Yesterday, I posted my 300th Snarkout entry. I don't think it was particularly good, but it was a chance to sneak in "300" at the end. I'd estimate that I've written somewhere north of 120,000 words since I started doing this in April 2001; that's a good-sized book. I also posted my 200th entry to the sidelog. I've only been doing that for a few months, but it's awfully addictive; I see why Graham and Anil are so hipped on the form. My two hundredth link was to the Wayback Machine archives of the weekly "Work" column of the late Word.com; Word was an okay web magazine before it sold out to fish oil producer turned dot-com meteor Zapata (aka Zap.com), but "Work" was absolutely brilliant: a series of interviews with people about their jobs, from the mundane (garbage collectors, waitresses, and truck driver) to the titillating (dominatrices, pornography writers, and strippers). They interviewed Lawrence Block, Wendy Day, and the Mayor of Los Angeles. They interviewed Lauren Wacht, a shockingly articulate model; they interviewed Bob Braine, who showed what salesmen sound like when they're not being asked to serve as great metaphors for America. (Answer: Like you and me, mostly, only a bit more disillusioned about cameras.) I looked forward to its arrival every week. Then Word went to a hideous pay model, and then Zap.com (and Word) went away. And the Wayback Machine only got a few of the entries. (If anyone has the complete set, please email me.)
What a grand, fragile medium this is. I hope I've done my part.
Andrew Plotkin, the author of the excellent Mac puzzle game System's Twilight and more good interactive fiction than you could shake a small digital stick at wrote in to raise a few points about my recent piece on puzzles.
He offers a few comments:
These all strike me as legitimate objections, except perhaps the first, which is more related to my failure to define my terms more clearly; I was explicitly thinking of games like those by Cliff Johnson when I was talking about puzzle games. Everything else, the inevitable seepage of association, came out of that. The Johnson style of game really does seem moribund to me, and if Andrew knows of any hobbyists taking a crack at it, I wish he'd let me know. (It could be done, I'm sure; a game like Grow, while a trivial puzzle, suggests the same sort of wonderfully cracked logic that I occasionally glimpse in good games.) But I'm going to diverge from Andrew's point for a moment and wonder about why it is that text adventure games have so much more of a hobbyist market.
I suggested in an email to Plotkin that it was the tools, and now I'm not so sure. Obviously, requiring someone to be a good puzzle writer and good game developer and a good programmer to get started is pushing the limits. But I'm not so sure, now. Obviously, an enormous amount of the success of hobbyist IF is attributable to tools like Inform and TADS, but thinking about it more, I wondered if tools like Flash and Director weren't the equivalent. Flash and Director aren't easy to learn, and they cost a heck of a lot more than free. Inform, at least, is pretty basic; it's mostly putting together a big list of objects and properties. But how much of it is due to the "visual" versus "verbal" distinction? I'm fairly sure that Plotkin is a professional programmer, but Adam Cadre is a writer and Emily Short is an academic. Is there something about the idea that wordy types who are attracted to computer gaming are likely to see a good example and want to emulate it (or a bad example and want to better it)? Most wordy types have written fiction or essays or, heck, letters; a much, much smaller proportion of the population has ever designed computer graphics or used a multimedia authoring tool. Even if it's not any harder to do a puzzle game (and it is), the conceptual barrier still might be a great deal bigger.
This is all in the nature of musing (and delivering a few links), but if you have any thoughts, I'd love to hear them.