XYZZYnews
Issue #16

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HOLLOW VOICE
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

It's a good thing I never considered direct mail as a 
way to make a living.

At times, I'm just terrible at holding up my end of a 
correspondence. Gifts may languish for months before I 
send out a thank-you note. And while I never mind 
taking on freelance work, writing and sending the 
invoice at the end is a chore I constantly dread. 

That's why I owe David Dyte such a debt of thanks for 
all his help with preparing and sending out the prizes 
for the winners of the 1997 XYZZY awards. He 
researched prizes for the winners -- we considered 
trophies before deciding on medals -- then coordinated 
everything from finding a vendor to do the work to 
having the medals designed and inscribed to actually 
mailing out the medals to all the winners. All I had 
to do was write a check -- and even that took me 
forever and a day! :-) So I'd like to take a moment to 
publicly thank David for his invaluable assistance; 
there will certainly be a seat of honor for him at 
next year's online ceremonies!

One other interesting note I wanted to point out in 
this issue's introduction is a cute Unix shell that I 
understand has been around quite awhile but that was 
new to me -- the Adventure Shell, available in C 
source code by John Coker (see ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-
archive/shells/advsh.tar.Z) This custom shell makes 
using Unix a real adventure; you need to search for 
and locate magical items that in turn enable you to 
run programs and execute the other commands you want 
to perform. Best of all is the "xyzzy" command that 
returns the user to the home directory -- if that's 
not intuitive, then I don't know what is. :-) A big 
thanks to Urpo Lankinen for sharing this!

Until next issue, happy gaming!

Eileen Mullin
eileen@interport.net

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
TABLE OF CONTENTS
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Contents:
     **Top 10 Picks for IF on the Web
     **Letters
     **Tales from the Code Front: Parlez-Vous Nalian?
     **Book Review:  Game Developer's Marketplace
     **Reporter's Notebook: International Game 
          Developer's Network (IGDN) Conference
     **Game Review: Spider and Web
     **Bulletin Board: readers helping other readers

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LEGALESE
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

XYZZYnews is published more-or-less bimonthly by 
Bran Muffin Communications, 160 West 24th Street, # 
7C, New York, NY 10011, USA. Email: 
eileen@interport.net. URL: 
http://www.xyzzynews.com/. Send all inquiries, 
letters, and submissions to any of the addresses 
above. 

Contents (c) 1998 XYZZYnews. All rights reserved. 
Published in the United States of America. 

Electronic versions: There are currently three 
versions of XYZZYnews made available online. One is 
in ASCII and can be viewed with any text reader. You 
can also download a .PDF file that mirrors the 
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Thirdly, you can also read this issue online at 
http://www.xyzzynews.com/xyzzy.16.html

Subscriptions: All electronic versions are available 
at no cost. You can obtain either the ASCII or PDF 
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archive/magazines/ XYZZYnews directory. To be added 
to the mailing list, please write to 
eileen@interport.net and specify text-only or .PDF 
version. The print version is $15 (U.S.) for one 
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print subscriptions outside the U.S. or Canada, 
please email or write for rates. 

All products, names, and services are trademarks or 
registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Editor: 
     Eileen Mullin
Associate Editor:
     Neil deMause
Contributors to this issue:
     Lauren Meckler
     Gillian Pilau
     Lucian P. Smith

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Issue # 16 Top 10 Picks for 
Interactive Fiction on the Web
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Cascade Mountain Publishing
http://www.cascadepublishing.com/

Guilty Bastards
http://www.geocities.com/hollywood/academy/
    5976/guilty.html

The Explore Adventure Series
http://www.jump.com/joe/explore.html

You Be The Hero
http://t2.technion.ac.il/~site

Teaching and Learning With Interactive Fiction
http://k12s.phast.umass.edu/~desilets/

The 4th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition's 
Website
http://www.ifcompetition.org/

Welcome to HTML-TADS
http://www.tela.bc.ca/tela/html-tads/

Bob Turkee's Interactive Fiction Link Page
http://www2.netcom.com/~bobturky/games.html

The Giant List of Classic Game Programmers
http://www.dadgum.com/glist/list.html

Inform for New Writers
http://www.placet.com/int-fiction/

[screen shot of the You Be The Hero site.]

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LETTERS
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In issue #14, I printed examples of references to text 
adventure games discovered in non-IF materials sent in 
by readers ("Spot the IF Reference"). The following 
two letters provide some additional examples. 
 -- EM

Dear XYZZYnews,

Two more references to "a maze of twisty little 
passages, all alike," only one of which I can quote:

From Taltos, by Steven Brust (pp.158-159):

"We made out way through the corridors of the Halls of 
Judgment and well as we could, which wasn't very.  
What had been a single straight, wide corridor had 
somehow turned into a twisty maze of little passages, 
all the same. We must have wandered those little halls 
for two or three hours, getting more and more lost, 
with none of us willing to admit it. We tried marking 
the walls with the points of our swords, keeping to 
the left-hand paths, but nothing worked. And the  
really odd thing was that none of the passages led 
anywhere except to other passages. That is, there were 
no rooms, stairways, doors, or anything else."

There is a reference to the Maze somewhere in Terry 
Pratchett's "Witches Abroad," but I lost the slip of 
paper that I wrote it down on, and I've returned the 
book to the library. Oops.

      -- Howard Liu
      ifnews@gamestats.com

Dear XYZZYnews,

There's a reference to Adventure in Larry Niven's 
novel Destiny's Road.

One of the characters describes the ecological system 
of the planet Destiny by saying "We seem to be in a 
bunch of twisty little ecologies, all different." 
Verrry hard to miss: made me almost fall out of my 
chair laughing. :) 

      -- Allen Short
     ashort@iname.com
----------------------------------------------------
Infocom bugs, continued

Dear XYZZYnews: 

Here's an interesting one from Infidel (off 
Masterpieces):

>put all in pack
knapsack: You take the knapsack off and place it in 
the cigarette pack. As
it settles in the cigarette pack, the cover flaps 
open. 
farewell note: There's no room.
cigarette pack: How can you do that?

>i
You are carrying:
  A farewell note
  A cigarette pack
  The cigarette pack contains:
    A knapsack
    The knapsack contains:
      A rope
      A canteen

>version
INFIDEL
Copyright 1983 by Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
INFIDEL is a trademark of Infocom, Inc.
Release 22 / Serial number 830916
The Infocom Bugs List mentions the "container bug' in 
Infidel -- putting the knapsack and the chalice in 
each other at the same time makes them disappear. It 
works with the knapsack and the cigarette pack too. 
You can trigger it with the amusing sequence:
>put sack in pack. put pack in sack.

Shades of Dr. Seuss!

      -- Joe
     jcmason@uwaterloo.ca

Dear XYZZYnews: 

Suspended bug: Iris (the one who can see) can be used 
to describe all rooms.

There was something that you plug in so that can see 
the room that you are in. Anyway, have one robot 
(e.g., Poet) plug in the device, then direct that 
robot to follow another robot (e.g., Sensa), then move 
Sensa. Poet will forget to unplug the device, and you 
can then view the descriptions of all rooms, including 
the ones that are in the section that requires the 
wedge for access.

Perhaps stranger that such descriptions exist... or 
have I missed something?

     8^) p.
      -- Peter Ferrie

Dear XYZZYnews: 

I have found a bug in Spellbreaker which is not 
listed on the bugs list:

If you have water in the bottle then casting tinsot on 
any body of water except for the one in the Oubliette 
will give the message "The water and bottle freeze and 
shatter into a million pieces!" and destroy the bottle 
even if the bottle is not in the same room or if it is 
inside the closed zipper.

