IFComp 2020 spiel: Amazing Quest by Nick Montfort

I played Amazing Quest by Nick Montfort today, having only glanced at some reviews of it. I enjoyed it and was curious about its contents, which I knew I'd be able to look at and comprehend.

I then went to read every other review of it to see if anyone had said what I might say, thus removing the need for me to say anything. I was surprised at how much negativity the game had drawn. Reviews declaring Amazing Quest could be full of hidden meanings that might elevate it if they weren't hidden, was some arms-length ironic joke, must be full of in-jokes, was definitely trolling them, had wasted their time, meta-this, meta-that, etc. So much suspicion for something so simple! Below I share some thoughts and rhetorical meanderings on the game with reference to some ideas coming from the reviews.

Does knowing (not even necessarily understanding) tech/historical context help one like Amazing Quest?

Probably.

This is the kind of game you can (and did) write in BASIC in the 1980s, especially if your microcomputer was low on RAM. The Commodore 64 that Montfort has used was not low on RAM, but contests to produce maximum program bang for minimum listing length (sometimes called 'one-liners' for a single-line program, for instance) were popular in the day. Now they remain popular in retro circles. Amazing Quest is in the spirit of such contests in either context. Looking at its listing, it's also a good example of getting that much effect out of that short a program.

In my review survey, I see that even amongst reviewers who lived through these times, had such computers and/or performed such activities, opinions on the game still vary. Someone said (paraphrase), 'I wrote better (programs) when I was fifteen.' Well, I did as well, but I don't think I ever went in for the minimal source approach. In itself, Amazing Quest's source to outputted game ratio is impressive.

The context of the instructions and strategy guide

The instructions for the game are presented as a single typed sheet. It may have come from a typewriter, a daisy wheel printer or be a facsimile of such output. The upshot is, this is a pastiche presentation of 1980s instruction sheets that came in games.

At the stage of the instructions alone, interpretation can sit easily between sincere and cute. Instructions absolutely were this florid about basic content in the day, often embellishing a game's simple graphics with some imaginative strokes to get them to take off in your brain. Similar mechanics are at work with the simple prose in the Scott Adams games. Neuroscientifically, I don't know how younger people today read into the Adams prose. Does it ever take off for them? Or does it just sit there on the page looking literal and undernourished? I assume it, and other prose like it, could work for them if they persisted, thanks to neural plasticity. But who's going to do that work now unless they have a special interest in the kind of material they're doing the work for? There's not enough of it around now, casually, to generate much need or interest. Response to Amazing Quest also shows there's not much tolerance for it per se, but this has to be figured in with some sense of IFComp expectations. IFComp always generates haste and a degree of intolerance that, objectively, we'd have to say is reasonable, especially now there are so many games to play. This means an Amazing Quest can get eyeballs on it, but those eyeballs are primed to quickly move past anything for almost any reason. And relatively speaking, Amazing Quest has prompted a lot of folks to come up with a lot of reasons.

The strategy guide is definitely even cuter than the intro, raising the embellishment stakes even higher and at further length for what is, mechanically, an all probabilities-based random game.

Is the game's randomness so obvious?

It wasn't to me. However, knowing I was dealing with a tiny BASIC program - and still before looking at it - I suspected it could be. There was definitely no way to know just from playing. I think it's testament to the prose Montfort wrote and the style of choices offered, and the fact they can turn out clearly positive or negative outcomes (even if only two!) that players can feel their actions altering things, as reviews indicated they did.

Does it matter if (or should I say That) they don't? For this kind of game in the 1980s, it didn't to me then (assuming the game didn't screw you over. Then I'd be angry. But this game is just measured progress towards victory) and so it doesn't matter to me now so long as the journey evokes something.

Would it matter if the same game had been presented to me in Twine?

Here's context again: For me I'm sure I would not have received it as well. I've got my memory of the time the game can be said to be a pastiche of, the context, the knowledge of how it's done then or now, the knowledge that the knowledge is specialist knowledge. That all impresses me and I enjoy the technical level a bit, but only because I enjoy the experience of the game enough. If we took all that away and I've just got small, random texts in the Twine interface for a short duration, I'd be considerably less entertained.

