Интерактивна литература: инструменти и образци

[Trip]

Интересуват ли се някои от вас от писане на интерактивна литература и tool-овете за това?
Целя най-вече да започна разговор, понеже в последно време се интересувам, та ако има хора с интерес...

[Кал]

За interactive fiction ли говорим? В компютърния вариант?

[Trip]

Мхм.

[Кал]

Тогава премествам темата в съответния форум.

И сега по темата: аз се интересувам от Ren'Py, като платформа за създаване на visual novels. А самата идея с ЧоБи да правим visual novel съм я зачекнал тук.

В момента сме на етап „сбиране на екип + избор на изходен текст за сценарий“. Имам чувството, че от наесен ще подхванем нещата сериозно... Да видим.

[Trip]

Аз пък взех да понаучавам псевдопрограмиране покрай моите Използвам най-вече Twine, и то за да бета-тествам различни начини да правя това или онова. Най-некомерсиалната от наличните програми е, поддържа Javascript, което я прави страшно гъвкава и мощна, но за по-пипкавите неща човек или трябва да владее JS, или да рови на двете-трите места в нета, където разни добри хора обогатяват фонда от функции. Базирана е на hyperlinks, а не на парсър, като класическата IF. Млада е още и се развива активно.

Иначе е интересна и с това, че набра много скорост и exposure вкл. в доста мейнстрийм медии като инструмент, с който обичат да работят маргиналните (най-вече LGBT) автори. Няма инфраструктура, чрез която човек да монетизира творчеството си, front end-ът обаче е html и е много удобно за игра с фонтове, визуални ефекти, дори звук. Други са Инкъл, която оперира изцяло в нета, по-простичка е и като възможности, и като работа, много джиджана и лъскава (римейкът на Франкенщайн на Дейв Морис изглежда умопомрачително), с възможности да спечелиш пари покрай цялата работа. Срещу 5 паунда може да си конвертираш творбата в киндъл-формат.

Друга доста популярна е ChoiceScript, въз основа на който има най-много кънтент - около 20-30 огромни интерактивни романа, за съжаление твърде геймифицирани за моя вкус (една сюрия статистики, на доста места глупав placeholder текст). Отново с възможности да изкараш някой лев.

Голямата класика е Inform 7, която е епичен двайсетгодишен безплатен проект за parser-based* IF, който с развитието си обаче позволява вече и choice-based, и hyperlink игри. Невероятно богат набор от функции и програмен език, много близък до естествения.

*Parser-based IF - интерактивна литература, в която игралният интерфейс представлява команден ред, в който човек пише неща като "examine A", "listen to B" и тем подобни комбинации от глаголи и съществителни.

[Кал]

От личните ми познати най-навътре в interactive fiction е Александър Андонов (Mordred). Дори е класиран в едно от IF състезанията - но не помня кое...

(А – ето го!)

Ако искаш връзка с него – ще ти пратя мейла му.

Дръж ни в течение за каквото интересно откриеш (или направиш ). И това ми е на мерника, но... едно по едно.

[Trip]

http://eblong.com/zarf/essays/seltani-talk/

Става дума за interactive shared text-worlds, които един американски пич е решил да разработи като проект, най-най-общо казано Световете са в стила на Myst online, MMO по игрите Myst.
Има си и действащ алфа/бета-сайт вече, но то всичко си пише в линка

[Trip]

Още едно предложение, този път сингъл плейър - един от авторите в тоя жанр, които най-много са ме впечатлили с консистентно качествен език, независимо в какви жанрове го кара. Долното е едно по-хубавите му неща:

The Colder Light

[Trip]

The Moonlit Tower на Йон Ха Лий, сама по себе си сериозен автор на фентъзи и фантастика.

Писана е през 2002 г., докато Лий си е отупвала познанията по програмиране. Играта е parser-based - иначе казано, напредваш чрез писмени команди от типа еxamine tree, hit troll, touch trap и т.н. Препоръчвам който ще я играе да мине набързо през help-частта, за да му се изясни как се играят подобни неща. Ако на някого му е достатъчно интересно, може да линкна и програмките, чрез които може да се играят тези игри и офлайн (и в които има save game oпции, за разлика от онлайн вариантите)

[Trip]

Игрите на най-известната дизайнерка в Twine, Порпентайн.