If that's not clear, here's a concrete example. At the 
Enchanters' Retreat I dropped the bottle which 
contained water. I then blorpled the earth cube and 
went west then south to get to the Ruins Room. I then 
cast tinsot on the water there and received the 
message about the bottle shattering. Going back to the 
Enchanters' Retreat I found that the bottle was gone.

I found this in version 87/860904 of Spellbreaker.

      -- Paul
     rizzo@best.com

----------------------------------------------------
Second that emotion

Dear XYZZYnews: 

I read both Neil de Mause's critique and Laura Mixon's 
response.

I feel the difference in the emotion of her game 
(which I have tried a bit) and "regular" IF is in the 
way it is presented. The Erasmatron forces the emotion 
on you like it was trying to say "Look here! Emotion! 
We have determined emotion is important so we're going 
to stick it in your face and base the entire game on 
it."

Emotion works best when it's subtle and finds its way 
into the readers' hearts through unexpected paths. The 
emotion in Shattertown is predictable and completely 
superfluous. If you want emotion in IF play Babel.

Shattertown is a noble attempt at best and a waste of 
time at worst.

      -- Lawrence Noc-Woon Kwong
     lnkwong@midway.uchicago.edu

----------------------------------------------------
Inquiring minds

Dear XYZZYnews,

It was a huge surprise to me that there are people out 
there who still cherish the ol' text adventures, as I 
thought everyone migrated to DOOM/QUAKE land...

A long while ago, I was putting the finishing touches 
on a horror text adventure game (a real horror game, 
not the cheezy "you see a ghost here" games). I was 
writing for the PC DOS platform, but then Wolfenstein 
3-D came out and killed the text adventures off.

What venues are out there for me should I decide to 
dust off the game and finish it? Should I even bother?

Thanx loads!
      -- Dave
     dadametz@uhc.com

As you might guess, I'll take issue with your blanket 
statement that the Wolfensteins of the world have 
killed off text adventures. I think you'll find a 
willing crowd of play-testers for the asking on the 
Usenet newsgroup rec.games.int-fiction. From there, 
it's up to you how much you'll take their feedback 
into account in creating a final version for general 
distribution to the IF community.  -- EM

Hi Eileen,

I've been reading XYZZYnews since number one, and I'm 
a big fan of it, lots of nice interviews. Anyway, I'm 
writing this because I was recently rummaging through 
some old papers (old indeed, as I threw away some 
copies of TRS-80 Magazine ;)) and discovered my 
collection of NZT/Status Line. I think it is complete 
(I have 22 issues), and I'm willing to scan them into 
PDFs, and the if-archive seems an obvious spot where 
they should go. Question is, you know if there are any 
legal constraints ?

Thanks a lot. Keep the good work !

     --Rafael Oliveira
     rafaelg@pobox.com

I would assume that Activision currently holds the 
copyright on these materials. You would need to ask 
permission from the company before you could 
legitimately reprint their material.  -- EM

Hey Eileen,

I had worked with the Adventure Game Toolkit a while 
back, and while digging through archives on the Net to 
find it, I came across a link to your XYZZYnews site. 
It is very nice, but I'm a bit confused.

What exactly is interactive fiction? Just any "game" 
that employs only text, or is there more? I'm trying 
to work on a browser-based game where many people can 
all interact in a fictitious, self-running environment 
-- and it's all text (and if I finish, it'll be free 
for public access). Does this fit the definition? 

      -- Rod Jackson
     rodjackson@bigfoot.com

Sure, your Web-based IF games still sounds like IF to 
me -- and I've no doubt you'll find an eager audience 
if you promote your game to rec.games.int-fiction when 
you're done.   -- EM



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TALES FROM THE CODE FRONT: PARLEZ-VOUS NALIAN?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Lucian P. Smith (lpsmith@rice.edu), author of The 
Edifice, was  awarded the 1997 XYZZY Award for Best 
Puzzle for the game's language puzzle. In the 
following article, he describes how he developed and 
built this compelling feature into The Edifice's plot 
and gameplay.

One of the better gaming decisions I've made in my 
life so far was to set up the second level of The 
Edifice so the player would have to learn a new 
language. It seemed natural enough -- after all, what 
characteristic of early human development is more 
important than the ability to communicate with others? 
This article attempts to trace that idea from its 
initial spark to its final implementation.  I'll 
address the code in pretty general terms here, but 
I've re-coded this puzzle as a separate module for 
anyone interested in exploring it in greater detail 
and uploaded it to GMD, where you should be able to 
find it at:

ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-
archive/programming/inform6/examples/nalian.inf

Not all of the instances described below are in that 
module, but all the tricky parsing is. If you have 
additional questions after reading this article and 
perusing the module, please feel free to e-mail me 
directly.

Before introducing the new language in the game, it 
was necessary to set up the proper context. All great 
discoveries are driven by necessity, so I made the 
scenario pretty basic: your son is sick, and needs 
Feverleaf, which you can't find in the forest on your 
own. Enter Stranger, who, the player should suspect, 
might have some.

At this point, I could tell the player's goals were 
going to be twofold -- first, they would have to 
communicate to Stranger that their son is sick, and 
secondly, they would have to discover Stranger's word 
for 'Feverleaf', so they could ask for it.

But a language with just the words, 'son', 'sick', and 
'feverleaf' would be pretty dull. At the opposite 
extreme, I wouldn't want the player struggling through 
a 5,000 word vocabulary just to find those three 
words! So the vocabulary I chose had to be large 
enough to be interesting, but not so large as to be 
overwhelming. I also had to keep in mind that I'd have 
to code up responses to every reasonable sentence the 
player constructed, so I wanted to keep that number 
within reason.

I turned to nouns first. The basic three pronouns were 
a necessity; I decided that one word was sufficient 
for he, she, and it, and also chose to ignore plurals. 
'Son' and 'feverleaf' were necessities, of course, and 
I included a few other items in the area -- 
'home/hut/house', 'weapon', and 'panther' (since I'd 
given Stranger a panther skin to wear, it only seemed 
logical that he would be proud of the fact that he 
managed to kill it, and would want to tell the player 
so.)

Adjectives were next -- 'sick' was one of the basics, 
along with my, your, and his/her/its. 'Good' and 'bad' 
seemed pretty basic, and I rounded those off with 
'strange' (his probable adjective of choice for the 
player), and 'dangerous' (his adjective of choice for 
himself).

For verbs, I included 'give' and 'take'; these terms 
seemed to be necessary for an exchange to take place. 
If the player shows up with a weapon, Stranger gets 
angry, so 'leave' and 'threaten' were logical next 
choices. Once the player starts to communicate 
fluently, 'understand' would seem to be important, 
along with 'see' for good measure. Throw in 'is' with 
'yes' and 'no', and I've created myself a rudimentary 
language!

Creating the actual words was really rather fun. To 
ease the translation process, I gave each part of 
speech a common ending, with the exception of putting 
a few different options in for nouns. This led to 
logical connections between the words for 'I' and 
'my', for example, further easing the player's task. 
To keep the language even more consistent, I tried to 
keep common words short, and I had fun with some of 
the roots -- 'panther' and 'dangerous' have the same 
root, for example, and the word for 'understand' comes 
from the words for 'take' and 'I'.

