The state of IF worlds today

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu Jun 19, 2008 4:22 pm

The base has moved! I think keeping the bases where we talk about game development "separate" from the other sections, used largely to scream obscenities at people, is a Good Thing.

by **The Moved Base Fairy** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 4:24 pm

MOVED BASE!!!

by **Lysander** » Fri May 30, 2008 12:25 pm

I think it's Steve Moretzki who brought up in a podcast i was listening to that they would have a situation wheere they would put a bunch of different objects and obstacles in a room and give them all flags, and that would cause the game to behave more like a world with rules than an actual game. Because, you could solve problems with ways the authors hadn't thought of, since the authors might be expecting you to solve a problem with one way but there's nothing preventing the problem to be solved another way because rather than specifically writing in solutions the action is more free form allowing any object with a certain flag to react a certain way with certain other objects with acertain flag.

by **Guest** » Tue May 27, 2008 8:53 pm

Anonymous wrote:Which may be the difficulty in creating a story, that the story itself is the perception of the one telling it. As has been already used as an example, the choice Robb made to allow his own writing to be the actions the player takes (creating an enviroment and a specific narrow path for a story to unfold at the expense of freedom and the ability of the player to act how they would within that world), allows him to directly control the perception and of the player and gives him a more direct medium for his writing to come through. It is creating an enviroment and emersing those playing in the logic and perception of the creator, but as been said already, at the expense of the players own ability to interact and foster their own way in that world.

And arguably its just his style. Trying to deconstruct it leads only to not really understanding it. Which appears to be what Robb may be seeking in trying to understand his own relationship with the player. I don't know. Just that I highly doubt creating a template and trying to pretend that leads to be imaginative and a wonderful writer, actually touches on being able to write.

Or that writing touches on being a good writer.

I doubt writing is real and only allows it to feed into itself, but maybe that all of this is merely a form of taking the system in our heads and applying it to a system that invariably loses that.

Yes, let us teach comedy and the ability to be imaginative and wonderful.

After all of this has become real to everyone, has taken a form, maybe the entire medium is just a bunch of people screaming at other people that it HAS IT BE THIS WAY, for no other reason that they are comfortable with it, and have come to defend it.

Or maybe that is how everything works, and why the new is so fragile and precious; for when it becomes something, it stops being everything except a form and reason for those who are believed to be the ones who understand it, to create reasons for justifying their own imagination and patterns of thought. And so the template is just stagnation, the teaching just a dead form forced upon to destroy a clear voice.

Perhaps.

by **Guest** » Tue May 27, 2008 8:46 pm

Lysander wrote:I'm bumping this. Robb, this is the thread I was talking about in the planet IF thread on the other bass.

It is difficult for me to now grasp the understanding behind what I previously wrote, and it reads now as so much bullshit. I guess its the difference between a creator and one who takes what they see before, and tries to create a template out of it, which just invariably destroys what was interesting and wonderful about it in the first place.

To reapply an idea looking for a result, without the understanding that it is movement and creation, creating a new thought that accomodates what we are now.

by **Guest** » Tue May 27, 2008 8:39 pm

bruce wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
bruce wrote: Not from Infocom.

From Atari, once upon a time.

More recently, from Batshitville, which is in the province of Insania.

Bruce
That Atari bloke is at least thinking and applying his thoughts in an effort to create something, regardless of what that effort may accomplish. And its another thing everyone can draw on, take, and do something else with.
Oh, so am I. And that effort is going to accomplish another Stiffy Makane game. And the source will be available.

So I don't think the act of creation is all that special. What separates me from Chris Crawford is 1) I didn't used to be an excellent game designer and 2) I'm not currently a batshit-insane megalomaniac.

Bruce

Ya, well... Its nice to see people have ideas and then create a problem for their ideas to solve, wherein there never was a problem in the first place.

