Utensils in a Landscape, Chris Edwards, Stray Dog Editions, Vagabond Press, 2001

Searching for something suitably disruptive in the landscape of Australia, where Jacket is rooted, I found this. The first poem is made from sometimes misquoted bits of The Book of Common Prayer and Burroughs’s “The Cut-Up Method …” With technical and abstract language, folklore, Mallarmé, and guy-on-guy action, the book offers all sorts of utensil viewing. And later, in “but me,” this reflection:

My project, which began in
one room of the abyss, soon spread toward a perimeter
you can imagine, should you be inclined to do so.

I usually prefer projects in which sources are altered sparingly and systematically – Craig Dworkin’s “Legion” is a brilliant example. These approximate centos work, though. The invented language weaves with the appropriated, making it seem that Edwards could have done it all with his pen – or all with his scissors.

After a busy week, I’m just now getting to try a few of the Jay Is Games IF competition games. For those who aren’t familiar with it, this is a JIG-hosted IF competition on the theme of Escape; the games are short and all playable online, and there are some substantial prizes. It looks like this intrigued some people who aren’t IF veterans (and some who are) to contribute games. So, very cool.

I probably won’t get to all of them during the play period, but I thought I’d try out a few. Brief, non-spoilery thoughts on “Fragile Shells,” “I Expect You To Die,” and “Golden Shadow” follow the cut; if you’re interested in more, longer, and much funnier reviews, Jenni Polodna is also covering this comp, as is Matt W.blah

Fragile Shells by Stephen Granade: I beta-tested this, so I’m biased, but I liked it quite a bit. It’s puzzlicious; there’s a story there, but not a lot of story. I suspect this comp will trend that way in general.

The setting is nifty. We have a lot of generic space craft from the far future popping up in IF, and looking basically like office buildings with starry backgrounds out the windows. Fragile Shells’ setting is much more plausible in the nearish future, and therefore much more unlike everyday experience.

I Expect You To Die by Anthony Schuster: I like the premise, which is that you’ve been captured by a Bond-esque villain who means to kill you with a bunch of crazy traps rather than shooting you in the head.

That said, the puzzles feel a bit on the arbitrary side, at least in the opening — I’m not sure why certain actions turn out to save me. That accurately replicates my flash escape game experiences, namely that you click a lot of things until you find the thing to click on that lets you progress, but it’s not always possible to tell in advance why something is a good idea to do. (I had this problem even with the demo screens of Machinarium, which is why unlike everyone else in the universe I did not play it.) There are also some rough spots in the implementation.

I didn’t finish it myself, but it may well appeal to the target audience. Probably would have appealed more to me had I been in a different sort of mood, in fact.

Also, it’s interesting to play because it really feels as though the author is coming in from a different medium with different expectations, so there are a lot of ways in which it is inventive but not at all within standard IF practice. For instance, a fairly small space is divided up into separate “rooms” in order to gate the player’s progress, in a way that is not very simulation-like.

Golden Shadow by The Technomancer: Very short, with simple puzzles and a surreal concept. There are a handful of technical glitches — I noticed a couple of typos/misspellings, and one or two actions that didn’t return any response at all — but overall it was reasonably solid. There’s some business about the various puzzles being metaphorical representations of psychological state, but this doesn’t affect the actual gameplay terribly much.

What do American Idol, lonelygirl15, and Invisible Children have in common?

They were all instituted to function based off of mass audience interactions and they all deliver strong and dramatically-compelling narratives.  The idea of interactive preexists video games and virtual worlds, and it’s alway refreshing to go back and examine new ways that interactivity plays out in our world today.

American Idol is the most “house-hold” of the three, mostly because it is most accessible, simple, and easy to digest.  The TV show draws you into the parallel narratives of all the contestants on the show.  Of course, for a contest where individuals have the opportunity to go against the odds in order to live their greatest dream, American Idol pulls on some core intrinsic desires among all people.  Overall, it benefits from this need to satiate a desire for the dramatically compelling and perhaps, affect the outcome of something that matters to somebody.  Maybe to abstract even further, it’s to give people a sense of being part of something important or interesting (albeit, there’s not a whole lot of agency as an audience to American Idol).