For grammar, I kept it simple -- there is none. No new 
word endings for different parts of speech, and no 
significance attached to word order. This makes Nalian 
a poor choice for creating complex sentences, but I 
wasn't planning on doing that anyway.

At this point, I was ready to start coding. Since most 
of Stranger's speeches would come from player input, I 
first needed to figure out how to correctly parse 
player input. Standard Inform parsing techniques were 
wholly inadequate to the task at hand, so I turned to 
the Inform properties 'grammar' and 'life'. 
Unfortunately, I had to copy some code here, but this 
wasn't terribly extensive. I got Inform to tell me 
where the player's sentence began and ended, and set 
up a loop to deal with each word of player input.

There were four possibilities for each word the player 
typed, and all four needed unique responses: The word 
could be Nalian, 'English' (understood by the parser), 
gibberish (not understood by the parser), or 
punctuation. The appropriate responses would be 
recognition for the first, partial recognition for the 
second, bewilderment for the third, and the last 
should be ignored.

The first order of business was to check if a typed 
word was in Nalian. After a brief unhappy experiment 
with byte arrays, I turned back to the old mainstay of 
IF programmers: objects, rooms, and containers. Each 
Nalian word became an object, stored in a new 
'LanguageRoom'. A container called 'Sentence' served 
to collect player input -- any time a word-object was 
matched, it got dumped into the 'Sentence' bucket -- 
the new repository of player input.

Gibberish words were easy to recognize -- I got a 
value of '0' for any word not in the parser's 
dictionary. English words were similarly simple -- any 
non-zero value not caught by my earlier 'Nalian' 
check.

With punctuation, however, I ran into a problem -- I 
was getting '0' again. In addition, any attempt I made 
to try to put punctuation 'words' into the dictionary 
resulted in failure -- sometimes it even caused Inform 
to not recognize commas and periods at all any more! 
My solution for the contest was to hack the library. I 
found that the routines 'FirstWord' and 
'FirstWordStopped' were throwing away any punctuation 
information they came across, so I changed this 
behavior for my calls to these routines from 'grammar' 
and 'life', being sure not to change the default 
behavior for normal library calls. Even this turned 
out to be inadequate, however. One of the bug reports 
I received from participants in the 1997 IF 
competition was that when the player tried to ask 
Stranger questions in Nalian, Stranger failed to 
understand them. This turned out to be because while 
Inform separates commas, periods, and quotation marks 
from the words they adjoin, it does not do this for 
other punctuation. Hence, the input:

>SAY "NA BEN LALSE," TO STRANGER

gets separated as:

SAY " NA BEN LALSE , " TO STRANGER

and the input:

>SAY "NA BEN LALSE?" TO STRANGER

gets separated as:

SAY " NA BEN LALSE? " TO STRANGER
		             ^^^^^^
Since 'lalse?' was different (to Inform) from 'lalse', 
the parser was failing to understand the latter as 
valid input. After a plea to the newsgroups, Torbjorn 
Andersson kindly answered and told me I could use the 
routine 'LanguageToInformese' -- a routine commonly 
used for foreign languages! In this case, it was a 
simple matter to convert question and exclamation 
marks to periods, since I was ignoring punctuation 
anyway.

At this point, I was able to flag English and 
gibberish words, and had all Nalian words stored in 
'Sentence'. Now came the hard part: coding responses 
to the various sentences!

Examining the vocabulary to this point, I found that 
Nalian had a 25-word vocabulary. Not too large, but 
let's see: accounting for all possible three-word 
sentences results in 25 times 24 times 23... 13,800 
potential sentences! Yikes! Clearly, I was not going 
to be able to code up 13,800 responses, so I had to 
resort to more devious methods.

First of all, I set up responses for when there was 
only one word in Sentence. 25 responses were a lot, 
but manageable. Next, I reorganized the remaining 
sentences, putting verbs first, then nouns, then 
adjectives. For sentences with no verbs, I assumed an 
implied 'is' between the noun and any adjectives in 
the sentence (Sentences with nothing but strings of 
nouns or strings of adjectives could be dealt with 
with a simple response indicating puzzlement, and a 
general clue as to how to better use Nalian; likewise 
with sentences with more than one verb.) Since the 
presence of the word 'is' now didn't mean anything, if 
my routine found 'is' in the Sentence with other 
words, it could just throw it out and start over. In 
the same manner, the presence of the word 'yes' 
wouldn't change the essential meaning of the sentence, 
so I could throw that out, too.

So, with eight nouns and eight adjectives, that meant 
only 64 responses -- some of which could be 
concatenated, and some of which had to be expanded. 
Nouns and adjectives which were crucial to 
communicating the player's plight were singled out 
(son, sick, feverleaf, and my) so that my routine 
would assume the player's sentence was basically 
correct if it contained the important bits of 
information -- Stranger is, after all, working to 
understand the player. However, to prevent abuse of 
this concession, I made Stranger unable to understand 
sentences that were more than five words in length, 
complaining that he couldn't follow your terrible 
accent all the way to the end. This allowed the 
potential sentence "Yes, my son is sick," to be 
understood, but not sentences of any greater length.

For sentences with one verb in them, I focused my 
responses on one noun that followed. With my 
reorganized sentences, this meant that Stranger was 
more likely to pick up on certain key words than 
others, if the player tried more than one. By leaving 
them in, though, I could tailor certain responses to 
acknowledge more than just two key words. For 
sentences with only verbs and adjectives, I gave a 
general response that essentially told the player that 
his sentence didn't make much sense without a subject. 
With six verbs and eight nouns, this meant 48 basic 
responses here, some of which, again, were 
concatenated, and some of which were expanded. (For 
example, when the player used the word 'son', it was 
important to check if the word 'my' was also used, to 
distinguish the boy standing next to Stranger from the 
player's sick child.)

Finally, I had to deal with the word 'no'. By this 
point, I had already written the bulk of Stranger's 
responses and was getting rather tired of it. This one 
simple word opened up a whole new unwelcomed vista of 
potential -- so I cheated. If the player used the word 
'no' and a verb, Stranger took that as a command not 
to do that verb, and just stood there. If there were 
no other verbs in an otherwise reasonable-sounding 
sentence, Stranger simply acted disinterested. This 
was not ideal, but I really didn't want to code up 
another 64 responses for the nouns and adjectives. 
Even so, in the end this section takes up 52K.

In the setup above, I showed how I had to condense 
Stranger's vocabulary so that the number of responses 
I had to code up was manageable. In actually writing 
the responses, however, I had to expand his vocabulary 
conceptually so it could express everything I wanted 
it to. 

One trick I used was to use 'yes' as an emphasis word. 
"I am dangerous," then, became "I am yes dangerous." 
To de-emphasize like sentences, I'd leave out 'is' -- 
"I dangerous." 'good' became the embodiment of every 
positive force in the universe, and 'bad' became the 
opposite. Generally, every word became much more than 
its original English counterpart.

Also, I tried to use a lot of body language. With this 
context, individual words would be (hopefully) easier 
to figure out. When the player spoke just one word, I 
often had Stranger mime a response that illustrated 
that word. I also decided that nodding meant 'yes' to 
both of them, and shaking one's head meant 'no'. This 
cleared up another problem I had had -- when Stranger 
asks the player a question, how should I respond to 
the Inform verbs 'yes' and 'no'? Printing out 'you nod 
your head,' and 'you shake your head,' before giving 
Stranger's response turned out to work nicely here -- 
and also meant I had to add three new verbs, "Nod 
head," "Shake head," and "Shrug."

