Judges' 1999 Spring Reviews


Note: Chad Schultz was allowed to debug "Pillow" before putting it on exhibit at the IF Art Gallery. These reviews are based on the original version entered in the IF Art Show.


Contents:

Michael Gentry's Reviews (Long)
Marnie Parker's Reviews
Lucian P. Smith's Reviews

About the Judges


Michael Gentry's Reviews (Long)


I want to begin this review with one caveat: this is the very first Interactive Art Show that ever was. Furthermore, this is the very first Interactive Art Show that I have ever judged. An inevitable problem that will arise in any such new endeavor is a certain amount of confusion over what, precisely, is expected here, both from the contestants and from the judges. The honest truth is, I didn't really know what an Interactive Art Show *was* until I actually started looking at the entries, at which point it became clear that each entry had itself been written with a different set of expectations already built in. So a good part of my own judging process was spent working out exactly what *my* expectations should be.

I came up with two criteria in the form of two questions.

The first: is it interactive? One phrase Doe repeated several times in her descriptions of this contest is that the entry should explore the "three-dimensionality" of its subject. I took this to mean that the entry should make its subject as real as possible within the command-and-response medium of interactive fiction. Descriptions should be vivid and detailed, the object should be manipulable in many ways, with tailored responses to as many of the "canon" verbs as possible and perhaps a few "custom" verbs specific to the object as well. Ideally I should be able to see, touch, taste, smell and feel the object, pick it up, heft it, read the label on the back, pick at the label with my thumbnail, and so on. Bugs and other technical problems that get in the way of this interactivity are addressed here.

The second question is: is it art? In addition to being interactive, this is essentially an exercise in descriptive writing. The object should be captivating. The descriptions should be not just detailed, but interesting -- I should *want* to keep looking at this object. Prose should be clear and well crafted. Spelling counts. I'm not looking for Pulitzer material here, but there should be something more than, "It's a jar. It's made of glass." Likewise, predictable constructions such as, "The adjective noun verbs the adjective noun in this adjective noun," should be avoided.

These are the guidelines I used when casting my vote. I hope they strike close to what Doe wanted to achieve with the Interactive Art Show.

One last thing: for the sake of grammatic simplicity, I will refer to all anonymous authors in the feminine, regardless of actual gender. One author actually included her name in the game file; I made a point to ignore it and now I can't remember what it was. Likewise, the player will be referred to in the general sense as male. This policy is not open to debate. Anyone taking issue with it will be summarily whopped with That Ugly Stick.


QUICK OVERVIEW:

Best of Show: Crystal Ball.

Not terribly interactive, but more vivid, engrossing, and well executed than either of the other two.

Runner-Up: Pillow.

A decent attempt to create a three-dimensional pillow, hampered by technical problems.

Second Runner-Up: The Possibility of Life's Destruction.

Obscure and rather limited, and some unfortunate originality issues.


FULL REVIEWS:

Crystal Ball.

The player enters a tent in which a crystal ball sits on a table. In the crystal's base is a button; upon pushing this button, the player is treated to an interpretive poem based on one of the 22 major arcana of the Tarot Deck.

Interactivity: Not very. There are only four relevant commands: X BALL, X BUTTON, PUSH BUTTON, and X [whatever scene is currently displayed in the ball]. Most other verbs have not even been implemented: RUB, LOOK IN, and even TAKE BALL will all get you bewildered error messages. Furthermore, the selection of cards is completely random, which means that once you've seen about a dozen, you'll have to push the button repeatedly to get a card you haven't seen yet. ("The World" in particular, for some reason, kept popping up inordinately often). It would have been nice if the cards were flagged so that no card repeats until the entire sequence has been viewed, though this may be beyond the capabilities of ALAN.

Art: The bald truth is, I'm not a poet, and I have no credentials to qualify me as a credible judge of poetry. To me, good poetry is a lot like pornography: I just know it when I see it. However, I can confidently say that this is pretty good poetry. Not the best I've ever read, but pretty good nonetheless. Like, if this author told me she was thinking about submitting some of this to a poetry journal, I'd say go for it. The author uses the interesting device of choosing six key words for each card; "The Hermit", for example, comprises 'lantern', 'lonely', 'path', 'plain', 'repent', and 'time'. Within a poem, each verse is structured around these key words; each word must be used once and only once within each verse. It adds a nice patterned effect. Furthermore, the author clearly knows her way around the symbolism of the Tarot, and usually manages to make an interesting statement about each card. I found "Justice" to be a bit preachy, but "The Tower" and "The Chariot" were quite compelling.

