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IF Comp 2011: The Play

It’s comp time, so I’m going to short summaries in my RSS feed in order to avoid dumping spoilers into the aggregators. And, as usual, I will be skipping games that have no evidence of beta-testing.

“The Play” is an Undum piece by Deirdra Kiai (Life Flashes By, Pigeons in the Park). “The Play” concerns the dress rehearsal of a play about a statue come to life, her artist, and an escaping gladiator. There’s a certain amount of slapstick humor, but mostly the story is about juggling the moods of the actors you’re overseeing in an attempt to get through the evening.

In the review to follow, there are some comments on thematic content at the beginning, then spoiler space, then a more detailed discussion of structure. That said, even the thematic comments give away a certain amount of what the game is about, so if you want to encounter it entirely fresh, don’t read on.

Continue reading “IF Comp 2011: The Play”

IF Comp 2011 Open

IF Comp 2011 is now up and running, and it appears to be a flourishing year, with 38 games in a range of systems, including Inform, TADS 2 and 3, ADRIFT, Undum, ALAN, Quest, Windows-standalone and unconventional web engines, including one engine that appeared earlier this year in the IF Demo Fair, if I’m not mistaken.

And now a side note about blurbs. The IF Comp about page gives authors a chance to include short blurbs about their work, and some of these do a notably better job than others of making me want to play.

Your blurb, like your cover art if you have any, is an important first contact point between your player and your game. If you can make the player eager to play, she’ll likely have a better time during the opening moves and be more inclined to give your game the benefit of the doubt. And a player who knows what genre and style she’s facing is also more likely to play in tune with the game’s intentions, and save the game until a time when she’s in the mood for what it has to offer — which again is likely to mean a happier experience for the player and a better score for the author.

Here’s a good one:

The Play
A dress rehearsal gone horribly wrong
By Deirdra Kiai
…
Pull yourself together, Ainsley. Just one more rehearsal until the big day, assuming nothing catastrophic happens. But really, all you have to do is get your motley crew of actors to run their parts once through from beginning to end. How hard can it be?

It’s not long, but it communicates character (you’re Ainsley), relationship (you’re directing), major conflict (keeping the actors on task until the rehearsal is complete), setting (a theater), and tone (humor centered on just how bad things can get). As it happens, I often enjoy slice of life humor IF, and this blurb suggests to me a cross between Four in One and Broken Legs. My expectations are now established and I’m keen to play.

Here’s one that doesn’t work as well for me:

The Life (and Deaths) of Doctor M
By Edmund Wells
…
Blurb: Your vision clears as you gently land in an endless landscape. There is the wind, a bleak and chill thing. And there is your sense of uncertainty: You don’t know which way to go. Or, maybe, which way you went.

Where am I? Who am I? What am I doing? Why do I care? The blurb refuses to say, and hints that the game isn’t even going to be specific about which tense it’s set in. Amnesiac wandering in a void it is, then.

But amnesiac wandering doesn’t seem to go with the title, unless this endless landscape I’m stuck in is the afterlife and I’m the repeatedly-dying Doctor M. Speaking of M, s/he doesn’t even get a full surname, so I can’t even sketch in a nationality for him or her. Meh.

This game might conceivably turn out to be interesting after all, but the blurb suggests it’s going to be a wash of artistic choices diligently avoided.

Or take the uberterse

The Hours
By Robert Patten
Blurb: Your new job may be harder than you thought.

This could be almost anything. The word “job” does sort of suggest a modern or future setting rather than a distant historical one, but anachronistic attitudes towards work are hardly unknown in IF, so we can’t rule out the possibility that this is about a freedman in ancient Rome, say, or an alchemist staring down a year’s supply of unmutated lead. Otherwise, I have no information about goal, character, tone, setting, genre, gameplay style or difficulty.

Here’s a different strategy entirely:

Kerkerkruip
By Victor Gijsbers
Kerkerkruip is a dungeon crawling game that brings interactive fiction and rogue-likes together. With a randomly generated dungeon and a complex world model, every game is different and exciting. Success can only be achieved through tactics and strategy.

