Also, unless things have changed dramatically these past few years, the parsers in a MUD are nowhere near as what you get in most Interactive Fiction. Well a MUD understand what you mean if you try to PUT LARGE ROCK INTO THE SMALL BOX THEN PUT THE BOX ON THE TABLE AND OPEN IT. ? I mean -- unless that *exact* interaction is required, it's not going to do anything in a MUD. With IF languages, as long as your box is a container, has a capacity large enough to hold the rock, and there is a table set up as a platform, it'll work. It might not be *meaningful* to do it, but it should work. IF parsing beats any MUD parsing I've seen.
I've played some MUDs. Even wrote a browser-based MUD-like game. I guess they *can* be IF-like, but I don't think that's as common. I've found MUDs to have room descriptions that are way too long, and intereactions/responses that aren't nearly long enough. It's like the effort goes into room creation, not gameplay. Plus, I don't really want to commit to one game for a long period of time. Double plus, authors of IF can work on a single game and make it work right, where MUDs just keep on going, with varying levels of consistency. I've never seen a MUD that emphasizes the *fiction* in Interactive Fiction. Invariably you can point to examples to contradict this, so feel free.
Wow. Weird -- and totally not true. IF has come a long ways since the old days. Of course, it depends on which games you play. You can find 1980's-ish games. You can find modern stuff too, with an emphasis on stories over puzzles. Because IF is a hobbyist pursuit now, and it's *written* by hobbyists, you'll find the good among the bad.
And Adrift has auto-mapping.
And some games may include notes. It's up to the author to implement, the same way it's up to the programmers to implement *everything* in a video game. Most authors just choose not to. This is where you exercise your freedom and pick the games with the feature's you're after.
In Interactive Fiction, there are a whole lot more bad or mediocre games than good ones. Newbies are likely to find coal before they find diamonds, and guess-the-command can be a big turn-off. The best thing is probably to play the games that get the highest marks first -- winners of prior IF competitions, maybe. Not all IF makes you guess the right command, and some do a great job of figuring out what you mean.
It's no shock that the audience is small. Most gamers don't even *like* to read -- at least, not for a game. The mainstream criticizes too much text in games. Take an all-text game, and it's the opposite of what most gamers like.
I think most gamers just aren't well-rounded. Most recently, my gaming includes Partners in Time (DS), Zelda: The Minish Cap (GBA), The Spring Thing 2006 Games (Text IF), and Resident Evil 4 (GC).
In a nutshell, it's a set of requirements applicable to any merchant who processes credit cards online. It's something driven by Visa and Mastercard, in their efforts to fight fraud. In my opinion, it's *way* too dramatic, requiring such a large number of points as to make it impossible for most smaller merchants to ever really comply. It's not optional, either. If you accept Visa and Mastercard, you have to be PCI Compliant. The amount of business you do can affect which compliancy level you have to meet, thankfully, but with even just 20,000 transactions a year, you're a level 3 merchant with a big self-questionaire to fill out, and quarterly penetration/intrusion scans required.
If you're entire site uses a separate service, such as PayPal, then it's PayPal's responsibility to be PCI Compliant (and they are). But if you accept credit cards on your own web page, even if you're shuffling it off through a gateway behind the scenes, this is something that affects you. It's not optional. Unfortunately.
Some of the requirements include the types of passwords that can be use, force-changing on a regular basis, the requirement to review logs regularly, your database and web server must be separated with a hardware firewall between them, unused services should be disabled, you can't use FTP and Telnet (insecure) without very good (and documented) reason, you have to sanitize all credit card info and you can *never* store CVS/CV2 or magstripe data... the list is huge.
If you accept credit cards at your website and you're not already certified as PCI compliant, technically Visa and Mastercard can shut you down (stop you from taking credit cards at your web site). They can also fine you in large amounts (thousands of dollars), although I'm told this doesn't generally happen unless there is actually a security breach.
Is it built in a way that lets it pass PCI Compliancy testing? That's a big deal since last year, and many of us with eCommerce merchant sites are still struggling to comply with the myriad of rules and restricts imposed by Visa and Mastercard.
The IF Communitity (Interactive Fiction community) is what hosts and sponsors the annual competiation.
Sorry -- I had just read dozens of silly "sandwich" comments, not to mention the off-topic discussion that thought the article was about text games in general. And all the replies that were based just on the blurb, and not on the article. I *was* too touchy. My fault.:)
If it's Interactive Fiction, they're not going to be nearly as good as those written in Hugo, Tads, or Inform. C# is a general-purpose language. Step one would be to create an IF *engine*, and those that exist now have had *years* to refine and get it right.
I know Hugo. and I somewhat know C#. It's all about going for the right tool for the job. C# ain't it.
If you haven't already done so, be sure to upload your game to Interactive Fiction Archive at http://www.ifarchive.org./ It's a central download site for everything IF.
