"And tomorrow will be beyond imagining."

I took some of my holiday time to re-read The Dark is Rising. It's still good. Shorter than I remember.

Prompted by nothing but the season, I began to wonder: what sort of game might be made of this book?

It must be twenty years since I last read through The Dark is Rising. It was written in 1973, long before fantasy -- much less children's fantasy -- became the battle-hardened marketing category we know today. The devouring gyre of media resurrection has almost entirely overlooked it. (The 2007 movie was reviled by absolutely everybody, as far as I can tell, and vanished in a knot of shame.)

So perhaps nobody has even considered the idea of transforming the story into interactive form.

Cragne Manor is available to play

Cragne Manor, the absurdly monumental and monumentally absurd collaborative tribute to classic horror IF, is now available to play.

I mentioned this back in June:

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

The project was organized by Ryan Veeder and Jenni Polodna as a twentieth-anniversary tribute to Anchorhead. Anchorhead is Michael Gentry's seminal work of Lovecraftian IF. I played it twenty years ago (obviously) when the revival of IF was a new and shining star in the sky. (Michael Gentry has now released an updated, polished, illustrated version of Anchorhead; you can buy it on Steam and Itch. The original release remains free to play at IFDB.)

I remember Anchorhead fondly, and so, as it turns out, does everyone else. Eighty-four people showed up to contribute rooms to Cragne Manor. The author list includes many of the great names of interactive fiction -- including Michael Gentry.

It's glorious. It's a mess. It's a glorious mess. You have to understand: Cragne Manor was built exquisite-corpse style. Each author worked independently, not knowing what any other author was doing. Ryan and Jenni designed the underlying map, and handed out assignments like "your room must contain a library book" or "your room must have a puzzle that requires object X and reveals object Y."

Ryan and Jenni have labored mightily to compile all the contributed source code together. Inform 7, and IF design techniques in general, work best with a unified vision. (This is why IF-inspired MUDs always felt patchy and underimplemented.) If you ask eighty-four people to design rooms without even talking to each other... well, which do you mean: the iron key, the iron key, the rusty iron key, the iron key, or the large iron key? For a start. The organizers have done amazing work just to get the thing playable from start to finish.

The result, inevitably, is a wild mish-mash of tone, difficulty, and style. That was Ryan's grand vision; that's what he got. To quote the introductory note:

This resulted in a game that is ridiculous. The world the authors created is inconsistent and often nonsensical. Commands that are necessary to progress in one room might not work anywhere else. Many of the puzzles are, by ordinary human standards, deeply unfair. By ordinary human standards, this is not a good game.

Except I disagree; it's a great game, for what it is. It's a grand collection of vignettes by the biggest collective of IF authors ever gathered in one fictional Vermont town. It's a demonstration of varied styles, varied approaches to puzzle design, and varied takes on the idea of "Lovecraftian/Anchorheadian game". It's creepy and funny and gross and poetic. It's got simple rooms and inordinately complex rooms. It's got bugs. (There will always be bugs.)

It's also... well... enormous. I said that already. This thing will swallow teams of experienced IF players for weeks -- if you can find a team of experienced IF players who aren't on the author list. Or even if you are on the author list! I've only seen the first little bit; I have no idea how to reach my own room. The playtesting group took several weeks to finish the game, and that was working together.

And yet, somehow, Cragne Manor hangs together. I have no idea how. Maybe because IF games always feel like a strangely jointed reality -- little self-contained rooms floating as bubbles on a map. We're used to filling in the gaps and visualizing a world. Somehow, even when the landscape shifts surreally from one room to the next, the world is still there.

If you have ever had any love of interactive fiction, give Cragne Manor a look. It's a cross-section of my world for the past twenty years.

System Syzygy

Last week someone passed me a reference to System Syzygy, a new free-to-play puzzle game.

A motley crew (of autonomous programs), a peaceful (if perhaps mysterious) mission, and no enemy vessels for lightyears around—what could possibly go wrong? Just about everything, as it turns out. [...]

System Syzygy is a story and a puzzle game, in the style of Cliff Johnson's classic Macintosh games The Fool's Errand and 3 in Three, and of Andrew Plotkin's System's Twilight.

Naturally, this was a startling thing for me to run into! And at the same time, it's bizarre for me to be startled by it! After all, this is exactly what I did 25 years ago (!) when I started planning System's Twilight. I looked at a game, decided the world needed more of that, and started hacking.

As you can see, System Syzygy is a pretty sharp riff. The writing style is... okay, I'll admit this: after I started playing, I pulled out my original design notes to see if Syzygy's author had lifted my lines. He hadn't! He's just got a darn good handle on my style circa 1993.

The most disconcerting part (to me!) is that it's vintage DOS graphics instead of classic Macintosh. Totally different palette. But we'll always have Chicago.

The puzzles, mind you, are entirely original. I haven't played through the whole game, but so far I've seen a nice mix of grid puzzles, letter and symbol puzzles, and word puzzles. It's in the same general domain as SysTwi and the Cliff Johnson games. Like all those games, it's inevitably uneven in difficulty. That is, a given player will find some puzzles comfortable, some easy, and some awkward. Players won't agree which is which, though.

Syzygy also has a metapuzzle element, in the explicit style which 3 in Three had (and SysTwi did not). Each solved puzzle leaves a word or pattern on the screen, and (I expect) these will come together as clues in a final metapuzzle. As I said, I haven't gotten to the meta yet, but I got a delightful Cliff Johnson buzz from seeing the clues pop out. If you're not me, you will get a delightful Zarf buzz from seeing the whole thing!

Unlike its forebears, Syzygy is free from the get-go. You can play it for free, and the source code is available under an open-source license. (Art assets included. It's written in Rust, apparently.)

Recommended. Keep the faith, kids.

Cyan news updates, late 2018

We've gotten a trickle of various Cyan-related news this week, so I figured I'd make a post out of it.

