Farewell, Paul
Sometimes death makes things clear.
Recently, Paul Panks, one of the colorful authors of IF passed away, apparently after a long battle with mental illness. Muffy brought it everyone’s attention, and yet besides a few condolences, the event has passed virtually unremarked.
Sometimes death makes things clear.
A lot of my angst, disappointment, and sorrow with the IF community has stemmed from the belief that we were all in it together. That we were supposed to help one another, and that somehow, we all cared about each other. When I saw these fundamental assumptions being violated, I was furious. Furious because we are just a tiny group of people holding the flame aloft for a textual art in a world fascinated with pictures, and yet there was infighting and backstabbing and dark networks? We had so much in common and yet, still, unity was a fever dream.
Where are the Old Ones on this? Nowhere to be found. None of them have weighed in on the passing of one of their fellows. None of them care. Initially this surprised me slightly, but as the pieces fell to the ground, I could see the picture that I had missed all along.
Most people in R*IF just don’t see IF as a community. They don’t think that we’re all in it together. They don’t want to work together. They don’t want to present the best face to the world. I remember one time when newbies showed up in the newsgroup and were wondering what was going on, because the Inform website was broken. What followed was a bloodbath of recrimination and disparagement. Yet I still hoped.
Sometimes death makes things clear.
How many people contributed to Panks’ memory? How many even signed the online guest book? At last count, I saw no-one but myself, and you know what? That’s not to say that I’m righteous; that’s a horrible statistic. I should be among hundreds, not the only one (that I could tell). The same near-silence awaits all the rest of us non-stars in the IF world.
The IF community really isn’t a community at all, and maybe it never really was.
Pray for the family of Paul Panks in this difficult time.
The Deleterious Effects of Contests
I was out on the IFDB, which has improved a few notches since my initial visitation, although it’s clear the juvenile attitudes of some people remain. In any case, I noted that often game entries bragged about winning such-and-such position in such-and-such contest, utterly unaware how much like rotted wreaths such approbations appear now! Yes, this game may have won 3rd place in contest Blah, ten years ago, but so what? Given that IF contests are one of the most incestuous affairs ever created, I’m not so sure that the opinions of a very small number of people really count for much, and their opinions rheumed with age count for even less. Reading these old braggadocios is like listening to someone in their 30’s brag about being voted “most likely to succeed” in high school.
Plus, because these contests are such incestuous affairs, some games will be crucified without any possible check or balance, because all contests rely upon the goodwill of the voters. If a bunch of people gang up on a particular author, his or her works will be the ones that crawl in at 200th place or something. This is an unacknowledged flaw which continues from year to year in all IF contests.
Not only that, but the inherent nature of a contest itself is that someone must win, and someone else must lose. I’ve always found it strange that people celebrate such a construct and then use it to lure people into submitting to the contest. Who would celebrate their chance to lose? Because the odds are (if you believe in such things) or common sense will tell you that you won’t win. Only one person will win, and unless you craft some freakin’ amazing stuff, you might as well not bother. Even if you do win, the honor is a little less than it’s cracked up to be.
I think awards are the way to go, instead of contests, and the more awards we have, the better. It would be wonderful to see different groups reward games on the basis of different criteria — say best SF game, or best portrayal of faith, or strong female main character, and so on. Think of the art world, and the literature enclave, and all the varied awards that they have. IF, as a kind of art, should do the same — if it ever grows up.
TADS 3 Sucks Like a Black Hole
Until recently, I was in a TADS workshop. Then I actually tried to install TADS. Doing so was so inordinately frustrating that now I am a former member of the workshop.
The warning bell was going off when I visited the TADS 3 site. No IDE for Macs except for one in pre-beta? Hmm. Ok. I went and downloaded that, only to find that it required a G4 or G5, which excluded my trusty Pismo — even though I was running the correct OS (10.4). Just for grins, I tried to run it anyways. No dice.
Next, I tried scouring through the IF archive (which STILL has no search — yeah, I know), and there I found a discontinued, unsupported IDE for OS 9. Cool! I downloaded that and tried to compile the first program in the Getting Started manual. Of course I updated to the latest libraries, like any good geek would, but no amount of inserting the latest 3.0.18 adv3 libraries would work. So then I tried 3.0.8 libraries. They too failed. So then I reinstalled the IDE, hoping to get down to a level that I could compile a ten-line program. THAT didn’t work either.
