Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Path: nntp.gmd.de!newsserver.jvnc.net!newsserver2.jvnc.net!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!librik
From: librik@netcom.com (David Librik)
Subject: Re: Remarks on recent threads
Message-ID: <librikDp9LJ4.H5o@netcom.com>
Organization: Icy Waters Underground, Inc.
References: <4jr8jo$5hg@life.ai.mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 3 Apr 1996 02:28:16 GMT
Lines: 46
Sender: librik@netcom20.netcom.com

dmb@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett) writes:

>The state of the newsgroup

>  Several people have expressed concern at the state of the newsgroup, and
>of IF in general.  Looking back to 1990, when I started reading this group,
>I recall that there were very few posts --- maybe 5 or so a week.
>Discussions generally centered around Infocom, how cool they were, and how
>no subsequent IF would ever compare.

It's too bad you weren't around when this group started up.  I remember
reading it for a long time when it seemed to be the haunt of the OZ Project,
some postmodern art-language writers, and Jorn Barger.  A lot of visionaries
but nobody who was talking about Adventures.

I worked on an adventure system -- a Scott-Adams-type interpreter -- back
in my TRS-80 days, and I was interested in discussions of how you create
adventure games.  (Not so much the plotting and writing, but the data-encoding,
world-modelling, and parser-writing.)  There wasn't much talk about that here,
and there still isn't, since the appearance of TADS and those great TADS
games finessed the system design issue.

When TADS appeared, along with some other systems I don't remember anymore
(I think one was called AGT or ADL), there was a shift in the sense of
*what this newsgroup is about*.  Interactive fiction came to mean Adventure
Games, and released lots of people's latent interest in writing Infocommish
games.  Jorn and his literary approach to AI, the OZ people and their
Story Generation issues, and the other former residents vanished -- much
to my approval, since I was basically interested in how I could write
Infocom-style adventure games!  (Remember, Scott-Adams-level stuff was
pretty easy to clone, and lots of late-70's-early-80's two-word adventure
games existed.  At one time, Softside magazine had an Adventure Of The
Month Club -- each month, a new adventure game.  Everyone had figured out
how to write one and they were churning them out!  But Infocom laid that all
to waste -- nobody could figure out how they did it, and fell short when
they tried, including Scott Adams' aborted Odyssey project.)

But the literary issues have never gone away, and always burble up in
heated discussions of what makes a good Adventure Game.  And now, as
Magnus Olsson points out, we have enough games out there that the "how,"
or even the "what," is no longer an issue.  We're back to the old, old
rec.arts.int-fiction question of "what can be done with computer-mediated
storytelling?"  Anybody know where the old visionaries went?

- David Librik
librik@cs.Berkeley.edu
