The Stack

When I started playing GTA3 seven years ago, I spent a good long time just wandering around, admiring the scenery, driving recklessly, and looking for hidden packages. Enjoying the feel of the thing instead of pursuing goals. Admittedly, this was largely because it took me so long to resolve certain hardware issues. But even taking that into account, I feel like I’ve been pursuing missions a little more single-mindedly in Vice City. It’s still an open world, but I pretty much know how it works by now. I don’t need to go through the initial-experiments phase again.

There are new elements, though. And the designers have been considerate enough to introduce them one by one over the course of the missions. Here’s what I’ve seen so far:

• Outfits. Several missions require you to be dressed appropriately to fit in, starting with a soiree that you can’t attend until you’ve changed into a Don-Johnson-style T-shirt-and-suit-jacket combo. You can optionally continue to wear these get-ups when they’re no longer necessary. Outfits here are monolithic things, though, with none of the detailed mixing and customization you find in later games in the genre. This was basically just Rockstar experimenting with the idea of outfits to see if it’s something players would want — trying it on, so to speak.
• Melee weapons. GTA3 gave you only one: the baseball bat. Vice City has a fairly wide assortment, including several sorts of knives, golf clubs, and nightsticks scavenged from fallen police officers, all with different attributes. One assassination mission requires you to use a chainsaw, which is so unwieldy that you can’t run very fast with it. You can still run just a little faster than your target, but the mission goes a lot faster if you think of putting the chainsaw away while running.
• Motorcycles. They’re smaller than cars, and thus can weave through traffic better, but they afford far less protection. If you run into a brick wall at full speed in a car, it damages the car, but you’re safe. If you do it on a motorcycle, it’s pretty much an instant death. Although there weren’t any motorcycles in GTA3, they aren’t really new to the series. There were motorcycles in the original top-down Grand Theft Auto, which had bonus items that could only be reached through ramp-jumps in places inaccessible by car. The mechanics of the thing are pretty much the same here as there.
• RC helicopters. GTA3 had this gag involving radio-controlled toy cars with bombs in them. The helicopters here are similar, except flying and much harder to control, which is probably realistic.
• Purchasing property? I haven’t actually been able to do this yet, and don’t know how much of a mechanic it is. There’s one building I know that has a tag outside that, when activated, informs you that you can’t buy it yet. And I could have sworn I saw another building that instead gave me a price, which I couldn’t afford at the time, but now that I can afford it, I can’t find it again. I know that buying buildings is a big thing in the Saints Row series, a competitor of GTA, so maybe that started here.
[Tags: GTA, Vice City]

So, I’m starting to try to pick up this blog again. We’ll see if it lasts. To give it a foundation, I’ve started by re-reading the posts from the beginning, intending to complete any games that I started and play sequels to any games that have them. The first relevant game is GTA3, and so I’ve started playing its immediate sequel, Vice City.

I thought for sure I had this on disc — I certainly have the next sequel, San Andreas, still shrinkwrapped on my shelf — but apparently I don’t. I still feel like I had it at one point and possibly lost it. It hardly matters. All these games have been on Steam for ages, and frequently get put on sale for measly sums, so I’ve had it there for a while, just as unplayed as San Andreas. It didn’t work properly with my gamepad at first, but things have gotten a lot easier since my fumblings with its predecessor seven years ago: a mod that replicates the Xbox input scheme on PC was just a web-search away.

What I know going in: This is the one where the controversy really seemed to pick up steam. So far it strikes me as more puerile than offensive, though. Also, this is the first of the GTA games to give the player a specific character, with a name and spoken dialogue. This doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of difference so far: even when he talks, Tommy Vercetti’s personality is no more than the implied personality of the previous games’ mute protagonists. He’s a thug for hire and that’s about it.