Although lonelygirl15 is presented under the guise of some sort of reality entertainment, it’s actually an almost fully-scripted experience.  I had the privilege to come across it right before it was revealed to be staged by filmmakers.  On youtube, I watched the vlogs of a sheltered religious girl, both deep and yet simple, share about her struggles with emerging adulthood.  The vlogs progress to reveal that she is in some sort of dangerous cult and in preparation to be a human sacrifice.  Her and her friends go against the odds, break away from what is expected of them to change the world.

The narrative, for the first series, was absolutely compelling, creative, and unexpected.  As these “actors” performed on their youtube channels, they also interacted with non-actor viewers in, what would be, typical internet conversation, as if the characters were real people.  Throughout the series, other “viewers” would fall into the lime-light only to be revealed as other staged characters for the narrative.  The lines between real and fabricated were able to be blurred by the power and culture around web 2.0.

In comparison, longelygirl15 wins for having far more agency (and creativity).  American Idol, on the other hand, unifies the convergent stories of real life to form one emergently cohesive experience, as opposed to having it made up. Still, lonelygirl15 is an immersive space where anybody can interact as themselves or their own creation to fit the “reality” of the storyworld.  User created content is commonly integrated and acknowledged by the staged actors, but also expected and accepted as expansions of the world.  Thus, the lonelygirl15 community has created a universe where anyone can participate in this psuedo-reality youtube drama.

I believe that the most unlikely-acknowledged interactive experience is that of Invisible Children.  Three film-makers go to Uganda to discover a story that’s changed the world and so many lives.  I have a few friends who were roadies for the Invisible Children non-profit that emerged from the film, and their stories are more captivating than any reality TV show or modern fiction.  The film-makers are indeed great storytellers, but they’ve given over authorial control and engineered their experience to be driven by interactivity.  On one level, anyone can volunteer and be a prominent acting agent.  In so many other ways, events and ideas are employed to gather as much participation as possible, all the while authoring the story as it unfolds.  Invisible Children is the archetypal example of a modern-day interactive documentary that continues to make itself as a result of its “fan-base,” showing us that changing the world in observable and distinct ways is perhaps the greatest of all agency.

The overly-analytical side of me believes that mass media has disillusioned us to feel things only when they are made up.  The truth is: our imagination is based off of those possibilities and even the desire to experience something so powerful for ourselves.  Mass media makes it so easy that we forget to pay attention to those things in our own lives, and the agency we have in the world around us, such as what the Invisible Children narrative space is trying to do.  Our creative media should be representing the reverence we have for the real things in our lives, not the replacement, because we are, in fact, able to live out the things that captivate us about fiction in our real lives.  I believe that the beauty of fabricated experiences speak to us, because of how possible those situations actually are.

So, if your life is boring and you need to be entertained, why not join and be entertained by the meaningful narrative that is around you?

I’m back from a nice slice of summer in Sydney, Australia. I spoke at the University of New South Wales when I was there, gave two talks at the Powerhouse Museum in connection with their “The 80s Are Back” exhibit, and was one of the three judges of the Global Game Jam Sydney. The people who participated in that event did some incredible work – congratulations to all. Here’s some video of me, at the Powerhouse Museum, on interactive fiction and on indie and 80s videogames.

Mauricio Giraldo Arteaga has completed a beta version of his extensive and well-designed Videogame Timeline. He’s also written a blog post about the project, in Spanish. The timeline contains people, technologies, businesses, platforms, accessories, and games and has a mode that shows connections between these items.

Heather Logas only has through tomorrow to make the crowdsourced funding goal for her indie storygame — or all the funding pledged so far is lost. Heather describes the game by saying:

Remember those Choose your own Adventure books you used to love as a kid? The game is a bit like that, if it was the fevered brain child of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and H.P Lovecraft.

Like a number of you, I’ve talked with Heather at places like GDC (she also worked with Michael at GA Tech way back when). You may have also played games she worked on at places like Telltale. I’d love to see what she’ll create if the funding comes through. She’s more than 2/3 of the way there, as of this writing, with close to 100 backers. So, if you can, take a moment to make a pledge!

