Espying the IFMUD
My initial impressions of the IFMud is that it is the watering hole of the Old Ones, the backroom where deals go down, and the hatchery of dark networks. Browsing through the FAQ turns up awesome gems like these:
Swearing is quite acceptable anywhere (there are several channels dedicated to nothing else). Insults are not.
The ignorance of a false dichotomy is painful to read. A whole channel devoted to swearing? I’d like to say I’m stunned or even surprised, but I’m just not. It’s another example of despotic excess. I guess you can’t expect much of the Old Ones, used to having their way in all things, to have a smidgen of self-control.
And insults are verboten? Excuse me, but if some Old One were to roast a newbie alive, who would stop him or her? Would the others not join in? How do you stop a king or queen from exercising their royal prerogative?
Time was when you had to turn on a special option to see who @emits were from, enabling people to hilariously torment the newbies. Then somebody decided to spoil our fun by making the option default.
I so love institutional cruelty. Don’t you? This is the truth behind all the mask; one-way torture is welcomed.
It’s been debated whether ifMUD is “newbie-friendly” or not. We don’t chop up newcomers with our +8 Swords of Dood, so to that extent we’re ahead of the game. We’re generally pretty darn polite as these sorts of places go. But here’s the “but”: we are, as noted, an established community, and not looking to change. MUD regulars have built up friendships with, and respect for, each other over many years.
It’s not an explicit “stay out”, but it is a warning sign about 10 feet tall. Nice. Screw you and your insider cliques! You are the very reason why the IF “community” is in such a sorry state! Here you meet to devise new dances for all the peasants to dance to, formulating tyranny while others sleep! I see your “change is not welcome” subtext, written in sick unholy fire. This is is just “go along or get out” said with a menacing leer. I’d like to say that I’m shocked, but I’m not.
If I could burn the IFMUD to the ground, I would — although it would be pointless. The Old Ones would just regroup somewhere else and find a new off-the-record, secretive, Journolist-like hangout to prepare their decrees.
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My Very Own “I Told You So” Moment
There’s been discussion on R*IF lately on how Paul Panks didn’t get his “I Told You So” moment, where he would’ve proved all his detractors wrong. It is a shame and not many people who take on the establishment get to have theirs. Something just clicked this evening and I realized that I was one of the fortunate few.
I got mine.
Here’s the backstory.
One of the reasons why the Ifwiki blows chunks is that it’s run by a clique of little Stalinists who try to prescribe their opinion about things as fact. I was one of the early contributors to the IfWiki, long before it really took off. I contributed to various articles and even wrote one (as memory serves). One of the articles I gussied up was about the history, present, and future of commercial IF. I wrote in admittedly-glowing tones that the age of commercial IF was not dead, as 1893 and Future Boy! had shown. Apparently two commercial entities weren’t enough. For daring to go against what the little Stalinists had decreed was truth immutable, my edits were flayed, I was personally attacked, and eventually, they took out what I wrote on the basis of majority vote.
Textfyre has released a commercial game. That makes three commercial games, put out by three separate commercial companies!
I TOLD YOU SO..
You can’t bury it any longer, guys. Commercial IF is resurgent, and long live all those who will make it glorious. Finally, on a personal note, there’s an awful lot of peace in being vindicated.
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Self-Congratulatory Hubris
I was back at the IF Planet thinking that I should add my blog back to the list. After scouring through a few blogs of my fellows, it became clear to me that Sturm Und Drang IF is a poor companion for the others. It sticks out like a bleeding thumb; it is the blood-red flower in a monochrome garden. It is one of the last voices of the lonely individual IF developer, amid the sick tide of masturbatory intellectualism and indie game developer snobbery.
Both of the aforementioned trends scream “look at me, look at me” as the blog authors attempt to make miniature deities out of themselves. The self-congratulatory aspect is what I find especially odious. It’s amazing to me, really, the need for people to brag about what they’re doing or their honors, as though anyone would be impressed by them. What you say to the people who write this or that means absolutely nothing to me, and will have absolutely no impact on my life, or my games, because it’s all small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. And no, honestly, I don’t give two stale turds about what board you sit on, what initials you have after your name, or any of the high regalia of an empty and dead society that you adorn yourself with. Those things are bones and ash!
Words outlast our lives and yet, instead of seeking something meaningful to say with them, here we all are, chasing after pointless honors. Two steps from death, we still fret about makeup.
(Note: After sleeping on it, I decided to take out the links to blogs that demonstrated these trends. There’s just no point in stating what everyone already knows or can find out by simply looking as I did. It’s much more helpful to take issues with attitudes and let people figure out if the shoe fits them.)
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Side Projects
Yes, I have decided to start some side projects along the way towards completing Seasons.
The first one, thus far named Brickhouse is a modern-day/surreal/horror story set in corporate environs. It is not related to my previous effort, Building. I’m writing it in ALAN 3. It will be a game of medium length.
The next one is a dreamy/romantic/slice-of-life story called New Cat. I’m writing this one in Inform 7. It will be a medium-short game.
Why am I doing this? Am I glutton for punishment? Have I no life at all? Leaving those questions as merely hypothetical ones, I did want to learn other IF programming languages to see how well they stacked up to Inform 6. I also have the feeling that Inform 7 is probably ready for prime time.
So here goes nothing. I’ll be keeping myself on track here as usual.
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Speed IF: Why?
Something that’s always bothered and amazed me is the concept of Speed IF. It’s a losing proposition from the get-go: create a game in some small amount of time (usually a day) for the purpose of winning a contest. What this does is litter the IF landscape with spartan, shallow, shoddy works, most of which aren’t even finished. For what purpose? To see who can code the fastest? Wow, that’s a plaque I want on my wall — I coded faster than the other idjits who entered this contest, and look at the pile of steaming turds I created with my ultrafast coding. I can’t think up any other reason why these contests recur like waves of the plague. They sure don’t create quality games. They don’t create interesting puzzles. They don’t even create finished works! Geez! Is this some kind of self-defeating contest, where we shout to the world, “Look at how much we suck?”
The IF “community” never seems to miss a chance to shoot itself in the foot and then brag about it to the world. In this case, Speed IF contests, are like holding a contest in foot-shooting and then not burying such juvenile antics, but preserving them, so that every Web crawler and idle passer by can look at the excesses of prior years.
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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.
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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 strongest 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.
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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.
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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. 
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