The Gaming Philosopher

Well, here they are, the results of the 15th annual interactive fiction competition . Congratulations to anyone who considers himself or herself a winner! No really big surprises here, I think, but a couple of things stand out: Rover's Day Out has won, which does not surprise me, but its score is 0.6 points higher than that of the number two, which does. Apparently a lot of people were willing to forgive the game its weak points entirely. GATOR-ON has placed far lower than I had expected. Surely the difference between GATOR-ON and, say, Interface should not be 2.7 points? I don't really know what has happened here. ADRIFT didn't do too well: I would say that both The Ascot and Yon Astounding Castle! deserve to be a bit higher than they are; but both games have probably themselves, not their language, to blame. The Ascot hid its cleverness too well, while YAC! annoyed a lot of people with its language so that they never got to the pretty good game below. What ...

I have decided to create a new personal website. It was more than time for that: my current website was created in 2000, and only slightly changed afterwards. It uses frames. That's right, frames . I wrote it in plain html, there is no CMS, and it was so annoying to keep up to date that I more or less stopped updating it years ago. So now I'm building a new site using the Drupal CMS. I have it more or less set up, and all I have to do is add content. ( Click here for a preview. Don't link to it; the URL is going to change.) Because of this, I am searching my hard drive, and finding unfinished products everywhere. One that impresses me is Fleur du Mal , an adaptation of Clinton R. Nixon's brilliant (and mostly free) RPG The Shadow of Yesterday . One of the best parts of TSoY is the way you gain experience. All characters have "keys" that describe for what kind of stuff that character gets experience. All keys also have a way you can buy them off, and buying...

Okay, I am going to give you my provisional scores (provisional because I might still change my mind) and write a short recommendation for all the ones I liked. So this post will contain quasi-spoilers for many of the games, but real spoilers for none . But first some overal remarks. I think the average quality of entries was quite high this year: some games were deeply flawed, of course, but only a few were without redeeming qualities. I seem to remember that I felt more frustration than other years as I waded through one bad entry after another. Emily tells us that "every year people gripe about the comp, to the effect that the best games are not as good as the best games of past years", and I must admit that I don't think there was a Nightfall or a Violet among this year's entries. (Though it is possible that the frustration that those games gave me--I'm particularly looking at you, Violet , game that I loved for the narration and story but hated for the...

Before any spoiler space, let me say that if you play Rover's Day Out and you see longs strings of blue question marks... don't play on. Get another interpreter. In my case, the Debian package of Gargoyle did not work, and I had to use Windows Gargoyle through WINE. (Ironical, given the game's evident pro-UNIX attitude! This was not a spoiler.) Perhaps this was an issue with non-free fonts? Who knows... anyway, the game will make absolutely no sense of you do not play it with the right interpreter. So, my second review, after player Rover's Day Out in the intended form. Obviously, I'm going to be a lot more positive, since things made a lot more sense this time and were also less boring--since the commentary changed, at least you had something new to read. I also discovered a lot of nice touches, of which my favourite was when it turned out that "ls" and then "cd engineering" actually worked . That was awesome; now if only "nano [file ...

I'm all out of spoiler space. I'll google "spoiler space" and paste in whatever comes up at the first hit. Hm. Google tells me about the first hit: "Deze site kan schade toebrengen aan uw computer.", which means "This site can damage your computer." MaybeI won't click the link, then. Tralalala. Did you people know that this is my last IF comp game this year? I've played them all. That's my very first time, and I'm proud of it. That I did it, not that this is the first time. And I couldn't have done it without all of you: it was the prospect of reading your reviews that was the prime motivation! Okay, it's time for Rover's Day Out . Which I did not finish, since it was the most pointless and boring game I have seen in this entire competition. Well-implemented, mostly, although there were a few bugs of this variety: > open storage cabinet I only understood you as far as wanting to open the cabinet-proxy. Also, ...

