Hmmmmm. Coincidence?
http://www.intfiction.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=17277
(770pts Adventure: iPad port)
I have a Nexus 7 instead of an iPad. Ah well… anyway, these days especially with Parchment and Quixe available, I find Zcode ports wildly more useful than a game ported to any specific platform. I hope this person gets playtesters, although between it being ‘the oldest school’ of public domain game design but restricted to iPad the newest school of platform lock-in, I wouldn’t hold out a ton of hope.
I’m joining late. Apologies. I have read this amazing thread through and what to react to a few things. I can’t always attach a quote since there’s not necessarily a single piece of text that prompted me.
I’ll start with what I know and hope the parallels are clear: Graphic Design.
New people like me work on screens, use projectors, arduinos, websites and other wizzbang things. Do something with an X-Box kinect and instead of evaluating the content of the piece (and how the kinect contributed to that) there’s often a comment: “Oh, you wave your hands about and things move - I’ve seen that before”… then the commentator goes back to cooing over content expressed in coloured chemicals affixed to rectangular sheets of dead trees (ink on paper is over a 1000 years old).
The thing I’m trying to raise is that there is a form of originality that is purely about experimenting with media… those can only claim fun while they remain a novelty. Once the media itself loses novelty then originality becomes about the content. This isn’t a binary - there is always an interplay where media should enhance content.
Now, a neat thing happens if you can manage a mindleap to generify (make generic) what happened with media+novelty into any “known structure”. ie1. Narrative; Mills and Boons Romance novels aren’t going to win awards for novel narratives but they are fun to their audience.
ie2. Song structure. Pop music is unlikely to win awards for novel experimentation of song structure but they are damn catchy!
There’s a tendency for the critic to focus on novelty. That’s great; to them their connoisseur like tastes equate novelty with fun. Not so the rest of us heathens.
This is an on-going debate that happens in creative disciplines though I see it more in media-studies. There is a real tension between the critics and the practitioners. I get the feeling that criticism is a path of lesser resistance in usual academic structures; It’s easier to criticise than create. I love that that tension between critics and creatives exists but I don’t like it when one or the other becomes too dominant.
A side point on the rise of gaming critics; I see this as an inevitability given how large gaming has become. Like any feedback use it how you will… including liberal application of ignore.
[quote=“Laroquod, post:25, topic:105”]
People who believe ‘games don’t need to be fun anymore’ will make boring crap that you are supposed to like anyway because to be seen not liking it would make you a Nazi or a misogynist or something. So why bother to make it fun: they can try for players out of guilt instead.[/quote]
I don’t mind the use of games for artistic self-expression. I’ve seen digital story-telling (and now I guess Twine) used as a media for art therapy. But I’m with you, I don’t happen to particularly like “angst” art. I can celebrate the growth/healing journey the artist took without having to like the outcome. It’s a bit like awarding “Most Improved” vs “Best in Class”, encouragement/relative achievement vs absolute achievement.
As for the “you don’t like it because you’re a misogynist…”; if they’re really such great mind-readers might I suggest a lucrative career in poker. The money they win they can then apply to reshape the world to their liking.
I fell afoul of the “not-fun” thing in my IFCOMP entry; “The Entropy Cage”. I wanted to replicate the feeling of a computer tech out of their depth. I knew that was going to be niche. It turned some people liked that aspect of the game (you feel my pain man) and tons of people didn’t - fine they weren’t my audience. Actually, I was hoping to perform better on the Golden Banana of Discord.
I did try an ameliorate that pain by keeping the “I press buttons and can’t see the story move” sequence fairly short - at least within some kind of tolerance.
+1. I take a pluralist approach to things: I love that people make things that won’t appeal to me but with that comes a mutual expectation that I’m left to my preferences. There are situations, such as classrooms, where you want exposure to a wider range things with the risk of many you might not like. But my leisure time is not such a situation.
I love the OP essay. It does a great job of explaining the significance of “Adventure”. So many similar articles tend to treat Adventure (or Zork) as this thing that came from nowhere and changed all TEH things!!11!!!1!. I learned to program by copying earlier text games - I tried to homage some of those games from David Ahl’s books on Arduino and in Twine. So, I see something of the influences from Wampus Hunt, Highnoon and Camel to modern adventure games, but with Adventure there is such a leap forward. From a coding perspective you can see this because the source-code switches to parsing data structures rather than logic.
