Responsibility Run Amok

Headnote (not footnote): The analysis of the contract shown below is, for the moment, still accurate, or as accurate as I know how to make it. But today I spoke to an individual at the City Attorney’s office who seemed to be more than willing to make changes in the contract. So for now, I’m very optimistic. To continue where we left off:

Two weeks ago I wrote about being asked to sign a contract that included an indemnification clause. I would have been required to sign this contract in order to be allowed to teach cello at a local music studio. I said no, thanks.

Today we have an even more amazing example of creeping indemnification.

I contacted the local library and volunteered to give a free 90-minute presentation to interested library patrons on the subject of interactive fiction. The librarian in charge likes the idea. She sent me two pieces of paperwork to fill out and return. One is a simple equipment checklist; the other is entitled “Hold Harmless.” (Ominous rumblings in the timpani.) Here’s the text of the latter document, in its entirety:

“The undersigned shall defend, indemnify, and hold harmless the City, its officers, officials, employees, agents, and volunteers from and against all claims, damages, losses, and expenses, herein, caused in whole or in part by any negligent act or omission of the undersigned or anyone directly or indirectly employed by any of them or anyone for whose acts any of them may be liable, except where caused by the negligence of the City, its officers, officials, employees, agents, or volunteers.”

Below this text (which was pasted into the .doc file as a graphic, so that it can’t be edited, thereby saving them, I suppose, the trouble of having to proofread it to make sure the signer didn’t try anything sneaky) is a space for my signature.

By doing a little research online on indemnity and contract law, I was able to spot ten or twelve separate problems in that one seemingly simple paragraph. And it was given to the librarian, for her to pass on to prospective volunteer presenters of free (that is, unpaid) programs, by the City Attorney’s office.

The individual I spoke to today (Sept. 22) said, in the course of the conversation, ”That’s a standard form. We’ve been using it for years, and no one has ever asked about it before.” What I didn’t say to him, because he seems a very nice, reasonable person, was, any time someone in an attorney’s office says the language in a form is “standard,” check your wallet.

The biggest problem with this contract is so huge that I read the document a dozen times before I noticed it. Have you spotted it yet? The difficulty is

Author! Author!

Both Inform 7 and TADS 3 are very, very powerful authoring systems for interactive fiction (i.e., text-based games). What’s odd, if you think about it for a minute, is that the authoring systems are so far out in front of the work that’s being written. Why don’t we have ten or twenty times as many talented authors laboring away over great new works of IF?

If it weren’t for the hard work of two dedicated software designers, Graham Nelson and Mike Roberts, we’d have no decent authoring systems at all. So maybe it’s just the luck of the draw. I’m not too sure about that, though.

I did a quick, informal survey of the games released by some well-known IF authors during the past decade, and found rather a dearth of gung-ho activity. Yes, new games are being released, and yes, a few authors are very active, but many others release a couple of games and then fall by the wayside.

An earlier version of this post (which I have now completely revised) sparked some discussion on rec.arts.int-fiction. That discussion highlighted several reasons why IF authors may fail to follow up their early successes by writing more games.

First, there’s no money in IF. A novelist whose first work is published, reviewed, and admired will have a big financial incentive to continue. Not so with interactive fiction. It’s a hobby.  And however passionate people may feel about their hobbies, after a few years the passion may settle to a lower level.

Second, writing IF is harder than many people realize. They may tackle writing their first game, buckle down and fight their way through the unexpected difficulties, release a very good game, and then be reluctant to put themselves through the wringer again.

Third, lots of people first try writing IF when they’re in college. By the time they’ve written one or two games, they’ve moved on to a new stage of their life — a job, a family, and so on. Time-consuming, unpaid hobbies tend to take a back seat.

Fourth, some people remain involved in the IF field but devote their time to other activities than writing new games. Mike Roberts, for example, has put a lot of time recently into the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB).

