The problem is that gamers enjoy pushing limits ....

What's funny is that game designers invite that sort of behavior by implementing responses to it. For instance, how many interactive fiction games implement a witty response to the XYZZY command, even though there is naturally no place or reason for using it? If no game other than Colossal Cave had a response to that command, nobody would be tempted to give it a try. And if there is a response implemented for that command, how many other interesting goodies like that might there be to discover? How many of us who played the original Warcraft sat there clicking repeatedly on their individual units to see how many different annoyed responses it would elicit? It's a form of exploration, I suppose.

Granted, this is a bit different than the topic of role-playing, but I think the same principle applies. Still, in the situation of role-playing, accounting for different types of behavior, even bizarre behavior, can actually work to the game's advantage.

The explicit response mechanic is something that seems relegated to a few types of games; the relation between 'getting into a game' and how a designer designs that game, however, is not. It's an interesting problem to muse on — especially since once a game is released to the public, there's no way to control how players are actually playing it.

Playing the Protagonist Part, Partly [Monk's Brew]

Nick Montfort and Andrew Stern have published the text of their very interesting speech given at the Electronic Literature Organization "Visionary Landscapes" conference; the subject is ELIZA, the 1966 parody of a Rogerian therapist — more correctly, it's where the next ELIZA-like program (in terms of influence) is going to come from and what it may look like. It's an interesting piece, coming from the perspective of "bigger and flashier is not always better":

We begin by assuming that computation and literary art are inherently very powerful. That is, we assume it is not essential to have recourse to networked communication, massive knowledge bases, or even graphics capabilities to develop a provocative, affecting project that inquires about important issues. In thinking about a such a project, we are seeking an antidote to today’s ever larger and complex computer applications — sixty-hour game quests within expansive virtual worlds, mashups of intricate Web technologies, and massively feature-bloated operating systems. A small yet powerful and surprising computer program would be both pleasurable and provocative because of its simplicity and clean concept. So we simply assume, rather than trying to prove, that while more elaborate systems may be interesting in some ways, a new system on the scale of Eliza can still have the sort of broad impact today that Weizenbaum’s computer character did more than forty years ago. Given that, we ask, what specific qualities would this system have?

It's worth a read through if you're interested in this sort of stuff (there's a nice, concise discussion of other systems that have had a big impact, from Tetris to SimCity to Google); Mark Marino has already posted a response.

Provocation by Program: Imagining a Next-Revolution Eliza [GrandTextAuto]

Emily Short has a thought provoking post over on her blog regarding interactive fiction for the "hard-casual" crowd. Can the modern crop of interactive fiction appeal to that segment of the market that isn't the traditional IF crowd, nor the "match three" type of casual player, nor the hardcore audience? Sounds sort of like a contradiction of terms, since IF is pretty niche to begin with, but she lays out her reasoning really well. On why the hard casual market:

In the original context, this referred to the idea of a game made to AAA production values, but paced for a busier lifestyle. In practice, what I’m seeing is something less dramatic: increased attention to ambitious indie games that are promoted on some casual game review sites but that go beyond the average/obvious.

This is a gaming audience ideal for IF to target. (This is not to say that IF shouldn’t also target readers, students, and other niches that we’ve sometimes identified. But in the gaming landscape, I think there’s more of an identifiable market than there has been for a long time.)

Yes? No? Maybe? There's a lot of creative IF floating around right now, and I think if it wound up at the right places (like JayIsGames as she mentioned), it could open up a whole new audience. The question is - do the creators want that bigger audience?

IF for the hard-casual gamer? [Emily Short]

A sequel seemed like such a sure thing, they mentioned it in the game's ending. In the final scene, the Heart of Gold sets down on Magrathea and you exit the ship. "Slowly, nervously, you step downwards, the cold thin air rasping in your lungs. You set one single foot on the ancient dust — and almost instantly the most incredible adventure starts which you'll have to buy the next game to find out about."

Milliways: Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [Waxy]

... The genre has fallen from all commercial grace, and its overall popularity is a miniscule fraction of what it once was. Barely twenty years ago, at least one IF game sold one-million copies at price points of thirty dollars or more; today, the active community of IF players is reduced to a bare handful of thousands, despite the fact that its games' creators now give their work away for free. On the other hand, though, those remnants of IF's once prodigious fanbase who remain have largely shed the lure of retro-gaming nostalgia that has afflicted similar revivalist efforts in other genres and produced work of often amazing originality and quality. While there is plenty of detritus about, the top ten-percent or so of hobbyist IF of the past decade easily dwarfs that of the commercial era in terms of design, sophistication, and literary quality. That a relatively small group of amateurs has been capable of surpassing the work of well-funded companies not just once or twice but on a regular basis is remarkable. That they have taken IF in directions those companies never dreamed of is inspiring.

Let's Tell a Story Together [Jimmy Maher]

... What we get is maybe a story that's not so much the standard cliché about an AI that gets out of control, but instead about the idea that any AI created would necessarily be emotionally broken, because it would be constructed with killswitches, designed to be disposable, or at least crippled so that it could not threaten the more important human life. If the AI had any urge towards friendship or companionship, that urge would be stifled and perverted by the fact that those around it have absolved themselves ("ethicists agree...") in advance for killing it if necessary.

