“Dwarf Fortress is really the kind of game that benefits third party viewers most when it’s transcribed and narrated and illustrated, rather than just watched.”
You’d imagine that, at some point, when all things approach infinity, we’ll be able to link Utah Phillips with Zork. The former, a storyteller and a wobbly, seems at least categorically dissimilar enough from the latter, the ur-Interactive Fiction, to avoid easy, triples-formatted, linking.* But I’ve stumbled on evidence to the contrary, in my constant attempts to keep up with the development of what the French refer to as le jeu incroyable: Dwarf Fortress. I’m not sure if it can be explained, or merely described:
On one of the forum threads at DF is a game of interactive fiction being played between a host and his interlocutors. Apparently the eighth installment of a series that, if I remember a-right, may have involved a surrealist examination of death and the afterlife. If you don’t know what interactive fiction is, or the adventure games that came out of it, then there’s not much I can do for you. You’re probably an actuary, or a lawyer, and you may have been the president of your frat*** which pretty much limited your early gaming time to Mario Bros and Zaxxon. Interactive fiction was some of the earliest computer games, like Zork and Adventure. Using text to describe a scene, the game allowed the user to type commands such as “tell Cyclops about Odysseus”, which were interpreted by primitive parsers with spotty results, and were just about the greatest things ever invented. The medium still exists, with IF writers creating strange and ambitious projects like Bad Machine or adventure game writers failing with yet-another-failed remake of Space Quest. But in the mainstream, it’s as dead as buggywhips, and been replaced by bazooka-ladled action games and incomprehensible JRPGs and various other historical flavors of ultra-violence, and Farmville.
All that’s old news, but what’s happening in this forum thread is something I’ve never seen before.**** Instead of coding the game, whether raw or with the various IF utilities available now, the story is being told by a single individual acting as both graphics and parser. Rooms and items are drawn up in advance, posted on the thread, and then a mob of forum-ites argue about what the next step should be (invariably with some rather awful suggestions followed by chastising and community self-policing that labels the originators of such suggestions as trolls) and then the storyteller “parses the commands” (with a few silly results) and posts the new graphics that result from the “player” actions. It’s the re-absorption of a method of digital storytelling back into a very analog and humane medium^ while maintaining the structure and memes of the original (bad suggestions can be disarmed by using the idea of the parser to respond “I don’t understand what you mean by X”). The storyteller as parser is not so alien as one would think–the parsers of many IF games were known and expected to have a personality, often mocking you for your foolish ideas or for your mistakes (and, in many cases, the way that your foolish mistakes lead to your demise). To see it come back and be adopted by an individual outside of the code and embraced by an audience is, well, a sign of something.
*Utah Phillips played Zork! Utah Phillips is the same as Zork! I wonder if exclamation points belong in triples and if they’re handled or if the nerds just see “bang” and don’t even understand that punctuation is useful for more than rogue-like games and procedural code.
**Procedurally developed agrarian landscapes!
***With one notable exception. Hey Riley! Did you hear that AGDI released a version of Quest for Glory II with updated graphics and a pizza elemental???
****Though it may be quite common in the wild, I’m not much of a forum-guy.
^If you’re going to call photoshop and forums “The Digital Humanities” then you might as well call it the Breathing Humanities or the Human-Operated Humanities.
We tend towards influential, fractional exemplars, partly out of necessity (raised to the level of institutions) and partly out of habit (raised to the level of traditions).
Tim Carmody’s very insightful “The Trouble with Digital Culture“, part of CHNM’s Hack the Academy event.
Now that Steve Jobs has firmly stated that Flash can be buried because rich internet applications can be written in “javascript” (a new and exciting “scripted” language that little is known about, except for the fact that Lowes.com has a javascript store finder that crashes my iPhone) and HTML5, I think it’s time to look at the top ten amazing new features available to you some time in 2022, when HTML5 may* arrive!
#10 – HTML5 finally solves that annoying rollover behavior that prevents any Web 2.0 application from running on a mobile interface by getting rid of it entirely. Instead, all mouselike commands will be nested in a <at-steves-whim></whim> tag that will implement shoddy, worthless junk depending on the current mood of populist technocrats.
#9 – HTML5 actually implements full Semantic Web capability, and will implement your very own Semantic Web whenever you’d like, just by giving a #start-semantic-web command. Please note, however, that this is theoretical, as even the Google techs that got Quake working in HTML5 forgot to try this, so while the Semantic Web is now a distinct possibility, it remains as unlikely as it did when it was impossible.
#8 – HTML5 will actually learn to code for you, so that all those times when you neglected to learn how to code and claimed you were just waiting for a really solid open standard will be forgotten because not only will HTML5 teach you to code and learn it for you, it will purposefully make the apps built by code literate losers who learned how to code (albeit in awful, awful languages) run less efficiently out of spite.
#7 – HTML5 contains <ideological> wrappers that allow arguments to be viewed based on their merits, thus solving thousands of years of senseless conflicts.
#6 – HTML5 also contains <wittgensteinian> wrappers that may or may not restore all of those senseless conflicts, just for kicks.
#5 – HTML5 will always render Joan Jett as a young, rebellious hellion, even if the video is of her appearance on The Ellen Degeneres Show. In HTML5, Joan Jett punches Ellen right in the eye.
