March/April 1995
Issue #2
Hollow Voice
Already a lot of time has passed since I launched XYZZYnews back in January (and I didn't even have to type "wait" repeatedly). If you'll excuse my gushing for a minute, I just wanted to thank everyone for their feedback and compliments on the first issue. I've heard from text adventure fans in 20 different countries. It's been a joy to read your email, and I hope you'll keep it coming!
'Zine archives and GMD
After several false starts, the format for the e-zine version archived at ftp.gmd.de has been finalized. Each issue will still be available in both a text-only version and as a .PDF file (Adobe's Portable Document Format). So the files for this issue, for example, will be available as XYZZY2.TXT and XYZZY2.PDF in the if-archive/magazines/XYZZYnews directory on ftp.gmd.de. The only difference is that from now on I won't be compressing these files for the various computer platforms. As it turns out, the savings in file size wasn't terribly significant, and I unwittingly created various formatting problems by misusing various compression schemes. Volker Blasius was invaluable in helping me organize this zine's presence on GMD; since I'd never uploaded anything to GMD before, it was a real learning experience for me. For those who're new to exploring the IF archives there, and even for those who've uploaded and downloaded there many times without thinking about how its operations take place, I had originally planned to include in this issue an interview with Volker and a behind-the-scenes look at GMD. Unfortunately a time crunch and work overload made that impossible this time around, but please look for it in a future issue.Women play text adventures too!
My final $.02 for this issue is in response to reading several posts on the IF newsgroups and in the text of the recent game "Sorcerer's Revenge" the opinion expressed that women just don't play text adventure games or compose an insignificant percentage of the text adventure-playing audience. As far as I can tell, women players are for the most part simply less inclined to place gratuitous posts on the IF newsgroups. But the lopsided M-to-F ratio in the game programming world is consistent with the larger general computer programming industry. So what would encourage more women to learn TADS, Inform, or whatever, and become IF game programmers? My list of things that won't help includes 1) perpetuating a male bias by assuming that all gameplayers are men; 2) distributing the really lame soft-pornish text adventures that objectify women; and 3) putting down women, however unintentionally, as you post to the newsgroups or write the text for your own games.Happy gaming!
Eileen Mullin
eileen@interport.net
Contents
- Legalese / Contact Information
- Sneak Previews
- Letters
- Notice: Assistant Interactive Authors Wanted
- The Infocom Bugs List
- Newsbriefs
- Game Reviews
- Spoiler Column
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