like Neo, also want a pony. With ribbons.
I basically use Gargoyle to play everything I can, but I agree that, in the days to come, all the Parchments and Quixes of this world should be the attention receivers. At the moment they lack in very simple things, like the aesthetics and the possibility to save the game. Gargoyle is still a most elegant, beautiful way to play IF. But I believe that will come with time.
On the other hand, one thing I believe will putt off new readers mostly concerns author choices. I was trying to play The Rover’s Day Out using Quixe, and, right after the first lines, the game just sits there, waiting for any key, nothing happening. I pressed one (it was the E key, by the way) because I’m already familiar with the mechanics of IF, but a new player will only see a website with some text, nothing to click on, and not a single instruction.
IF played inside a webpage enhances this “What the hell should I be doing now?” effect, because someone who just fell on that link will not expect that a text-based website will respond to pressing any key.
I was thinking that Parchment (and Quixe) should have a notification like “Waiting for a key press” when it’s waiting for key input, with the option that it could be dismissed and so it wouldn’t be shown again.
Hey, that looks cool. Hadn’t heard of it before – and for some reason it never comes up when I do a search on “playing ogg vorbis on OS X” or something like that.
Well, that already works for me with Zoom (and maybe Spatterlight?); which is part of the reason I haven’t learned. But Gargoyle does look more flexible than my current interpreters – I’m using Zoom partly because Emily Short said it was recommended for Alabaster, don’t know how Gargoyle performs there. Still, the web page illustrates part of the problem:
There are many interpreters that have been Glk-enabled. All of the following interpreters have been compiled for Gargoyle and are included in the package: Agility, Alan 2 and 3, Frotz (glk port), Glulxe, Hugo, Level 9, Magnetic, Scare, Tads 2 and 3.
This is not entirely clear to the newbie. I know that Tads, Alan, and Hugo work for games written in their respective languages, and that Glulxe is for glulx files, and presumably Frotz does z-code; and I know (because I found it out when I was looking for something to play ADRIFT games) that Scare plays ADRIFT – but I basically have no idea what the rest do. And even then, you may have some problems with certain kinds of game in certain interpreters, as with Cryptozookeeper. (If Emily can’t figure out how to get it running, it’s not noob-friendly.)
All of which is a long-winded way of agreeing with this:
If we’re thinking about how to get people to play, messing about with interpreters is less convenient than browser play even for some relatively experienced folks, and definitely for new players.
Quixe’s save possibility is working – I was able to save and restore my games of Under, in Erebus. And doesn’t Parchment allow you to save a game to an URL? This is most convenient if you want to keep one save state going while you’re playing, because you can revert just by hitting “refresh”; otherwise I think it recommends bookmarking the URL.
Didn’t know that! I mostly use Gargoyle, and I knew Parchment wasn’t able to save the progress a while ago. That is great for both terps!
I run OSX, and I use Spatterlight. So I also barely notice what format games are in. The only trouble I’ve ever had was with Cryptozookeeper (which was a pity, because the bits I read were awesome, but dark grey text on the same color background is only sustainable so long), and I hadn’t even checked its extension before trying to run it.
The first game I played during this year’s Comp was Rogue of the Multiverse, and I was not disappointed. (Thanks, Pacian! It hit exactly my niche of caring about writing and liking a good comedy but being rubbish at solving puzzles.)
For me, playing the games online feels like I’m only listening to online music without having a local song collection.
I will never get used to playing text adventures online. If I don’t have an interpreter, I get the feeling that something vital is missing. I want the games on my hard disk, as well as my save games, to organize everything as I see fit. And I don’t want to depend on whether my Internet connection is acting up.
In general I avoid the browser like the plague. I hate browsers. I use email through email clients, never through webmail. I use Usenet through newsreaders, never through web interfaces. I listen to music using my media player, never through stuff like grooveshark. And so on.
The browser is great for demo purposes though. But new players are likely to stick with it without ever experiencing the advantages of interpreters.
RealNC: My thoughts exactly.
Whereas for me, the music I really like, and listen to over and over, is on my computer (or more likely on CD or LP), but stuff I just want to listen to maybe once to see what it sounds like, I’m happy if I can stream it through a browser so it isn’t sitting on my hard drive and playlist. It’s cool to hear an operatic soprano yodel-rapping about reading Wittgenstein on the prairie with oom-pah tuba backing, but do I want it around forever?