Finally, I had to code up responses to the player 
showing Stranger things, or pointing at items. This 
was almost laughably easy, with a mere dozen items on 
that level. Unfortunately, this was where one of my 
game-crashing bugs showed up, if the player showed 
Stranger an unexpected item (like pointing in a 
direction, for example.), due to the way I cross-
referenced the verbs 'Point' and 'Show' (If there was 
no default response for one, it called the other, and 
visa versa. Oops.)

So, with all this analysis, have we discovered why 
this puzzle was so popular? Probably not. The analysis 
points to areas where it could have gone wrong, but 
not to the essence of what made it fun. Having not 
solved it myself, I am in the unique position of 
knowing the ins and outs of the puzzle intimately, but 
not having ever directly experienced it. I didn't even 
know if someone *could* solve it, or what paths they 
were more likely to take if they did! However, as best 
as I can figure from talking to people, I think the 
basic reason it was fun was that it let the player 
figure out a system, and then manipulate that system 
to produce a desired result. Making the system 
interesting and responsive were essential, but the 
basic concept is inherently intriguing, I think. I 
could be lalse, but that's the way I unen it.    

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
BOOK REVIEW
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Game Developer's Marketplace: The Definitive Guide to 
Making 
It Big in the Interactive Game Industry
by Ben Sawyer, Alex Dunne, and Tor Berg
Coriolis Group Books, 1998. US$49; Can$69.99 
728 pages, includes CD. 
ISBN: 1-57610-177-0

Anyone who's harbored idle fantasies about creating 
the next Myst would probably be drawn to this title 
while browsing at Barnes & Noble. None of the topics 
covered in Game Developer's Marketplace focus 
specifically on designing text adventure games or the 
history of such games, unfortunately -- despite the 
tome's hefty length -- but it's useful for gaining 
valuable insights about the the industry as a whole, 
especially if you're considering computer game 
development as a career choice.

The book is divided into four major sections; the 
first, focusing on the planning basics of game design 
and a brief history of computer game and video game 
companies, is of the broadest interest to all 
fledgling game programmers. So, even if you consider 
game development more of a time-consuming hobby than a 
potential career choice, you'll find useful tidbits in 
these first seven chapters. Of these, chapters 5 
through 7 will be the most interesting for interactive 
fiction fans considering game development for fun and 
(possibly, but not probably) profit.  

Chapter 5, "Refining Your Design,"tries to come up 
with some simple answers to questions like "What makes 
a game successful?" Its discussion of problem-solving 
and the role of puzzles in a game is good food for 
thought; while you may not come away with any earth-
shattering insights, it will probably help you better 
consider your audience's needs and interests when you 
plan your game's puzzles along with their overall 
difficulty and various outcomes.

I turned to Chapter 6, "Storytelling, Design Details, 
and Interface Design," right away because of the 
title. The focus on graphical game interfaces is 
annoying -- for IF-only developers, anyway! -- but the 
chapter does touch on some good issues that any good 
programmer worth his or her salt should consider. 
These range from how well a work of fiction can be 
adapted to an interactive game to how to give your 
characters depth. 

Chapter 7 is devoted entirely to tips for successful 
game design. This is the only chapter where I found a 
specific mention of text adventures; it also touches 
on all kinds of other specific game genres and gives a 
very general overview of the design challenges of 
each. 

In the second major section of the book, the authors 
turn their attention to how one can gain financially 
from an interest in computer games -- namely, how to 
get a job with a big-name entertainment company or how 
to pursue venture capital to fund your own startup. I 
liked the job-hunting tips in Chapter 9 the most; this 
practical advice would apply to just about any 
industry, but the chapter also includes capsule 
descriptions for the many different staff positions 
that play a role in developing a commercial computer 
game -- many of which, I have to admit, were new to 
me.

The third major section is a bit scattered, but is 
meant to address market research and legal issues that 
affect game development, from the demographics of game 
players to intellectual property rights. Finally, the 
resources section in Part IV -- listing software 
utilities and contact information for game publishers, 
among other tidbits -- is reproduced in electronic 
form on the book's enclosed CD.

The book's overall tone comes across as very casual 
and laid-back, a friendly approach that -- like a lot 
of other Coriolis Group Books -- could stand to use 
much more tightening and editing, but which makes for 
an easy read.    

 -- Lauren Meckler


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: International Game 
Developer's Network (IGDN ) Conference
by Lucian P. Smith (lpsmith@rice.edu) 
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

During the weekend of March 13th, I attended the 
International Game Developers Network (IGDN) 
Conference in Austin, Texas. What follows is what I 
learned and observed from that experience. I highly 
recommend that if you ever get a chance to go to one 
of these things -- a smaller conference, like this one 
was -- go for it! It's truly fascinating, and you'll 
learn a lot about the computer gaming industry.

---------------------
General impressions
---------------------
Informal. These people are not your corporate types. 
The "old hands" in the industry were dressed nicely, 
but nobody wore a suit. The majority of those under 30 
wore T-shirts. The name tags had your first name 
emblazoned in a huge font, underneath which was your 
last name, in a much smaller font. Under that it 
either had your company affiliation, university 
('Rice', in my case), or your lunch choice (which had 
me temporarily wonder if I was getting a particularly 
bland lunch.) Nary a 'sir' or a 'mister' was to be 
heard for the duration of the weekend.

Young. The old hands I spoke of earlier were few and 
far between, and comprised maybe 10 to 20 percent of 
those in attendance -- and I'm including everyone who 
looked like they were much over 30 in this category. 
I'd guesstimate the average age at maybe 27, the 
median at 25. However, there were precious few 
"newbies" like myself there. Most of these people had 
been in the business for years and knew the trade.

Male. The males outnumbered the females maybe 10 to 1. 
Interestingly, this ratio seemed to extend across all 
age groups; the number of women in the industry 
doesn't seem to have changed much over the past few 
decades. Even more noticeable was the lack of racial 
diversity; I think I may have seen one black person 
and a couple of Hispanics out of about 300 in 
attendance.

Unsettled. As people talked about their jobs, I began 
to realize just how volatile the gaming market is. 
People seem to work at one company for maybe one to 
five years before moving on; whether this was by 
choice or by force was harder to determine. There 
seemed to be an inordinately large number of small 
bands of people who would form small companies, create 
a game, and then try to get some big-name publisher to 
pick it up. I also heard about a conference called 
Computer Game Developers Conference where people with 
the games find the people with the money, and from 
there try to get funded for the year ahead.

---------------------
Issues of the day
---------------------
The most frequently voiced concern I heard at the 
conference was the complaint that the market is being 
driven by clones, and that the more creative and 
unique games aren't being funded. The other hot topic 
under discussion was what to do about online games. In 
addition, many people were wondering about gender-
inclusive gaming -- why this was so rare, and how to 
encourage it.

While I heard much discussion on how to deal with 
these issues, I didn't hear any that were 
wholeheartedly endorsed by the crowd at large. I heard 
plenty about direct publishing, and general 
acknowledgment that the Internet could change the 
publishing industry, but no one ventured further to 
say how that might play itself out. It seemed that 
just about everyone had ideas about online gaming, but 
no one could point to any that have worked really well 
yet or even to the satisfaction of those involved. 
There is money being made in these endeavors, but 
nothing seems to have emerged as an industry standard 
yet. It seems obvious what people are doing wrong, but 
it is still unclear how to do things right. Whoever 
does, though, is likely to make a lot of money. Gender 
issues in games weren't resolved either, but I'll talk 
more about that later.