The Myst 25th anniversary collectibles (the book-boxes and inkwells) have been delayed due to a late-caught manufacturing problem. (And the fact that shipping from China is just slow.) We haven't gotten an updated delivery date, but no sooner than February. The DVDs will arrive much sooner, perhaps by the end of this year.

Cyan has also announced a new publishing arm, Cyan Ventures. The idea is to partner with other studios creating VR narrative games. Their first release will be Zed, an adventure game developed by Eagre Games. Zed ran a kickstarter a couple of years ago (which I backed). They haven't had a lot of visible motion since then, but this announcement puts them back on the front burner. Zed is targeted at a Spring 2019 release date for PC, Rift, and Vive.

It's not completely clear what "publishing arm" means here. Normally we think of a game publisher as providing development funding and marketing contacts. But Cyan, by their own admission, "doesn't have huge amounts of cash lying around". (Or they'd be spending it on Firmament!) So I'm putting this deal down to sharing of marketing and distribution expertise, and leveraging Cyan as a prestige game brand. In unofficial chat, Eagre folks talk about Cyan's contacts with major game distribution networks. Plus it gets Cyan's name back in the headlines -- that never hurts.

Zed is a natural first project for Cyan Ventures. Chuck Carter, the designer, is a Cyan alumnus from the original Myst era. We'll see if this turns into a steady stream of Cyan-published adventure games from other studios.

And speaking of Firmament, what's up with that? Cyan hasn't made any public announcement since March. There's been no indication that they've staffed up to a full production team. However, they continue to talk about Firmament as a live project. They exhibited at GeekGirlCon just a couple of weeks ago, and I hear they said that Firmament was still in development. But there wasn't a lot more detail than they had back in March.

My sense is that they're still in the "concept sketches and design documents" stage, and will be until real funding arrives. But I'd be happy to be proved wrong.

Finally, a neat bit of fan art. On one of the Myst fan Discord servers, user Rasi Talon has been experimenting with a (proprietary) deep-learning image tool to scale up images from Riven. You can find them in this imgur album.

Four years ago in planetary exploration

I learned this weekend that Extrasolar is being shut down at the end of the month. Extrasolar is a weird little alternate-reality web game about exploring an alien planet. I blogged about it back in 2014, the year it launched.

The creator has written a brief postmortem.

If I had to name just one thing that prevented Extrasolar from being financially self-sufficient, I'd say this: We built an unmarketable experience. [...]

Once we got players through the front door, most were hooked. But every marketing campaign we tried fell flat. In a way, it's been comforting to hear fans tell me repeatedly — at festivals, through emails, and on our forums — "It's just too far ahead of its time."

(-- Rob Jagnow, Extrasolar Postmortem)

Let's run with that. If Extrasolar was ahead of its time in 2014, when is that time? Now?

In one sense, no. 2018 is a terrible time to launch an experimental, hard-to-explain indie game. (Or rather, it's a terrible time to spend significant money building one!) The market is full of highly-tuned experiences in comfortably familiar niches, or slight variations of those themes. Nobody has to search very hard to find a game they like. A few wild ideas will become unexpected hits, as they do every year, but the percentage of wild ideas that succeed has only slid lower since 2014.

But we do have a bit more vocabulary, and I don't think Extrasolar is as unpitchable as it was back then.

What is Extrasolar? It's real-time interactive fiction. We can say that because Lifeline introduced that genre in 2015. I don't mean Lifeline invented its gameplay mechanics de novo -- nothing does that -- but that was the big hit which spawned imitators and a category label. Extrasolar is graphical and exploratory, rather than branching and textual, but it shares Lifeline's rhythm: you make requests of a fictional distant partner and wait through a "realistic" delay for a reply.

Another obvious comparison is No Man's Sky, a game centered around procedural generation and rendering of alien worlds. Extrasolar doesn't offer infinite variety -- you explore one small island -- but the alien species are algorithmically generated. The characteristics of each plant, for example, are derived from the simulated environmental conditions of its location. (Sheltered or windy spots, sandy or rocky soil, and so on.)

The label "walking simulator" existed in 2014, but I'm not sure anyone used it to describe Extrasolar. It's not a bad fit, though. (Substitute "rolling" for "walking".) This is a game where the primary verb is Look At A Thing. If that doesn't advance the story, look closer or move on and look elsewhere.

And finally the label I started with: alternate reality game. That's easy to pick out. The game launched with an in-character web site (exoresearch.com) and an equally in-character opposition site (exoleaks.com, although that one doesn't seem to have survived). ARG-ish hacking and out-of-the-box exploration isn't the core of Extrasolar, but it's a nice frame which adds flavor to the experience.

So does that add up to a pitch? A walking simulator on wheels, as real-time IF, with procgen alien species and a ARG shell? Okay, that's trying too hard. My point is just that we have a larger ecosystem to compare Extrasolar to. Maybe the next wacky idea in this space will do better.

The post-mortem promises that when the game is taken down (December 1), it will be replaced by an archive that tells the story in static form. The creative work, the videos and emails that you received through the story arc, won't entirely disappear from the world. Good for him.

A Nebula Award category for game writing

A couple of years ago, SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, announced that game writers were eligible to join. Or, I should say, writers were eligible to join SFWA on the basis of game writing.

I thought that was pretty cool, so I applied. It turned out that Hadean Lands qualified for both the word count and royalty level requirements. So for the past couple of years, I have been a card-carrying SFWA member. Okay, I never got a card, but never mind that.

Yesterday, SFWA took the next step: game writing is now eligible for the Nebula Awards. The Nebulas are one of the major awards in science fiction and fantasy.

(The Hugos are more famous, particularly in the last couple of years. I've argued for a videogame Hugo category, but the Worldcon people who run the Hugos have not made a move in that direction.)

