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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!"
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!
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.
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...'
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
This is not score 3: Informative, it's score -5: Clueless newbie giving bad information. The moderaters suck.
Most modern IF runs on a virtual machine. The z-machine is the most commonly used, TADS a close second, and Glulx is designed as a replacement for the z-machine. The games in the comp are written using a variety of virtual machines (including one Java entry and a couple VB entries), but half the games this year are written using the z-machine.
For windows, the best interpreters I've found are WinFrotz (for z-machine games), HTML-TADS (for TADs games), and the Windows version of Glulx (for Glulx games). None of these programs will screw up your system folder, or indeed, even write anything at all to your system folder.
You can find these programs using Google or by following links from the IF comp page.
I'm almost sorry to see this story posted here. If you are new to IF or a casual player, the best thing to do is wait for mid-November when the results are posted and only play the the top 5 games.
I've already played through all the games, and can assure everyone that the top five will be worth your time--incredible experiences!
In the meantime, you might want to try playing some of the winners from previous years. You will probably be amazed by the quality of these homespun games. Interactive Fiction has become one of the best, most vibrant Do-It-Yourself communities on the net.
The best of modern IF doesn't feel at all like Dungeons and Dragons (ie, Zork). These are quality, mature short stories that just happen to also be games.
The same soes for moderator who gave the parent post the informative mod. Sheesh.
Tom.
Oh arse
A bit of a sweeping generalisation there! Really, if that holds true, then all men play with Lego and wet themselves over LoTR.... Admittedly, I am one of them, but that doesn't mean that all men are like me ;-)
Tom.
Oh arse
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.
Good point, but if a target market like us isn't adopting them (geeks, with a generally higher than average income, a proclivity towards new, "cool" technologies, and lots of voracious readers), then what hope do e-books have for The Rest Of Us (tm).
/. reader is right in the e-book bullseye. I know I have a handful of texts on my Palm, but except for the complete H2G2, they're all reference material of some sort or another. When I want to read fiction, I generally go out into the big room with the blue ceiling and visit places where I can look at chunks of dead trees and then bring one or more home with me. Sometimes I don't even have to keep them (when I go to this one place I've heard people call a "library"), which is good when I run out of firewood storage.
I'd agree strongly that we're not necessarily the best example of a target audience for a lot of things, but I think the typical
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
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
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!
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.
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.
Wrong, flat wrong. Files were indeed overwritten in my SYSTEM folder. Just because I wanted to play a few games doesn't mean I hallucinate watching an installer write to /WINDOWS/SYSTEM.
Typical slashdot sheep moderators did what you told them...hope you're happy. Facts defeated, bad knowledge successfully spread...a good day's work.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Uh you did finish the game? For robots, death is merely an upgrade issue.