I’m still pretty busy, but it is the holidays, so I have a *bit* of time: if there’s something you need me to help with, but you’ve been holding off emailing, now would be a good time.
I don’t promise to handle any and all requests, but, you know. Better now than two weeks from now.
The One Room Game Competition is a competition for games set in a single location; entries are allowed in English or Italian. This year there were five English entries, though one was written in Quest, so I skipped that. My (somewhat spoilery) reviews of the others follow:
The One-Room Game Competition is nearing the voting deadline on December 22 — but there is still time to participate! The games are generally short, and the voting requirement is that you vote on at least two games, so a couple of hours would do it.
I recommend a few things you could be playing (One Room Game Comp, C40 entries) and something you could be writing.
We’re not supposed to talk about the ORGC games during the judging period, so I won’t. Of the C40 games, so far I’ve only played with Cryptographer, which aside from being implemented on the z-machine is not vastly different from other cryptogram puzzles. Still, entertaining if you like that sort of thing, and I do.
Thesis: Many of the most memorable non-player characters in IF are ones the viewpoint character already knew before the game started.
Supporting positive evidence: Michael from Anchorhead; many or perhaps most of the characters in Robb Sherwin’s games; Miss Sierra and Princess Charlotte in Varicella.
Suggested explanation: it’s really hard to get to what is interesting about someone in the first few minutes or hours of acquaintance, so in games where we’re meeting everyone for the first time, a lot of energy has to be wasted on the building of trust and mutual figuring-out.
Also, the viewpoint character can’t make any general observations about the history and personality of other characters, because he hasn’t known them long enough — so the whole tool of direct exposition is off limits. Showing and not telling is good a lot of the time, but telling can be a valuable shortcut when you want to get to the interesting parts of a relationship.
on interactive fiction is now available. Jeremy was kind enough to let me read a draft a few weeks ago, and I found it quite enlightening. The introductory chapters, where he re-evaluates the timeline of IF and discusses the role of academic criticism in studying new media, I found pretty convincing.
More challenging is his argument that the term “player character” should be abolished entirely, on the grounds that it conflates several different kinds of relationship that the player can have with the characters in the game, and that using the terminology makes it unnecessarily hard for us to distinguish those different functions. I’m not sure whether this will change anyone’s long-held habits, but the argument is intriguing and worth a read.
Finally, Douglass offers several extended readings of specific works of IF, and especially a very long analysis of Andrew Pontious’ Rematch. This is great stuff, and I haven’t seen much IF criticism like it.
The book is not a small one and will take some time to go through, but it’s worth the attention. If at some point I come up for air from other tasks, I may address the substance of it at more length here — we’ll see.
In the mean time, congratulations to him for finishing, and thanks for making it available for everyone to read!
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 