The summary of the Game Writing Nebula:

• The award goes to an "interactive or playable story-driven work which conveys narrative, character, or story background." This is intended to include both videogames and table-top roleplaying games.
• The Nebulas cover science fiction, fantasy, and related fiction genres. I expect this will be interpreted broadly; horror and alternate history are traditionally considered siblings of SF.
• Any size game is eligible. The lack of a word count requirement means that entirely nonverbal games are also eligible (think Journey).
• A game is eligible in the year that it is first fully published in English or in the US. Demo, beta, and early-access releases don't count. A new release of a game can be eligible in its own right if it is a substantial update or change.
• Since this is a writing award, a game must have at least one credited writer to be eligible. All credited writers will get certificates.
• Nebula nomination and voting is done by SFWA members, but you don't have to be a SFWA member (or even have heard of SFWA) to have your game nominated.
• The official Nebula rules are here.

I'm happy to say that I took part in the discussion around these rules. We tried to fit them to the realities of the videogame and tabletop markets.

This is all pretty cool. Hopefully it's part of a general trend towards recognizing games and interactive narrative as primary parts of the cultural canon.

Vote: USA 2018 edition

You have heard all of this before.

"Both parties are equally bad..." I said that in my first adult election year. Bush (senior) vs Dukakis. I didn't vote. I was eighteen years old. I was stupid and it was a stupid thing to say.

"If voting could change the system..." Yes, there was the gerrymandering and the vote suppression. But if Trump voters hadn't shown up to vote, Trump wouldn't have won. That was the story of 2016. They showed up.

"It's too late..." Yes, in many respects it is too late. The GOP has the Supreme Court for a generation. They have the climate change that they fought so hard for. 2018 happened and it sucked. The question is, what is it not too late to hold onto?

"This is the most important election..." That one's true. This is the most important election in your lifetime. 2016 was the most important election in your lifetime too. 2008 was the most important election in your lifetime. So were 2004 and 2000. We didn't lose all of them.

If you're an American voter, you need to vote. You've heard it before. People have been shouting it at you for months. Years. I have nothing to add, no magic argument.

I've already voted. (Massachusetts had early voting.) I have nothing left to do except wait, and post this. Posting this isn't anything. Posting this makes me feel futile and helpless. I realize you're the choir-iest crowd I could preach to. But I have two years of shared fear and despair pooled in my guts, same as you, and I have to say something. I can't leave it unsaid.

Vote on Tuesday. Against the fucking white supremacist party.

Restless released in EctoComp

I don't post much about my day job, but we have something to show off this week.

You've been haunting old Mrs Fagles for decades. Now she's sold the house, and the new owner's moved in. Sylvie's broke, bad at plumbing, and anxious about everything. And with a living, breathing, fretting roommate, how are you supposed to rest in peace?

Drink blood. Set fires. Tell lies. Give advice, loan out a wedding dress, reclaim your true name. Remix your dialogue options to reflect your mood or dig deeper into the topics that interest you.

Restless is a short menu-based narrative game by Emily Short. Emily built it using Spirit AI's Character Engine tool. The visual design and Unity interface were provded by Tea-Powered Games. Restless is part of EctoComp, a Halloween-themed game jam.

I didn't design Restless, but I'm one of the people who supports Character Engine. I built a lot of the logic which handles menu-based games of this type.

It's pretty cool. (I do say myself.) You may think it's a familiar Twine-style choice game, but look again. You can select a mood and/or topic; the current menu options are biased to include options which express your selections. You can freely adjust the mood and topic controls at any time, and the menu will be "re-rolled" to match. It's a nifty way to explore a conversation space.

SpiritAI has a beta program for IF authors who want to experiment with this tool. If you're interested, check out our web site. (There's a "sign up" link up top.)

Myst, 25 years old

The history books say that Myst was originally released for Mac and Windows on September 24th, 1993. Or, at least, that's what Wikipedia and Mobygames say. Let's call it accurate for the purposes of wearing the party hat.

The anniversary collectible box-set is still in progress, but all the games are now available on GOG -- including Myst 3 and 4, which were out of print until now. As I write this, Myst 3 and 4 have not yet appeared on Steam, but Cyan indicated (in a KS update) that those games should be out for general release today. (KS backers have already received Steam keys, and I've replayed a bit of Myst 4 on Steam already.)

Fans should also take a look at the Myst community rewards page, which has some of the downloadable goodies that were promised as stretch goals. These include 3D printable models, scans of concept art, and design documents.

Here's one of the 3D models, which I had printed via Shapeways. If you want a copy, you should use my cleaned-up model. I printed it in steel, 8 cm high; cost me $100.

Another anniversary announcement: Mysterium, the Myst fan convention, is planning a Global Mysterium Day -- people will organize local fan get-togethers in as many cities as possible. The date is not set, probably spring of 2019 sometime. There's a mailing list, particularly if you're interested in hosting.

Mysterium itself will no doubt be back with its regular convention in late summer.

And finally, let me give a quick boost to The Five Cores Remastered, a Kickstarter which is now in its final day. The Five Cores was a Myst-inspired low-budget adventure game from 2012. The author now plans to update it to the Unreal engine, improve puzzles, make the environment more dynamic, and generally improve things.

I never played the original release -- I didn't have a decent Windows machine in 2012. So I'm excited about having a new "as it was meant to be" version available. As I write this, the Kickstarter is barely $100 short of its goal, so let's not let that wipe out.

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 »

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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.

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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.

Least interesting update ever

Zarfhome now has a privacy policy. So does my personal web site. They're short.

Ironically, neither policy applies to this blog, because this blog is hosted by Blogger.com (which is Google). When you read this blog, or comment here, your interactions are governed by Google's privacy policy. Google doesn't pass any personal information along to me, unless you explicitly leave it in a blog comment.

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UPDATE to add: Google has provided a notice for Blogger-hosted blogs, but I don't think it's showing up. Here it is:

This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic. Your IP address and user-agent are shared with Google along with performance and security metrics to ensure quality of service, generate usage statistics, and to detect and address abuse. Learn more.

