State of the Interactive Fiction Union

[severenz]

Can you guys sum up the interactive fiction situation? i.e. what are the other websites that allow you to write interactive fiction? What features do we need to stay ahead of the pack, etc?

I have some pretty cool ideas that I'm confident nobody else has that I'll be sharing soon.

Also, I saw a headline about this: http://www.ifcomp.org/

[End Master]

This site would be the other closest site to doing what is done over here.

http://chooseyourstory.com/Stories/

They have more focus on scripting and game elements like inventories and such, but I still never use any of that stuff since I just stick to pure writing like what is done here.

The community there is a little more active as far as the forums go, but you get a few people bouncing back and forth between the two sites. While I like both sites, I do still find this one a lot easier to write a story on since the editor is less cumbersome to use.

I don't have any major new ideas at this time, but looking forward to see what new stuff is in store for the site and I'm glad to see life in this place.

[mizal]

holy crap, I thought End was fucking with me. Some epic level necromancy going on here, I'm a little frightened/disturbed.

IFcomp was made for parser games, please keep filthy CYOAs away from it, seriously. Love them obviously but they are a cancer on the classic IF community.

Aside from chooseyourstory and Choice of Games, Twine is the big CYOA thing everyone cares about now.

edit: oh right but at textadventures.co.uk, parser IF and CYOAs live in harmony, united by being written with the Quest program and being mostly not very good.

That's the big thing programs like Twine and Quest have over IS and CYS, by the way. Fancy programming things being possible, and (more importantly) being able to easily download the games to play offline or archive elsewhere.

edit2:

If the idea is to bring in more new IS members, I can't figure out if it's a good or a bad thing that we're now easily mistakable for a terrorist organization...

[severenz]

I did a quick pass on CYS, Choice of Games and Twine. I have to say guys - I'm not impressed with their site designs and user interfaces. I'm going to create accounts and play around with their editing interfaces. Can someone with experience with "the other guys" prepare a list of the benefits/features they have that we don't?

One of the big features on my list is the ability to download the story. Also, not sure if you guys know this or not, but a lot of teachers have used IS in their classes. I regularly get barrages of signups all from a school domain.

[End Master]

Really I think the ability to download the stories would be one of the main features that would put this place up to speed with some of the others (and ahead in some cases)

Like I said, I already prefer the story editor here since it does the job for what I'm using it for and it's easy to use with no major hassles.

I'm really only familiar with the CYS editor and it's a bit of a mess at times. It hasn't been updated in years and from what I've heard from a few of the other coder types on that site isn't exactly easy to do scripting and other fancy game element stuff without fighting with the editor a bit even if it is still possible.

As far as CoG is concerned, they're more business oriented and from what I've heard their editor isn't exactly easy for beginners that don't have coding knowledge but it's much better designed than CYS editor.

Main problem with COG is the place is censorship city and the community is really big on political correctness. Not fond of their mission statement and politics in general.

[severenz]

Can someone send me what a downloaded story looks like from these other websites?

[Vesnic]

Hold on, downloading a story? Containing someone else's intellectual property? Unless I'm really misunderstanding this, then I would see it as problematic for people to download stories or to have games to play whenever they want, without any input or permission of the author. Engaging with something on a third-party server is one thing, but actually possessing the content is entirely another. Is that really what it means to "put us ahead of the pack"?

I never thought IS was all that concerned about being cutting edge in terms of technology. We've always been defined by, as End said, the simplicity of our story engine and the ability to just do some good writing rather than creating a game and all of its concomitant variables, which many other sites have been doing for some time now.

I do think we've missed some opportunities to attract and hold a higher quality of writer and the site could have been and still could be designed to ferry people to the stuff worth reading right away without having to wade through all the dross (of which there is an awful lot). Our uniqueness lies in our dedication to story and narrative and I'd like to see it stay that way, even if some changes are implemented to make some of the more arduous tasks easier.

In terms of site design, I can see the new forums and main site are still being worked on, but there's something a little cold about them. I miss the warmth and scale of the originals, but I am curious to see what you'll be doing with this.

As for the community itself, IS has always been smaller but more cohesive. Our members, once in, stay longer and tend to write better quality material. We also don't employ censorship on the forums except in the most extreme cases, which means that those of a creative bent can make comments without fearing the sting of some moderator's censorious whip.