Here the hook is about the kind of gameplay being offered rather than the story the game is going to tell, but the blurb is still communicating the game’s unique selling point. Sometimes that’s appropriate, especially when the focus is on systemic challenge. I admit I wouldn’t have minded getting a little more flavor here along with the description, but I do at least feel like I know what’s going to be in this package and whether I’m likely to enjoy it.

By contrast, this gives a little information about gameplay, but not enough to qualify as an actual hook:

The Guardian
By Lutein Hawthorne
Blurb: A beginner level fantasy quest, made to be straightforward to finish without previous IF experience. Small feelies, an instruction book and MIDI music, are included. A walkthrough is available.

The genre and difficulty rating are useful information, and the presence of feelies and instructions suggests that some care has gone into the production. But it’s not telling me how this game might be different from (and possibly more interesting than) any other piece of beginner-level fantasy IF, and there’s quite a lot out there.

Atlus’ Catherine

…is written up here. It’s a very odd balance of puzzler and dating sim, which I didn’t find entirely satisfying in either dimension, and which raises some issues about gender stereotypes but veers off before dealing with the implications.

L. A. Noire Article

Here I talk about what I liked and didn’t like in L.A. Noire. (Quite a lot, actually, in both cases.) My main contention is that the story and gameplay aren’t clear enough about what the player’s role is meant to be — and various game systems pull in different directions.

The Night Circus in book form

I’m partway through the actual book The Night Circus now, after having played Failbetter’s intro game quite a bit. It’s a curious experience on two fronts. First, the book has a number of short passages written in second person present tense, describing “your” interactions with the circus — pieces that fit very well into game narration terms. It feels as though the book were tying into the game as well as vice versa. And second, because I encountered the game first, that experience has a sense of primacy. It’s pleasing and reassuring whenever I read something in the book that I recognize from the game, and I think, “oh, yeah, here’s the ice garden” or “finally I found the living statue.” The world of the Night Circus feels more… for lack of a better word, more fully-dimensional than fantasy worlds in books typically do, because the game has given me a sense of the spatial and tangible existence of the circus.

Which I guess is a roundabout way of saying that I feel like the game has actively added to my enjoyment of the book, and not just in the marketing sense of making me aware of the book in the first place (which is true also).

Balance of Powers on Kickstarter

Balance of Powers is a dark new alternate-history world from the team that wrote Perplex City. Follow the free-to-read story online, with eight chapters unfolding over eight weeks.

…Or better, sign up and receive bonus content in email, artifacts in your mailbox, or be invited to take part in live online events.

Balance of Powers is being launched on Kickstarter by Adrian Hon, Naomi Alderman, Andrea Phillips, and David Varela, a group that includes veterans of game and ARG design, live interactive events, and conventional fiction writing. The four of them were kind enough to answer a few of my questions about their new project — talking about pacing, storytelling as performance, and the narrative value of feelies.

Balance of Powers is set to unfold over eight weeks, one chapter a week. Can you talk a little about the function of time in your storytelling? How do you want the experience to differ from just sitting down and reading the story in one compressed session?

The action of the story itself takes place over much less than eight weeks – really more like eight days – so we’re absolutely not aiming to produce real-time storytelling. But there’s something deliciously Dickensian about enjoying a serialised story every week. It creates suspense. It allows time for the words to sink in and be analysed, either by the individual reader or between readers online. (We love a bit of speculation.)

The time between installments doesn’t just allow for reader speculation, either – it lets us peek at, and perhaps be influenced by, that speculation. The great thing about writing something online is that, unlike print materials, you can tweak at the last moment if you have a really fantastic idea. And it’ll allow us to drop in the other cool items – like our newspaper – between episodes, at a point in the story where they’ll have most impact.

The long timeline also gives people a chance to read at their own leisure without feeling that they’re being left behind. Having said that, we hope that the readers will be really looking forward to each week’s installment. TV execs talk about ‘appointment television.’ We want this to be ‘appointment reading’ because they’ll want to discuss and speculate about the story with their friends as soon as they’ve finished.

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