Kooneiform

Following on the last post, the other night I heard Robin Hobb read at the University Bookstore, on her tour supporting her new book Renegade’s Magic.

I brought the recorder to try it out. I was about ten feet from the podium, and the bookstore is something of a big open space so there was a lot of ambient noise. For the introduction of Robin I had the recorder in my shirt pocket (I don’t have an external microphone yet) and for her reading I held the recorder in my lap pointing up. The PA system for the reading wasn’t very loud — kind of like a little louder than normal speaking voice. The final file was about half a gig of 44.1 khz WAV.

In Audacity I cut out a few spots of the WAV file and used the envelope tool and amplify effect to increase the volume on some points, and the envelope tool to decrease some loud spots, but other than that I didn’t do too much. I still haven’t figured out how much of that works.

I did cut up the file into two parts — so if you just want to hear the question and answer you can skip to that.

Robin Hobb introduction and reading:

Robin Hobb Q & A:

I was impressed by the reading, she seems really cool.

So I’m pysched lately because I’m starting a new thing that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. After much reading of reviews and gazing at EBay, Craigslist &c. I went out to (local) Streamline Audio (totally nice there) and got a digital field recorder! My choice after looking at the Zoom H-4 and H-2, Edirol r-09, m-Audio MicroTrack and a couple of others was the Marantz PMD620.

All of the super-portable recorders seem to have their pros and cons at this price level, but for me the Marantz has the features (good and basic) and the form factor (streamlined) I was looking for.

I took it out of the box and within seconds I was up and running; it’s really very easy to use, feels well-made and just solid. In the coming weeks I’m going to record some readings and talks, use Audacity to edit the files and then put the mp3s up here. In the farther future I want to experiment a little, possibly making some IF/audio games. OK!

I know I tend to go on and on about how great God Wars II is. Well, if you needed another example:

The developer of GW2, Richard Woolcock (aka KaVir), has been posting weekly updates of progress on the game in this thread at the GW2 forums.

Weekly updates.

For five years.

Not only is it pretty inspiring, it’s a kind of fascinating look at how a game is developed.

It does seem like it’s getting harder to find muds that instantly impress me these days. It’s just a theory but I think most muds develop by accreting features onto the ‘outside’ of the mud, the edge that long-time players inhabit as they’ve exhausted the content on the ‘inside’. The content immediately apparent to the new player, like the look and feel of the mud, and major systems that new players interact with from the get go, don’t change that much. If no one is improving them, and they weren’t good to begin with, there’s a problem — without something or someone telling me to stick around, I’m just not likely to put time into a mud to see cool systems when most of the time the look, feel, and content is stale, not interesting, confusing, or plain ugly.

Many new muds don’t seem to offer anything new or exciting either, just retreading old ideas and not making it look very nice either.

A few muds buck the trend. In no particular order they are:

God Wars II: if I was a hardcore PvPer or achiever I would play this mud to death. It’s without question one of the most interesting and nice looking muds out there.

Legends of Karinth: lots of cool features, big world. The best ROMy ROM I’ve seen.

Aeonian Dreams: many interesting features to recommend this mud. Unfortunately the UI isn’t that great and that makes it hard to get into.

Blood Dusk: just found this mud. Highly recommend this for something different.

I noticed someone made a Google search on that when I was looking at the WordPress dashboard here (i.e., obsessively checking the hit counter for this blog). A typical question for the IF scene, you might say, until you do that search. ‘Does anyone…’ is like the question of the ages.

And no, I haven’t played Lost Pig yet. Though I have spent many hours in the last two days on Desktop Tower Defense. Damn you, Jon! Damn you!

1.

The IF should be 40+ hours of meaningful play — whether you serialize it or not.

2.

Character customization and credible ’systems’ (such as combat and magic — though not necessarily these systems in the conventional sense) must be in place. However I’ve seen enough of ‘you hit the rat for 5 damage’, and ‘the rat bites at you and misses!’, not to want to program that into a game. Alternatives might be based on systems such as Spellbinder or the Way of the Tiger gamebook series.

3.

The work should be open-ended in play, not a railroad.

With some free time over the holiday I’ve finished Jeremy Douglass’ dissertation. Chapter 4 is taken up largely by close readings of several works, and I have somewhat less to comment on here.

23.

Here CL considers what it calls minimal works, to describe the essential of IF (241).

24.