A partial solution to the Slack problem

A couple of months ago, you may recall, I wrote an open letter to Slack saying that they shouldn't shut down their IRC and XMPP gateways.

Slack sent me a nice reply saying that they had passed it along to their product team. I am sure that their product team read it, and nodded sympathetically, and then didn't change their minds. Slack is still shutting down those gateways on May 15th -- tomorrow.

This is not great, but I have a partial solution.

"...Holy beefwaffles, Zarf just wrote a Slack client?!" Yes! Sort of. Ish? I wrote a very small Slack client -- the most minimal app that could still be called an interactive Slack client.

Before I describe it, let me point out a few alternatives that already exist:

• slackcat: Post snippets to Slack from the command line.
• slack-term: A terminal-window Slack client.
• terminal-slack: Another terminal-window Slack client.

These are cool! They are not quite what I want. I want something that will sit in a terminal window and show all my favorite Slack channels -- just the important ones -- in chronological order. Yes, interleaved.

The point is that I never have to type in this window; I can just keep an eye on it. Conversations flow by. If I want to jump in, I can type a reply there (to any channel).

Of course, my client doesn't handle any of the fancy Slack features like threading, reactions, search, or file attachments. It's just a plain text stream. If I want to do anything more than that, I fire up the official Slack client and go to town.

This sounds like extra work. Okay, it is extra work. But I like having lightweight and heavyweight solutions to the same problem. I use three web browsers, for example, from plain-text Lynx up to full whiz-bang Javascript-enabled Safari.

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But you're not here for my computer usage habits! You're here for the Slack client, so here's the repository. (Python3 code.)

Even more Myst Kickstarter stuff

A couple more things happened this week. I know, I know, I promise my next post won't be Myst-related! But for now...

On Wednesday, Cyan announced a stretch goal. But it's not pegged at a dollar level. Rather, they want to hit 3750 backers at the "Writers" tier. That's the $250 level, where you get the metal inkwell and pen (modelled after the one in Gehn's office in Riven). That tier now also includes the three old Myst novels and additional Riven design documents. If they hit the 3750 mark, they'll throw in the Uru soundtrack for all backers, plus some bonus tracks.

When they posted that, they had 1875 backers at that level; they're aiming to double that. Fans seem to be into it. In the past two days, the KS has gotten 450 new backers (or upgrades) to that level, and about $125K in new donations -- an impressive spike.

(They were also featured on the Kickstarter home page for a day, which certainly helped.)

They're asking for another 1400-ish high-tier backers, which is ambitious. But I'm tempted. (I didn't buy in at that level originally, but for design documents...) I'm also tempted to start speculating on the economics behind the move. Maybe the inkwell has a higher minimum order than they expected? Or the fancy box has a higher per-unit cost, so they're trying to make it up with the inkwell money? I'm just juggling ideas here, I have no way to tell.

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We have a little more solid info, because Rand Miller did a live ask-me-anything session yesterday. I've transcribed a few of his comments here.

Keeping an eye on the Myst Kickstarter

Running commentary on somebody else's project is probably a waste of keystrokes, but I will amuse myself anyway.

The Myst anniversary kickstarter is tootling along nicely, with about two-and-a-half weeks to go. They're up to $1.5M and almost 10000 backers as I write this.

The good news, announced yesterday, is that Mac versions of the games will be available. With some caveats: Myst Masterpiece is "giving [them] trouble", and they probably won't get the Mac versions into the physical DVD package.

The Mac conversions are being done by Codeweavers, so they'll use a Windows emulation layer rather than being native MacOS apps. Sigh, but that's the cost-efficient solution. (To be clear, the Windows 10 versions are themselves going to be some kind of emulation layer wrapped around the original ancient binaries. This project has no budget for any ground-up reimplementation work.)

The other good news, albeit not about this KS, is that the PSVR port of Obduction hits the streets today. Big news if you have a Playstation or get excited about VR! I'm neither, but go for it.

It's instructive to compare the Myst KS with the Obduction KS in 2015. (See KickTraq charts for Myst and Obduction. Gaze only upon the Daily Data tab -- projections will cause you naught but sorrow.)

Obduction finished out at $1.3M and 22000 backers. That means that Myst has already beaten it, but with fewer than half the backers. So we can say that some people will pay a lot for Myst nostalgia and physical artifacts. The most popular reward level is the fancy linking-book package.

Obduction had broader appeal; a lot more people will pay for a brand-new game. But they won't (in general) pay a huge premium for it -- the price level is set by the expectations for software. (Obduction offered a physical box reward tier, but the vast majority of backers just wanted a Steam key.)

Another difference: Obduction's KS had the usual dead patch in the middle of the donation period, but picked up towards the end. Myst, in contrast, kept a remarkably steady $25k flow rate through its first three weeks. (With a spike on 4/19 when they blast-emailed their customer mailing list.) It's only in early May that the pace has slowed. I'm not sure why backers keep trickling in like this. Maybe Myst fandom is highly dispersed, Internet-wise, and there's no common news source they all read?

Or maybe I'm looking at the wrong number. The two kickstarters had similar numbers of backers per day in the middle stretch -- it's just that Myst backers are putting in more money each.

I'm tempted to go off down a side trail of "Should Cyan have done a Firmament kickstarter instead?" (Or in addition.) But there's really not much new to say on the subject. One can reasonably predict that a Firmament KS would look like Obduction -- lots of backers, but relatively few going for the high-level rewards. Remember, the Obduction KS didn't cover all of Obduction's development costs, so this might not be an attractive path.

Anyway, that's the state of the excitement. If the backer curve continues on its current slight decline, the project will come in a little under $2M. If there's a big spike at the end, then higher, but this doesn't seem likely without a stretch goal to generate excitement. (And the company hasn't made any noise about stretch goals beyond "we're thinking about it.")

