Re: Instant Death


8 Mar 1995 11:35:22 GMT

In article <3jj1rp$l7t@life.ai.mit.edu>, David Baggett <dmb@ai.mit.edu> wrote:
>In article <neilg.794610504@sfu.ca>, Neil K. Guy <neilg@malibu.sfu.ca> wrote:
>
>> Hm. Well, I could of course. The reason I didn't in my original post
>>is that I wouldn't to come across like I was specifically attacking
>>the authors of the three games I was going to cite. I dunno. Wonder if
>>they'd mind. :)
>
>I've noticed that no one wants to "name names" in this newsgroup.

Indeed, and I confess to being guilty of this in particularly damning
circumstances (hopefully, only dmb knows what I'm referring to :-)).
Maybe it's partly because r.a.i-f has such a small number of regular
contributors - things seem to get more personal.

>Unfortunately, feedback -- positive or negative -- only benefits authors if
>we know who and what you're targeting.

Also, in cases like this, I don't think anybody should be afraid of
hurting the authors' feelings. After all, if I publish a work of
I-F, it's the same as if I publish a novel or a painting; I should
expect criticism, good or bad. Saying that you don't like, say,
Dunjin because it contains mazes won't hurt my feelings. Similarly,
saying that you don't like game X because you get killed too often
shouldn't cause the author to feel personally attacked. If he does feel
hurt, you'd be in your full rights to say "but why do you publish if
you can't take criticism?".

It's of course a totally different matter if you're attacking a person's
opinions as stated here on the group; that's much more sensitive.

>Personally, I'd like to see more reviews and analyses of the better games.

There is a lot of reviews in SPAG. So far, the focus seems to be on
getting at least one brief review of every games in existence; I
suppose that when that objective is fulfilled, we'll see more in-depth
analyses of the better games. But maybe I should leave it to Whizzard
to comment on that :-).

Magnus Olsson (mol@df.lth.se) / yacc computer club, Lund, Sweden
Work: Innovativ Vision AB, Linkoping (magnus.olsson@ivab.se)
Old adresses (may still work): magnus@thep.lu.se, thepmo@selund.bitnet
PGP key available via finger (to df.lth.se) or on request.