Memory Blocks at Different Games 2018

Memory Blocks, the Twine anthology game I mentioned a while back, is showing at the Different Games Arcade! That's the weekend of Oct 13 in Worcester, MA.

Some memories fade. Some memories break. Some memories outlive us.

I have a small chapter in Memory Blocks, but there are many other chapters by a whole bunch of cool people. Plus music, art, and overall production by Ghoulnoise.

I see a bunch of cool people showing games and speaking at Different Games, so I expect it will be a good time. I'll be hanging around, so I'll see you there, if you're there! Look for the green jacket.

(Will I have a new IF work of my own to show off? Depends whether I get more done on the puzzles, the story, or the UI in the next five weeks...)

Incluing and the unreliable narrator: Unavowed's cold open

Usually when I write a game design post, I am careful to explain that I'm not writing a review; I'm talking about specific areas of the game's design. So, you know, when I spend paragraphs judging the player's shadow in The Witness, I'm not panning the whole game.

So that whole disclaimer? Consider it written, because in this post I am going to talk about the first two minutes of Wadjet Eye's new adventure game Unavowed. That's how much of the game I have played to date. Technically six minutes, because I played the opening three times over. Research!

(I am absolutely going to play Unavowed. But openings are their own topic, and I reacted so strongly to this one that it gets its own blog post.)

This is a spoiler, but, look, it's a spoiler for literally the first thing that happens. If you want to stop reading here, no sweat. Play the game, I hear it's good.

A question about Magic the Gathering rules timing

Not a question about card effect timing, but about the timing of the development of the rules!

This nifty article just came orbiting through my Twitter stream, about the history of Magic's rules. It has some delightful quotes:

The timing of spells is occasionally rather tricky. -- MtG rules, Revised, April 1994

Usually, figuring out what happens first in Magic is pretty easy. -- MtG rules, Fourth Edition, April 1995

However, I want to ask about this claim from the blog post:

Which takes us to the end of our journey, 5th edition. 5th was released in march 1997, and at this time professional magic tournaments was thriving. Hence, any ambiguity of the previous rules had been cleaned up or removed. The rules for timing however were more complex than ever.

-- Magnus de Laval, blog post, August 2014

You know what else happened that month? The release of the first big MtG videogame. (MicroProse, March 1997.)

The videogame included most of the cards through Fourth Edition, but operated under the brand-new 5thE rules:

That's because in Shandalar, the rules used are the official interpretations supplied by Wizards of the Coast. These up-to-date rules are ruthlessly enforced, and there is no room for negotiation, argument, intimidation of your opponent, or weaseling your way through loopholes.

Tough luck, all you whiny rules lawyers.

This version of Magic: The Gathering enforces the official Fifth Edition rules.

-- MtG game manual, MicroProse, 1997

I'm not sure when development started on the game. But in 1996 and 1997, the WOTC designers must fielded a steady stream of haggard MicroProse developers asking "But how do you resolve this corner case? How do the timing rules really work?"

My long-held theory is that the clarifications and cleanups of 5thE are not so much because of the tournaments, but rather because of the effort of making the videogame behave consistently.

If you've played any modern board/card game with a computer implementation, like Ascension or RFTG, you know that the computer version quickly becomes "the real version" in your head. The easiest way to answer rules questions at Game Night is to say "The videogame does it this way." So my gut feeling is that MtG must have been the first big example of this.

But I don't know for sure. I only played a bit of MtG in the earliest days; I was never involved with the tournament scene.

Can anybody say more about this development history?

The next MtG rules update, Sixth Edition (April 1999), completely revamped the timing algorithm. Which we can fairly call an algorithm at that point! 6thE spell resolution uses a "stack", in the programming sense. So the computer paradigm obviously had an influence on its development. But that's a couple of years after the change I'm asking about.

IF in pop culture and back again (guest post at sub-Q)

I wax slightly rhapsodic over at sub-Q Magazine.

I just noticed an amusing synchrony. In the late 1970s, when Crowther and then Woods were writing the first parser game, a New Wave SF writer named George R. R. Martin was writing short stories about far-future humanity among the Thousand Worlds. I, very young, was a fan of both. (Nightflyers, 1980, is still a favorite story of mine.) Heliopause was inspired, in part, by Martin’s sense of unbounded human potential set against even vaster, time-swallowing depths of space.