And there’s no IF that I play as often as I listen to the music I like best. So that just makes me want to download it less. (Maybe Galatea, but I’ve never downloaded that; been playing that on ZPlet basically since the week I rediscovered IF, and if I hadn’t been able to play it and a few others online I probably wouldn’t be playing IF at all.)
As I said, this is a matter of idiosyncratic preference, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person who plays in-browser where practical.
Any activity that I do regularly enough to justify using a desktop application for, I almost always choose to use the desktop app rather than to do it in a browser. It’s just superior. However, I’m damn glad that the web exists anyway. As important as it is to have an open and easily accessible web despite the fact that every computer system has its own applications; that’s how important it is to be able to pick up and play IF in a browser despite the fact that every platform has its own interpreter(s), So stuff like Parchment and Quixe will turn out to be exactly as important to disseminating IF as the web is to disseminating tech news, which means it will turn out to be all-important. That still doesn’t mean that I’m going to choose to play in a browser if I have other options for experiencing a particular work of art. But I don’t see my personal choices as very relevant here.
I also would love to see a lot more experimentation with things the web can do that are a lot more difficult and cumbersome to achiev in a native app — like for example interoperating and exchanging data with other embeddable protocols like Flash, HTML5, and general AJAX programming. The web sports the greatest modular collection of interoperable media technologies the world’s ever known. The real sweetness will come the more these technologies are combined and hybridised. Right now IF is still too much like a LEGO brick without very many pips, in that regard. (I’m talking about its place in the interoperable ecosystem here — I am not talking about any internal features or drawbacks of the programming languages involved.)
I want to see stunning things, visions of things I never would have thought of doing with an IF window. It’s the web interpreters that will make those things the most possible.
It’s weird how I can hate using web apps and love them at the same time like that, but I do — it’s complicated. It all has to do with choosing the best tool for the job. What is the job? That depends entirely on the individual author and individual work of art. Playing Zork or Spider and Web in a web browser would drive me a little nuts with all the unnecessary inefficiency of the experience. Playing a different vision of IF in a web browser, on the other hand, a vision that could only be easily achieved in a web browser, because other web technologies are being leveraged — that would make me giddy with excitement to see that crossover potential, fulfilled.
Paul.
This is getting back to outreach stuff, rather than the question of why on earth an experienced player like me still plays in browsers, but I was looking back at the JayIsGames threads that really reintroduced me to IF, and I think they’re instructive.
First, this thread on zarf, where a bunch of games by Emily Short and Adam Cadre and others are mentioned in comments. All zarf’s games were playable in Zplet, and there was a link to an online-playable version of Galatea; the links to Adam’s and Emily’s pages have rotted, but I think there were a bunch of online-playable games there too. (As an aside, Spider and Web wasn’t a great choice for my third IF game. This is not a comment on Spider and Web.)
A few months later you have this thread about Floatpoint. About 90% of the comments are about how to get it to run.
Then in 2008 there’s this download thread about IF, with Galatea, Delightful Wallpaper, The Elysium Enigma (TADS), and Tales of the Traveling Swordsman (HUGO). Note the commenter who says “I think Galatea is awesome. I’ve been hoping to try an IF that didn’t require a download, and this one really intrigues me. I may have to try downloading some more IF games”; she actually wound up reviewing IFComp 2010 on JiG.
This doesn’t really prove that online play is super-important and that file formats confuse people, but I’m willing to marshal it in support of my preexisting prejudices. [emote];)[/emote]
Also, when JayIsGames featured Dead Like Ants, we see the comment:
I’d give them permission, if their online interpreter could play TADS games. T_T
I don’t think anyone can seriously dispute that clicking a link is simpler than downloading a file, installing an interpreter and running the former with the latter. At the very least, it’s quicker, and I often play IF games online because I just want to sample the opening. On the other hand, there are plenty of people who are happy to download games, or who prefer to.
(I usually always release a Windows executable version of my games along with the game file, which is one of the many things I did differently for IFComp - I expect IFComp players to either understand about interpreters, or to have found the comp by a link that explains them.)
