Paul O'Brian writes about Watchmen, trivia, albums, interactive fiction, and more.

>SUPERVERBOSE

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Prelude to PAX: Drive Like The Wind

Thursday, January 25

You’ve been looking forward to it for months: a unique gathering of interactive fiction authors, organized around the huge gaming convention PAX East and the new IF documentary GET LAMP. As is your habit, you’ve arrived at the airport plenty early — you pull into the the shuttle parking lot at 9:15pm for an 11:25pm flight. You open the trunk to see your suitcase and… wait. What about your laptop case? What about your little travel bag? Good lord, what about your TICKET?

Oh no.

DRIVE LIKE THE WIND
A non-interactive recounting by Paul O’Brian

Shuttle Parking Lot
It’s dark, and the lot is full. The bus waits to take you to the airport. Of course, the airport is for people who have plane tickets, unlike yourself.

Your car is here, with the trunk open.

> LOOK IN TRUNK
No matter how many times you look, your other bags do not appear in the trunk.

> SWEAR
That doesn’t help. Well, maybe it helps a little.

PAX Bostonia

Looks like I am going to PAX East, specifically the IF activities. WOO HOO!

Let’s have a round of applause for Laura Wilson, spouse extraordinaire, who very graciously offered to take on childcare for the weekend.

Earth And Sky — live transcripts

I wrote a series of superhero-themed interactive fiction games called Earth And Sky. If you’re interested in learning what the games are like without actually, y’know, playing them, you may be in luck.

Recently, a group of IF enthusiasts over at ifMUD played through all three games in a chatroom environment, as part of a venture called Club Floyd. Floyd is a bot on the mud who can act as a game interpreter, so a group of people can (virtually) gather to play a game in Floyd’s room. This makes for a lovely combination of playing, kibitzing, snarking, and even the occasional insight or analysis. I showed up for the sessions, so I was sometimes able to offer a bit of information about the making of the games.

Transcripts are here:

Part 1: Earth And Sky

Part 2: Another Earth, Another Sky

Part 3: Luminous Horizon

1893 review

It occurs to me, albeit many years later than it should have, that when I have some writing appear elsewhere on the net I should probably post a pointer to it here.

So, in that spirit: I’ve written a review of Peter Nepstad’s epic IF game 1893 for IF-Review.

Words I Learned From Infocom, Deluxe Edition

As revealed in the comments section of my original Words Infocom Taught Me post, we learn words from lots of unexpected places. Reading Eugene Ehrlich’s Highly Selective Thesaurus has reminded me of many of them. Now that I’ve finished the book, I’ve decided to write a short series of blog posts, detailing words I’ve learned from various geeky sources. First in line is a fuller list of words from Infocom games, this time complete with definitions and comments explaining the context of each word, for those who don’t know the Infocom canon by heart:

Words Infocom taught me

One of Textfyre‘s marketing claims is going to be that interactive fiction teaches literacy: vocabulary, reading comprehension, that sort of thing. (It also teaches typing — I have long claimed that Infocom taught me how to touch-type, because I was too absorbed in the game to look down at the keyboard.)

The vocabulary claim is certainly true for me. I always suspected that Infocom had a hidden agenda to broaden our vocabularies, because there were always a few words in their games that sent me to the dictionary. When I wrote my first game, I tried to inject a little tribute to this tradition, with a peninsular location I called “Chersonese.” I was reminded of this recently as I thumbed through a thesaurus given to me as a gift.

In that spirit, I present an incomplete list of the words I learned from Infocom games:

EBCDIC (Zork I)
gnomon (Trinity)
menhir (Zork II)
oubliette (Spellbreaker)
reliquary (Beyond Zork)
reticule (Plundered Hearts)
skink (Trinity)
topiary (Zork II)

These are just the ones that turned up in a cursory search of my brain. Anybody else got others?

Gratis Oryza Sativa

Trrish pointed me to a nifty little site called FreeRice, and the experience was satisfying on several levels. FreeRice offers an unending stream of multiple-choice vocabulary questions: given a word, choose which of four options is its synonym. For every word you get right, 20 grains of rice are donated via the United Nations World Food Program. The money for this comes from fairly unobtrusive banner ads that appear below the test area. I enjoy a vocabulary challenge, so the opportunity to play a fun game while effortlessly doing a little bit of good was a double pleasure. In addition, the site ranks your vocabulary level, so there’s a scoring element, which helps encourage replay. The scores range from 0 to 55, but according to the site, “it is rare for people to get much above level 48.”

Your initial vocab level gets set after you answer your first four questions, and then advances by one for every three words you get right. The first time I played the game, my initial level was set at 40. Almost immediately, I was being given unfamiliar words, trying to piece together their etymological roots, narrowing down options by process of elimination, and generally having a fine time. However, the next time I played, I started out hasty and careless, so I got the first word wrong. Well, my initial level got set at 10 that time, and I then slowly crawled up to my former level.

This got me thinking: what’s the real score on FreeRice? Because I am all game-playey and test-takey, I immediately focused on the vocab level as the place to focus my achievement efforts. However, the session I played when I bombed my first question most certainly contributed more rice, and during that session I came to see that the real score isn’t vocab level, but rather grains of rice donated. I was reminded a bit of games like A Change In The Weather and Little Blue Men; these games offer an initial “win” state early on, but if you accept that win, you’ve missed the point of the game. It was yet another level of satisfaction: not only was I building my word power and donating food, I got to think a little bit about clever game mechanics as well.

After getting my first question wrong, I donated 2340 grains of rice and built my vocab level to 48 before getting another question wrong. Can you beat that?