Read more at sub-Q »

---

Another bit of news: Ryan Veeder and Jenni Polodna are organizing a collaborative IF game in honor of Anchorhead.

A strong female character wanders the halls of a decrepit mansion. Her husband is in danger. She has to help him. Each room into which she points her flickering flashlight teems with arcane danger and unspeakable history. Each room has been designed and written by a different author.

Cragne Manor: An Anchorhead Tribute »

They note that the initial response has been "very very positive", so why not make their life even harder by volunteering to write a room yourself? Sign up by July 6th.

You can, of course, buy Anchorhead itself on Steam or Itch.

---

Finally: remember, as if you could forget, that Meanwhile and Hadean Lands are both on sale on Steam (and also on Itch.io) until July 5th.

Meanwhile and Hadean Lands: the summer sale!

That time has come around again: the time when you buy a stack of exciting games which you always meant to try!

(Or "that time when your to-play stack grows out of control", but I shouldn't lead with that, should I...)

What I mean is: Meanwhile and Hadean Lands are both discounted for the Steam Summer Sale! 50% off on Meanwhile, 25% off on HL. The sale runs for two weeks, as is Steam's invariable habit.

If you like your platforms independent and scratchy, both games are also on sale at Itch.IO. Both 50% off there, so that's a bonus for HL fans.

I suspect that most of my regular blog-readers already own both games -- thank you! But this is a fine time to spread the word about interactive fiction and experimental dynamic narrative. You don't even have to say "interactive fiction and experimental dynamic narrative". Just tell your friends about the wacky text games. One of them is illustrated! It's an unbeatable deal.

Enjoy.

Heliopause, Memory Blocks

Announcements time!

Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home, a far-future parser IF piece, has been published by sub-Q magazine!

Heliopause isn't a new work -- I originally wrote it for @party in 2010. It's quite short, but I've always been rather proud of it. My thanks to Stewart Baker for offering to reprint it.

Speaking of sub-Q, I should mention that Anya DeNiro wrote an editorial there about my (even older) short game The Space Under the Window.

Keep an eye out for the next sub-Q editorial, written by me! That will be appearing next week.

Finally, here's a Mysterious Announcement: Memory Blocks!

Some memories fade, some memories break, and some memories outlive us.

It's Mysterious, so I'll just say that it's a Twine anthology project to which I contributed a small chapter. Organized by Priscilla Snow (also of Bravemule). Coming in September.

IF titles: the next generation of generation

Many years ago, Juhana Leinonen wrote an IF name generator which mix-matched the titles of IF games:

• Asteroid Synesthesia Factory
• Ill The O Zone
• Voices of Spoon Planet
• Lethe Hobbit
• The Quest Detective

This is "IF titles created by joining the beginning and end parts of random existing titles," to quote the author. The source code shows what's going on: it's taking a random number of words from the beginning of one title and a random number of words from the end of another, with some tweaks to avoid pulling just "The" or "A".

The result is very convincing. But this is 2018! Not only do we have neural nets, we have plug-and-play neural nets that any bozo can install.

I looked through some of Janelle Shane's blog posts -- she's been doing the lists of Pantone colors, D&D spell names, and so on which you might have seen. Obviously she knows what she's doing and gets excellent results out of her experiments. I do not know what I'm doing, so I probably got sub-par results. But they're still pretty great, so here's a list!

• Hills of Paradise
• Castle of the Impala
• The School of Rock
• The Door Drivers
• The Volvil's Room
• Guttersnipe: Sorcerors
• Color the Demon Adventure
• Vault of Survival
• Il Das Etverra de Joie (Terror 1)
• Playa Alley
• The Dream Whore, Bubble Zefro
• Smast of Imron
• A Beginning of the Princess
• Iramidic Text Adventure
• Space Lust War Tale
• El Sexter
• Blackback
• Friendly Doors
• Shuce-Quest
• Wolf: Spy to grind a codion
• Gris e no pluu
• The House of Zombrit
• The Citch and the Dogs
• The Heather Continences

This is pretty good stuff! I did a little bit of hand-selection, but this is most of one generator run, plus a few extras. (I couldn't resist The Heather Continences.) Most of my editing was to delete real titles like The Cube and All Things Devours.

Okay, so how did I do this? Content warning: the rest of this post is about Python code.