[severenz]

I had only intended to offer the download to the owner of a story. Do the other sites allow anyone to download a story?

I have always been concerned with creating cool features that the users ask for. And I would like there to be more users. One way to assist with that is to offer the most features but it's not the only way.

I do not (and probably will continue to not) have a ton of time for marketing this website. I've relied on members to work together and give me culled lists of info and feature requests.

As for the design - cold and bland are words used to describe the IS website so far. That's intentional. I stripped it down and made it responsive which was the big change. I will spruce it up eventually with a logo and another color, but I am happy with how it looks now. In reality, the stories should be what shines. My website is just the tool.

I have impetus and motivation right now so if any of you core members have been pining for features, now is the time to speak up.

[End Master]

I had only intended to offer the download to the owner of a story.

That’s what I figured you meant by being able to download a story. It would just be the author of said story that could do it. And I figured that would be a convenient feature for the author since I know some folks write directly on the site rather than writing out their stuff on a separate word document before posting it here.



If we were talking about allowing others to download a story that someone else has written, that’s a whole other can of worms and I can see the problems that Ves mentioned in her post.

But here's little of what I know about what other sites do with this feature.

CYS doesn't have the feature at all.

CoG allows authors to download their own stories since you have to download their editor anyway, however CoG also charges money for stories as well. It has to go through a whole weeding process of whether or not the story is suitable for the site or the Apple Store. Like I said, they'’re going for a more business type thing.

Apparently people who download these stories can play around with the story’s coding and see the internal game variables and inner workings as well. Not really familiar with all of it since I’ve never bought anything from the site.

I’'m even less familiar with Twine. I think they just allow the author to download their own stories, but if it is the case that other readers can download any story, as far as I know Twine doesn’t charge anyone.

As far as the other places that Mizal mentioned, I'm not sure what their procedures are.

[mizal]

Being able to download our own stories would be a good start, at least that would allow us to keep a backup copy on hand.

Being able to download any story would be ideal, though. I'm not sure why the idea of it is so terrifying tbh, I mean it's...a game. Or a story with game elements, whatever. You download games and play them. Or you download books and read them. That's how it works. I'm far more likely to be interested in something I can enjoy at my leisure rather than one I have to be online and on a specific site for.

Twine allows a lot of advanced scripting, but at it's most basic level you just write a passage and put choices in [[brackets]] and it creates the page for you. It's easy to use and you only need the program to write, not play, but the main downside to Twine IMO is it's never really had a community grow up around it, it's just a program that creates html files that can be put up wherever. As consequence they're sort of taking over the IFDB which has been traditionally for IF games.

Quest and other IF interpreters are also their own programs, they generally have a play online option nowadays as well as the download option, though downloading is again the superior way to play. I won't play parser IF online at all. Neither CYS or IS are really the norm for any kind of IF, since you can build the stories right on the site.

Quest has a version of the developer built into the site, but you need the Quest runner if you're going to play offline.

I'm not as familiar with how Choice of Games works.

Here's a link to a Quest game in the CYOA style. (at the...bottom of the post apparently, with some other junk) You can see the download link there, but trying to attach the game directly gave me an error.

And here's a Twine game, since I can't figure out how to add more than one link without the old one being deleted: http://www.noncanon.com/HorseMaster.html

It's just an html file, right click and 'save page as' for your own copy.

edit: Uh...so the Quest link came out weird. Still getting used to this forum. Tried to remove it and just paste the URL and it kept telling me it wasn't a valid URL and wouldn't let me post, so IDK.

[Vesnic]

Being able to download our own stories would be a good start, at least that would allow us to keep a backup copy on hand.

Being able to download any story would be ideal, though. I'm not sure why the idea of it is so terrifying tbh, I mean it's...a game. Or a story with game elements, whatever. You download games and play them. Or you download books and read them. That's how it works. I'm far more likely to be interested in something I can enjoy at my leisure rather than one I have to be online and on a specific site for.

No, that is not "how it works". That is a very recent and insidious development, in which art and entertainment are treated as things you presumptuosly assume are just coming to you, and which have no intrinsic or even monetary value for the poor slob who had to create it. "Free" stuff on YouTube for example isn't really free. The smaller you are, the more you get screwed. If you have spent years honing your abilities to become a writer, then really you should be able to earn a little support from it. At the very least, it is your intellectual property and no one has any business downloading it, which means owning it. Is it not enough to be able to see the thing in its entirety on the site? If you're just too lazy to be online, then that is your problem, not the writer's.