Am I consistent about this kind of thing? Definitely not! But I expect my own sliding scale involves the scale of the game. As any game gets larger, I feel it can stand more on its own by the girth of its design, no matter what system it's being delivered with. My positive appreciation of Amazing Quest is both dependent upon its small size and outsize to its size because of the tech involved.

Does it matter how something was made?

There was a quote somewhere in the IFComp debates like, 'This isn't a competition for technical proficiency, it's a competition for interactive fiction.' True on the surface. Nobody can hold any player or judge to more than that, but where individuals know or are interested in more than that, or are authors themselves, they probably can and will apply it. We'll also typically write such evaluations into our reviews.

Re: how things are made, in movies, I particularly dislike how CGI has stepped in for things that weren't even that hard to do practically when they were all done practically. Every time some character stands on a nondescript hill in a Lord of the Rings film and I'm supposed to believe the sun and sky are behind them when they aren't, I'm irritated. I can see the fake, intensity-lacking light that's barely falling on anything, unlike even in the cheapest sword and sorcery film of the 1980s. In the context of a film filled with tons of photoreal people and Earthy environments, I wish they'd gone and shot on a real hill at the right time of day. I've plenty of similar annoyances with CGI blood and other cinema topics, etc.

Why do these things matter to me? It's not just dogmatic principle. Certain ways of doing things create aesthetics which may not be obtainable in other ways. If I value the aesthetic, I value the way of getting it, and may not accept substitutes that produce poorer facsimiles. In films, I mostly like real light when there's real light everywhere else. If it's a hypercolourful ballad like The Phantom Menace, then I'm open to the CGI look, because that's the whole aesthetic.

I'm sort of speaking to Amazing Quest's isness here. It's a C64 game, and has that aesthetic. If you don't know about or care for that, or feel (justifiably) that you're only here for interactive fiction, the words on the page, I can see why it may not have done much for you. For me, it's a case of all of how the words get there, what they are, how the game's made, how the whole thing feels, and how the instructions and guide reproduce a certain technological and historical context accurately.

(y/n)

How would I rate Amazing Quest, were I still able to? I don't know, and because I don't have to, I'm spared agonising over it. The more things are unlike each other, the harder they are to rate against each other on a single scale. Amazing Quest is a lot less like the other things in this IFComp, and there are tons of other things. My appreciation for it stands out on some other limb of the tree that I probably can't see if I stand so I can see the other hundred limbs all at once. In life, I encourage anyone to go more towards any game and stand there, rather than standing out in the tower/bungalow/semi-detached house of yourself and looking in with unnecessary suspicion. This isn't the worldview I endorse just for Amazing Quest, it's the one I try to endorse for any game. I probably fail myself sometimes, but that'll always be the dream.

IFComp 2020 review: Alone by Paul Michael Winters

 'A well-implemented parser game is a joy for ever.' - Keats

This will be my last IFComp 2020 review.

Alone, by Paul Michael Winters, is an adventure of survival set in a sparsely populated post-apocalyptic world. The initial situation of having your car break down out on the road leads gradually (but not too gradually) into a series of dense and satisfyingly overlapping puzzles, especially of the mechanical variety. With its keys, locks, recalcitrant security doors, fuseboxes, circuits and deserted environments, Alone's puzzlebox reminded me most of the Resident Evil games. Alone also steps into the equivalent IF tradition of the Resident-Evil-type game, though pointedly without gunplay, shooting or much violence at all. I'm now finding it harder to think of other similar parser IF games than I expected; there's Divis Mortis, and, with a supernatural spin added, One Eye Open. Calm has deliberately very fiddly mechanics in a post-apocalyptic world, but not any bogeymen if I recall correctly. Alone has The Infected. Zombies if you prefer.

Alone's puzzles are broadly familiar in the adventure game aesthetic, but that doesn't  matter when their execution and interweaving are as solidly performed as they are here. That doesn't mean the game's perfect – a couple of the most difficult actions only accept one very specific phrasing, and I had to use the walkthrough to get through those parts. But otherwise, there's consistent logic to all the mechanics. Alternate solutions to problems are considered by the game and well-excused. Nearly successful attempts on puzzles give feedback to point the player in the right direction. Irrelevant objects fob the player off to avoid time-wasting. These standards are maintained for the game's duration and that is very good work.

