Re: "Serious" IF (was Re: Gareth's competition comments)


17 Oct 1995 02:21:27 GMT

In article <GDR11.95Oct16142749@stint.cl.cam.ac.uk>,
Gareth Rees <gdr11@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>Neil Demause <neild@echonyc.com> wrote:
>> For some reason, this competition has loosed a lot of tongues in this
>> newsgroup. Used to be, everyone bent over backwards to praise authors
>> just for having produced a game. Lately, though, there's been a lot
>> more sniping at games and less constructive criticism, and this latest
>> trend of arguing over what constitutes "real" i-f similarly seems more
>> likely to scare people off from writing games than to encourage them
>> to do so.
>
>I seem to have upset a few people with my comments. I apologise to
>anyone whom I have offended. I think it's extremely impressive for
>anyone to master the intricacies of complicated and idiosyncratic
>programming languages like TADS and Inform and produce a game with
>coherent plot, writing and puzzles.
That's for sure. And ...

>But I also think that the best compliment that can be paid to a game is
>to treat it as though it were a serious piece of work rather than a few
>minutes diversion of roughly comparable value to Space Invaders. If
>anyone praised my work just because they wanted to make me happy I would
>feel patronised. I'd much prefer something along these lines:
Yes. Truly. I put an awful lot of effort into _Lethe_, and I expect people
who discuss it with me to talk accordingly. I don't want just heapings of
praise (although, I must admit that I was very surprised and pleased by how
many people wrote to say they enjoyed it), I'd like people to suggest ways to
improve it (such as "in all the time you spent checking and programming it,
why didn't you catch the large bug with the buckets?").

>"Christminster": a review
>-------------------------
[..]
>In conclusion, the author is to be commended on having had the endurance
>to write something as long as "Christminster", but this reviewer
>suggests he stick to flower-arranging in future.
Come, come. This is an example of a poor review, IMO. As someone who writes
IF oughta know, the presentation and content are both important :P It's just
not necessary to be this harsh with your game, even though you did point out
some flaws with it. Like someone says elsewhere, IF authoring and criticism
are both new genres, and we really need to be a little more careful how we
write (from either side of the review).

>--
>Gareth Rees

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