Planet Interactive Fiction

Recent playing:

Gregory Weir’s How To Raise a Dragon. It’s cute, but I find it in every way less moving than Majesty of Colors. Partly that’s because in Majesty of Colors I always had a clear sense of what my actions were going to achieve, whereas I was repeatedly surprised in HTRaD — sometimes I accidentally went someplace I didn’t want to go or killed a spare human by mistake. I suppose if I replayed the game over and over I’d get a clear sense of what all the options meant and be able to approach it with some sense of agency, but it didn’t strike me as sufficiently rewarding in content to be worth that kind of time.

Trial version of Jack Toresal and the Secret Letter. If you’re curious what Textfyre has done, it’s worth checking out. Notice the cool map (flip to the back of the book).

My impression so far is that I am indeed not the target audience: the story signals strongly about the secret revelations to come, which I suspect is for the benefit of young readers. On the other hand, it is recognizably Mike Gentry writing: solid prose, and if it’s not as dark as Anchorhead or Little Blue Men, there are still entertainingly observed bits, especially in the behavior of the characters.

Fable II, as suggested on the Must Play list instead of the original Fable. Played this through to the end, though because of its breadth I’m sure there are vast tracts of the game that I didn’t see on a single playthrough. In general, I liked it pretty well: the combat was well designed, I never got too lost, and (most important, from my point of view) there were very few points where I felt I was being asked to do tedious grinding in order to get the next bit of story. I did get a little bored performing jobs for money, but fortunately there are other ways to earn income that turn up pretty quickly, so the jobs were not a big part of my play experience. The grinding and sense of wasting time is what usually makes me give up on an RPG, so in that respect I count Fable II as a big winner.

As storytelling, it was an interesting experiment: the design attempts to combine an open sandbox world (in which you can take on any ethical allegiance, marry anyone, set up various types of career, etc.) with a fairly linear main arc made up of several big quests. The end ties what you’ve done in the sandbox into the main story. It doesn’t quite work, but I think I can see what they were trying for. The problem is that the sandbox story always feels (at least to me) like it’s not nearly as important or real as the main arc, and because it’s so generic, any sandbox elements that get drawn into the main narrative are handled in the most cliche and melodramatic way imaginable. I’ll come back to this later because it deserves a full-length article.

One thing that did leap out at me, though: much has been made of the Fable series allowing the player to choose a good path and an evil path. I’ve seen the reviewers talking about the design choices here, but not that many talking about the actual content of the moral system, and to be honest, that bothered me a little.

Specifically: in several places Fable II appears to equate “good” with self-sacrificing, empathetic, principled action and “evil” with selfish, unsympathetic, and unprincipled action. The most “good” person you meet has strong non-violence principles (at least at first), while the most “bad” person is wholly and pragmatically out for himself. The gameplay consistently demonstrates that principles can be a bit of an encumbrance, but it still seems to frame them as desirable.

There’s a separate scale for corruption vs. purity, which might have added some nuance but in practice didn’t make a lot of sense to me. (You can get corruption points by eating meat or drinking alcohol, for instance; but this kind of lifestyle choice has almost no bearing on the main story or most of the gameplay.)

So in terms of aspects that affect the story meaningfully, the good/evil axis seems more to the point, and it seems very often to be handled in this one particular way.

This bothered me a bit, because it leaves out the whole question of judgment. Plenty of people believe strongly in a value or principle that turns out to be misguided; in the most extreme case this gives us terrorists. Moreover, principle and willingness to self-sacrifice aren’t necessarily the same thing. At several points the game seemed to come close to recognizing the complications. It hinted, for instance, that there were times when one might need to let someone suffer — contrary to one’s usual principles — in the short term, in order to accomplish one’s goals in the long run. But ultimately the simplicity of the good/evil axis hampered the game’s exploration of these issues because it provided a strong pressure on the player to choose an interesting extreme rather than the dull middle road, and (I suspect) a pressure on the designers not to punish “good” behavior too much.

As an exploration of morality, or even as a tool to allow the player to express his own belief structure, I think Fable would have been much more interesting had it not gone with “good” and “evil” but with more nuanced characteristics: principled vs. pragmatic, say, or self-preserving vs. self-sacrificing. And I would have left the lifestyle stuff out of it completely: the ability to make your character more corrupt and fatter by eating a meat pie, or purer by drinking water instead of beer, felt like a tedious public service announcement — one that had almost nothing to do with what the story of Fable II was about.