Vice City was one of the three cities from the original Grand Theft Auto, and clearly based on Miami as portrayed in Miami Vice: sleek cars, bright sunshine, 80s fashions. Cyan and magenta all over the place. Michael Jackson and Yes on the radio. This is a period piece, much like the London 1969 expansion to the original GTA. It even emphasizes its retroness by starting the intro cutscene with a fake Commodore 64 loading screen. By now, it’s doubly retro, a glimpse of how the 80s looked twelve years ago.

To my eye, it doesn’t look too retro. The character models have hands that are mittens, without distinct fingers, but other than that, once you’ve cranked up the resolution it looks pretty much okay. Except that the women all walk funny, swaying their hips in a way that I guess is supposed to be sexy but just looks rather difficult and uncomfortable.

I wrote up some thoughts about the 2013 “Best Puzzles” Xyzzy Awards nominees at the Xyzzy Awards blog.

Actually, I did this last year as well, although I didn’t mention it here at the time.

The randomizer seems to be giving me all the Twine clustered at the beginning. Spoilers follow the break.
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Spoilers follow the break.
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Next up, the first of many Twine entries. Spoilers follow the break.
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And of course right after I make a post complaining about static hypertext in the Comp, the first thing the randomizer picks for me is a PDF file, accompanied by a brief readme that instructs you to print it out and play it genuinely CYOA-style: the text is a series of numbered nodes, each ending in a list of nodes you can go to next. (Asking around, it seems that few people actually bothered to print it out. I myself played it straight from the screen.) Spoilers follow the break.
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It’s been several months since I’ve posted here, but I’d really like to get back into the habit again. Luckily, the Comp is here to force the issue, late though I am to start it. This year, there are 35 entries. Strikingly, more than half of them — 19, to be precise — are listed as “Web-Based”. I’m told that about 3/4 of these were written in Twine.

And that’s as good a reason as any to go off on a rant that’s been building inside me for a while: the Twine rant. This is in large part a reaction — a visceral reaction, largely unjustified for reasons I’ll describe — to a provocative essay by Porpentine, portraying Twine as a revolutionary force against the gatekeepers and hegemons of capitalism, elitism, and the dominance of the parser-based IF community. As a member of the IF community, this stance really took me by surprise. Dominance? I thought we were the scrappy underdogs. What are we dominating? Certainly not the games industry.

As far as I can tell, our domination is of the term “Interactive Fiction”. Porpentine laments the fact that googling “interactive fiction” yields pages of results about parser-based IF, but little about hypertext. As she puts it, “Some say non-parser isn’t interactive fiction. If the words can be interacted with, it’s interactive fiction.”

Now, my gut reaction to this is that it makes as much sense as Bobby Fisher’s infamous claim that he shouldn’t be considered anti-semitic because Arabs are semites too. Words have histories, and don’t always mean what they sound like they should mean. In the case of “interactive fiction”, Infocom gave it a much more specific meaning three decades ago — essentially, “text adventures, but said with less embarrassment” — and that usage stuck well enough that the hobbyist community that sprung up after Infocom’s demise still used the term, and named the Usenet newsgroups where most of the early information-sharing took place “rec.arts.int-fiction” and “rec.games.int-fiction”. ¹ Actually, there’s at least one usage of the term “interactive fiction” before Infocom’s: Robert Lafore’s Interactive Fiction: Six Micro Stories, published by Adventure International. I played this on TRS-80 back in the day. The interface here was command-line-based, I don’t think it actually qualifies as a parser, because it made no attempt at grammatical analysis: it just scanned the input text for certain key words and ignored everything else once it found one. For example, “No problem” would be interpreted as a refusal, because it contains the word “no”.

