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Interactive Fiction Competition 2001
Matchstick writes: "In the spirit of last year's article: The seventh annual Interactive Fiction competition is underway. This year there are 52 entries, each a bite-sized two hours long, and you only have to judge at least five for your votes to be counted. Winners from previous years are easily as high-quality as the classic Infocom games, and in many cases surpass them. Judging started October 1 and runs to November 15. The interpreters run on all major platforms (and many minor ones). It's late! Get started!"
my name is omg!
National Novel Writing Month: nanowrimo.com.
Write a novel in November. You have one month. Write 50,000 words. You're not a writer? So? Do it. See what happens. Sure, it'll probably suck, but you don't learn by not doing. (See? If I was a good writer, I wouldn't have just used a double negative.)
And it'll be fun!
how's it going?
I can't seem to find a way past the timber room. I can't take the lamp with me and I get eaten by a grue :(
I think the Chris Crawford (founder of the Video Game Developers conference-a very intellegent man) is the person making the biggest leaps in this genre, and perhaps "video games" in general.
I urge everybody to check out Erasmatazz http://www.erasmatazz.com/ because of its potential. This is pushing interactive fiction to beyond what people expect out of it. Its true interactice fiction rather than north, north, north, get key.
In video games somebody has set a path, if you go off it then nothing really happens. Chris Crawford is basically trying to make a game where instead of going to locations in order to advance the story, the events can come to you as you play. That'd give the gamer true freedom instead of end-level walls and barriors that exist, while at the same time making the game interesting even if (s)he tried to walk off in some random direction.
CowboyNeal was walking into the laboratory,
when suddenly a shot rang out!......
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It's too late to sign up :( Not that it should prevent anyone from writing his novel, but not as a nanowrimo novel.
I don't know about anyone else but I find reading (particularly fiction) to be very tiresome on a desktop computer.
I have played several IF games 6 months ago (I like lovecraftian horror) but would be more likely to continue to do so and move into genres if I owned a laptop or such which I could play them on. I like to snuggle up on the lounge or sit in a park and read not at a desk.
'Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson...'
Crack Cocaine == COMMUNISM
The real thing. Accept no substitute!
can lick my balls.
Sign ups for 2001 are over.
Thanks to everyone who signed on! We expected 500, we got 5000. This is going to be the biggest, best NaNoWriMo ever.
At this point in time, the NaNoWriMo staff are busy planning their third-rate novels. Any emails recieved about sign ups after October 29 will be deleted automatically so as to give the staff more time to realize their own mediocre fiction visions.
Thank you kindly,
The NaNoWriMo Staff
[Emphasis added]
And now some scary poetry...
Lady bugs, Lady bugs,
Crawling on the floor.
Lady bugs, Lady bugs,
Scratching at the door.
Lady bugs, Lady bugs,
Crawling on your ring.
Lady bugs, Lady bugs,
Are a special thing.
I have one I'd like to submit.
Why, that would just about kill a weeks worth of
(BTW, I hope the boss dosn't read this!)
Newt-dog
My Doctor prescribed daily nasal saline irrigation, hehe
I can troll again.
Sweet glory!
Who Refused to Fly
By Arthur Cohen
Originally published on March 21, 1974
The target area is bugged in advance of the raid. At night the electronic sensors make only a slight rustle in the trees as they drop and then begin transmitting immediately upon impact.
Now they reveal the sounds of the jungle night life and the guard pacing back and forth on the gravel path; in the morning they will record the routine sounds of an American B-52 bombing raid.
"I heard about 10 or 15 minutes of those sounds on the tape. We were dropping cluster bombs at the time. I could hear people screaming as the bombs hit."
"After I got home on March 1, I sat watching West Side Story on television. At the end when I saw Tony die, all I could think of was bombing missions. I couldn't talk for half an hour, not even to my wife."
Captain Donald Dawson was out of the Air Force just about a week when I talked with him. Although his tour of duty was scheduled to end in August of 1974, in June of 1973 he refused to fly any more combat missions over Cambodia and requested a discharge, claiming he was a Conscientious Objector. Instead he was confined to base and accused of refusing the lawful orders of a superior, for which he faced a court-martial.
Working through civilian lawyers in New York, he finally managed to have his C.O. application accepted in February, and formal charges were dropped shortly afterward.
He and his wife were still settling into a new apartment in Agawam, and ex-Capt. Dawson still looked very much the military man, mostly because of his regulation haircut; but there was the demeanor of a military man about him. He was polite, formal and eager to please. I could hardly think of him as a contemporary of mine although he was; his experience with Vietnam had been so different from my own.
He graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1969 and then from pilot training in August of 1970. He began flying his first B-52 missions, mostly over Laos and Cambodia, in November of 1971. He stopped flying missions on June 19, 1973.
"I've always been sort of a dreamer. I wanted to fly and I wanted an education. I figured the Air Force could teach me both... . I planned on making the Air Force a career. It wasn't until my first tour of duty in Southeast Asia that I began to seriously consider getting out.