Few people will say that graphical games are for stupid people. Had the article included more, I go on to say that I *do* play console games, and enjoy them emmensely. And Interactive Fiction isn't the only thing I've written.
Without a commercial market for Interactive Fiction, it's necessarily a mixed bag of good and bad. IF is just a hobby for most of us involved.
It's great that WSJ online posted the article -- good exposure! But don't take it out of context. We're not a bunch of self-deluded cultists who live in the 1980's. Much of what goes on in the community's chatroom is talk about everything else. A big part of that is console gaming. If anything, it's more about being open-minded. We like more than *just* mainstream video games. Most everyone else doesn't.
Do *none* of you read the other replies before posting. You're about the 100th person to comment on *just* the blurb portion of a much longer article. Good grief. And you don't even know what you're talking about. See my other replies for more info. Or don't. Just continue to post idiotic nonsense.
As I said before, the rest of my 30-minute interview wasn't included. It's not so much that what I said was taken out of context, as it is that what *else* I said would have helped it make more sense. I play a lot of console games. I know about pause. Sheesh. But the action is usually pretty fast-paced. That's the difference. Things don't *happen* in Interactive Fiction until to make a move. You don't *have* to pause. You don't *have* to reach a save point. You just get up and walk away. Simple.
I think the people here get a bigger kick out of making asinine comments than in actually discussing the topic. And most of it is just misinformed. MUDs? Browser-based games? This was an article about Interactive Fiction. It wasn't an article about Kansas and Sandwiches. Most people just read the blurb, and replied to get in a quick jab. A shame. The article was about a lot more than that.
It *was* mentioned. In the article that this Slashdot article was referencing.
Nobody read it. If they had, maybe there would be fewer misinformed, silly responses. The article is about interactive fiction. Not BBS games. Not MUDs. Not rougelikes. Not browser-based games. And the article is *about* the competition.
That's bad design, or a newbie mistake. IF languages like Inform, Tads, and Hugo make this easy, because every command isn't coded from scratch. Grammar definition for "throw" may include "fling" and "toss" and "hurl" just in case. Worlds are modeled with rules where objects are openable or not, platforms, containers, light sources, light or heavy, cuttable, wrappable, etc.
Most of the replies to this topic come from sad ignorance. I don't mean that to be critical -- just an observation. Today's interactive fiction isn't what it was twenty years ago. At least, not the IF that people enjoy. The good stuff doesn't get away with too-sparse descriptions, guess-the-verb, unfair puzzles, and everything else that's being cited in these replies. This is why it's still around.
You cited the very thing which goes against the grain of your whole argument. Musicians do want to make money. It's unfortunate that "Big-Name Record Companies" may not come up with fair agreements WITH musicians, but how can removing every right to sell music and profit by it FROM musicians help? "Free Art" you say. Don't you realize that musicians are ALREADY free TODAY to create and freely distribute their music? Those who support your way of thinking CAN. Those who have no interest in feeding themselves - surviving - or those who can do so without profiting from their work, CAN do that now.
The problem is, you're not encouraging them to do so. What you're doing is DEMANDING that they do so -- saying they have no RIGHT to sell what they've created. You're removing their right to choose.
Let me ask you this. Why, in a system that already allows people who create intellectual property to give it away at no charge, would stripping away the right to protect this property be better? You don't have to remove copyright protection - you simply have to convince everybody that they SHOULDN'T use it.
This comes down to wanting something for nothing. The lack of a copyright system isn't necessary for those who do it "for art." Electronic duplication makes now the best time in HISTORY for such "labors of love" to be shared with the world. Let those who create for free do it. Allow those who don't the protection of copyright. There is no NEED to change this.
Without protection, I think you'd be shocked at how little "art" you'd find.
One of the biggest complaints against copyrighting always seems to be that "information should be free." It is. As somebody who HAS filed for copyright (on computer software), I'm no expert. However, this point is clear. You cannot copyright facts and information such as "how trees grow" or "why it snows." If I were to discover a new planet and copyright my work, I would simply be copyrighting my expression of my findings. I would not own the facts nor have exclusive rights to the data presented in my paper. This is a point people forget, ignore, or simply don't realize, when arguing against copyrights.
Copyrights are designed to protect expression, not to allow the supression of facts and information. I've seen no evidence that this isn't working. I don't need open rights to Mickey Mouse to further my life, if I'm not prevented from making a cartoon myself. Copyright isn't keeping me away from anything I need - only things I might want - and that's where people begin to complain.
Unless you've registered a copyright on your code -- and my understanding is that this isn't really done on Open Source -- you couldn't sue for any damages. What would you sue for? Emotional damage?
