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From: erkyrath@netcom.com (Andrew Plotkin)
Subject: Re: Random competition thoughts
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Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 17:09:03 GMT
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Gareth Rees (gdr11@cl.cam.ac.uk) wrote:
> 1. Why the fad for including responses like this?

>      >score
>      Life doesn't work like that.

>    I don't know about you, but my life has a score (currently 10 out of
>    100).

<Long penetrating look> I'm not sure what you mean. 

I believe I was the initiator of this offense (in "Weather"). I did it
because the game *didn't* have anything resembling a meaningful score, and
I wanted to tell players to concentrate on the story rather than
accumulation of "successful subtasks". Furthermore, part of the point of
the game was to figure out what the point of the game was, and I wanted to
convey that through the prose rather than the upper right-hand corner of
the screen. 

People who have imitated me, I assume, had similar reasons. 

I was very surprised when I started getting complaints that the wording 
was "smug"; I just don't see it. Fortunately, I'm the author and I don't 
have to change it. :)

(See? When I'm smug, you'll know it.)

> 6. No women (no surprise there).

*I* was surprised, since Bonni Mierzejewska had been plugging "Night at 
the Computer Center" in her sig. (It did get released, independent of the 
competition -- "night.z5" in the archive.)

In general, though, the relative infrequency of female hackers is bound to
be reflected in the IF, as it were, oeuvre.

(Infrequency! Infrequency! Not absence!)

Hm. Are there a lot of women out there, reading this, who play IF and
want to design games, but aren't programming types? (As many as there are
men of that description, I mean.  I'd guess that even playing IF is enough
of a geekish activity that women are underrepresented in it. Don't know 
how much though.)

I'd suggest collaboration between writers who can't hack and hackers who 
can't write, but there's a basic problem: *everyone* thinks they can 
write. :-) Note that the only such collaboration, _Path to Fortune_, was 
programmed by C.E.Forman, who has also written two competition entries on 
his own in the same period -- which puts him among the most productive 
IF programmers, if you think about it. Anyone who can program is pretty 
much working on their own ideas.

--Z



-- 

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."