The thing about storytron and all these approaches that pretend that they are approaches, instead of just a person doing it without the fanfare and waving for attention to VALIDATE THEIR IDEA, is that in many cases, people become dazzled with their own bullshit.

They stop trying to solve the problem, believe they have found a solution, and forget that the problem and not the answer, was what drove them forward to constantly try and constantly recreate and become different and hone themselves to an edge. To become better.

Or perhaps I am merely describing myself and saying why I'm a horrible shrill.

YOU DECIDE

by **Guest** » Tue May 27, 2008 8:35 pm

The problem is still the same, that of trying to direct the player through a world created by another. The menu choice allows the author to describe their world from the logic they have applied to it. These previous posts touched upon another idea of IF that both the player and the creator are human and are both capable of creating and thinking through these worlds.

As said before, the author has the ability to discern the logic inherit in the world they have created, as they are the only one who knows what is important and where and how things should flow. How they can flow and the result of each action. The menu choice makes this easier in telling a story in the same way a book tells ones, guiding the one involved and given them a direct line to follow.

The issue is, that the Player and the Creator both think and are both human and thus imaginative and able to see what is presented and come to their own conclusions. With most IF and Robb's stories explictly, the approach is to immerse the player at the expense of their own ability to confront the issues in their own way, in effect creating a story (a set of certain instances that lead to another). The perfect game would perhaps be an enviroment where the author is merely a guide who has created a world that isn't set, just objects thrown into a certain perception of reality.

Which may be the difficulty in creating a story, that the story itself is the perception of the one telling it. As has been already used as an example, the choice Robb made to allow his own writing to be the actions the player takes (creating an enviroment and a specific narrow path for a story to unfold at the expense of freedom and the ability of the player to act how they would within that world), allows him to directly control the perception and of the player and gives him a more direct medium for his writing to come through. It is creating an enviroment and emersing those playing in the logic and perception of the creator, but as been said already, at the expense of the players own ability to interact and foster their own way in that world.

Has has been said before...

Guest wrote:The ultimate game would be a platform to evolve and change a problem around the actions and input of the player, which is something narration can't do, and the player can't accomplish, without both the author and the player forming a mutual basis of creation and evolution around eachother.

I mean, having the perception of the player impact the perception of the author, and from that, having a third result that neither could anticipate. Its an interesting idea, and would invariably solve the problem that has already been discussed, of how to present the authors perception to the player. Which is invariably the style of writing and what not, wherein were just bitching aimlessly about things we don't understand nor are willing to do.

by **Lysander** » Wed May 21, 2008 8:41 pm

I'm bumping this. Robb, this is the thread I was talking about in the planet IF thread on the other bass.

by **Vitriola** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 6:19 pm

bruce wrote:I'm not currently a batshit-insane megalomaniac.

...allegedly.

by **bruce** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 4:23 pm

Anonymous wrote:
bruce wrote:
Anonymous wrote:That Chris guy from infocom that is working on Storytron
Not from Infocom.

From Atari, once upon a time.

More recently, from Batshitville, which is in the province of Insania.

Bruce
That Atari bloke is at least thinking and applying his thoughts in an effort to create something, regardless of what that effort may accomplish. And its another thing everyone can draw on, take, and do something else with.

Oh, so am I. And that effort is going to accomplish another Stiffy Makane game. And the source will be available.

So I don't think the act of creation is all that special. What separates me from Chris Crawford is 1) I didn't used to be an excellent game designer and 2) I'm not currently a batshit-insane megalomaniac.

Bruce

by **Guest** » Thu Jan 04, 2007 12:24 am

bruce wrote:
Anonymous wrote:That Chris guy from infocom that is working on Storytron
Not from Infocom.

From Atari, once upon a time.

More recently, from Batshitville, which is in the province of Insania.