At UC Santa Cruz, the Digital Arts and New Media MFA program is organized around collaborative research groups. For those applying this year (deadline February 15th) I’ll be leading a group on the theme “Playable Fictions.” This is a great way for writers, game designers, and related sorts of digital media artists to get an MFA while working in the midst of groups dedicated to pushing the boundaries of this field: the EIS lab in particular and also the larger interdisciplinary DANM cohort. We have a great list of faculty to work with here, including Michael Mateas, Warren Sack, Sharon Daniel, Marilyn Walker, Jim Whitehead, Arnav Jhala, yours truly (Noah Wardrip-Fruin), and many more. While most EIS members are CS PhD students, DANM has been a fruitful entry point for artists like Aaron Reed and Mike Treanor. If you’re interested, feel free to contact me with questions about the work we do and/or contact DANM for admissions questions.

After a hiatus of some months (sorry about that), the extensions page has once again been updated, and is under new management. To submit new materials to the volunteers maintaining the site, please send your extensions to i7extensions@smallwhitehouse.org.

Recently on the intfiction forum someone asked me how to code puzzles in I7. I found that a bit of a stumper, but I cobbled something together, and he liked the answer enough that he suggested I post the reply more permanently on my blog. So I’m doing that, with a little bit of editing and fleshing out.

There are some tutorials out there on designing puzzles — like, working out what makes a good or bad one. But tutorials for coding puzzles? Not exactly, because that’s too broad a question: a puzzle could involve anything in the world model. So it’s hard to give advice about “how to code a puzzle” without knowing what the puzzle is that you want to code.

But let me try to break it down a little conceptually.

Typically in IF a puzzle involves something that the player wants to get, reach, or achieve — some action he wants to do — but can’t, until he’s fulfilled some previous requirement. So it might be a door he can’t open, a room he can’t go into, a trophy he can’t take, a woman he can’t dance with. But all these things are tied up with some action that the player might type into the game, for which he should get refusals until he tries under the correct circumstances.

That means that to code the puzzle, we need to keep track of some information:

– has the player fulfilled the requirement for doing the puzzle-solving action? E.g., is he carrying the key that opens the door? Is the tall lady carrying the rose that the player is supposed to give her before dancing with her? That sort of thing.

– has the puzzle already been solved once? (If we’re keeping score, we need to know this for scoring purposes so that we don’t give the player more points each time he opens the same locked door, for instance.) We might keep track of this with a special attribute — like “The tall lady can be ready to dance or finished dancing.” and then set that attribute from “ready to dance” to “finished dancing” when the player manages to dance with her.

Now we need action rules. We need to put a restriction on the action the player is trying to do, until the requirement is fulfilled. In Inform, that might mean writing rules like

Instead of dancing with the tall lady when the tall lady does not carry the rose:
say "The lady doesn't seem at all interested. Perhaps you'll need to get her attention with a token of your admiration first."

And of course we also need a rule to say what happens when the player succeeds:

Instead of dancing with the tall lady when the tall lady carries the rose:
if the tall lady is ready to dance:
say "She is delighted to dance with you!";
award five points.
now the tall lady is finished dancing;
otherwise:
say "She has already danced enough for the evening."

Notice that this rule will only occur when the player has achieved the prerequisite (handing over the rose somehow); then it will check to see whether the puzzle is previously unsolved (if she’s “ready to dance”). If so, it awards the points and describes the success case, and marks the lady as “finished dancing”. The next time the player tries the same thing, we’ll instead get the refusal message (“She has already danced enough…”) and no more points will be awarded in the future.

There are many much more complicated ways to code puzzles depending on the world model features involved, but it usually comes back to the same concepts:

– check whether the player is *allowed* to do the action that completes the puzzle
– check whether this is the first time he’s doing so, if you’re tracking points or have a puzzle that can’t be repeated
– if this is a valid solution attempt, print the message describing success and give whatever rewards the player has earned (such as raised score, new objects to play with, etc)
– if it’s not a valid attempt, print a message that gives the player an indication of why things failed
– (if appropriate) flag that the puzzle is done.

Something the original post doesn’t go into is the difference between solutions that trigger on a player’s action (which is most of them, hence the simplification) and solutions that trigger on world state.

What does that mean? Well, one way to detect the solution to a puzzle is to do what this post describes, and have a rule that happens when the player tries an action that should succeed because he’s done the right prerequisite actions.