The second line of the program was #charset, but there’s no matching charset in the libraries. Somehow I find out that the IDE doesn’t support charsets. Fine. I commented it out, only to be hit with a different set of 70+ errors.
Then I go to R*IF and look around. No-one has any binaries for the Mac (OS 9 or X) that they’re sharing. Even years ago, it was apparently a well-known fact that developing TADS 3 on the Mac involves compiling FrobTads from the source, which eliminates all graphics, sounds, and movies from the output. At this moment, I’m staring at the screen in irony.
The reason to code in TADS is to take advantage of its multimedia capabilities, but in order to develop a TADS 3 game on the Mac requires you to basically forgo that. And the reason why you’d use TADS 3 instead of TADS 2 is that you don’t have to hack the libraries extensively to do what you want.
TADS 3 sucks like a black hole.
Puzzles: The MRS Method
While working on Seasons, I realized that I needed a way to measure several different aspects of a puzzle to determine whether it worked or didn’t. I ended up with a new way to determine whether puzzles work for any game: the MRS method.
First, the MRS method is a mnemonic for Momentum, Resonance, and Satisfaction. Each puzzle can be measured along this tripartite axis (think of x, y, and z for the geometrically inclined). I’ve chosen to use a ten point axis for each of these measurements, but of course, there’s nothing that restricts anyone else to that.
Momentum measures how much the puzzle advances the plot. Does it open up a new area, reveal some clue to the murder, or somehow move the overall plot of the story forward? Puzzles with a high momentum rating both settle something and leave the players unsettled for the next part. That is to say, metaphorically they close one door behind them and open a new door before them.
Resonance measures how well the puzzle fits into the themes, atmosphere, and other non-plot aspects of the story. If a puzzle feels “tacked-on” or exists for the sake of giving the player points, it is missing resonance.
Satisfaction measures how satisfied the player can reasonably be assumed to be, given the effort put forth into solving the puzzle and its payoff. You can construct the most elaborate puzzle, but if it is nearly impossible to solve and the player is not rewarded for it, they will still hate the puzzle.
A good puzzle will score high on each one of these three measurements, and the more puzzles that score highly in your game, the better the game tends to be. Of course, puzzles are not the whole game, but that’s another post for another day.
BBEdit INFORM Tools 1.1
One of the things lost with my laptop was my Inform BBEdit tools build process. Well, after a lot of thrashing around with MPW, I finally rediscovered how to create these tools. And in the process of so doing, I updated them. They are, as Mac people are known to say, snappier. Ok, not really. They do have more functionality, though. In short:
- Single-quoted strings are now colored
- Preprocessor commands are now colored
For those of you using BBEdit 6-8 on OS 8-9, check ‘em out. Now don’t say I never gave you anything. 
Delayed Due to Theft
I’m going to have to push back Seasons another month or two, because my primary development machine — a graphite iBook 466 — was stolen. I’ve already forgiven the thief, but it’s also humorous, especially given that he didn’t get the power cable. Can you imagine his surprise when he opens it up and finds out that it’s running OS 9.2.2? *shaking head* He’s definitely in over his head. Meanwhile, I’ll see what I can do on my other old-skool Mac, a PowerTower Pro with a G3 1 Ghz upgrade in it. I think I’m going to get another graphite iBook, though. In terms of usability, ergonomics, and just downright coolness, Apple hasn’t made a better laptop since.
Animosity and Rancor (A Retrospective)
One of the reasons why I traditionally have held such animosity and rancor towards the IF community as a whole is because so many individuals have either attacked me for volunteering to fix problems or have ignored my ideas. This has happened both publicly and privately, sometimes, for no other reason but the pleasure of rubbing my face in my own ignorance. It is a common mean-spiritedness, shared from the high and mighty to the low and unknown. It belies the concept of a “community” unless you mean a “community” of gangs, all ready to annihliate one another at a moment’s notice.
After reading Thomas Sowell’s Black Rednecks and White Liberals, I came to see just how much the violent, volitale life on the fringes of society is really like what RAIF and RGIF are every day of the week. People freak out over insults to their honor and overreact. People must have the last word. People regard everyone else but them (and possibly their clique) as subhumans either to be tormented for fun or ignored. Like rednecks of the past, the IF “community” cares nothing for individuals, not their achievements, not their toil, not their personhood, not their feelings.
