The Gaming Philosopher

Girth Loinhammer and the Quest for the Unsee Elixir is a fantasy comedy about a dungeon lord who didn't realise what crowd you'll attract when you open a dungeon. Having seen things he would rather forget, Loinhammer goes on a quest for the unsee elixir (not a typo), and you, dear reader, go on the quest with him. I decided to put on some horribly cheesy fantasy metal – Rhapsody of Fire – just to get in the mood, and join Loinhammer I did. The game presents itself as a classic gamebook experience for which you need to print out an adventure sheet. It's decidedly nonstandard, with scores like "Self-esteem" and a box for Luck which has "Bad" pre-printed in it. I could have done without it being called “Ye Olde Adventure Sheete,” as the "Ye Olde" there is too trite a joke to make me smile, but I’m sill on board for this. Plus, Rhapsdoy of Fire is singing bad English lyrics that fit Girth Loinhammer just fine: For the glory, the power to...

Mike Spivey made a name for himself with his 2017 game A Beauty Cold and Austere and his 2018 game Junior Arithmancer . Both of these were mathematical puzzle games, that is, puzzle games that were about mathematics; and both of them were very well received, placing 7th and 7th in their respective interactive fiction competitions. And now we can add Sugarlawn to the list, a game that did even better, taking 4th place in the competition (and winning the author-awarded Miss Congeniality prize). Sugarlawn is in many ways precisely what I would expect from Spivey: a polished, competent, and systematic puzzle game. But the mathematics -- while there -- is much more hidden this time around. As Spivey explains in his design notes , he didn't want to become 'that guy who only writes games about mathematics', and so he settled on a different theme: Louisiana. You are a participant in a ridiculous game show that has you go on a treasure hunt in an old Louisiana mansion while...

Parser games excel in representing space , in placing the player in an environment consisting of multiple -- even many -- locations and allowing them to explore it. It is no coincidence that the drawing of maps is deeply associated with parser games; that Adventure started out as a cave exploration game; or that the one thing you need to do to create a legal Inform 7 source text is declaring a room for the player to be in. A spatially defined environment is central to most of the working assumptions of parser IF. It is therefore also not a coincidence that when first-time parser authors sit behind their blank screen, wondering what to write, they often decide to implement a spatial environment for exploration, and choose the environment that is most ready-to-hand: their own apartment. You don't see that many of them any more, but there used to be lots of these games. Sam Ashwell refers to this as My Apartment Games ; I remembered them being called My Crappy Apartment Games, but...

During the interactive fiction competition, I wrote 48 reviews on the secret author's forum -- exactly as many as last year! I'll be posting them here, but as I do so, I'll often be using the opportunity to update them too. Some games I want to play more; in other cases, I might want to research the context better, or react to other reviews that have been written. Unless you were on the author's forum, you won't notice the difference, of course. But I wanted to put this up front anyway. So without further ado, we go to a heavily changed (indeed totally rewritten) version of my review of... Let's Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: The Text Adventure , by Pippin Barr, plays like an extended version of a game entered in the 2006 IF Comp, Sisyphus by Theo Koutz. In Sisyphus , you get to play the legendary king Sisyphus after he has died. You're in Hades, faced with a boulder and a slope. The task is to push to boulder up the hill. But of course, when you're ...

I'm working on a game that is based loosely -- very loosely -- on Puccini's opera Turandot . This post is not about that game. It is about the opera itself, which is an absolutely fascinating example of a writer (in this case the librettist Giuseppe Adami) setting himself up for narrative failure. But first, a quote from a recent piece in the Guardian : I ’ve always hated “Irish jokes”. Having an Irish mother, I’ve always been aware how they were used to denigrate Irish people and undermine the cause of Irish nationalism. There’s one joke, though, I’ve always enjoyed. It’s the one where the guy asks the Irishman for directions, to which he replies: “Well, if I were you I wouldn’t be starting from here.” Why is this relevant? Well, if your aim is to write a story that ends with the boy and the girl getting married and living happily ever after, then the place that you really don't want to be starting out from is the end of Act 1 of Turandot . The background to the p...

The primary aim of a review is to tell us whether a particular piece of fiction is worthy of our attention. The primary aim of criticism is to teach us to read. There is of course no sharp line between the two genres, and a single article can have both aims. But it is nonetheless a useful distinction to make. Good criticism teaches us to read. How? By showing us good reading in action. In the ideal case, we and the critic have both read the piece to be discussed; but the critic has seen things we have not seen, has thought about the piece in ways we have not thought, and has related the piece to contexts that may not even have crossed our minds. The point of this is not that the critic has arrived at the correct interpretation of the work and will explain it to us. If the work is rich in meaning, many interpretations are possible, making it senseless to seek the correct one. If it is not, then the question of interpretation does not carry much weight. The point is also...