But sometimes, especially if you have multiple solutions to a puzzle that’s about manipulating a complicated simulation, you instead want your rule not to be about how the player did whatever he did, but about what state the world is now in. For instance, let’s suppose we’ve got a puzzle where the player needs to balance a balance beam.

Using an action-based approach to recognizing the solution gets us a certain distance, and we can make this pretty general with a rule like this:

After putting something on the right pan or putting something on the left pan:
if the total weight of the right pan is the total weight of the left pan: (stuff that happens when the puzzle is solved)

Buuut what if we have such a sophisticated simulation that the pans can come into balance in other ways? What if we can throw things at the pans? Ask NPCs to put things on them? Put a block of ice on there and wait for it to melt just to the right weight?

Now a better way to recognize the solution is to process actions normally, but then check on the world state every turn and see whether the beams are balanced.

Every turn:
if the total weight of the right pan is the total weight of the left pan: (stuff)

The way Inform works, this will happen after the action’s outcome is described to the player, so you’d get output like

>WAIT
The ice melts a bit more.

The scales come into balance! Slowly, by ancient mechanisms, the golden door creaks open.

This is an advanced technique, relatively speaking — in the vast majority of cases, you can safely tie your puzzle solution to action rules. But it’s worth mentioning because a puzzle based on a good simulation model can be very satisfying to players, because it can often be solved in many different but equally logical ways.

EIS PhD student Teale Fristoe spent last summer at Microsoft Research working on Kodu, the exciting new platform for game creation. Now we’re developing a proposal to extend Kodu with support for deeper characters, social situations, and dynamic stories — providing the first high-level computational support for the kinds of games that research shows girls want to create. We’re looking for your input!

Specifically, we’re seeking seed funding through the HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition. They’ve just opened the first phase of the competition, which involves public comments on very short (300 word) summaries of the ideas. There are hundreds of them. If you comment on our proposal now you can help us make it better — and also help it stand out from the crowd.

In our director Mary Flanagan’s home state (coincidentally also home to D&D creator Gary Gygax and GenCon), Dungeons & Dragons is not allowed to be played in prison. In a recent New York Times article, prison officials were noted as saying that Dungeons & Dragons could “foster an inmate’s obsession with escaping” his or her incarceration situation. Another great discussion on this situation by Professor Ilya Somin at George Mason at this legal blog.

It is difficult to imagine anything but D&D as a wholesome family activity after this commercial:

Perhaps this old classic Tom Hanks movie
Mazes and Monsters, may have had more influence than one would have imagined.

Back in 1993 I was tutoring my sister in algebra. Her quizzes and tests were always made of word problems with a running storyline involving many recurring places and characters. I tied the fate of the main characters to how well she did on the previous quiz, so a good performance brought them good fortune.

Unfortunately, one test she completely bombed, and, well, this is a transcription of the quiz she got next. (On behalf of my younger self, I apologize to the people of Argentina, the spirit of Goethe, and hypnotists. [Hi, Conrad.])

ETA: Didn’t anticipate this getting Metafiltered, so I put it someplace with a low bandwidth allowance, and that’s now used up. You can also see it cached and in non-PDF form here.blah

The second annual global game jam at UCSC is coming up, kicking off on Friday, January 29th. But even if you aren’t participating in the jam, you should still come by the Simularium at 4:00 pm on Friday to check out the great speakers we have lined up. This year, you’ll get to hear from:

Edmund McMillen (http://edmundm.com/), renown indie game designer

Kate Compton, EA/Maxis technical artist and avid indie game jammer

Alex Neuse, founder of local Santa Cruz game studio Gaijin Games (http://www.gaijingames.com/)

All of the talks should be great, so I hope you can make it!

This is a slightly self-regarding post about the status of various IF-related projects of mine, since people have been emailing to ask. Warning! It’s kind of boring!

Are you leaving IF now or something?

What? No. I’ve had a bunch of real-life stuff come up over the last six months, a combination of medical and employment issues. It looks like both of those things will resolve happily, but the fall was demanding physically and mentally. Even when I didn’t have other obligations and could afford to put some time into IF, I often had the energy and focus only for easy stuff (e.g., playing and reviewing comp games) and not harder or more fiddly stuff (maintenance, programming).