Fifth, as Emily Short pointed out, developing a game that will unfold as a satisfying story is quite a conceptual challenge. Not that writing novels is a paint-by-the-numbers activity, but the parameters are pretty well understood. Not so with IF. Some authors undoubtedly have games that they’ve been working on for an extended period that they’re not ready to release because something about the project hasn’t yet jelled.

Sixth, some authors may have gone on from IF into the world of paid game programming. Why on Earth would they want to come home and write games for free in their spare time?

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this discussion — and my apologies to anyone who felt that my off-the-cuff survey was ill-considered or overly negative.

The comments contributed to the original version of this post are no longer relevant to the updated version, so I’m deleting them. However, I’ll keep Adam Cadre’s comment on the original version, since it illustrates the issues discussed in the new version.

Handy Andy

Starting to think about expanding my Inform 7 Handbook. I’ve gotten a number of nice compliments on it, so I know people are finding it useful. If I’m able to put together an IF class this fall, having an even heftier textbook would be a good thing. (I could even print out spiral-bound copies and sell them.)

Jeff Nyman has just uploaded a PDF on how Inform assembles the text in a room description, and I’m thinking, “Oh, I should probably do something like that for every chapter in my handbook.”

Also, I’ve started doing a survey of the types of puzzles in IF. This material should be equally useful for authors and players (including me, which is one of the reasons I’m doing it — I’m lousy at solving puzzles). The Handbook could use a whole chapter on puzzles, I think, complete with spoiler examples from existing games and probably a few coding tips too.

To create a well-rounded survey, I’m not just relying on stuff I know already. I’ve played part or all of half a dozen more games so far, and I’ve just barely started. Varicella is brilliant — and impossible. I had to use the walkthrough. Lots of other interesting games too. I went through All Hope Abandon by Eric Eve and found it modestly enjoyable, with a few good puzzles. Eric is a New Testament scholar, so his depiction of Hell is perhaps more liberally interwoven with theology than I’m equipped to appreciate, but that’s one of the fun things about writing IF: You get to pull in bits of this and that based on whatever fascinates you.

Not that I’m planning to write a game about cello playing, though. That would be a bit too esoteric.

Caution and Paralysis

I’ve been trying to figure out how to teach a couple of classes — one in interactive fiction, another in computer-based music-making. I’m sure there would be enough interest to fill a couple of small classes (say, 8 to 10 students each) if the price were kept reasonable. The difficulty is figuring out where to hold the classes.

I have several options, all of them problematical.

If I had no more than half a dozen students, I could easily teach a class out of my home. The sticking point is liability insurance. Insurance is a peculiarly post-World War II issue. Seventy-five years ago, during the depths of the Great Depression, anybody who had the expert knowledge to teach a course in their dining room would certainly have done so if they needed the money. They would never have considered that they needed liability insurance. Homeowner’s insurance didn’t exist at all in the 1930s.

What has changed?

Society is less homogenous than it was 75 years ago. Because of increased physical mobility and the concomitant weakening of the bonds of community, you’re more likely to run into people who have no reason not to cause trouble if they see an advantage in it. So the risk of inviting strangers into your home is undoubtedly a bit higher. And my impression (not researched) is that there’s more litigation per capita than formerly, which means the probability of your getting sued is higher.

The intrusiveness of government regulation also plays a role. Seventy-five years ago, auto insurance wasn’t mandatory. (Massachusetts was the first state to make it mandatory, in 1927; other states followed suit by the 1940s.) Health insurance was, I’m sure, a rarity in those days. In effect, then, we’ve been softened up by the insurance industry, which has fostered an environment of pervasive low-level fear. Unless we have coverage, we’re paralyzed.

I’ve looked around for other venues where I might teach. The local library has rooms available, but they won’t let me charge students a fee; I’d have to teach for free, as a volunteer. (Gee, I wonder what bean-brained bureaucrat thought that one up. Let’s see — we’ll deprive our clientele of high-quality content by structuring the use of the facility so that people who really know their subject matter and are not already wealthy will have to go elsewhere.)