Another review from last year's IF Comp. Spoilers ahead. Railways of Love by Provodnik Games One of the questions that kept nagging me as I played through Railways of Love was whether the game really had a Russian vibe, or whether I was just imagining this, based on the fact that you can choose between Russian and English. Of course, the long train journey might conjure up images of the Trans-Siberian railway, and the failing lights fit well with a perhaps clichéd idea of the state of household technology in the USSR… but there are long railway trips in the rest of the world too, and I’ve seen the lights in Dutch trains fail at times. But then there was the Progress Program, which sounded ever more like a science fiction version of Marxism-Leninism, 5-year plans included. And when I got to an ending in which the protagonists fail to hook up because one of them is praying and the other cannot refrain from making a hard-line atheist comment, I was certain: this is l...

Another review from IF Comp 2018; spoilers ahead! They Will Not Return by John Ayliff They Will Not Return tells the story of a robot who spends his life cleaning up after his human owners, until one day a deadly virus wipes out all of humanity. The protagonist slowly comes to grip with this fact and ends up having an opportunity to master himself and thus become free. In terms of craft, this is a very fine work. The writing is good, with the right amount of detail to bring the environment to life, especially the house in which the first half of the game is set. Letting the player see several phases of its slow deterioration is effective. The interactivity is also designed well: while the vast majority of choices doesn’t matter in terms of outcomes, quite a number of them work as opportunities to express the protagonist’s character. (E.g., will you hide the potentially compromising piece of underwear?) Although I did not replay to check, I assume the very last choic...

Continuing with my reviews for the Interactive Fiction Competition 2018. I wrote reviews for most games in a topic on the private authors' forum over at the interactive fiction forum . I'm posting the more interesting and more spoilery ones over here, and the less interesting and less spoilery ones directly on the IFDB . So, again: spoilers ahead! Writers are not Strangers by Lynda Clark (Placed 27th out of 77; I might have placed it somwhat higher.) When I started the game, I was confronted with a barely coherent fragment of fiction that I suspect was supposed to be an interpretation of Space Invaders . Then the game asked me to rate that piece. Interesting. I gave it a 3 and continued with the story of Alix and her dying superhero mother. Just when I had almost forgotten about the fragment, Alix came home, started up her computer to see if anyone had rated the piece of fiction she was so proud of… and was heartbroken to see it had been rated with a 3. But, she d...

After a bit of a hiatus, I'm back posting some of my IF Comp 2018 reviews. They're all quite spoilery, so beware! The Broken Bottle by Josh Irvin In Disney’s The Little Mermaid , the mermaid and the prince she so desperately loves end up marrying. In the original Andersen fairy tale, the prince marries a princess and the mermaid’s heart breaks. Disney changed the story in order to make it more… well, the gamut of possible answers ranges from “appropriate for children” through “commercially successful” to “American”, but one thing we can no doubt agree on is that it changes the nature of the entire story in a fundamental way. But what about an interactive version of the story where you could get either ending depending on the choices you make earlier? Would it work? What kind of story would it be? In essence, these are the questions asked by The Broken Bottle , although the game features an original story instead of rehashing an existing one. But it is a fai...

Bi Lines ended up taking 34th place out of 77 games. It average grade was a 5.81, but with an enormous standard deviation. I rated it much higher than the average and think it is a game absolutely worth playing. The following review is very spoilery. The author explicitly tells us that Bi Lines has to be understood in the context of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and the discussions about sexual assault that were sparked by this all-too-political and yet all-too-personal spectacle. What is it, then, that the game is trying to add to these already copious discussions? The answer is formulated by the editor character, Jacobson. After reading the story that the male protagonist has written about his own experience of sexual assault by a ghost, and after the player character has claimed that it was just a fiction, Jacobson says that it's a great story -- it really "captures the female perspective." That , I think, is the challenge that Bi Lines sets itself. To ...

