“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.”

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  But in the mainstream, it’s as dead as buggywhips, and been replaced by bazooka-ladled action games and incomprehensible JRPGs and various other historical flavors of ultra-violence, and Farmville.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.

In other news, ESRI’s new ArcGIS app reports the area of San Francisco to be 69 square miles, which is wrong, and different from the 79 square miles that it reported on Friday.  Of course, I was in San Diego on Friday, so maybe the reason it gave me a different value was because it was assuming a projection based on my location, which would make no sense.  More likely they’re just ironing out the kinks.  It’s amazing the quality of the junk we’re willing to play with in this perpetual beta test known as Web 2.5.1rc3 while implicitly supporting oppressive regimes across the world, allowed to be all the more oppressive due to the extremely reliable and highly effective surveillance tools and software we’ve developed.

Fellow Stanford digital type Carlos Seligo and I checking out the usability of Flash on an iPad by running a remote client and hosting the Flash app on a nearby MacBook.  This was an impromptu investigation, and so I apologize for not performing a more rigorous and involved test run, or showing off a more engaging Flash application, but given all the fuss about how Flash just wouldn’t work for iPad for stylistic and technological reasons, I have to say I was shocked at how attractive and functional these apps were, given that we’d spent absolutely no effort optimizing them for multitouch.  Even the much-maligned rollover caused no trouble at all (in the case of this test, rollover events were only triggered if your finger left the screen at a rollover point, which is actually rather interesting functionality and I’d love to play with that).

As far as the gross inefficiency of Flash, we were using well-designed and coded apps, and not hacked together ads or other junk, but of course there was no way to test power drain since this was remoting in, so we had to settle for a rudimentary interface test.  I have no stance on Flash video–I don’t use it except to embed Youtube videos and don’t care if it’s replaced by some other video standard, but I think this and other examples of quality RIAs built in Flex and Flash put the lie to the blanket condemnation of Flash as a tool for software development.  As has been said elsewhere, getting rid of Flash is not going to get rid of junk ads or junk websites, it’s just going to result in junk ads and junk websites written in javascript.  That’s no improvement.

Oh, and A Guide To Authorial London would make a killer iPad app–it’s the perfect form factor for it.

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.

Craig Adams put up an excellent essay on the man.

My interview with Dwarf Fortress developer Tarn Adams is up on HASTAC.  I tried to craft a series of questions that would allow Tarn to discuss issues important to various Digital Humanities scholars, and not just a maps-and-games kind of guy like me.  He obliged:

Whether or not a narrative’s representation is effective really depends on what sort of graphics an individual player prefers more than anything, and the time and care put into the narrative are going to matter a lot more than the particular methods used.  Even “@…D” can be evocative if you’ve been stoked with the proper context–it’s the most terrifying D you can imagine.  At the same time, your imagination on the spot in situations like that is limited to what information you’ve been given coupled with the existing archetypes etc. in your head, and an artist’s dragon could be something you wouldn’t normally imagine, and that’s great too.  To some extent, it depends on how much and in what way you want your escapism influenced by the artist, which is a matter of taste.  In Dwarf Fortress, I think the lack of a strict, fixed narrative lends itself a bit more to ASCII to me personally, but that can’t be the basis for any kind of absolute judgment.

#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.

This iPhone 4G menaces with spikes of lawsuit.