Thanks for this detailed explanation. I understand the situation a bit better now.
Linear gameplay is not wholly unusual in games (there’s a lot of railroady IF, and most commercial games fall into the same category). Still, this is one of the least gamelike IF systems that I’ve heard of.
The lack of player volition doesn’t sound appealing to me as a player or author, but I wish you luck in finding your Wilbur. And (because I love seeing new IF projects succeed!) I hope you find an author who writes something amazing enough to change my mind.
Interface-wise, we’re harking back to the genre’s text-adventure roots; content-wise we’re focusing strongly on the “fiction” branch of the Interactive Fiction tree.
From your lips (er, keyboard) to God’s ears (iPad).
Still no nibbles. Remarkable. But before I file this project under “cancelled for lack of interest”, I think I should make one more pitch extolling the virtues of Conversational Storytelling.
As I understand it, text adventures were big in the glory days of Infocom because they were (a) something new and different, and (b) done in the best way possible at the time. Text-based games on text-based computers – a marriage made in heaven! But when (a) the novelty wore off, and (b) better ways of doing essentially the same thing became technically possible, text adventures became – relatively speaking – obsolete. Why? Because a picture really is worth a thousand words, in many cases; and because it’s very often significantly easier to point and click rather than type and type and type. Aficionados may not comprehend these things, but the ordinary folks in the marketplace do. And it’s just plain hard to sell slide rules to people with pocket calculators.
But if there was something that a slide rule could do better than a calculator, we just might find a revived market for slide rules. And so, when we ask the pertinent question – Is there something we can do with a text-only interface that can’t be done (or done as well) with a graphic one? – my answer, as you all know, is a resounding “Yes!” We can realistically simulate the same kind of pithy, text-based “conversational stories” that billions of people share with each other all day, every day, “texting” one another on their phones. It’s a very small and restricted subset of Interactive Fiction, no doubt. But it just might be the one tiny slice where the interactive in Interactive Fiction actually (and naturally) works for “the rest of us”.
Again, your latest “pitch” makes it clearer and clearer we are not the people you should really be pitching to - we are the “aficionados”; the novelty for us hasn’t worn off. You want to emulate realities, something deep and complicated. Some of us, while still enjoying complexities like Make It Good or Galatea or Blue Lacuna or Varicella (four very different types of complexity), are not in it because of the complete and utter and brilliant interactivity which is closer to real life - if so, we would all be making Facade, or using Chris Crawford’s engine.
You are very enthusiastically taking the concept of IF and doing something else entirely with it, going in a new direction which is alien to me as an IFer (though I can’t, and won’t, talk for other people). As people who’ve seen many such ideas fail - your parser, and how it pretends to understand more than it does, springs to mind - we are wary. On top of that, you ask for a commitment to follow your dream, in a community where everyone already has their own dream and it’s more ALONG the lines of normal IF than AGAINST it.
I really do believe you’d have more luck pitching this at non-IFers; in fact, your latest pitch makes that even more evident. Try at writers’ forums.
Also, I think you’ve misdiagnosed the problem with the commercial viability of IF. You say people like pictures, and they like clicking on things; this is probably true. I just don’t see how you get from there to “And the problem with traditional IF is that people can’t situate themselves in relation to the player character! Let’s turn the prompts into text messages!” People are pretty good at suspending disbelief. If they find typing in text commands absorbing, then they aren’t going to worry about the exact status of the words they’re typing in in-universe. It’s the same kind of cooperation with the work that leads them not to try to break it with crazy commands.
This is leaving aside the fact that if you really want to simulate text messages your parser will probably need to understand “a/s/l,” “wat can u see,” “lol,” “ oh no” and a few other things as responses to the first prompt.
Anyway, I’m kind of disappointed that you seem so ready to drop the ball and go home when you can’t get a collaborator on an extremely ambitious project after cold-calling a forum. It seems kind of… unserious. Especially when your ideas and ambitions do seem interesting; is it that unappealing to you to write up a short project? You’ve already given us a transcript of one.
(Oh, another project that sounds like what you’re working on is British Intelligence Officers Exam, which has both the “communicating to an agent” pretense and a free-text parser, or at least one that’s not traditional IF. It seems as though you can e-mail the developers for a playable link.)
I may yet do that; but do you really speak for everyone on this forum? Surely there’s a little variety of opinion among the 800-some who have perused this thread?
