Slashdot Mirror
2004 Interactive Fiction Results
silent_knight writes "Early in October, the 2004 Interactive Fiction competition began. The results are now in! Be sure to check out some of this year's best entries: Luminous Horizon, Blue Chairs, All Things Devours, Magocracy, and Murder at the Aero Club. All entries (and interpreters) can be downloaded together for Windows and the Mac from the download page." As mentioned in the previous story, Linux support for these games is also easily available.
Is this the new "In Soviet Russia..." joke? Come to think of it, I haven't seen many of them lately, unless they involved old Korean people...
Hurricane Ivan: A 17th century prison collapsed. All of the inmates escaped.
It would be great if anybody who has tried one of these games could post something to give us an idea about it. "Luminous Horizons" is the only one I found with a README; it's a superhero adventure done in comic book style. http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/compe tition2004/glulx/eas3/eas3info.txt
My personal favorite from the IF Archive is Christminster, a quirky Pynchon-esque conspiracy puzzle. Reviews for this game (and more) are in Baf's Guide to the IF Archive:
http://wurb.com/if/
If this story gets more than 50 comments, please kill me now.
Oh yes, the old "something is of no use for me, so it must hold no value to anybody else".
This is such a horrid mindset, and one so common today, that I could not resist the need to bring you one comment closer to your death.
I like how they show the results as a histogram of ratings. This makes it easy to distinguish a game that everyone thought was mediocre from one that a lot of people liked, but a lot of others didn't. I wish imdb, iblist, and all the other similar sites would do the same.
Actually, way back in the "In Korea, e-mail is for old people!" article from earlier today, there was a thread of people sort of concluding that this is our new meme-of-the-week:
In Korea, only old people make up new memes.
Hell, someone's added it to the slashdot wikipedia entry already.
Probably not. The whole point of celebrating an artist is to commend the choices he/she made. The whole point of IF is to give choices to the player. Granted, there's still a lot of decisions when you write a game, but not to the degree that pre-written fiction has
That's not to say that games don't have their snooty prestige points. Chess is probably the best example of this.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
I hate to ask, but is there an emacs z-code interpreter? Has Firefox broken new "it's this kind of application but it also does *that*" ground?
IANAIFA (blah blah Interactive Fiction Author) but I would contend that IF authors have to make more, not fewer, decisions than a pre-written author would for a work of the same length.
Pre-written authors need ultimately only follow one timeline where everthing happens in sequence; IF authors have to anticipate the player performing actions at any given time under different situations, and account for that. (Has the player got the dingus to go through the puzzle door? Has he talked to NPC #2 and subsequently learned about the Amazing Event? How is Sparky the Wonder Dog described in the rain versus when he's in his doghouse?) Also, IF that allows for multiple endings (like my current favorite, Slouching Toward Bethlehem) has to be flexable, yet credible under many circumstances, which means even more decisions on the part of the author.
Not to take cred from one or the other, but in order for the player to make choices, any choices, the IF author has to have anticipated them, made them, and accounted for them.
Maybe IF authors can be forgiven a little snootiness. It seems like a hell of a lot of work to me, and most players won't explore the game sufficiently to be exposed to all of it. (Yay, easter eggs!) Contrast with a written book, where it's just a matter of turning all the pages.
Probably not. The whole point of celebrating an artist is to commend the choices he/she made. The whole point of IF is to give choices to the player.
This was a very relevant comment, but it brings up another point.
There are numerous instances of art, in which the viewer is allowed to take their own path to the presentation. This can be as basic as the angle from which we choose to view a painting or sculpture, or as technical as an installation that contains audio / video / kinetics, and alows one to interact in a way that alters, and personalizes the experience. I don't think that the ability to personalize the experience with Interactive Fiction precludes it from the ranks of art, or literature as art.
Have you ever read a book, in a not totally end-to-end fashion? Ever skipped ahead to see what might happen, looked in the middle to get a sense of what the work was about, or never read the liner notes and foreword at all? There are even books that allow young readers to chose one of many paths through a given story. There are classes for childern's literature, correct?
If conventional literature is to be held up as art, then so should be Interactive Fiction.
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
Printed page has already embraced Interactive Fiction. Ever hear of Choose Your Own Adventure books?