-----[sidebar]-----
Hear for yourself!
Several of the speeches given at the IGDN conference 
in March, and described in this article, are available 
for audio playback online. You'll need the RealAudio 
plug-in (available from http://www.real.com/). 

Chris Crawford's talk is at:
ftp://www.kesmai.com/audio/crawford.ra

and Jim Dunnigan's is:
ftp://www.kesmai.com/audio/dunnigan.ra
-------------------
So now, on to the speakers...

---------------------
Keynote speaker: Alex St.John
---------------------
Alex worked for Microsoft for many years before 
leaving to join the gaming industry, so he had a 
slightly different perspective to share with us.

What are companies? Are they their hyped product? Or 
are they the hype? What really endures -- any one 
given product, or the process?

One half of all applications running on personal 
computers at any given time are games. This should 
translate into incredible leverage for the gaming 
industry -- but it doesn't. Entertainment doesn't 
leverage anything, at least not in the manner of Word, 
Lotus, and others, with their continual upgrades, 
which you pay money for.

Leverage comes in the form of platforms. Why do we run 
games on top of existing operating systems, which are 
designed to do tons of extra things we don't need? Why 
not model the arcade games?

The main point is this: Game companies right now live 
or die by their latest product. This is no way to run 
a company. If we want to keep some of our leverage 
from our last product, we need to find a better way to 
keep customers.

---------------------
Roundtable:  Gender-inclusive games
---------------------

Richard Garriot wasn't around to talk about "Ultimas: 
Past, Present and Future" (he was busy dealing with 
his Ultima Online class-action lawsuit), so I decided 
to stop by this roundtable, with facilitator Sheri 
Graner Ray. Sheri is the president of Sirenia 
Software, and was described as "one of the pioneers in 
the field of designing girls' games." Sirenia Software 
apparently hasn't produced any games yet -- I did 
mention the gaming market was volatile, didn't I? -- 
but she used to be director of product development for 
Her Interactive and produced three games there, 
including "The Vampire Diaries." Previously, she 
worked with Origin on the later Ultimas, among other 
games. Most of the examples she gave were from her 
experiences with U7:Serpent Isle, although she did 
talk briefly about why vampires appeal to female 
players.

A recurring refrain in this roundtable was, "Females 
represent 52 percent of your potential market. Why not 
pay attention to those aspects of your game design 
they feel is important?"

The first thing she said was: Males are visually 
stimulated, females are emotionally and tactually 
stimulated. Attach electrodes to guys and show them a 
car chase scene with no context, and they react. 
Females won't. Put a kidnapped child in the front car 
and a mom in the back car, and the females will react 
too -- and not just because of the mother/child 
relationship. Give a gun to the woman in the back, and 
the females will cheer along as she shoots at the 
kidnappers. Violence, excitement, flashy graphics, 
whatever -- a female will tend to be bored rather 
quickly unless a reason is given. She quoted the line, 
"A woman needs a reason for violence, a guy only needs 
a place." (I had heard the line elsewhere applied to a 
different subject, but no matter.)

Her most controversial statement -- to me, at least -- 
was that people don't want to role-play people of a 
higher social status than they are. Conversely, people 
don't mind playing people of a lower social status. In 
U7:SI, there were a variety of characters you could 
choose between. The females invariably picked female 
characters. The males picked anyone. There were also 
interesting divisions along race lines: Blacks picked 
black characters, while whites picked anyone. The 
largest demographic group that chose to play the black 
female character? White males.

I'm not sure I agree with this, although it's an 
intriguing hypothesis. The observed behavior is what 
it is, but I'm not sure it implies what she thinks it 
implies. As my wife pointed out to me in a discussion 
we had later, it may be that when a guy plays a girl, 
he doesn't have any problem playing her 'like a guy' -
- she becomes a tomboy, is all. The female, on the 
other hand, doesn't want to play a guy like a girl; 
she would want to play him like a guy, and this would 
take more effort than she wants to expend in something 
that should be entertainment.

There are other reasons I'm not sure I buy the 'higher 
social standing' argument. There are, of course, many 
scenarios where the player plays someone of a much 
higher social standing than they are. Kings, 
emperors... even an active and respected member of a 
community. This doesn't seem to have any bearing on 
anyone's comfort level with role-playing that 
character. Or consider the issues with the tables 
turned -- imagine a game set in a matriarchy, for 
instance. I may be alone here, but in this setting, I 
would suddenly feel awkward playing a female of any 
social ranking, let alone one of high status. I would 
imagine females would have no problem playing those 
characters. Likewise, in this same society, I think 
females wouldn't have problems playing a male, while 
males would feel compelled to play the male. It's hard 
to pinpoint where this awkwardness comes from, 
however. It may be that I feel instinctively that the 
social rules of behavior would be different in this 
society, and that I would be lost trying to play 'like 
a female' within it. This feels close, but I'm not 
sure I've pinned this down yet.

Other things that tend to be more important to female 
players: exploring relationships between people and 
their environment. Exploring alternative pathways of 
resolution. Finding endings that are mutually 
beneficial to the parties involved.

It turns out that both boys and girls play the same 
computer games up until the age 8 or 10, at which 
point the boys continue on (to games like 'Doom', more 
than likely), while girls tend to stop. As time goes 
by, females are socialized to never consider using 
computers for entertainment, but only for work. Sheri 
conducts a lot of surveys where she asks women 
questions like, "What would have to be in a computer 
game before you would buy it?" All too often, she'll 
get the response, "I work with computers all day. Why 
would I want to be on them more, in my free time?" If 
you think about this, this is dumb. Ask a TV studio 
exec if she caught the latest Seinfeld episode, and 
she won't say, "Ugh. I work with TV all day. Why would 
I want to watch it in my spare time?" It's a 
completely different experience. But females have been 
indoctrinated to associate using computers only for 
work.

Other trends: Males tend to approach conflict 
resolution mano-a-mano, strength vs. strength. Females 
try more to resolve conflict through compromise and/or 
manipulation. A female player will try to work out a 
happy ending for someone, not even necessarily her own 
character; she can be willing to sacrifice her own 
character if she knows the fortune of another 
character they care will take a turn for the better.

One disclaimer: Sheri told us, about halfway through 
one of her talks on this subject that usually someone 
will say, "But isn't that just good game design?" 
Bingo. The trends outlined above are not universal, by 
any stretch of the imagination. By incorporating into 
your design aspects that will appeal to the 
stereotypical female, you appeal to a huge swath of 
males, as well. If you can do both well, you only 
serve to widen your game's appeal.

---------------------
Brian Moriarty:  'Entrain'
---------------------
[Note: Unlike my other write-ups of the conference 
speakers, here I've largely reported Brian Moriarty's 
speech verbatim -- as far as my illegible notes and 
faulty memory could allow, of course.]

 "Hi, my name is Brian Moriarty. Welcome to the 
premiere of my '98 rant."

Brian's talk was the only multimedia presentation I 
saw. Throughout the duration of his talk, he showed a 
video accompanied by a deep, rhythmic music. He 
started off by explaining what was in the video. 
First, he showed us the final scene from 'The Great 
Train Robbery,' in which a man lifts his gun, points 
it at the audience, and fires. The next scene was from 
'Duke Nukem' and showed a guard approaching the 
player, getting shot, and then writhing around on the 
ground. After that, the video went into a continuous 
loop, with one second of the Train Robbery shot, and 
one second of Duke, each second punctuated by a silent 
gunshot.