"I had begun to feel bad about the killing. I had studied some international law at the Air Force Academy and thought the rules should be followed, but I thought I could stay in the Air Force long enough to change things. I liked the Air Force and never minded following orders."
Dawson's Air Force career was a gradual coming to terms with himself and with the military. He realized that advancement within the Air Force to a position where he could affect things would be difficult if not impossible because he couldn't get behind the basic ideals of the organization.
"At first I thought that nuclear war was so unbelievable that I didn't think anyone could take it seriously. The SAC program appeared to be almost a flying club between the Russians and ourselves. But then I found out how serious the officers were. I didn't understand how anybody could be so "gung-ho" about nuclear war."
In October of 1972 while he was stationed at Westover Dawson began thinking about applying for C.O. status. It wasn't only the Bombing that was bothering him or the incompatibility he was beginning to find with Air Force ideals and his own, but he had also begin to notice the fundamental deceit about the war on the home front.
He described watching Melvin Laird on television before a Senate committee in March of 1972 while he was on leave: "Laird got mad and lost his temper. He told them the Nixon Administration didn't start the war, and the bombing was only designed to support U.S. troops in the field and get us out. But I knew some of the stuff we had been bombing had nothing to do with American troops. We had been bombing Pathet Lao troops and North Vietnamese in Laos."
Captain Dawson said he began to think about applying for C.O. status as early as October of 1972. He was stationed at Westover at that time and hadn't done any flying since his first tour which ended in February. After speaking with the chaplain at Westover he felt he didn't qualify as a C.O. He also requested a transfer to a transport plane instead of the B-52, but within a week found himself retraining for combat missions in Southeast Asia.
That was about the time Henry Kissinger was saying peace was near, but Capt. Dawson found himself back flying missions after the peace agreement was in fact signed in January, 1973.
"By April of '73 I was flying missions over Cambodia and each mission was getting harder and harder. I wrote letters to people like Pete McCloskey and George McGovern. Then I heard about a mass gravesite of 600 people in Cambodia resulting from B-52 raids and then I heard about a wedding party that had been hit by one of our bombs."
It was while writing to Congressman McCloskey about the immorality of using B-52s in Cambodia that Dawson realized the necessity of doing more than just writing a letter. He realized he had to stop flying missions he couldn't condone, taking personal responsibility and risking official sanctions.
What happened after that is an interesting story for which there is no room or time as my deadline approaches. Suffice it to say that on June 19, 1973 Captain Dawson refused to fly any more missions and applied for C.O. status.
We all have to reach an accommodation with war in our own way. Captain Dawson's action in refusing to fly further combat missions makes him a greater hero to me than anyone who ever risked his life in combat. He risked a lot more than he would have by continuing to fly B-52s, which except for the brief period during the bombing of Hanoi, were extremely routine flights.
He risked the condemnation of a society that has come to thrive on war, both economically and spiritually.
DCOM is easy
Windows 2000 is a stable, "enterprise class" operating system
Anyone can produce professional quality applications with VB
This sig made only from recycled ASCII
Fiction Dump
Broken Hearts are for Assholes. - Frank Zappa
(_*_) you like mah ass?
Well friend, i do respect your views on this subject. Your little piece on cambodia was nice. Oh by the way, we are not bombing Cambodia anymore. So you can be happy now.
Now it's my opinion time: More Carpet Bombing.
I don't know how i feel about obliterating people because they are communists. but i do know a few other things.
1. when you hijack and slam four jumbo jets full of innocent americans into things. then we will kill you.
2. when two of those things are the tallest buildings in our largest city. we will kill you
3. when those buildings collapse and take a huge chunk of lower manhattan and 5000+ lives with them. we will kill you.
4. attacking the pentagon is fair game. but we are still going to kill you.
5 anthrax is flowing like cocaine in hollywood. we are going to kill everyone.
Americans are not that special. there are a lot of things we do not do well, but one of the things we do well is this: homocide. We are spledid slaughterers of human life. we rock at it. we like it. we look for reasons to engage in it.
do not ever play america in a game of "i bet you won't come over here and kill all of us!" because you will loose.
we are a country that dropped atomic bombs, twice... remember that. america had exactly two atomic bombs in our arsonal. so how many did we use? both.
it is a shame that people can't seem to understand how much we love the killing. we get high minded and swear to god we won't kill the same way an alchoholic swears off gin, and then some assholes give us a reason to attend a mardi gras bender.
so anyway the only problem with the current b-52 attack on afghanistan is this: not enough carpet bombing.
i thank you for your attention.
I've gone to sleep in the spartan beds which at least provide a modicum of privacy, woken up, picked up all the stuff I could find, and now I've got this darn robot following me around and wanting to play hider-seeker. The laser won't even work because all I've got is a battery that doesn't work.
Can anyone help?
Thanks,
jD
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The problem is that there's nothing left to bomb. You know, bombing desert rocks is just not as much fun...
The real thing. Accept no substitute!
Manuals, tech books, websites, and much other info I can handle (although I still regularly print out long tech docs), but novels? I dont think I could ever get used to it. Perhaps the next generation will like 'em.
