I’ve typed the scores for the 2006 Thanksgiving Bunco game into an online spreadsheet for your perusal1.
The way it worked out, if your name started with a J or an O, you won a prize.
This information is guaranteed to be somewhat inaccurate. If you see an exclamation point next to your name, it means your total of wins & losses did not add up to 12 (the number of rounds we played). Insofar as anyone cares, corrections are welcome.
When, a couple of weeks ago, another two wedding invitations landed across our desk, we found our happiness for the otherwise-graceful couples somewhat diminished by alarm: alarm, we say, at the rapid and almost unnoticed evolution of a sinister trend in matrimonial circles: Registration.
By some inconceivable process, it has become normal for the modern couple, when once marriage has been decided upon and is impending, to make lists of the things they would like people to give them. These lists they then refer to as lightly and as quasi-tactfully as possible when writing up the invitations. Some have even advanced the practice to the perverse point of including actual lists of desired merchandise along with the invitations.
Many people assume that this practice has been around forever, but in fact it has only recently become common. The generation before us had their foibles, but they had enough wind in their wristwatches to know that when a man and a woman marry and invite people in to watch, they ought to be grateful for their gifts, and that if they do get three toasters, or a teak cutting board that doesn’t match their maple kitchen cupboards, they ought to consider it par for the course.
We here request your aid in the slaying of an unfortunate trend, by which many wonderful men and women are being unwittingly discountenanced, in the name of “custom.”
—JD
“The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.”
—William Cowper (1731-1800)
Some things creep up on you over a long period of time. I learned only a couple of days ago that on September 15th, unbeknownst to most of the world, Mike Roberts and his crew of gnomes plan to officially release TADS 3, the third major revision of an interactive fiction system that has been around since 1987.
This is a project that I have been following over the past few years, albeit from a great distance. The TADS project is amazing for its longevity: the thing simply will not die. Mike Roberts has not only continued to maintain the software after making it shareware in 1996, but in TADS 3 he has engineered a major overhaul of the language and the software.
My own interest in text adventures goes back quite a ways. My first purchase of a C++ compiler, when I was fourteen, was motivated by a text adventure project of mine called Wandering Woods. (I wish I had known about TADS then, but this was before the Internet as far as I was concerned, so the news had no way of reaching me.) I still have a text adventure project that currently exists only as handwritten notes on paper, that has been around for the last six years or so.
The appeal of text adventures is a phenomenon that has been extensively described elsewhere, so I won’t delve into it here; but the appeal remains, and could very well experience something of a revival in the not-too-distant future if IF systems can smooth out the two biggest remaining obstacles to text adventure development: Style and Packaging. Since TADS 3 is already very powerful under the hood, I think it is well-positioned to address these remaining issues1.
“You are carrying a large purple hyperlink.”
The text adventure authors of yore didn’t have to worry much about user interface elements; there was only text. Then in the mid-90’s came things like the HTML and multimedia extensions. Although the rest of the world has matured a little in its use of these things, HTMLTADS never quite got past the “Geocities” stage of user interface design.
It unfortunately appears that on Friday’s release, TADS 3 will still be using essentially the same interface as the old HTMLTADS, which, frankly, looks really bad. With its tacky tiled background, garish colors, uninspired fonts and stale toolbar, it strikes the user as more of a Windows 3.1 web browser than a vehicle for interactive literature. This produces a much worse effect, even on someone new to IF, then if they had simply re-created the fullscreen text-mode experience of the DOS days.
If the text adventure form of interactive fiction is even going to retain whatever appeal remains to its current, narrow audience, it needs at least to faithfully recreate the simplicity of the console days, without making the user tinker with options on the interpreter. But additionally, if text adventures are ever going to be really re-introduced to the mainstream, they need to look really good. Now that we have access to better typography and more elegant UI design elements on most platforms, why not take advantage of them?
It is possible to get TADS looking fairly decent, but it requires a fair amount of tinkering (see this screenshot showing both the customized and default settings side by side2).
It’s hard to explain it in words, so here’s a picture of what I mean by a step towards ideal interface simplicity. The toolbar is gone, the menu is hidden, and just like on the web, the hyperlink is the user interface. Theoretically we could get the menu back by moving the mouse up to the top of the window. The uninspired Times New Roman of HTMLTADS is replaced by the new Cambria font from Microsoft. The transparency is just a cute idea borrowed from Console, a better Windows command prompt. (Here’s a screenshot of the DOS version of TADS running under Console.) Obviously this is just a starting mock-up and a lot of improvement could be made.
As you can see, I’m not one of these purists who say that TADS should never have gone the route of allowing pictures and sound effects via the HTML extensions. If tastefully done, such things can really extend interactive fiction’s “design vocabulary.” But TADS needs to get over its fascination with purple hyperlinks and tacky, tiled backgrounds. It’s not 1993 anymore. As long as that big ‘T’ in TADS stands for ‘text,’ we believe some attention can be given to improving the quality of that text.
