>SUPERVERBOSE

I wrote a series of superhero-themed interactive fiction games called Earth And Sky. If you're interested in learning what the games are like without actually, y'know, playing them, you may be in luck.

Recently, a group of IF enthusiasts over at ifMUD played through all three games in a chatroom environment, as part of a venture called Club Floyd. Floyd is a bot on the mud who can act as a game interpreter, so a group of people can (virtually) gather to play a game in Floyd's room. This makes for a lovely combination of playing, kibitzing, snarking, and even the occasional insight or analysis. I showed up for the sessions, so I was sometimes able to offer a bit of information about the making of the games.

Transcripts are here:

Part 1: Earth And Sky

Part 2: Another Earth, Another Sky

Part 3: Luminous Horizon

It occurs to me, albeit many years later than it should have, that when I have some writing appear elsewhere on the net I should probably post a pointer to it here.

So, in that spirit: I've written a review of Peter Nepstad's epic IF game 1893 for IF-Review.

As revealed in the comments section of my original Words Infocom Taught Me post, we learn words from lots of unexpected places. Reading Eugene Ehrlich's Highly Selective Thesaurus has reminded me of many of them. Now that I've finished the book, I've decided to write a short series of blog posts, detailing words I've learned from various geeky sources. First in line is a fuller list of words from Infocom games, this time complete with definitions and comments explaining the context of each word, for those who don't know the Infocom canon by heart:

( >OPEN FROBOZZ MAGIC DICTIONARY )

It looks like Zork II wins the Infocom top vocabulary builder award!

One of Textfyre's marketing claims is going to be that interactive fiction teaches literacy: vocabulary, reading comprehension, that sort of thing. (It also teaches typing -- I have long claimed that Infocom taught me how to touch-type, because I was too absorbed in the game to look down at the keyboard.)

The vocabulary claim is certainly true for me. I always suspected that Infocom had a hidden agenda to broaden our vocabularies, because there were always a few words in their games that sent me to the dictionary. When I wrote my first game, I tried to inject a little tribute to this tradition, with a peninsular location I called "Chersonese." I was reminded of this recently as I thumbed through a thesaurus given to me as a gift.

In that spirit, I present an incomplete list of the words I learned from Infocom games:

EBCDIC (Zork I)
gnomon (Trinity)
menhir (Zork II)
oubliette (Spellbreaker)
reliquary (Beyond Zork)
reticule (Plundered Hearts)
skink (Trinity)
topiary (Zork II)

These are just the ones that turned up in a cursory search of my brain. Anybody else got others?

Trrish pointed me to a nifty little site called FreeRice, and the experience was satisfying on several levels. FreeRice offers an unending stream of multiple-choice vocabulary questions: given a word, choose which of four options is its synonym. For every word you get right, 20 grains of rice are donated via the United Nations World Food Program. The money for this comes from fairly unobtrusive banner ads that appear below the test area. I enjoy a vocabulary challenge, so the opportunity to play a fun game while effortlessly doing a little bit of good was a double pleasure. In addition, the site ranks your vocabulary level, so there's a scoring element, which helps encourage replay. The scores range from 0 to 55, but according to the site, "it is rare for people to get much above level 48."

Your initial vocab level gets set after you answer your first four questions, and then advances by one for every three words you get right. The first time I played the game, my initial level was set at 40. Almost immediately, I was being given unfamiliar words, trying to piece together their etymological roots, narrowing down options by process of elimination, and generally having a fine time. However, the next time I played, I started out hasty and careless, so I got the first word wrong. Well, my initial level got set at 10 that time, and I then slowly crawled up to my former level.

This got me thinking: what's the real score on FreeRice? Because I am all game-playey and test-takey, I immediately focused on the vocab level as the place to focus my achievement efforts. However, the session I played when I bombed my first question most certainly contributed more rice, and during that session I came to see that the real score isn't vocab level, but rather grains of rice donated. I was reminded a bit of games like A Change In The Weather and Little Blue Men; these games offer an initial "win" state early on, but if you accept that win, you've missed the point of the game. It was yet another level of satisfaction: not only was I building my word power and donating food, I got to think a little bit about clever game mechanics as well.

After getting my first question wrong, I donated 2340 grains of rice and built my vocab level to 48 before getting another question wrong. Can you beat that?

"Sometimes it seems like I've been here before
When I hear opportunity kicking in my door."
-- Marillion

My goodness, this has been quite an overwhelming couple of weeks. Opportunities and events have been hailing down on me, some of them great and some of them challenging. In fact, some of it I can't quite talk about yet, because it's not quite official. Here, though, is a sampling of the rest of it.

( Behind here, that is. )

Since I started posting to this blog in 2004, it had no real title -- its name was what LJ gave it by default, which was my username. I could never think of any name that I really wanted it to have... until now. As of today, this blog is officially rechristened >SUPERVERBOSE.

As some of you may know, my IF page is called >VERBOSE, since that's both my writing style and one of the first commands I tend to type in an IF game. The old Infocom games had three levels of verbosity: VERBOSE, BRIEF, and SUPERBRIEF. These commands would control how much of a room description you'd see when traveling through the game world. Wouldn't it be cool, though, if there was a SUPERVERBOSE? Not only would you get to see the full room description every time, you'd also get lengthy explanations of where the game objects came from, discursive asides about NPC histories, extensive screeds about the game author's political views... well, maybe it wouldn't be so cool after all.

Instead, look no further for your superverbosity fix. Since the majority of posts on this blog are in my verbose writing style, and they tend to be about superheroics, >SUPERVERBOSE it is.

I learned about Inform 7 a couple of days ago, but I've only just now gotten the chance to spend much time looking into it. The more I looked, the more astonished I became. My breathing got all short and gaspy. I began to curse a lot, as I sometimes do under the influence of intense amazement.

I downloaded. I installed. I started a project, spontaneously titled "Earth And Sky's Day Off." I wrote a room description. I... encountered a bug. With literally the first sentence of the first description I wrote. My code begins:

Living Room is a room. "Your parents' living room is nothing if not tasteful.

Unfortunately, I7's interpreter engine renders this as:

Living Room
Your parents" living room is nothing if not tasteful.

Bah. I tried a couple of methods of escaping characters (\' and '') but no dice. I searched the documentation for the word "apostrophe" and found this:

Apostrophes used to contracted speech at the end of words are wrongly converted to double-quotes: thus "Lucy snaps, 'What's the matter? You don't trust my cookin' mister?'" has the apostrophe in "cookin'" wrongly converted. For now, best avoid such contractions.

Hrm. But... but... Hrm. Perhaps I should take the word "Beta" more seriously.

(Please note: I am not not NOT intending to slag off everybody's years of hard and brilliant work with a two-second dismissal. I still have a huge crush on Inform 7 and will continue exploring it. It's just that encountering a lacuna so quickly was a bit... deflating, is all.)

I never saw the original King Kong, nor the 1976 remake, so all I knew of the big monkey was from parodies and film clips. Still, I liked Peter Jackson's work on Lord Of The Rings, and I'm a fan of the principal actors involved in his version of King Kong, so I thought I'd give it a try. ( Verdict: mixed )