A few spoilers if you read on:

IFComp 2020 review: The Place by Ima

The Place by Ima is a short (5 minutes) Twine story that asks for some typed user input.

Due to the Twine's size, my whole review below must be considered a spoiler.

IFComp 2020 review: For a Place by the Putrid Sea by Arno von Borries

For a Place by the Putrid Sea (PS from now on) is a parser game sequel to Arno von Borries's remarkable and demanding 2015 IFComp debut parser game Gotomomi. No knowledge of the former is necessary to play, but my memories of it did help me tune back in to its gameplay style and aesthetic, which extend into the latter. Gotomomi's PC was a teenaged girl who was sharp with both street smarts and intellect. Her goal was to scrounge up the money to buy a train ticket out of the seedy Gotomomi docklands area of Tokyo. In PS, she returns a few years later, fleeing some unspecified shadiness in Manila and looking for a place to live.

Gotomomi was a large, quite open and difficult game of great mechanical and cultural detail. It offered many monetary paths through its world (e.g. the ability to take on and complete different jobs and to haggle over prices) and a lot of optional experiential content. Some sequences were implemented with microscopic granularity, for instance the (in)famous timing-critical fish-bucket-carrying challenge, which I described as a kind of Tetris and which marked the point at which I stopped playing due to feeling overwhelmed in general. The game was a very impressive construction, but fans and onlookers alike admitted it was not the kind of project to clean up in the context of IFComp.

The arrival of this sequel suggests to me that Borries likes the original game, wants to revisit its world and reinforce it, and maybe address some of the criticisms levelled at the original.

I travelled better and further in PS than I did in Gotomomi, but again, I didn't make it to the end. PS is definitely a more player-focusing game than its predecessor. The geography is tightly gated so it shouldn't take the average player long to acquire a clear goal or two, and the catchment area for exploration and solutions is more localised. The heroine Ayako again finds herself dealing with a range of shady and eccentric residents of Gotomomi – amongst them a very non-community-minded landlord and that guy who runs the fish factory – as she seeks sources of money and behaves quixotically.

Minor spoilers beyond this point.

IFComp 2020 review: SOUND by Cynthia P

SOUND itself is sufficiently small (for me, a few minutes per play) that my whole review amounts to a spoiler. Therefore, don't read on if you don't want to know about this text-on-black Twine before going into it:

IFComp 2020 review: The Brutal Murder of Jenny Lee by Daniel Gao (The game is by Daniel Gao, not the murder!)

IFComp 2020 is on now, so it's an inspiring time. You can find the 100ish entries plus the instructions and rules for voting on them at the IFComp website. There's also a helpful/informative/motivational video you can watch on YouTube, by Victor Gijsbers, called How to be a judge in the IF Competition. I will be reviewing some games here in my blog as my time, energy and health allow. My reviews will probably be detailed, but without major spoilers (revelations, twists, solutions, ending details). If I want to talk about those things, I'll put it after a jump break. That said, my level of general detail tends above average. If you are ultra spoiler-averse, you shouldn't be reading strange reviews before playing the games they address, especially mine, and it's always your own fault for doing so the moment you experience spoilage. It definitely isn't mine! Disclaim, disclaim!

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I like to kick off my IFComp experience of a year with the playing of a parser-based horror game that I expect will tickle my fancies. In this year's entries list, I definitely could not go past the title The Brutal Murder of Jenny Lee (hereafter referred to as BM) by Daniel Gao. It's not actually a horror game, and I should point out that it correctly bills itself as a mystery. Its blurb also indicates that sci-fi (time travel) is involved. It doesn't dwell on its adult elements, so references to sex and violence are at the level of any restrained modern whodunnit.