Трите по-мащабни са Меtrolith, Ultra Business Tycoon III и най-вече Howling Dogs, най-доброто й нещо.

[Кал]

Spoiler

Емо, слях двете теми в една. Нали може?

[Trip]

Да, другата и бездруго беше пет поста на кръст и няма изгледи да става повече

[отсъстващ]

Twine / An open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories
http://twinery.org/

You don't need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you're ready.

Twine publishes directly to HTML, so you can post your work nearly anywhere. Anything you create with it is completely free to use any way you like, including for commercial purposes.

At its most fundamental level, Twine is a combination of Twee, a command-line tool, and a graphical interface used primarily to create interactive stories. It allows a user to create a Tale, a collection of Passages, and create links between those passages. It's seeming simplicity has allowed many to make their first game with very little programming knowledge and, for those who know JavaScript and CSS, to make more intricate projects.

http://twinery.org/

[отсъстващ]

http://inform7.com/

Inform is a design system for interactive fiction based on natural language. It is a radical reinvention of the way interactive fiction is designed, guided by contemporary work in semantics and by the practical experience of some of the world's best-known writers of IF.
Interactive fiction

Interactive fiction lets the player explore your worlds and stories through text. Write adventure games, historical simulations, gripping stories or experimental digital art.
Code that reads like English

Inform's source reads like English sentences, making it uniquely accessible to non-programmers. It's very easy to get started. Watch a screencast.
Platform Independence

Inform runs under Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and more. The games it produces can be played on an even wider range of platforms, including handheld devices, legacy computers and the iPhone. Download Inform for your platform.
Support for Teachers

Inform is used in the classroom by teachers at all levels from late elementary school through university. Playing and writing interactive fiction develops literacy and problem-solving skills and allows the development of historical simulations. See tutorials and reports from the field.
Community Support

A large and varied community of users write with Inform, which means that technical support and guidance is always available.
Accessibility

Inform is widely used with screen-readers and other tools serving the visually-impaired.

http://inform7.com/

[отсъстващ]

Интервю с авторка на интерактивна литература
Beautiful Weapons
http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/beautiful-weapons/
Текста на интервюто

Spoiler

The Twine-game designer on interactive fiction, “trash spinning ,” and how to destroy the “completely unredeemable” games culture

Porpentine’s newest Twine game, created to accompany this issue, is called Parasite. Click below to begin playing:Porpentine is a game designer, writer, and erotic photographer whose work on the Twine platform has recently attracted critical attention. Finch Kaye spoke with her recently at her Oakland home to discuss her work.

Finch Kaye: To start off, can you talk about some of the games you’ve made?

Porpentine: I made a game called CYBERQUEEN, a sci-fi body horror incorporating my queer sexuality. It asks, What if the evil female AI won? And what if she was extremely horny? Cry$tal Warrior Ke$ha weaves together pop star Ke$ha’s personal mythology into this epic battle against trans-dimensional haters. How to Speak Atlantean explores my conflict-blasted body as a series of enormous mechanical zones followed by scavenging a hideous trashscape for spare parts to repair my broken Hitachi and cum my brains out.

I’ve made a game about communicating nonverbally with alien partners through the use of symbols, a game about hacking cupcakes designed to be played by a live audience, and an online multiplayer game about hungry ghosts sucking identity from the bodies of their fallen comrades to transcend the lamia-plagued plane of existence to which they are bound, to name a few. I made all of them in Twine.

This interview appears in TNI Vol. 17: Games. Subscribe for $2 and get it today.

FK: Tell me a little more about what Twine is. My sense is that it’s an important program because it’s so accessible.

P: Twine is probably the most accessible way to make games in the world right now. People who never made a game in their life are making games in Twine — people traditionally disenfranchised from game creation. It came into popularity because me and other queer women started using it.

Twine dispenses with a lot of the bullshit traditionally surrounding games — the gatekeeping, the obscure control schemes, the worship of high-end visuals over game play, etc. Twine is a really great visual environment. It lets you create your writings in nodes and connect them very spatially. It requires no code. I mean anyone can make a game in it in five minutes.