That's a sad and interesting story, but Portal stops short of completely telling it

She also critiques some aspects of gameplay. It's another take on a game we all know about from a different perspective.

Still Alive [Emily Short's Interactive Fiction]

Fear not though, IF arcade fans. A number of years ago a few key players in the IF community came together to create IF Arcade, a set of clever and well-written arcade-to-IF adaptations. Games represented include Centipede, Donkey Kong, Joust, and Pong.

An excerpt from Adam Cadre's excellent Pac-Man IF, after the jump.

Intersection The streets are all the same, dark alleys with glowing borders keeping the riff-raff like the Pac-Man away from the Elect and their pleasure palaces. Here two of them cross, paths stretching into the darkness in all four directions known to mankind.

"Need to get well," Pac-Man mutters, shivering. "I just need to get well."

There is a food dot here.

> eat dot
Pac-Man chokes down the food dot.

Many blogs have become books - from The Baghdad Blog to Belle de Jour. But Grand Text Auto is the first blog ever to become a gallery exhibition. It opens October 4th and runs through December 15th at UC Irvine's Beall Center for Art and Technology. The exhibition features the work of Grand Text Auto members Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, Andrew Stern, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and their collaborators.

Grand Text Auto is a blog about the potential of digital media, from literary websites to experimental computer games. At the exhibition, the blog members will put these ideas into practice, showing a variety of cutting edge works. Some use the latest in artificial intelligence technology, such as Mateas and Stern's interactive drama Façade — of which The New York Times says, "This is the future of video games." The Beall exhibition will feature the first public showing of a life-sized "augmented reality" version of Façade, created in collaboration with Georgia Tech's GVU Center. Virtual reality is also on display, as with Wardrip-Fruin's collaborative work Screen, a literary game played with 3D text — never seen before outside of a research lab and presented with support from UC San Diego's Center for Research in Computing and the Arts. On the other hand, some works in the exhibition use decidedly do-it-yourself techniques, such as Montfort and Rettberg's Implementation, an experimental novel distributed around the world on mailing labels. Others are quirky, such as Flanagan's [giantJoystick], a replica Atari 2600 joystick so large that two people must work together to play (this has its North American debut at the Beall show).

I'm hoping to head up in November to check it out.

Grand Opening [Grand Text Auto]

I think I will be able to sell hundreds of thousands of games in a year and we're going to expand into educational, subject-matter, library, and other markets and we will be the market leader in high quality text-based interactive educational entertainment.

I have to wonder how successful text-based games are going to be when aimed at a generation raised on CGI, but stranger things have happened (though it's certainly 'an eyebrow-raising prospect,' as GameSetWatch says). It's an interesting interview and an interesting concept - we'll see how it pans out in the future. Could it be that interactive fiction is no longer going to be the pet project of PhDs across the country? ... Though I really have a difficult time imagining this as a truly commercially viable concept.

Textfyre's Cornelson On An IF Resurgence [Gamasutra via GameSetWatch]

Noah's Screen, developed in collaboration with Josh Carroll, Robert Coover, Shawn Greenlee, Andrew McClain, and Ben ("Sascha") Shine will be there for you to experience in 3D splendor. Mary's [giantJoystick], a ten-foot-tall Atari joystick, will make its United States debut and provide massive multi-player fun.

Michael and Andrew will not only be showing their Façade - they will be providing us with an AR (augmented reality) version of this interactive drama. The exhibit will also include some Petz and Babyz (Andrew et al.), photos and stickers from Implementation (Scott & myself), some interactive fictions (me again), and the famously funny collaborative hypertext The Unknown (Scott et al.).

The exhibit will be opening on 4 October, 2007 and running through 15 December, so you SoCalers can mark your calendars - I'll be taking a break to head up to Irvine and check it out. The GTA post about their exhibit has lots of linkage so you can check out exactly what's going to be on display.

were in ur museum [Grand Text Auto]

In the name of science you are about to become a freak accident waiting to happen. His name is Dr. Doglin and you are the new volunteer at Preconstruction, his mysterious private clinic located inside a hotel. In a few seconds he will ask you to swallow a strange tablet and be hit by a very big truck. But first he would kindly like to ask you to practice in a wheelchair. Welcome to the clinically bizarre world of Hotel.

Hotel [via Grand Text Auto]

Here's some actual source code from the new system:

The warning sign is scenery in the Entrance Hall. The description of the warning sign is "You know the words by heart, having heard them first from your father, and then studied them yourself on many more recent occasions." The printing of the sign is "Those who seek to leave the castle depart at peril of their lives and souls, unless another servant be provided in exchange, or a fixed term of absence be granted by their master." Understand "old" or "familiar" as the sign

At first blush, that looks a lot easier to understand than the more standardly esoteric variety of source code. Still, once you get over the fact that you can understand it even without programming knowledge, it starts looking pretty clunky — it may be "natural language," but that doesn't change the fact that people just don't write like that. Longer blocks of source code are even more convolutedly phrased.

Ultimately, it's still pretty cool. Almost enough to make us write that IF game we always dreamed about, before discarding our ambitions because IF games suck.

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