One of my goals with porting Gargoyle to the Mac was to release a multi-format interpreter that would work on all three platforms, which could be recommended to new players without needing to consider what platform they used.
Speaking as someone who only arrived on the IF scene three years ago, I remember floundering for a while trying to find a program that would play IF. I used ZMPP for quite a while until a thread on raif directed me toward Gargoyle. (Ironically, the poster was lamenting the unmaintained state of the project.)
Despite Gargoyle’s popularity it is unusual to find it mentioned by any of the IF authoring projects. I don’t believe it appears anywhere on the Inform or TADS sites. I can understand why this might be; Gargoyle’s “lowest common denominator” approach means that it rarely shows off the strengths of a given format. Creators are understandably reluctant to promote a sub-optimal experience for their work.
At the same time, there’s a network effect for creators as more potential players have Gargoyle installed. Treating every format as a story file to be played gives people confidence that technical barriers will not prevent them from getting the game to start, and makes them more willing to try a game as a consequence. It also promotes a form of IF literacy; most if not all talented IF authors are conversant with games from a broad spectrum of formats, and encouraging the audience to play them can only mean an enriched appreciation of the author’s own contributions.
I cannot deny the importance and appeal of web-based IF, but at the moment that progress threatens to reignite the format wars of the last decade, when the most salient characteristic of a game was whether or not it could run in your Z-Machine interpreter. The results of that are still with us today, in the form of voter preferences during IF Comp, and it seems we are destined to indoctrinate a new generation of players along similar lines.
Same commenter, it turns out. (The one who wound up reviewing IFComp 2010 for the site.)
Yep. I’d need to adjust my browser settings and reconfigure my proxy to “play games online” (which is nonsense anyway, considering a Javascript based interpreter’s first step will be to download the respective game anyway). All that just to get an inferior experience - less stable, not conforming to my favourite colour settings, shaky save function etc. Not to mention the steep technical requirements (Internet connection, a ‘graphical’ environment,…). Personally, I see zero advantages over saving a story file locally and simply running it.
No, there are a tiny number of people who are happy to download IF games.
This thread is full of people in that tiny minority, but that does not prove me wrong. 
Let me correct that for you:
It seems to me that players who take the step of downloading a story file are more likely to engage with it than players who will only play via a hyperlink. The latter may be more likely to make it to the first prompt, but if they are significantly more likely to abandon it at that point, the gain in raw audience numbers may be blunted by a disproportionate lack of commitment across the set of players.
Proving this contention is going to be difficult until some means of automated transcript submission gets picked up. But if we accept your claim at face value and agree that web-only players are fully as desirable, why are you developing Hadean Lands as a downloadable application instead of gated but otherwise more broadly accessible web app?
It seems like your reasons for doing so boil down to your ability to offer a higher quality experience than you otherwise could. I agree with the commercial wisdom of this choice. I just don’t think that the tiny number of people happy to download IF games at the moment has any bearing on the willingness of potential players to download (and pay for) IF, or in any way demonstrates the inherent superiority of the web as the medium of presentation. It seems like you would have gone in a different direction if you truly believed that it did.
Also, I take issue with the “tiny” label. Gargoyle’s last release had over 12,000 downloads - double counting some folks, to be sure, but also omitting anyone who installed the Debian packages. In the last 45 days, with a single announcement on raif mired in negative feedback, the new release has been downloaded 1800 times.
These are not huge numbers on the scale of global populations, or indeed more than a footnote on Activision’s balance sheet, but they also represent only a fraction of the overall market in IF interpreters: the players passionate enough to download a dedicated interpreter and willing to use Gargoyle for this purpose. I doubt this amounts to more than 25% market share, all told, which gives us around 50,000 interested players. This is a couple orders of magnitude above the pessimistic estimates I routinely encounter. (The first approximation of community size I saw was in an article that suggested there were a few dozen authors and a few hundred players in the field.)
I would say “small” instead, and suggest that a small, devoted community can be far more valuable than a large but indifferent one. After all, fewer than 600 such people were enough to put your Kickstarter project well over the top. 50,000 players spending $5 on a game would put that title within striking distance of Braid in terms of sales figures. At some point it stops making sense to underestimate the value of the players we already have.