GET LAMP - Stephen Granade [english]

 

Get Lamp is a documentary about interactive fiction (a genre that includes text adventures) filmed by computer historian Jason Scott of textfiles.com. Scott conducted the interviews between February 2006 and February 2008, and the documentary was released in July 2010. The documentary and its hours of bonus episodes and footage contain material from about 80 interviews with developers, designers, and players of interactive fiction. The bonus film includes a nearly 50-minute documentary on Infocom, the best-known commercial publisher of interactive fiction.

Source: Wikipédia

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Stephen Granade is an I.F. author but also (and perhaps most importantly?) an organizer of interactive fiction competitions and an author of articles on the genre and on the art of game design.

– He begins by recalling the history of IFComp, founded in 1995 by Kevin Wilson, then organized by David Dyte before he himself inherited it from 1999 (until 2013, later in the documentary).

– He describes the fact that games in the early days of IFComp were longer than today, trying to replicate the Infocom model. The first to break away from this model was John Baker with his game John's Fire Witch (1995), which paved the way for a different conception of interactive fiction.

– Granade remembers that at the time, like his predecessors, he tested all the games, tried to establish walkthroughs, etc. He no longer has time to do so. He doesn't have time for that now, given the number of participants each year.

– Granade's priority as an organizer is not to provide solutions or test games, but rather to make sure that the widest possible audience, and ideally people who don't yet play interactive fiction, have access to the games entered each year, and can most easily participate in the voting. As such, he uses BitTorrent instead of just uploading the games to the IFArchive (which he stresses in passing is lacking in bandwidth).

– The number of voters is about 250 per year, but the total number of downloads is much larger: around 1000-2000 people download at least one Comp game every year.

– Stephen Granade has established that most authors work two, three months on the game they then submit. More rarely, six months. He remembers this being approached once by someone who had worked four years on his game.

– He estimates that out of all the submissions (30-40 games per competition), between one and three games offer something truly revolutionary in terms of the evolution of interactive fiction.

– Granade explains the shortcomings of most interactive fiction by the lack of beta-testing and the fact that authors do not ask themselves who is going to play their game, why (and why continue to play it) and how it could be fun, or more fun. How to keep the player and his attention, knowing all the offer that exists, in the "competition"?

– Granade also tells an anecdote: in 1997 a company called The Mining Company (which will become About.com) approached people from the interactive fiction community to recruit them as content writers and link collectors for their site project, which was meant to be a new web directory, like Yahoo was in its early days; Google was still far away. Granade accepted and was paid for a while for this work, which he continued to own after the site had completely overhauled its activities.

– He adds that this "guiding" (as he puts it) activity on About.com had led him to receive many emails from people totally outside the interactive fiction community, delighted to discover that the genre continued to exist. This made him happy because he likes to "evangelize", always to use his expressions. He continues to introduce new people to the genre, saying that instead of telling them about it, he shows them, concretely, on screen.

– Explaining his journey outside the IFComp organization, Stephen Granade explains his love of interactive fiction by the fact that he was exposed to it at a very young age, around the age of five, when his father was a university professor and he would take him to his workplace, where the computers of the time were located, where he could play Colossal Cave Adventure. He continued to play these games later at home on a TRS-80, still very young, but recognizing today that while he understood the content of the descriptions, he could not grasp the logic of the games themselves, the expected actions, etc. He also points out the importance for him of the discovery of Infocom games, and of their parser, which was much more sophisticated than the two-word parsers that most games offered at the time.

– In his early writing career, Granade started with Frank DaCosta's book Writing BASIC Adventure Programs for the TRS-80, then TADS software, before moving on to Inform. He describes his early games as a cross between Sierra games and Infocom games, with the brutality that characterized them at the time (sudden deaths, etc).

– Among his influences or authors who have marked him, Stephen Granade cites Adam Cadre, of whom he points out that unlike the first developers of interactive fiction (the Zork team, etc.) and many authors still today, Cadre has a literary background and not a scientific one. This probably gives him a very different approach to interactive fiction, less focused on puzzles, etc.