Games: October 2007 Archive Page

Next Generation:

"The game begins with Bart wanting to play a game called Grand Theft Scratchy. Of course this is a parody of Grand Theft Auto. And Marge immediately takes it away from him. She tries to clean up the town and stop the game from being distributed in Springfield because Marge is against video game violence. She uses horrific violence to stop video game violence... in a video game... That's called irony. The people who make Grand Theft Auto - they spazzed out like little babies."

In a corner of the living room between the couch and the video tape cabinet, my kids keep a huge stash of paper towel rolls, which they use to stage epic battles.

The Cardboard Tube Fighting League website is annoying since it's mostly made up images... I didn't find any text that I could copy and paste here.

Structure, Sign, and Play

An Interactive Fiction by Jason Helms and Jacques Derrida

"There seems to be a voice reverberating around you, but whether its origin is above or below, you are unsure. It speaks in a heavy french accent: "Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an 'event', if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural-or structuralist-thought to reduce or to suspect."

The concept is clever, though the implementation is a bit shaky... for example, one room mentions a spiral staircase, but when you type "climb staircase" the game says "You don't see any such thing."

Students are starting to ask questions about the online course I'm planning to teach in January. I was very happy with the way the course went the last time I taught it, in 2006. I'm sure I will tweak the course here and there, but here are the course objectives and some other details about the course that are likely to remain essentially the same. Video Game Culture and Theory: Course Objectives (2006)

Your objectives for this course are to

• explore definitions of important concepts such as game and fun
• learn about the origins and historical development of video games,
• expose yourself to a broad range of games,
• gain experience recognizing and interpreting basic game elements (goal, risk, fiction, emotional engagement, rules, outcome, values, consequences, close playing, etc.),
• develop an awareness of the complex cultural context within which games exist (children's culture, geek culture, women's issues, political issues, economic issues, aesthetic issues, etc.),
• and ultimately, to discern the core cultural values represented in a particular game.

To that end, you will:

• play several games on the syllabus, read three books and additional shorter articles as assigned,
• complete quizzes and exercises to ensure that you are keeping up with the readings and to evaluate your progress,
• participate regularly in classroom and web-based discussions, and
• write a formal research paper (minimum 10 pages).

Neither ability to "win" a game nor programming/design talents are germane to the subject of this course. At the end of this course, you should be able to

1. Demonstrate competence in the critical reading of complex cultural texts (including games, cultural responses to games, and the academic study of games)
2. Engage intellectually and respectfully with your peers (in person and online)
3. Write a college-level paper that appropriately uses primary and secondary sources to defend a non-obvious claim (without minimizing or neglecting opposing or alternative views)

This quote from a Gizmodo interview caught my attention.

There is considerable attention given to John Wilkes Booth as the central figure in the majority of the artworks. For instance, I have been rewriting the code (story line) for the interactive fiction game 'Adventure!' to include Booth as the lead antagonist.

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.

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.

Newsweek:

The assumption that all videogames are toys for children rather than entertainment for a variety of different audiences is one of our pet peeves. It may seem innocuous, but it's not only the foundation of continued attempts at the state and national level to regulate the sale and marketing of videogames, it's also an excuse for developers and publishers to coast on the innocuous, the inoffensive and the tried-and-true rather than push the medium forward in multiple directions for multiple audiences--including adults. In other words, it's not just videogame outsiders who hold this belief: many insiders do as well.

Wired's gaming blog ponders how one might play an official The Princess Bride game.

Will you have to defend yourself against ROUSes? Perhaps duel against the six-fingered man? Maybe if you collect a certain number of buttercups you unlock a mini game where you have to figure out what the hell Fezzick is saying. We'll see, I suppose.

New York Times:

Those buying it must be 17 years old, given it is rated M for mature audiences. But that has not prevented leaders at churches and youth centers across Protestant denominations, including evangelical churches that have cautioned against violent entertainment, from holding heavily attended Halo nights and stocking their centers with multiple game consoles so dozens of teenagers can flock around big-screen televisions and shoot it out.

The alliance of popular culture and evangelism is challenging churches much as bingo games did in the 1960s. And the question fits into a rich debate about how far churches should go to reach young people.

Far from being defensive, church leaders who support Halo -- despite its "thou shalt kill" credo -- celebrate it as a modern and sometimes singularly effective tool. It is crucial, they say, to reach the elusive audience of boys and young men.

Game Career Guide has an interview with some writers who work in the games industry. Hurrah for the liberal arts!

I already knew in high school I wanted to work in entertainment, so I attended some special workshops called the Media Workshops in Hollywood. There I was advised to major in whatever I wanted in college because I would learn everything I needed to know my first six months in entertainment. Taking this advice to heart, I chose to major in Archaeology.

While I continued to study programming and art in college, auditing a class in C and taking more art history classes, the archaeology emphasis has had the greatest influence on me. Combining soft knowledge like art, history, and mythology spanning the globe, with hard knowledge like biology, statistical analysis, economics, and urban planning has helped me the most in my game career.

Engadget:

That's right, the first 2600 units rolled off the assembly line in October of 1977, delighting both children and kids at heart with games like Pitfall and Pole Position, and helping distract the nation after the untimely death of the King, the tragic crash of Lynyrd Skynyrd's plane, and Pele's retirement. So here's to you, dear 2600: Atari may only be a shadow of its former self today, but you've lived on in our fond memories,