Twine is guerrilla warfare. It is cheaply-made pipe bombs and land mines that can proliferate and crop up in the dominant space. Besides being easy to create, it is not enough that our art be beautiful. It must be a beautiful weapon. We must ensure that our art is weaponized and can destroy other things.

We can flood sites and the Web with our games because it’s so easy to upload and share. There’s just no obstacle to playing them — you just load it like a webpage. We’re competing now with AAA games. That’s what I mean by weaponization. It’s hard to argue with that kind of viral, proliferating, breeding spirit.
Well, I guess I want to know what it is you want to destroy?

I mean, all of it. Just, all games culture. It’s completely unredeemable. The good games people have made will be around still. We don’t need any of the bullshit misogynist racist culture. Games journalism is toxic, games writing is toxic, game design — the most popular, the mainstream of it is just sick. It’s hard for me to answer that question, its just so big and virulent and there and monolithic.

You once wrote that creation is the most powerful criticism because it allows you to destroy what you critique. Could you expand on that?

Criticism is powerful too. A lot of my favorite criticism is legitimate art on its own merits, like Cara Ellison’s poem Romero’s Wives, which was later read by Anna Anthropy. And on the everyday level pushing back and being loud in our social spaces is important. We have to fight for every inch of our space. If we don’t we will be crushed by the insidious creeping tendrils of liberalism where every act of violence against a minority can somehow be justified.

That being said, what I meant is that our radical energies can be neutralized by pathological snark. It’s important to spend time with friends and alternative power structures, because otherwise you are purely locked into combating an oppressor whose goal is to make you feel insane. We have to take care of ourselves. Fighting and fucking. Basically, I don’t have time to explain to 1000 people about why I deserve to live and why being trans is beautiful, but I can make 1 game about it that 1000 people play.
How do you compose in Twine or construct experiences in hypertext? There’s a lot of that I don’t really understand in terms of placement of links as opposed to, say, poetry.

I’ve always just called it trash-spinning. Just like rolling up trash. But most of my games are just spontaneous improvisations where I roll up everything in my environment and I wad them together. They’re a big, crystalized trashy ball of everything that’s happened to me over the 24 hours or 48 hours in which I made the game. Like conversations, or you’ll notice how I incorporate all of the music I’m listening to in my games. It’s just very organic. Then I try to turn it into a weapon, something people can feel. How can my emotions be transmitted to another human being? A dart of nausea, arousal, triumph, crying, even radical, transformative joy.
What’s the place or role of music in these games? I mean, I’ve played Ke$ha Crystal Warrior, but —

Music is paramount: I make music games. Music is my surrogate emotion when I have none. I can’t emphasize it enough. I list the music I listen to while making the game because a lot of the games are actually kind of shrines to the music. They’re kind of hypertext music videos in some ways, Ke$ha being the most obvious example. But others are embodiments of the song in some way.
Recently you wrote a piece called “Seven Thoughts on Women in Games” in which you talk about making a Twine game called Howling Dogs, for which you were criticized. I think someone called it a crime. What was Howling Dogs and why did some people react that way to it?

Howling Dogs is something — God, what a question. It’s a game that uses the central hub of being trapped in this tiny room, and you only have a daily regimen of base nutrition and hydration. Every night you go into a virtual-reality chamber and experience something that the artificial intelligence creates for you, and then you’re back again. The reasons are probably twofold, or threefold, for why people disliked it. In interactive fiction at the time, parser was dominant and people reacted strongly to nonparser work. Parser is like the old text adventures where you type commands to “go East,” or “pick up … fucko…”
Sword?

Sword, that’s better. “Fucko” is not a commonly recognized term. Whereas hypertext is clicking on links to navigate, and I guess it has superficial comparisons to choose-your-own-adventure books, yet it’s far more complex than that, as people are proving.

And really, we need both tools. Parser is adapted for expressing spatiality. For instance, the most popular parser authoring tool, Inform 7, posits everything within it as rooms with items inside them and actors where the default node that it creates is a room. Twine creates passages of words, which could be any kind of writing. Hyperlinks are just ­infinitely ­versatile. So while parser is created for spatiality, hypertext is suited to representing emotions and thoughts and more complicated things than mere physical space.

