Thursday, June 30, 2016

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Stellar Adventures Kickstarter

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Stellar Adventures Kickstarter

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Slloyd14 wrote:
will it be possible to get some Fantasy Titan Adventurers to travel through time and space and land somewhere technological? Or will the rules not be compatible?
Be interesting to see but you'd guess there wouldn't be a prob, the rules for the sci-fi and fantasy gamebooks were pretty similar. I can even think of an adventure that seems just like you're describing and was done for a fantasy system. Be interesting to convert that for AFF.

From what I've seen of sci-fi RPG systems there's two broad types, ones where personal defenses are in balance with weapons and those where one hit kills and shooting first is critical. Most fantasy RPG systems can do the first well but not really the second, and AFF less than most because simultaneous initiate wouldn't work with it. But then that sort of realism isn't as much fun to play as it sounds.

Statistics: Posted by SkinnyOrc — Fri Jul 01, 2016 1:44 am






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June 30, 2016 at 09:34PM

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Pdf now available!

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2 • Re: Pdf now available!

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I've got my fingers crossed for Out of the Pit being released next. It's the one book that I don't have.

Statistics: Posted by Eisenmann — Fri Jul 01, 2016 12:29 am






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June 30, 2016 at 06:34PM

Sibyl Moon Games: Announcing the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF)

Sibyl Moon Games: Announcing the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF)

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Dear everyone,

I admit it: I haven’t been absent just because my day job has been busy. I’ve also been working on an exciting new project with Jason McIntosh, Andrew Plotkin, Chris Klimas, and Flourish Klink, and I’m delighted that today is the day we can unveil it to you all.

The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation is a nonprofit organization that will support interactive fiction players, authors, and communities. We’re carrying out that mission through technology: we want to maintain, preserve, and improve the tools and services that people use to create and distribute IF. We’ll also develop new projects to foster the continued growth of IF. (More mission details here!)

Our first project, already underway, is assuming stewardship of IFComp. There’s an official IFComp blog post discussing this, but in essence – IFComp now owns its own code and copyrights, which is important for legal reasons.

Other projects on the horizon:

Twine stewardship. We’re going to explore ways to provide legal and financial support to the Twine project and its community infrastructure.

IF accessibility. We want to create a programs that will identify ways to bring popular IF platforms up to modern accessibility standards. We will assist projects in implementing these improvements, and we will create permanent accessibility guidelines for future work.

(More project and program details here!)

You can sign up for IFTF news via Twitter, Facebook, or our announcements-only mailing list. We also accept grants and donations from the public, if you would like to donate.

On a personal note….

I believe fervently that self-expression is a human right, and art is a core aspect of self-expression, and game development is a form of art. In IFTF, I see not only a way to improve the tech underlying various IF communities, but an opportunity to celebrate the sheer variety and wonder of modern IF. It’s no accident that one of our first programs focuses on accessibility.

I’m very proud to be part of this effort, and I believe we can make a real difference. Down the road, there will be many ways to get involved, both by joining committees and through volunteering for various programs. If you love IF too, I hope you’ll spread the word and let people know we exist.

IFTF_logo_blackonwhite





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June 30, 2016 at 03:25PM

The People's Republic of IF: July meetup

The People's Republic of IF: July meetup

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The Boston IF meetup for July will be Wednesday, July 13, 6:30 pm, MIT room 14N-233.

Topic: the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation! Go ahead, try to shut me up about it. :)





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June 30, 2016 at 02:23PM

IFComp News: IFComp is now part of IFTF

IFComp News: IFComp is now part of IFTF

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Starting today – well, starting several days ago, really, with some minor website updates still pending – IFComp now operates under the stewardship of The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation, a new, charitable nonprofit organization that seeks to help maintain and preserve the software and services that make modern IF possible.

What does this mean to you, the IFComp participant? Not a whole lot, really – none of the competition’s rules or policies are changing as a result of this, and IFComp is led by the same team of volunteers. But, as I wrote on the intfiction.org forum post announcing IFTF to the community:

Through IFTF, IFComp can now effectively own its own code and copyrights. Community-provided funding (and, where applicable, tax-deductible volunteer work) can significantly broaden IFComp’s own technological and organizational potential. And formally transferring the ownership from an individual to a nonprofit company also grants IFComp a new measure of safety and stability. I see all these as infrastructural improvements that IFComp, important as it is to the IF community and the world beyond as well, has long deserved.

So there you have it. And, of course, if you love IFComp, you now have a new way to support it through donations to IFTF, for which we would be humbly grateful.

Please feel free as always to direct any questions about IFTF or IFComp’s relationship with it to us at ifcomp@ifcomp.org.





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June 30, 2016 at 01:23PM

Emily Short: End of June Link Assortment

Emily Short: End of June Link Assortment

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June 30, Introcomp intent deadline. You have just a few hours to register your intent to enter this year’s Introcomp, a chance to get your game introduction in front of a bunch of players and collect their feedback.

July 3, Oxford, the Oxford/London Meetup is doing a WIP exchange to share and critique one another’s work. The RSVP list is currently full, but if you join the waitlist you’ll be notified if a spot becomes available. (These sessions need to be pretty small to be effective, hence the low ceiling.)

July 9, the SF Bay Area IF group meets.

I’ll be in Hong Kong, Kyoto, Tokyo, Honolulu, and Seattle over the course of late July/August. If you’re in one of those places and think it would be useful to meet and talk, drop me a line. My time is not unlimited, but as always I’m happy to try to set things up where useful.

Sept 17 (well into the future, but worth knowing in advance) there’s an all-day Roguelike Celebration event that might be of crossover interest to IF folks, especially if you like procedural generation or procedural narrative. Nick Montfort will be speaking.

Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation Launch

Today is the launch of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (main website here). This is a non-profit, fundraising body in a position to do things like

  • provide long-term stewardship of important IP assets and infrastructure
  • raise (tax deductible!) funds for critically important developments such as Twine

I know this may sound rather dull and legal, but it is in fact very important. A lot of fundamental assets of the interactive fiction community, from the IF Archive to the various coding tools, have survived on quiet individual support — but no one person is able to provide support indefinitely. IFTF will be in a position to receive rights assignments and look after some of these projects. And some things, like Twine itself, perform their mission effectively only by being freeware, but would benefit from financial support from those in a position to offer it.

Then there are plans like this:

IFTF intends to create a program during the coming year that will help identify ways to bring popular IF platforms up to modern accessibility standards. We will assist projects in implementing these improvements, and create permanent accessibility guidelines for future IF work.

Again, accessibility is important, but often individual authors don’t have the skills or resources to make sure they’re meeting accessibility standards. This is a good work, and I’m excited to see where it goes.

Game releases and announcements

Screen Shot 2016-06-27 at 1.50.35 PM.png

Classic parser IF games by Magnetic Scrolls have been difficult to access or play for some time, but now Magnetic Scripts offers them for free play in the browser. And if you’re curious to see more history of Magnetic Scrolls, Digital Antiquarian is as usual an excellent source on their creation and publishing.

Adam Cadre has launched a tutorial IF game for iOS, designed to teach new users about the parser (and possibly prepare them for the other iOS parser games he’s also got in the App Store).