Spoiler space. Spoiler space. Here is a transcript of the brilliant new game A Day in Boot Camp : "Get up, you worthless maggots!", the drill instructor shouts. > stand "Forty push ups! Quick!" > do push up You do a push up. "Faster!" > do push up You do a push up. "Hey, private Weakling, am I going to see some action or what?" > do 38 push ups You cannot use multiple objects with that verb. > do psuh up "You got a typing disability, private Weakling? Here to mar the reputation of my beloved corps, are you?" Let's move on to Broken Legs as quickly as we can. This, my friends, is pure Varicella . We have a nasty protagonist, a wide open map, a lot of people whom we have to dispose off, sharp writing, and cruel, difficult and little clued puzzles. Saying that something is like Varicella is of course a compliment; but in the context of this competition, it is also a point of criticism. I cannot ima...

Today's spoiler space is a quote from Isaiah Berlin's The Roots of Romanticism , in which he talks about how romanticism severed--really for the first time in Western thought--the ideas of truth and moral goodness. Suppose you had a conversation in the sixteenth century with somebody fighting in the great religious wars which tore Europe apart at that period, and suppose you said to a Catholic of that period, engaged in hostilities, `Of course these Protestants believe what is false; of course to believe what they believe is to court perdition; of course they are dangerous to the salvation of human souls, than which there is nothing more important; but they are so sincere, they die so readily for their cause, their integrity is so splendid, one must yield a certain meed of admiration for the moral dignity and sublimity of people who are prepared to do that.' Such a sentiment would have been unintelligible. Anyone who really knew, supposed themselves to know, the truth, say...

I made another recipe with pumpkin yesterday. It is apparently of Cuban origins, but enough has been changed in order to meet ingredient availability that its probably no longer recognisable as such. I got it from Madhur Jaffrey's incredible vegetarian cookbook. Cook pumpkin with white beans (I get my beans pre-cooked from a jar; if you have raw beans, cook them first, because they'll take much longer than the pumpkin) and some water. Add lemongrass when it's about half-done. (It takes maybe 20 minutes.) Pour away any left-over water once the pumpkin is done. Meanwhile, fry garlic, an onion, a liberal sprinkling of cumin, some salt and a green paprika bell pepper. (Good that I looked that up on Wikipedia!) Add them to the pumpkin. That's all. Serve with green salad, cheese and pita bread. You could also serve it with rice, if you prefer a less messy eating experience. I also served this with two spicy side dishes: (1) fried green peppers, garlic and onion; (2) frie...

Today's spoiler space: I've begun getting pages together over at IFWiki about individual blogs. I started with Renga in Blue and Illuminated Lantern , and I'll probably be doing my own next. If you want to help keeping all that great information in all these great blogs accessible (in the sense that people will be able to find it), why don't you join in the fun? My basic plan is to do the individual blogs first, and then make pages for each of the topics discussed which would link to all the specific blog posts about that topic. Anyway--a big project that I might not want to be doing alone. (Though the good thing about a project like this is that every little contribution to it is already useful in itself.) That's probably enough? Not that I'm going to spoil Beta Tester all that much. Another game I didn't finish and that I probably won't be voting on, since it annoyed and bored me, but in a way that makes it conceivable that there is something goo...

Here is spoiler space for the spoiler space. I'm going to answer a trivia question that I asked in the last spoiler space, so if you don't to know it, read that entry first! You know, I'll write the name in reverse, so your eyes won't betray you. Right. The music of rerheL moT was among the first English-language music I listened to and loved--I suppose that my parents must have told me the general meaning, but most of the songs I only slowly figured out as I got older. An early favourite (undoubtedly because of the low language barrier) was The Elements , which I learnt by heart when I was nine or ten. Yes, I know that is nerdy. Okay, very nerdy. And yes, I still know it. "There's antimony, arsenic, ..." And while we're on the topic: it occurred to me that mister rerheL's Silent E in combination with the central puzzle mechanic of one the games in this competition (and preferably some nice illustrations) would make a great educational piece ...