Bruce

That Atari bloke is at least thinking and applying his thoughts in an effort to create something, regardless of what that effort may accomplish. And its another thing everyone can draw on, take, and do something else with.

by **bruce** » Wed Jan 03, 2007 10:52 pm

Anonymous wrote:That Chris guy from infocom that is working on Storytron

Not from Infocom.

From Atari, once upon a time.

More recently, from Batshitville, which is in the province of Insania.

Bruce

by **Guest** » Wed Jan 03, 2007 7:57 am

I've also encountered two or three puzzles in regular video games that presented an entirely feasible alternate solution, and instead required me to find a switch.

Why is IF special in this regard? Or are we bitching about how video games are one off worlds formed by the machinations of a guy being worked sixty hours a week, instead of the end result of the player who ends up being the audience the game caters to?

Somewhere, I ended with talking about how the player has a magical proportion of being influencial to the game, and forgot that the game is created with a style and a regard by the author to become what it is.

I'll shut up now.

by **Guest** » Wed Jan 03, 2007 3:22 am

Lysander wrote:
Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:I'm all wrapped up in coding solutions that I suspect that 90% of the players won't try. But man, is a game boring if you don't give your players a chance to implement inventive solutions, you know?
Indeed. Like I said earlier--if there's one solution that, by all accounts, SHOULD work, but didn't work because i'm smarter than the author and the author didn't think of it or did think of it but just didn't want to code it, I feel cheated. Why should i put the effort into thinking through the author's uzzles to solve them if the author didn't put in the same effort to code them? As far as the former, I'm okay if, when the author finds out about this possible solution from alpha/beta testers, he implaments it in a subsequent release. If he knows but just doesn't want to deal with it, fuck him. I'm even okay with him implamenting the solution and saying "you can't do that becasue blah blah random lame reason #8662" as long as that reason is plausible; jsut that he thought of it is all I ask.

Talking about how the game communicates with the player or how the player communicates with the game (or another absurdly stupid academicly inclined translation of the blindingly obvious)?

Discussing the menu options is the bane of the style of books; what and how the book reveals the story to the reader. I talked about how menu options took the context away from the player and directed them with full on dialogue options that are presented as nothing more than a "choose your own adventure" story book, and thats how it goes; what and how do we reveal the possible avenues of interest to the player?

Its all about information and slowly pulling back the curtain one foot at a time to show a little more, except if this process is treated with any sort of structure or expectation, the author ends up fucking himself over because he's trying to be something he isn't and following a form that doesn't make due to him.

And is that where IF is stuck? Trying to find a way to accurately and presently make the player as closely apart of the story as possible while doing it in the context of the author having to engineer every single machination of the world they inhabit?

That Chris guy from infocom that is working on Storytron appeared to be trying to solve this problem and had the idea, except he's just become starry eyed at his own bullshit while forgetting that alot of talk doesn't amount to anything. Really though, menu options, story structure, game mechanics, is just a bunch of lies called up to try and explain the idea of how people do what they do, and the style surrounding how they do what they do.

Ya... Right.

by **Lysander** » Wed Jan 03, 2007 3:00 am

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:I'm all wrapped up in coding solutions that I suspect that 90% of the players won't try. But man, is a game boring if you don't give your players a chance to implement inventive solutions, you know?

Indeed. Like I said earlier--if there's one solution that, by all accounts, SHOULD work, but didn't work because i'm smarter than the author and the author didn't think of it or did think of it but just didn't want to code it, I feel cheated. Why should i put the effort into thinking through the author's uzzles to solve them if the author didn't put in the same effort to code them? As far as the former, I'm okay if, when the author finds out about this possible solution from alpha/beta testers, he implaments it in a subsequent release. If he knows but just doesn't want to deal with it, fuck him. I'm even okay with him implamenting the solution and saying "you can't do that becasue blah blah random lame reason #8662" as long as that reason is plausible; jsut that he thought of it is all I ask.