I’m guessing that’s logical way of expressing the jump in complexity that Adventure represents. So many good ideas coming together and improved upon in that moment.
3 Likes
This is a good way to put it. I think one of the big problems I have, which may be a straw man, is that, well, the more vocal critics will frame it as “does this give me a good argument to get into?” This is the sort of thing that made me run away screaming from books, figuring I had to be like that or I wasn’t “into” them.
I know that, when I imagine there’s some panel behind me nodding, saying, I really should like this if I’ve been paying attention, I have a right to back away from that work. My spidey-sense isn’t perfect, but I do have somewhat of a feel for stuff that is Progress/Difference for Difference’s Sake.
There were certain IFComp entries that touched off this spidey-sense & got in the way of me playing all the entries in the time period. Perhaps I’m putting my feelings of the author in the way, but really–I came to text adventures to get away from the “respect popular person X” mentality. And I feel it’s there–that’s not to say I don’t enjoy some popular writers’ works.
As for fun–I think it’s a subjective term. I know I write stuff that is fun for me is not fun for others. But I do write with a specific goal in mind,and to do the best I can to achieve it, and hopefully people can understand quickly if a game is not fun for them and can move on with minimal time-wasting. Tricks like three-second delays in Twine are not cool, because it’s like a person using conversational tricks to keep you interested, or a hack comedian doing stuff that a semi-drunk audience always falls for. And I don’t think people should be praised for using these tricks.
So if I feel at any time blackmailed into saying “Oh, yes, it’s very good, for people who understand better than me” without actually enjoying a game, it is not fun for me. While this is subjective, it’s certainly preserved my sanity and helped me waste less time.
ETA: I also use the William Shatner bongos test. If at any time I picture start to imagine Shatner reading the text while accompanied by bongos, I cut off playing right there. This isn’t something I do deliberately, but it’s a good way to say, okay, there’s something here I just don’t BUY.
Agreed. Though it takes away something; any mystery / surprise must be within those expectations. That is much more challenging to write than a blurb that says: “Whatever will happen next?”
This reminds me of the great old debate between high and low design; the theory/principle driven work versus populist works. Forget that these people SEEM to understand better… what they understand better isn’t your idea of fun.
+1. I take a pluralist approach to things: I love that people make things that won’t appeal to me but with that comes a mutual expectation that I’m left to my preferences. There are situations, such as classrooms, where you want exposure to a wider range things with the risk of many you might not like. But my leisure time is not such a situation.
I love the OP essay. It does a great job of explaining the significance of “Adventure”. So many similar articles tend to treat Adventure (or Zork) as this thing that came from nowhere and changed all TEH things!!11!!!1!. I learned to program by copying earlier text games - I tried to homage some of those games from David Ahl’s books on Arduino and in Twine. So, I see something of the influences from Wampus Hunt, Highnoon and Camel to modern adventure games, but with Adventure there is such a leap forward. From a coding perspective you can see this because the source-code switches to parsing data structures rather than logic.
I’m guessing that’s logical way of expressing the jump in complexity that Adventure represents. So many good ideas coming together and improved upon in that moment.
[/quote]
That’s a great way to put! Parsing data structures, indeed. It was the first time a game was written to try to understand [a limited subset of] what a human would do in a story and respond accordingly, rather than the human being simply handed a short list of operational keypresses. It was inevitable that this would happen eventually, but at the time Crowther did this, nobody else seems to have thought it was possible. I was quite serious when I wrote that Adventure could have been written a decade earlier. Crowther didn’t even use a monitor - it was on teletype, and the system he used (PDP-10) was first put on the market in like 1966. If anyone thought it was possible before Crowther realised his vision, why hadn’t they done it? They had 10 years with the same equipment.
Paul.
10 years earlier he was too busy changing diapers. Timing was just right having had plenty of caving experience and his kids eager for a game.
Your point being, I assume, that no one else could have dreamed it up except for that individual?
Although I disagree, I agree that there was a very nice conflation of characteristics in Crowther - love of RPG, love of spelunking, love of computers, and the catalyst: a gift for his children.
What I mean is, someone would probably dream up ADVENTURE in one way or another, I’m sure, if Crowther hadn’t. But as it happened, he was the first person to seriously wonder aloud about it and have the technology, the know-how and the bacgkround to make it happen - and the motivation. It could have happened ten years earlier.