To the extent I’ve needed to revise my priorities, that’s taken the following forms:

I’m looking more at commercial gaming and writing more about it (and that’s proved entirely useful and necessary as I go through the interviewing process with various game industry folk).

I’m broadening the focus of this website and my own work to be about interactive storytelling in general, both by bringing the successful experiments in IF to the attention of other gamers and new media folk, and by paying attention to advances in other areas that might inform IF in turn.

What’s up with your participation in Inform 7?

I’m not monitoring RAIF, being Inform’s spokesperson there, or doing tech support questions these days. I recommend against emailing me unsolicited source code you’re having trouble with, unless it’s a focused bug report about an example or extension that I wrote. You’re better off going to RAIF or (perhaps more accessible and less prone to flamewars) the intfiction website for guidance. Jesse McGrew has taken over a lot of the spokesperson work, and tech support is now something that many RAIFers are competent to provide.

There is, nonetheless, quite a lot of I7 work to do that doesn’t take that form. I am still responsible for managing the examples and producing new ones for new features, consulting on the new feature list, helping to revise documentation, testing out versions of the program between public beta releases, etc., and I am not planning to leave behind that set of responsibilities.

Graham and I are also still very interested in feature suggestions. As always, the best way to reach us is via email (to Graham, though you can cc me if you wish). We find it most effective to answer this kind of thing in a batch, because we tend to accumulate suggestions from many sources on many topics. But we do always go through all the material we’ve received when creating the next consultation document (unless a suggestion was so transparently correct and easy to apply that we implemented it immediately instead).

Likewise: if you have a substantial project — a game or extension you’re writing, or, say, teaching or a presentation — that is held up due to the lack of a feature or the presence of a bug, you’re welcome to email about that as well — email me and cc Graham, because I’m the person who is likely to answer first. I am indeed busy these days, but requests concerning showstoppers on major projects are a high priority for me and I try to provide some prompt answer to them, even if all I can give is information about what to expect from future builds.

The more information you can give about why you need the feature/bug-fix, the more likely we’ll be able to accommodate you in some way; occasionally we can’t do exactly what the requester wants, but are able to offer an alternative fix. (Then again some things will just necessarily take a long time to do.)

What’s happening with the conversation library that went into Alabaster?

I don’t have a deadline for when that work is likely to be complete. How much time I have to give to that project, and how much I’m ultimately able to polish the tools for it, will depend hugely on how my employment options turn out over the next year. (There are promising possibilities, but I’m not sure how things will go, so I don’t want to discuss them yet.)

However, when that package gets finished, we do expect to include it with Inform 7 on the same basis as the other included extensions — something that would be automatically available to all users, mentioned in the main documentation, and supported through language updates. I would like it to be compatible with the framework extension Eric Eve has provided for things like implicit greetings, but it will provide its own set of rules for designing quips, etc.

If I have sufficient time and resources, I hope also to make available some of the visualization tools I’ve been working on to help authors see *how* the conversation is shaping up.

Whatever happened with the Theory Book?

The IF Theory book is on a semi-permanent hiatus, having never quite recovered its organizational direction since our original publishing plans fell through and various other issues came up. Again, this is dependent on how things go for me over the next year; it is possible I’ll have time to return to it. I do have a volunteer to help who knows a lot more than I do about the practical aspects of editing and type-setting a book. But there are no guarantees about this, and it’s lower priority than lots of other things. Many of the originally intended articles are available on line, which is a partial consolation.

I do apologize to the people who put work into the project that it has dragged out so long; at the same time, I’m very conscious that starting it up again would require a lot of reassessment of content, because IF has moved on very substantially since 2003 or so.

The iftheory website is broken — did you know that?

Yes. The original website for the theory book has been hacked to contain spam links to random junk sites.

This is not something I can fix. As far as we can tell, what happened is that the domain lapsed and was bought up by a spammer, who then reproduced the original page… but with spam links in it. Which is despicable, but I don’t have any real recourse. If I get the project up and running again, I’ll make a new website.

Are you going to rerelease Floatpoint?

At some point, I’d like to rewrite Floatpoint, taking on board all the criticism it received on version 1 and making it substantially longer and with more conversation. That’s something I’m starting to have the tools for as the conversation library becomes more robust.

Again, though, time is a concern, and this is a lower priority for me than assorted other work, including both new WIPs and the conversation library itself.