Not that there wasn’t disagreement about terminology back then! Every once in a while, someone would wander into the newsgroups and tell us all that the stuff we were writing and playing wasn’t really interactive, because it didn’t meet some criterion he had made up — say, for example, that it only counts as interactive if there’s significant plot branches and multiple endings — and that therefore we should all be doing things his way instead. These attempts at redefining our art out from under us seldom went over well, and that’s part of why I’m so defensive about this. Magnus Olsson, in a memorable 1997 raif post, compared the IF community to a jazz club, and these bossy newcomers to someone who goes to the club to tell everyone in the club that jazz is dead and they should all be using pre-programmed synthesizers instead. No matter how good his arguments are, they’re going to be ignored by the people who showed up because they like jazz.

I kind of felt like Olsson was giving these guys too much credit, though. Some years later, I came up with another metaphor that I think better captured the more cluelessly bossy newcomers: Imagine someone who has never heard of baseball. On hearing the term for the first time, this person tries to imagine what it might be like on the basis of the name alone, and comes to the conclusion that it’s probably a soccer-like ball game involving RTS-style base-building, creating structures to protect your goal from the enemy. Intrigued by this admittedly rather interesting idea, he goes off to see a baseball game, only to find that it’s nothing like what he imagined. And so he yells at the players that they’re doing it all wrong.

So anyway, the Twine Revolution strikes me as kind of similar to this scenario, except that instead of demanding that existing baseball teams abandon their ways, a whole bunch of people who are interested in RTS-style baseball got together and formed a league. And they’re getting a lot of press coverage, and people are watching their matches, and they all refer to this new sport as “baseball”. For some of them, it’s the only kind of baseball they know. And somewhere, there are players of traditional baseball (which is what they have to call it now, “traditional baseball”) looking on in bemusement and confusion.

Now, that was my gut reaction. Here’s why it’s bunk. For starters, the IF community is a tiny, tiny thing. Even at its height, the Comp never got more than a few hundred people to vote on it. That is not enough people to dictate common usage. Besides, the whole bossy newcomer scenario described above should have been a pretty good indication that “interactive fiction” was a poor choice of term for what we were doing in the first place, and if people even today are googling the term and expecting hyperfiction, well, something is wrong. If a small group like the IF community disagrees with the rest of the world about what “interactive fiction” means, we can’t reasonably tell the rest of the world that they’re the mistaken ones. Which leads to my second point: we don’t actually disagree with them. There have been plenty of Comp entries with hypertext interfaces in the past. Andrew Plotkin’s last-released work of IF has an essentially hypertext interface, although it does allow you to type the words instead of clicking on them if you really want to. Emily Short’s current project, a highly procedural and simulationist system called Versu, has a touchscreen-friendly contextual menu interface rather than a text parser. And for years now, every time “CYOA” interfaces come up, I’ve been pointing out that a simple interface doesn’t have to mean a simple world model. There has even been parser-based IF that I thought would have been improved by taking the parser away.

But I will draw one line. Regardless of the interface, the world model — the thing you interact with — is an important part of IF. I wouldn’t call static hypertext ²That is, stuff that could be represented entirely in HTML without any scripts. interactive in any meaningful way, even when it represents a branching story. You don’t act on such a work and change its state, you just look at different parts of it, change which already-present page is being displayed. That’s exactly the level of interactivity you have with a normal, linear book. Twine is of course capable of much deeper interaction than this. But static hypertext is kind of Twine’s default state, just as text-adventure-with-directional-movement-and-inventory is Inform’s. It’s the easiest thing to do in Twine, and therefore, as far as I’ve seen, it’s all that the majority of works in Twine do. And all power to them, really. If static hyperfiction is all you want to make, Twine is a pretty good way to make it. The Twine community certainly won’t disapprove. But to call the result “interactive fiction” — can I at least fight this? Or am I edging into bossy-newcomer territory here?

Ultimately, is the terminology even worth fighting over at all?

Well, there’s at least one place where it makes a substantial difference: the Comp. Because that’s where the inevitable static hypertext and the text adventures will be judged against each other. Which is kind of like having a baseball match where one side is playing traditional-style and the other side is playing RTS-style.