Entrain (en tran'), v.t. 1. To carry along. 2. To 
trap. From MF 'entrainer' = en- + 'trainer' to drag, 
trail.

When Brian was in the fifth grade, he went with his 
class on a field trip to visit a small restored town. 
While most of his class went off in one direction, he 
wandered instead across the street into a little shop. 
Inside, he saw walls and walls of antique clocks, and 
an old man behind the counter. "Notice anything 
strange?" the man asked him, smiling. Brian looked 
around carefully, but couldn't figure out what the man 
was talking about. "All the clocks are ticking at 
once." Astonished, Brian listened, and found it was 
true. "How'd you do that?" he asked, impressed by the 
trick. The old man shook his head. "I didn't do 
anything. The sound of the ticking teaches them to 
beat in time." Wondering, Brian watched and listened 
to the steady "tick, tick, tick, tick, tick," for 
another minute. Then he realized something else. It 
was about five minutes before four in the afternoon. 
Slowly piecing it all together, he asked the man, "If 
they're all ticking together...does that mean they all 
chime together, too?" The man smiled. "Stick around. 
The place fills up." Sure enough, within the next few 
minutes, the place began to fill with tourists, 
including (fortunately) his own tour group. And sure 
enough, on the hour the clocks exploded together in a 
wondrous cacophony of chimes, bells, and music.

That's entraining. But this describes not only the 
entraining of the clocks to each other, but also of 
the tourists to the clocks! The town itself pulses to 
the rhythm of the clocks in that shop. Brian imagined 
for us a frontal wave of effect from that epicenter of 
entrainment, from the bakery across the street filling 
up with people ordering coffee and danishes a few 
minutes after the hour, to the rush on the bathrooms a 
predictable time beyond that, either or both of which 
could become entraining events of their own, 
perpetuating the wave an unpredictable distance from 
the clock shop.

But back to the video, which, along with Brian's 
steady voice, had been entraining us and pulling us 
into the talk. Brian's original idea for his talk was 
spurred by a particular game whose effects had pulled 
him in very unwillingly. "You write games, don't you? 
Why do you people put out games like Postal?"

Out of an urge to answer that question, he had planned 
a lovely diatribe: He would show examples of movies 
from the '40s, culling examples that showed that era's 
propensity to show violence for violence's sake. He 
would compare that to today's computer game offerings, 
catering to similar tastes and appeal. Then he would 
show how movies evolved past that, taking violence out 
of the spotlight, and enabling the industry to create 
wonderful works of art. In a dazzling final montage of 
video, he would show great scenes from Casablanca, 
Citizen Kane, Star Wars, and other great movies, and 
say that computer games had that same potential for 
greatness.

But first things first: the spectacular video montage. 
He worked up his two-second loop, and sat down to 
watch it. And started to think. And think. And he 
realized that what he had to say, at its basic form, 
was nothing more than snobbery.

But why does 'Postal' and its ilk bother him so much? 
Are players touched by the violence, or does it pass 
on by? What is the job of the gamewright?

Rhythms and patterns exist in all games, if you watch. 
Watch someone playing a game sometime. Not the game 
itself, lest you be sucked in, but the player, and the 
space around him or her. Watch the rhythms emerge, and 
how the player and the game interact. It will become 
clear that a game is really an entrainment engine. The 
job of the gamewright, therefore, is to reinforce 
patterns, and dampen dissonance.

Once you get into multi-player games, the job becomes 
more difficult. Like a phase-locked loop, multiple 
oscillators must all be entrained to the same phase. 
You must therefore give lots of feedback, generated 
from the game itself and from the other players, to 
teach the gamer how to play the game. The goal is fun, 
and shared intelligence.

[At this point during Brian's talk, the constant 2-
second video began to change. The pulsing remained the 
same, but the picture began to shrink, slowly, 
eventually revealing behind it a turning kaleidoscope 
whose sections were those same two images of gun 
shots.]

Brian's wife, unlike Brian himself, may easily be 
classified a baseball fanatic. One day, she convinced 
Brian to go with her to a game because the Monkees 
were going to perform beforehand. What he found was 
one of the most astonishing examples of a multi-player 
game he had ever seen. Not on the field, mind you, but 
in the stadium itself.

Many stadiums and franchises have claimed to have 
started the craze known as the "wave," but legend has 
it that it was started by a fan known as "Crazy 
George" Henderson. Crazy George was known for dressing 
up wildly, and getting the fans to cheer just as 
wildly. One day, he managed to get the entire 22C 
section to stand together at once, and cheer. As they 
sat down again, section 22B stood up and cheered. 22A 
was soon to follow, as the newly-born wave crashed 
down towards the field, and proceeded to sweep around 
the stadium, all the way back to section 22C -- who, 
of course, stood up and cheered again, restarting the 
cycle.

Why is the wave fun? We're wired for it. Are fans 
particles or oscillators? "I call them: Customers!"

Violence in games is like dissonance in music. It can 
be a valuable tool, if used correctly.

Brian and his wife have had tickets to the Boston 
Symphony Orchestra. Generally, they played a lot of 
old standbys -- Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and so on. 
One day, they had on the program, "Symphony no. 1, by 
Schnitlie," who turned out to be a Russian composer. 
This was its premiere performance in the United 
States, and Schnitlie himself was in the audience. 
They started off with something traditional -- Handel, 
maybe. Then the conductor raised his baton for the 
beginning of Symphony no. 1.

What followed, as one reviewer noted the next day, had 
only happened once before in the Boston Symphony 
Orchestra Hall, when Stravinsky's "The Rite of 
Spring" had premiered some 50 years earlier. As wave 
after wave of unadulterated Russian angst poured out 
of the orchestra, wave after wave of horrified 
Bostonians fled the hall for the safety of their cars.

This was no traditional piece, of course. At one 
point, the entire percussion section went on strike, 
and held up picket signs. And the cacophony was rather 
intense.

By the end of the piece, maybe 50 Bostonians remained; 
Brian and his wife were among them. They gave the 
orchestra and Schnitlie a standing ovation -- Brian 
not so much for the piece itself, but for the effect 
it had had on the Boston cognoscenti.

[By this point, the shrinking picture had given way 
entirely to the turning kaleidoscope, centered on a 
pulsing white light in the middle.]

But now think about "The Rite of Spring." The 
cacophony was just as intense for those first 
listeners, but today it is an accepted part of the 
standard symphony repertoire, and we have learned to 
appreciate the dissonance. And why? Because 
Shostakovitch used his dissonance with integrity. And 
once we understood it, it added an intensity it could 
not have had otherwise.

When we put violence in our games, do we use 
integrity? It's useless, if we have no justification 
for it.

[Here, the kaleidoscope itself disappeared, leaving 
only the pulsing white light in the middle of the 
screen.]

Those who criticize violence in computer games don't 
really know what all that exposure to screen violence 
will do to people. But we don't know either! There 
simply isn't evidence that clearly shows the effects. 
But all multiplayer games are lessons in how to get 
along. And therefore, we must use violence with 
integrity.