Finally, my review copy of the full version of Sims 3 has arrived. I’ve only played a couple of hours, and it’s clearly the sort of thing that takes a while to get rolling, but I do notice there’s a lot more complexity in the communication between characters than there was in the original Sims, and it seems to lead more directions than in the mobile version. So we’ll see how that goes.

We completed the initial publishing process last night and added the Intel Mac installation this morning (it’s 5am by me).

You can purchase Secret Letter, for $24.95, from the Textfyre.Com website.

Thanks goes out to Justine de Vesine for building the Mac installation package and to Thomas Lynge of Tenteo for all of his hard work and their partnership respectively.

We still have a lot of work to do. We’re just getting started.

I’m working on the last few bits here. The digital download process is complicated and I want to make sure we test it thoroughly. The installation packages are backed and ready to go. We’re almost there…

Everything is coming together…check out the new cover!

On the accretive PC in Varicella and Make It Good.

We’ve been at this for a few years now and I’ve gone through several artists and one art director in the process.

I originaly worked with a local artist, Erika Swanson and thought she had a strong feel for the Secret Letter story and characters. We hit a few snags in art direction and she moved on.

I then started working with an art director, Will Capellaro, and that was a fantastic experience, except for the part where he decided to move on and do other things. But before he left, he helped me find Goni Montes, a great artist that also had a strong feel for Secret Letter. Goni unfortunately found other work and moved on as well. His wife stepped in and drew the game map, but we were in dire need of someone to do the artwork for the release of the game.

I contacted Erika, wondering if she still felt some ownership for the work and she did. With the experience I gained working with Will and Goni, I was finally able to communicate properly with Erika and we’re now getting sketches ready for the release. Eventually, the game will have several dozen professional sketches.

I could have delayed releasing the games until we had stronger artwork, but my advisors suggested this was not really the core of the product and that we can always add artwork in patches and updates, which is what we’re planning to do.

The image I’ve shared of Jack looking down at Grubber’s Market done by Goni is great, but it will not appear in the final product.

We’re working like crazy to get everything ready for Friday. I just wanted to share this last bit of production news before we officially launch.

What follows is an overview of some ways I7 can be used to generate more writerly prose, especially in the context of room descriptions. It refers to several extensions; of these, “Complex Listing” and “Plurality” are bundled with Inform and part of the standard distribution, but “Room Description Control“, “Tailored Room Description“, “Introductions“, “Assorted Text Generation“, and “Automated Drawers” are available from the I7 extensions site.

Structuring information to provide narrative focus

Sorting for importance:

The beginning and the end of any set (a list, a sentence, a paragraph) are the positions of emphasis, which means that we can use them to direct the player’s attention. Postponing information to the end of a grouping can also have a humorous or surprising effect, if that information is incongruous with the tone of what’s gone before.

“Complex Listing” exists to help with this at the low level, since it lets the author create a table and sort it on whatever ordering principles he wants, and also create delimiters however he wants.

“Room Description Control” sets the order of paragraphs in a room description. (”Room Description Control” expects to be used with a set of “writing a paragraph about” rules that specify the actual form of the output. “Tailored Room Description” is one such set.) Something similar is possible with the default implementation of looking in Inform using “locale priority”. The use of locale priorities is exemplified in the example “Priority Lab”.

Unless we’re going for a humorous effect, we probably want to avoid lists like

You can see here a broken goldfish bowl, a gold ingot, a crumpled Snickers wrapper, the King of Sweden (naked), a deck of playing cards, two used toothpicks, President Obama, a swirling transdimensional vortex, and a cotton swab.

…because this totally fails to capture the way that a person looking at the room would prioritize objects.

In general, it’s a good idea to rescue human and other sentient characters from this kind of list entirely by giving them unique “writing a paragraph about” rules that change to reflect their attitudes and behavior: this makes them seem more like people and less like pieces of the furniture. Likewise, the swirling transdimensional vortex is probably a sufficiently surprising sight to deserve its own sentence, at least.

Even with that done, though, we might want to arrange the list to put the good stuff (say, the gold ingot) at the beginning; and for this purpose one might use “Complex Listing” to mark all treasures, or all items currently valuable to a puzzle, or whatever, with scores that indicate their priority, and then sort accordingly.