Typing at the command line is primarily a site of anticipatory or prospective closure – an attempt (which may be frustrated) to discover or solve the gap between the current state of the simulation and its next state. [244]

Compare this with the new design notes for Deadline Enchanter, and DE’s possible “projective fiction”. I wonder if DE is not so unlike interactive fiction as may be first thought.

25.

CL goes on to examine tense and person in IF.

First and third person IF tend to complicate the narrative and functional relationships between interactor and protagonist by their nature, opening the distance between the two as separate selves. For this reason, first and third person increases the need for a framing tale to capture the separate self of the interactor in the diegesis; these modes thus encourage narrative elaboration. This is not to say that such elaboration is good or bad, nor must it follow that the minimalist mode of IF (second) be the dominant mode. Still, the fact that second person is by far the dominant mode might be telling about the general relationship of IF to framing complexity. [265-266]

You know, I’m still not convinced that first and second person in IF are really so different (in terms of complexity of the relationship between protagonist and interactor).

I’m perhaps as far from an English major as you could get, so my ability to understand the root cause of the dominant mode in fiction, third person (compared to IF’s dominant second person), is limited.

Whereas it’s easier to write IF in second person, maybe it’s easier to write fiction in the third person? That doesn’t feel right though — in fiction it seems to be more about convention.

Yet social convention is not so far removed from the function of physical technology, if not convention (i.e., what is possible with the tools).

26.

CL takes a brief detour into talking about interactivity (273), dispels some myths about IF’s relationship to graphical computer games (278), discusses “time fiction” and time-loop fiction, and then makes a close reading of three works: Aisle (287), Shrapnel (309), and Rematch (324). The diagram of possible commands in Aisle is particularly cool (297).

Somewhat disappointingly CL does not essay a conclusion, though really each chapter is more self-contained than leading up to some grand thesis. And of course the works cited is a great reading (and playing) list (369-383). You easily could make a self-study course out of that list alone.

I’ve found CL to be instructive in many ways. As a historical and theoretical work to be sure. I think it’s also answered the question of whether I would want to spend several years writing something comparable — and I believe the answer is no! Even though I did enjoy reading it. I would much rather be making games than writing about them. However some of this goes hand in hand with making games, does it not? Maybe not for everybody — time will tell.

The zine Lady Churchhill’s Rosebud Wristlet has fluttered on the periphery of my consciousness for some un-specifiable amount of time. I finally ordered a copy, #21, to see what it’s all about. Other than reading Strange Horizons occasionally I haven’t kept up with SF (and most short fiction, really) at all — stopped reading F&SF and Asimov’s ten or so years ago.

A lot of the stuff in this issue has similar flaws. The writing lacks sustain, an emphasis on what’s important, interesting ideas, and kind of jumbles things together in a sophmore creative writing class kind of way. Not that I would really know I guess, I never took a sophmore creative writing class. I just read the stories my friends wrote in them.

On the other hand I think the cover is fabulous (though my friend and his girlfriend turned their noses up at the Xerox — people with taste!). And for the five or whatever bucks I spent I did get a really great story, “The Postern Gate” by Brian Conn. I’m happy with that.

I’ve also got a new subscription to Electric Velocipede but I’m saving that for the plane ride back to Seattle (not to mention an old copy of Fictitious Force sitting at home).

I wrote a few short reviews and put them on RGIF, as OGRC - three short reviews.

Later I read Emily Short’s review of the same games, particularly Urban Conflict, and my idea of what a conversation game is all about is changing as I write this, mainly in how to consider a game where the player’s thoughts and feelings interact with the work.

I’m getting more into the idea of some Noah’s Ark of text gaming. It would work something like this.

You run a mush server as a back-end for the persistent world. Players connect with a Flash or equivalent client on the web site, where you have forums, help files, player wiki and player character pages. So people are playing on the web site in something that looks like a mush — room descriptions, poses, and so on. If the player wants to they can connect to the game with their normal client. I guess it would be somewhat trivial to mirror help files and bboard between the web and the mush server — but this would be for advanced players who are coming in with their own clients and some mushing history. The Flash client lets you log, quote in, and configure the display.

In the forums you have PbP games running — it would be possible for these games to affect the mush world, but a little more difficult I think. On the site you have a library of IF the player can play solo with a Flash client as well — these could affect the mush game. Meanwhile there’s some strategy-based persistent browser-based game also running. This affects properties in the mush game in which people are RPing.