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From: palmer@ansoft.com (Palmer Davis)
Subject: Re: The IF Gates are Closed. Let the voting Begin!!
Message-ID: <DFKt3z.FnJ@ansoft.com>
Keywords: green fuzzy bananas
Reply-To: palmer@ansoft.com
Organization: Ansoft Corporation
References: <427d7s$puv@agate.berkeley.edu> <baf.811207562@laraby.tiac.net> <DF46GL.41M@ansoft.com> <445qvk$60v@nic.lth.se>
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 1995 18:09:31 GMT
Lines: 46
Xref: nntp.gmd.de rec.arts.int-fiction:8401 rec.games.int-fiction:9829

In article <foo>, mol@marvin.df.lth.se (Magnus Olsson) wrote:
>>
>>Agreed.  I haven't looked at the TADS division yet, but the Inform
>>entry pool was *awfully* thin, with only one entry that was close
>>to the level of quality that I had expected.  
>
>Might I ask just what level of quality you had expected?

The level that I'm seeing in the TADS division, now that I'm getting
around to looking at it....

>IMAO, most of the entries _were_ the quality you'd expect from amateur
>writers/programmers, several of whom are total beginners, who are
>given a very short time to write a game.

Perhaps I've been a bit spoiled by the full-length efforts that I've 
seen from many amateur authors (including a number of the contestants).  
Perhaps I take a slightly rareified view of IF as a genre.  Perhaps I 
shouldn't have played through the Infocom sample disks before starting
my evaluation....

However, IF is a form of entertainment, played for fun.  However 
rudimentary a work of IF may be, there is a certain enjoyability
threshold that must be met for a player to want to play it.  In 
the Inform division, there were only two entries that I didn't have 
to force myself to play for review purposes, only one of which was
really suitable as division winner; that's why I was complaining.

What level of quality did I expect?  Something along the lines of the
"Trinity" sample from Infocom Sampler #2, but with a real ending.  Both
of my choices for division winners came reasonably close to this level.

Getting any piece of software into a releasable state is a lot of work,
and I'm glad that there were as many authors who completed playable 
entries as there were.  Hopefully, we'll see more work in the future
from some of the new faces.

-- PTD --

(For that matter, hopefully we'll see some production from *me* once I
finish recovering from the destruction of my development archive....)
-- 
---
                   Palmer T. Davis <palmer@ansoft.com>
  Ansoft Corporation, Four Station Square, Suite 660, Pittsburgh, PA 15219
                 http://www.ansoft.com/palmer/home.html