Only six more games to go! I have seen very good things about some of them, and I am secretly saving the ones that are probably best for last. Hm, was that a spoiler about Eruption ? No, of course not. Spoiler space, spoiler space, la la la. Did I already tell you that there are at least two games in this competition that mention a platypus? One of them has the platypus marry you to someone. (I gather, from the walkthrough. I don't think anyone has actually reached that part of the game, since it is apparently unwinnable. So this is not a spoiler.) Trivia question of the day: which song compares marrying a platypus to being a certain mythological figure, and prefers marrying the platypus? Right, on to Eruption , by Richard Bos. For all I know, he might be Dutch: he certainly has the same last name as our vice-prime minister. It means "forest". My expectations for this game were incredibly high, because Conrad had written this: We see here the self-portrait of a man...

I have never been to the Everglades. In fact, the greater part of the time I spent within the borders of the United States of America was on the O'Hare International Airport near Chicago, waiting for a flight to Vancouver, so I haven't really been anywhere in the USA. I will probably never go to the Everglades. Of course I could, if I wanted to, but why fly across the Atlantic for a vacation when there is so much to see nearer to home? I've never been to Berlin yet, it has been more than ten years since I visited Paris (not counting hours spent cursing the traffic on the Périphérique as we tried to get to other parts of France), I haven't seen Italy and Spain, I have never visited Scandinavia--and I certainly wouldn't mind revisiting London or the Alps or Bruges or many of the other places that I did visit. So the Everglades will probably forever escape my direct experience. Which is--this should have been enough spoiler space--why playing an interactive ficti...

I'm looking for beta-testers for a small game I have written. It is not, perhaps, a "real" game--more a proof on concept, a piece of conceptual art, or a move in a discussion. Think Figaro or +=3 , though this piece is more extensive than either of those, and also less about design than about a socio-political issue. (Hm, IFDB has no Figaro page.) Also, when I say "small", I mean small: I coded up the whole thing this evening, though I did some design work before that. It's a 3271-word source code. Nevertheless, I think it should play smoothly, and if some of you want to help me with that I would be very pleased! Simply send me an email at victorlilith.cc, where you put the @-symbol between my name and that of Adam's first wife. Or you can leave a comment here with your mail-address.

Writing up a recipe in English is very difficult for me. What on earth do you call the water in which something has been cooked? Is "brown rice" what I would call "zilvervliesrijst"? Anyway, here is an attempt at pumpkin, rice and black-eyed beans (and I leave the amounts up to you, because it doesn't much matter whether its more "beany" or more "pumpkiny" or whatever): Ingredients: pumpkin, rice, black-eyed beans, onions, fresh red or green peppers, vegetable oil, whatever spices strike your fancy. If the black-eyed beans are raw, first cook them until they're soft. Keep the cooking water(?). Put oil in a big pot, add onions, and fry them. Add, rice, diced pumpkin, sliced peppers, beans and as much of the cooking water of the beans as you believe the rice will absorb during cooking. (If it's not enough, add extra water.) Add optional spices. Cook until the pumpkin and the rice are soft. Good with green salad. There are those who ha...

This time, I'd like to use the spoiler space to present the "most insightful remark I've seen so far in an IFComp 2009 review". The award goes to Jenni of Pissy Little Sausages for the following observation: Y’know, every time I read “Violence isn’t the answer to this one,” I am skeptical, because very often this default message is left as a failure notification in places where you’re simply using the wrong kind of violence, or on the wrong thing. That, my friends, is hard-won IF wisdom. Anyway, let's go on to Eric Eve's Snowquest . This too is a game that is a bit too surreal and confusing for its own good. We have reality and we have a quest, which turns out to be a metaphorical/hypnotical something, but then we also have flashbacks within the quest and a further even more metaphorical dream-sequence... hard to keep track of, even harder to fit together once you have completed the game. I think that one of strengthening this game would be to simply cu...

