Judges' 1999 Summer Reviews


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

Due to the nature of one of the entries, several judges put spoiler warnings on their reviews. So you might want to play the entries first.

Joint Spoiler Warning...


Contents:

David Dyte's Reviews (Short)
David Lebling's Reviews
Michael Gentry's Reviews
Doe's (Marnie Parker's) Reviews
Mike Roberts' Reviews

About the Judges


David Dyte's Reviews (Short)


wheel.z5: Random sentence generators are fun to play with, I must admit, but I would have gotten more of a sense of this as an object if you could do something else other than spin it. Rewrite some words. Turn one ring around to reveal a new set of words. Also, it seems like it would be cooler as a real object.

ststue.z5: Nice atmosphere, although when I did what I guessed was the key action (fixing the statue), the output was confusing. Was the almost repeated message a brilliant piece of writing or a bug? Very cute to play, I think. My vote goes to the statue.

- David


Michael Gentry's Reviews


THE BOTTOM LINE:
"Wheel" wins.

THE OTHER STUFF:
This was a tough choice. Both entries had comparable levels of interaction, both authors seemed to have an able grasp of the theory and purpose of the IF art show. One was more artistically interesting; the other was more technically proficient. On the other hand, the one that was more technically proficient was also less technically *impressive.* Ah, well. After much deliberation that took a bit longer than Doe would have liked it to, I have made my decision: the prize goes, insofar as it is my decision, which it isn't, to the wheel. Read on if you are interested in how I reached this decision. It's too late to change my vote, but you can still complain about my judgment on RAIF. Everyone else does.

STATUE
Begins with that poem, "Ozymandias," by wossisname, Shelley. Thank you, author, for giving credit, by the way. We find ourselves in the midst of a vast desert, standing before a half-buried statue, ostensibly the very one from Percy's verses. We then commence the interacting. X THE STATUE. So far, so good. SMELL THE STATUE. It has no odour. Well sure. Not very interesting, but the author took time to cover some of the old stand-bys, so that counts for something. Does it help that "Ozymandias" is an old favorite of mine? Does it help that I'm sucker for desolate landscapes and the odd "heap of broken images" motif? Sure it does. But this is an art show after all. I'm supposed to be a *little* subjective; I even wore my turtleneck and everything.

Unfortunately, we soon start to notice imperfections through the shine. The level of detail quickly peters out after the first few verbs. The statue has arms, legs, shoulders, eyes, lips, a full anatomical suite, but examining any of them only gives you the general description of the whole statue. Fine in a full-sized game, where you have more to see and do than leer over every detail, but in an art show the whole point *is* the detail. The game experiences a few technical difficulties as well: a daemon that doesn't stop when it's supposed to, the odd parser quirk (UNCOVER won't work on the half-buried head; nor will DIG SAND; but DIG HEAD does the trick). There's a single, simple puzzle, too, which I liked, but it was awkwardly implemented, and when I solved it I got two different responses in sequence, as though there were two different ways to solve the puzzle, one good, one bad, and somehow I triggered the text to both. Odd.

So: well written and captivating, but more could have been done, and what was there was buggy. Don't stop writing, author, but do start beta-testing.

WHEEL
This one starts out, self-referentially, in an art gallery. Before us is the main exhibit: a wheel. The wheel consists of a central hub, on which is written the word "THE," surrounded by three concentric wooden rings, on which are written, from innermost to outermost, a series of nouns, verbs, and adverbs. (The author says they're adjectives, but the author is wrong. They're adverbs.) Clearly, the wheel is made for spinning; so we spin it. And sure enough, the result is a short sentence containing one random noun, one random verb, and one random adverb (and the word "the"):

"The author lectures greedily."
"The programmer lectures gratuitously."
"The nurse watches loudly."
"The barber screams fretfully."