Mike Preston (Map, Fifteen Minutes as “Ade McT”) has announced his forthcoming game Worldsmith, a parser-based game with a great deal of creation possibility, expected in fall of 2016. To quote the press release:

“As you explore the world of the Septem Tower, you will create solar systems and Life, unearth ancient mysteries, and discover the secrets behind the Septem Tower and its billion year mission.”

Patanoir and Hadean Lands are also both now available on Steam, if you’ve been waiting for the day when more parser IF would turn up there.

Yarn is an iOS app that repackages Twine games for mobile consumption. It already features several familiar Twine works on its platform. An Android version is forthcoming, together with more authoring tools.

Bring Out Your Dead, the jam for unfinished and abandoned works, closed with 89 entries. Comments are gradually still appearing on these, and Planet-IF has some commentary and reviews from various people. I hope to run a few more posts on this myself.

It’s not, to the best of my knowledge, new this month, but I also played and liked Niamh Schönherr’s All Tomorrow’s Parties, a Twine piece about the process of discovering trans identity. It isn’t doing anything especially startling in terms of interactivity style, but I enjoyed it.

Paid IF (and similar) Writing

Voicemap is a platform for building audio tours with GPS location tie-ins, where the listener unlocks new content by traveling around the designated area. They are open to including fictional work as well as factual tours, and are actively seeking new creators. They do not provide the voiceover work, so you’d need to record your own.

Payment structure is based on a 50% royalty on post-app-store earnings, with no advances offered; download volumes vary from multiple thousands to just a handful. So compared with some IF-like writing opportunities out there, this would be unlikely to earn much in the first instance, if you even reached the $100 mark at which they start paying out.

However, they do offer an editor on-hand to help you get your project into shape, and if you’re particularly interested in location-tie-in writing, this might be the most broadly accessible tool currently out there.

As noted here earlier this month, Sub-Q and Whodunnit Manor are also both seeking new writers.

Reviews and Other Venues

I have a new Rock Paper Shotgun column, exclusively about IF, where I’ll be doing news, reviews, and articles on various types and styles of game. RPS is a site dedicated to PC games, so exclusively mobile work won’t be suitable for coverage, but that leaves quite a lot of material available to investigate. If you think something you’re working on would be appropriate for coverage, feel free to get in touch. (I make no guarantees about the results: as always, I will choose what I consider most newsworthy and notable.)

Podcasts

Clash of the Type-Ins offers two new episodes in the second half of this month, with Carolyn VanEseltine and Wade Clarke.

Meanwhile, inkle’s podcast has been very busy, with observations on interactive film, VR, and lessons from interactive fiction.

Craft and Tools

Genre writing is like pro wrestling – the rare moments of truth dig in really deep, because as an audience you’re so completely primed to expect it to be entirely fake. So whenever we look at what concerns or thrills or saddens us, and we stuff that into science fiction or fantasy, that’s like aiming for the chink in people’s armour of irony. That’s like a gloriously ridiculous WWE cage match climaxing when a meaty, spray-tanned man dives into a bed of actual thumbtacks.

Spooky Action at a Distance has a long, detailed interview with Bruno Dias about writing in general, writing hypertext specifically, his upcoming Voyageur project, and procedural text generation. And if you like that, you might also like Bruno’s devlog.

And in particular, he has some detailed technical advice about how to scrape web sources for procedural generation corpora. Recommended if you have also caught the procgen bug.

If ink is more your thing, Luis Diaz offers this development diary about working with ink and Unity.






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June 30, 2016 at 01:23PM

Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation Announced, Takes Over IFComp

Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation Announced, Takes Over IFComp

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Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation

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Cambridge, Massachusetts, 30 June 2016—The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF) was formally announced today as the first-ever nonprofit formed to support the success and growth of all forms of interactive fiction — text adventures, choice-based games, visual novels, and more. The Foundation’s mission is to ensure the ongoing maintenance, improvement, preservation, and development of tools and services necessary to the creation and distribution of interactive fiction. IFTF also announced today that it will assume stewardship of the prestigious Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp).

Interactive fiction is a game category where the player’s interactions primarily involve text. Examples run the gamut from classic titles such as as Infocom’s Zork (the bestselling computer game of 1980), to more contemporary work including Zoe Quinn’s controversial Depression Quest (2013), or inkle studios’ 80 Days (TIME magazine’s 2014 Game of the Year).

In order to further support and broaden the reach of interactive fiction, a team of category veterans came together this year to found IFTF. The board of directors includes President Jason McIntosh (principal organizer of IFComp), Andrew Plotkin (the most award-winning interactive fiction author of all time and author of Hadean Lands), Carolyn VanEseltine (founder of Sibyl Moon Games and former Harmonix developer), Chris Klimas (creator of Twine), and Flourish Klink (Chief Research Officer of Chaotic Good Studios).

The Annual Interactive Fiction Competition is the largest and longest-running competition of its kind, founded in 1995 by Kevin Wilson and having taken place annually ever since. In 2015, more than 20,000 people took part in making, playing, or rating the 53 games entered into the twenty-first IFComp. Under IFTF’s stewardship, IFComp will receive long-lacking legal and financial support to ensure its continued presence as a cornerstone of the modern IF community.

“IFComp is just the first of many efforts that we want to help with this foundation,” says Chris Klimas. “People have given so much of themselves to projects like it, not for any external reward but because of their love of interactive fiction, and we want to make sure that work endures.” Carolyn VanEseltine adds, “The formation of IFTF begins a new chapter in interactive fiction history. With input and help from players, authors, and communities, we’ll maintain old tools and create new ones so this unique art form thrives for years to come.”

IFComp is just the beginning: IFTF seeks to support all parts of the interactive fiction community. It is currently considering ways to best support the Twine platform’s growth and development. A project to increase the accessibility of works of interactive fiction is also in planning stages. To learn more, visit IFTF’s website: http://ift.tt/29ivVr2.

I’m on the Advisory Board of IFTF and I’m super excited about it!





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June 30, 2016 at 12:04PM

Choice of Games: Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation Announced, Takes Over IFComp

Choice of Games: Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation Announced, Takes Over IFComp

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Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation

http://ift.tt/29ivZqT

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 30 June 2016—The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF) was formally announced today as the first-ever nonprofit formed to support the success and growth of all forms of interactive fiction — text adventures, choice-based games, visual novels, and more. The Foundation’s mission is to ensure the ongoing maintenance, improvement, preservation, and development of tools and services necessary to the creation and distribution of interactive fiction. IFTF also announced today that it will assume stewardship of the prestigious Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp).

Interactive fiction is a game category where the player’s interactions primarily involve text. Examples run the gamut from classic titles such as as Infocom’s Zork (the bestselling computer game of 1980), to more contemporary work including Zoe Quinn’s controversial Depression Quest (2013), or inkle studios’ 80 Days (TIME magazine’s 2014 Game of the Year).

