My Play This Thing! review of Warbler’s Nest is now up. As is often the case with PTT, I wind up giving away a (small) amount of what the game is about, because PTT reviews tend to be about convincing the reader that something interesting is happening from a design point of view.
Month: November 2010
Estimating numbers
An interesting argument that the IF-playing community is much larger than we usually estimate:
Gargoyle’s last release had over 12,000 downloads – double counting some folks, to be sure, but also omitting anyone who installed the Debian packages. In the last 45 days, with a single announcement on raif mired in negative feedback, the new release has been downloaded 1800 times.
These are not huge numbers on the scale of global populations, or indeed more than a footnote on Activision’s balance sheet, but they also represent only a fraction of the overall market in IF interpreters: the players passionate enough to download a dedicated interpreter and willing to use Gargoyle for this purpose. I doubt this amounts to more than 25% market share, all told, which gives us around 50,000 interested players. This is a couple orders of magnitude above the pessimistic estimates I routinely encounter. (The first approximation of community size I saw was in an article that suggested there were a few dozen authors and a few hundred players in the field.)
Homer in Silicon on Fable 3
Over here. There were a lot of things I did like about the game (awesome loading screens, some hilarious side quests, more memorable characters overall, Stephen Fry), but I was seriously disappointed in how it handled its moral dilemmas, and that’s mostly what I talk about.
Contribution on Echo Bazaar
I’m delighted to say that I’ve contributed some guest content to Echo Bazaar, and it is now live in the game. EBZ is a favorite of mine, and so is their excellent, interactive narrative theory-rich blog. Likely more to come.
(To quote the EBZ feed about where my content appears: “Nocturnal fever: @emshort’s first foray into the Bazaar now live for fortunate and Fated scholars of the Correspondence.” If this is excessively cryptic, it is possible that you have not yet encountered the prerequisites for this storyline.)
IF Comp 2010: Results out!
IF Comp 2010: Aotearoa
As has been my practice for the last few years, I’ve set my RSS feed to truncate entries so that I can post reviews without spoilerage. Within an entry, there is a short, spoilerless discussion (though the comp purists may want to avoid reading even that before playing for themselves); then spoiler space; then a more detailed discussion of what I thought did and didn’t work in the game, if appropriate.
I’m also pursuing an approach I came up with a couple of years ago: I’m playing and reviewing games that have listed beta-testers, and skipping those that don’t. In 2008 that turned out to be a pretty fool-proof indicator of which games were going to end up scoring 4 or less on my personal scale, and it made my reviewing process a happier one in 2009, so I’m sticking with it. I’m hoping this will mean I have more time to devote to the remaining games, which in turn will (I hope) be of higher quality, and you, dear reader, will have fewer rants inflicted on you.
Next up: Aotearoa
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 