Slashdot Mirror
Also, unless things have changed dramatically these past few years, the parsers in a MUD are nowhere near as what you get in most Interactive Fiction. Well a MUD understand what you mean if you try to PUT LARGE ROCK INTO THE SMALL BOX THEN PUT THE BOX ON THE TABLE AND OPEN IT. ? I mean -- unless that *exact* interaction is required, it's not going to do anything in a MUD. With IF languages, as long as your box is a container, has a capacity large enough to hold the rock, and there is a table set up as a platform, it'll work. It might not be *meaningful* to do it, but it should work. IF parsing beats any MUD parsing I've seen.
Bleh.
:(
I've played some MUDs. Even wrote a browser-based MUD-like game. I guess they *can* be IF-like, but I don't think that's as common. I've found MUDs to have room descriptions that are way too long, and intereactions/responses that aren't nearly long enough. It's like the effort goes into room creation, not gameplay. Plus, I don't really want to commit to one game for a long period of time. Double plus, authors of IF can work on a single game and make it work right, where MUDs just keep on going, with varying levels of consistency. I've never seen a MUD that emphasizes the *fiction* in Interactive Fiction. Invariably you can point to examples to contradict this, so feel free.
So yeah... bleh.
Wow. Weird -- and totally not true. IF has come a long ways since the old days. Of course, it depends on which games you play. You can find 1980's-ish games. You can find modern stuff too, with an emphasis on stories over puzzles. Because IF is a hobbyist pursuit now, and it's *written* by hobbyists, you'll find the good among the bad.
And Adrift has auto-mapping.
And some games may include notes. It's up to the author to implement, the same way it's up to the programmers to implement *everything* in a video game. Most authors just choose not to. This is where you exercise your freedom and pick the games with the feature's you're after.
---- Mike.
In Interactive Fiction, there are a whole lot more bad or mediocre games than good ones. Newbies are likely to find coal before they find diamonds, and guess-the-command can be a big turn-off. The best thing is probably to play the games that get the highest marks first -- winners of prior IF competitions, maybe. Not all IF makes you guess the right command, and some do a great job of figuring out what you mean.
And start here: http://www.ifwiki.org/
It's no shock that the audience is small. Most gamers don't even *like* to read -- at least, not for a game. The mainstream criticizes too much text in games. Take an all-text game, and it's the opposite of what most gamers like.
I think most gamers just aren't well-rounded. Most recently, my gaming includes Partners in Time (DS), Zelda: The Minish Cap (GBA), The Spring Thing 2006 Games (Text IF), and Resident Evil 4 (GC).
---- Mike.
In a nutshell, it's a set of requirements applicable to any merchant who processes credit cards online. It's something driven by Visa and Mastercard, in their efforts to fight fraud. In my opinion, it's *way* too dramatic, requiring such a large number of points as to make it impossible for most smaller merchants to ever really comply. It's not optional, either. If you accept Visa and Mastercard, you have to be PCI Compliant. The amount of business you do can affect which compliancy level you have to meet, thankfully, but with even just 20,000 transactions a year, you're a level 3 merchant with a big self-questionaire to fill out, and quarterly penetration/intrusion scans required.
If you're entire site uses a separate service, such as PayPal, then it's PayPal's responsibility to be PCI Compliant (and they are). But if you accept credit cards on your own web page, even if you're shuffling it off through a gateway behind the scenes, this is something that affects you. It's not optional. Unfortunately.
Some of the requirements include the types of passwords that can be use, force-changing on a regular basis, the requirement to review logs regularly, your database and web server must be separated with a hardware firewall between them, unused services should be disabled, you can't use FTP and Telnet (insecure) without very good (and documented) reason, you have to sanitize all credit card info and you can *never* store CVS/CV2 or magstripe data... the list is huge.
If you accept credit cards at your website and you're not already certified as PCI compliant, technically Visa and Mastercard can shut you down (stop you from taking credit cards at your web site). They can also fine you in large amounts (thousands of dollars), although I'm told this doesn't generally happen unless there is actually a security breach.
Here's some more info:
http://www.solidcactus.com/pci.html
Is it built in a way that lets it pass PCI Compliancy testing? That's a big deal since last year, and many of us with eCommerce merchant sites are still struggling to comply with the myriad of rules and restricts imposed by Visa and Mastercard.
The IF Communitity (Interactive Fiction community) is what hosts and sponsors the annual competiation.
:)
Sorry -- I had just read dozens of silly "sandwich" comments, not to mention the off-topic discussion that thought the article was about text games in general. And all the replies that were based just on the blurb, and not on the article. I *was* too touchy. My fault.
Three of the top-5, interestingly enough, were part of the WSJ interview.
1) Vespers
2) Beyond - tied with
A New Life
4) Distress (mine)
5) Tough Beans
If it's Interactive Fiction, they're not going to be nearly as good as those written in Hugo, Tads, or Inform. C# is a general-purpose language. Step one would be to create an IF *engine*, and those that exist now have had *years* to refine and get it right.
