Interactive Fiction and Squeak

Andrew C. Greenberg werdna at mucow.com
Mon Jul 30 19:51:23 UTC 2001


My remarks hold, but moreso, with respect to graphic games purporting to 
be IF.  To me, the problem isn't puzzle-sense or game-sense (all that 
goes to the smoke-and-mirrors to which I referred), the problem is 
gamemaster control of storytelling versus player control of the 
simulation.  You can't have the first without compromising the latter, 
and vice-versa.

Many interesting solutions have been posited in many formats.  Infocom 
narrowly circumscribed simulation for storytelling, but compromised 
quite a bit.  Wizardry narrowly circumscribed stroytelling for 
simulation, but compromised quite a bit.  First person shooters, well, 
you know where they sit.  Graphics adventures don't really address the 
question at all.

My personal favorite (albeit my critically best-received and 
commercially worst-received) deliverable after Wizardry was Star Saga, a 
storytelling single-platform multi-player game which used off-line books 
of text and a game board -- a sort of a play-your-own-adventure book 
with computer-managed state.  What I liked about the product is that 
players reported a strong sense of simulation experience in a game that 
actually dramatically controlled the story-telling.  Moreover, the game 
had puzzles and boundaries but no dead ends.  It was my first product 
built on the "IF oxymoron" thesis, and I think it was critically great 
for that reason alone.

Despite its virtues, and the perceptions to the contrary, Star Saga was 
not, of course, "interactive fiction."  For reasons previously stated, 
there's no such thing.

On Monday, July 30, 2001, at 03:11 PM, Kevin Fisher wrote:

> You might be interested in the interview with Dave Lebling:
>
> http://www.adventurecollective.com/articles/interview-davelebling.htm
>
> He talks quite a bit about the limits of text adventures, both in the
> past and today.
>
> He also has some comments on the early work and object oriented coding.
>
> It's interesting that even Infocom has some remote influence from 
> Spacewar.
> :)
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 30, 2001 at 11:33:40AM -0400, Roger Kenyon wrote:
>> No question. I was pointing out the limits of current IF authoring
>> environments in favor of something, as you say, entirely Squeak-based.
>>
>>> More interesting would be an entirely Squeak-based IF system that
>>> could offer something new (which couldn't really be said for a z-code
>>> implementation in Squeak or compiling Squeak to z-code).  An etoy-like
>>> or etoy-based graphical adventure construction kit could fit the bill,
>>> as I think it would be the first widely cross-platform compatible such
>>> system, and one of the few providing access to a complete and flexible
>>> underlying system.
>>
>> On the other hand, my reference to Game Maker
>> (http://www.cs.ruu.nl/people/markov/gmaker/index.html) was to suggest 
>> not
>> limiting the tool to text-based adventures. Take a look at the Game 
>> Maker
>> documentation (that's about all us Mac folk can do with it). Now 
>> imagine
>> something like this for the omniuser -- a step up from eToy tiles; a 
>> set
>> down from actuall Smalltalk code.
>>
>> Frankly, I think kids would eat it up. Judging from how active the Game
>> Maker forum is, I am sure they would.
>>
>> --
>>
>> R. Kenyon
>>
>> |T|h|i|n|k|L|i|n|k: http://www.riverwoodpub.com/educatio.htm
>> Not everything is black & white: some things have to be read.
>>
>>
>>
>
>




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