And that's it, really. Like the tarot deck from the last IFart show (incidentally, can anyone else read that without giggling? how about say it out loud?), there's not much to do here other than keep triggering the randomizer until you get tired of reading the responses. Unlike the tarot cards, there are thousands more possible outcomes to this game, but on the other hand these responses are much, much shorter. And the mechanism is *simple*. This exhibition must have taken all of an hour to code, and most of that was probably spent thinking up the lists of words. But then again, I did vote for the tarot cards last time. Maybe I've got a thing for simple random systems. Somebody write a game about rolling dice: that should keep me occupied for a week or two.

Well, it's like this: I very nearly took my vote to the statue, but the thing that tipped me over to this entry was when I finally got around to typing SMELL WHEEL.

"The wheel smells like pine. Pine, with a hint of Pledge."

Heh, that was pretty funny. So I tried something else, and got another pithy remark. I tried every verb I could think of in the standard Inform canon, and, with few exceptions, every one of them had been covered. And even though the statue was somewhat more involving, the wheel struck my fancy because of the details. And as I said before, that's the whole point. I went all over that wheel, up one side and down the other, until I had explored it in every way the IF medium would allow, and it held up throughout the whole thing. No bugs, no weird responses, just simple, amusing interaction. So the prize goes to "Wheel."

'Til later:

"The judge bows gracefully."

-M.


David Lebling's Reviews


My pick is the wheel, by a nose (or a spoke?).

When I first played with these objects, I zoomed by the wheel very quickly. I noted the basic idea, spun the wheel a few times and then probed it with a few choice verbs, most of which it blew off.

I moved on to the statue. The statue is a relative of the famous statue of Ramses II celebrated by Shelley in "Ozymandias." This object is more richly described, keying off of the poem, and presents itself as a puzzle-object, though it is possible to just enjoy the descriptions. However, there is also a "solution" to the statue. Once you have found the solution you get a well-written cheering-dwarves scene (marred by what appears to be a bug) and are thrown back into the desert you started in, though there is a nice touch in an appropriately changed description. This object would be nice as the entry-point to a game set in ancient Egypt, or with slight modifications, as a puzzle (a relatively easy one) in an archaeological or mystical or Indiana Jones style game set in modern Egypt. The one apparent bug involves the cheering-dwarf scene, where you appear to get two different reactions to your winning move -- perhaps the original reaction was the "bad" one, and the author decided to change to the "good" one, which gave the opportunity of adding the nice touch of a changed statue description after the solution. All in all, a nice effort.

After playing with both objects, I let it rest for a while then went back to them, concentrating on the wheel; I was pretty sure I had done all there was to do with the statue. The wheel consists of three concentric rings with words inscribed on them: people on one ring, verbs on the next, and adverbs on the third. You spin the rings and get a sentence. Each ring appears to have about thirty different possible settings, so there are a lot of possible outputs. This is not unlike the medieval "Lull Engine" described (among other places) by James Blish in his novel _Black Easter_ -- it was used in divination. The interesting thing about this wheel is the amusement and oddity of spinning the rings and getting interesting or incongruous outputs. There seems to be some code which makes at least the first ten or fifteen spins generate unique outputs, which is a nice touch (if I'm not hallucinating it). Some of the more amusing outputs I got included:

The programmer weeps justifiably.
The film director prays furtively.
The artist sins candidly.
The scientist spends readily.
The investor gives expensively.

As you can see, you could construct an entire adventure game (or soap opera, for that matter) by implementing some of the actions described. That leads me to why I picked this object as the winner. First, the sheer variety of possible outputs made it a great digital toy -- I continued to spin the wheel long after I had (possibly) enumerated all possible sentence components -- or had I? Secondly, I could imagine many different things to do with this object (or one like it -- a true Lull Engine would produce sentences such as "Patience becoming Reality", which in the context of Blish's novel refers to Easter). The code could force appropriate responses at certain points in a game, responses that might be clues, or commentary, or predictions. With some modification the object could appear in a magical game or an SF game. Responses could be used as keys to doors, or passwords in a computer, or incantations.

