Category: interactive fiction

IF Comp Reviews

In case you’re dying to check out some comp reviews, I’ll post here the places I know of that are posting them as we go along.

Philip Armstrong
Sam Kabo Ashwell
Renee Choba
Cobalt Nine
Riff Conner (Minimum Safe Distance)
Conrad Cook
Ben Dixon (Another Mr Lizard)
George Dorn
Elizabeth (runnerchild)
Shane Fitzgerald-Gale
Jeremy Freese
Frozen Isles Productions (warning! short reviews all in a single post, without spoiler cuts)
Victor Gijsbers
N. B. Horvath (all in one long uncut post)
Christopher Huang
Denis Klotz
Amanda Lange
Yoon Ha Lee
Juhana Leinonen (Nitku)
Michael Martin
memegarden
Rob Menke (grid of reviews but nothing actually posted yet)
Wesley Osam (Super Doomed Planet)
George Penrose
Jenni Polodna (Pissy Little Sausages)
Proactive Apathy
Rhian (Blasting Requires Dynamite)
rxpi
George Shannon (newlin)
Dan Shiovitz
Mike Snyder
Michael Neal Tenuis
Mark J. Tilford (ralphmerridew)
Matt Weiner
Jake Wildstrom
WinterIceCrystal (video reviews)

Russian forum reviews in Russian and via Google translate
Octopus Overlord reviews (posted to a forum, no spoiler cuts or space)

See also: reviews broken down by game, on ifwiki.

IF Comp 2009: Gleaming the Verb

GleamingAs 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.

I’m also pursuing an approach I came up with last year: I’m playing and reviewing games that have listed beta-testers, and skipping those that don’t. Last year 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. 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.

So without further ado, “Gleaming the Verb.”

You too can play it if you download the comp games, or even try it online.

Continue reading “IF Comp 2009: Gleaming the Verb”

It’s IF Comp time!

And you know what that means. I’m setting this blog back to summary-feed RSS so that I can post reviews as I go along without exporting spoilers to Planet-IF. But I encourage you all to check out the competition too. And congratulations to all the authors, and thanks to Stephen Granade and his technical supporters in putting the comp together for another year. I’m looking forward to playing through this batch.

Drama Management with Anchorhead-based Test Case

Manu Sharma, Santi Ontañón, Manish Mehta, and Ashwin Ram are publishing some research into drama management using a simplified version of Anchorhead (with a choose-your-own-adventure interface rather than a text parser).

The full paper is worth a read (though fairly technical), but the gist is that they proceeded by taking a series of cases from players, determining which players liked which subplots. They then designed a drama manager that would compare the current player’s behavior against its cases, determine which subplots this player was likely to be most interested in, and hint the player in the direction of those subplots. The result appears to be a better experience especially for non-gamers, though some players (especially the more experienced ones) disliked being over-hinted in the direction of things they would enjoy.

When no confident predictions can be made from player predictions, the drama management model falls back on author-defined rules about what to present when.

I have a bunch of minor quibbles with particulars of the study, but found the conclusions intriguing.

Continue reading “Drama Management with Anchorhead-based Test Case”

Speaking of contests

“Citizens for Global Solutions” (about which, I confess, I knew essentially nothing until today) has posted a contest for interactive fiction dealing with global concerns and their solutions. (That includes human rights issues, global warming, nuclear proliferation, etc.) Their definition of interactive fiction is a bit different from mine, but it sounds as though text-based IF would count among the things they’re looking for.

There are cash prizes ($2000 first place, $1000 second place, $500 third place, plus a people’s choice award). Submissions are due November 17th.