So a little while ago I commented on the absence of cover art for IF games, and several people posted saying they didn’t feel like they had the skills/wherewithal to make art for their own games. I somewhat rashly suggested we should have some kind of cover art drive, whereby people could contribute art for other people’s games, and this met an initially positive response.
Category: community
A Plea to IF Authors (which I’ve probably made before)
It’s easier for interested third parties to promote your stuff outside the community (e.g., on indie game blogs) if your game has some cover art that can accompany the review/article. Screenshots of pure text are usable, but not as much fun, and it takes a little more time to set them up and crop them to be the right shape.
The cover art doesn’t have to be fancy, and it doesn’t have to have a picture. The title of the game in an appropriate font, with appropriate colors, still catches more attention than a) no picture or b) a screenshot of text.
Too Many Things! (Or: in which Emily takes a little vacation)
I get lots of email about IF. Lots. And lots. This is flattering. However: the amount of time it takes to get through my inbox is becoming unworkable, and I need to get some other things done. So I am taking a break from some of it; specifically:
If you have bug reports or feature requests for Inform 7, they should go to Graham. That’s where they always wind up anyway, so you’re not missing anything by sending them there.
If you have coding support questions about Inform 7, they should go to rec.arts.int-fiction or to the #I7 channel on ifMUD. These days there are a fair number of people who have written complete I7 games and are competent to help with most requests. (We will still be monitoring the extensions-development thread.)
If you have hint requests about one of my games, they should go to rec.games.int-fiction.
If you want to comment on a review I wrote about your game, or give feedback on one of my games, that is terrific. I’m still interested, but I don’t promise to answer immediately. Please don’t feel snubbed.
If you have an I7 extension, you should go ahead and send it to me; I don’t promise that service will be instant, but this is one area where I don’t have a great substitute for me, so I will try to make sure any new material gets posted at least once a week. Please give your email a sensible subject line, such as “[I7] New Extension”.
If you want beta-testing, design guidance, help tracking down the URL of something you think I posted 5 years ago, etc., this is not really the best time.
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.
IFDB meets Zoom: or, More Concentrated Awesome
The recently-launched IFDB has a browser-plug-in mechanism to enable Windows users a one-step “play now” button to download an interpreter and start playing many of the games on the IF archive.
That doesn’t mean that Mac users are out of luck, though. Andrew Hunter announced today a new version of the multi-format interpreter Zoom. With Zoom, you can
- Use the “Find more” button to go browse IFDB. If you already have selected a game file in your Zoom window, it will look up the same game at IFDB, allowing you to read reviews and find walkthroughs, or use IFDB’s recommendation features to locate other games similar to the one you’ve been playing.
- Download and start new games with a single click.
- Automatically search for new interpreter plug-ins for Zoom, increasing its compatibility with minimal user upkeep. This new version adds SCARE to the Zoom interpreter set, so that Zoom is now able to play z-code, Glulx, TADS 2 and 3, Hugo, and Adrift games.
Lots of fun and very elegant.
Further IF Comp reviews in far-off places
Just noticed a Russian IF Forum’s thread on IF Comp, alongside those already noted.
I can’t read Russian, but Babelfishing provides at least a general outline of what the reviewers thought, and gives their criticisms a curiously evocative quality. (One game is criticized for its “indistinct, greased finale”, another because the player found himself “breaking teeth against ferroconcrete pazly”.)
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 