Opportunity kicks

“Sometimes it seems like I’ve been here before
When I hear opportunity kicking in my door.”
— Marillion

My goodness, this has been quite an overwhelming couple of weeks. Opportunities and events have been hailing down on me, some of them great and some of them challenging. In fact, some of it I can’t quite talk about yet, because it’s not quite official. Here, though, is a sampling of the rest of it.

* I’ve agreed to design a game for a startup interactive fiction company. This company is taking a pretty unusual approach to game creation — it splits the design, writing, and coding duties between three different people. It reminds me a bit of the way some comics are created by collaboration between a writer, a penciler, and an inker. I have no idea whether it will work — it could be an awesome way to expedite game creation, or it could be an utter disaster. I really hemmed and hawed over this decision — the pros and cons felt about evenly balanced, and in fact they still do. What finally tipped the balance for me was that after sitting with it for a while, an idea came to me that I really wanted to use, and given the current structure of my life, I couldn’t really hope to actually design, write, and code it. If I can just design it, perhaps it will be able to see the light of day after all, maybe even better than I could have made it on my own. The writer I’m teaming up with is somebody whose work I definitely respect, so it’s possible that we’ll hit a creative synergy. And if it turns out I make a few bucks off it, hey, that’d be great.

* Laura and I have agreed to participate, with Dante, in a local research project focusing on speech-delayed kids. Basically, once a month for six months, we outfit Dante with some clothes that conceal a device a little bigger than an iPod nano. That device records how many words are spoken to him, how many words he speaks, and how many conversational “turns” (i.e. alternating speaking with listening to another person) occur in his day. In addition, he gets evaluated at the beginning and the end of the study period by one of their speech therapists, and in a couple of the months we do two extra recording sesions. Our motivation is not altruism in the interest of science: we’re well-compensated for our trouble. If all goes well, we should earn a little over a thousand dollars by the end, which should make a nice addition to his college fund. He just had his first recording session last week.

* Laura’s car is a 1992 Ford Escort, with over 100,000 miles. This car was not designed to go over 100,000 miles. We know this because after 99,999 its odometer rolled back over to zero. Tons of little things on it have broken over the years. Its gas gauge doesn’t work. One of the doors won’t open from the inside. One of the doors won’t open from the outside OR the inside. The trunk also won’t open from the outside. The little plastic piece that holds the driver’s-side lap belt in place is broken, so you always have to fish around beside the seat for a few minutes to snag it. Et cetera. Well, recently she reported that a few times she felt like the car had hit a pothole, when in fact there was no pothole. We took it in to our trusted mechanic, who reported that the front struts were just about to break, and the back ones were deteriorating too. All in all, it would be a $900 repair, which is a bit ridiculous on such an old car. It was the death knell. Time for a new car for Laura. The only question was whether we would try to leap into action and get one immediately, or get the front shocks fixed and buy ourselves some time. We opted for the latter, partly because of all the other craziness that’s been going down. It feels a bit silly to do a $450 repair on a car that we’ll soon be getting rid of, but to me it’s worth the trade-off for not having to frantically rush through a big purchase, and not having to try to dispose of the car while worrying that the wheels are about to snap off.

* Oh, and today, Dante fractured his arm. Sheesh.

>SUPERVERBOSE

Since I started posting to this blog in 2004, it had no real title — its name was what LJ gave it by default, which was my username. I could never think of any name that I really wanted it to have… until now. As of today, this blog is officially rechristened >SUPERVERBOSE.

As some of you may know, my IF page is called >VERBOSE, since that’s both my writing style and one of the first commands I tend to type in an IF game. The old Infocom games had three levels of verbosity: VERBOSE, BRIEF, and SUPERBRIEF. These commands would control how much of a room description you’d see when traveling through the game world. Wouldn’t it be cool, though, if there was a SUPERVERBOSE? Not only would you get to see the full room description every time, you’d also get lengthy explanations of where the game objects came from, discursive asides about NPC histories, extensive screeds about the game author’s political views… well, maybe it wouldn’t be so cool after all.

Instead, look no further for your superverbosity fix. Since the majority of posts on this blog are in my verbose writing style, and they tend to be about superheroics, >SUPERVERBOSE it is.

Inform 7 speedbump

I learned about Inform 7 a couple of days ago, but I’ve only just now gotten the chance to spend much time looking into it. The more I looked, the more astonished I became. My breathing got all short and gaspy. I began to curse a lot, as I sometimes do under the influence of intense amazement.

I downloaded. I installed. I started a project, spontaneously titled “Earth And Sky’s Day Off.” I wrote a room description. I… encountered a bug. With literally the first sentence of the first description I wrote. My code begins:

Living Room is a room. "Your parents' living room is nothing if not tasteful.

Unfortunately, I7’s interpreter engine renders this as:

Living Room
Your parents" living room is nothing if not tasteful.

Bah. I tried a couple of methods of escaping characters (\’ and ”) but no dice. I searched the documentation for the word “apostrophe” and found this:

Apostrophes used to contracted speech at the end of words are wrongly converted to double-quotes: thus “Lucy snaps, ‘What’s the matter? You don’t trust my cookin’ mister?'” has the apostrophe in “cookin'” wrongly converted. For now, best avoid such contractions.

Hrm. But… but… Hrm. Perhaps I should take the word “Beta” more seriously.

(Please note: I am not not NOT intending to slag off everybody’s years of hard and brilliant work with a two-second dismissal. I still have a huge crush on Inform 7 and will continue exploring it. It’s just that encountering a lacuna so quickly was a bit… deflating, is all.)

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