There have been static hypertext works entered into the Comp before. (Heck, there was one last year.) But they were always entered by isolated individuals, and voted low by irritated players, and forgotten shortly afterward. The Twine Revolution is bigger than that, and could possibly balkanize the Comp. If the Twine authors are out in force this year, it stands to reason that the Twine players will be too. This could be the first time that there’s a substantial faction of Comp voters who just don’t like parser-based IF at all, just as there is surely a substantial portion (myself among them) who will balk at static hypertext. If they’ve read Porpentine’s inflammatory rhetoric (and forgotten the bits where she says she actually “likes parser”), they may even possibly regard the parser as an enemy, as something to be defeated by staging a mass invasion and voting all the Twine games to the top. And that would make me sad, just like the patrons of Olsson’s jazz club would be disappointed if they suddenly found that the “jazz is dead” guy and his friends were not only booking half the performance slots but winning awards at jazz festivals for their preprogrammed synthesizer recordings.

But in the end, as I said in a previous post, the Comp isn’t where the really exciting stuff in IF is going on these days anyway. And I still intend to get around to talking more about that in a month or so, once my Comp writeups are done.

Lately I’ve been playing a couple of games with a friend back east via iPhone apps. First we played a few rounds of Ascension, then a few rounds of Ticket to Ride. These are both adaptations of games designed for non-electronic play: Ascension is a card game, Ticket to Ride a board game. In their original forms, they would be played face-to-face in a single session, which is to say, in a period of time set aside just for play. As mobile games, no set-aside time is required. You can take your turn at any idle moment of your day. It’s no surprise that this transforms the experience of the game. It’s a little less obvious that it transforms it in very different ways depending on the rules of the game.

Ascension isn’t a CCG, but its design is informed by them. As in Magic: the Gathering, most cards are in some way exceptional, with special-case rules printed directly on the cards themselves. And if the central act of gameplay in a CCG is deck construction, Ascension manages to approximate it within the body of the game: the players start with small identical decks, and vie to acquire cards from a central pool, to add them to their decks and use them later in the game, most often for acquiring more cards. On every turn, you’re dealt a fresh hand of five cards from your deck, and your turn doesn’t end until you’ve played them all and your hand is empty. Importantly for the mobile adaptation, you’re dealt next turn’s hand immediately on the end of your turn, so you can contemplate what you’re going to do with it while your opponents are going.

Ticket to Ride is about trains. The board is a map of a rail network. Players compete to claim the tracks between cities and complete connections between particular distant pairs of cities assigned to them in secret. Each track can be owned by only one player, so some of the strategy is in dealing with, and exploiting, congestion: trying to foil your opponents by claiming the tracks they need while trying to plan for alternate routes in case your own efforts become blocked. Buying a track costs varying types and numbers of resources in the form of cards, which build up in your hand over the course of play. On any given turn, you can either draw two cards, or buy one track, or get additional contracts to connect cities (which is risky, because any contracts left uncompleted at the end of the game count against you).

Now, the big difference between these two games is in the length of the turns. Ticket to Ride turns are short. You do one thing, and that’s it — and if all you did was draw a couple of cards that you didn’t really need, it hardly feels like doing anything at all. Ascension turns are long, and get longer as the game advances and your deck becomes more powerful, enabling you to do more stuff. Moreover, Ticket to Ride separates the act of acquiring resources from the act of using them, and the result can be fairly excruciating: you finally get the fifth green card that you need to buy the St. Louis to Pittsburgh line and complete the connection you’re aiming for, but then you have to wait hours for your next turn before you can complete the transaction. In Ascension, your purchasing power is also tied to the cards in your hand, but it’s transient, not something that builds up from turn to turn, and so you use it the moment you get it. It’s a little strange to say this about a game that’s all about collecting things for future use, but turns in Ascension feel pretty self-contained, or at least self-sufficient. They’re like full sentences, where Ticket to Ride turns are sentence fragments, only meaningful in groups.

