Design: October 2007 Archive Page

Ear Studio:

Moveable Type, by New York artist Ben Rubin and U.C.L.A. associate professor Mark Hansen, is an artwork commissioned for the ground-floor lobby of The New York Times Building in New York City. When complete, it will be a dynamic portrait of The Times. Statistical methods and natural-language processing algorithms will be used to parse the daily output of the paper (news, features, editorials) and the archives, as well as the activity of visitors to NYTimes.com (browsing, searching, commenting). The resulting refracted view of The Times will be displayed on 560 vacuum-fluorescent display screens installed in the lobby.

Web guru Jakob Nielsen risks the wrath of the grammatical bluestockings when he suggests that the passive voice might be useful for headlines, but he's really talking about front-loading web titles, so that the first two words of a web heading will contain words that will catch the eye of people scanning the page. Since people usually search for concrete nouns, rather than verbs, it makes sense to get those content keywords in a prominent place.

Words are usually the main moneymakers on a website. Selecting the first 2 words for your page titles is probably the highest-impact ROI-boosting design decision you make in a Web project. Front-loading important keywords trumps most other design considerations. Writing the first 2 words of summaries runs a close second.

Nielsen got plenty of attention for this claim, but it's a bait-and-switch. Passive sentences are not the only way, or even a particularly good way, of getting subject words to the beginning of web headings.  Consider "Passive Voice Can Boost ROI in Web Headings," or "Passive Voice: Surprisingly Useful in Web Headings." 

Also I cringed at one of Nielsen's examples of a good, scanning-friendly use of the passive voice: "13 design guidelines for tab controls are all followed by Yahoo Finance, but usability suffers due to AJAX overkill and difficult customization."  If somebody alphabetizes all the page titles on a website, that page is going to be alphabetized under "13."  

Professional writers know that the most meaningful part of a sentence comes at the end, when you're setting up for the idea that follows.  So the most significant part of this particular sentence is not that 13 design guidelines for tab controls were followed, but rather that other design choices hurt the site's usability.

Invisible Games:

The Phelps Telegraph Machine (pictured) was at that time in widespread use throughout North America. Oskar Karolson, an operator in rural Ontario, a young-to-middling man of Jewish-Polish extraction with a love of puzzles, who taught the wheat farmers' children mathematics and piano, had had a new Phelps delivered to his remote station sometime early in 1877. The telegraph traffic of dairymen and the odd dentist was low, however, and Oskar had little to do. In his boredom, he reached out across the wires.

[...]

The quiet telegraph upon which so much depended read as follows:

"I am alne. North-fire. South-water. East-earth. West-Air. Cme, fnd me. Execute."

Curiously, when the corresponding Phelps Machine's keys were depressed, a melancholy little melody emerged. The song echoed through Baxter Hobshack's office, and through trial and error, the asthmatic operator managed to return:

"I am cming. Head East in the evening."

Thus began the game of Karolson and Hobshack, in which Hobshack was led through a simple, charming world of Karolson's imagination.

And, yes, I admit, before I blogged this I googled Karolson and Hobshack -- just in case I had actually missed something. Almost as charming is the equally whimsical account of the origin of the Simon game.

Utterly pointless, and at the same time completely brilliant. You can only eat a few spoonfuls of cereal at a time, so why not keep most of the bowl dry, and soak only a few bites at a time? From eatmecrunchy.com.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun prints an assessment of the function of text in recent computer games. Some good discussion of the effect of talking movies, the fact that having good voice actors means you don't need to write as much dialog (which is a good thing since recording dialog is much more expensive than writing text) and some interesting predictions about the future of text in computer games. (IF authors Emily Short and Adam Cadre are quoted, and Graham Nelson is referenced.)

And the merits of the text adventure remain. They simply weren't necessarily supplanted by necessarily better technology - just more populist, accessible ones. "There's a great deal of beauty to be found in verbal expression," notes Emily Short, IF author of critically acclaimed games like Floatpoint, Galatea and Savoir-Faire, "This sounds trivial, I know, but many of the IF pieces I like, I like for the writing: the rhythm of the prose, the attitude of the narrator, the wit or grace of the phrasing." Having text as your only medium also changes the sort of experiences you make. "There are things you can write that you can't draw effectively," Emily adds, "The reverse is also true, of course: graphics are superior at conveying spatial relationships, color and light, a sense of scale. But words are better at showing the subjective and the internal. It's hard to draw into a picture what the viewpoint character feels about what he sees; it's much easier to imply in a verbal description." There's even simple utilitarian uses to text in play. "Words are handy for highlighting only the important aspects of a scene, and downplaying the unimportant ones," Emily adds, "In a text game you can say "There's something glinting under the water", and the player knows 1) that there's something there he should be thinking about and 2) that he's not expected to know exactly what it is yet. I've played a few graphical games where I was scratching my head trying to figure out what a pictured object was".