And I was able to play with physical space in Howling Dogs as well. The core is this physical space and then the exterior is arranged in all these dreamlike spokes. But to get back to what you were saying, another reason people disliked it was because I was a woman and I was trans and I had people specifically saying things or reading trans subtext into my work because they knew I was trans, which is a very cheap thing to do. People were commenting on the pictures on my site — talking about my game and also the pictures on my site in the same breath, like using the fact that I take erotic pictures — that I do queer erotic ­photography — as something against my game.
Earlier you told me about new game mechanics that people were developing. What are these, and do they show up in indie games in general?

There are a lot of interesting things people are doing with hypertext. Leon Arnott developed a lot of cool scripts for us to use. It’s like if you were a writer and suddenly you could make your pages play music or flip faster or change colors or have words melt mid-sentence.

Christine Love’s done some of the most experimental stuff with Twine. She has one where you don’t even click but your cursor’s a gun, and whenever you even hover over a link it just explodes! It’s a very volatile game. It just keeps going forward, propelled by your clumsiness.

In later games, the thing I’ve been impressed most by has been the cycling macro which actually lets you click on the hyperlink but it’s like a dial, so only the hyperlink changes. Previously in hypertext, how do you handle variables changing? You click on a link and you go to another page and there you set a variable. Whereas with cycling links, you have one page with words you can morph by clicking to change them around. It’s a way to give the player aesthetic agency. So it’ll say, “the sun is bright”, or “the sun is shrouded by clouds”, and you click it back and forth. And then you maybe click “and then I go outside”.
Controlling the world just seems so different from the normal control over what your character or your avatar in the game is doing.

Yeah, it gives the player a huge level of ­collaboration — which is what writing is in the first place. It’s saying, okay, what do you want this world to be? And you can just have it be aesthetic. It doesn’t have to show up later in the story and affect anything. I feel people feel the need to hard-code things. What people have been experimenting more with lately is just a more mercurial environment. I think people are going to be playing more and more with that. But that’s just one approach out of infinity. The important thing is giving people open-ended tools so they can surprise us. I just want to be surprised.

This interview appears in TNI Vol. 17: Games. Subscribe for $2 and get it today.

Some people think games have to be about surmounting a challenge —

[ppffff]
— that you try to win. Are your games ­winnable?

I don’t think that’s a factor. I guess climax is a better term. I think win is a bit dominating. You wouldn’t say of a film, “Did they win?” I guess you could say was there a happy ending or not, but there’s a respect for non-happy endings as well in film. There can be a respect for games where you are not the victor. My games have a lot of different endings. They do have fairly triumphant endings. But I think some of them have pretty ambiguous endings. What do you think of the endings of my games?
There’s a dominant idea of alternative ­endings or a different set of choices. Like, you’re good or evil and you get a different ending. I found myself pondering over the end to “Howling Dogs” for a long while after.

Which one?
I don’t know! I think I’ve only had the same ending. You get up and then there’s one more phrase and then the quote at the end.

Is it the one with the leaves?
Maybe. I don’t know.

Is it the one where you wake up and get out of bed?
Yeah.

That’s the false ending. But it reinforces the real ending if you find it.

[Cliff_Burton]

http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yed_about.html

yEd Graph Editor

yEd is a powerful desktop application that can be used to quickly and effectively generate high-quality diagrams. Create diagrams manually, or import your external data for analysis. Our automatic layout algorithms arrange even large data sets with just the press of a button.

Аз лично го ползвам, за да си правя схеми за книги-игри

http://www.yworks.com/en/products_yed_about.html

[Кал]

sub-Q: a new magazine for interactive fiction

... paying professional rates. And check their mission.

Are we ready to storm them?

[Trip]

Мда, много смислено начинание са, при все че клонят за момента по-скоро към "динамична" литература, игровостта я застъпват по-слабо.

[Кал]

Лелеее... Това как съм забравил да го кача и тук...

Отзив в Goodreads за Videogames for Humans:

~ I literally squealed with joy when I found out what Videogames for Humans is about. An entire book on Twine! And Twine games! And the people who make them! Why, welcome to Wonderland! :)))

Thing is, I have a friend who's been thrusting Twine onto me for the past couple of years; yet I, partly disappointed by the low tide of people's interest in pure text reading, partly excited about the new opportunities offered by visual novels, have been neglecting it, probably thinking thoughts like, "What can another textual tool bring to our waning medium?" Who knows? Sometimes, I can't quite trace my own thinking.

