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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: Sycamora Tree: "Inform is outdated"
Message-ID: <GCtqry.KBA@world.std.com>
Date: Fri, 4 May 2001 18:45:33 GMT
References: <lve8etcbql4ccn6uj5flmeo0i52bdb0con@4ax.com> <rykH6.20765$9f2.1785900@ruti.visi.com> <fy78zkheyei.fsf@blancolioni.org> <iFAI6.22337$9f2.2121818@ruti.visi.com>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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Xref: news.duke.edu rec.arts.int-fiction:86312

David Thornley <thornley@visi.com> wrote:
>Also, there is a definite well-selected order in which the player
>learns things about the PC's world, and this is monitored by the
>usual "solve a puzzle - get more info" mechanism.  If the player
>could solve puzzles in a different order, this could be thrown
>off.  It might be possible to limit this, but probably with
>difficulty.

There are simulationist games that *have* done this--by cordoning
off some puzzles with a traditional emulationist gating.

>The more simulationism that gets put into it, the more it becomes
>desirable to automate the messages.

True.

>If Ms. Short were to use a simulationist library, she would lose
>that control over the game's responses, and would have to make
>sure the library covered the transformations involved.

In practice, though, Ms. Short *is* writing a simulationist library--just
one that doesn't automatically generate messages.  And under this
approach, she has to make sure her messages cover all the transformations
involved.  I'm not sure that process is so different.

>This requires different skills from the traditional.

I agree, assuming "this" means "generating messages"
instead of "writing messages".  But how different?  It
would seem to require a clever blending of writing and
programming ability--the two skills already required
for creating IF.  As opposed to pictures or music...

>In that it is comparable to other extensions.  It is possible to
>put pictures and music into games now, but most of us write text a
>lot better than we draw or play an instrument.  This means that going
>from plain TADS to HTML-TADS does not give me much greater expressive
>power, since I simply don't have the skill to use it properly.

Does that mean MJR should have stuck his head in the sand and
never allowed for the possibility of multimedia support in
TADS?

>Once we start expecting multimedia or serious simulations or
>anything else in interactive fiction, this community is going
>to be greatly changed, I think for the worse.

Let's crawl before we walk: before "expecting" serious simulation,
let's see if we can even get anybody doing it at all.  It need
not become "expected" anymore than multimedia has.

>The community is built on the idea that many of us can make reasonably
>good works of IF part-time and with a relatively small amount of
>outside help, an amount that can be gotten on a volunteer
>basis.  This works because we look for quality within certain limits,
>and these limits pretty much guarantee that the game is not
>going to use anywhere near the computational power of a medium
>lousy laptop.

In some senses I agree--that we should consciously keep the
craft of IF steered at being a single-author medium--but at
the same time I don't think we should assume that all authors
have an identical level of programming vs. writing skill (much
less game-design skill).  I can easily, just using my own personal
skills, consume all the computational power of a medium-high
laptop doing consumer-game-quality 3D graphics; with that existence
proof in hand, I'm not so willing to dismiss the possibility that
there are things we could be doing with that extra power.  Perhaps
they are things that only a smaller subset of authors would use;
but perhaps there is a whole set of candidate authors whose skills
are not so applicable to traditional IF but would be more applicable
to such a system.

SeanB