Update: Shortly after this was published, I was notified that such a beast exists already in the form of Gargoyle (and its cousin Spatterlight for Mac OS) by a fellow named Tor. Gargoyle has already been updated with the latest T3 interpreter, and I have to say it looks mighty nice. It doesn’t (yet) support HTML extensions, which is just fine with me :) Tor’s programs are open source as well; perhaps it’s worth a look by Mike & co. at updating & integrating into standard TADS packaging?
Cross-platform Packaging
The TADS community had (yet another) undeserved stroke of fortune in 2002, when another selfless developer, Dan Shiovitz, joined the scene and released Jetty, a version of the TADS interpreter written from the ground up in Java.
We don’t know if anyone else realised this, but this made possible the use of an entirely new format for distributing your stories. Previously, when you released a TADS adventure, you either (a) distributed just the .gam file and told people to download the correct interpreter for their platform, or (b) created native executables for certain platforms. The second approach was more convenient for most users but would have been a pain to maintain for the author.
With the Java interpeter, you could create a single package (containing your .gam file, a simple html file and the Jetty java class) that could run on pretty much any platform with a browser, without making your users install a separate interpreter. Besides being easier for both the author to maintain and the reader to use, this actually looked better than the “standard” interpreters and gave the author a little more control of the presentation.
We contacted Dan while writing this article, and he said that he will not be updating Jetty to support TADS 3, since this would require a complete rewrite. This is understandable, but regrettably returns TADS to the same packaging tradeoffs that existed before 2002. It is our hope that this gap will be filled before too long, as arguably a good Java interpreter is more valuable for a text adventure system than a native one on either Mac or Windows.
Chapter Three
I am looking forward to rolling up my sleeves and digging into TADS 3’s impressive language features and writing some interactive fiction, although at the same time I don’t care to contemplate what the finished product would look like for the user at this point. Regarding UI improvements, the TADS site says:
“…Most of the advantages of TADS 3, though, aren’t things that the player will ever directly see. Instead, they’re things that make the author’s job easier, and things that give the author more flexibility and power in realizing her3 creative vision.”
It’s true that TADS’ revamped engine represents a huge improvement for authors, but it must also be recognized that players do not operate in the abstract realm of the author’s “creative vision”; they must view it through the lens of their computer screens. TADS’ lens is currently of the disposable-camera variety; with comparatively little effort it could be upgraded to a Carl Zeiss. Furthermore, the details of the presentation – the typography, visual design, and ease of use – are an important part of the author’s creative vision, and they should be given some level of control over these as much as over the actual gameplay.
Finally, for those of you who cared enough to read this far, I do not wish to complain; rather, to look forward to the possibilities of a powerful IF engine combined with elegance of design. I am really quite astounded by Mr Roberts’ persistent and selfless effort on this free project that cannot possibly bring him a drop of revenue, and deeply encouraged by the fact that he refuses to move on with his life, even while the rest of the world speculates mainly on whether it will be Spore or Duke Nukem Forever that hits the stores first. I hope Mike will forgive me for not getting in touch with him before this was published, but I did not feel there was time, and I did not want to introduce any unnecessary distractions so close to the release date. If, as is my hope, this article occasions any further dialogue on the topic with the developers, we will be certain to relate the results here.
—JD
1 My more informed readers are probably all too aware of Inform, the primary challenger to TADS, and its superiority on the design front. Inform’s IDE does in fact, look very good on both the Windows and Mac platforms, and is light years ahead in functionality; but the interpreters, which are what the users actually see, are supplied by third parties and are, while a mild improvement over the TADS interpreters on either platform, still merely average. Furthermore I strongly favor TADS’ structured programming language over the highly ambiguous “natural language” code of Inform, an idea which has historically not turned out well.
2 The tweaked settings are shown on the left, using Consolas, the new monospaced font from Microsoft.
3 I was not aware that all IF authors are females. A typo perhaps?
In 1998, Joel’s Improved Personal Website was created with an account on a free hosting service called Icestorm, which was later sold to Stormloader. Unfortunately, after moving to another host, I lost the login details for this account.
For some reason they never closed that account, and amazingly, the Stormloader service has not been bought out or shut down. For six years that website has been sitting there, untouched and unaccessed, but still visible to the world.
…Until last weekend. I was going through some very old files, and out fell an index card with my Stormloader ID and Password written on it. As soon as I had time, I tried logging in – success. Finally, I was able to make some minor updates to forward people to the current address.
There are perhaps two elements from this original design that have survived over the past eight years.
