Interviewing past IFComp/Spring Thing winners about their games (process, influences) and what advice they could give future participants
A History of the Spring Thing, similar to what Brian has been doing for the IFComp, but for the SpringThing, highlighting important games and community behaviour (like the change of rules)
How different reviewers review games (maybe a tableround interview or something) - I feel like this has been mentioned before but I can’t remember what/when/by whom…
Some deep dive into obscure IF games from like… the 70s?
Yeah, @DeusIraeasked for favorite reviewers a while back: my recollection is that he found reviewers who agreed to talk to him but hasn’t found time to schedule interviews yet, let alone start writing the article.
Not to derail this thread (didn’t Hanon say there was now a way to make a reply as a new thread? I don’t see it) but have you tried Allison Parrish’s Inform 7 Concepts and Strategies? It’s almost exactly this.
Yup, I pitched the article idea, and you kindly agreed to be one of the panelists Sorry, I know it’s been a long time! It’s first on my list after Spring Thing (well, and the bad IF jam).
I’m planning to write this! (Well, maybe not quite this broad in scope, but definitely covering some of this part of IF history.) I haven’t officially pitched it to the Rosebush yet, but I definitely plan to.
Mathbrush has already done it, you can see it here.
As for what articles I would want to see show up at some point, how about the challenges IF faces for the new generation and what is being done to mitigate them- one of them, as someone else mentioned, is trying to make IF accessible- this does not mean just ‘easy to play’- to newcomers, and opening up to a broader range of IF authors. We have devoted a significant a mount of space to discussing IF theory, why not this?
I’d like to hear from them and find out about their style. Mathbrush has a series of IF author insights- no interviews though- about different authors who have ‘a significant body of work in their arsenal’. Adam Cadre, Chandler Groover, Ryan Veeder et al have been featured. There have been 50+ authors planned on that list, and there may be more down the road.
This one could be a thing- but there need to have enough reviewers first. There is no problem finding them, some may be authors (Mike Russo/Tabitha/Kastel), some are more active in the review departement only (JJMCC, wolfbiter), and maybe myself, but that’s something else for now.
Ooh, yeah! That has my vote. Just need someone knowledgeable to write it.
Other web sites such as Jimmy Maher’s The Digital Antiqurian and Jason Dyer’s Renga in Blue do a good job of this, together with other scattered blogs.
It’d be nice if you’d make it clearer that you’re joking? I think a fair number of us know enough to see that this is nonsensical fooling around, but with the straight-faced tone, some people could be misled by this…
Maybe a look into new IF/IF-adjacent programs, like Decker or Bitsy (I know that one has been out for a while now, but it’s “new” for IntFiction).
One thing that I like about Fiction-interactive.fr is that we have those like “first-look”/talk about the bases of unconventional programs.
I think it would be interesting to take a (maybe critical) look at projects like the Text-Adventure Literacy Project, and talk about how/why it was started, what came out of it, whether it had influence on IF (like the inclusion of tutorials/hints/walkthroughs in parsers)… (and why we really should care about this if we want new/younger peeps to make parser/IF)
I don’t know if it’s even feasible, but a craft article about making good NPCs/Characters in game. Or looking at Characters/NPCs that won a XYZZY Awards and why they did (like why people like them).
Speaking of the XYZZY, maybe a History of the XYZZY
Yeah. Or something on decisions about characterization. What kinds of games call for strongly characterized PCs, versus empty PCs intended for the player to see themselves in? Or PCs with traits selected by the player? From occasional bursts of conversation about this, it seems that older players like me dislike creating their own PCs, whereas younger players want that. But I’m gleaning that from a half dozen comments scattered across threads about other things, so that could be wrong.
I’d guess games with any sort of Romance component or where the game tend to track your “emotions” (doing things the stoic way instead of being emotional, intro/extraverted…) would see more “select-traits” PCs than characterised ones, letting players the possibility to insert themselves into the story (You are romancing the NPCs, not the Character in the game).
I’m not sure it’s an older vs newer distinction so much as different communities with different conventions. To radically oversimplify things, I’d say the Choice of Games crowd expects to choose their character’s eye color as a standard feature just as much as the parser players here expect to be able to X ME—it’s just a convention that’s so deeply ingrained that it’s the default, and you don’t break it without a reason.
On which note, actually—it would be fascinating to see a writeup of what the “archetypal” game from some of these communities would look like. What’s the Platonic ideal of an Inform game, a Twine game, a ChoiceScript game? What things are considered the defaults so that any variation from them is taken as a conscious artistic choice?
