inform7.com

So, there's a new release of Inform 7, and a new web site.

The entire web site has been redone, and I was responsible for the new extensions section. I won't say it's pretty (I'm working on it), and it still doesn't have quite all the features of the old site (the RSS feed should be available by this weekend), but there is an important new feature: you can now browse both the documentation and the source for all I7 extensions on-line. Here's Intelligent Hinting by Aaron Reed, for example.

Judith

Judith is Terry Cavanagh's latest game, and this time he collaborated with Stephen Lavelle.

It's another one of his experimental story-telling games, which are my favorite. I played the game about ten minutes after it was released and about an hour after that I was writing up a long analysis of it.

I was thinking of posting it here, on my blog, but instead I decided to put it on the intfiction.org Interactive Fiction forums, because I'd rather have a conversation about the game than try to assert things about it in an exposition on my blog. Still, it's a rather wankery academic post, but my intentions are good.

(By the way, intfiction.org is having some problems with spam lately; try to be careful and don't click on any dodgy-looking topics, since they may contain rather explicit porn spam).

Games with non-expository stories

At the end of this blog post you'll find a list of games by three different developers. I think you should try them out.

Edit: Pathways does actually work on Wine if you set fullscreen=0 in the config.ini file.

Vignettes? Well, that's how one of these developers describes his works. Some of them definitely aren't short (Don't Look Back took me about half an hour; Eversion took a few hours spread over a few days), but the stories they present all have in common a reflective simplicity. All of these games are more about story than gameplay: some of them have gameplay elements which try to give the player some direct, deeply effective control of the fiction (Daniel Benmergui's games), and others take tried-and-true gameplay mechanics and use them as a way to communicate story elements to the player (Don't Look Back and Eversion).

The title of this post calls them "non-expository", and I'm not sure how accurate a phrase that is, but it's the first one that came to mind when trying to describe the way they present the story. Let's take a look:

 1. The act of exposing or laying open; a setting out or
displaying to public view.
[1913 Webster]

It may be overly subtle or perhaps even punny, but I think it does make sense to refer to them as non-expository. The stories they present are not clear-cut and laid out. The author did not tell us what the story is: he showed us some scenes, depicted some characters, but didn't flesh out their details. They're much more introspective than that. When you get to the end (or one of the endings), you think to yourself: "okay, maybe I know what just happened. Whatever it was, it was cool."

I can only say that I am really happy that indie game development is becoming so widespread and successful. Certainly most indie development these days is focused on improving the essential gameplay of video games, which is awesome, but I find the experiments with story much more fascinating.

There's a more concrete property that most of these games share: there's no text or dialogue. Despite this, they instill in the player a strong sense of the narrative with subtle graphical, audial, and gameplay cues. Somewhat tangentially, there is something that I've become a bit obsessed with as I think more and more about story and games -- the way that we can communicate to the player by taking something which is commonly used as a utilitarian device of user interface (a score counter or a health meter, for example) and twisting it in some way to reinforce the impact of an event in the game's story. Eversion does this well. I'd like to write about this more, once I find a better list of examples.

The one game in the list below which does have dialogue is Pathways, and its dialogue is very limited. Each character only says one or two very simple sentences. Even so, that dialogue really has an effect on me, and I wonder if that has something to do with the nostalgia I have for those old, badly-translated Japanese video games where most of the characters you run into simply repeat the same line over and over again. I wonder if someone who's not familiar with those types of games could have the same kind of emotional response to the simple but incisively crafted dialogue in Pathways.

Anyway, here's the list. Most of these are Flash games and the links will take you directly to the page where you can play them, unless otherwise noted.


Daniel Benmergui

• I wish I were the Moon. Take pictures of the things you see on the screen, and then click again to move them elsewhere. See what happens.
• StoryTeller is similar in that you basically have the ability to move elements of a scene around, but this time it's broken into three distinct scenes, representing three points in the lives of three characters. You can modify the elements in any of the scenes and immediately see how it affects the later ones.
  

Terry Cavanagh

• Don't Look Back. It's a pretty simple jump-and-run game with beautiful music and a haunting turning point.
• Pathways (runs well on Wine if you change config.ini to say fullscreen=0). This one is really touching. It's all about making decisions, and it reinforces what seems to be a recurring theme in his works by not allowing the player's character to turn back. He can only move forward or turn onto another path.
  