In order to further support and broaden the reach of interactive fiction, a team of category veterans came together this year to found IFTF. The board of directors includes President Jason McIntosh (principal organizer of IFComp), Andrew Plotkin (the most award-winning interactive fiction author of all time and author of Hadean Lands), Carolyn VanEseltine (founder of Sibyl Moon Games and former Harmonix developer), Chris Klimas (creator of Twine), and Flourish Klink (Chief Research Officer of Chaotic Good Studios).

The Annual Interactive Fiction Competition is the largest and longest-running competition of its kind, founded in 1995 by Kevin Wilson and having taken place annually ever since. In 2015, more than 20,000 people took part in making, playing, or rating the 53 games entered into the twenty-first IFComp. Under IFTF’s stewardship, IFComp will receive long-lacking legal and financial support to ensure its continued presence as a cornerstone of the modern IF community.

“IFComp is just the first of many efforts that we want to help with this foundation,” says Chris Klimas. “People have given so much of themselves to projects like it, not for any external reward but because of their love of interactive fiction, and we want to make sure that work endures.” Carolyn VanEseltine adds, “The formation of IFTF begins a new chapter in interactive fiction history. With input and help from players, authors, and communities, we’ll maintain old tools and create new ones so this unique art form thrives for years to come.”

IFComp is just the beginning: IFTF seeks to support all parts of the interactive fiction community. It is currently considering ways to best support the Twine platform’s growth and development. A project to increase the accessibility of works of interactive fiction is also in planning stages. To learn more, visit IFTF’s website: http://ift.tt/29ivVr2.

I’m on the Advisory Board of IFTF and I’m super excited about it!





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June 30, 2016 at 11:22AM

The Digital Antiquarian: Peter Molyneux’s Kingdom in a Box

The Digital Antiquarian: Peter Molyneux’s Kingdom in a Box

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Peter Molyneux, circa 1990

Peter Molyneux, circa 1990.

I have this idea of a living world, which I have never achieved. It’s based upon this picture in my head, and I can see what it’s like to play that game. Every time I do it, then it maybe gets closer to that ideal. But it’s an ambitious thing.

— Peter Molyneux

One day as a young boy, Peter Molyneux stumbled upon an ant hill. He promptly did what young boys do in such situations: he poked it with a stick, watching the inhabitants scramble around as destruction rained down from above. But then, Molyneux did something that set him apart from most young boys. Feeling curious and maybe a little guilty, he gave the ants some sugar for energy and watched quietly as they methodically undid the damage to their home. Just like that, he woke up to the the idea of little living worlds with lots of little living inhabitants — and to the idea of he himself, the outsider, being able to affect the lives of those inhabitants. The blueprint had been laid for one of the most prominent and influential careers in the history of game design. “I have always found this an interesting mechanic, the idea that you influence the game as opposed to controlling the game,” he would say years later. “Also, the idea that the game can continue without you.” When Molyneux finally grew bored and walked away from the ant hill on that summer day in his childhood, it presumably did just that, the acts of God that had nearly destroyed it quickly forgotten. Earth — and ants — abide.

Peter Molyneux was born in the Surrey town of Guildford (also hometown of, read into it what you will, Ford Prefect) in 1959, the son of an oil-company executive and a toy-shop proprietor. To hear him tell it, he was qualified for a career in computer programming largely by virtue of being so hopeless at everything else. Being dyslexic, he found reading and writing extremely difficult, a handicap that played havoc with his marks at Bearwood College, the boarding school in the English county of Berkshire to which his family sent him for most of his teenage years. Meanwhile his less than imposing physique boded ill for a career in the military or manual labor. Thankfully, near the end of his time at Bearwood the mathematics department acquired a Commodore PET,  while the student union almost simultaneously installed a Space Invaders machine. Seeing a correspondence between these two pieces of technology that eluded his fellow students, Molyneux set about trying to program his own Space Invaders on the PET, using crude character glyphs to represent the graphics that the PET, being a text-only machine, couldn’t actually draw. No matter. A programmer had been born.

These events, followed shortly by Molyneux’s departure from Bearwood to face the daunting prospect of the adult world, were happening at the tail end of the 1970s. Like so many of the people I’ve profiled on this blog, Molyneux was fortunate enough to be born not only into a place and circumstances that would permit a career in games, but at seemingly the perfect instant to get in on the ground floor as well. But, surprisingly for a fellow who would come to wear his huge passion for the medium on his sleeve — often almost as much to the detriment as to the benefit of his games and his professional life — Molyneux took a meandering path filling fully another decade to rise to prominence in the field. Or, to put it less kindly: he failed, repeatedly and comprehensively, at every venture he tried for most of the 1980s before he finally found the one that clicked.

Perhaps inspired by his mother’s toy shop, his original dream was to be not so much a game designer as a computer entrepreneur. After earning a degree in computer science from Southampton University, he found himself a job working days as a systems analyst for a big company. By night, he formed a very small company called Vulcan in his hometown of Guildford to implement a novel scheme for selling blank disks. He wrote several simple programs: a music creator, some mathematics drills, a business simulator, a spelling quiz. (The last, having been created by a dyslexic and terrible speller in general, was a bit of a disaster.) For every ten disks you bought for £10, you would get one of the programs for free along with your blank disks. After placing his tiny advertisement in a single magazine, Molyneux was so confident of the results that he told his local post office to prepare for a deluge of mail, and bought a bigger mailbox for his house to hold it all. He got five orders in the first ten days, less than fifty in the scheme’s total lifespan — along with about fifty more inquiries from people who had no interest in the blank disks but just wanted to buy his software.

Taking their interest to heart, Molyneux embarked on Scheme #2. He improved the music creator and the business simulator and tried to sell them as products in their own right. Even years later he would remain proud of the latter in particular — his first original game, which he named Entrepreneur: “I really put loads of features into it. You ran a business and you could produce anything you liked. You had to do things like keep the manufacturing line going, set the price for your product, decide what advertising you wanted, and these random events would happen.” With contests all the rage in British games at the time, he offered £100 to the first person to make £1 million in Entrepreneur. The prize went unclaimed; the game sold exactly two copies despite being released near the zenith of the early-1980s British mania for home computers. “Everybody around me was making an absolute fortune,” Molyneux remembers. “You had to be a complete imbecile in those days not to make a fortune. Yet here I was with Entrepreneur and Composer, making nothing.” He wasn’t, it appeared, very good at playing his own game of entrepreneurship; his own £1 million remained far out of reach. Nevertheless, he moved on to the next scheme.

Scheme #3 was to crack the business and personal-productivity markets via a new venture called Taurus, initiated by Molyneux and his friend Les Edgar, who were later joined by one Kevin Donkin. Molyneux having studied accounting at one time in preparation for a possible career in the field (“the figures would look so messy that no one would ever employ me”), it was decided that Taurus would initially specialize in financial software with exciting names like Taurus Accounts, Taurus Invoicing, and Taurus Stock Control. Those products, like all the others Molyneux had created, went nowhere. But now came a bizarre story of mistaken identity that… well, it wouldn’t make Molyneux a prominent game designer just yet, but it would move him further down the road to that destination.