Other game kickstarters I'm backing or just backed:

• Archives of the Sky: A tabletop RPG book from my IF pal (and coworker) Aaron Reed. It's a GM-less system; a group of players collaboratively create intimate human stories in a epic far-future setting. Think Alistair Reynolds or Iain Banks.
• Paradox: The Rusty Lake / Cube Escape series has been trundling away for years on web and now mobile. I enjoy it, in its creepy and slightly gross way, but it's never been splashy enough to talk about much. Now the designers want to make a film short which is linked to their next game. Transmedia! I have no idea if this is going to work, but I'm down to give it a try.
• Dystoa: Atmospheric walking simulator, what's not to love?
• The Good Life: I've never played a Swery game, but my videogame friends can't shut up about him, so I threw in a few bucks. This KS just wrapped successfully.
• Genesis Noir: This wrapped a few months ago, but I'm still excited about it. Noir tropes at the Big Bang, plus William Blake and jazz. I'm there.

Missing moments in games

This weekend I finally played David OReilly's Everything. (I tried a pre-release build a couple of years ago, but I had trouble with the controller and gave up almost immediately. This time I played all the way through, or at least to what I can call an "ending".)

Spoiler warning: I am about to start talking about the ending ("ending") of Everything, and how it is constructed. I'm going to go into detail. So if your kink is surprises, buy Everything and play through it before reading this. It won't take you too long.

Death of the Author warning: I am about to start talking about the intent of games by seeing how they are constructed. Indeed, I will be making assumptions about how the design evolved. That is: I will be reading games as texts. I realize it's perfectly possible to go find the designer and ask what they intended, or how the game evolved -- but that's not the point here. That is not, as Alan Watts says in Everything's adopted narration, the game we're playing.

Myst 25th-anniversary Kickstarter

Cyan just launched a Kickstarter for a 25th-anniversary re-release of Myst. And all four sequels, newly updated for Windows. And the single-player Uru collection (Complete Chronicles). Myst (the first one) will be included in both classic slideshow and full-3D (RealMyst) forms.

Everything will be available on Steam, but the big prize is a physical collection of discs in a case which looks (of course) like a linking book.

(Regrettably, this is Windows-only. They don't have the resources to update all the Mac ports.)

Cyan has been hinting at this for a few days now. Also, you know, posting to Facebook about it, which goes a bit beyond hinting. But here it is.

So that's the headline. Is there anything interesting to say about it, other than "Back this"?

Obviously, we'd prefer a new game rather than a re-release of some old games. I still have all my old CD-ROMs of the Myst series -- although it's a shaky bet which ones might run on any computer that's not buried in a closet. But Myst 3 and Myst 4 have been out of print for a very long time. This release is a first opportunity for a lot of younger players. I'm rather keen on replaying them myself.

(Yes, 3 and 4 have some obvious flaws, which are running jokes in the Myst fan community. So do 1, 2, and 5. There isn't a one of them that I regret playing.)

The more important question, to me, is "What happens to Cyan next?" Recent articles have made it clear that the company is in very tight straits right now. Obduction did not make enough money to fund a new game. In fact, Cyan is still paying for Obduction work, since the PSVR port remains stuck in the pipeline.

So this Kickstarter, if it succeeds, will get some cash into the barrel. But it looks like they're just aiming to raise enough money to fund the production of the physical rewards. (They have, very sensibly, omitted all mention of stretch goals. If the project over-funds, they'll make more of what they've planned.)

Hopefully they've done their spreadsheets right and they'll break even on the rewards. Then they'll have an additional ongoing income stream from Steam sales. I don't know if that will add up to much -- as several developers have posted recently, it's a rough year for narrative games, and re-releases of old games are going to be hard put to compete. But any long tail is better than no long tail.

In the meantime, we'll have nifty memorabilia to fondle.

Why does Twitter allow third-party clients?

In last month's open letter to Slack, I wrote:

(Twitter may not block third-party clients, but it sure wants to discourage people from using them.)

The next shoe in that caterpillar cavalcade just hit the floor:

After June 19th, 2018, “streaming services” at Twitter will be removed. This means two things for third-party apps:

• Push notifications will no longer arrive
• Timelines won’t refresh automatically

That's from a web page, Apps of a Feather, which was just launched as a joint announcement from the developers of four popular Twitter clients. Twitter has responded by "delaying the scheduled June 19th deprecation date" (@TwitterDev, Apr 6) but it's unclear if their new Account Activity API will be sufficient for third-party apps to keep working.

This sucks for me. If third-party clients vanish -- and I see that day coming, soon or late -- I will not be switching to the official Twitter client or Twitter.com web site. I'm not saying that out of principle or anything. I just find the official Twitter experience to be abysmal. I can't do anything with it. It's noisy, it's out of order, and it's full of ads. No.

(Apps of a Feather is hosted by Twitterific, Tweetbot, Talon, and Tweetings. I use Echofon on iOS and Tweetbot on Mac. Echofon hasn't posted or tweeted anything about the issue, which is worrisome in a different direction.)

You might imagine, given my Slack post, that I will now write an open letter to Twitter telling them to continue supporting third-party clients. Sorry; nope; waste of time. Twitter isn't listening to me.

The question isn't why Twitter would drop support for third-party clients. The question is why they've kept supporting them for so long. Remember I just said that the official Twitter experience is full of ads? The clients I use don't show ads. I'm using Twitter ad-free. I am a freeloader! Why does Twitter put up with me?

They've never said, but I have a theory. I believe Twitter sees me as a selling point for their service. Not me, I mean, but people like me: early adopters with a lot of followers, who are seen as important or interesting people to follow. (In one circle or another.) "Influencers," if you will. I am a very small-time influencer, but there are a fair number of such people. Big-name bloggers, pundits, and so on.

We are, I am sure, the biggest users of third-party clients. We started with Twitter early, and we like how early Twitter behaved. (Ad-free, for a start.) We are cranky and unwilling to change our habits.