---------------------
Chris Crawford:  Demi-languages for non-techies
---------------------
Many of us know or have heard of Chris Crawford; for 
the past six years of his life, he's been working on 
the "Erasmatron," a designing engine used to create 
interactive worlds filled with people who interact on 
a much higher level than most games. Although I 
personally have not been able to get his Erasmatron to 
work on my Mac, a recent review of 'Shattertown Sky' 
in XYZZYnews (see issue #14) was, shall we say, less 
than favorable. I heard him talking to someone before 
his talk, and he said (of the Erasmatron), "Well, 
we've sold three units..." Shattertown Sky, while an 
interesting experiment, does not seem to be bringing 
in the customers, at least not yet. But for all that, 
he has an amazing amount of material on his Web site 
(http://www.erasmatazz.com/), much of it insightful. 
It seems clear to me that if he wants to sell the 
Erasmatron in high quantities, he'll need a much 
better gaming environment than he has now. And he is, 
indeed, working on such a beast, based on Arthurian 
legends (so Whizzard better get "Avalon" out soon ;-)) 
which might fit the bill.

But enough of that. What he talked to us about didn't 
quite fit with my concept of "game design," which was 
what this track was supposed to be about, but it was, 
nonetheless, interesting.

His philosophy seems to be that if you want to create 
games which are also works of art, you will need to 
create a bridge between the "two cultures" -- the 
science/ engineering folk, and the arts/humanities 
folk. To illustrate this point, he said, "If I say, 
'The ides of March are upon us!' what do you say?" 
There were scattered replies of "Uh, Julius Caesar?" 
He shook his head sadly, grinned, and said, "'Aye, 
Caesar, but not gone.'" Hmmmm.

These two cultures, he says, have been wed in shotgun 
marriages between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, with 
less-than-stellar results. What he proposes is a new 
way of looking at programming languages, one that 
abandons the whole sense of being general purpose, and 
which "tricycle-izes" the language -- makes it into a 
toy. That's what he's done with the Erasmatron, and 
that's what he told us we could do, too.

What follows are the specific points he told us about 
what his language did to make it more accessible to 
artists.

*  No data typing. There's no generic data for the 
user to type -- they get numbers, then specific things 
to work with (like "actors" and "rooms").

*  No compound data structures. I took no notes on 
this, maybe because I don't know what compound data 
structures are in the first place.

*  No looping or branching (!). Well, this is only 
partially true. There are structures in the language 
that loop and branch, but the user doesn't have to 
know this. There are built-in functions like "Pick the 
best actor that ______" that loop, and there is a 
"script" that branches, but the concepts are opaque to 
the artist.

*  No subroutines. None that the artist can program or 
get to, at any rate.

*  A New Lingo. Instead of using the phrase "the array 
of characters," the program has a "cast." Instead of a 
"database," it has a "history book." These terms make 
the artist more comfortable with what they're working 
on.

*  A "break with tradition." Why do we compile things? 
Because we used to take punch cards down to the 
librarian, who would feed them into the computer 
later. But there's no need to do this; the Erasmatron 
"compiles" continuously, since we have plenty fast-
enough computers.

*  An intuitive interface. It's impossible in the 
Erasmatron to get syntax errors -- it's all done with 
mouse clicks. Chunks of code are clicked on and copied 
over to where they need to go by the programmer, and 
come with default arguments. If something is 
"unspecified," it gets a special screen syntax -- it's 
underlined; the only thing on the screen that looks 
like that.

*  No acronyms. Spell everything out; you've got the 
space.

*  Use type styles, fonts, sizes, etc. to communicate. 
Underlining has already been mentioned; other things 
are true here, too, like coloring actors' names one 
color and "events" another. Sound is also used in 
certain special instances.

*  Sniffers, scanners, and testers replace the 
standard debugger. These routines are running all the 
time to check for errors. In the "rehearsal," run-time 
errors are avoided by "poisoning" invalid choices, but 
the programmer is notified what happened. Should a 
player come across an invalid choice, they would never 
see it.

So there you have it: how to make your own Erasmatron 
in 12 easy steps. It's certainly an interesting idea, 
but I remain unconvinced. Frankly, I don't see 
anything in there that couldn't today be replaced by a 
team of two -- one programmer and one "artist." In 
fact, that's what is happening in the industry right 
now. With that, too, you get the advantage of being 
able to change the "default" behavior, which you 
simply can't do with the Erasmatron. (Well, not unless 
you're Chris Crawford.) While I applaud the effort to 
"chunk" certain aspects of programming, I still think 
there should be a way to get at the lower levels of 
the language if need be. Inform, frankly, is an 
excellent example, and I believe TADS to be, too. You 
can program in Inform all your life and never need to 
put in "Tetris," but it's still there if you need it. 
There are precedents for forcing one's creativity down 
tightly-constrained channels (the symphony and the 
sonnet being two good examples of this), but 
eventually you'll need to break the conventions if 
you're to come across a Beethoven. And the Erasmatron 
makes no allowances for these types.

But I'd be happy to be proved wrong.

---------------------
Jim Dunnigan:  'What Computer Game Designers Forgot'
---------------------
Many years ago Jim Dunnigan founded SPI, a war-gaming 
company that was extremely popular in its heyday. I 
believe he now works for a computer gaming company, 
while collaborating with the military on war games on 
the side. I missed the first part of his talk, since 
that was when I finally cornered Brian Moriarty and 
got him to sign my Trinity map, so I'll start with a 
few things he said that I jotted down as I was getting 
into the swing of his talk.

*  "Games have about the half-life of snow."
*  Wargames are a niche market.
*  The next pattern: the game as a movie.
*  Non-violent games have a bigger potential market.
*  Interest vs. fun
*  A formula isn't enough.

At this point, Jim started talking about 'Rapid 
Application Development'. This means you churn out a 
bunch of game prototypes and follow up on the ones 
that go over well. At SPI they had a monthly magazine, 
part of which was a new war game. This meant they had 
to come up with new concepts on a regular basis! Jim 
was able to put together a game in a day, and had to a 
few times when someone else backed out at the last 
minute, and a deadline loomed. He told us not to use 
the Hollywood model -- we're forgetting the game part. 
We have to keep people entertained within the 
interactivity.

As part of the Rapid Application Development rubric, 
we shouldn't be afraid to steal ideas. At SPI, they 
had a big Sears' catalog-type book in which were 
compiled the various rules they had developed for all 
their games. So there was a section on movement, a 
section on terrain types, a section on conflict 
resolution, and so on. So, if someone was having 
trouble coming up with interesting movement patterns, 
all they had to do was flip to the appropriate section 
of the book.

We should also do extensive analysis of all our 
projects -- especially the failures, if only so we 
don't repeat the same mistakes the next time around.

Jim listed some possible areas the industry hasn't 
explored yet, which do well in the book market: 
historical detective novels, historical romances, and 
soap operas. And another piece of advice: don't put 
all your eggs in one basket -- develop those 
prototypes, and go from there. Try to avoid the 
Hollywood model, which is driven by fear.

Based on Jim's talk about Rapid Application 
Development, I have a great job opportunity for all 
you IF programmers out there. Find a likely game 
company (remember, new ones start up all the time) and 
convince someone that your skills would be perfect for 
game development. With the ability to quickly and 
easily develop a game or two in all text, massive 
amounts of time and money won't need to be spent on 
graphics in the create/test/refine cycle that most 
adventure games need to go through. Or, if adventure 
games don't go through such a cycle (and certainly 
some games out there seem like it), convince them how 
much better their games will be if they can be easily 
tested at first! Tell 'em Jim Dunnigan sent you.

FYI, Jim Dunnigan has his book, "The Complete Wargames 
Handbook" online at 
http://www.hyw.com/Books/WargamesHandbook/Contents.htm 
Chapter 5, "The History of Wargames" includes a 
fascinating section on the history of SPI.