Anyway, finally I've found something that will guide me through Twine without (I hope) all the pain of trial-and-error, excitement-and-disenchantment, hit-and-miss. I hope. ;)

~ The opening essay, Eva Problems' thoughts on Rat Chaos, both thrilled and terrified me. And it did both for one and the same reason: its honesty. I love to see people open up like this. But then I hate to comment on their words. They feel ... too personal. In some way, sacred.

So see me smile instead, and nod.

~ Riley MacLeod's stroll through Fuck That Guy had me smile a lot, too. Sometimes incredulously ("C'mon, they can't be all that bad"), sometimes with great sympathy (especially at this part: "I tend to arc toward sleeping with people instead of sleeping with bodies"), and sometimes with bafflement (is Riley pulling our collective leg here or is this observation dead serious?).

At any rate, if the going's going to be that good, I'm holding on for dear life.

~ Emily Short's experience of Anhedonia is another instance of too personal, too sacred. In fact, here I'd have appreciated if Emily had said more, included more screenshots. Being bipolar myself, I'm deeply curious about others' version of depression and other ways to cope with it. So yes, I want moar. ;)

Also, so far I've been enjoying the essays far more than the game texts themselves. Hmmmm.

~ And seemingly to compensate me, the book then offers me Imogen Binnie's thoughts on Eva Problems's Sabbat. Where, while I do enjoy Imogen's thoughts, I squeal with laughter (or shudder with this tiny bit of visceral terror) at Eva's writing. It's luscious, lascivious, ludicrous. It makes fun of itself. What more could I ask for?

~ Tom McHenry's Horse Master is the second game whose narrative excites me. There's a type of jigsaw fiction (speculative or not) where the thrill is in discovering what world we are in. Naomi Clark's notes accentuate the discoveries--so much so that sometimes they feel like the log of certain quests.

Yes, a part of me hates the ending; another part hates the randomness. But the rest of me have been too thrilled (and moved) to nitpick.

~ Elizabeth Sampat's Nineteen reads like a non-suicide note: summing up all the things that we wouldn't have been able to tell our loved ones if we had gone through with the act. Which is perhaps a tribute to interactive fiction itself, the "what if--but also what if" aspect that makes it far more satisfying than linear fiction for a vast number of themes and situations.

And one of its conclusions resonates with one of my foundations, why I am still alive too:

It took a decade, maybe longer, to realize that no matter what I did it would be impossible to handle these feelings on my own. I joined a church in high school, I wrote, I tried therapy. All of these things helped, some more than others, but the only consistently valuable tool I have found has been my friends.
Depression convinces you that you have no power. Sometimes you need friends to lend you some of theirs.

~ My first reaction to Michael Brough's scarfmemory was, "WTF? A dirge about a stupid scarf?!" Now, after going through it along with Anna Anthropy, I feel ashamed. Stereotyping has many faces. I should know better. :(

(And, Michael, I'm sorry about your loss too.)

~ Aevee Bee's Removed: another very personal journey. Across the densest jungle so far: each sentence needs its own untangling.

I wish it were longer, though.

~ In Bryan Reid's For Political Lovers, a Little Utopia Sketch, I didn't enjoy the game but really sympathized (and often empathized) with Avery McDalndo's experience of it. In fact, the game text made me gulp uncomfortably a few times: I, too, am prone to these impenetrable layers of abstraction and having too much fun at the expense of my readers. (I don't always do it on purpose, I promise.) But there was a thought at the very conclusion of Avery's reflections which points to a possible interpretation: that Little Utopia Sketch starts as a muddle and ends as a mirror in order to demonstrate the quality of the transition that it hints at. Sounds good.

~ Bryan Reid's (literally) poetic response to Miranda Simon's Your Lover Has Turned into a Flock of Birds was eloquent, multi-layered and, well, impenetrable. (To me.)

Miranda's Lover was short. (But I do hope their love was longer.)