I’m looking for an author here – not a user; I think the user problem will solve itself. And I’m hoping for someone familiar with the traditional genre so we can immediately speak, in depth, of the significant (and significantly different) characteristics of this subset of the whole. I’m not really interested in persuading a neophyte who might be easily led to believe things that I believe (but that , in the end, aren’t quite the whole story). “Iron sharpens iron; so a man sharpens the countenance of his friend,” Proverbs 27:17. I need a friend with a “right Jerusalem blade” against which to test my own.
I get from the one to the other in two ways. First, by not attempting to do things that are better done with pictures and pointing. And secondly, by eliminating the need for any kind of “orientation” to the genre – the user simply responds as he would to any other text message. No instructions necessary.
I agree. But the less “suspension of disbelief” that’s necessary, the better. And when the commands typed are exclusively of the the kind that can’t be better expressed with pictures and clicks, the typing of them will be more absorbing (and less onerous) than ever.
Exactly. The prototype already handles such things.
I’m testing the waters here. The success of the project depends not just on finding users, but authors. And it’s the authors, I think, that are the challenge. (After all, it takes work to produce compelling and consistent works of Conversational Storytelling; it’s nothing but fun using them.) And we’re going to need lots of authors to fill up our library, especially considering that the users will typically consume these stories in just an hour or two. So if I can’t, on a major forum like this, find a single Interactive Fiction buff who wants to give the thing a whirl, where will I ever find those many others?
I really don’t like working alone – it tends to result in products that I (and I alone) think marvelous.
Yes. And again, I’m surprised that not a single soul here is interested in fleshing that out. Or trying something similar. Or something altogether different. It’s not very encouraging.
Yes, that’s very close to what I’m describing – the conversational setting, the free-format commands, the ethical dilemma at the end.
What’s different, I think, for the user, is that they dragged too much of traditional gameplay along: too many “rooms”, too many puzzles, too much action: not enough character development. It is intended that Conversational Stories have a theme, not just a plot. If I may speak metaphorically, I picture Conversational Storytelling as a reflective device: the user, in the course of persuading the main character to adopt this or that position (in the story world), ends up re-examining and clarifying his own beliefs (in real life).
What’s different for the author is that our development environment is designed specifically and only for this kind of storytelling, which greatly increases the efficiency with which the experienced author can produce compelling stories, and significantly the minimizes the learning curve for new authors.
Well, I’d say that you’ll find those others by showing them something that works and has potential and that they might be able to adapt for their own purposes. It should be much easier to attract collaborators once you’ve got a prototype up and running. Don’t tell us how your project works; show us. It’d have been a lot cooler if I’d fired up your project, typed “a/s/l,” and wow! It worked!
Well, you didn’t say “Anyone want to flesh out this transcript?” You asked for someone to jump into a full-length collaboration. And I don’t think you should be discouraged about this project by the lack of response. You should be discouraged about your way of finding collaborators. That’s what I think isn’t working. You haven’t been getting a hostile reception here the way you have some other places – I’d describe it as polite but skeptical, I hope – but still, I think you’re finding that it’s hard to attract someone to use your system without a way of showing its capabilities.
I mean, I’m not a marketing consultant, and you seem like you have a definite idea of how to proceed, but I think that you can tell that what you’re doing right now isn’t accomplishing your goals.
I do have enough of a prototype, running on Windows, to demonstrate the look, feel, and feasibility of the thing. And I’m more than willing to share that with anyone who is interested enough to write me directly and inquire further (gerry.rzeppa@pobox.com).
Actually, I thought I was simply asking for interested parties to inquire further: baby steps, no leaps and bounds. After all, how hard is it for someone to say, via email, “Sounds like something I might be interested in. Tell me more.”
I’m sure it isn’t working; I’m not so sure about why.
Agreed. Nothing hostile here at all. In fact, these exchanges have helped considerably in focusing my ideas on the subject. I thank you all.
As I mentioned above, anyone with Windows (or a way of emulating Windows) can study my not-ready-for-prime-time prototype simply by asking for a copy.
Again, agreed. What worries me is that I never thought it would be so difficult to accomplish those goals, at least not the initial one (have someone write for further information and discussion). Makes me think the Interactive Fiction community is much smaller (or maybe just way different) than I pictured it.
Why not put up your prototype for easy download? If we have to go to the trouble of asking directly then your pitch better make it sound pretty special, and personally I’m not hearing anything innovative.
EDIT - Rewritten to remove some hostility (not your fault, I was just in a rotten mood when I wrote this).