Commodore was about to launch the Amiga in Britain, and, this being early on when they still saw it as potential competition for the IBMs of the world, was looking to convince makers of productivity software to write for the machine.  They called up insignificant little Taurus of all people to request a meeting to discuss porting the “new software” the latter had in the works to the Amiga. Molyneux and Edgar assumed Commodore must have somehow gotten wind of a database program they were working on. In a state of no small excitement, they showed up at Commodore UK’s headquarters on the big day and met a representative. Molyneux:

He kept talking about “the product,” and I thought they were talking about the database. At the end of the meeting, they say, “We’re really looking forward to getting your network running on the Amiga.” And it suddenly dawned on me that this guy didn’t know who we were. Now, we were called Taurus, as in the star sign. He thought we were Torus, a company that produced networking systems. I suddenly had this crisis of conscience. I thought, “If this guy finds out, there go my free computers down the drain.” So I just shook his hand and ran out of that office.

An appropriately businesslike advertisement for Taurus

An appropriately businesslike advertisement for Taurus’s database manager gives no hint of what lies in the company’s future.

By the time Commodore figured out they had made a terrible mistake, Taurus had already been signed as official Amiga developers and given five free Amigas. They parlayed those things into a two-year career as makers of somewhat higher-profile but still less than financially successful productivity software for the Amiga. After the database, which they named Acquisition and declared “the most complete database system conceived on any microcomputer” — Peter Molyneux’s habit of over-promising, which gamers would come to know all too well, was already in evidence — they started on a computer-aided-design package called X-CAD Designer. Selling in the United States for the optimistic prices of $300 and $500 respectively, both programs got lukewarm reviews; they were judged powerful but kind of incomprehensible to actually use. But even had the reviews been better, high-priced productivity software was always going to be a hard sell on the Amiga. There were just three places to really make money in Amiga software: in personal-creativity software like paint programs, in video-production tools, and, most of all, in games. In spite of all of Commodore’s earnest efforts to the contrary, the Amiga had by now become known as the world’s greatest gaming computer.

The inspiration for the name of Bullfrog Software.

The inspiration for Bullfrog Software.

Molyneux and his colleagues therefore began to wind down their efforts in productivity software in favor of a new identity. They renamed their company Bullfrog after a ceramic figurine they had lying around in the “squalor” of what Molyneux describes as their “absolutely shite” office in a Guildford pensioner’s attic. Under the new name, they planned to specialize in games — Scheme #4 for Peter Molyneux. “We had a simple choice of hitting our head against a brick wall with business software,” he remembers, “or doing what I really wanted to do with my life anyway, which was write games.” Having made the choice to make Bullfrog a game developer, their first actual product was not a game but a simple drum sequencer for the Amiga called A-Drum. Hobgoblins and little minds and all the rest. When A-Drum duly flopped, they finally got around to games.

A friend of Molyneux’s had written a budget-priced action-adventure for the Commodore 64 called Druid II: Enlightenment, and was looking for someone to do an Amiga conversion. Bullfrog jumped at the chance, even though Molyneux, who would always persist in describing himself as a “rubbish” programmer, had very little idea how to program an action game. When asked by Enlightenment‘s publisher Firebird whether he could do the game in one frame — i.e., whether he could update everything onscreen within a single pass of the electron gun painting the screen to maintain the impression of smooth, fluid movement — an overeager Molyneux replied, “Are you kidding me? I can do it in ten frames!” It wasn’t quite the answer Firebird was looking for. But in spite of it all, Bullfrog somehow got the job, producing what Molyneux describes as a “technically rather poor” port of what had been a rather middling game in the first place. (Molyneux’s technique for getting everything drawn in one frame was to simply keep shrinking the size of the display until even his inefficient routines could do the job.) And then, as usual for everything Molyneux touched, it flopped. But Bullfrog did get two important things out of the project: they learned much about game programming, and they recruited as artist for the project one Glenn Corpes, who was not only a talented pixel pusher but also a talented programmer and fount of ideas almost the equal of Molyneux.

Despite the promising addition of Corpes, the first original game conjured up by the slowly expanding Bullfrog fared little better than Enlightenment. Corpes and Kevin Donkin turned out a very of-its-time top-down shoot-em-up called Fusion, which Electronic Arts agreed to release. Dismissed as “a mixture of old ideas presented in a very unexciting manner” by reviewers, Fusion was even less impressive technically than had been the Enlightenment port, being plagued by clashing colors and jittery scrolling — not at all the sort of thing to impress the notoriously audiovisually-obsessed Amiga market. Thus Fusion flopped as well, keeping Molyneux’s long record of futility intact. But then, unexpectedly from this group who’d shown so little sign of ever rising above mediocrity, came genius.

To describe Populous as a stroke of genius would be a misnomer. It was rather a game that grew slowly into its genius over a considerable period of time, a game that Molyneux himself considers more an exercise in evolution than conscious design. “It wasn’t an idea that suddenly went ‘Bang!'” he says. “It was an idea that grew and grew.” And its genesis had as much to do with Glenn Corpes as it did with Peter Molyneux.

Every Populous world is built out of combinations of just 16 blocks.

Every Populous world is built out of combinations of just 16 blocks.

It all began when Corpes started showing off a routine he had written which let him build isometric landscapes out of three-dimensional blocks, like a virtual Lego set. You could move the viewpoint about the landscape, raising and lowering the land by left-clicking to add new blocks, right-clicking to remove them. Molyneux was immediately sure there was a game in there somewhere. His childhood memory of the ant farm leaping to mind, he said, “Let’s have a thousand people running around on it.”

Populous thus began with those little people in lieu of ants, wandering independently over Corpes’s isometric landscapes in real time. When they found a patch they liked, they would settle down, building little huts. Since, this being a computer game, the player would obviously need something to do as well, Molyneux started adding ways for you, as a sort of God on high, to influence the people’s behavior in indirect ways. He added something he called a “Papal Magnet,” a huge ankh you could place in the world to draw your people toward a given spot. But there would come a problem if the way to their destination happened to be blocked by, say, a lake. Molyneux claims he added Populous‘s most basic mechanic, the thing you spend by far the most time doing when playing the game, as a response to his “incompetence” as a coder and resulting inability to write a proper path-finding algorithm: when your people get stuck somewhere, you can, subject to your mana reserves — even gods have limits — raise or lower the land to help them out. With that innovation, Populous from the player’s perspective became largely an exercise in terraforming, creating smooth, even landscapes on which your people can build their huts, villages, and eventually castles. As your people become fruitful and multiply, their prayers fuel your mana reserves.

Next, Molyneux added warfare to the picture. Now you would be erecting mountains and lakes to protect your people from their enemies, who start out walking about independently on the other side of the world. The ultimate goal of the game, of course, is to use your people to wipe out your enemy’s people before they do the same to you; this is a very Old Testament sort of religious experience. To aid in that goal, Molyneux gradually added lots of other godly powers to your arsenal, more impressive than the mere raising and lowering of land if also far more expensive in terms of precious mana: flash floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc. You know, all your standard acts of God, as found in the Bible and insurance claims.

Lego Populous. Bullfrog had so much fun with this implementation of the idea that they seriously discussed trying to turn it into a commercial board game.

Lego Populous. Bullfrog had so much fun with this implementation of the idea that they seriously discussed trying to turn it into a commercial board game.