~ Jeremy Penner's There Ought to Be a Word is deceptively simple, yet perhaps the most mature and explorational essay so far. Or at least it becomes so when youI supplement it with Austin Walker's analysis. (Also, is "essay" the word I'm really looking for? How 'bout "analysis"? Yes, There Ought to Be a Word has that effect on youme.) I see all my relationships--intimate or not--in a similarly ambivalent, between-and-beyond-the-words way, so I was the third man in the company, silently pondering, asking and answering and asking again.

So ... what do you call a friend to whom you go when all your words have failed? What about the one whom you call when you've bashed in your own door and can't fix it? The one that shares with you the most amazing visions of the future, kindling the fire to come up with your own? The one you've never seen in person, she who writes the tenderest reviews and sounds just this bit broken and makes you want to make the whole world whole?

Spoiler

"You call them by their names" feels like a cop-out.

~ Musing on Olivia Vitolo's Negotiation, Katherine Cross wrote this.

I rest my case. ;)

~ Soha Kareem's reProgram was, so far, the most uncomfortable piece for me. Had I been left to read~play it on my own, I most likely wouldn't have been able to complete it. There're chambers I'd rather not enter; there're choices that make me feel like slapping everyone involved. (And not in the kinky sense.)

Amazingly, Mattie Brice's commentary made the experience completely comfortable. She sounds calm, understanding, supportive throughout the journey. A voice that I can trust won't let me down.

Here's another reason why I enjoy listening to people who cherish something rather than people who criticize it.

~ Nina Freeman's Mangia throws you in the middle of digestive disorders. It's deeply personal. Highly instructive.

And I found Lana Polansky's commentary another welcome hand-holder. (Says the boy out of his depth. :)

~ Cara Ellison's Sacrilege: :D & <333

Soha Kareem's commentary: :DDD & <3

~ Anna Anthropy's writing in And the Robot Horse You Rode In On feels the most delicious so far, and her future of cowgirls and cyberhorses, the most detailed. (But is the whole story really a family drama? Some of me shake their heads incredulously. C'mon, there should be moar to it ....)

I also loved listening to Cat Fitzpatrick's commentary. "Listening" here reflects the tangible quality of her voice. And her sympathy.

~ Zoe Quinn's Depression Quest may be the most realistic depression simulator I've ever encountered. The fact that for any decision you face, you can see all those good, constructive options in your head but cannot act on them, is telling enough. (Toni Pizza, the commentator, asked if there could be any other game mechanics representing this state of anxious passivity. I had an intriguing idea ... but let me try my hand at it before I tell you more. ;)

Considering my own experience with depression, I wonder about the purpose of the two "stat meters", "You're not currently seeing a therapist" and "You are not currently taking medication for depression." Is there any path where these statuses change? To what effect? If I weren't afraid that spending so much time in such a depressive environment (no pun intended) wouldn't drag me down, I might have given the game a shot. The website says that choices do matter and there're five different endings, so one day I still may.

While this may be the most realistic representation of depression I know of, the most moving one (also in the sense that it made me move my ass while in a very depressed state: no small feat in itself) was the beginning of Dreamfall: The Longest Journey.

~ Kayla Unknown's 3x3x3 was sweet. To each mermaid, her own mermate. :)

~ While I shuddered at the beginning of Michael Joffe's Eft to Newt (I find Kafka's Metamorphosis deeply disturbing), I smiled at its endings.

Spoiler

(All of them, not just the 7th one.)

Quirky structuralist humor is my cup of tea.

~ Rokashi Edwards's I'm Fine was an instructive counterpart to Depression Quest. It helped me understand my sister better. (She used to get aggressive in her depressive periods; I get passive.) And John Brindle's analysis highlighted the depth and details I'm bound to miss, in my present exhausted-agitated state.

Thank you both, guys.

~ Lydia Neon's Player 2 is an interesting tool, a sort of vent-your-hurt assistant, but it's too abstract for me. Stories with concrete plots and fleshed-out protagonists have always worked better in my case.

Which brings me to a general observation about Videogames for Humans: If I consider it as an anthology of literary fiction, I won't rate it very highly as a whole. However, I choose to consider it as a much-needed introduction to a new medium, blending fiction and non-fiction, narrative and interactive devices, distancing and self-identification. Twine transcends traditional approaches, so we need new yardsticks for rating it.

You won't be surprised by my rating, will you?