There are empty buildings downtown, no more than a few blocks from here, but … well, I’m betting whoever owns the building would have issues with liability insurance. If I were a church-goer, I could approach my church about using one of their meeting rooms. But alas, I’m not. I’m almost hypocritical enough to join a church (probably the Unitarians) purely to have access to their facilities, but I like going to the gym on Sunday mornings. Exercise is a high priority for me.

Maybe I’ll buy a great big tent and put it out in the back yard. That way at least I won’t have hordes of students invading my home. Except that they’ll need to use the bathroom, and — no, wait. I don’t have a back yard, so that’s out.

Guess I’ll have to come up with some other creative approach.

Score for Games

Text-based games are not, by their very nature, multimedia-rich experiences. The developers of various game authoring systems have added, over the years, a few limited bits of media support. Authors can, for instance, clear the screen and show a still image. Or rather, we can do it in the game code, but we’re at the mercy of the end user’s interpreter software, which may or may not be able to display the image.

Macintosh users who want to play games written in TADS have been at a particular disadvantage. But CocoaTADS is a new and viable interpreter for TADS games on the Mac, which is good news indeed.

Better yet, CocoaTADS implements audio fadeins and fadeouts. According to a message posted today by developer Charles Srstka on the newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction, this is “by popular demand.” I had to chuckle, because as far as I’m aware, all of the popular demand is coming from me.

I’ve been beating the drum (so to speak) for audio fadeouts in TADS for a year or two now, principally because I’m also a musician and composer. If an author wants to include some background music that will play while the player is in a particular room, I feel it’s essential that the music be faded out smoothly when the player leaves that room. Abrupt cutoffs are jarring and amateurish, but not being able to cut off the music when the player leaves the Flower-Bedecked Garden and enters the Dank Crypt would be far worse.

The problem for me is this: Now I don’t have any excuses. I’ve asked for a fairly slick modern feature, and the developers (Mike Roberts and Charles) have done the necessary work — so maybe I ought to write a game that uses music, hunh?

Now all I need to do is think of a story that would benefit from music.

Learning TADS 3

Conrad Cook recently started a Google-based Study Group for learning TADS 3. So I’ve been learning some meta-lessons about learning.

T3 is easily the most powerful system for writing interactive fiction. It’s sophisticated, it’s dense, and it’s not easy to learn. There’s a reason why Inform 7 has become vastly more popular: I7 is ultimately less powerful and arguably more idiosyncratic, but it’s also far easier to get started with, perhaps especially if you’re a novice.

More than a dozen people have joined the study group, and messages have been flying back and forth. What I’ve been observing is that the frustrations I found myself mired in three or four years ago, when I first looked at T3, are mirrored or echoed by some other people in the group — people who are now approaching it for the first time.

T3 comes with five or six book-length manuals, each with its own raison d’etre. There is some overlap, but each manual is different. And there’s no overall index that covers them. Part of the learning process is discovering what’s in each of the manuals, so that you’ll know where to look when you get stuck. Because you’ll

Little Things

I’ve been wondering why I enjoy something as bizarre and pointless as writing interactive fiction. But ultimately it’s no different from a lot of other creative hobbies.

There are people (mostly men, I imagine) who build quite elaborate model train layouts for fun. Such a train layout might fill an entire bedroom. In the evening you might find the guy building a trestle out of popsicle sticks and then painting it rust-red so it looks authentic.

In each case, what’s fun is creating a tiny model of the real world — a model that has light and color and sound in it, and where things move around. The human brain seems to like building models.

A community theatre performing Shakespeare is the same thing, isn’t it? There’s more social collaboration than if you’re building a model train, but the result is a tiny model of the real world (the life of Richard III, for instance) that includes color and sound and movement.

Hobbyist Programming

Trying to get back into TADS 3. It’s an incredibly powerful language in which to write interactive fiction, but it’s not for the faint of heart. The first time I tried learning it, I found myself crying, “Classes and templates and macros, oh my!” By now I’ve written one long game in TADS, one shorter game, and one medium-sized game co-written with Eric Eve, who is not just a TADS expert but the TADS expert.