So for years (my theory says), Twitter has had a problem. They want to keep us early-cohorters around, because their selling proposition for newcomers is "Twitter is full of interesting people." But they don't want newcomers to use Twitter the way we do, because we're free-thinking radicals. Twitter wants newcomers to use the web site, which they have total control over. That's their only hope of getting and staying profitable.

This explains Twitter's weird, half-assed client support over the years. In 2012, they limited how popular third-party clients could get. (So old people could keep using their clients, but it's hard for those clients to acquire new users.) Over the past few years, Twitter has added new features which are not available to third-party clients. (I don't care about those features -- I just want my old-fashioned behavior -- but newcomers will want them.)

The problem with this, of course, is that every year there are more newcomers, and they follow more people who aren't me. Or people like me. Even if I'm right, the early cohort is a shrinking piece of Twitter's selling proposition. One day they're going to just shove us off the boat.

Last week's announcement, and partial retraction, is just another step in that dance. Third-party clients will still work, but maybe they won't refresh as smoothly. Or maybe they will. Nobody knows. Twitter isn't saying, because every year they're a little farther away from caring.

Where does this leave me? Off the boat. I can't use Official Twitter. I'll keep using third-party clients even if they become degraded. (I can use fussy, degraded interfaces for a long time.) If they go away entirely? I guess I lose Twitter.

There will be no Twitter replacement. I mean, there will be no service that is "like Twitter, with a Twitter-sized mass audience, but run with respect for users." You can't get that many users with an open service, because big services are expensive to run, and the only way to make money is to grind up your users for advertising paste.

On the other hand, I don't have a Twitter-sized mass audience. I have about 2500 followers. IF services that I help run, like IFComp and IFTFoundation, are of the same order of magnitude.

I have a Mastodon account: @zarfeblong (on the gamedev.place server). Perhaps the gamedev and IF crowd will migrate to Mastodon. That's not an absurd idea. Mastodon will never become a Twitter replacement, but it might work for my followers. I'm going to stay optimistic. Let's see what happens.

The Firmament demo

This morning, I got to play the demo (or "playable teaser experience") of Cyan's planned next game Firmament. This is the first time it's been demoed in public, as far as I know, and I got in within the first hour of the show. So that's some bragging rights for me!

(Nobody cares about me bragging. Okay.)

Firmament is a first-person puzzle adventure game which Cyan announced as a project three weeks ago. As I noted in my previous post, the game is not yet in production. They're hunting for funding. This demo is all that exists, aside from the teaser trailer on the web site. They brought the demo to GDC to show it off and drum up interest.

This demo is VR-only; they've got an Oculus Touch hooked up for people to play with. The game itself is marked "platform TBD", which is the only thing they can possibly say at this early stage. It's probably fair to say that they're designing it with VR in mind, but that doesn't mean it would be VR-only or even VR-first at launch time. (If it ever gets funded at all, right?)

Anyhow, I will describe the experience. I got myself wired up, figured out how to zap the "play" button, and found myself in an ice cube. Big icy cave full of ice cubes. Then a big brass mechanical fork-thing got in my face and chipped me out of the ice.

(Ryan Warzecha warned me, as the game launched, that a machine was about to make me uncomfortable. Fair enough. Is this the VR equivalent of a 3D movie snowballing you in the face? A shock experience to show off how immersive the tech is, regardless of whether the player needs to be shocked? I'm not complaining here, I'm just saying that if you start your demo by apologizing for it, it might be a sign that you should rethink matters.)

Once de-iced, you figure out how to move around (standard VR teleport) and then leave the room. The next room is a frozen dining chamber with a corpse and a polyhedral drone, which wakes up and starts hovering around your head. (The ghost character in the trailer was not visible in this demo.)

You can grab the drone and stick it into various sockets to open doors and generally activate machines. You can also point at a distant socket, and the drone will fly over and plug itself in. If you raise your hand over your head, the drone will fly back towards you from wherever it is, unplugging itself if necessary.

(The drone pathfinding was simplistic; the thing tends to get lost if you move around a corner. Early demo problems, sure.)

The bulk of the demo consisted of climbing an icy mountain, using the drone to lower bridges and so on. You also get to pull some levers. (VR hand controllers!) It pretty clearly acts as a tutorial; by the time you've unlocked the teleport pod at the end, you've demonstrated all the basic drone interactions. The pod takes you to a mechanical hub chamber (visible in the trailer video) and that's the end of the demo.

In fact, the demo cuts off after five minutes, to give the next fan a chance to play. I didn't make it to the pod myself. But I watched a few other people.

I chatted a bit with Ryan Warzecha and Karl Johnson. Items of note:

The demo represents about two months of work. Yes, Cyan laid off some people last month; they're currently at about ten developers. If they get funding for Firmament, they'll staff back up. Ryan noted that he's been laid off from Cyan three times, and he's always happy to go back when they can afford to hire him.

Yes, the PSVR port of Obduction is still going. (I think they said it was in validation at Sony, but I may be misremembering that.)

As noted on the Myst web page, Cyan has gotten agreements and funding to re-release all of the Myst games (for modern Windows machines). They don't have dates for any of this; they'll continue to make announcements throughout this year. They also have some kind of nice swag in mind, and a 25th-anniversary physical package.

That is, I think, all the news.

As for my own reaction: the Firmament demo looks great. Dusty interiors, snowy exteriors, towering machinery, swirling snowflakes. Cyan has definitely gotten the hang of the Unreal engine, and can use it to produce high-detail worlds in a pretty quick time-frame.

The demo contains only the simplest puzzles, as you'd expect from a tutorial scene. There's no sign of an overarching puzzle mechanic like Obduction's spheres. You just have the drone. I have no idea what they have planned for the game, and they aren't saying.