Parts of Populous were prototyped on the tabletop. Bullfrog used Lego bricks to represent the landscapes, a handy way of implementing the raising-and-lowering mechanic in a physical space. They went so far as to discuss a license with Lego, only to be told that Lego didn’t support “violent games.” Molyneux admits that the board game, while playable, was very different from the computerized Populous, playing out as a slow-moving, chess-like exercise in strategy. The computer Populous, by contrast, can get as frantic as any action game, especially in the final phase when all the early- and mid-game maneuvering and feinting comes down to the inevitable final genocidal struggle between Good and Evil.

Bullfrog. From left: Glenn Corpes (artist), Shaun Cooper (tester), Peter Molyneux (designer and programmer), Kevin Donkin (designer and programmer), Les Edgar (office manager), Andy Jones (artist and tester).

Bullfrog. From left: Glenn Corpes (artist and programmer), Shaun Cooper (artist and tester), Peter Molyneux (designer and programmer), Kevin Donkin (designer and programmer), Les Edgar (office manager), Andy Jones (artist and tester).

Ultimately far more important to the finished product than Bullfrog’s Lego Populous were the countless matches Molyneux played on the computer against Glenn Corpes. Apart from all of its other innovations in helping to invent the god-game and real-time-strategy genres, Populous was also a pioneering effort in online gaming. Multi-player games — the only way to play Populous for many months — took place between two people seated at two separate Amigas, connected together via modem or, if together in the same room as Molyneux and Corpes were, via a cable. Vanishingly few other designers were working in this space at the time, for understandable reasons: even leaving aside the fact that the majority of computer owners didn’t own modems, running a multi-player game in real-time over a connection as slow as 1200 baud was hardly a programming challenge for the faint-hearted. The fact that it works at all in Populous rather puts the lie to Molyneux’s self-deprecating description of himself as a “rubbish” coder.

You draw your people toward different parts of the map by placing the Papal Magnet. The first one to touch it becomes the leader. There are very few words in the game, which made it much easier to localize and popularize across Europe. Everything is done using the initially incomprehensible suite of icons you near the bottom of the screen.

You draw your people toward different parts of the map by placing the Papal Magnet. The first one to touch it becomes the leader. There are very few words in the game, which only made it that much easier for Electronic Arts to localize and popularize across Europe. Everything is instead done using the initially incomprehensible suite of icons you near the bottom of the screen. Populous does become intuitive in time, but it’s not without a learning curve.

Development of Populous fell into a comfortable pattern. Molyneux and Corpes would play together for several hours every evening, then nip off to the pub to talk about their experiences. Next day, they’d tweak the game, then they’d go at it again. It’s here that we come to the beating heart of Molyneux’s description of Populous as a game evolved rather than designed. Almost everything in the finished game beyond the basic concept was added in response to Molyneux and Corpes’s daily wars. For instance, Molyneux initially added knights, super-powered individuals who can rampage through enemy territory independently and cause a great deal of havoc in a very short period of time, to prevent their games from devolving into endless stalemates. “A game could get to the point where both players had massive populations,” says Molyneux, “and there was just no way to win.” With knights, the stronger player “could go and massacre the other side and end the game at a stroke.”

A constant theme of all the tweaking was to make a more viscerally exciting game that played more quickly. For commercial as well as artistic reasons — Amiga owners weren’t particularly noted for their patience with slow-paced, cerebral games — this was considered a priority. Over the course of development, the length of the typical game Molyneux played with Corpes shrank from several hours to well under one.

Give them time, and your people will turn their primitive villages into castles -- and no, the drawing isn

Give them time, and your people will turn their primitive huts into castles.

Even tweaked to play quickly and violently, Populous was quite a departure from the tried-and-true Amiga fare of shoot-em-ups, platformers, and action-adventures. The unenviable task of trying to sell the thing to a publisher was given to Les Edgar. After visiting about a dozen publishers, he convinced Electronic Arts take a chance on it. Bullfrog promised EA a finished Populous in time for Christmas 1988. By the time that deadline arrived, however, it was still an online multiplayer-only game, a prospect EA knew to be commercially untenable. Molyneux and his colleagues thus spent the next few months creating Populous‘s single-player “Conquest Mode.”

In addition to the green and pleasant land of the early levels, there are also worlds of snow and ice, desert worlds, and even worlds of fire and lava to conquer.

In addition to the green and pleasant land of the early levels, there are also worlds of snow and ice, desert worlds, and even worlds of fire and lava to conquer.

Perilously close to being an afterthought to the multi-player experience though it was, Conquest Mode would be the side of the game that the vast majority of its eventual players would know best if not exclusively. Rather than design a bunch of scenarios by hand, Bullfrog wrote an algorithm to procedurally generate 500 different “worlds” for play against a computer opponent whose artificial intelligence also had to be created from scratch during this period. This method of content creation, used most famously by Ian Bell and David Braben in Elite, was something of a specialty and signpost of British game designers, who, plagued by hardware limitations far more stringent than their counterparts in the United States, often used it as a way to minimize the space their games consumed in memory and on disk. Most recently, Geoff Crammand’s hit game The Sentinal, also published by Electronic Arts, had used a similar scheme; Glenn Corpes believes it may in fact have been an EA executive named Joss Ellis who first suggested it to Bullfrog.

Populous‘s implementation is fairly typical of the form. Each of the 500 worlds except the first is protected by a password that is, like everything else, itself procedurally generated. When you win at a given level, you’re given the password to a higher, harder level; whether and how many levels you get to skip is determined by how resounding a victory you’ve just managed. It’s a clever scheme, packing a hell of a lot of potential gameplay onto a single floppy disk and even making an effort to avoid boring the good player — and all without forcing Bullfrog to deal with the complications of actually storing any state whatsoever onto disk.

It inevitably all comes down to a frantic final free-for-all between your people and those of your enemy.

It inevitably all comes down to a frantic final free-for-all between your people and those of your enemy.

Given their previous failures, Bullfrog understandably wasn’t the most confident group when a well-known British games journalist named Bob Wade, who had already played a pre-release version of the game, came by for a visit. For hours, Molyneux remained too insecure to actually ask Wade the all-important question of what he thought of the game. At last, after Wade had joined the gang for “God knows how many” pints at their local, Molyneux worked up the courage to pop the question. Wade replied that it was the best game he’d ever played, and he couldn’t wait to get back to it — prompting Molyneux to think he must have made some sort of mistake, and that under no circumstances should he be allowed to play another minute of it in case his opinion should change. It was Wade and the magazine he was writing for at the time, ACE (Advanced Computer Entertainment), who coined the term “god game” in the glowing review that followed, the first trickle of a deluge of praise from the gaming press in Britain and, soon enough, much of the world.