But that was last year. Now I’m trying to re-learn what I’ve forgotten and nail together what I never knew. Tonight I got hopelessly frustrated trying to create an odor. TADS has not one but two classes for the purpose — Odor and SimpleOdor. There’s quite a bit of documentation (written by Eric) on how to use them. And I still couldn’t figure it out.

Eventually I got it working, but I’m sure my code is very amateurish. I tend to use a ballpeen hammer for tightening screws.

Yesterday I was working out how to cause the player character to automatically sit down when the player types ‘get in car’. If you don’t take care of the posture change, TADS will report, “Okay, you’re now standing in the car.” But changing the PC’s posture can have side effects. That took an hour too.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother with this stuff. It’s as much work as building a ship in a bottle, and at the end of the day, what you have is about as useful as a ship in a bottle. But it beats the heck out of watching Jeopardy.

Never Satisfied

This is a sad story about technology.

I own two very nice laptops, a Mac and a PC. The PC is my office machine, and is normally hooked up to a second monitor, a Firewire audio interface, a USB hub, a router via Ethernet, and so on. The Mac sits by my easy chair in the living room, and I use it mainly for idle hobbyist stuff in the evening.

This week I wanted to do some idle hobbyist stuff with a Windows program called TADS Workbench. Fortunately, I picked up a free copy of Crossover last fall, during Codeweavers’ one-day giveaway. So I can run Windows programs on the Mac.

Sort of, but not quite. Workbench loses its preferences every time it’s shut down, and its Options box doesn’t display properly. A bigger issue is that I would like to use a very nice freeware applet called AutoHotKey, because there are some QWERTY keystroke combinations I like to use in Workbench. And AutoHotKey is so system-level that it won’t run at all under Crossover.

So last night I turned off the PC, unplugged its cables, and took it into the living room to mess around with Workbench. Now I’m happy with the software side, but the hardware is driving me crazy. The PC laptop has a quiet but annoying acoustical 60-cycle hum, apparently due to a physical connection between the power supply (or possibly the fan motor) and the exterior case. Also, it runs hotter, so my lap gets a little toasty after a while.

While I’m using it, I can’t check my email or do anything on the Web, because I’d have to buy and configure a wireless router to do that. And when I’m finished playing around with Workbench, I have to hook up all the cables again.

Buy a cheap PC laptop just so I can fiddle around with Workbench? That seems strangely misguided. Plus, it would take hours to set it up. First I’d have to verify that Workbench and AutoHotKey are even compatible with the new OS.

I have two powerful laptops, and I’m still not satisfied.

Photoshop Junkie

Remember the Mac IIci? Great computer, for its day. Back in 1992 or thereabouts, I found myself with a loaner machine in my home. On it was a copy of Photoshop.

I can’t draw, so Photoshop was an ideal program with which to discover the joys of being a visual artist. Apply three or four filters to areas selected with the magic wand tool, apply a few color contours, and you can end up with stunning abstract textures that you might never think of if you could draw. I had a few of my best images printed (not cheap, in those days) and framed (not cheap either). Four or five of them hang on my walls today.

Computers are a lot faster now, and I’m sure Photoshop is more powerful too. But it’s also expensive! Plus, I don’t need a bad case of mouse hand. So I’ve been able to resist temptation.

Last night I was looking for some basic photo processing software to crop some images, and downloaded Gimp. Oh, no! It’s Photoshop! And free! (Yes, I know it’s properly GIMP — the Gnu Image Manipulation Program. I just hate names that are in ALL CAPS.)

I still don’t own a digital camera, but I do have a nice scanner in my office, so old family photos are fair game. Not only that, but the possibilities for presentation of digital artwork have progressed rather markedly. In 1992, there was no such thing as a personal website, let alone flickr.

The possibilities go far beyond that. I’ve had a look at Ren’Py, a free program for building interactive visual novels. The folks who created it seem to be devoted to anime-style comic books, but you could do a slide show with it. The slide show could be nonlinear. It could include embedded Python code that would do some odd or provocative things.

This could be fun!