Guilherme S. Töws (of Zaratustra Productions)

• Eversion (another Windows-only game, works well on Wine). Another jump-and-run game which looks like a typically boring and hyper-cheery Mario-type game for the first couple of levels, but becomes gradually deeper and more bizarre. This one is the most difficult of all the games I've listed to actually complete, but you can get through the first 7 levels without having to collect all the gems. Getting them all may require the use of walkthroughs, which are readily available on Youtube.

Interactive Fiction Writing Month

I've just added the Interactive Fiction Writing Month blog to Planet IF. The project looks really cool. If you know anyone who's been thinking about trying to write some IF, point them in that direction.

See also the main IF Writing Month web site.

Blueful

Okay, this is really cool. I think you should check it out.

http://blueful.com/

By Aaron A. Reed.

Open-Morality

I am really getting sick of open-morality games¹.

These games have a problem. It's not that they lack a wide enough range of moral decisions: I really do believe that my Fallout 3 character is a shining beacon of humanity's hope in the wretched landscape of the USA's post-apocalyptic capitol. And I realize that he could just as well have been an absolute bastard, even offending the sensibilities of the other horrible people in that world. So, okay: let's say that the game industry has figured out how to give the player some choice in how their character develops. The problem is that they haven't figured out how to construct an engaging story from those decisions. Not once have I felt any twitch of meaningful emotion or insight while playing any open-world game that focuses on allowing the player to make wide-ranging moral decisions. Okay, so most games don't give me any such reactions, but I think open-morality games actually destroy tiny bits of my brain that are responsible for emotion and insight. Maybe I'm being too harsh.

I want to talk about Fable 2 today. I picked up Fable 2 a couple of weeks ago, honestly expecting to not like it very much. I'd played through most of the first Fable game, and found its story pathetic but its gameplay fairly entertaining. After playing it, I ranted to my friends that the morality of the world was shallow: The leader of the Hero's Guild, after turning me from a village boy into a full-fledged adventurer, gave a speech indicating that whether I would be good or evil was entirely my own decision. In this world, I could create suffering or ease it. Sure, that's true, it is my decision, but you know, I would expect some encouragement in the good direction at this point (later plot events notwithstanding). When major characters don't even care whether you're good or evil, it sure does lessen the importance of that decision. So, morality in Fable is just another part of the toy.

Other than that, I thought the game was somewhat fun.

I've also been antagonistic to Peter Molyneux. He has some strong opinions about how stories in games should work, and after having played Fable and seeing how weak of a story it had, I basically condemned him as an unfortunately popular eccentric.

I've changed my mind. Fable 2 is good. I like Fable 2 a lot. And maybe I don't think Peter Molyneux is quite as crazy as I did.

Don't get me wrong: I still think open-morality is a dead-end road for narrative in games. Frankly, I think that people like Mr. Elrod who are apparently deeply emotionally affected by this game need to read some books and get a more robust personal philosophy. If a player can construct a unique, unauthored narrative out of the simple mechanics and quests of this or other open-world games, then he could probably do the same with a string tied to a stick. We all have our weaknesses, Mr. Elrod. I watch sappy anime. But I don't imbue it with an imaginary quality of depth, even if it sometimes makes me cry.

So why do I like Fable 2? Let me explain. It's incomplete to call Fable 2 an open-morality game. In addition to being an open-morality game, it is a parody of open morality.

I realized this as I was having my character join the Temple of Shadows -- the evil brotherhood of monks who receive benefits from an unnamed evil force by sacrificing innocent villagers. I should have realized it earlier (arguably even back when I played the first Fable game). But this is what made it clear to me that this game was parodying moral decisions. You see, the Dark Monk (or whatever he is) who decides whether you can join the Temple of Shadows gives you a simple task: eat five baby chicks. Including the feathers, bones, and beaks. While they're alive. He mentions that back in his day, they only had to kick a blind beggar's walking stick out from under him, but nowadays they've got more strict entry requirements. As you eat the chicks, one by one, he makes comments indicating his disgust at your actions, at one point crying "You really have no scruples, do you!?"

This scene had me cracking up. It was well-written black humor², and the subject matter was so over the top that I could have no serious emotional reaction (other than amusement) to my character taking the "evil path" by joining this temple.

Another example of this kind of thing is the Assassin's Guild. The guild will offer you jobs for killing particular (seemingly random) NPCs somewhere in the world. Each contract has the reason for the hit: reasons like the character having bad breath, or the guild needing to maintain its monthly quota.

This is not a dramatic player-generated narrative, people.