Michael J. Roberts, creator of the TADS interactive fiction system, offers a thoughtful reflection on contemporary interactive fiction. Yes, nostalgia is part of the reason why some people like interactive fiction...

But for many of us, that's not it at all; there's a lot more to IF than fond memories of classic games on antique computers. Many of us see text-based interactive fiction as a uniquely expressive story-telling medium. To us, text is not the same as really lame graphics - it's an altogether different medium with altogether different capabilities, and it didn't become obsolete when graphical games came along any more than books became obsolete when television was invented.

What is it about interactive fiction that keeps us enthusiasts interested after all these years?

For starters, IF is probably the only computer game medium in which an individual author can hope to create an entire work on his or her own. Part of the reason today's cutting-edge computer games are so technically accomplished is that they're created by huge teams of specialists. Without millions of dollars of financial backing, someone with an idea for a game has little hope of realizing it as a full graphical production. In contrast, a lone writer can readily create an entire text game single-handedly.

Probably the most interesting thing about IF, though, is its inherent emphasis on story.

I got an e-mail this morning from a multimedia developer who found my online version of Emily Short's Metamorphoses, asking some technical questions about whether it is possible to give web-based users tasks to perform in an interactive fiction game, and have the game notify the outside world when the task is completed. I'm reproducing it here with permission.

Dennis,

Hi. I write with something of a request. I wonder if you can help?

I've been able to find one of Emily Short's IF stories playing within a web page on your site <http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/gallery.metamorp/index.html>. This is the only time I've been able to find IF playing this way - most IF seems to get played as a self-standing application - and so I wondered if you might be able to give me some idea about how the web-based IF is accomplished?

As an old (in both senses of the word) player of IF, and now a self-professed multimedia developer, I am trying to see if I can use INFORM7 to write some "tasks" for users of a web-based 'community' site that I'm working with. The idea would be bring up a short IF task as an alternative activity for a user who requests one, on the  

web page, get the user to work through it, and get the story to send a message to the web server on successful completion (or on saving, etc.).

If you have time to reply, and if you can help, I would be most grateful.

Regards,

Denis Williamson

Hong Kong

I'm posting my response here, in the hopes that anyone with a better answer will share it.

The Inform system produces game files that run on the Z-machine, which is a virtual machine that exists only in software. When you see an IF game running in a web page, it is probably using Matthew Russoto's ZPlet, which is a Java interpreter for the Z-machine.  I wouldn't know how it is possible to send a message from within the virtual machine to the outside world, but my programming skills are very modest, so just because I can't imagine how to do it doesn't mean it's impossible.  I don't know all that much about the Z machine -- Andrew Plotkin or Matthew Russoto would be the ones to ask (both of whom read the rec.arts.int-fiction Usenet group).

It should be a fairly trivial thing to have a small stand-alone ZPlet program that ends with the player finding a magic word, which the user would then just manually key into some other program.  I embedded a few small IF programs in a web page designed to teach my students about exposition in interactive fiction -- that might give you some idea of what you can accomplish. I don't try to communicate to the outside world from within the sample games, but there is some crude interaction (in in the form of questions the web site asks about the in-game experience.)

The Glulx interpreter has some significant multimedia capability, and there is a Java interpreter for Glulx, Zag, by Jon Alfred Zeppeiri. Inform 7 can output gamefiles in the Glulx format.  (It requires the Java Runtime environment to be installed on your local computer, so it's not as point-and-click simple as ZPlet.)

TADS also has some multimedia capabilities, but it is a completely different system from Inform and I have not recently checked out its capabilities. It has had HTML hyperlinking for some time, so I imagine it should not be too hard to send a message to the outside world.

The website Homestarrunner.com created a flash-based spoof of text adventures called Thy Dungeonman. I don't know whether the flash code has been released, or whether some other text-adventure fan might have released a homebrew version of the code. But that game was released long before Inform 7, so my guess is the creation of such a flash-based game would be hackish.

I just Googled and found Flashonate, a flash-based z-machine interpreter, by Peter Rogers. He has released the code as GPL.

I hope you will share whatever you learn as you investigate the possibilities.

Update: I posted the question to rec.arts.int-fiction, where the IF gurus are.

The New Yorker has an article about a bookstore that supplies custom-made libraries for purchase or, for comercial displays and movie sets, rental.

Although prop books are meant to be seen and not read, they have to evoke a mise en scène, inside and out. For Indiana Jones, the filmmakers specified that the books cover such topics as paleontology, marine biology, and pre-Columbian society. They had to be in muted colors and predate 1957. "People have gotten so character-specific nowadays," Jenny McKibben, a manager at the store, said. "It can't just be color anymore. With high-def, they can just freeze the film and say, 'Oh, that's so inappropriate.' "

Philipp Lenssen and I had a bit of fun imagining what an early, early draft of the Google home page might have looked like.