The same technique can be used to invert the order and put key objects at the end, if we prefer to make them appear as a surprise:

You can see here a broken goldfish bowl, a crumpled Snickers wrapper, a deck of playing cards, two used toothpicks, a cotton swab, and a gold ingot.

Not punchy enough? We could emphasize that ingot if we wanted:

Before printing the name of the gold ingot while listing nondescript items:
say "fantastically valuable ".

which would give us

You can see here a broken goldfish bowl, a crumpled Snickers wrapper, a deck of playing cards, two used toothpicks, a cotton swab, and a fantastically valuable gold ingot.

Or we could underline the afterthought joke:

You can see a broken goldfish bowl, a deck of cards, a crumpled Snickers wrapper, a cotton swab and two used toothpicks here.

Oh! And also a gold ingot.

In the standard Inform implementation, this could be achieved as shown in the “Priority Lab” example; in “Tailored Room Description”, by tweaking the paragraph for description of “deeply dull” items to save this item for last.

Grouping: Items that are related to one another are often best presented as a group or set:

You can see here a pair of playing cards (the Jack and the Queen), a poker chip, and a five-dollar bill.

The “grouping together” activity provides a hook for this for use with the standard Inform listwriter. “Complex Listing”, by contrast, does not deal with grouping together, because this would be incompatible with the other options it offers for ordering the list of objects precisely; but an author could set the order of objects in the listing table in such a way that like items were clustered in the list.

In the larger context of room descriptions, “writing a paragraph about” is an excellent way to create pairs and grouping, as in

Jack, Flo, and Patricia are huddled in urgently whispered conversation at the foot of the patient’s bed.

The documentation on “writing a paragraph about” in the Activities chapter demonstrates this.

Picturesque effects: Sometimes when I’m going for a strong visual image, I want to structure my description to emphasize something other than the objects as objects: the lighting in the room, the sensation of clutter, an oppressive mood. The key here usually is to use a writing a paragraph rule to draw together descriptions of objects that might otherwise be described separately.

For instance, the example “Reflections” suggests a way to combine shiny objects into their own paragraph:

The radiant light of the fallen torch reflects in the surfaces of the reflecting ball and Aladdin’s lamp.

You can also see a piece of chalk, a plumbline, an abacus and a canopic jar here.

That’s as far as the example goes because it’s trying to demonstrate simply, but we could extend the idea to get rid of the “You can also see” line entirely, and replace it with a single cohesive paragraph:

The radiant light of the fallen torch reflects in the surfaces of the reflecting ball and Aladdin’s lamp. The rest of your equipment – the piece of chalk, the plumbline, the abacus and the canopic jar – is barely distinguishable against the surrounding shadow.

or, if there’s only one dull thing on the ground,

The radiant light of the fallen torch reflects in the surfaces of Aladdin’s lamp and the reflecting ball. The piece of chalk, by contrast, is barely distinguishable against the surrounding shadow.

We’d do that simply by extending our rule for writing a paragraph about a shiny thing to include the other, not-so-shiny things as well; once these are mentioned in the paragraph they will not appear again in the “You can see…” line.

Rhetorical and poetic effects

Good human-generated prose demonstrates a sense of musicality. It avoids repetition where repetition would be dull, but relies on parallel constructions for shape. It offers the reader natural places to pause. It changes tempo.

This kind of thing is very very hard to teach to a computer — it’s not always that easy to teach to humans — so what follows is just the set of things I’ve found worth doing and accessible.

Ordering for rhythm: ancient rhetoricians were interested in lists — how they were ordered for best effect, and how the elements in them were set off. A particular favorite was the tricolon crescendo, in which three items are named, each longer and more impressive than the last.

That particular flourish really only works if you know the list elements in advance, but some of the concept remains applicable even in generated prose. Clustering elements in pairs and trios rather than flat lists (”a mango and an orange, a plum and an apple and a brown Bosc pear, …”) can improve the rhythm of a long list and contribute to a sense of richness or abundance.

This is not always easy to design in a way that will sound good and is probably a technique to be used sparingly, but one way to achieve it would be to use “Complex Listing” and to change the “rule for delimiting a list” to operate differently under some circumstances. Bronze demonstrates another variation, using just the “writing a paragraph about” activity, in the section on the Black Gallery.

