Have added a “Mood Variations” extension to let authors mark up text to have varying effects depending on the mood of the person currently spoken to. It’s meant to be compatible with several approaches to conversation (and uses the same “current interlocutor” variable as Eric Eve’s conversation extensions). The “[set {mood}]” token then also lets you set the NPC’s current mood in the middle of other text.
Not a huge deal, really.
This particular item won’t come as news to anyone here, since I started with a review of an old-but-good piece, but I’m contributing reviews of IF to Greg Costikyan’s new indie and alternative game blog.
There’s some other cool and fun stuff to see over at PlayThisThing too. As it does pretty much everything but casual games, I’m hoping it’ll be a great game-a-day pairing with JayIsGames, where I get my casual fix.
I meant to play and review all the introcomp games this year, and then other aspects of life intervened. So I didn’t vote and didn’t write up comments on most of them.
However, there’s no reason not to post the comments I did make:
Three Princes: Argh, I can’t get into this one at all. I can’t figure out what to type, and there’s a woeful lack of responsiveness to lots of basic attempts to type on the keyboard.
Tin: This is kind of awesome. Admittedly, subversive re-tellings of classic stories are nothing new, but I took a certain sick pleasure in the way this particular one went. It was also among the most polished of the entries and felt solid throughout. That said, I’m not sure how well it meets the “do you want to play more?” criterion: I feel like the premise might not bear the weight of a full-length game. It makes for a great short diversion — the length of this introduction, e.g. — but I don’t know that I want to play another hour or two or five of it.
In a response to my recent comments on his work, Mark Bernstein writes:
I wasn’t actually talking about ate and hamartia, or not only about them: there’s a simple logistical contradiction that lies at the heart of IF. You’re the hero. You’re in a tight spot. Things seem hopeless.
>What do you do?
>Well, what would you do? What would James Bond do, or wily Ulysses? They’d do something brilliant, totally unexpected, something nobody would have thought of. They’d do the one perfect thing that only they could do to get out of this tight spot.
So, you rack your brains. And you come up with something incredibly clever, unexpected, and far-fetched. Something perfect! But I’m just a writer, not a hero: have I thought of your incredibly clever strategem? If I have, you’re deflated: it’s not heroic after all, it was just a puzzle and you’ve supplied the correct answer. A tough puzzle, maybe, but (obviously) the author was here before you.
And if I have not been here before, the game’s going to say, “I don’t understand.” So, heads you lose, and tailsyou lose.
I have several responses to this:
The other day I posted to Jay Is Games about the Commonplace Book Project games, and now there is a moderate-sized comment thread, in case you’re interested in reading some more reactions to Ecdysis, The Cellar, and Dead Cities. The thread also contains some hints about several of the chief puzzles. (And it appears that Dead Cities has even more possible outcomes than I realized myself.)
I’ve been saving these for last, because they’re really the juiciest: a couple of articles authored or co-authored by Mark Bernstein.
Bernstein is the founder of Eastgate Systems, a company promoting serious hypertext. They sell a small but — within the hypertext community — highly respected collection of hypertext fiction and nonfiction, at serious book prices: much of it runs from $25 to $45. And they produce and sell Storyspace, a tool for hypertext creation. This is a niche market: the major works are self-consciously literary or pedagogical, and I think it would be fair to say that IF in general is a more populist form. At the same time, hypertext is a more successful niche market than IF: how many of us are selling IF game files at $45 a pop? how many would feel ballsy enough to try? And, leaving aside the commercial, hypertext also gets studied more extensively by academia, taught in more new media courses, and generally considered more serious.
Some of this has to do with accidents of community — with the sorts of people who happened to be drawn into creating each kind of thing, and with the ways in which they framed and presented their finished products. But I also think the media favor different kinds of content, and it’s interesting to look at why.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 