Re: My comments on the entries
9 Oct 1995 13:13:18 GMT
In article <459une$4dm@nntp4.u.washington.edu> scythe@u.washington.edu
(Dan Shiovitz) writes:
> In article <459fep$ft8@news.duke.edu>,
> Stephen Granade <sgranade@scratchy.phy.duke.edu> wrote:
> >On a slightly unrelated tangent, I noticed that several peoplementioned
> >that Zebulon's Will and Undertow both broke no new ground. My question
> >is, how much new ground do you expect IF authors to break when given
> >three months to write a game playable in two hours? It's like holding
> >a gun to Faulkner's head and saying, "Ok, we want you to write a
> >five-page short story in which you revolutionize fiction. Oh, and do
> >it in six days." I got into the contest late--I had one week for
> >research, five weeks to program, and one week to playtest/debug and
> >rewrite, all while working at a full-time job. Give these
> >restrictions, I can't imagine making bold new strides in IF. I was
> >just happy enough to come up with a mildly-diverting game.
> This didn't bother me terribly. Hopefully hopefully next year's contest
> will start a little earlier and end a little later and make the myriad
> of rules changes necessary to satisfy everyone :P Like you say, the
> games that wandered off track did tend to get trashed. On the other
> hand, short pieces can often do things that you can't support in a
> longer game. For instance, you could write a short game that was played
> backwards: you started off with max score, dropped objects when you took
> them, got objects from people by giving it to them, and had to "unbeat"
> the game before your turns hit zero. This could work in a small game,
> even though it would get tiresome in a large game.
I think your ideas are interesting, but they strike me more as gimmicks
rather than true changes in the genre. Just reversing the conventions
gives you the same conventions all over again--counting down turns gives
you a timed game, subtracting points from the maximum gives the same
effect as adding points to 0, &c. What you end up with is a game that, to
me, would quickly become annoying without adding that much to IF. Perhaps
if that section was only a small part of a larger game, I wouldn't mind as
much. A very, very small part. ;)
One of the more unique games I ever played was Suspended. To me,
something like that stays mostly within the conventions of IF, yet pushes
the boundaries back a bit. Of course, Infocom authors were getting paid
to author IF, so that provided a bit more incentive.
Stephen
--
Stephen Granade sgranade@phy.duke.edu
Duke University, Dept. of Physics 1-919-660-2549
Box 90305, Durham N.C. 27708-0305, USA