Author: emshortif

I7: New Version Up

For those who don’t follow rec.arts.int-fiction, there is a new release of Inform 7. In addition to fixing over a hundred bugs reported in the previous release, it provides dynamic string handling for the first time, and regular-expression matching.

This means that it’s possible to (for instance) run regular expressions on the player’s command to modify it before parsing; that it’s possible to make any “to say” phrase produce upper-, lower-, title-, or sentence-cased output; and that it’s easier to store and read back text files for use by Glulx.

There are other goodies too.

Art in Competition

One of the questions I semi-routinely get asked on interviews about interactive fiction is whether I think the annual IF Comp is a good thing for the community. I find the question hard to answer: the competition is so essential to the community identity that I have a hard time imagining it away, and besides, my opinion wouldn’t change anything; it’s like someone asking whether the human body would be more aesthetically appealing if it didn’t have a spine.

Nonetheless, I’m constantly conscious of the con arguments brought up a few times a year: that the competition siphons off attention from other games released at other times; that it produces a trend towards small games rather than epic works; that there is something wrong or unfair about the voting scheme (opinions vary on what that might be); and — my least favorite — that “real” artforms, like novels and paintings, are not produced primarily for competition, and that therefore competition is an unhealthy or unnatural context for artistic production, and we’d be better off without it. (Here we touch another of my pet peeves: people who make sweeping statements about “real” art are usually talking about [what they know about] commercialized artistic production in the early 21st century. I run into something similar with freshman mythology students: they’re often convinced that “originality” is the defining feature of good art, and so object to the fact that ancient authors reused mythological material. Their conceptions about literature have been shaped by market forces and copyright law in ways they don’t recognize. They also, if pressed, don’t have a very clear idea of what originality means, other than perhaps refraining from reusing the same plot and cast of characters from another work.)

Lately I’ve been reading two books that have helped clarify my visceral sense about this problem into something I can articulate.

Continue reading “Art in Competition”

Re. Floatpoint v2

Since several people have contacted me about this in the last couple of days (it seems to happen in waves): no, a new build of Floatpoint is not imminent. I realize it is annoying that the current build has a few bugs, one of them unsightly, and I agree it’s not entirely recommendable to new players in the current state. But I am, at this point, disinclined to release a build that only fixes those problems, because feedback indicates that what the game really needs is a rewrite: for best effect, it needs to be a four- to six-hour piece, featuring much more conversation with significant characters, more internal structure, better exploration of the back-story and justification of the central problem, and so on.

I am working towards this, in various ways, but it is not likely to be done in the near future; and (perhaps obviously) Inform 7 support also consumes a fair amount of my available time.

Anyway, I apologize to those who are vexed by this, but that is the state of affairs.