The practice of putting quotes at the bottom of each page (some of the quotes themselves are still in use).
The chipmunk
Since the site has survived for so long under a state of total neglect, I have decided to leave it up almost exactly as it was. As well as being a miracle of data survival in what I would consider to be a fairly volatile arena (free web hosting leftover from the dotcom days), it also serves as almost a badge of authenticity. Writing online since 1998.
Joel has been very busy lately. He knows he has missed several of your cell phone calls, and is sorry for that. He has never been very good at remembering to bring the silly thing with him. Secretly, he has always wondered why people think it is so important to be able to get ahold of everyone else at a moment’s notice.
That kind of lifestyle was once considered laughable and ridiculous, the stuff of old Maxwell Smart episodes on TV. Who would have thought that the shoe phone could ever be taken seriously? Now, however, Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone is common currency, and we are seeing the end of all structure in life.
In an ideal world, if you need to talk to Joel when he is at work, you could call him at his work phone number. If you need to talk to Joel when he is at home, you could call his home phone number. If Joel is not near a phone at one of these two locations, and has not left an alternative phone number, then it can wait.
This us how it used to be everywhere in the world, as recently as the 1980’s. Ironically, the year 1984, whose number has become a symbol for central control, now conjures images in Joel’s mind of a better, simpler time, when phones were still in fixed locations. No one used to have the instant ability to insert themselves into someone else’s head at a moment’s notice. Joel wished you would think about that kind of lifestyle, really try and picture it in your mind. What would that be like?
But Joel is really genuinely sorry he left his cell phone on the nightstand this morning before he left for work. He will try and do better, even though he knows your call probably did not concern an emergency of any kind.
The monochromatic vision, to which you had lain a captive audience for some hours, was of the striped underside of a mattress in the bunk above yours, supported by black metal crossbars. It filled almost your whole field of sight. The stripes were navy on a white background – this you had from distant impressions of a time before the fever, and not from any present faculty of discernment; and the light was low and odd, such that it was hard to distinguish even between white and navy.
If you tilted your head back quite far, you were allowed to see a fragment of a window, which was just visible between the bed frame and the ominous curtain. There was bright light from outside shining in through the fragment of window, but in that harsh light nothing could be seen – no trees or clouds, only the bright sky. You remember thinking that if you died, you might just barely be able to squeeze between the bed frame and curtain and out that little part of the window and fly up to heaven. On second thought, you did not seem to possess the necessary energy to make it that far, or to go through such contortions. More likely you would float up to the ceiling and seep out of the room like a gas.
Once, you were healthy. Once, you liked to think that you were capable, and maybe even sort of good-looking in a way, a picture of sound living. And now, when you are not well, your thoughts of yourself are marked by small, succinct words like “gas” and “die.”
The light from the fragment of window made the backs of your eyeballs hurt in their sockets. However commonplace the monochromatic vision of the mattress underside might seem after one, or three, or twelve hours, at least it did not make your eyeballs hurt. It presented a never-ending pattern of regularity, and, on prolonged exposure, scenes of feverish creativity. The stripes began to vary in width, then to march by in full motion.
At some point you became impressed with the idea that the navy stripes hated you. They seemed to glare at you as they marched by, not with casual envy only, but with a perfect malice that was only restrained by the black metal crossbars between you and the mattress. The black metal crossbars did not seem to be restraining the stripes out of any consideration for you, however; only they seemed to be hissing, “Not yet! Not until the time is ripe!”
But time stands still in a fever, though you waited for hours upon hours. Besides, you had neither the energy to be alarmed by these incredulous vicissitudes, nor the mental clarity to consider what could be the implications of being hated by some stripes on the underside of a mattress. At last, somewhere in the universe, the sun went down. You drifted in and out of sleep and were unable to tell the difference. Some of the things you see now, in the heart of the fever, may prove to be true…
You heard them talking in the room, that you wouldn’t have wanted to burden them, that you wouldn’t have wanted to exist this way. They would sit by your bed for a day, but not for a month, because they could get no response in return: and they sent you into that long night alone. What would you have done for them if your place had been exchanged for theirs? Would you have been their voice, the sun rising and setting in the fragment of their window?
You wanted, not just to live, but to live in the light of your friends’ voices; and you wanted, not just to die, but to be called for, and to wear their undying care as a wreath of honour, when it was time to go. But though you would die, it would be at the hands of your friends, and though you could live, it would be amid the sounds, not of the voices of friends, but of those making their excuses, and leaving early.
—JD
“I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month,
& I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.”
— Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Joel has been very busy lately. He knows he has missed several of your cell phone calls, and is sorry for that. He has never been very good at remembering to bring the silly thing with him. Secretly, he has always wondered why people think it is so important to be able to get ahold of everyone else at a moment’s notice. 