I could try to describe the archetypal Inform game, but I don’t have nearly enough experience with the others to draw contrasting pictures of them!
I don’t think there is an “archetypal Inform game”. Is there? Perhaps that would be the crux of the article. And if there is an archetypal Inform game, then surely it would have changed over time to reflect what was in vogue at the time.
For example, compare the old Graham Nelson games (before marriage to Emily Short), which are very hard, cruel text adventures reminiscent of the Phoenix mainframe games that came out of Cambridge University. Then compare these to the later narrative-heavy games of Emily Short (after marriage to Graham Nelson) and the obvious influence she had on both Inform and the direction of interactive fiction in general.
As someone who has been on the CoG side and on the parser side, there are some conventions that have since become standard:
For CoG: character customization (gender, hair, eye, romantic orientation)- this one is more pronounced in romance-heavy HC (Heart’s Choice).
For parser: go into a room/area, L, then X whatever you can find- X ME is not strictly necessary, I, TAKE ALL, N/S/E/W into another area, rinse and repeat.
The reason why is that being a member of different communities, with different underlying structures to the authoring systems used, you naturally get different conventions. Moreover, the crowd at CoG and parser is different as well. The former tends to be considerably more laid back and tends to feature a lot of WIPs, with fantasy the most popular genre. The latter tends to be more formal, but has several “factions”: the old-school type who grew up with Colossal Cave Adventure and the like, the late 1990s-early 2000s IF participants (Leon Lin, Emily Short), and those who were introduced to this more recently.
I don’t consider myself as belonging to either side; I pretty much adopt a big-tent approach when it comes to IF: use whatever is most appropriate.
Probably giving some more discussion about my style somewhere else.
It’s sort of both, but the more granular detail is definitely a newer thing. I played a couple of very early Choice of Games games when they were first out in 2012 or so, and then got into them in 2014. Most of them didn’t include very detailed PC personalisation (by which I mean flavour like appearance rather than personality traits that shift based on player choice). I started making Twine games with more defined protagonists, but have been making CoG projects for about eight years now.
When the bestsellers Wayhaven and Fallen Hero: Rebirth came out in 2018, they jumpstarted a number of trends that continue to ripple through that part of the IF community, especially the Hosted Games releases and WIPs. One of them was very granular PC appearance choices, in particular height - I’d never seen height options being available before Wayhaven and then they were everywhere in Hosted Games (less so in Choice of Games and Heart’s Choice, whose authors tend to be less active online), including people asking me to implement it. I notice it being requested a lot, not just from me - in Ink and Intrigue, the detailed hair/eye colour choices were added in response to forum player feedback.
Although it isn’t always something I feel passionate about, and I wince at the way it slows the pace (and try to spread it out/vary how it’s framed/not go so granular that the PC feels like a jigsaw) I’ve increased the amount of appearance customisation I put into my games over time. Partly so I can be more specific and help avoid me writing in assumptions about, for example, a PC being white or thin - which I do feel passionate about - but also in response to audience expectations.
All that said, I do like to balance those expectations with my preferences and leave some things up to the imagination - ironically the more granular it becomes, the more risk there is of leaving something out. I’ve seen huge lists of different shades of brown hair where “brown” would cover all the bases, and it makes my eyes glaze over.
(I also struggle to think of a way that an eye colour choice would feel fun to me, to play or write, even though I’ve been occasionally asked to implement it. I probably won’t unless there’s some kind of magic or plot related reason to do so - somehow it feels less important and visible to me than hair colour and I don’t want to use up a precious choice page on it )
The question of blank vs set vs player-defined protagonists, and the tolerance and expectations around them, is really interesting to me. Some players on the CoG forum are really strict in their definitions! For example, I’ve seen folks suggesting that if a PC has a backstory defined by the author, but the player can define their name, gender, appearance and personality is an example of “a set protagonist”, or close to one, which isn’t what I would think of at all. (This is perhaps my cue to write something up formally and submit it to The Rosebush. If I had some time I’d totally do a deeper dive into when this became more common over time…)
I’ve briefly skimmed the CoG forums at various times over the years and it always feels like a “vocal minority” sort of situation, especially with the (sometimes conflicting sets of?) very strict black-and-white “requirements” that a lot of players there seem to have.
I doubt there’s any way to really tell, but I think it’d be fascinating to see some thought around how those vocal preferences shape the games and how well that lines up with what the larger player base cares about…
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Sorry, I know it’s been a long time! It’s first on my list after Spring Thing (well, and the bad IF jam).