So, I picked the wheel as the winning object because it was fun to play with and got more of my creative juices going than the statue, in spite of its otherwise sparser appearance. Both, however, are fine objects which with a bit more work would be ornaments to any IF game.

Dave


Doe's (Marnie Parker's) Reviews


There were only two entries for the Summer IF Art show, but I was very pleased with both. They definitely fulfilled my vision/concept of "IF Art". I was also happy to see both were by "newbies".

A major quality of "Art", is a sense of discovery. Both have that sense.

Wheel - Object

I was quite intrigued by this. The wheel turns and has a noun, verb and adverb on its spokes. Essentially it is a random sentence generator.

The sentences are all about people, by job description. It is fun to spin and infinitely replayable. The results are sometimes koan-like, seeming to impart insightful information. Other times they are silly.

I was happy to find the wheel was interactive in other ways as well. You can touch it, smell it, taste it, feel it and try to take it. The author wisely didn't limit his interaction to just sentence generation.

Very well done. I found no bugs, which is a big plus. However, if I had been judging I would have also taken off points for discovering the concept did not spring from the author's own inspiration, but was, in fact, a textural copy of an actual sculpture. I am glad the author disclosed that, but was a bit disappointed, though not really surprised. It would make a fantastic sculpture.

Statue - Object

Inspired by a famous poem, there is a crumbling statue in the desert. The player must reassemble it. Once they do, there is an interesting reaction.

However, I found bugs. Misworded sentences and the "cut scene" that plays, weirdly, ran twice in a row. I also found the statue not as interactive in other ways as I would like, although it did also respond to touch and kiss.

Additionally, assembling it was a bit confusing because I thought the statue was too big for me to pick parts of it up, but it soon became obvious that was the only way to do it. Prior to this particular IF Art Show there was a lot of discussion/argument about puzzles. But "Statue" met the puzzle limitation quite well, i.e., that any puzzles be fairly "obvious", not brain twisters.

Despite its flaws, it was satisfying to play. I suspect, because of when it was emailed, the author worked up to the deadline. Word to the wise (been there, done that): next time plan ahead better and beta test. I would really like to see the bugs fixed and some other types of interactivity added.

Summary

For this Show I was an "alternate judge", ready to tie break and/or fill in if too many judges dropped out. Wheel was unusual, technically flawless, but not completely original. Statue was less fully-developed, flawed, but creative. I am glad I didn't have to vote, it would have been a tough call.

Doe :-)


Mike Roberts' Reviews


Wheel

Wheel is an interactive simulation of a random statement generator. The title's wheel is a mechanical device with three linked word wheels: one choosing a random noun, one choosing a verb, and one choosing an adverb. Spinning the wheel, naturally, randomizes the three wheels, picking one word from each to form a sentence.

The wheel seems to have ten or twenty words per wheel, so it can produce a large number of sentences. The sentences are all of the same form as "the programmer lives wisely" and "the sales representative swears gratingly."

That the sentences generated are all grammatically well-formed is guaranteed by the construction of the wheel, of course; the fun is that these random sentences are often seemingly insightful or amusingly nonsensical. In the former category, we find "the president sins regretfully" and "the scientist obfuscates charmingly." In the latter, I encountered "the contractor dies cordially" and "the barber spends internally." A surprising fraction create the same impression as the obscure utterances of an oracle or Zen master: superficially paradoxical or nonsensical, but with a hint of a deeper meaning that can only be gleaned through extensive reflection.

It's fun to play with Wheel for a while to see the range of results possible with a cleverly-constructed random number generator.

Statue

Note: This review contains a spoiler for the work's single puzzle. The puzzle isn't complicated, though, and the puzzle as such isn't the work's main point anyway, so reading the spoiler probably won't significantly take away from the experience of playing.

Statue is a sort of interactive adaptation of the poem Ozymandias , which serves as the work's introductory passage; or perhaps the work was merely inspired by the poem. We find ourselves before an ancient stone statue in the middle of the desert; the statue has worn over time and is now in pieces.