A community should be sharing, giving, willing to listen, and basically governed by openness and friendly relations. How can people feel like they can give when destruction awaits them around the next corner? How can they positively contribute when getting no response is much better than the usual response, humiliation? Many people who are drawn to IF have nothing within them that seeks to build bridges. Instead, they build a heap of islands and wait for the worshippers to show up. Trawling the archives reveals (at least to me) a serious winnowing out of moderation and reason as the years went by, to leave us with this stark landscape of ruined altars and fevered acolytes.
It’s very much like Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights — what the main characters had was not love, but a sick, dark, diseased attraction that consumed them like the plague. The movers and shakers in IF have the same sort of “love” for their creations.
They have secured perhaps the ultimate phyrric victory. I look forward to a day where new forums will rise and blossom from the dust of the old, where people can help one another hone their art, polish their craft, and genuinely aid and support one another.
Not Down and Not Out
I haven’t posted lately because I haven’t had any great insights or great pains concerning IF in general. I’ve just been making slow, steady progress on Seasons. I’ve managed to get in less than an hour/day during the week, but I usually hit 4-5 hours/day on the weekends. That hasn’t been enough to prevent schedule slip, and so now I’m looking at the end of the year, with a strong possibility of spring ‘09.
Still, it’s been easier for me to focus on the game when I don’t have other things draining or inflaming me, and the IF scene was always that way. Maybe it’s just me, but the rare frissions of belonging never balanced out or atoned for all the negatives. I’m not a pessimist, but I have come to understand some things about communication, which is why I don’t see myself participating much in R*IF again. These are the four communicative truths:
- Few people care about what you say
- Those who do care and correctly understand (not misinterpret) what you say are fewer still
- Those who care, understand, and agree are fewest of all
- You have no real ability to convince anyone of anything. People only come to understand or agree with something through their own reasoning or through divine conviction
All that remains for us to do, then, is to build it and tell others about it. The like-minded will be drawn to it.
A New Development Methodology
Maybe this is news to no-one but me, but it still represents a breakthrough in efficient development of IF. (To recap, the constant war against the independent developer consists of sloth, lack of community, lack of organization, and difficulty in measuring progress). What I’ve discovered is this: coding the puzzles without worrying about the text allows you to map out the plot of the game and to make sure that the pieces are fitting together. Doing this allows you to really develop at a quicker pace, because instead of gnashing your teeth over the perfect spot of prose, you can say, “Ok, everything WORKS, but the words aren’t there yet.” Getting the words right is usually a tougher task for me, but sheer logic, putting the pieces together — that is not as difficult.
Maybe I’m deformed in that I see no great beauty in logic, or derive any intense emotions from the way things fit together. I have a threshhold that the puzzles must pass, but that’s it. They must make sense, they must fit the level of difficulty, they must be well-clued, and they must be fair to the player. But once they’ve cleared that admittedly non-trivial hurdle, then it’s relatively easy to simply grind through all their ramifications, with occasional touchbacks to the overall plot, theme, and characters to make sure that it all works together.
The short and sweet version: code the puzzles first and worry about the prose later.
IFDB: That Don’t Impress Me Much
I’ll make no secret about it. The IFDB doesn’t impress me much. Now the idea is a great one, for both game designers and game players. But it’s the people involved who screw it up, a la usual. Sometimes I think that the IF community is comprised of the smallest, most vindictive, petty, vengeful, and disrespectful people on the face of the earth, because there is a spirit of “never let the other guy get the last word” that runs rampant on the IFDB and elsewhere.
Seriously, now. Where else have you seen where people feel it’s necessary to not write a review about a game, but a review dogging on another review? That’s pretty common. Then you have the silly little “I’m going to vote down MOST/ALL your reviews because I don’t like what you said in one” voting. What the heck is this, people? Third grade? Lastly, you have the “anything goes” policy of the moderators, which just amp up the noise ratio so that you have to wade through all of these personal vendettas disguised as reviews.
I wrote one “review of a review” just to prove a point — that if you want to broadcast your smelly little orthodoxies, that there will always be someone who can disembowel you verbally if he or she so chooses. Then, having said my piece, I immediately lost all of my interest in the ifdb as a watering hole. I don’t even bother to read reviews on my game.
That’s a big thing that generally sucks about the IF community: lack of spine. The bartenders are so afraid of offending this Old One or people in general, that no-one is willing to call them on their immaturity. As a result, every saloon gets shot up on a regular basis and everyone lives one step away from blowing away someone else. I really don’t get why we can’t treat each other like human beings instead of trying to argue our points endlessly. IF suffers from an endemic lack of humility and a corresponding overabundance of vanity.