Bullfrog’s first royalty check for Populous was for a modest £13,000. Their next was for £250,000, prompting a naive Les Edgar to call Electronic Arts about it, sure it was a mistake. It was no mistake; Populous alone reportedly accounted for one-third of EA’s revenue during its first year on the market. That Bullfrog wasn’t getting even bigger checks was a sign only of the extremely unfavorable deal they’d signed with EA from their position of weakness. Populous finally and definitively ended the now 29-year-old Peter Molyneux’s long run of obscurity and failure at everything he attempted. In his words, he went overnight from “urinating in the sink” and “owing more money than I could ever imagine paying back” to “an incredible life” in games. Port after port came out for the next couple of years, each of them becoming a bestseller on its platform. Populous was selected to become one of the launch titles for the Super Nintendo console in Japan, spawning a full-blown fad there that came to encompass comic books, tee-shirts, collectibles, and even a symphony concert. When they visited Japan for the first time on a promotional tour, Molyneux and Les Edgar were treated like… well, appropriately enough, like gods. Populous sold 3 million copies in all according to some reports, an almost inconceivable figure for a game during this period.

Amidst all its other achievements, Populous was also something of a pioneer in the realm of e-sports. The One magazine and Electronic Arts hosted a tournament to find the best player in Britain.

The One magazine and Electronic Arts hosted a tournament to find the best Populous player in Britain.

While a relatively small percentage of Populous players played online, those who did became pioneers of sorts in their own right. Some bulletin-board systems set up matchmaking services to pair up players looking for a game, any time, day or night; the resulting connections sometimes spanned national borders or even oceans. The matchmakers were aided greatly by Bullfrog’s forward-thinking decision to make all versions of Populous compatible with one another in terms of online play. In making it so quick and easy to find an online opponent, these services prefigured the modern world of Internet-enabled online gaming. Molyneux pronounced them “pretty amazing,” and at the time they really were. In 1992, he spoke excitedly of a recent trip to Japan, where’d he seen a town “with 10,000 homes all linked together. You can play games with anybody in the place. It’s enormous, really enormous, and it’s growing.” If only he’d known what online gaming would grow into in the next decade or two…

A youngster named Andrew Reader wound up winning the tournament, only to get trounced in an exhibitio match by the master, Peter Molyneux himself. There was talk of televising a follow-up tournament on Sky TV, but it doesn

A youngster named Andrew Reader wound up winning the tournament, only to get trounced in an exhibition match by the master, Peter Molyneux himself. There was talk of televising a follow-up tournament on Sky TV, but it doesn’t appear to have happened.

The original Amiga version of Populous had been released all but simultaneously with the Amiga version of SimCity. Press and public alike immediately linked the two games together; AmigaWorld magazine, for instance, went so far as to review them jointly in a single article. Both Will Wright of SimCity fame and Peter Molyneux were repeatedly asked in interviews whether they’d played the other’s game. Wright was polite but, one senses, a little disinterested in Populous, saying he “liked the idea of playing God and having a population follow you,” but “sort of wish they’d gone for a slightly more educational angle.” Molyneux was much more enthusiastic about his American counterpart’s work, repeatedly floating a scheme to somehow link the two games together in more literal fashion for online play.  He claimed at one point that Maxis (developers of SimCity) and his own Bullfrog had agreed on a liaison “to go backwards and forwards” between their two companies to work on linking their games. The liaison, he claimed, had “the Populous landscape moving to and from SimCity,” and a finished product would be out sometime in 1992. Like quite a number of the more unbelievable schemes Molyneux has floated over the years, it never happened.

The idea of a linkage between SimCity and Populous, whether taking place online or in the minds of press and public, can seem on the face of it an exceedingly strange one today. How would the online linkage actually work anyway? Would the little Medieval warriors from Populace suddenly start attacking SimCity‘s peaceful modern utopias? Or would Wright’s Sims plop themselves down in the middle of Molyneux’s apocalyptic battles and start building stadiums and power plants? These were very different games: Wright’s a noncompetitive, peaceful exercise in urban planning with strong overtones of edutainment; Molyneux’s a zero-sum game of genocidal warfare that aspired to nothing beyond entertainment. Knowing as we do today the future paths of these two designers — i.e., ever further in the directions laid down by these their first significant works — only heightens the seeming dichotomy.

That said, there actually were and are good reasons to think of them as two sides of the same coin. For us today, these include first of all the reasons of simple historical concordance. Each marks the coming-out party of one of the most important game designers of all time, occurring within bare weeks of one another.

But of course the long-term importance of these two designers to their field wasn’t yet evident in 1989. Once you stripped away their very different surface trappings and personalities, the similarities of the fundamental innovations at the heart of each were real. AmigaWorld said it very well in that joint review: “The real joy of these programs is the interlocking relationships. Sure, you’re a creator, but even more a facilitator, influencer, and stage-setter for little computer people who act on your wishes in their own time and fashion.” It’s no coincidence that, just as Peter Molyneux was partly inspired by an ant hill to create Populous, one of Will Wright’s projects of the near future would be the virtual ant farm SimAnt. In creating the first two god games, the two were indeed implementing a very similar core idea, albeit each in his own very different way.

Joel Billings of the king of American strategy games SSI had founded his company back in 1979 with the explicit goal of making computerized versions of the board games he loved. SimCity and Populous can be seen as the point when computer strategy games transcended that traditional approach. The real-time nature of these games makes them impossible to conceive of as anything other than computer-based works, while their emergent complexity makes them objects of endless fascination for their designers as much or more so for than their players.

In winning so many awards and entrancing so many players for so long, SimCity and Populous undoubtedly benefited hugely from their sheer novelty. Their flaws stand out more clearly today. With its low-resolution graphics and without the aid of modern niceties like tool tips and graphical overlays, SimCity struggles to find ways to communicate vital information about what your city is really doing and why, making the game into something of an unsatisfying black box unless and until you devote a lot of time and effort to understanding what affects what. Populous has many of the same interface frustrations, along with other problems that feel still more fundamental and intractable, especially if you, like the vast majority of players back in its day, experience it through its single-player Conquest Mode. Clever as they are, the procedurally generated levels combined with the fairly rudimentary artificial intelligence of your computer opponent introduce a lot of infelicities. Eventually you begin to realize that one level is pretty much the same as any other; you just need to execute the same set of strategies and tactics more efficiently to have success at the higher levels.

Both Will Wright and Peter Molyneux are firm adherents to the experimental, boundary-pushing school of game design — an approach that yields innovative games but not necessarily holistically good games every time out. And indeed, throughout his long career each of them has produced at least as many misses as hits, even if we dismiss the complaints of curmudgeons like me and lump SimCity and Populous into the category of the hits. Both designers have often fallen into the trap, if trap it be, of making games that are more interesting for creators and commentators than they are fun for actual players. And certainly both have, like all of us, their own blind spots: in relying so heavily on scientific literature to inform his games, Wright has often produced end results with something of the feel of a textbook, while Molyneux has often lacked the discipline and gravitas to fully deliver on his most grandiose schemes.

But you know what? It really doesn’t matter. We need our innovative experimentalists to blaze new trails, just as we need our more sober, holistically-minded designers to exploit the terrain they discover. And indeed, SimCity and Populous would be followed by decades of games that built on the possibilities they revealed — many of which I’d frankly prefer to play today than these two original groundbreakers. But, again, that reality doesn’t mean we should celebrate SimCity and Populous one iota less, for both resoundingly pass the test of historical significance. The world of gaming would be a much poorer place without Will Wright and Peter Molyneux and their first living worlds inside a box.