[quote=“Laroquod, post:46, topic:105”]
I was responding to how the thread had moved on to equated novelty with value. The opposite applies to adventure; Adventure is great IMO because it mixed a new approach with fun content; the new approach enhanced the fun of the content in a way not previously done.
It gets so many levels of meta. The critic with the player in mind is fine. The critic with other critics in mind is a meta step removed. The more levels of meta the more they operate in an ivory tower separated from the swamps of reality. At what point is their discourse valuation? To me, not so much because I like hanging out in the swamps.
Yep, sparing egos. Instead of choosing boxing, chess, snail-racing they choose game commentary as their battle ground. I wish they wouldn’t.
You did an amazing job on that review. I’ve read it through once and have gone back to think over parts of it. We could remain ambivalent on the relative difficulty of creating works vs creating criticism of works and still the “path of least resistence” holds; criticism is valued more than creative works.
I was reading it, and thought “This review would really suit a rewrite in Twine?” 
#nottrolling #sorrynotsorry
Cultural commentators?
[quote=“Laroquod, post:46, topic:105”]
What happens when the ‘participation pin’ gets elevated above more meritorious measures like ‘fun’? Has there ever been any part of the art world where that kind of thinking led to excellence?
[/quote]A1: Nuuuuu happens. A2: I don’t know enough to answer.
[quote=“Laroquod, post:46, topic:105”]
I was quite serious when I wrote that Adventure could have been written a decade earlier.
[/quote] Looking at the technology you’re correct. I think it’s a mind-set thing - it just takes time for the humans to get there.
For example, it took some time for programs to use event-loops rather than code waterfalls that ran through more or less from start to finish (pauses for input, but moving on, input sequences were not being recycled). (e.g. [Nicomachus][1] like games)
Also, I think there’s a progression that took programmers time to move from using single-value variables (e.g. int) to represent world-state into using compound variables (e.g. arrays) and then into using compound variables for representing the world model itself. Though, I’d need to research a bit to make this claim. Anyways; each point along that progression represents a leap the way humans thought about programs.
Good point on the parser<->worldmodel interaction. I was trying to comment from an info-science point of view; in info-science data and logic/algorithms can be used interchangeably to represent information; it becomes a matter of pragmatics which is better. Adventure appears to have reached a level of sophistication where it was better to represent it’s worldmodel in data and have code parse that data instead of write control flow to represent the worldmodel. Making the world larger, with more interesting and consistent data interactions eventually is much easier in data. That data vs logic thing is a to me a sign of the huge leap in world-model sophistication that adventure took.
(I say Nicomachus like because Nicomachus is an example, even though it is written in 1975)
[1]: http://eturnerx.blogspot.com/2012/10/nicomachus-conversion-for-twine.html
[quote=“PeterPears, post:48, topic:105, full:true”]
Your point being, I assume, that no one else could have dreamed it up except for that individual? [/quote]
No. My point being the conclusive disproving of the notion that is often bandied around that Crowther merely put together elements whose combination was sparked by recent technology. The technology that enabled it was not so recent as people assume, so it couldn’t have actually ‘sparked’ anything in 1975. Thinking that what Crowther achieved could be achieved with those tools required a huge leap of insight. Nowhere do I argue that Crowther is the only human being who could have made that leap — and I did say above that it was inevitable that it would happen eventually — but I hoped that after reading my essay it would be much more difficult for anybody to conclude that Crowther was simply the man standing there when technological elements came together. Those technological elements had already been together for long enough, that the brilliance of his insight cannot be denied.
This does not mean I’m saying he’s the only one who could have. That’s a bit of a bizarre requirement that nobody really lives by. When critics elevate Shakespeare, they don’t argue that he is the only person on the planet who could have written what he did — in fact, theories of other authorship of his plays notwithstanding, Shakespeare’s education was not impressive. What he had was insight. Was that insight totally unique in the human race at that time? Probably not. Shakespeare was not a mutant! He was just an extremely insightful person who joined the theatre and ended up in the right place to use his insight to change the culture of the English language, forever.
All I’m asking is that Crowther be judged by those same rules. He does not have to be a unique mutant who did something no other human being could possibly have done, in order to be heralded as a man of brilliance and insight that allowed him to do with the tools of his field things that nobody else had got it in their heads to do despite having the same tools for a decade. He was a person of great insight in the right place to use that insight to change gaming, forever, something he did almost accidentally, as an afterthought to his extremely high proficiency with those tools. Nobody else with that much insight had access to those tools during that decade — if they had, we would have obviously had mainframe Adventure games much earlier than we did.