One could even, if appropriate, mark objects with information about the syllabic length of their names, or their phonetic qualities, and assemble listing sub-groups depending on alliteration or rhyme. But it’s hard to imagine a circumstance where that wouldn’t simply be distracting unless the work was overall written in a poetic register.

Listing with alternative delimiters: “Complex Listing” allows the author to build lists with alternative delimiters, as for instance

semicolons: “Rome; Venice; Paris; Lourdes.”
periods: “Rome. Venice. Paris. Lourdes.”
dashes: “Rome — Venice — Paris — Lourdes.”

Several settings are built-in, but the set can be extended freely.

Rhetoricians also used to talk about asyndeton and polysyndeton, the omission or over-supply of connectives. “Complex Listing” supplies these options as well:

Asyndeton: “Rome, Venice, Paris, Lourdes.” or “Rome Venice Paris Lourdes.”
Polysyndeton: “Rome and Venice and Paris and Lourdes.”

Changing list delimiters alters the pace at which the player reads. Semi-colons create stronger pauses in the reading, as is especially appropriate if the listed items are not merely names but longer phrases. Asyndeton and polysyndeton are best used sparingly; polysyndeton produces a sometimes-comical galloping effect when read aloud, while asyndeton can move quickly but bring the reader up short at the end of the list because it lacks the usual marker that the list is about to end.

Variation: avoiding repetitive sentence structures to increase a sense of greater liveliness in the prose, so that (for instance) not every supporter’s contents are introduced with the sentence “On the [foo] are…”.

“Tailored Room Description” does this by default: it picks randomly from a set of template sentences for common situations, and since these sentences are stored in tables, the tables can be amended or extended freely by the author.

Parallel construction: repetition of a structure for emphatic effect, perhaps also omitting some words that would otherwise be repeated. For instance,

The place is a shambles. On the pedestal are a fig and a cookie; on the table, a cup, a plate, an apple core and a vase; on the bed, a laptop and a camera; and as for the shelf, it supports a book and a toothpick.

Notice that we don’t repeat “are” in the clauses about the table and the bed, because the verb is held over from the first clause in the sequence. This is really another fairly cheap trick using the writing a paragraph about rules. With Inform’s default behavior, it could be written so:


Include Plurality by Emily Short.
Definition: a room is cluttered:
if it contains less than two supporters:
no;
if every supporter supports at least two things:
yes;
no.
Definition: a supporter is grounded if it is in the location.
Rule for writing a paragraph about a grounded supporter when the location is cluttered:
say "The place is a shambles. ";
let N be the number of grounded supporters;
let index be 0;
repeat with item running through grounded supporters:
increase index by 1;
if index is 1:
say "On [the item] [is-are a list of things on the item]; ";
otherwise if index is N:
say "and as for [the item], [it-they] supports [a list of things on the item]. ";
otherwise:
say "on [the item], [a list of things on the item]; ";
say "[paragraph break]".


The implementation for use with “Tailored Room Description” would be very similar, except that we’d want also to check that our supporters were “mentionable”, to make sure we weren’t referring to any that we wanted to keep concealed.

Structuring the text to show awareness of what the player already knows

Another key indicator of human-like narration is that the description contains as much information as the reader needs, but no extra information; and that it shows an awareness of what has already been revealed.

Choice of articles: using “a” or “the” correctly depending on whether we’ve already mentioned a given item during the course of that same description.

This is not too difficult assuming that we’ve been consistently tracking what has been mentioned so far during a room description. “Tailored Room Description” does this by default, and provides the phrase

To say (N - a thing) as a possibly-known item:
if N is mentioned, say "[the N]";
otherwise say "[a N]".

to be invoked when we want to be sure to use the appropriate article-state.

Concision: describing the stand-out characteristics of a scene only. For instance:

There are doors west, south, and east. The east door is closed.

This is more compact and idiomatic than

There are doors west, south, and east. The west and south doors are open. The east door is closed.

…but because of the rules of conversational implication it conveys the same information to a typical speaker of English. On the other hand, after the player has manipulated the room a bit, we might want to change to

There are doors west, south, and east. All three are closed.

Or again

There are doors west, south, and east. The west door is open.