#4 – HTML5, while technically incapable of restoring your childlike optimism, contains <polyanna> tags that allow you to force your own twisted corruption of it upon others.
#3 – HTML5 contains </terminator> tags that can be used to deactivate killer cyborgs as well as allow Monsanto-engineered crops to produce viable seeds.
#2 – HTML5 also contains <terminator> tags (necessary for compliance) that should only be used by very responsible individuals.
#1 – In HTML5, Soviet Russia finally gets to tag you.
*No really, 2022. Remember, HTML5 is also part of the Semantic Web Zombiepocalypse, so even though its arrival will fix everything, you have to weigh that value against the distinct possibility that, like the Zombie Web, it may never actually get here.
Saw this over at Know Your Meme:
It’s absolutely incredible. The timing necessary to pull this off, and the mastery of the gameplay elements… I can’t believe it’s been around for three years and I’ve never heard of it.
Some days, when you’re working with spatial analytical software, looking for a way to shoehorn techniques used to study bighorn sheep into studying the historic gravities of power, you forget that you’re dealing with some of the most beautiful imagery to have graced the retina. There’s something about radar topography and electron microscopy that reveal shapes and patterns both foreign and familiar. Here’s Canada and the northern United States, round about the Rockies.
North America - 250m Resolution - Albers Equal Area Contiguous
For all of us who find it completely not suspicious at all that everyone at Boing Boing loves Hot Tub Time Machine (starring action spectacular superstar John Cusack, not coincidentally soon to be a guest blogger at Boing Boing, which I wouldn’t have known except they mention it in every post, along with how impressed they are by the cinematic quality of John Cusack Presents Hot Tub Time Machine starring John Cusack) and are intrigued by the idea of “time travel” I direct you to a blog, from the future.
Note the dates, note the prescient information that could only come from someone who actually came back from one week in the future. Or perhaps the blog has become quantum entangled with a stray waveform tabby, and it exists both now and later. Note that Dwarf Fortress Alpha is about to have a new iteration that includes the kinds of features I spent eight years looking for in Nethack (and all I ended up with was a rusty longsword, which is not, thank you very much, a metaphor).
Just finished watching Will Wright’s presentation for the Games for Learning Institute. It’s cleansing, I think, to move from some of the raw intuition that open source types present as social commentary and listen to someone like Will Wright, who’s actually considering the difference between “the social landscape and the material landscape” and has been doing so for years. The talk itself focused on the concept of games and stories as schema, fostering understanding of our world through lessons and cause-effect chains.
Wright obviously has been engrossed in story for his entire career, and during the unplanned delay before the talk engaged with an audience and pointed out that games do not supplant the linear narratives of books, but rather modify and complement them. This comes up at the end of the talk, where he discusses Fractal Entertainment– How modern “properties” or “worlds” are not a single piece of media, but rather multiple expressions (some cinematic, some interactive, some linear, some board game, some RPG). This includes not only top-down licensed expressions but also crowd-driven epiphenomena such as machinima and graphic novels based on Sims gameplay.
Also interesting is the concept of emergence not only within a game but also around a game, where the activity that surrounds, say, Wii Bowling, is as important to the enjoyment and definition of the game as the hardware and software. As Wright puts it, the absurd gesticulations one makes while trying to bowl with a plastic stick. But emergence plays a role outside the story proper, and becomes part of the meta-story, where the story is dissected and used as lesson (Wright notes that Blade Runner is the inspiration for city planners for The Dystopian Future to Avoid) and also as Story deconstructed into components to create what the designer calls “possibility space”. And once that space is created, story emerges from it, to start the dialectical chain all over again.
Of course, story is too narrow, and Wright deals with this by settling on describing movies and books as linear narratives, which is broad enough not only to cover romance novels but also monographs and encyclopedias. The convergence presented by Wright is mirrored by the convergence of high end research, focusing on model building and schema pattern strategies. And while these schemas and models are arbitrary, they allow, as Wright points out, the ability to map the patterns that emerge within possibility space.
So many years of so many toys has left the theorists of the world in flux. That’s why we have so many would-be philosophers with no background in the matter and so many academics struggling to understand their place in society cut loose from the linear narrative. It’s good to see someone like Will Wright, who is knowledgeable and systematic in his understanding of how the digital world and the social world mesh and the new subtleties available as a result of that meshing. And on top of all that, there’s a great story about the Soviet space program accidentally crash-landing in China.
“Dinner for wolves”
It’s hard to tell if there’s such a fragmentation of visual culture that the post-ironic, repurposing crowd exists at a convex location from the materialist/idealistic crowd or if they’re right next to each other but, because of how we project them, they get split in half and floated away on an imaginary ocean. You know, like Greenland when you run a Lambert Asian Conformal Conic.
To muddy the water a bit, I offer this piece of <3000 viewed Youtubedness:
What’s going on here? Is it an attempt to show how absurd dancing is, or to show how absurd arguments are? Or is it just playing a game with highly responsive digital tools (that’s about the only excuse I can imagine for the Brendan Frasier clapping meme) and the actual message isn’t a message at all, other than, “Look, I did something cool with Final Cut!” which is, ultimately, so idealistic as to be childlike, and hence the exact opposite of the ironic implication of much of these memes. I think there’s a serious schizophrenia in modern underculture media production, to the point where I’m no longer sure if anyone is reflecting at all about what they’re producing and how it’s communicated.