(Sources: The Official Strategy Guide for Populous and Populous II by Laurence Scotford; Master Populous: Blueprints for World Power by Clayton Walnum; Amazing Computing of October 1989; Next Generation of November 1998; PC Review of July 1992; The One of April 1989, September 1989, and May 1991; Retro Gamer 44; AmigaWorld of December 1987, June 1989, and November 1989; The Games Machine of November 1988; ACE of April 1989; the bonus content to the film From Bedrooms to Billions. Archived online sources include features on Peter Molyneux and Bullfrog for Wired Online, GameSpot, and Edge Online. Finally, Molyneux’s postmortem on Populous at the 2011 Game Developers Conference.

Populous is available for purchase from GOG.com.)


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June 30, 2016 at 11:22AM

The Gameshelf: IF: The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation: a new nonprofit

The Gameshelf: IF: The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation: a new nonprofit

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Here's something new!

Today we are announcing the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF), a new 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting the software and services that underlie modern IF.

The web site (iftechfoundation.org) has all the information. But the quick overview goes like this:

For the past 25-ish years, IF has been primarily a free hobby supported by free-time volunteers. This is great; it's organized around a community (or communities) rather than being pinned to one company's fate. But it's also a weakness. People's free time varies. Services and tools go unmaintained.

The goal of IFTF is to support these efforts; to provide an umbrella organization that can manage projects when the original creator doesn't want to; and to be a visible donation point for benefactors who want to support IF.

(To be clear, IFTF does not plan to directly support creators or become a paying market for IF. The "technology" in the title means tools, services, and web sites.)

Our first project involves assuming stewardship of IFComp, lending the event (and its website) the legal and financial backing of a formal organization. Jmac will still be in charge of IFComp, but he will now do it wearing an IFTF hat. And IFComp will now (through the parent organization) own its own web-site code and copyrights and so on.

Our plans for the near future include support for Twine and doing a study on accessibility of existing IF tools. Beyond that, well, we'll have to see how much money comes in.

Who are we? A bunch of IF fans, authors, and people generally known in the community:

  • Chris Klimas (Twine, Blue Chairs)
  • Flourish Klink (Muggle Studies)
  • Jason McIntosh (IFComp, The Warbler's Nest)
  • Andrew Plotkin (Glulx, Hadean Lands)
  • Carolyn VanEseltine (ParserComp, Ollie Ollie Oxen Free)

We also have a large advisory committee drawn from across the various IF worlds.

I could burble on about this project, because we've been swinging at it for several months and the ideas are flowing rapidly. But today's the day we announce it, so I'll stand back and let the news percolate.





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June 30, 2016 at 10:22AM

Redeemer! – Attempt 1, Part 1

Redeemer! – Attempt 1, Part 1

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9781515330455

Alright, this is it.

After literally decades of waiting, the cliffhanger with Avenger lying helpless in the web of the Black Widow will finally be resolved.

Aside : Mad props if paragraph (1) of Redeemer simply stated.  “The Black Widow eats you alive.  You will never make it home.  Psych!”

Hopefully that’s not the case.

In any event, a careful reading of the preliminary rules yields the following initial points.

  • Notwithstanding the recent Twitter exchange between myself and Jamie Thomson, the introductory notes specifically confirm that my Inner Force still has only a maximum of 4 due to picking up (in Book 4) the cursed Amulet of Nullaq.

Aside – Now that’s a sentence that a non-gamebook fan would need subtitles to understand.

  • Appparently, while falling into the dark, Kwon has restored my Endurance and Inner Force. No word as to Kwon’s motivation for not helping when a spider tried to set up camp in my brain, but there you go.  Endurance : 20, Inner Force : 4

Aside : This, even more, speaks to how useless to the overall narrative the confrontation with Tyutchev was, near the end of Inferno!  But I’ll try to be restrained with regard to criticisms of that book. Ancient history, baby!

Alright – paragraph 1!  (Deep breath.)

My Torch of Lumen remains dark, and the only illumination is a ‘pale, sickly white light from above’.  That could be a magical light, or just the reflection from a vampire slumber party.  In any event, my friends and enemies alike are all trapped in this massive spider’s web.  I confirm that my eye / Orb is still intact and that Foxglove is (absolutely, definitely not) my companion.

Vespers (the warrior from the four stooges) attempts to be a hero, in that he frees himself (using his sword ‘Manmaster’) from the web and confronts the Black Widow.

This would be a heroic last stand, except for the fact that the book has just begun.

Yeah, well I said that before I turned the page. Vespers’ head is (literally) bitten clean off.  Yikes.

Welcome to Book 7, my friend.

In a wonderfully atmospheric piece of text, I am ‘showered’ with blood.  I guess my shambler’s disguise just isn’t going to cut it anymore.

My first real choice!

I can :

  • Pray to Kwon;
  • Try to jam my little vial of the Blood of Nil into the maw of the Black Widow;
  • Command my Torch of Lumen to flare with light;
  • Two other non-options (using a token I don’t have, or using the Feigning Death skill, which I also don’t have).

I feel sure that the author of this (much delayed) sequel threw the Feign Death option in as a bone to those who have seen this skill sadly unused through the six previous books.

Since Kwon has literally restored my Endurance and Inner Force about five minutes ago, I think it might be pushing the friendship to ask for further help so soon.  Given that the Blood of Nil is a one-use-only item, whereas the Torch of Lumen will continually flare with light on command, I try to keep my one-shot poison until later and try to shine a light from the Torch of Lumen into the Black Widow’s face.

I turn to the correct paragraph and….

Alright, firstly massive props to the author(s) for using the term chelicerae correctly with regard to the spider’s mouth.  My admiration is short-lived, as I manage to make the Black Widow rear in shock (due to the flare of light) but her ‘flailing limb’ lashes out, catching my left leg.

I lose 4 Endurance (which is tolerable) but apparently, my leg is so injured that I suffer a -2 (!!!!!) to my Kick modifier!

Incidentally, I also can’t use my (non-existent) skill of Acrobatics until further notice.

Yeah, like that’s my main concern.

To paraphrase the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, its times like this when I have a crippled leg, am miles underground, am facing a massive spider, and have a miniature spider in my brain, that I wish I’d listed to my mother when I was young.

For the second part of that story, you’ll just have to wait.

Stats : Endurance : 16, Punch Modifier : +2, Kick Modifier: +1 (!!), Throw Modifier : 0, Fate Modifier : +1, Inner Force : 4





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June 30, 2016 at 06:49AM

Il était une fois

Il était une fois

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June 30, 2016 at 03:35AM

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Segue: Scraping DBPedia for Fun and Corpora

Magic the Gathering Spells I would like to know if I were a wizard

Magic the Gathering Spells I would like to know if I were a wizard

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If I were a fantasy wizard, I would like to know these ten spells above all others.  They will be extremely helpful in my magical adventures.

Ancestral Recall

First of all, I would use this spell to reveal to me the knowledge of the past.  With this spell, I could expand my magical power.