The extension “Assorted Text Generation” supplies some tools for generating appropriate sentences of the “All three are closed” variety. It provides the (somewhat unwieldy) phrase “selection of (description) conforming to the description (a second description)”. This tells Inform to look at all the elements of the first set, count how many of those also belong to the second set, and print a descriptive phrase, which might come out to

“None of them is…”/”Neither of them is…”
“All three of them are…”
“The black door is…”

and so on, depending on what needs to be specified under the current state of the world model. We would still need to apply another layer of logic to decide whether we want to list the open doors or the closed ones, but ATG spares the work of hand-producing the subsidiary text.

“Automated Drawers” applies these rules to a rather specialized domain, namely, describing which drawers in a multi-drawer set are open. It generates text such as

The large dresser has five drawers. The top drawer and the fourth drawer are closed.

There are two tiny inlaid drawers in the table. The left drawer is open.

This may not be of much use in all instances, but it provides some sample code that might be used as a reference for other similar prose problems.

Introductions of objects: adding contextual information about objects when they’re first seen, or when the narrator/player character is inclined to point out a particular fact to the player.

The “Introductions” extension exists to help with this, allowing the author to define some introduction text to be printed as part of the room description the first time the player encounters a specific object.

First impressions for a room: Another common case is that we want to have a sentence (or a paragraph) of the viewpoint character’s first impressions of a room, to be printed at the end of the room description. The example “Saint Eligius” in the manual shows how to do this; “Introductions” offers an even easier implementation by allowing the author to create introduction text for rooms as well as for objects within a room.

Segues: moving naturally from the description of one item into the description of the next when both are present. E.g.:

Fred is no favorite with Doctor Pearson, either, which is why you’re surprised to see the old man sitting serenely in the comfy chair, sipping a vodka gimlet.

…to appear only when we’ve just described Fred’s presence in the room.

“Introductions” provides a mechanism for defining segues of this kind, using a look-up table for the two objects (the one described last and the one described next). This is especially likely to be relevant for independently moving characters, where the NPCs might be in any of a number of configurations when the player first stumbles on them.

Where the initial room description is static and the order is known to the author in advance, it would be enough simply to write this text into the initial appearance of the items, as in

The initial appearance of Doctor Pearson is "[one of]Fred is no favorite with Doctor Pearson, either, which is why you're surprised to see the old man[or]Doctor Pearson is[stopping] sitting serenely in the comfy chair, sipping a vodka gimlet."

Elaboration and discovery: Sometimes it’s worth going the other direction from the introduction technique, and have additional information that only appears when the player looks more than once (in order to streamline their first impression of a room) or to reveal information that the player has discovered in the course of play.

This is something to do carefully and sparingly, because a player who realizes he’s missing vital information in every room unless he types LOOK twice is likely to get really annoyed about it. Nonetheless, I did this with Floatpoint in some of the opening rooms, because I wanted the player to have a sense of urgency and movement, and only to see his surroundings in more detail (with which, in any case, he didn’t have to interact to win) if he deliberately stopped to explore. Several players reported enjoying the effect, so it seems to have worked in that case.

Omitting objects from the initial description can be done easily using the concealment rules with “Tailored Room Description”; or by the expedient of leaving some items out of play and moving them into the room after the first look. Bronze demonstrates a related effect with the Bellroom section, where specific bells become present as the player finds out about them.

Recently read an interesting article by some Microsoft playtesters that suggests playtesting studies using 25-35 participants focusing on a single hour of gameplay, followed up with standardized surveys. The idea is that this could be done repeatedly during the course of a game’s development in order to drive gameplay improvements and then confirm that the changes have had the desired effect. This method contrasts with usability tests (an hour to two-hour interview one-on-one with testers, usually conducted with a group of eight or so) in that it is more statistically reliable though not so in-depth.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

Aaron Reed’s research on novice gameplayers of “Whom the Telling Changed” was extremely useful, especially his analysis of what errors players were most likely to make. Reducing these errors substantially is an obvious goal, and the whole IF community benefits when these problems are identified and the tools improved to address them. Presumably further testing might be of further use, especially if it’s focused on making tools and libraries that better handle areas that traditionally trip up new players: learning the interface and communicating with the parser.

In the short term, I’m concerned about the refinement of the conversation system. I’ve been fortunate in that there’s been a lot of feedback about Alabaster already, and that has suggested some directions of improvement — most especially in the form of hinting to the user about how to use abbreviations and to remind him that it’s not necessary to retype the whole command verbatim. But I’m interested to implement these improvements and then see what people make of the results.