I feel this is a pretty airtight case, and the only way to deny it is to fudge with history or to apply a different standard of insight to Crowther than we apply to all the artists who have changed their fields forever in other media.
I don’t have much time to reply to more this morning, but I’ll return this thread soon. I just wanted to be sure to address the inapplicability to art of a ‘no one else could have dreamed it’ standard. No one else with access to the same tools dreamed it, for ten long years. That is all we normally require to laud any artist’s insight, so Crowther’s doesn’t deserve to be downplayed in any way simply because theoretically, maybe somebody else on the planet could have thought of it, given the same tools. Plenty of people had those tools and they didn’t. They were all really smart people, too, most of whom had also, like Crowther, played D&D, and to quote one of them (fellow ARPANET coder and D&D player Bernie Cosell), “We thought he was nuts.” This seems to me to be plenty good enough evidence to confirm the importance and non-obviousness of Crowther’s artistic use of those tools at that time.
Forgive me for going on at such length to counter your single sentence, but I guess you kind of strayed into contradicting the central thesis of my essay, so I felt a proper defence was required. 8)
Paul.
1 Like
Erm, I was kinda responding to namekusejin’s “he was too busy changin diapers” post. 
I go on to say that it would probably happen eventually, but Crowther happened to be the first person to “seriously wonder aloud about it and have the technology, the know-how and the bacgkround to make it happen - and the motivation”… but I don’t mean this to say “He was merely the person in whom all these things got together”.
I mean, yes I do. In the same way that Shakespeare was “merely” the person who happened to have that insight and happened to love the stage and happened to know how to read and write.
I’m sorry about sparking your rant, because I don’t think I actually disagree with you…?
Was it a rant? Sorry if it came off that way and if I misread your post, but in any case, I’m glad I got a chance to make some of those points.
Paul.
Rant-ish. I didn’t mean it in a negative sense.
I think there’s been a gap for a while. I know when jumping in back in 2010, I was confused at all that had changed and what Was Good and what Was Bad.
Also re: theory, I think there’s theory that tells you what you can try, and theory that tells you what you should try. Or theory that helps you to focus on something new and cool, or theory that tells you you better focus on something new. This is a loaded question, but guess which I (and probably most people) like better?
http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=fft6pu91j85y4acv&review=28583
Cute. Another version of Adventure, apparently toning down the Woods additions.
There’s life in the old dog yet! And what’s more, people are still actively interested. For a given value of “active”, but still!
It’ll be interesting to compare this person’s adaptation to Chris Conley’s. Speaking of which, Chris just notified me that he has updated links up with all of my new reported bugs fixed. No time to update my Tumblr page for Crowther’s game right now because I am working on a tiny 3-room game on a deadline for the Fun-#IntFic-for-#GamerGate jam, which it turns out my game is the only one in. LOL. At least I get to blow past the deadline. I’m bad with deadlines but not so good at giving up, so there will be another one of these jam, regardless. And then another. Even if I have to code all the games myself. 8)
Honestly, I think people just need compact, easy-to-read code examples that are free for them to expand.
P.S. You can review your own games on ifdb??
You can rate them, too! One of the most recent entries did so, “The Room.”
Yep. Didn’t even bother to link to the actual game, either.
And yeah, I noticed the updated version of “Crowther’s Adventure” on the archive. Also, days ago people on IntFiction were looking for a version of adventure that turns out to be one by the HUG group. It just keeps popping up.
And they didn’t even give themselves 5-stars.
Weeellll… I happen to think it is possible for an author to meaningfully rate his own work, though the rating they give just after relese is probably not the same rating they’d give some time later. And often the author’s rating will not reflect the player’s rating. This is, potentially, very interesting and enriching.
In practice, though, it’s not what happens. This guy didn’t give himself five stars - maybe he was trying to be modest, maybe he genuinely thought his game was worth four stars, or maybe he was trying to avoid being called out on “rating your own game five stars”.
On one hand, rating your opwn game five stars is courting criticism. On the other, if you’re going to go ahead and rate your own game, like harpua suggests, you’ll definitely want to go whole hog.
None of which matters much anyway, because there still isn’t a playable game. The game doesn’t exist. I used to automatically rate these entries 1-star, but I can’t be bovvered anymore. I’m above it. (I’ve also been watching way too much Catherine Tate, I think)