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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: Aisle
Message-ID: <GBFwDr.DGA@world.std.com>
Date: Sat, 7 Apr 2001 20:46:39 GMT
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Neil Cerutti <cerutti@together.net> wrote:
>I thought it was a hoot. Sean Barrett Wrote a parody of it that
>was, I think, supposed to point out what a sucky idea it was, but
>I liked his parody a whole lot too. Sean, is it still available?

It is still available: http://world.std.com/~buzzard/games/if/ill.zip
(contains a .z5 file).

Hmm, six months before I heard the first comment after posting a
game.  I'd been meaning to check to see whether anyone even downloaded
it.

Anyway, some brief commentary about what it is and isn't:

  1. I thought Aisle was a hoot.

  2. When writing my comp reviews, I wanted to make a brief comment
     about the feebleness in general of games with multiple endings,
     particularly games that have multiple endings, but the player isn't
     really able to control which ending they get--that is,
     the correlation between action and result may even be
     strong, but the predictability is not--the player cannot have
     any expectation about what conclusion they are reaching from
     their actions.  I forget which games I was critiquing at the
     time--Big Mama and another which I forget.

     There's a moment in Masquerade where you have a clear choice with
     a train--that's a fine, wonderful branching narrative moment.  But
     if you find a game where there are two reasonably similar situations,
     and if you do something in one situation you win, and you do the same
     thing in the othe you lose, and there's no clues about them,
     then it bugs me.  Oh yeah, that little rant reminded me of which
     other comp game I was probably writing about--Kaged and its ending"s".

     Instead of writing that little comment, I came up with the idea
     of writing a silly little game and linking to it instead.  That
     game being ill.z5.

  3. ill.z5 is intended to take to the extreme the problem
     I describe above.  It didn't live up to the quality standards
     I desired in terms of correlation-but-unpredictability because
     I didn't have sufficient time or motivation.

  4. The one implicit criticism I made of Aisle, I think, is in the
     whole "the past is malleable" thing--here, nearly ever command
     implies a slightly different past, and a few alter the back-setting
     significantly.  As an "immersed" player, I strongly resent having
     the past be influenced by my actions.  [Bureaucracy parodied this
     sort of thing (probably before anybody ever did it) with the plane
     that crashes if you stay on it, but that manages to keep flying
     if you get out "in time".]  The lack of causation fights with
     the sense of simulation and intentionality directly; I'm not
     sure exactly why immersion is fragile to this.

     In reality I don't really mind this in Aisle--hardly an immersive
     game in the first place; I'd just hate to see lots of people imitate it.

  5. I spent so much time implementing responses for all the default
     verbs that I barely implemented anything new.

  6. There is one winning command and one Aisle easter egg.

  7. It's not on GMD. It's not a "real" game--it really was just
     an attempt to level some criticisms "by example", and I definitely
     don't wanted people to start thinking of me as "the guy who
     wrote that crappy Aisle parody".

  8. I have no freaking clue why I numbered these points.

SeanB