In the longer term, a handful of adjustable-default games exist to allow people to explore their preferences about default IF behavior such as narration voice and tense, compass directions, etc. It might be interesting to have feedback on some of these from a larger group composed of IF novices.

What I imagine based on the description here is: get access to a computer lab (possibly at a college or university). Install some game on all of the lab computers, and set the games to keep transcripts automatically. Have roomful of participants play for roughly an hour, then fill in a survey about their experience (using some sort of ID tag to associate survey results with the specific transcripts, ideally).

So the question: what are other resources that describe best practices for playtesting projects? What sorts of pitfalls should one be watching out for? How much would each playtester need to be paid for an hour’s work to make it worthwhile participating? (I imagine if the players were themselves college students the answer might be $10-$20, but for adults…?) I realize I’m not trained in the field of usability testing and that there’s a huge amount to know — but given that hiring a consultant is probably not in my budget, is there an amateur approximation that would be of some use?

Have now had a chance to read more thoroughly the article I mentioned last post, Improving Computer Game Narrative Using Polti Ratios, by Richard Hall, Kirsty Baird.

The idea of the article is that the amount of drama in a game can be arithmetically calculated by counting the number of different Polti situations one can recognize in the game, then calibrating against the total number of events and the number of major and minor characters required to bring these events about. They further use these calculations to argue that games with no characters (”unembodied” games) may not reasonably be interpretable as stories. They propose that games in production should be improved by restructuring the story to include more Polti situations and to decrease the number of characters.

I’m in general pretty skeptical of anything that claims to be a recipe for narrative construction, but some are still more plausible than others. This one strikes me as especially doubtful, since the natural limit of the proposed equations is a story in which all 36 Polti situations are included in a tale with just two characters and a minimum of distinct events. A sense of fitness in the narrative development, thematic coherence, etc., do not enter into the equations.

The authors offer a sample revision of a game which does demonstrate concern for thematic coherence in that they eliminate a certain number of Polti situations at the outset, and they do arrange the game to convey a specific message; which looks like an acknowledgement that good narrative is characterized by something other than an optimization of their proposed equations, but they do not account for this theoretically. Nor does the article attempt to distinguish between narrative, story, and plot, though these terms are often treated as distinct in other game/narrative literature.

The most interesting part of the article to my mind is the part that suggests that story depends on how many situations the player recognizes:

We’re going to… initially propose the theory that if people can explain what is going on in terms of at least one of Polti’s units then the object that they are engaged with can be labelled a story.

Even this is a little vague, but let’s assume that by “people” we mean “the player”. This would suggest that a game’s emergent behavior begins to appear as emergent narrative iff the player can recognize the action as corresponding to some fundamental narrative element. But the article raises an important question at the end:

Do people in general (with an understanding of Polti’s units) detect exactly the same units in the same story?

This becomes even more pointed with something like The Sims in which the interaction of characters might be construed to be “about” any of a number of things: one can observe the apparent emotional content, but there’s no verbal dialogue. (This may become more complex and richer in Sims 3; I’ll come back to this point when I’ve had a chance to play the PC version rather than just the cut-down iPhone edition.)

Anyway: the point is that emergent behavior might be construed by the player as corresponding to different narrative elements depending on the kind of arc the player already thinks he’s building. (See: Alice and Kev.) On the other hand, the game has no way of “knowing” which situations the player is recognizing as narratively significant and thus no way of trying to produce episodes that follow (thematically or causally) on those the player has already recognized.

I wonder whether the process of narrative building would tend toward more coherent structures if the player’s interpretation were actually polled and then used to refine the character behavior model.

Whether Polti’s situations are remotely useful for this purpose, I’m not sure. But that’s a separate point.

In the presale announcement, I mentioned that the online demonstration versions of our software will require Silverlight, but I did not note that Silverlight is also installed as a part of the downloaded product.

Because of licensing issues with Silverlight 2.0, we are required to have the user download and install Silverlight from the Official Silverlight Website.

Silverlight 3.0 has an “install local” feature that we will implement in July and this will make the download and installation process seamless.

We will continue to look at other cross-platform technologies, including Adobe Air and potentially C++ with a cross-platform toolkit, but right now, the best technology for our developers has been Silverlight.

If anyone has already purchased our games and would prefer not to use Silverlight and would like a refund, please let me know and I will be happy to refund your purchase.