I am still not a VR convert. The demo was an immersive experience, but it wasn't any more immersive than Obduction or Quern or any of the other games I've played on my (non-gigantic) TV. Or I should say: for me, games on my TV are fully as immersive as VR! That's just how my brain works. I can fall into a TV screen... without getting my head all cramped and sweaty... and run to the bathroom any time I want. So that's how I will continue to play games. You play your way.

More Cyan news as it pops.

A few recent narrative and adventure games

What Isn't Saved (will be lost)

• (Cat Manning)
• Game site

The most important lesson of this game is never put punctuation in your game titles. It leads to confusing tweets.

What Isn't Saved (will be lost) is LIVE!

What if you could resurrect the dead--by rebuilding their memories? Zoe, a neuroscientist, is trying to do just that after her girlfriend Sara's death. But her tech isn't perfect, & difficult choices must be made.

(--@catacalypto)

Title snark aside: WIS(wbl) is a short SF Twine piece about memory and self-definition. It's short enough that I hesitate to talk about it in any detail. But as the blurb above implies, the gameplay is reviewing and interacting with memory fragments.

You have only a few possible interactions. However, the game forces you to balance the consequences in the story (what will I do with each memory?) with the gameplay consequences (memories unlock other memories). And your actions are limited; you can neither see every option nor save every memory in a single play-through; indeed, your attempt to do either cuts against the other. This provides a nice tension and gives you reason to play through several times. It's still a short experience even with that, but it's worth doing it and seeing the range of endings.

(Interest: the author is a friend and I support her Patreon.)

Lisssn

• (Robert Wolff and Knut Müller)
• Game site

Lisssn (three S's) is a new game from Knut Müller, the creator of the Rhem series. He has collaborated with music professor Robert Wolff to create a music-education adventure game.

Sadly, the combination doesn't serve either element as it deserves. I feel like both designers were holding back. Probably they thought that really difficult music puzzles would turn off adventure gamers, and really intense adventure puzzles would frustrate people interested in the music theory.

The problem is that the Rhem series is all about intense adventure puzzles; that's what Müller has going for him. You play a Rhem game by obsessively looking at everything, from every angle, and noting down everything you see. It's a uniform puzzle space: everything is a clue, and there's a clue everywhere you could possibly look. Lisssn has some of this dense clueing, but it also has long empty corridors and connections that lead nowhere. You can't skimp on the obsessive peering around, but it's not consistently rewarded either.

Similarly, the music theory is simplified almost to the point of nonexistence. You have to listen to and repeat some note sequences, which only ever span two or three pitches -- low/high or low/medium/high. And there are some rhythm sequences, which only cover short/long beats. I'm not pining for the Myst organ puzzle -- we all agree that was annoying! But when the game is about sounds, you expect a little more depth. Not difficulty, but depth.

They throw in a bit of music history and instrument recognition as well. (Entirely within the Baroque period; don't expect electric guitars or synths.) The history puzzles are the most inexplicable: you need the birth and death dates of four Baroque composers. You are supposed to search the game obsessively for these dates -- looking at tombstones, solving riddles. At one point you have to solve a puzzle to get an item to reveal a riddle which gives you partial information about Henry Purcell's lifespan.

Or you could spend fifteen seconds Googling it: 1659-1695. You can't call that a spoiler, it's like knowing Morse code. This is puzzle design in these modern times (let's say, the past 15 years); you assume that common information is a freebie. I am honestly befuddled how Lisssn missed that.

Lisssn scratched my puzzle itch, but clumsily. I will continue waiting for Rhem 5.

(I will not complain about the graphical style. If pixels can be retro-chic for years on end, surely low-poly Perlin-noise rock textures can be too. But it may not be your thing.)

(There's another whole post in me about how free-travel 3D games have out-competed fixed-node fixed-angle games like Rhem and the original Myst. Because looking around and seeing stuff in your peripheral vision is fun, whereas clanking 90-degree turns are not. But I've already gone on way too long.)

Butterfly Soup

• (Brianna Lei)
• Game site

I enjoyed this but did not fall in love with it. It is on the less-interactive end of the visual-novel spectrum; you spend most of your time clicking through dialogue, and when you do hit a choice point, it is often of a lawnmowery nature. (That is, you have N topics to mention or M places on the screen to search, and you get to run through them all. The only question is what order.)

I don't object to this sort of design, but it doesn't grab me like the more-interactive VNs I've tried. For example, Ladykiller is continually hitting you with story-significant choices and explicit plot branch options. Dream Daddy has more click-through dialogue chains, but still puts the "who do you want to date" question front and center. In contrast, after one run-through of Butterfly Soup, I don't even know whether it's possible to kiss more girls than the ending I reached.

(Note added later: pretty sure not.)

The strong point is the characters, who are wonderfully over-the-top specimens of teenage humanity without ever becoming cartoony or implausible. I can't say how well the game portrays the Asian lesbian high-school experience (I barely understand the straight white guy high-school experience) but it's all convincing, sympathetic, and frequently funny.

The game's worst problem is that "gang of fucked-up kids figuring themselves out" puts it right up against Night in the Woods, which just isn't a fair comparison. Butterfly Soup isn't trying to convey an entire town. Grownups appear rarely, and are faceless caricatures when they do. The focus is entirely on the four protagonists plus a couple of older classmates. That's fine; it's what the game is trying to do.

Really, the better comparison is Lost Memories Dot Net. In that frame, I'll happily say that Butterfly Soup has more zip and narrative tension -- you want these kids to catch hold of their natures and start smoochin'. Without losing the zany energy that's kept them squabbling and yelling at each other through the whole game. And they do that.

Open letter: Slack should not discontinue its gateways

I sent this message to feedback@slack.com today.

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I saw yesterday that you are planning to discontinue your IRC and XMPP gateways. You are making a mistake. You should keep supporting the gateways.

That's the one-line summary. You want to keep reading?

