David Kinder has posted about recent releases to the IF archive, and as usual there’s a bunch of games I never heard of and I suspect may have had no announcement at all.

The Musician, by Phillip Skains.
Iraqi Invasion: A Text Misadventure, Interactive Propaganda by Anonymous.
Housekey, Part I, by Arien Holthuizen
The Care and Feeding of Adjuncts, by Eric Remy
The Airport, an interactive waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, and waiting… by Cascadian_Patriot.
Somewhere, an Interactive Poem by Kazuki Mishima.
Sporkery 1: There Will Be Sporking, by David Hughes.
Teacher Feature, by Paul Equinox Collins.

I know some of these titles the authors might have considered not for the general public, but this many works just slipping by is a bit ridiculous.

The author of Snowblind Aces has a new “IF shoot-’em-up”.

 Link to story at IndieGames.com

Just a note that Thursday, March 6th is the deadline for second-round voting for the XYZZY Award finalists.

Courtesy GameSetWatch comes a pointer to the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities and specifically a wildly obscure IF game called Real Life: The Greatest Adventure of All.

Real Life: The Greatest Adventure of All, an “interactive novel” by Relational Systems Corporation, is billed as a simulation of life, to help you figure out where you’re going, or perhaps how to avoid getting there.

Also fun on the same website: the original packaging for Mystery House

Roberta and I couldn’t afford typesetting so we cut/pasted words from magazines.

and a map from Infocom’s hint service before the Zork User Group.

The deadline for nominations is tomorrow (Sunday the 24th) at midnight Eastern Standard Time.

Emily Short has posted about a new short work, and I have decided to review it. It is short -– as in two minutes or less short -– so you may want to play first and then read this after.

“Are thoth thnailth?” the man asks, craning his neck past the bulk of his wife, looking at your escargot. (They are served in a dish, concave in six places, whose sole purpose is the conveyance of a half-dozen gastropods. This dish is the crowning achievement of civilization.) “Groth.”

It’s difficult to review the avant-garde, especially when it goes into the surreal.

(But in the breakdancing tortoises scene, the inclusion of salmon was all wrong for the symbolism, it should have been trout instead!)

Fugue doesn’t reach that far, although through my first playing I did have absolutely no comprehension whatsoever of the text. Things became clear on subsequent tries, so perhaps the work can be considered a success in the manner of Deadline Enchanter — where the reward is comprehension.

The work is part of the larger collection Up Right Down, and to be frank none of the pieces are strong on their own; it doesn’t help the common plot sounds like it was made by randomly scrambling refrigerator poetry magnets. Where the interest comes about is in the different artistic stabs at the same ideas.

In the case of Fugue, we get culinary fixations, and attempts at characterization in a few strokes. One of the obese couple has a lisp, one has a stammer; it’s almost like the symbolism in a arty French movie.

I did step away disappointed. I have difficulty expressing why.

Actions are so dictated the entirety of Fugue could be rendered as a 40-section CYOA book, and while I realize that was intentional, I felt like I was being led by a transcript just like in Deadline Enchanter. However, my emerging understanding of the text was enough to feel like I was not merely a passive observer, so this wasn’t the central source of disappointment.

I think it’s more the proceedings seemed so unnatural. I was never convinced by the verity of the universe, so no piece of it lent me an emotional effect. I had no reason to care about the pregnancy, or the varying advice of the friends. Perhaps it was the remove of world-modelling which caused this difference.

For future Up Right Down premises, I might suggest more generality. I believe the exactness of the plot resulted in weaker artistic statements than the individual authors were capable of.

Link to website

This is a remake of a Spectrum game done in CYOA menu style. The remake has ports for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and the Gamepark GP2X (!).

In honor of this conversation thread, I bring forward two examples of emergent gameplay in IF that are not normally cited as such. I am defining emergence here as “allowing solutions to problems unanticipated by the programmer that come out of the complexity of the underlying system.”

Suspended by Michael Berlyn (1983)

When Suspended was in beta, Steve Meretzky (a tester at the time) solved
Suspended in 42 moves. I made him do it while I watched, so I know it was real.

(Original post by Mike Berlyn here.)

Suspended includes an overall “optimization puzzle” which reflects the number of casualties, and completion of the game is of a high enough complexity and variance that it can be called emergent gameplay.

The other thing that allowed emergence to happen was the player was allowed to “short-cut” and sacrifice robots for the sake of reaching the end state. This made alternate routes of solution a built-in capability of the system.

Moral: Optimization can cause emergence even in a normally non-emergent game.

Verb! by Neil deMause (1998)

The setup here is the only verb allowable is TAKE, and any new use of the verb TAKE scores a point. People scored much higher than the author thought possible, because the coding was generalized; all it did was check for valid uses of TAKE and that no use was repeated.

Moral: When wordplay is coded in a general way instead of hard-coded, complexity arises naturally.

Someone’s working on a remake of Melbourne House’s The Hobbit.

They are working in C++ rather than something modern like TADS, but I am supposing they are aiming for an authentic parser. The original is difficult to recommend because the response time is sluggish, so hopefully a remake would at least fix that issue. The more pressing concern is, will the emergent gameplay be preserved?

The Snowman was second place in the Text the Halls competition. My review is down below.

The Snowman looks like a huge, humanoid, murderous snow creature. He has a small, inexpressive face that makes you think he wants to kill you. And guess what? He pretty much does.

The excerpt quoted above says everything you need to know about the plot setup.

The structural motif here is non-linearity. Rather than setting up a discrete set of puzzles, the author has placed in some characters and items and let things run loose. Most interesting is that the author nearly achieves emergent gameplay, and because of this the game is worth a look.

Unfortunately, while the structure is wide-open descriptions are given minimal attention

>x table
A cooking table. How AMAZING! I may just submit it to Digg.

or laden with in-jokes

TIGSource
You are in what seems to be some kind of restaurant. There are many gentlemen sitting around tables; some are eating, some are using laptops, all are rocking the TIGS. A hyperlink south leads back to other websites.

to such an extent I am hesitant to recommend this to a general audience. In a text game, the prose is everything in the presentation; any poor writing will get in the way of understanding. Minimalist presentation can work (see Suveh Nux) but it must be applied with great care, lest the environment be confusing.

Still, there have been very few attempts at emergent IF (The Hobbit is still the only true one I know of), so those interested the possibility should give The Snowman a try.