Social_Software: October 2007 Archive Page

The New York Times has published more details about Google's plans to compete with Facebook:

On Thursday, an alliance of companies led by Google plans to begin introducing a common set of standards to allow software developers to write programs for Google's social network, Orkut, as well as others, including LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning.

The strategy is aimed at one-upping Facebook, which last spring opened its service to outside developers. Since then, more than 5,000 small programs have been built to run on the Facebook site, and some have been adopted by millions of the site's users. Most of those programs tap into connections among Facebook friends and spread themselves through those connections, as well as through a "news feed" that alerts Facebook users about what their friends are doing.

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".

A brief MacWord item on Facebook security changes:

Facebook users can now report complaints about pornography, harassment or inappropriate contact either by clicking on links on the Web site or by sending email to the abuse@facebook.com address. The company will respond to these complaints within 24 hours, and it will allow an independent examiner appointed with the approval of the New York AG, to monitor the company's compliance for the next two years.

Sounds like Facebook is doing a good job acting on complaints from the wider community (that is, legislators and parents). Thanks for the link, Karissa.

Blogcosm offers a good round-up of online reaction to a NIH agency's not-so-useful method of citing a weblog.

Several bloggers noticed yesterday that the US National Library of Medicine (NLM, which is part of the NIH: National Institutes of Health) has a style guide for citing blogs... The NLM's definition of a blog isn't bad... But the guide itself is several years late and still flawed.

TiddlyWiki is a complete wiki in a single HTML file. It contains the entire text of the wiki, and all the JavaScript, CSS and HTML goodness to be able to display it, and let you edit it or search it. Without needing a server.

I played with TiddyWiki a bit, but wasn't able to edit the pages in my browser, as promised. Perhaps the ad-blocker or some security feature on my browser is interfering with the operations. I'm blogging this so I can go back to it later.

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.

Josh Olsson relates a fascinating tale of internet deception in the LA Weekly.

"Audrey, this is Harlan Ellison. It's imperative that I talk to you and Tania as soon as possible about Josh. I'm very worried. Tania's on her way to your house right now, and I'd like the two of you to come here."

Audrey asks if she can bring her friend Janna, and Harlan says no.

Audrey asks if she can bring her new puppy, and Harlan says no. You don't argue with Harlan Ellison; she says yes.

A project called StupidFilter is trying to weed out stupid internet comments. Hoax? At any rate, it's amusing.

Do you really expect to be able to detect and filter anything that's conceivably stupid?

No, of course not. You'd need real AI for that, and beyond a certain point it's simply subjective; after all, a sufficiently advanced AI would probably filter out the whole of human discourse, which isn't the idea.

So what do you plan to filter?

The idea is that the most egregiously stupid comments will also be the easiest to detect while remaining ignorant of context; comments with too much or too little capitalization, too many text-message abbreviations, excessive use of "LOL," exclamation points, and so on.

How do you rate stupidity?

Since we're trying to build a detailed database that serves as a very verbose example of What Not To Do, we look for comments whose prose style we can point to and say, "I don't even have to understand the content of this comment to know that it's stupid," -- based on the gross prose style alone, its stupidity is self-evident. It is then useful as an example for our parser to integrate into its database of stupidity.

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.

Mark Dery, on 10 Zen Monkeys

Reporting -- especially investigative reporting, the lifeblood of a truly adversarial press -- is labor-intensive, money-sucking stuff, yet even The New York Times can't figure out how to charge for its content in the Age of Rip, Burn, and Remix. To be sure, newspapers are hemorrhaging readers to the Web, and fewer and fewer Americans care about current events and the world outside their own skulls. But the other part of the problem is that Generation Download thinks information wants to be free, everywhere and always, even if some ink-stained wretch wept tears of blood to create it.

Lawrence Lessig talks a good game, but I still don't understand how people who live and die by their intellectual property survive the obsolescence of copyright and the transition to the gift economy of our dreams.

Inside Higher Ed:

Virtually all college students come to campus with their own cell phones, but for privacy reasons, telecommunications companies require their subscribers to manually opt in to any mass alert service. The result is that in many cases, the primary obstacle to widespread campus access to text alerts is the students themselves.