This entry's only weakness is that there's nothing for the player to do except push the button until he's seen every last entry. After that, there's nothing to do except type QUIT. I found myself thinking that an actual real-life Tarot Deck, with the poems printed on the backs of the appropriate cards, would make a much nicer and more easily accessible medium for this author's verse.

Pillow.

One room, one exit, one pedestal, one very comfy pillow. Simple enough.

Interactivity: The purpose of this entry was pretty straightforward: to explore the three-dimensionality of a pillow. Appropriately, all interactivity is focused exclusively on the pillow, and the player's only job is to mess with the pillow in as many ways as is imaginable. Sounds good so far, but unfortunately poor implementation gets in the way almost immediately. Many verbs that seem intuitive are not implemented, meaning that exploring the pillow quickly becomes a guess-the-verb exercise. According to the author there are 15 pillow-related responses; I was able to achieve six: EXAMINE, SIT ON, TAKE, EAT (but not TASTE), FLUFF, and (sort of) ASK. Some verbs that I tried that elicited no response were SMELL, TOUCH/FEEL, THROW, SQUEEZE/HUG, HIT/PUNCH/KICK, JUMP ON, and TEAR/RIP. There is an odd bug wherein taking the pillow provides an appropriate response but does not actually move the pillow to your inventory; however, I don't this actually prevented me from eliciting any responses, since most of the time the game simply didn't understand the verb.

The author says in the help text that there are "more than a dozen" verbs implemented. I'm not sure if this refers only to verbs dealing with the pillow or to the entire game, but either way it seems pretty sparse. The pillow's description changes as you mess with it, which was a nice touch; I just wish I could have seen more of it.

Art: This entry wasn't trying to be literary or deeply significant; it was just trying to describe a pillow, and it did so reasonably well. Some of the description is rather funny -- particularly after EATING the pillow. A good job, but once again the coding and incomplete vocabulary prevented me from seeing its full potential.

A good effort overall, but it could have used more work.
**Reviewer's Note: after writing this, I went back and tried a few more verbs. SLEEP ON PILLOW generates an error message, but simply typing SLEEP elicits a response (bringing my total up to 7) and furthermore moves the pillow to the player's inventory.

The Possibility of Life's Destruction.

An ant goes to the river; what it sees there makes it shiver. After that, your guess is as good as mine...

Interactivity: Very limited. This is essentially a sort of hyper-poem in the same style as Andrew Plotkin's "Space Under the Window". There are no conventional verbs; you simply type in words corresponding to key images in the poem, and the poem alters in some (presumably) related way. However, in TPOLD I was only able to find three words that generated any sort of response. These seem to correspond to three "verses", and after you have seen all three verses the game summarily ends and quits out of Frotz. The verb LOOK re-displays the current verse. Everything else has been disabled. What's left is a very short guess-the-verb puzzle.

Art: This poetry struck me more as just sort of noodling around with abstract imagery, as opposed to the cohesive musings in "Crystal Ball". The good news is that it's interesting imagery -- the bit with the ant drew me in immediately, and I enjoyed reading it up until it ended. The bad news is that there are only three short verses. The worst news is that one of these verses was lifted without alteration from a Nine Inch Nails song.

I want to make it clear that it is not my intention to accuse anyone of deliberate plagiarism. But please be aware that inserting another artist's song lyrics into the main body of your text *without indicating your source* is a Very Bad Idea. Aside from the whole copyright infringement problem (which is admittedly a nonissue in this case, since no one's making any money), it throws into question the credibility of all the rest of your writing. I'm giving the author the benefit of the doubt and assuming that the rest of TPOLD is her own work, but in the future, please give credit where credit is due.

I apologize if that sounds overly harsh, but I take this sort of thing seriously, no matter how informal the venue. Anyway, that being said, this was an interesting work that could have been expanded further.

-M.



Marnie Parker's Reviews (Short)


Winner: My vote went to Crystal. But I have to say I was really torn and wavered back and forth between it and Pillow. The reasons are below.


Objects

Pillow: I felt this came the closest to the stated concept of the IF Art Show and really enjoyed the author's delight in the fluffiness of the pillow. But it had three major problems: taking the pillow didn't put it in the player's inventory, it sometimes crashed and it suffered too much from the "guess the verb" syndrome. Even trying hard, I only found 8 of the 15 responses (another judge gave me some hints, but I decided not to count those actions). Since guessing the verb became too much of a puzzle, I felt it "lost" in that area. However, despite its problems, I enjoyed playing it the most.