(FTR, just because Zork III was the first game (besides shitty PC-only IF that nobody's heard of) does not mean it was the first one I complete. That was Border Zone, but only because of the invisiclues; teh first one I completed completely on my own was Moonmist. Then I beat Seastalker in the course of one afternoon, except for teh last lousy three points because I could never find the damn snark. But since those two games don't count, I'm pretty sure that the one I got farthest in was Planetfall. I kept going after the red harings in the rad-labv and when I found out by reading walkthroughs that I wasn't supposed to do that I got rather upset. But I actually got to the rad-lock without help, which was nice. The other one I got farthest on without help was Trinity, I managed to complete basically all of the sidequests without realizing what the hell I was supposed to be doing, without ever figuring out the gnomon puzzle and thus unable to get anywhere because the shadow kept moving. After I igured thegnomon out a whooole lot of things started making sense and I got all the way to the Trinity sight almost completely without help (this was when I was 14, or so, I think. God, I can't remember. Anyway, now i"m rambling and i'll shut up.))

by **Guest** » Sat Dec 30, 2006 4:39 pm

And conversation options make more sense in that, they are what the character would say (getting a clear conversation tone over to the player is a bitch, because they are outside the context of the game and don't know exactly what the programmer allows. In other words, typing in a full sentence wouldn't make any sense, and the conversation option gives it more depth).

Of course, the only point to express the reason behind anything, is a pathetic attempt at trying to make sense of something that already is and is beyond my power to change. This is also the only fact gleamed from over fifty units of history classes.

by **Guest** » Sat Dec 30, 2006 4:35 pm

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:Whether this is because the conversational menu became easy for me to implement and anticipate because I used it in 5 games, I dunno. Hopefully people like the new system.

Robb Sherwin text adventures are more narration and getting the player to feel fucked over by the character than "Hey, you are the character!" because as its been said before, the choices presented are all based on the characters personality.

Or, eh...

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Sat Dec 30, 2006 2:26 pm

Lysander wrote:Through a menu of conversations. Which is, again, why I like the conversation menu, because I feel like it has a more realistic format of how people actually think and choose to formulate statements and responses to statements by the other peson in that conversation.

I am trying a different system in my current work in progress. Let me say that I miss the ease of the conversational menu. I know a lot of people are turned off by it, though. (Probably nobody here because, hey, if you hate the system you probably have not played many of my games and therefore why would you be so intrigued to come here in the first place. Or second place. Whichever, I'm coo.)

Whether this is because the conversational menu became easy for me to implement and anticipate because I used it in 5 games, I dunno. Hopefully people like the new system.

And I remain quite jealous that a certain poster here went with PONCY ON and PONCY OFF because that is one of the funniest meta commands ever. I salute him for his genius.

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Sat Dec 30, 2006 2:23 pm

Anonymous wrote:Don't know. Just all of this sounds to a sort of long sheet about validating the "DESIGN CHOICES!!!" of whoever implented whatever I described because... THATS ALL I KNOW

Here's my current issue. Hopefully I find some good solutions to this problem.

I would like to put the player in an environment where a few reasonable choices would allow them to get out of the bad situation their character is in. For instance, let's say that I code up the following:

- Lead the player on so that they realize that they have a glass eye and can throw it at somebody and freak them out.

- Let the player hide somewhere

Most players are going to pick on the second bit. Encouraging them to yank their eye out takes a lot of work and talent. And there will always be those people who say, "The game simply didn't let me hide, that sucks."

I'm all wrapped up in coding solutions that I suspect that 90% of the players won't try. But man, is a game boring if you don't give your players a chance to implement inventive solutions, you know?

by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Sat Dec 30, 2006 12:49 pm

Lysander wrote:In Zork III (the first infocom game I ever played by the way) it serves as a backdrop to the action that's going on.

Damn, that is a doozy to be your first. I'm thrilled you stuck with it. To this day I still have not gone very far in that one. The ability to play even though, through random acts, your game can not be completed is a huge turn off.

The state of IF worlds today

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