I know Hugo. and I somewhat know C#. It's all about going for the right tool for the job. C# ain't it.
"Reviving" is the author's word, not ours.
And you're not likely to gain many new numbers with your idiotic attitude. The IF community has its own MUD.
*plonk*
If you haven't already done so, be sure to upload your game to Interactive Fiction Archive at http://www.ifarchive.org./ It's a central download site for everything IF.
Must *everyone* reply soley based on the blurb. It's a whole article. Not just a commentary on making sandwiches and pausing games. Sheesh.
Few people will say that graphical games are for stupid people. Had the article included more, I go on to say that I *do* play console games, and enjoy them emmensely. And Interactive Fiction isn't the only thing I've written.
Without a commercial market for Interactive Fiction, it's necessarily a mixed bag of good and bad. IF is just a hobby for most of us involved.
It's great that WSJ online posted the article -- good exposure! But don't take it out of context. We're not a bunch of self-deluded cultists who live in the 1980's. Much of what goes on in the community's chatroom is talk about everything else. A big part of that is console gaming. If anything, it's more about being open-minded. We like more than *just* mainstream video games. Most everyone else doesn't.
Do *none* of you read the other replies before posting. You're about the 100th person to comment on *just* the blurb portion of a much longer article. Good grief. And you don't even know what you're talking about. See my other replies for more info. Or don't. Just continue to post idiotic nonsense.
Either a really bad subset of AIF (Adult Interactive Fiction), or a blatant lie. Most likely, a troll response.
As I said before, the rest of my 30-minute interview wasn't included. It's not so much that what I said was taken out of context, as it is that what *else* I said would have helped it make more sense. I play a lot of console games. I know about pause. Sheesh. But the action is usually pretty fast-paced. That's the difference. Things don't *happen* in Interactive Fiction until to make a move. You don't *have* to pause. You don't *have* to reach a save point. You just get up and walk away. Simple.
I think the people here get a bigger kick out of making asinine comments than in actually discussing the topic. And most of it is just misinformed. MUDs? Browser-based games? This was an article about Interactive Fiction. It wasn't an article about Kansas and Sandwiches. Most people just read the blurb, and replied to get in a quick jab. A shame. The article was about a lot more than that.
It *was* mentioned. In the article that this Slashdot article was referencing.
Nobody read it. If they had, maybe there would be fewer misinformed, silly responses. The article is about interactive fiction. Not BBS games. Not MUDs. Not rougelikes. Not browser-based games. And the article is *about* the competition.
See my prior replies.
Yeah. Twenty years ago.
That's bad design, or a newbie mistake. IF languages like Inform, Tads, and Hugo make this easy, because every command isn't coded from scratch. Grammar definition for "throw" may include "fling" and "toss" and "hurl" just in case. Worlds are modeled with rules where objects are openable or not, platforms, containers, light sources, light or heavy, cuttable, wrappable, etc.
Most of the replies to this topic come from sad ignorance. I don't mean that to be critical -- just an observation. Today's interactive fiction isn't what it was twenty years ago. At least, not the IF that people enjoy. The good stuff doesn't get away with too-sparse descriptions, guess-the-verb, unfair puzzles, and everything else that's being cited in these replies. This is why it's still around.
And when did reading become a *bad* thing?
That was **ONE QUOTE** from a half-hour interview. The rest of it includes things like:
"I have an XBox, Gamecube, and PS2 which I play MORE than Interactive Fiction"
Grow up.
Legend of the Red Dragon is a BBS game, not Interactive Fiction.
Yeah, that was one comment taken from a half-hour interview. I play console games quite a bit. I know about pause. LOL.
The problem is, you're not encouraging them to do so. What you're doing is DEMANDING that they do so -- saying they have no RIGHT to sell what they've created. You're removing their right to choose.
Let me ask you this. Why, in a system that already allows people who create intellectual property to give it away at no charge, would stripping away the right to protect this property be better? You don't have to remove copyright protection - you simply have to convince everybody that they SHOULDN'T use it.
This comes down to wanting something for nothing. The lack of a copyright system isn't necessary for those who do it "for art." Electronic duplication makes now the best time in HISTORY for such "labors of love" to be shared with the world. Let those who create for free do it. Allow those who don't the protection of copyright. There is no NEED to change this.
Without protection, I think you'd be shocked at how little "art" you'd find.
Copyrights are designed to protect expression, not to allow the supression of facts and information. I've seen no evidence that this isn't working. I don't need open rights to Mickey Mouse to further my life, if I'm not prevented from making a cartoon myself. Copyright isn't keeping me away from anything I need - only things I might want - and that's where people begin to complain.
It's all about money, huh?
Unless you've registered a copyright on your code -- and my understanding is that this isn't really done on Open Source -- you couldn't sue for any damages. What would you sue for? Emotional damage?