BM took me about an hour to complete, and I was impressed by its interwoven layers of mystery, reality and narratorship, even as the gameplay remained straightforward look, read'n'search throughout. The issues of the PC/narrator split and narrator reliability get a triple workout here. The player initially doesn't know who they are, or why they're investigating Jenny's murder back in 2003. A bold-text-voiced narrator issues instructions that initially seem to intrude on the prose in real time, indicating that the player is under surveillance. Yet that narrator also alludes to having their own problems with another entity. I see BM's sci-fi factor landing individually with different players, but I think the whole is grounded by the specificity of Jenny's world. She was a 17-year-old Chinese immigrant to Canada, was academically pressured by her mum, and lived her teen life in rounds of the band room, the library, and the ACE Tutoring Agency. In the best narrative tradition of the murdered, she also kept secrets.

The whodunnit element presents a decent catalogue of speculative possibilities for the game's size. It's fuelled by the details of Jenny's life, one that evokes some typical migrant experiences but also has enough texture to give Jenny individuality. The way the player experiences her world is as retrospective "recordings" of her most-frequented locations, devoid of people but rife with intimate notes, diaries, library cards, signs and messages on computer screens. The rooms are full of stuff, so much so that even when a lot of objects are "real" (implemented) players are still likely to bounce off the ones that aren't. Weird implementation or under-implementation – and almost no synonym support - are typical shortcomings of the Quest engine, and they're present here. Ninety-five percent of the time, you don't need to guess verbs in Quest games, but when you do, you're in trouble; the walkthrough got me through two such bits in BM. Nevertheless, compelling forward progress and little mysteries come thick and fast.

I was also struck by a lot of the physical environmental details in this game. The letters cut out from cardboard spelling "Asian American Heritage Month" in the library, for instance, or the markered masking tape instrument labels in the band room. The accumulation of these sorts of observations conjured the atmospheres of schools and libraries of my past.

In retrospect, BM seems to mix some unusual elements, but then again I've got a feeling this kind of thing is more common than I think. (For instance, in the Young Adult genre. I just had a flash of the novel Slide by Jill Hathaway.) Ultimately, I liked the Jenny's World elements best, and I see how the sci-fi elements facilitate the exploration of her world in a prying, adventure-gamey way that would otherwise be realistically impossible. In fact, it occurs to me I used almost the same mechanism for exploring a character's past in my contribution to the game Cragne Manor. Rough edges and implementation troubles aside, BM is novel and ambitious, often well-observed and delivers an involving story with elements of cultural specificity.

The author's note recommends playing BM offline by downloading the PC-only Quest app. This is how I played, and based on my personal and anecdotal experiences of both the Quest system and textadventures.co.uk website, I'd say: if you can play offline, don't muck around. Play offline. However, if you can only play online, then you can only play online.

Click below to read my spoilering thoughts on the game's ending.

IFComp 2020 Music Prize info

This post offers a few more details about the IFComp 2020 prize I'll be offering than will be able to fit on their screen.

The prize is a music commission. I'll compose and produce something for you, or derive something from unreleased recordings I have if they're the ideal match, for your chosen purpose.

I specialise in instrumental and electronic music, but can do or wrangle many styles and things, so long as you don't want me to supply vocals.

For last year's picker of this prize, I composed a theme song for the new version of his show opening:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWppNq8N0kg

Here are my Restrictive Clauses!

• For non-commercial use, the purpose can be almost anything. For commercial use, the piece can contribute to some creative project you've made or are making. I can decline if the purpose is hazardous, inscrutable or commercially murky, etc.
• Length is a limitation, but up for reasonable negotiation in context. For instance, some electronic or ambient music can be made quite long in the same time it would take to produce a shorter piece in some other kinds or genres. Composing to vision also takes more time.
• If you pick this prize, you have to call it in within a year.

Links to my music

• My long-term electronic music project is Aeriae:

https://aeriae.bandcamp.com/

( Peril Triage is my most recent EP. DE is a live set recording. Victris is my most recent album.)

https://aeriae.com/

• Some other pieces I've made in different genres can be found on the following Bandcamp page:

https://wadeclarke.bandcamp.com/

of which, the ones listed below were actually for IF games:

Black Giant (sci-fi theme)

Andromeda 1983 (C64 style in-game)

Kerkerkruip (Diablo-esque)

Leadlight Gamma (horror, eclectic)

Ghosterington Night (cheesy spooky)