I'll be posting reviews for IFComp games, focusing mostly on games where I think my reviews can still add something to the critical consensus. A good example of that is Carter Sande's Let's Explore Geography! Canadian Commodities Trader Simulation Exercise , which I suspect to be the most misunderstood game of the competition. (It probably isn't, because the most misunderstood game is presumably one that I haven't understood either.) So Geography -- I mean, let's settle on a short name here -- presents itself as an educational tool for learning about Canadian geography by playing a trading simulation. Some reviewers took this entirely at face value and worried whether the game would work in an educational setting. Others did wonder whether Geography was serious or a joke, but nevertheless ended up concluding that it was serious. So let's be entirely clear: this game is a joke; it is satire. Satire wrapped in a perhaps unforgivably clunky user interface...

Beyond Division , by Joseph Geipel A parser-based game about interspecies telepathic communication, Beyond Division immediately creates a positive impression by its implementation. For instance, commands like "follow hare" are understood. During the entire game, the implementation just feels solid. The writing attempts to rise above the level of the mundane, but sometimes comes off as forced or awkward. A sentence like "Tall trees with tops full of the remnants of unobtainable varmints are scattered all around." does not give us a clear impression of what is going on. "As you wait in the midst of the blizzard, your sense beyond the blizzard improves somewhat." is abracadabra to me. And I'm not sure the verb 'to emanate' is well chosen in "Pure power is emanating all around the cavern from a glowing circle on the west cave wall." But this is nothing that a good round of editing couldn't fix. The general tone is fine and the pr...

The Kerkerkruip team is happy to announce the release of Kerkerkruip 9, by far the most extensive update of the game ever made. Kerkerkruip is a short-form roguelike in the interactive fiction medium, featuring meaningful tactical and strategic depth, innovative game play, zero grinding, and a sword & sorcery setting that does not rehash tired clichés. With over 700 commits to the code repository, the changes made in Kerkerkruip 9 are far too numerous to mention here. But the highlights are: Original theme music for the main menu, composed and produced by Wade Clarke. An entirely reworked reaction system allows you to dodge, block, parry and roll away from incoming attacks. Successful reactions increase your offensive or defensive flow, adding a new layer of tactical depth to combat. An entirely reworked religion system allows you to sacrifice absorbed powers to the gods. Worshipping gods grants lasting benefits, including divine interventions on your behal...

The results are in! I got distracted by other things halfway through the competition, so I played only about half of the games. I haven't played any of the top 3, and in fact only one of the top 7 games, so I guess that there is still some good stuff for me to try out. I'm flabbergasted by the fact that Their angelic understanding has scored an average of 5.99. I changed my own mark to a 9 at some point. There can be some disagreement about marks, of course, but I cannot imagine how anyone could score it below a 7. This piece has beautiful writing, interesting thematic content and does new and impressive things with its medium. It's a difficult piece, sure; but if you don't understand something, just refrain from judging. As a judge, you are called upon to judge a work of art, not to tell us how much you "liked" the experience of playing it. If you don't understand it, you shouldn't be judging. (Yes, I'm kind of mad at this injustice, a...

By now you probably know that the Interactive Fiction Competition 2013 is happening. Spoilers behind the break.

The Interactive Fiction Competition is back! Spoilers behind the break.

The Interactive Fiction Competition is back! Spoilers behind the break.

You may think my not posting about Kerkerkruip means that I haven't been working on it. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. In fact, I am very rapidly approaching the first beta: a feature-complete game with documentation, cover art, and hundreds of bugs! Talking about documentation, I am planning on recording a short introduction video. You will see me playing the game in gargoyle (the video captures a part of my desktop), and you will hear me explaining the basics of the Kerkerkruip system. Technically, this is very easy (using gtk-recordmydesktop); and I suspect a tutorial video can be a lot more fun than a written tutorial. There will also be written help, of course, for those who prefer it and those who wish to look something up. I just got permission to use the photograph I found on Flickr , so let me share the cover art with you: Perhaps the text on the right should be a bit more orange? Let me know what you think. I'm really looking forward to...

Thinking up cool things and then implementing them is of course a mode of programming that is a lot of fun. In interactive fiction, it is also generally unproductive: you have a story to tell, and "cool things" are often mere side attractions that decrease the time you have to develop the core game. Luckily, for Kerkerkruip this is not the case. The core game is simple, and adding cool things to it is exactly what I should be doing. Of course, some thought needs to go into the kind of cool thing one develops: having several hundred weapons with different cool stuff isn't much good if the player can only fight an identical goblin over and over. (Be assured: Kerkerkruip does not have a goblin. It does not have a giant rat or an orc either, and the skeleton is a temporary standard monsters slated for removal.) And although I believe it is important and cool to have "special" situations that only occur in a small percentage of the games, it would be unwise to sp...