Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

The deadline for nominations is tomorrow (Sunday the 24th) at midnight Eastern Standard Time.

Emily Short has posted about a new short work, and I have decided to review it. It is short -– as in two minutes or less short -– so you may want to play first and then read this after.

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Link to website

This is a remake of a Spectrum game done in CYOA menu style. The remake has ports for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and the Gamepark GP2X (!).

In honor of this conversation thread, I bring forward two examples of emergent gameplay in IF that are not normally cited as such. I am defining emergence here as “allowing solutions to problems unanticipated by the programmer that come out of the complexity of the underlying system.”

Suspended by Michael Berlyn (1983)

When Suspended was in beta, Steve Meretzky (a tester at the time) solved
Suspended in 42 moves. I made him do it while I watched, so I know it was real.

(Original post by Mike Berlyn here.)

Suspended includes an overall “optimization puzzle” which reflects the number of casualties, and completion of the game is of a high enough complexity and variance that it can be called emergent gameplay.

The other thing that allowed emergence to happen was the player was allowed to “short-cut” and sacrifice robots for the sake of reaching the end state. This made alternate routes of solution a built-in capability of the system.

Moral: Optimization can cause emergence even in a normally non-emergent game.

Verb! by Neil deMause (1998)

The setup here is the only verb allowable is TAKE, and any new use of the verb TAKE scores a point. People scored much higher than the author thought possible, because the coding was generalized; all it did was check for valid uses of TAKE and that no use was repeated.

Moral: When wordplay is coded in a general way instead of hard-coded, complexity arises naturally.

Someone’s working on a remake of Melbourne House’s The Hobbit.

They are working in C++ rather than something modern like TADS, but I am supposing they are aiming for an authentic parser. The original is difficult to recommend because the response time is sluggish, so hopefully a remake would at least fix that issue. The more pressing concern is, will the emergent gameplay be preserved?

The Snowman was second place in the Text the Halls competition. My review is down below.

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This is a web-based CYOA game. It can be found online here. Review after the jump.

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This TADS 3 game could be thought of as Urban Conflict set as a romance in alternate-universe World War 1. Review after the jump.

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The contest is over.

The top three are
1. Snowblind Aces by C.E.J. Pacian
2. The Snowman by Caio Miranda
3. TIGSaga by various (Terry, Kinten, Akhel, Xander, Haowan, Shinygerbil, and #tigIRC)

I plan to put up reviews for these three games (and maybe a few others from the competition) over the next few days.

2007 ended with a flurry of activity, with the French IF-Comp launching and two new games. (The Text the Halls contest also hasn’t closed yet.)

2007 was quite a year for theory: we saw two new IF dissertations and new blogs. While I don’t see any more dissertations coming down the pipeline, I’m hoping more pieces like Dennis Jerz’s brilliant article on Adventure surface in journals.

For the coming year, Textfyre should be coming out with their first game. While there is understandable trepidation at commercial interests, I find the possibility of there once again being professional IF writers too thrilling to ignore.

It’s much harder to predict freeware releases, but based on commentary in various Internet forums I predict this year we’ll see more new authors brought in the fold by Inform 7.

Also, the trend of more non-English IF will undoubtedly continue. I’m hopeful translations will also start to appear for the best works.

Out of sheer wishful thinking I will also predict a major tutorial for TADS 3 will come out, giving it a major boost. I also predict (once again based on nothing at all but hope) that a major multimedia Hugo game like Future Boy! will come out and hit outlets like Adventure Gamers.

I’m hoping more “mainstream” outlets like Play This Thing!, TIGSource and JayIsGames continue to support IF (although it seems from the JayIsGames awards list this year they didn’t have much exposure outside of the Lovecraft Project and IF Comp).

Personal goals:

• Finish this thing. Nudges from the peanut gallery may help.
• I will resume posts on Nick’s thesis, and I have general theory posts of my own to make (“Hotel Dusk: player as conscience” and “Mutual exclusivity in puzzles” are in my draft queue).
• At some point this year I may run a 4th Interactive Fiction Excerpt Hunt.
• I should brush off my old paper for that Theory Book; my paper is now likely hopelessly outdated and it lacked a proper conclusion anyway.

Let me slip in something extra and say I have something new coming out on the 10th of January.