Emily tells us that pumpkin pie is delicious. I don't know about that--I'm not even quite sure what "pie" means in the US--but I do know that the pumpkin is one of the great vegetables. And I should know about vegetables, because I'm a vegetarian. The only problem with pumpkins is that cutting them up and cleaning them is so much work. It makes me wonder why they don't sell pre-sliced pumpkin in my supermarket, even though they do sell such useless things as pre-sliced mushrooms. Maybe we can put recipes in these spoiler spaces? Anyway, next is The Believable Adventures of an Invisible Man . Many reviewers express concern at how unsymapthetic the player character is. This didn't bother me at all; in fact, it would seem to be interesting to step into the mind of the kind of vengeful sociopath portrayed here. People with a huge inferiority complex and an unhealthy dosis of paranoia are less rare than we might hope, they are pretty scary to be in close c...

I am now officially past the half-way mark, since this is the 13th game I review out of 24. I don't think I ever managed to review that many comp games during the comp... and let me tell you, this does have something to do with the fact that we are now allowed to publish reviews during the comp. It makes me want to play everything so I can read what all of you guys are talking about and talk about it as well. :) That should almost be enough spoiler text, shouldn't it? So we can get on with Condemned , by the mysterious "a delusioned teenager". Renee Choba writes: Playing a game that wants me to literally crucify myself is not really my thing. It will come as no surprise to anyone that playing a game that wants me to literally crucify myself is very much my thing. And indeed, the crucifixion scene impressed me, and I think with some changes (both in the scene itself and in the game in general) it could have been awesome. Just think of a play experience where it...

This time, I will fill the spoiler space with an announcement. I have received a bunch of code that solves basically all of the disambiguation and multiple actions/objects problems of The Art of Fugue ! Expect to find it in the next alpha. The reason I'm telling you now is to ensure that nobody else is going to spend a sleepless night trying to figure out how to do this. :) Which brings us right to Spelunker's Quest , a game that is exactly as old-school as the title might make you suppose. The author is a professional programmer, and it shows: we have a very cleanly implemented game. The author is a big fan of the old adventures like Adventure and Zork , and that shows as well: we wake up in a cave, find some treasures, kill some monsters, get ourselves into unwinnable situations, consult the hints menu... wait, did Zork have a hints menu? I don't think so. So that's one extra point for Spelunker's Quest . I dislike Adventure and Zork ; these amnesiac-tr...

This time, the spoiler space is a quote from an essay by Michael Moorcock. There are still a few things which bring a naive sense of shocked astonishment to me whenever I experience them -- a church service in which the rituals of Dark Age superstition are performed without any apparent sense of incongruity in the participants -- a fat Soviet bureaucrat pontificating about bourgeois decadence -- a radical singing the praises of Robert Heinlein. If I were sitting in a tube train and all the people opposite me were reading Mein Kampf with obvious enjoyment and approval it probably wouldn't disturb me much more than if they were reading Heinlein, Tolkien or Richard Adams. ( Starship Stormtroopers ) On to a review of Grounded in Space . Basically, this game has three kinds of segments, which I will discuss in turn. Mostly non-interactive "cutscenes", where all you get to do is wait as your father screams at you, the computer tells you stuff; or where you try to think of ...

The development of my/our puzzle game The Art of Fugue (see my earlier posts here and here ) is going well, and today I would like to present the second open alpha to you. You can find the game file here , and the source here . What is new? The fourth puzzle has been removed, as has the functionality that made it possible to solve this puzzle. However, four new puzzles have been added. The new puzzle four is some fun with mathematics. The fifth puzzle, contributed by Jimmy Maher and Dorte Lassen is about movement; I have used their code to create puzzle six. Puzzle seven is about making indistinguishable objects distinguishable. I believe that puzzle six and seven are of a higher difficulty than puzzle one to five. Puzzle six seemed especially hard, but it is possible that I have simply missed an easier solution. Also new is the menu system. You can now switch between puzzles through the menu. As you progress new puzzles will become unlocked. The game keeps track of which puz...