The gateways are a valuable feature and they make Slack more valuable to users. Yes, I'm sure you have charts showing how few users connect through the gateways. And yes, the gateways can't keep up with your shiny new Slack features. But those of us who use the gateways, use them because we like them! They let us Slack in the ways that we get work done. If they vanish, Slack turns into a second-best service.

I don't despise the Mac Slack app. I have it running right now. But -- sometimes I shut it down. This is how I use Slack: a few high-priority channels in my XMPP client, and the Slack app for everything else. The XMPP client is always running; it has my most important chats ganged together in one tidy window. The Slack app is different; it's a busy free-for-all that I peek at when I have a few free minutes.

Today, Slack supports this. I can direct channels where I want them on my screen. It's flexible and it fits me. But you're telling me that in two months, I lose that flexibility. I won't lose access to my chats, but I'll lose the ability to read them how I want.

That's bad. It is a mistake.

Flexibility isn't the only issue. On your explanation page, you say you are "focused on making Slack accessible to all people". Good! Please keep working on that. But then you admit "these changes are just the beginning of our accessibility journey." Doesn't that mean you should keep supporting the mature technologies that people already use?

Similarly, the "creative integrations" you mention. It's great that your APIs support some users' needs. Probably even most users' needs. But that's not an argument for cutting off the standardized mechanisms that people are already using.

Honestly, I think you know this. Your explanation page is written with a tinge of defensiveness. "We're hopeful that [tech] will meet the majority of your needs..." ...but you know it won't meet all of them. Yeah. Your only actual argument for removing the gateways -- as opposed to apologies -- is "to provide a secure and high-quality experience across all platforms." Look: taking away a user's current platform doesn't improve their experience. It is a removal. It takes away the experience they want.

At this point you maybe want to bargain with me (and people like me). You want to say "We'll keep running the gateways for another six months -- or another twelve months -- until Slack's accessibility and APIs are good enough. Then we'll shut them down for real."

No. Still wrong.

There are plenty of web services which demand total control over how users use them. (Think of a little blue bird.) That's their brand; they protect it fiercely.

(Twitter may not block third-party clients, but it sure wants to discourage people from using them.)

I would like Slack to not be that way.

I would like to be able to use Slack however I need. No offense to the emoji, but I don't need emoji to get work done. Slack was valuable before the reaction tags, before the threads, before the shared channels. (I haven't even looked to see what "shared channels" are.) Slack was valuable because it was a simple stream of text messages shared between people. I still use it that way. And that's exactly the format that fits into the XMPP/IRC model!

It's also, by no coincidence, the format which is maximally accessible. A simple linear stream of text messages can be translated into any user interface and any platform -- mobile, audio, you name it. Morse Code if that's your kick. You can pile on all the extra features you like, and yes, a lot of people will use them. Sometimes I will use them. But some people -- maybe, now and then, a lot of people -- will stick to the simple linear stream, because it suits their technology and their needs.

Slack has to keep supporting that simple use pattern. For accessibility, for portability, for flexibility. And if it supports that pattern, it can support IRC/XMPP without much hassle.

That's my argument. Thanks for reading.

Cyan announces Firmament

Everyone around me just started yelling about a new Cyan game, so I have to jump off the bridge too.

Cyan has a teaser site and trailer for something called Firmament.

In their last public chat, Rand Miller said "...we're going to reveal almost nothing about it until it ships." Maybe he was kidding about that, or maybe this is all we're going to get until launch day. (No launch day is listed.) I'd be okay with that.

What we know is the blurb on the site:

The game of Firmament is a resplendent, magical, journey — a monumental voyage through four diverse and curious realms, working in concert with an ever-present, clockwork companion, and the support and instruction of a long-dead, ethereal mentor.

The trailer video shows the clockwork companion (clearly an ancestor of Bit) and the ethereal mentor. And there's some kind of realm portal. Check.

It's notable that this isn't a Kickstarter launch. And the trailer says "a new VR experience". So I'm guessing that Cyan got funding from one of their VR partners. Perhaps Sony, since Cyan posted last summer about their exciting Obduction Playstation deal with new content and so on. (I do not have a Playstation so I haven't seen this.)

They haven't said anything about platforms, or whether this will be VR-only. I'd be surprised if it weren't playable on regular displays, but funding deals can have exclusivity clauses so you never know.

Also, it looks like it's not related to either Myst or Obduction. Except stylistically.

However it comes out, it's nice to see that Cyan is still alive.

---

Followup with more info:

The Spokesman is a Spokane-area paper which is reliable at getting extra information out of Cyan. Their article just went up. Some quotes:

The team has developed what Miller called a working “experience,” similar to a demo, that will be shown later this month at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in an attempt to garner interest and financial backing.

[...] Cyan isn’t using Kickstarter for “Firmament,” Miller said, but rather appealing to backers directly with its package of gameplay that they hope to be able to complete with financial assistance.

“We put all of our ‘Obduction’ money back into that, but ‘Obduction’ hardly pays the bills,” Miller said. “We’re using up our bank money as well, and we’ve gotten to the point where we’re out at this point.”

So the situation is less optimistic than I thought. Or rather, it's all optimism, no money in the bank. Precarious!

I'll be at GDC, so I'll have a chance to try the Firmament demo. (If I can fight through the crowds around it! It's listed as being part of the Indie Megabooth, starting Wednesday.) I doubt there will be any more financial news by then, but if I hear anything, I'll post.

My favorite games of 2017

I started this post as the capstone of my "IGF nominees" post sequence, and then it fell to pieces because I kept wanting to write about games that weren't IGF nominees. Also the Meanwhile release swamped me for a couple of weeks.

If I just call it "favorite games of 2017" I can write about anything I want. Right?

"Favorite game of the year" is an indefensible category. I will not say these games are perfect, only that they did something perfectly. Did something right, with a rightness that felt both surprising and inevitable, beginning to end.

In this post, in no particular order:

• Gorogoa
• Cinco Paus
• Universal Paperclips
• Night in the Woods