Another thing: Both of these games involve a struggle to get stuff before your opponents, and the possibility that a thing you really want will be taken away before you can get it. But the degree of consequence is very different. In Ascension, if I don’t get the sweet card I wanted, well, it’s just a card. There will be others. But in Ticket to Ride, if someone nabs the track I wanted, I’m devastated, and have to rework my plans. This again relates to the relative unimportance of forward plans in Ascension, which is more about seizing whatever the circumstances offer.

The end result: Ascension works more or less the way I want asynchronous multiplayer to work, with turns as satisfying nuggets of gameplay that I can take care of whenever it’s convenient. With only two players, there came times when we shuttled several turns back and forth in a short period of time, but this wasn’t a necessary part of the experience. Whereas in Ticket to Ride, the times when we made multiple moves in rapid succession were the only times that the game really felt like it was going anywhere. After submitting a move, I’d keep impatiently checking my phone for an opportunity to finish what I started. In other words, despite the asynchrony, I wanted to treat it like I was in a dedicated game session. Whereas Ascension is so well-suited to the format that I feel like it would be weird to play it face-to-face.

So, I’m speculating that this is generally applicable. Games that are well-suited to asynchronous multiplayer play will be those with long, self-sufficient turns, and without a great deal of forward planning. What does this predict for other games?

Chess and Go are big losers in this model, having both short turns and heavily planning-based gameplay. Scrabble, I suggest, is a winner — sure, you only get to do one thing per turn, but my experience is that it the turns tend to take an uncomfortably long time for face-to-face play anyway. And indeed asynchronous Scrabble-oids such as Words for Friends have been immensely popular. Settlers of Catan? Ignoring the problem of how to handle trading, it seems a pretty good candidate to me, despite sharing Ticket to Ride‘s congestion and resource-accumulation aspects: the congestion is never as individually crucial as in Ticket to Ride‘s routes, and resources can be spent as soon at they’re acquired. Magic: the Gathering might seem promising at first glance, what with its long turns, but it involves a degree of out-of-turn interactivity that’s unwieldy even for synchronous online play, let alone asynchronous. Diplomacy more or less fits the bill, and is also one of the few board games that I know to be more satisfying played via email than in its original form, but it’s also such an oddball with its all-players-move-simultaneously thing that I’m not sure it really fits into the same model as these other games at all.

One thing I neglected to mention in my previous post about the gamelike attributes of Homestuck: sometimes Homestuck is difficult. Sometimes just reading it is a challenge. That’s not just because it’s a sprawling and complex work with a lot of characters to keep track of. It’s also because the text is often obfuscated in some way.

Most of the story’s text is in the form of chatlogs, and quite a few of the characters have “typing quirks” of some sort, such as leet-style letter substitutions, which somehow carry over into their speech and even sound effects. The simpler and more consistent substitutions are easy to get used to, but then you get contextually-variable ones, where the same substitution has more than one meaning. For example, one character uses “8” for both “B” and the sound of the word “eight”, or sometimes even for just a long “A” sound, and when she’s upset she just starts sticking 8’s into words where they don’t make sense at all. Occasionally the quirks become incomprehensible enough to baffle the other characters.

There’s one character who speaks in white text — the website’s background isn’t quite the same color, but it’s still most easily read by highlighting it. The effect is sometimes that you see other people’s reactions to what he said before you see what provoked those reactions. There’s an infrequently-used alien alphabet, stolen from the Elder Scrolls games. There’s a character who’s a firefly, who’s completely mute and communicates (or tries to communicate, anyway) by blinking in morse code, transcribed for the reader in dots and dashes. There’s a brief appearance by a character who speaks solely in bad Japanese. It all becomes a sort of gesture of amiable hostility on the part of the author, who knows that anything he does to thwart his readers will be decoded in short order and posted online by the more dedicated ones. And that adds up to another bit of gamishness: even outside of the interactive sequences, people are getting to the full content by looking up hints online.