Þis time, þe spoiler space is a short Inform 7 program. "Thorns" by Victor Gijsbers Include Unicode Character Names by Graham Nelson. London Bridge is a room. "You have eyes for only one [unicode 254]ing: '[unicode 222]e Olde English Pubbe', right across [unicode 254]e street." But Adrift may not have unicode support, so on to þe review of Yon Astounding Castle! of some sort . I expected to hate þis game. Þe blurb seemed pretty bad, and þe opening screen was even worse. See, I þink you can only poke fun at someþing effectively if you understand þe þing you're poking fun at; so to make a humerous parody of old (or faux-old) English, you need to be able to write it very well. So I shuddered when I saw þis: ‘Twas writ using ye olde ADRIFT 4, for which all rights of copy & such doth hereforeto belongeth to Campbell Wild Ye First Version released upon ye Twenty-Ninth of September in ye Ninth Year of ye Second Millenium Anno Domini.  ...

This time, the spoiler space is an important announcement concerning the game Byzantine Perspective . It is not a spoiler. It is an anti-spoiler. This game has not abandoned you. It is not an untested bugfest. Play on and you will understand. Right. I mean, without that, people might pull out the hints and spoil the whole thing for themselves Some people already have. As for a review itself, well, I don't have a lot to say about this game except that I managed to solve the puzzle on my own, and found it very satisfying to do so. Best individual puzzle so far in this competition. There should be a post-competition version with a bit more polish, though. Things like this shouldn't happen: > x glass Which do you mean, the glass, the Hagia Sophia, or the mosaic? > x tiles Which do you mean, the mosaic, or the tiles? Anyway, recommended.

This time, the spoiler space is a riddle. QUESTION: What is wrong with a game that is called "Earl Grey", that is about a tea party and a monarchy, and that contains phrases like this one: "a riot of color with dozens of varieties you have never seen before."? ANSWER: It combines the essence of Britain with American spelling! REMEDY: > cast u into color Anyway, on to the game. Earl Grey by Rob Dubbin and Adam Parrish is a word-play game, like Gleaming the Verb , but of a totally different nature. In Earl Grey , you get to manipuate words by taking away letters or putting other letters in this place. "Knocking" a dame turns it into a dam, while a cane becomes a can. (But my friend Sam stays just the same. Ten bonus points for those who catch the reference.) This is a delightful idea, but its execution leaves a lot to be desired. There are simply too many words in the game that ought to be knockable, but aren't, or that ought to be castable,...

Another review, another spoiler space. Why fill it with nonsense text if I can actually tell you something interesting? Such as... There are a lot of processes in our world that happen one way, but not the other. Mirrors break, but shards do not assemble themselves into unbroken mirrors; two colours of paint mix, but they don't unmix. Why? You may believe the answer is the second of law of thermodynamics. You are wrong! I'm serious. At this dramatic point... the spoiler space ends. Well, this was a nice game. The author claims that it is old-school, with the idea dating back from 1984. He even calls it a "throw-back/relic". He is wrong. There is no random death, there are no parser issues, there is no maze, you cannot make the game unwinnable, the item descriptions are longer than three words... nothing in this game reminds me of 1984 (not that I have any clear memories of 1984, but still). Nothing, that is, except the carrying limit, but since all locations a...

This time, I will review Gleaming the Verb . Spoiler space? Hm... I'm running out of ideas. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Ok, let's go. Either I am stupid or this game is really weird. It drops me in a room with a cube, tells me to read the cube, gives me a reply and then... nothing. Turns out that reply is a linguistic puzzle from which I must, uhm, gleam the verb, but how am I supposed to know that? I had to look up the first two commands in the walkthrough before I noticed what was going on. And then I got stuck again. Here is the sentence I was given: ETER...