[Кал]

Из размислите на The Digital Antiquarian за Portal (1986) (дефиниран от създателите си като computer novel):

In a Baffler article from 2012, David Graeber, in the process of trying to figure out whatever happened to the flying cars and hotels in space that science fiction once promised us, notes how our most transformative inventions of recent years, the microprocessor and the Internet, are largely used to simulate new realities rather than to create them. Those matinee audiences who watched Buck Rogers serials in packed theaters back in the 1930s wouldn’t be as impressed as we might like to think by a modern film like, say, Interstellar because they thought we’d be out there actually exploring interstellar space by now, not just making ever more elaborate movies about it.

(...) Whether you claim the failures of more recent science-fictional prognosticators not named William Gibson to be the result of a grand failure of societal ambition and imagination, as Graeber does, or simply a result of a whole pile of technological problems that have proved to be exponentially more difficult than first anticipated, it does sometimes feel to me like we’ve blundered into a postmodern cul-de-sac of the virtualized hyperreal from which we don’t quite know how to escape as we otherwise just continue to go round and round in circles on this crowded little rock of ours. The restlessness or, if you like, malaise that this engenders is becoming more and more a part of the artistic conversation — appropriately, because one of the things art should do is reflect and contemplate the times in which it was created. See, for example, Spike Jonze’s brilliant film Her, which so perfectly evokes the existential emptiness at the heart of our love affair with our gadgets that makes the release of a new Apple phone a major event in many people’s lives. We’ve spent so much time peering down at our screens that we’ve forgotten how to lift our eyes and look to the stars. Already many of us find virtual realities more compelling than our own — and no, the irony of my writing that on a computer-game blog is not lost to me. Portal doesn’t have quite the grace of Her, but it’s nevertheless just as remarkable in that it nails the substance of our modern dilemma almost thirty years before the fact.

Spoiler

Само не споделям очарованието от Her.

[Кал]

Защо не спя тез нощи?

Ами (да речем) защото четох поредицата контекстуални обзори на The Digital Antiquarian около Trinity, една interactive fiction за трагедиите на ядрената надпревара. Започва тук и свършва с Trinity Postscript: Selling Tragedy. Особено ме порази T Plus 1: Bombing Japan, заради съвършено новите (за мен) погледи, които дава към Хирошима и Нагасаки. Часът е късен, а месецът – неподходящ за сладкодумни обобщения, така че заделете нощ-две-три и се гмурнете в извора.

Какви ли ще излезете от него?

[Кал]

... И веднага след Trinity, за баланс, пристигат

Leather Goddesses of Phobos

Избрано:

More successful are all of the sly double entendres that litter the text, right from the moment you walk into a restroom at the beginning of the game and find a “stool” there. They’re all about as stupid as that, but sometimes gloriously so. My favorite bit might just be the response to the standard SCORE command.

Code: Select all

>score
[with Joe]
Unfortunately, Joe doesn't seem interested, and it takes two to tango.

When he’s not cursing or referencing sex in some way, Meretzky is giving you pretty much the game you’d expect from the guy who wrote Planetfall and co-wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: lots of broad, goofy humor, the jokes coming fast and furious, often falling flat but occasionally hitting home. The situations you get yourself into are as gloriously stupid as the puns and double entendres, and perfectly redolent of the game’s inspirations: you go wandering through the jungles of Venus; go sailing the canals of Mars; and, best of all, get into a swordfight in space where you can inexplicably talk to your opponent and where Newtonian mechanics most resoundingly don’t apply. I’d probably be a bit more excited about the humor in this and Meretzky’s other games if it hadn’t led to so many less clever imitators who held fast to the “stupid” but forgot the “glorious.” See, for example, this description of a spaceship in Leather Goddesses, which is far more anatomically explicit than anything in any of the sex scenes: “Hanging from the base of the long, potent-looking battleship are two pendulous, brimming fuel tanks.” Then compare it with its distressingly literal adaptation to graphics in the blatant but more explicit Leather Goddesses clone Sex Vixens from Space of a couple of years later.

И еночко от коментарите:

Yes, if you never play Leather Goddesses on Tame mode, you’ll never see the funniest parser error message in Infocom history:

>fuck Trent

[I don’t know the “f-word.”]