We can do a few things with the statue, such as examining it and climbing it, but the statue doesn't have a great deal of depth; we can't find any more detail by examining any of its parts, for example. (I found this lack of detail a little disappointing, since the statue is the whole point of the work.)

There is one significant thing we can do, though: we can reassemble the statue from its pieces. Since there are only two pieces, this is a trivial task, not apparently meant as a puzzle; it took me a few minutes to think to try, though, mostly because my initial sense of the scale of the statue, which came from the introductory poem, led me to believe that the pieces were all far too large for me to pick up. (If I were reviewing this work as a game, rather than in the context of an art show, I'd complain that this made the puzzle a little unfair; since this is an art show entry, I will instead say that the description was lacking, in that it didn't give me the correct sense of the scale.)

Reassembling the statue leads to a fantastic sequence, or perhaps just a vision, in which the king in whose likeness the statue was made comes to life and addresses us, before fading back into the statue.

The work was marred by an apparent bug in the important scene that appears after reassembling the statue. Two slightly different versions of the scene both appear, one after the other, as though the author rewrote the scene but didn't remove the older version. I looked at this several times, thinking that perhaps this was intentional (two simultaneous, overlapping visions? some kind of time travel loop with diverging histories?), but the purpose eludes me if this was indeed deliberate.

The special effect of reassembling the statue takes excellent advantage of the combined nature of the medium -- both interactive and fiction. The interactive aspect is served by the simulation, simple as it is in this case; the fiction aspect is served by something unusual and unexpected happening in response to the player's actions. This is a good example of one important feature of a puzzle: an action produces a novel result. It's interesting to see a minimal puzzle like this in isolation, because it's still pleasing to reach the novel result, even though we didn't have to work very hard to get there.


About the Judges


David Dyte (ddyte) - Author of a "Bear's Night Out", which placed fifth in the 1997 Annual IF Competition, also coordinated the 1998 competition. An Australian, he toured the U.S. in the Summer of 1998. Adam Cadre was his "ride" on the West Coast; David then flew East Coast to catch several baseball games and eat hot dogs with ketchup (no mustard). This was a perfect chance for some iffers to join him and madly snap pictures of each other.

Michael Gentry - Author of "Little Blue Men", which placed seventh in the 1998 Annual Competition, also wrote the popular Lovecraftian horror game, "Anchorhead". He is currently concentrating more on his regular fiction writing and recently made his first sale to a magazine.

Christopher Huang (Miseri) - Author of "Muse", an Autumn Romance, which placed second in the 1998 Annual IF Competition, likes reading about saints and is currently working on a new game.

David Lebling - Is an original Infocom Imp (implementor) who helped create ZIL (the Zork Interpreter Language) and authored/co-authored these titles for Infocom: "Zork", "Zork I", "Zork II", "Zork III", "Starcross", "Enchanter", "Spellbreaker", "The Lurking Horror" and "Suspect". Inventor of the grue, he also visited the first Imp Luncheon hosted by Mike Berlyn. But he made his biggest impression visiting the IF Mud unannounced the night before, An Evening with David Lebling.

Mike Roberts - Created TADS (Text Adventure Development System) , an IF programming language and compiler. He is currently taking it through several exciting additions: HtMLTads and TADS Workbench, an integrated graphical system. We can thank, first AGT, next TADS, and later, Inform, for keeping IF alive and kicking today. Mike also wrote the games: "Ditch Day Drifter", "Perdition's Flames" and "The Plant", which placed third in the 1998 Annual IF Competition.

Lucian P. Smith (lpsmith) - Author of "Edifice", which placed first in the 1997 Annual IF Competition, has coordinated the IF Comp Beta Testers for the last two years. His "IF of The Month" idea is also rapidly gaining momentum. Emulating a book reading group, one IF game will be played/discussed monthly. .


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