Oh, and for the last time: what we create here are stories, not games. We have readers, not players. That is our distinguishing feature.

Rather than turning us into the poor man's version of countless other sites, let's maintain the thing that gave us drive and purpose.

[mizal]

No, that is not "how it works". That is a very recent and insidious development, in which art and entertainment are treated as things you presumptuosly assume are just coming to you, and which have no intrinsic or even monetary value for the poor slob who had to create it. "Free" stuff on YouTube for example isn't really free. The smaller you are, the more you get screwed. If you have spent years honing your abilities to become a writer, then really you should be able to earn a little support from it. At the very least, it is your intellectual property and no one has any business downloading it, which means owning it. Is it not enough to be able to see the thing in its entirety on the site? If you're just too lazy to be online, then that is your problem, not the writer's.

Oh, and for the last time: what we create here are stories, not games. We have readers, not players. That is our distinguishing feature.

Rather than turning us into the poor man's version of countless other sites, let's maintain the thing that gave us drive and purpose.

LOL.

"Free" stuff isn't free....unless you're one of the thousands of people who write a book or a game or a comic and make it available for free. With interactive fiction, that's always been a given thing instead of a rare few exceptions.

I'm guessing you must not read many ebooks or play games or have much of an interest in interactive fiction, because I can't imagine how else anyone with even a passing familiarity with creative works on the internet could come to that kind of conclusion.

I definitely don't want us to be a poor man's version of anything though. It's not like this is some kind of site for filthy plebs who write for fun or anything, you are free to continue bringing in the cash hand over fist on IS the way you always have, I guess? I mean I can't imagine any other possible motivation a person would ever have to write or create a thing.

Anyway, it's kind of silly to pretend this is even a viable writing site. The tiny handful of people writing stories are being deliberately ignored by the tiny handful of so called 'community' members, and this has been the situation for years. I was looking at the model of other IF sites with thriving communities that have been around for years and making suggestions for increasing popularity based on that.

If the very idea offends you...well, that's fine. The site isn't going to become any more dead or any more alive based on either of our opinions. Sev will either keep the status quo or try to change things in a way that might revive it, and that's the only thing that will matter.

And I mean this is seriously a stupid discussion to have here. If you're writing professional level CYOAs where you care about making money and who's allowed to look at it, you use CoG or make it an app. This isn't some radical new development. This is incredibly basic shit anyone with the slightest interest in IF is aware of. Otherwise, it's just like any other story or IF game people make freely available every day. Written for fun or for practice, and put out there with the hope of getting feedback.

[Vesnic]

You completely missed the point of my post. But since you're a self-appointed expert, I'm sure I don't need to tell you how ad revenue works. You also blithely ignored the difference between having access to content and effectively owning it. And you know what, I don't give a shit if certain shitty ways of doing things online have become trendy or even standard. That doesn't make them right or worthy of imitation. How about thinking for ourselves and setting our own ideas and ideals?

You have rarely missed an opportunity to waltz in here to tell us all how much we suck and how dead our site is. All that time, you might have been a positively contributing member. You had years to do it.

[mizal]

Yes okay, let's continue this meaningful and important argument about the brand new and 'trendy' way interactive fiction has worked since the internet was first created. IF is downloadable, for free, and it has been since the Usenet days. Playing or reading it online is the new thing, and online only is almost unheard of.

You wanted to argue semantics about CYOAs being 'stories' only, while ignoring my point about all the books made available for download by their authors, for free. Or...the entire rest of the internet on all the hundreds of sites where stories are freely posted. I'm not sure how downloading any of those would be different from downloading a story here, and you don't seem to be either.

"That doesn't make them right or worthy of imitation. How about thinking for ourselves and setting our own ideas and ideals?"

So...and I get that you're one of those 'all popular things are bad and beneath you' type of people, but looking at where the 'ideas and ideals' of IS have brought us today, in your opinion this site is perfectly fine, and healthy, and has no room for change or improvement? So much so that even suggestions for it, made at the request of the site owner, need to be brutally stamped out?

Okay.