I used ZTools to reverse engineer the story file of The Duel in the Snow , because I wanted to know whether I had missed anything important to the story. Findings below, after some spoiler space. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. Okay, back to the game. I couldn't find any answers to the question I and others had about the story, so it seems things are not explained. One slightly suggestive thing that I had not seen in the game: The book is a slim volume of poetry. Natasha claimed that it was the collected works of one of her friends, an amateur poetess. Sadly, it has seen better days, for now it is all covered in blood and there is a bullet-hole through...

My review of Owen Parish's The Grand Quest contained an analysis of its playing card puzzle. I couldn't stop myself from doing some more calculations, which I present here. (This post also contains a walkthrough for the card puzzle that is shorter than that in the official walkthrough. It's right at the end.) You won't understand this discussion if you haven't read the previous post. Which also means that it's not too bad if it turns out that I haven't provided anough spoiler space. In my previous post, I defined the four operations A, B, C and D, and we saw that 4A + B + 5C + D was a solution of the puzzle; it is also the solution of the walkthrough. But of course, we would like to find all solutions by construction, rather than check a single given solution. The way to go is linear algebra. The four operations form a matrix, and we can get four linear equations out of it. If the Four of Diamonds is supposed to turn into the Ace of Clubs, we get t...

As in the previous post, I'll simply begin my game with saying some non-spoilery things about this game. That should keep the people on Planet IF happy. The Grand Quest is a game by Owen Parish, whose Cacophony I recently reviewed on the IFDB. That game was radically non-linear, and gave the player very little guidance; The Grand Quest is almost its exact opposite. Here we simply have a linear series of connected rooms, and you can only progress to the next one once you have solved the puzzle. Spoilers begin here. The story and the setting are really just window dressing: the puzzles make or break this game. I was favourably impressed by the first puzzle: it's a kind of riddle, with some wordplay, and although you might not want a whole game based on such thoughts it was nevertheless amusing. Unfortunately, this quality was not maintained throughout the rest of the game. Some of the puzzles barely qualified for that name, and their inclusion in the work is a mystery...

Another review in the Interactive Fiction Competition. This time, let's just fill the spoiler space with some non-spoilery comments about the game--yet another idea I simply copy from Emily Short. The Duel in the Snow takes place in aristocratic Russia. Unsurprisingly, given its title, it is about a duel, and almost as unsurprising is the fact that you are one of the two parties in the duel. There is some clever irony in the game: the player will have formed these expectations immediately, while the protagonist, who is also the focal character, has spent the night drinking and takes about half the game to remember about the duel. So we know what is going to happen, while he is still in the dark. Spoilers begin here . This game has good atmosphere: aristocratic Russia is as good a setting as any, and it is nicely evoked, given the size of this particular piece. There is the kind of melancholy, hopeless feel that one does associate with the great Russian novelists as well....

Another IF Comp review, another spoiler space... with the final part of this Thomas Hardy poem: The Ruined Maid (3/3) "You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream, And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; but at present you seem To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!" "True. One's pretty lively when ruined," said she. "I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown, And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" "My dear a raw country girl, such as you be, Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she. That should do the trick, and we can go on to The Ascot . I expected a game about horse racing, high society, and (perhaps) definite articles. A spiritual successor to Sting of the Wasp , maybe? Instead, I got an obscure kind of tie. And it was cursed. The Ascot is a CYOA-game of an especially minimalist type: you can only type "yes" and "no". Your choices have some effect on the narrative, th...

More IF Comp reviews, more spoiler space. As promised, the second part of Thomas Hardy's: The Ruined Maid (2/3) -"At home in the barton you said 'thee' and 'thou,' And 'thik oon,' and 'theäs oon,' and 't'other'; but now Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!" "Some polish is gained with one's ruin," said she. "Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek, And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!" "We never do work when we're ruined," said she. This time, I review Trap Cave by Emilian Kowalewski. It is a CYOA-style game, written in a new engine (Node-X) that is available for Windows and Linux. The engine seems good enough for its purposes. Some integration with the window manager might be a good idea, as it would allow for much nicer output, but I won't complain about that. Also, the author does not...