I should hope there is. I’m only speaking for myself - indeed, I thought that was obvious. I even said, earlier in my post, “(though I can’t, and won’t, talk for other people)”, in another context.
But my personal opinion - and I can’t speak without being based on my personal opinion and subjective view - is that you might have better luck elsewhere, for the reasons I stated. Also, the more you talk, the farther away you seem to go from what we know as IF. Look, that’s fine, and super, and innovative, and I really mean what I’m saying - but it’s not what most of us are really drawn to. We might also LIKE it, and we might be interested in it after we see it work, but I think you’d probably find writers are more excited about it. And readers of “Visual Novels” and such.
Because the prototype (development environment and sample story) are, at this stage, in pieces – and that’s intentionally so. There are a lot of design decisions yet to be discussed and finalized before the thing is anything like a turn-key product, and I don’t want anything “set in stone” prematurely – I want the author to be part of as much of the design process as the programmer. Which means that the author I’m looking for has to be willing and able to tour a rather messy construction site with me, as it were, seeing potential where a more cursory viewer might simply get the wrong idea. Besides, being under development, the thing changes every day; if I posted a link today I’d find myself responding three days hence (to the merely curious) with things like, “Yeah, I know. I fixed that yesterday” or “I doesn’t look like that anymore”. Waste of time.
I’m not quite sure what you mean by “trouble”. All you have to do is click here (gerry.rzeppa@pobox.com) and say, “Tell me more.” Is that really so difficult? Apparently it is (though I don’t know why). But that’s okay; it serves me well as a preliminary “interest-level screening” of potential applicants for the position.
If it doesn’t sound “pretty special” to you at this point, and if you don’t see anything “innovative” at this point in this thread, then you’re clearly not the author I’m looking for. I’m looking for someone more like this guy, who replied to me earlier:
I’m pretty sure he’d be able to get over the “write me directly” hump…
Oh bugger, you’re already reading and responding. Let me reword my previous post, because I just came back to edit it as I was in a rotten mood when I wrote it.
Its worth noting the now 900-odd views are thread hits, not unique users. I’m probably about 25 of them myself, and I expect Gerry accounts for many more. If he thought nearly a thousand people had read the thread without a nibble, I could understand his despondence.
For me, if I write you, that makes me feel like I’m establishing a bit of a connection/commitment, and then I feel like a jerk when I don’t do anything with it (as is about 95% likely). Whereas if there’s just a prototype I can download I can do that without feeling like I’m setting myself up for anything – and then, who knows, I might get intrigued. But putting up barriers to entry early is a big deal. It makes sense if you’re trying to screen applicants for a position, but if you’re trying to hook potential authors it doesn’t.
And that’s why I don’t think you should make the jump from “No one has contacted me yet” to “No one will use the system if I get it working.” Right now you’re deliberately making it somewhat inaccessible. If you make it more accessible you might attract more interest, and interest will as it were compound as more people encounter more things that use it and get interested in it. But you have to start from more than zero.
(There’s also a “handing out my e-mail address” issue, though in my case you can get it if you really want. And this is all theoretical for me, because I don’t want to install a Windows emulator, but it’s the thought process I’d go through if there were a Mac port.)
Acknowledging the issues with putting up a prototype that you’ve mentioned (a lot of posts went up on the thread after I started typing), that’s why I think having something in public would help.
I understand that; in fact, it’s exactly that “bit of a connection/commitment” I’m looking for. Kind of like face-to-face “speed dating” versus someone just reading profiles on a dating sight. But there’s never any hard feelings when it doesn’t work out – better for both parties to find out as soon as possible.
And the screening stage is exactly the stage I’m in now. But once the thing is ready for prime time, all the barriers for potential authors and users will be removed. (Though removing the operating system barrier for authors may take a little longer than removing it for users.)
Believe it or not, I agree. But surely, if the idea is as good as I think it is, it shouldn’t be so hard to get just one author to write and say, “Okay, maybe you’ve got something there. Seems pretty straightforward. And people do seem to find texting pretty addictive these days. Show me more.”
As I mentioned in a previous post, the thing is in no shape for public release; it’s a messy (but impressive) construction site.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. And besides, if all I wanted was email addresses, don’t you think I could find an easier way to get them than this?
Wish I could see my way clear to obliging. But I just can’t shake the thought that there’s enough information right here in this thread to entice the kind of person I’m looking for to contact me directly. Goodness! I’ve responded to Craigslist ads with way less to go on…
oh no” and a few other things as responses to the first prompt.
Well, sorry about that, I was out of line. I edited my post already.