Still, as futile as it is, I'd still like to put forward the radical idea that writers write in large part with a desire for feedback, and enjoy talking with other writers, and that you need those three things: writers, feedback, and discussion, to make for a viable community. We're missing all three here, but that's not evidence of anything of course, the site is just fine, and healthy, and so on. I'm sorry I haven't contributed more, since that seems to be such a sore point, but frankly, this site has barely been on my radar for much of the time. I got to the point I'd check in maybe twice a year, see that absolutely nothing of substance had been discussed since the last time, and move on. My time on the internet is limited and other sites that have active discussion going on were naturally going to draw more of my attention. As for writing, I've posted a couple of stories, then taken them down because absolutely no one even so much as glanced at them. One of them that was about 50 pages long, I posted at the other site and got immediate, useful criticism and feedback. So of course that was going to color where my future efforts were focused.


"All that time, you might have been a positively contributing member. You had years to do it. "

The same could be said for anyone else here. IS had and even today still has a lot of promise, but the core issue killing the site is and always has been that no one here gives a shit about the writers or anyone that isn't part of the 3 to 5 person zombie circlejerk on this forum. I've been just as guilty as the rest of you, but don't act like I'm the sole source of the problem. I can click 'Newest' on the main page, and see who the contributing members have been these last couple of years, and hint: it's not you or anyone at all from the forum. And if none of you care, why should I or anyone else be expected to? What passes for discussion here is largely irrelevant and has basically nothing to do with the site itself. Sev could pull the plug on the whole thing tomorrow and the only part of IS used by the members who matter would still be just fine.

You have to have new blood posting new stories, and you have to have people reading and giving feedback on those stories for a community like this to work. And as I said, anyone who contributes has been deliberately ignored and strangled out while a tiny handful perch around in a thread patting themselves on the back and feeling superior over...what, I don't know. I had hopes the redesign would stir up a little life around here and have been making an effort to pay attention to the few new authors we've had to keep them around ever since, but if suggestion that would increase awareness of the site, give the option of getting those stories available on the IFDB and in the sight of the wider IF community, get more people contributing and interested in the stories and contributing reviews and discussion gets shot down immediately so...okay. I don't know what else to say. Just keep on keeping on, I guess. Let's all return to the status quo, since that seems to make you...well, not happy, but the closest to what passes for a human emotion like that for you, let's say.

[Vesnic]

This is going to be my last in-depth reply to you on this subject.

You've put a lot of words in my mouth. Look back into any number of past threads. I've been an active participant for many years, including when we've discussed possible improvements to various aspects of the site. I've made several suggestions this time too, as have others. I'm promoting caution and a well-conceived plan, not stagnation. In fact, I just thanked Sev today for his work on the site.

It's both unkind and untrue to say the forum members are a "circle jerk" of self-congratulation. We criticize one another plenty. We've also done some damn good work. What's wrong with my saying, "Great job, DEP!" when he's really deserved some congratulations?

Admittedly, I'm not as active as I once was. However, I have looked over the New Stories section quite a lot recently in hopes of finding promising new members. I didn't see very much that could even be counted as literate. If I have missed recent additions of note, then by all means, let us know about them!

I am taking a much longer view of history when I say the internet is shifting the paradigm of how people approach literature, music, games, entertainment and other forms of intellectual creation. You don't have to villify me for insisting upon the rights of the artist, and for his or her final story, game, what-have-you, to be regarded as more than a freebie to be chewed up, spat out and forgotten. Have you read Chubby's thread about how culture is sliding downhill? We'd be a better and wiser society if we didn't treat our art and the people who make it like trash. So let's set a counter-example. Let's dare to be iconoclastic!

IS has long had a unique culture. Those who stay, stay for years. If someone just wants to write on the main site and not jump into the forum fray, we respect that too. That's why I referred Sev today to an expanded list of recommended stories that included authors who are not present on the forum. If you're going to accuse us of "deliberately ignoring and strangling out" new talent, then some specific examples would really be in order because that's one hell of an accusation.

Please don't presume to know more about me or the dynamics of this site than you do. With the others, I usually get a sense of goodwill underneath all the snark. With you, I just feel some very sharp barbs, which often seem to come out of nowhere and whose goal seems to be more about inflicting injury than effecting change you care deeply about. But maybe I'm wrong about you. In fact, I hope I am. I've always wanted to like you and to read any other stories you might eventually want to share with us, because you are clearly a capable writer.