Soc Blogger Jeremy Freese won this year’s Interactive Fiction Competition, where the goal is to write a text-based puzzle game in the tradition of stuff like Infocom classics. The premise of Jeremy’s game, Violet, is summarized by the Chronicle of Higher Education:
It’s noon and you’ve still got 1,000 words to type. That might not seem like much, but it’s been months since you’ve last worked on your dissertation and distractions are plentiful. To make matters worse, your girlfriend, Violet, says she’s out the door and flying back to Australia if you don’t finish the paper by the end of the day.
What’s your next move?
This is the premise for Violet, a text-based computer game in which a graduate student is the main character. As the student, you must fight through countless distractions and solve a number of puzzles to finish the paper in time to save your relationship. The story is told by Violet, who allows you to examine objects in your office and ask for hints.
Here is a review. Naturally, a sequel must now be in the works. Who should the protagonist be? What situation should they face? Obvious possibilities include a disaffected English professor teaching somewhere in a state beginning and ending a vowel, whose only creative outlet is bitter, overwritten Chronicle columns; a busily networking scholar-blogger desperate to finagle an invitation to appear on Bloggingheads.tv; or perhaps the crisis of a senior faculty member whose long history of abusive pseudonymous commenting is suddenly and inadvertently exposed.
{ 14 comments }
Jonathan 11.19.08 at 6:03 pm
I didn’t even realize it was the same guy until now. I think all of the Crooked Timberites should enter next year’s competition. The latest version of Inform allows you to create games in something resembling natural language, so it’s not as difficult as you might imagine. (I think that either Belle or Montagu Norman would place highest.)
Lex 11.19.08 at 8:27 pm
“the crisis of a senior faculty member whose long history of abusive pseudonymous commenting is suddenly and inadvertently exposed.”
Steal my life and I shall sue!
lemuel pitkin 11.19.08 at 8:35 pm
Awesomeness. So there’s a package that lets you create these things?
Zarquon 11.19.08 at 9:59 pm
That’s just wrong. Now woman from Australia is called “Violet”.
Jon H 11.20.08 at 5:29 am
Obviously, the next game should involve students having sex in your office.
Given how many Infocom spoof posts SEK does, I’m almost surprised he didn’t write this game.
Lemuel: There’s a new thing called Inform 7, which lets you create these in a slick book-metaphor IDE, using a rule-oriented language that approximates English.
Here’s a brief example demonstrating the creation of synonyms, from the documentation:
"Vouvray"
The Wine Emporium is a room. "Set aside, you rather suspect, for tourists: this chamber is barrel-vaulted stone, lined on each side with casks of aging wine. Discarded brochures here and there advertise Wine Tours of the Loire Valley in three different languages, none of them French."
A cask is a kind of thing. A cask is always fixed in place. Understand "cask" or "barrel" as a cask.
Understand "casks" or "barrels" as the plural of cask.
The Vouvray cask and the Muscadet cask are casks in the Wine Emporium.
You can put this text in the source code view of the IDE, click “Go”, and you get a running game where you’re standing in The Wine Emporium, and there are two casks:
Vouvray
An Interactive Fiction
Release 1 / Serial number 081120 / Inform 7 build 5U92 (I6/v6.31 lib 6/12N) SD
Wine Emporium
Set aside, you rather suspect, for tourists: this chamber is barrel-vaulted stone, lined on each side with casks of aging wine. Discarded brochures here and there advertise Wine Tours of the Loire Valley in three different languages, none of them French.
You can see a Vouvray cask and a Muscadet cask here.
>examine cask
Which do you mean, the Vouvray cask or the Muscadet cask?
>
You can download it, free, for Windows, Mac, or Gnome, at http://www.inform-fiction.org
Jon H 11.20.08 at 5:35 am
Oops, I messed up the tags.
In the above, everything from the first code-formatted “Vouray” to “The Vouvray cask and the Muscadet cask are casks in the Wine Emporium.” is source code. The latter sentence creates two casks, names them, and puts them in the room that was created.
Everything between my “you’re standing in The Wine Emporium, and there are two casks:” and my “You can download it” is the output of running the source code in the IDE.
Jon H 11.20.08 at 5:44 am
Actually, it appears that Jeremy used Inform 7 for Violet.
Rich Puchalsky 11.20.08 at 5:06 pm
Yeah, I’ve been waiting for a post from SEK on this one. The game might as well have been called “SEK, this was your life!” Except that his partner, from her comments, doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would blackmail him.
Jon H 11.20.08 at 5:18 pm
SEK could do a good one about getting your money back from the library so you can register.
Rich Puchalsky 11.21.08 at 2:47 am
All right, now I’ve played the game. Violet is too cute to be that manipulative. Also, who knows why this feckless grad student has one hot girlfriend hovering over him/her and an ex just across the hall throwing herself at him/her. It’s all too dramatic to be grad-student-y.
belle waring 11.21.08 at 9:56 am
I don’t know, Rich; sounds pretty grad studenty to me.
andthenyoufall 11.21.08 at 9:56 am
Obviously someone has never been a grad student. If even half of graduate students could limit themselves to one hot girlfriend and one psychotic ex, we would have a new Renaissance on our hands.
Rich Puchalsky 11.21.08 at 2:18 pm
I was an astrophysics grad student. Clearly the humanities must be very different.
J Thomas 11.22.08 at 6:41 pm
Rich, think about this. Why would anybody subject themselves to a humanities graduate degree and a life of poverty? Hmmm?
Astrophysics students have a reason to avoid drama. Too much of that stuff and you won’t graduate. This doesn’t apply nearly as much to humanities grad students. And if they don’t graduate, is that so terrible?
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