Re: Marketing, was Re: C


Wed, 13 Dec 1995 13:05:49 -0500

Ivan Cockrum <ivanc@cis.compuserve.com> writes:
> >> That's the sort of raggedness I mean. Different games make very
> >> different assumptions about level of detail of action, level of
> >> detail of description, amount of hand-holding, etc, etc. These are
> >> not just deliberate differences of difficulty; they're different
> >> assumptions about how games should go.
> >>
> >> What we can do about it:
> >>
> >> There is nothing we can do about it.

Would everybody believe that I was late for lunch, had to finish the
post in a hurry, and that's why I was so abrupt?

No? :-)

(In part, I was quoting the end of Larry Niven's essay "How to Stop
War". It was even more depressing there.)

> I disagree. You pointed out that Infocom were able to settle on group
> wide standards because they were all working together, 9 to 5. Now,
> it's going to be a lot tougher for our current crop of IF people to get
> together and agree on a set of standards, but I believe it is possible.
> What is needed is some kind of workshop: either a real life gathering,
> or an online real-time meeting, or even just a week when everyone
> agrees to contribute to an ongoing discussion in the newsgroup.
> However it's done, the basic need must be to focus on identifying a set
> of fairly universal IF standards. Obviously, we're not all going to
> agree on a complete set of standards, nor adhere to them rigidly, but
> it would be a huge step in the right direction.

Would you also believe (and I *am* serious this time) that I don't
necessarily think that a set of standards is a good thing. I was just
pointing out that it's something Infocom had that we lack.

The more diverse range of design styles inevitably means that there
are games I have problems with. That doesn't mean I dislike the
diversity!

On the other hand, I would very much like to see the matter discussed
here. Not so much to generate a *universal* set of standards, but so
that authors are aware of what standards other individual authors have
chosen. Make a choice, rather than letting it fall arbitrarily out of
your program, sort of thing.

I think a real-life workshop is kind of hopeless. How many of us are
on opposite sides of the Atlantic?

>>There is nothing we can do about it. [The unsaleable state of IF]

Oop! I didn't mean the current unsalability of IF; I was talking
specifically about what Infocom had that we didn't. And I was being
rather arbitrary about the beta-testing, too. I don't think we can
beta-test games as well as a commercial company, but the heavy
pounding of the public release *does* serve the purpose. You just have
to accept the fact that the whole wide world will see a buggy first
release.

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."