Hi. I'm the competition organizer for this year. I suspect the competition web server is going to get hammered, so I'll give a rundown of what's going on and what you can do to enter.
Zeroth, your source for most everything I'm going to talk about is the IF Archive. Reach it at http://ifarchive.org, or at the mirror http://mirror.ifarchive.org.
First, you'll need interpreters, since most of the games are written for specific interactive fiction virtual machines. I'm guessing plenty of you have Linux boxes; I'll try to get my old article on Linux interpreters up at my personal IF site, Bras Lantern, later today. It should have more bandwidth than the competition site.
Second, the games. This directory on the IF Archive has all of the games, either unpacked or in a big .zip file.
Third, choosing which games to play. You only have to play five of them to judge. If you think you'll only be able to play a handful of games, I ask that you play a random selection. There's a front-end to the competition, Comp01.z5, which is structured like a text adventure. It will randomize the list of games, sorted by which ones you can play, and even give you a nice voting form to fill out if you're so inclined.
Fourth, judge. You can play games for a maximum of two hours before giving it a rating. Note that you don't have to play for two hours. We only set a maximum play time, not a minimum one. To rate a game, give it a score from 1 to 10. 10 is good. 1 is not good. Use whatever criteria you wish.
Fifth, vote. You can mail your votes to the competition vote-counter or visit the web site to record your votes there.
Sixth, and optional, we've got competition t-shirts for your wearing pleasure.
All of this is detailed in the README which comes with the competition games packages. Enjoy.
The documentation he provides is interesting. However, one thing really irritated me as I browsed the site, and that was the following paragraph from his overview under "Why is the Erasmatron better?":
My emphasis.
I have no problem with defensive patents, but he's basically saying that he wants to make sure no one else can use similar technology to write even better games (which would benefit players/human kind).
At the risk of drawing hasty conclusions on how he will use his patent(s); I just cannot respect that.
(I actually considered buying his book, but that will not happen now).
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I built one some time back to run the database-driven Scott Adams text adventures using only Javascript and PHP- since even the best Java tended to break my browser.
It works well on older versions of Netscape as well as IE 5. Opera users have reported some trouble.
Here's the link:
http://www.ridiculopathy.com/adv_sa.php
You, sir, are pure evil. How am I going to get any work done today if I can play all the classics of my youth on my Visor until the batteries run out?
What's next, an Atari emulator?
I have an if-archive mirror available at ftp.guetech.org, and my small IF website at www.guetech.org. The archive is updated nightly and the contest directory is at ftp.guetech.org/if-archive/games/competition2001
Remember Lexington Green!
I've compiled an annotated bibliography of interactive fiction scholarship and amateur theory and criticism. It's specifically focused on text-adventure games, and it's due for an update (some URLs have changed).
See the recent copy
http://www.uwec.edu/jerzdg/orr/articles/IF/biblio
...or the copy published by the journal Text Technology:
http://texttechnology.mcmaster.ca/jerzbib/index.h
Erasmataron
The Erasmatron comes up periodically on rec.arts.int-fiction and related groups. For those who're interested, here's how Crawford's claims and accomplishments were received the last time they came up on that particular newsgroup.
In that discussion, Neil K. posted thus:
Erasmatron is not particularly interesting and the demonstration games are
terribly embarrassing. Crawford is about 15 years too late, for a start.
For more interesting and worthwhile work related to IF and personality
I'd look at Emily Short's Galatea or Adam Cadre's Varicella.
Dennis G. Jerz
Literacy Weblog http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog
You gotta be kidding. I enjoy IF games, but suck at them. Planetfall is the only game I ever got through without help, hints, or cheating. It's not so much about puzzle solving as about not being misdirected.
Au contraire! If you take a look at last year's results you'll find that the votes are pretty much spread across the spectrum, with most of the voting looking pretty normalized (non-skewed) to my statistical eye. (Ooh, pretty charts!) In fact, considering the relatively small sample size, it seems to be a very normal distribution! (That link for the paranoid: http://www.ifcomp.org/comp00/detailed-results.htm
Speaking as one of the authors of the competition, I do not mind the voting system. If you enter the contest, you are subject to the whims of both geniuses and trolls. However, enough people vote, that I think it balances things out. No, it may not be completely fair... (Name a voting system that is.) But I think it's fair enough that it just doesn't matter.
This argument has been rehashed on rec.*.int-fiction several times in the past few years, yet we always come back to the KISS rule: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
Adventurers...Yummmm.
Hey there, for those of us too lazy or modem-impaired to download the games, they are available via Telnet at telnet://chungkuo.org . (BBS account setup required, but worth it.)
They've not only got this year's competition playable (at least the ones playable sans graphics) but appear to have all past years' games, as well as many other Interactive Fiction goodies.
Cheerio,
Yekrats
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
Uh you did finish the game? For robots, death is merely an upgrade issue.
Since I don't have an mod points today, this is as close as I can get to saying, "Great job!" This post was very informative. I wish I could give this guy a 6.
http://www.classicgaming.com/pcae/