Interactive Fiction Competition 2001 88
Matchstick writes: "In the spirit of last year's article: The seventh annual Interactive Fiction competition is underway. This year there are 52 entries, each a bite-sized two hours long, and you only have to judge at least five for your votes to be counted. Winners from previous years are easily as high-quality as the classic Infocom games, and in many cases surpass them. Judging started October 1 and runs to November 15. The interpreters run on all major platforms (and many minor ones). It's late! Get started!"
Check out Erasmatazz (Score:5, Informative)
I urge everybody to check out Erasmatazz http://www.erasmatazz.com/ because of its potential. This is pushing interactive fiction to beyond what people expect out of it. Its true interactice fiction rather than north, north, north, get key.
In video games somebody has set a path, if you go off it then nothing really happens. Chris Crawford is basically trying to make a game where instead of going to locations in order to advance the story, the events can come to you as you play. That'd give the gamer true freedom instead of end-level walls and barriors that exist, while at the same time making the game interesting even if (s)he tried to walk off in some random direction.
Re:handheld (Score:5, Informative)
As stated above: TOO LATE FOR 2001 (Score:1, Informative)
Sign ups for 2001 are over.
Thanks to everyone who signed on! We expected 500, we got 5000. This is going to be the biggest, best NaNoWriMo ever.
At this point in time, the NaNoWriMo staff are busy planning their third-rate novels. Any emails recieved about sign ups after October 29 will be deleted automatically so as to give the staff more time to realize their own mediocre fiction visions.
Thank you kindly,
The NaNoWriMo Staff
[Emphasis added]
Re:handheld (Score:5, Informative)
ftp://ftp.monkey.org/pub/users/thom/infocom/
Re:Check out Erasmatazz (Score:5, Informative)
If you're interested in this sort of thing, you'd can get a good feel for the existing work in the field from:
- InteractiveStory.net [netcom.com] - Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern's interactive drama/believable agent project, and obligatory huge page o'links.
- Oz [cmu.edu] - The Oz project at CMU
- Erasmatron@Robotwisdom [robotwisdom.com] - Jorn Barger's excellent thumbnail sketch of Crawford's writings. In most cases, Jorn's synopsis is hyperlinked to the related page on erazmatazz
I'd also recommend the following papers (try CiteSeer [nec.com] before heading down to the library):Selmer Bringsjord and David Ferrucci, Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of Brutus, A Storytelling Machine, August 30, 1999.
Nicolas Szilas, Interactive Drama on Computer: Beyond Linear Narrative, 1999.
Antonio Furtado, Angelo Ciarlini, Plots of Narratives Over Temporal Databases, 1997.
Barbara Hayes-Roth, Robert van Gent, Story-marking with improvisational puppets, 1997.
W. Scott Neal Reilly, A methodology for building believable social agents, 1997.
IMHO, interactive storytelling is one of the most interesting cross-discipline computational problems out there.
Re:Check out Erasmatazz (Score:3, Informative)
BTW, mid-November you can check out rec.games.int-fiction and rec.arts.int-fiction for the results of comp2001. It's considered extermely impolite to discuss particular games on open forums until the votes have been counted and released (mid-November).
Re:Windows interpreter (Score:5, Informative)
Most modern IF runs on a virtual machine. The z-machine is the most commonly used, TADS a close second, and Glulx is designed as a replacement for the z-machine. The games in the comp are written using a variety of virtual machines (including one Java entry and a couple VB entries), but half the games this year are written using the z-machine.
For windows, the best interpreters I've found are WinFrotz (for z-machine games), HTML-TADS (for TADs games), and the Windows version of Glulx (for Glulx games). None of these programs will screw up your system folder, or indeed, even write anything at all to your system folder.
You can find these programs using Google or by following links from the IF comp page.
I'm almost sorry to see this story posted here. If you are new to IF or a casual player, the best thing to do is wait for mid-November when the results are posted and only play the the top 5 games.
I've already played through all the games, and can assure everyone that the top five will be worth your time--incredible experiences!
In the meantime, you might want to try playing some of the winners from previous years. You will probably be amazed by the quality of these homespun games. Interactive Fiction has become one of the best, most vibrant Do-It-Yourself communities on the net.
The best of modern IF doesn't feel at all like Dungeons and Dragons (ie, Zork). These are quality, mature short stories that just happen to also be games.
A Rundown of the Judging (Score:5, Informative)
Hi. I'm the competition organizer for this year. I suspect the competition web server is going to get hammered, so I'll give a rundown of what's going on and what you can do to enter.
Zeroth, your source for most everything I'm going to talk about is the IF Archive. Reach it at http://ifarchive.org [ifarchive.org], or at the mirror http://mirror.ifarchive.org [ifarchive.org].
First, you'll need interpreters, since most of the games are written for specific interactive fiction virtual machines. I'm guessing plenty of you have Linux boxes; I'll try to get my old article on Linux interpreters up at my personal IF site, Bras Lantern [brasslantern.org], later today. It should have more bandwidth than the competition site.
Second, the games. This directory [ifarchive.org] on the IF Archive has all of the games, either unpacked or in a big .zip file.
Third, choosing which games to play. You only have to play five of them to judge. If you think you'll only be able to play a handful of games, I ask that you play a random selection. There's a front-end to the competition, Comp01.z5 [ifarchive.org], which is structured like a text adventure. It will randomize the list of games, sorted by which ones you can play, and even give you a nice voting form to fill out if you're so inclined.
Fourth, judge. You can play games for a maximum of two hours before giving it a rating. Note that you don't have to play for two hours. We only set a maximum play time, not a minimum one. To rate a game, give it a score from 1 to 10. 10 is good. 1 is not good. Use whatever criteria you wish.
Fifth, vote. You can mail your votes to the competition vote-counter or visit the web site to record your votes there.
Sixth, and optional, we've got competition t-shirts [ifcomp.org] for your wearing pleasure.
All of this is detailed in the README which comes with the competition games packages. Enjoy.
Patents. Bleeeech. (Score:4, Informative)
The documentation he provides is interesting. However, one thing really irritated me as I browsed the site, and that was the following paragraph from his overview [erasmatazz.com] under "Why is the Erasmatron better?":
My emphasis.
I have no problem with defensive patents, but he's basically saying that he wants to make sure no one else can use similar technology to write even better games (which would benefit players/human kind).
At the risk of drawing hasty conclusions on how he will use his patent(s); I just cannot respect that.
(I actually considered buying his book, but that will not happen now).
Additional mirror at ftp.guetech.org (Score:3, Informative)
IF Competition Games available via Telnet (Score:2, Informative)
They've not only got this year's competition playable (at least the ones playable sans graphics) but appear to have all past years' games, as well as many other Interactive Fiction goodies.
Cheerio,
Yekrats