Crystal Ball: An interesting object with an original implementation. The poetry appeared to be (I am "poetically challenged") good to outstanding. The object was not very responsive, but the only real problem was the randomization of the button pushing. I am familiar with the Tarot so I could keep track of which of the major arcana I had seen and which I hadn't, but I think someone unfamiliar with it could easily get lost. Also having to push it so much to bypass seen "cards" was tedious. Randomization with flagging or none at all would have worked better. But I still felt it was a nice touch to use one object, a crystal ball, to explore another object, the Tarot deck. However, ultimately, the sheer quantity and quality of poems was, for me, the decisive factor.


Scenery

The Possibility of Life's Destruction: Initially I was unsure what this was about and only found two things to do. Then I realized the poetic connection between the author and "scenery". A pleasingly intuitive idea. But although I found it intriguing and do think an abstract representation of something is still a representation of something, I felt it fit the concept of the IF Art Show the least.


I don't feel I totally successfully communicated the concept behind the IF Art Show. So I will exhibit some examples (as I finish them) at the IF Art Gallery.

However, I want to add that I enjoyed doing the 1999 IF Art show and enjoyed all the entries. It is fun to see others try something, fun to see them finish, fun to see new ideas and fun to think maybe one helped encourage someone else's creativity. Thank you to all the entrants for the experience.


Lucian P. Smith's Reviews



Crystal:

There was quite a bit of poetry here. And most of it was fine, though I am no connoisseur of poetry. One got at it through the somewhat mundane artifact of pushing a button, and examining the resultant proffered noun.

The biggest flaw in this, to my thinking, was that the image produced by pushing the button was random. This might suffice in a larger game like 'Curses' where trying to find all the random messages is part of the fun, but in a game where it is supposed to be the focus, some other mechanic needs to be dreamed up, I think. I became more and more frustrated (and thus less and less able to enjoy the poetry) as I pressed and re-pressed the button, trying to get some new image to appear. At the very least, pressing the buttons could cycle through the images, not repeating themselves until all had been seen. Ideally, a more interactive method could be found that could have been slightly more interactive. Tarot cards could have been inserted in the base, for example, or different images could appear in the ball as one carted it through a series of rooms.

There was, without a doubt, plenty of 'rewards' trapped inside this object. It would simply have been nice if the player felt justified in receiving each award, instead of simply rewarding repetitiousness.


Pillow:

Here is the entry that accomplished, I think, most clearly what the original concept of the Art Show was all about. One object which would respond to a variety of commands, and which changed its state after each. This is exactly the sort of thing I was expecting to find, and I was not disappointed with what I found--I just wish there was more. The game responded (apparently) to 15 verbs, giving unique responses to each, and changing the response to 'examine' after each as well. I only found about half of these, but what I found was humorous, succinct, and appropriate. Many verbs I tried had no response or a default response, and this was the game's biggest problem. The second biggest problem was a few programming errors as, for example, when the response to 'take pillow' mentioned you taking it, but failed to move it into your inventory!

If there was an aspect of this game I would have liked to see even more, it would be 'more combinatorial stuff'. In an ideal setting, *each* unique verb would have been somehow modified by the pillow's initial 'state' before the action. So a 'fluff' after a 'push' would have one response, while 'fluff' after a 'sleep' would have another. This would soon prove quite difficult, of course, but it would have gone a long way towards making the pillow seem more life-like, and more, well, 'three-dimensional'.


Tpold:

This game provided the least amount of text of any of those entered (indeed, of any compiled game I think I've seen), but it did have an interesting premise. In a 'Space Under The Window' type way, you were presented with new text as you 'navigated' the scenery, typing in key words. If this had been taken anywhere, it could have been rather interesting. As it was, it was spartan and frustrating--almost none of the words I tried did anything, and most of the ones that did merely reiterated the room description. An interesting twist on the SUTWin concept, though.


About the Judges



For Michael Gentry, Lucian P. Smith and Mike Roberts, see the 1999 Summer Reviews.

Mike Berlyn (Foobler) - A published science-fiction author, was at Infocom during its heyday, creating these well-known games: "Cutthroats", "Infidel" and "Suspended". He also later wrote "Zork: The Undiscovered Underground" for Activison. Mike, who has written games for several companies, decided to start his own, Cascade Mountain Publishing . Soley web-based, it publishes IF games, books and ebooks. One of its first releases was his, "Dr. Dumont P.A.R.T.1.". He also instituted and, until recently, hosted the Imp Luncheons, bringing some class to the IF community.

Dan Shiovitz (inky) - Is author of "Bad Machine". However, he is even more infamous for creating Alex, an intelligent-seeming bot, "Awk, want a cork nut!". Alex resides on the IF Mud.


Back to South Wing