And I like Fable 2 more than Oblivion. Sure, when I took that first step out of the dungeon at the beginning of Oblivion I was excited to see the wide-open world awaiting my exploration. But when I actually found things in that big open world, the badly written and unengaging stories really detracted from the experience. I still go back to the game from time to time and enjoy a bit of a romp around the world, but who was really that excited about completing the main story? And what alternatives do we have? Farmer Brown wants you to go into a cave and kill a giant crab. Epic. Fable 2 has its moments of badly written story, but they make up a way smaller portion of the game. That is, less than all of it. Fable 2 has good comedy surrounding a bad story. Oblivion just has the bad story.

I still think Peter Molyneux is probably a bit crazy, but I can respect what he's done a lot more now. I think I conflated his seriousness about story with seriousness of story. It turns out, he is just deadly bloody serious about comedy³.



Footnotes:

1: I would say 'to coin a phrase' here, but I can't be bothered to google it up to make sure nobody else has said it yet. Anyway, it's clear that we're going to need more words than just "open-world" to explain the things happening in game development these days. Open-geography, open-morality, open-plot: these are all fairly different, and there are games to which these terms apply independently. Exercise for the reader: categorize Far Cry 2, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto, Deus Ex, and any Final Fantasy game.

2: Mr. Gijsbers, I understand that interactive dark comedy is difficult for you, and so I recommend you do not play Fable 2 to avoid wildly misinterpreting it.

3: Actually, I don't want to pretend like I'm getting at the True Intended Meaning behind this game. Mr. Molyneux might actually think that his game is a touching piece dealing head-on with hard moral problems, but if he did, he has failed. Oh, look! A stick and string!

Twisted 8.2.0pre2

Please try out the second pre-release of Twisted 8.2.0, the first Twisted release since April.

Downloads

Release notes

Please try it out and report any bugs.

edit: Updated to pre2.

A meme that is not a quiz, thankfully

There's a meme about books that's going around:

• Daniel Watkins
• Cory Dodt
• Steve Holden

What you do is grab the nearest book, turn to page 56, and post the fifth sentence to your blog.

First, the proof:



This picture was taken after rotating about 120 degrees in my chair. The Kindle in the picture probably is a few inches closer than the rest of the books, but first, it's unclear that it's a book, and second, its ebooks don't have page numbers.

So I chose the book on top of the stack (not the Nintendo DS game case that's at the very top: that's The World Ends With You). The line reads as follows:

Events that do not command our attention hardly exist for us, even if they influence how we perceive, feel, or react.

It's from Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style by Virginia Tufte. This book is made up mostly of quotes, so the line is actually a quote from another work, by Gerard Roth: The Quest to Find Consciousness.

(I've added the interactive-fiction tag to this post even though it has nothing to do with IF, so that my readers who only follow that tag will see it).

Planet IF: Now slightly less buggy

I've updated the software behind Planet Interactive Fiction to a new version/fork called Venus. This should fix that bug which caused some blog post titles to be replaced by the username of the person who authored the post. I think this was affecting Wordpress users who used images, or something.

Other than that, the templates are exactly the same, so you shouldn't notice a difference.

Just so I don't feel like a slacker

I took a week off from work this month (and I'll do this once per month until the end of the year, since my vacation time doesn't roll over) and have been trying to actually use it productively. Here's a list of some interesting things that I've done so far:

• Twisted stuff: there was a developer sprint on Sunday that Itamar, Glyph, Jean-Paul and I attended, and since then I've been sporadically (but much more than usual) reviewing branches to try to get a release out. Speaking of which, Twisted contributors: please review #3487!
• Did a bit of evangelism for the new GarGlk project on Google Code, organized a mailing list and rustled up some members, and started making an Ubuntu package for the new Gargoyle. You should see something by the end of the week.
• Worked on my own interactive fiction game, which is progressing at just about the right pace to be ready for the GameplayComp mini-competition in September of 2009.
• Posted a couple of updated extensions to the I7 Extensions page: Emily Short's Ordinary Room Description and Jesse McGrew's Dynamic Objects.
• Watched Resident Evil: Extinction (the third in the series), which did not have as good an ending as either of the first two.
  

Of course, in addition to this I've been spending way too much time playing video games (Far Cry 2! Fallout 3! Man, there is a ridiculously awesome influx of good games lately. And I am looking forward to Left 4 Dead). Of course, I am never one to be satisfied with simple pleasures, so all this gaming has been inspiring me to brew up an essay in my head which I'm thinking of calling The Purity of Interaction, or less wankerly, Consistency in Interaction. We'll see. I do still have three free days before I have to get back to the salt mines.

Oh yeah, and if you're in the mood for something spooky for Halloween (or as I like to call it, All Hallow's Evening), check out Dave's latest blog post.