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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: IF for Non-Programmers
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Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2002 03:24:48 GMT
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In article <a51tjb$n03$1@news.fsf.net>, Adam Thornton <adam@fsf.net> wrote:
>From where I sit (where that is: among my hats are both "published
>author" and "professional programmer," but I certainly self-identify as
>much more of a technical geek than a writer), I'd say that to write a
>great game, you need to be a very good writer, but you can get away with
>being a mediocre programmer.  Nevertheless, you will need some
>programming skills to achieve enough mimesis that your game is actually
>fun to play.

I totally concur. As an, umm, extremely talented programmer (I am, as
far as I can tell, at the top of my profession in my industry), I observe
two phenomena: one, I will never write an IF game as good as some games
out there written by authors who are great writers and I'm fairly certain
are not as good at programming as I--*according* to the current definition
of "good IF game"--and two, because I know that a lot of the IF code
I write is fairly crappy, because IF coding is mostly just a pile of
exceptions.

I mainly followed up because I wanted to post the following URL, which
somebody sent me last week, which actually attempts to address WHY
programming is important. (Not IF specific, but close enough, you'll see.)

http://home.netcom.com/~apstern/interactivestory.net/papers/deeperconversations.html
[evil long URLs, sigh]

However, it is not a particularly unbiased piece; it is written by
a programmer, and indeed by a programmer who I would say (although
he would disagree) works in the game industry (that is, the mass-market
interactive entertainment industry), and by an author who (IMO)
denigrates games in an attempt to reach out to academia.

SeanB