Lightning Bolt

Of course, I will come across some dangerous creatures so I will need this spell to make short work of them.

Fireball

And this spell is just in case I come across several dangerous creatures at once, so I can take out several of them.

Unsummon

Some creatures are not dangerous, just annoying.  I will use this spell to send them back from whence they came so that I do not have to suffer their presence.

Pay no Head

If I come across a rival mage who has their own lightning bolts then this spell will protect me from them.

Counterspell

And this handy spell will protect me from less damaging but possibly more insidious spells.

Coercion

Like this one.  If I come across a rival mage, then I might want to be pro active in removing dangerous spells from their mind.  I may also want to remove people’s memories of me in case I want to infiltrate a castle.

Desert Twister

If I just want something destroyed, I could harness this force of nature to crush anything I want.

Invisibility

Invisibility is handy in many situations. Hiding, sneaking, escaping.  This is a handy utility spell that can get me out of all kinds of sticky situations.

Teleport

Sometimes travelling is a wonderful experience where you get to see magnificent panoramas.  Sometimes, it’s just a tedious chore and this is why teleportation is something that every self respecting wizard should know how to do.

So there we go.  What spells would you like to know to get you through your adventures?






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June 29, 2016 at 05:30PM

Emily Short: IF Only on Hadean Lands

Emily Short: IF Only on Hadean Lands

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I talk about Hadean Lands (recently released on Steam!) on Rock Paper Shotgun.






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June 29, 2016 at 03:13PM

Emily Short: Mysterious Package Company and Narrative of Objects

Emily Short: Mysterious Package Company and Narrative of Objects

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articles-diary

Last year, I interviewed the spokesman of the Mysterious Package Company about their Kickstarted project The Century Beast. The company was doing a form of object-based storytelling that struck me as really fascinating, though — as they also encouraged secrecy around their projects — it was hard to get exact details about what one could expect.

Since then, their Kickstarter has been successful and they’ve been sending out Century Beast packages. I bought a Bronze version of that experience for myself, less deluxe but also less exceptionally expensive than some of the other tiers of the experience. I’ve also heard from a few other people who bought MPC products after reading my interview. I’ve come away thinking the idea is still pretty interesting but that the execution is a mix of excellent, the less-than-excellent, and the problematic.

I’d like to talk about all of that, though I’m conscious of the need not to spoil too much, so I’ll avoid specifics as I do when writing about escape rooms.

I’ll start with the problematic first. A few weeks ago I heard from IF author and reviewer Lynnea Glasser that she’d ordered the Mysterious Package Company’s King in Yellow package and that she’d been distressed to find that it contained some casual racism, and that she hadn’t gotten any response at all when contacting the company about her experience.

By email she filled me in a little more about that: at a couple of points, the story uses non-western ethnicity as a marker of other-worldly evil. That’s a common trope in the Lovecraft stories from which the experience may be drawing, but Lovecraft’s wild racism is, I think it’s fair to say, not a feature many of us want to see emulated and perpetuated in contemporary Lovecraftian stories. (I forget to what degree Chambers deploys racist tropes; I recall more classism, off the top of my head.)

(Obligatory reminder: I am not saying everything problematic must be Purged With Fire. I am also not saying it’s impossible to like things that participate in these problems. At the same time I think it’s worth pointing them out.)

So there’s that. Another thing I’ve been hearing, and seeing firsthand, is that MPC’s published delivery timelines tend to be optimistic. Things often arrive weeks or months later than the initial schedule suggests they will. If you want to time something for a loved one’s birthday or Christmas present, and it’s important for that to be timely, this may not be the route for you. I’m personally probably more tolerant about this than some people would be. I’m old enough to remember a time when, if you ordered something from a company far away, you could expect it to turn up in four to six weeks, not the next morning via Amazon Prime. And I realize that the latter form of rapid delivery is the result of an extremely automated and corporate system that is not necessarily so easy to emulate if you’re a tiny company, and especially if you’re a tiny company making unusual hard-to-source objects. But if you’re placing orders, you might still want to know.

All that said, the packages I got had a number of impressive aspects. There were quite a number of different documents, on different papers, stylized and weathered as circumstances required. There were period magazine pages with advertisements lightly parodying the advertisements of the time. There was a small physical prop that felt solid and beautiful. There were some interactive elements too — sealed packets that had to be opened, an audio recording on a USB stick — and these gave the transgressive thrill that always comes from art you have to damage to experience.

Having at one point done some IF feelie development of my own (and much less skillfully), I recognize that a huge amount of work must have gone into designing and sourcing each of these pieces. The production values on these could out-compete most of the Infocom feelies, though I would say that Infocom feelies with a few exceptions tended not to take themselves at all seriously, which gave a very different tone to the experience. A possible exception were the feelies for Deadline, which I remember regarding with a reverential awe when I was a child because I was convinced this was exactly what police evidence would really be like.

I did find myself wishing for more from the Mysterious Package Company’s writing, though. The story told through all these objects was a story of characters in peril — I don’t think that constitutes much of a spoiler — and despite the meticulous work that had gone into creating their paper and penmanship, I was less persuaded by what they wrote. The characters and their situations felt like tropes only lightly inhabited by personality or uniqueness. In journal articles and letters and audio tracks, they described things happening that would indeed be very upsetting, but there wasn’t much by way of subtext or characteristic detail; I didn’t feel like I knew these people enough to be invested in their dangers. They were A Vacationer, A Loving Father, and so on.

I’m afraid I’m not alone here; Room Escape Artist’s review of the writing in King in Yellow is not encouraging either. (Did MPC perhaps underestimate how much writing skill would actually be needed for this project? They wouldn’t be the first in the games/puzzle space to do so.)

Then there’s the structure of the thing. This may just be the fact that I got the Bronze package and not the Silver or Gold which would have contained more mailings and more things, but I also felt that the set was a oddly distributed in terms of pacing. There were two mailings, one containing very little information and barely enough to provoke my curiosity about the story, and the other a crate containing all the other documents and objects all at once. Possibly the Gold experience — which I believe is the thing now sold on MPC’s website if you were to order The Century Beast from scratch — would be more intriguingly paced. Effectively, since these packages are not relying on the recipient solving puzzles to get the main sense of the story, they’re using real-time (mailing) delays instead, but the story needs more than two revelation points to work best.

Finally, and again I’m not sure whether this is a quirk of my own experience, there was something about the items I was sent that suggested to me that I might find an online tie-in. But investigating this led me nowhere. Did I read in too much, or not enough? I don’t know, but the overall feeling was a bit of a let-down. (There was an email address I could have tried emailing, too, but somehow that seemed like an extremely unnerving thing to do, so I refrained.)

I hope this doesn’t sound like a completely unalleviated string of complaints. My feelings are probably best described as Very Mixed. I don’t expect to order any more mysterious packages soon: they’re very expensive, especially if ordered to the UK, and relative to the story provided. On the other hand, I have lots of love for the object-manufacturing skill and for the basic concept of this.

I hope they will iron out their delivery process a bit, and bring on more writing support — ideally someone who will bring a critical eye to the implicit prejudices in whatever source material they may currently be adapting.






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June 29, 2016 at 09:11AM