Hi.
I wrote a couple AIF games 10-15 years ago and am wondering if anyone can tell me whether there is still an AIF Community as the links to the groups I used to frequent seem defunct.
Thanks
Lou
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The AIF community has always stayed a bit separate from this forum, thanks to the rules about explicit posts (they have to be properly flagged and hidden or separated by a link, which makes it very hard to ask questions like “how do I properly implement a REDACTED action on REDACTED in Inform”). I think the intent was that we would keep links to external AIF discussions around so that people could find those other communities, but unfortunately that hasn’t really happened.
Which is to say, I unfortunately don’t know, but hopefully someone else here does.
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/me whirls in from the darkness with that seldom-used cape and a toss of confetti…
Hi @LucillaFrost ! Your name rings a bell from the AIF community, so welcome!
I also have written AIF and some quasi-erotic games that have crossed over to somewhat mainstream that have been (to my relief) surprisingly well-received in the community and IFComp.
Everyone is welcome here. We’re an all-ages forum and do a lot of shop-talk, so if you’re discussing adult mechanics or prose, just make sure that you’re providing a content warning in the title or early in the message body or tags, and any specific detail can be [spoiler]spoiler blurred like this[/spoiler] or folded behind a details tag from the gear menu when composing.
A lot of people will also post “pseudocode” when asking questions - essentially to preserve plot details and mechanics so that’s also an option.
There are (likely?) others here who also have special capes such as for erotica but just don’t get the opportunity to wear them much, so we’re glad to have you!
All the special caveats that some common and specific niches and tropes of erotic fiction and porn can prove sensitive or troubling to some people apply. Just keep public discussion polite.
And as always, anyone is welcome to private message me with questions about what is appropriate for discussion, or if you need to discuss plot elements that are too risqué for public posts. We can always set up group private messages for special interests.
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Thank you for the welcome and advice. One day i’m going to write another full game but it is not this day. I’ve got a technical question or two which I’ll ask in the TADS folder.
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That’s what we do here!
As far as “Has the AIF community regrouped elsewhere”… I think the pure-text AIF these days is kind of a non-starter what with technology advancing and visual pronoguraphy so easy to acquire and venues to create adult art mostly accessible to the public. There are still fans of “parser porn”, but it’s a niche of a niche. My adult games are my highest viewed on itch, mainly due to tagging them well so they show up in search.
For I while I was on a private discord with adult game makers (think adult VNs and apps like HuniePop) and while it was fascinating and professional (I totally followed an extensive conversation that was a tutorial about rigging 3D models for animating male and female genitalia and how they…erm…interacted) it was way above my aspirations. There are still people doing pure text “harem simulators” in Twine, and quite a few adult stories that are illustrated with DAZ3D to varying realism and success. A lot of the talented hobbyists are singularly or on teams accomplishing elaborate adult games like “Coming Out on Top” “Robin Morningwood” “Ladykiller in a Bind” that sell for real money.
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Mha. As noted elsewhere, the core issue is that the border between the IF and AIF is very different between the two sides of the Atlantic, as one can easily figure from, for example, the different perception of exposure between sides.
In EU, love and sex are recognised as the two faces of the same coin, nothing strange in this; actually, rather explicit scenes of interaction between lovers is common in EU mainstream media, and not as fanservice, but as part and parcel of the narration and character building, trust me. and one of my major WIP follow this Old World perspective, in a rather unusual setting.
This to say, if the adult side of media and arts is marginalised, media and arts aren’t capable to deliver their full potential.
On the obverse, porn is about sex without love, an incomplete, false coin.
This to say, nay, suggest to find a valid mean of discussing AIF here, with in mind the concepts above, perhaps a VM18 subforum ? (I think that many people here don’t even need much proof of age, my very first post in rec.arts.int-fiction is of 2002 vintage, more than 18 years ago…)
So, I think isn’t a bad idea having a VM18 forum for discussing AIF in the fold of the general IF community.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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Speaking personally (so this is not the official stance of the moderation crew), I would be fine with that; we cover every other genre of interactive fiction here, after all, and it seems like a detriment that there are two completely separate places where people have to go for Inform (or TADS or Twine or…) help. There were some very odd and very circumspect conversations when an AIF game exposed a bug in the Inform 7 compiler as we tried to talk about the technical details without touching on what the game actually was.
The question is, can we restrict a forum so that it doesn’t (e.g.) show up by default on the “newest” page unless people have opted in? Because we do have minors here (I joined well before I turned 18) and also don’t want to drive them away.
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Yes, it would be very easy to create a forum that only displays to members of an opt-in group. Sometimes it’s difficult to know since as Mods we have visibility to everything by default, but I’m pretty sure messages do not appear in Latest or “Top” lists that you are not privy to. I’d imagine people not in the IFComp author groups aren’t notified of those posts, and regular members don’t see notifications for the private Staff forum.
I do know occasionally the forum has glitched on rare occasion and shown a message header to a person who then clicked on it and then got “oops! we can’t find that content” because they don’t have privileges to see it, but as far as I know that’s rare.
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Secret illuminati restaurateur cult business! Veeder tried to warn us!!
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How about just having users tag topics with “Adult” if there’s any adult content in it? Then people can avoid those topics. I don’t know how the forum works, but the first time you click on an adult-labelled topic, perhaps it could ask if you want to opt in, and if you did so, you’d never see a warning, otherwise you would get a warning.
Honestly, if people don’t like it, they can ignore it as long as it’s well-signposted.
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question for moderators: it’s possible that a topic can be hidden-if-not-opt-in on a tag/label basis ?
as alternative to having a separate forum isn’t precisely the best, but can solve the inform 7 AIF game bug debating issue Daniel noted (after all, I suspect that teens of today are less inclined to lend an hand in toiling around a bug, but this perhaps is a sign that I’m now in the “old grumbler” class…)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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