Qooper on 23/9/2020 at 18:46

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Certainly an interesting (https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football/) read. Instantly became one of my favorites. Enjoy! :cool:

EDIT: People seem to want a small intro. It's tough to write one without spoiling things, but here goes.

In the future, people find a... Scratch that.

What would you do with your life if you had... No, this is spoiling too much.

Football! We all love football. And good storytelling. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you 17776!

Written by Jon Bois, this is a beautiful piece in its own unique way, and I don't think anyone's ever written anything quite like it. Just start reading and let it do its thing. Don't worry if you don't understand at first. Nine doesn't either.

Tomi on 23/9/2020 at 19:57

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Heh, I was honestly about to report that post at first, because the link took me to a rather suspicious-looking site that didn't seem to make much sense (and I didn't feel like clicking any of the even more suspicious-looking links on it), but I decided to google "17776" to see if anything comes up. Well, I guess it's all good after all, even though I still have no idea what it's all about. Some sort of a short introduction could have been nice perhaps, but maybe that'd spoil things, I don't know.

But yeah, it does seem fairly interesting, now that I know that you haven't been kidnapped by a spambot. :p

Qooper on 24/9/2020 at 16:04

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I was going to report game 27 as being the silliest football game in the known universes.

And just to be clear, we're talking american football, none of that soccer nonsense (apologies if there are any soccer nonsense fans on TTLG :p).

@Tomi: You're probably right. A short intro would've been polite. I figured I wouldn't need to say anything, since the idea gets out quick. Once you're past chapter one, you know what's up.

demagogue on 25/9/2020 at 02:15

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An intro is definitely inappropriate to the experience, in the sense of going in without expectations, except to say "an intro is inappropriate to the experience" as an intro. It is an experience, anyway.

I enjoyed the thing. It was cleverly plotted out and did the whole mixed media thing well.

The one thing I didn't like (this isn't a spoiler, but it could give one expectations they'd be better off not having going in) ... okay, I also hang around the interactive fiction (IF) community, so this debate has already been a thing there since the 2000s. And this isn't even that debate exactly, but it reminds me of it. And there's a larger debate across all of social media too. Okay, there are different ways you could frame it. Maybe the simplest way is it has a Tumblr voice (a lot of platforms also have that voice, but it's most purified in Tumblr maybe). And it has some of the thinking that's transformed IF over the last 10~20 years into something still maybe clever in a way, but not really enlightening. (You could boil that debate down to the influence of Twine and how its tropes have practically taken over the genre, IF where you're basically just clicking links down narrative trees, as opposed to the IF made on TADS and Inform, where you're coding an actual parser.)

This had so many cool ideas in it, but at the end of the day it struck me as teenagers playing Tumblr validation tennis with each other. When I see IF that does that, it kind of makes me pine for the golden age-style of IF that's captured by Emily Short's blog, where these kind of clever mechanics also make you really re-think reality, that are alienating or bewildering and push your mind way outside its comfort zone, but are ultimately enlightening or mind-expanding in some way. This was so creative and had the potential to do that, but then it didn't really at all... That's not really a criticism of this thing by itself. I thought it was cute and liked it a lot. It's this larger criticism I have with creative projects recently and this just pinched that nerve more than usual, probably because I did think it was more creative and surreal than usual.

Sulphur on 25/9/2020 at 05:15

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I'm pretty sure the IF community has been grousing about non-puzzle based IF since the resurgence of IF when Graham Nelson put Curses out in 1993. The argument even tracks back all the way to A Mind Forever Voyaging, which is still a wonderful work of IF regardless of whether it has traditional parser-based puzzle challenges or not. I think there's more than enough space for both, but creators usually create things that appeal to them first, so that's what you'll see as a sort of zeitgeist for X periods of time. As someone who dabbled in Inform, TADS, and one or two other IF parser engines a long time ago, I realised that puzzle-based IF wasn't something I really wanted to make: I was playing all these bits of IF like Jigsaw and Anchorhead and the like to see what happened next; to me, the puzzles were secondary. When Twine came around, it had the most direct story->reader route and as a bonus, making a story was ridiculously easy because of how it's designed to let you iterate and manage story branches. It's a godsend for making branching hypertext narrative quickly.