---------------------
Personal:  Conversation with Brian Moriarty
---------------------
Since I knew Brian Moriarty was going to be at the 
conference, I came prepared -- I brought my Trinity 
map (from the LTOI II packaging, unfortunately -- I 
never had the original) and a certificate I had 
designed for him to sign as a prize for the IF 
Competition 
(http://www.bioc.rice.edu/~lpsmith/ruby.jpg). I was 
way nervous, and I might have chickened out had I not 
brought the certificate with me. After all, I couldn't 
deny someone else his signature! So, after stalling 
through lunch and then losing him afterwards, I jumped 
at the opportunity to corner him when I saw him later, 
fearing he would disappear completely if I lost him 
again.

Brian was... grumpy. There's really no better 
adjective for it. When I told him I wrote text 
adventures, he said without hesitation, "I'm sorry." 
He grumped about Cornerstone, he grumped about 
adventure games today, he grumped about the low 
quality of my LTOI map. (I am now the proud owner of a 
brown map saying "There are better maps!  -- Brian 
Moriarty") Still, underneath the grumpiness was a 
great deal of kindness. He offered to mail me a "real" 
copy of the map, and took my name and address. And, 
sure enough, a few weeks later, I received a package 
from him in the mail. He hadn't been able to find any 
individual copies of the Trinity map, but, by way of 
compensation, he sent the original maps from 
Wishbringer and Beyond Zork instead, both signed. Do 
you see me complaining? No, you do not.

Brian wasn't much of a conversationalist, and neither 
was I, but fortunately there was someone else there to 
whom I am eternally indebted, who kept the 
conversation up and going. A few of the topics that 
came up:

*  Had Infocom kept going, one thing Brian would have 
wanted to see improve was the parser. As good as it 
got, it could never pass the "Here, sit down and type 
something," test.

*  Another dream of Brian's was the all-sound game. He 
doesn't believe that even now the technology exists to 
create it, though. One problem he sees is that if 
you're physically sitting in front of the computer, 
there's a big monitor staring at you, and you simply 
can't have it black -- there's too much expectation 
built up around it for that to work commercially.

*  He firmly believes that Cornerstone killed Infocom. 
The games were still selling, but Cornerstone lost so 
much money that the company as a whole could no longer 
support itself.

*  As Infocom was being dismantled, some scavenging 
went on. Details omitted to protect the guilty ;-)

Brian now works at Mpath Interactive 
(http://www.mpath.com), and although he didn't talk 
specifically about any particular projects he was 
working on, I've since discovered that he was Dani 
Bunten Berry's boss before she passed away recently. 
(Brian has set up a Web page memorial for her at 
http://www.mpath.com/dani/) She had been working on 
updating her classic game Modem Wars to be playable 
over the Internet; I presume this project is still 
underway. Overall, I found Brian to be a fascinating 
character, and was glad I was able to meet him.

---------------------
For more info...
---------------------
In addition to the URLs provided in this article, you 
may want to check out the IGDN Web site at 
http://www.igdn.com/. There you'll be able to find 
information about upcoming IGDN events in Los Angeles, 
Dallas, and San Francisco.  It looks like I'll be able 
to go to the Dallas event this year, too, so expect 
another report from me around November or so!


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
GAME REVIEW: Spider and Web
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Spider and Web
release 4
Parser: Inform
Author: Andrew Plotkin (erkyrath@netcom.com)
Requires: Inform run-time interpreter
URL:  ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-
archive/games/infocom/Tangle.z5
Response to the XYZZY command: "That's not a verb I 
recognize."

Intrigue. Spy versus spy. Secret hiding places and 
surprise endings.

If you can figure out how to get to them, that is. 

Andrew Plotkin's "Spider and Web" has a bang-up 
beginning sequence, an interesting give-and-take 
format with a major NPC, and an intriguing story-
within-a-story plot that can't be described well 
without spoiling the surprise --  but ultimately, I 
was frustrated by the lack of straightforward 
playability in this game. 

While the game's turning point has a wonderful "Aha!" 
quality to it, it's a point that I never would have 
gotten to without relying heavily on a walkthrough 
solution. And although the descriptions are expansive, 
the characters' dialogue believable, and the plot is 
richly complex, I was left feeling that I could have 
done without some of these features if only I could 
have really played more of the game for real, without 
outside intervention.

The game's beginning does a great job of drawing the 
player into character -- and helping to solve the 
initial puzzles for you. Your character is a spy who 
has slipped unseen into an enemy headquarters. As the 
game's opening unfolds, you discover that you've been 
caught, and the moves you make are being recounted, in 
a sense, for an interrogator who demands the details 
of your break-in. Although you, the player, are seeing 
these rooms and puzzles for the first time, within the 
game's narrative the interrogator seems to await your 
description of how you overcame certain obstacles -- 
even if you have no idea yet how you might have done 
so. If you take a false step, the interrogator may 
interrupt you with a crisp counterpoint on why that 
move wouldn't be feasible, then warn you not to try to 
deceive him -- although at this point you're probably 
just curious to know how to solve the problem that he 
wants you to confirm you've solved. The interrogator 
also manages to offer many hints on certain steps that 
you should or shouldn't take before proceeding, which 
is impressively interwoven into the NPC's dialogue 
without appearing too obvious.

As the gameplay progresses, you acquire objects that 
may help you later, play cat-and-mouse with a series 
of guards, and  -- probably -- spend an inordinate 
amount of time learning (or trying to learn) to 
operate a toolcase filled with devices that may be 
used in conjunction with one another to bypass alarms 
or get you out of a jam. 

You may find, as I did, that the initial novelty of 
conversing with the interrogator quickly wears off. 
Your character's responses -- no matter whether to a 
pointed question or a long-winded, half-rhetorical 
monologue -- are limited to "yes" or "no." Although it 
surely would have been a programming nightmare to 
account for a larger vocabulary, it strains credulity 
to see the impassioned speeches the interrogator gives 
in response, so to speak, to your barely maintained 
half of the conversation.

I enjoyed the aspect of trying to figure out what my 
character was supposed to do, given that a certain 
amount of activity was already assumed to be a 
foregone conclusion. Your exact mission is trickier to 
determine as you near the end of the game. Once you 
enter the enemy laboratory proper, you can either 
seize the secret papers and destroy them on the spot, 
or take them with you as you make good your escape. 
Why dying is a certain failure, you can also wind up 
with an ending where you "fail to make a difference" -
- namely, by failing to acquire the secret papers and 
doing something with them. No points are awarded in 
this game for solving puzzles.

At one point, your character's survival depends on 
split-second timing as you need to enter rooms and get 
out successfully. Saving your game every few moves is 
the safest way to navigate this dangerous section, but 
playing too safe throughout the game isn't 
recommended; you could wind up missing out on 
important events that move the plot along and will 
help the story make better sense. 

Much of the game's cleverness is best enjoyed after 
you've experienced the plot's major twist -- and 
which, again, I think is next-to-impossible without 
outside help -- and you realize the significance of 
text that was puzzling the first time it appeared. 
While enjoyable after the fact, its prose and clever 
set-up made for good reading but not, ultimately, for 
a very satisfying game-playing experience.   

 -- Gillian Pilau

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
BULLETIN BOARD
Readers helping other readers
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Below are some new queries I've received recently 
from readers looking for hard-to-find games, or who 
are in need of specific help. If you can help answer any 
of these requests, please don't be shy about chiming in 
with an answer! --EM

Dear XYZZYnews,

Do you have any information on how to complete 
Microsoft Adventure once you have all the treasures 
and you must exit through