"The first is that I'm not keen on the breeding idea at all. This, if the game ever got released beyond the stage where you run it for fun, would gather a load of criticism because it could be seen to "be a bit tacky". I'd rather that the pack gathered size by you finding a few other NPDs (non-player dogs?) [They're (maybe) called underdogs - see page 2!] as strays and you incorporate them into your pack after they have run with you for a while and they like what they see. I suggest that dogs join your pack without permission as they just tag along. Perhaps some of the dogs (perhaps identified by colour/sex/breed to form an unique label?) have some different characteristics/liabilities, for example, a certain dog, you discover, has a tendency to get you all into fights and so the only way to ditch the dog is to hope that he strays off again, gets killed or injured or you leave the pack yourself. Therefore, do you keep a large pack which can get you into trouble or do you risk starting from scratch again?
  "The second problem is that the description, or labels, of the dogs as in he-dogs etc. is awfully cumbersome and extremely unwieldy. I seriously suggest that you reconsider this part most carefully.
  "Your maps are great, incidentally, and the block layouts remind me of the Bygård housing in Oslo. Perhaps you could stage it there with a disaster being the fjord starting to overflow..."

  Well, so much for Mal's comments this far. He said he would read my notes again and may have some more comments later...
  To take one of the first remarks quite literally, when I stop running a game for fun it's the end of all the problems with that game - I'll only run a game as long as it is fun to do! I suppose you mean when it's released (more or less) commercially.
  Isn't it strange how everyone (?) suggests that other people may be offended by the fact that puppies are not brought by the stork? Well, those other people probably don't play PBM games, so there's no problem! (Seriously, it's impossible to write anything that won't offend anyone. I am convinced that somewhere in the world there is someone who would be offended by the rules for chess!)
  Well, the sex life of alley dogs is tacky, so there! I think I already mentioned in an earlier supplement how impractical it would be to depend on breeding for increasing one's pack (because of the time factor), and recruiting strays already is the main way of doing that.
  All (under)dogs have more or less different personalities, but not necessarily always connected with visible characteristics. The game would be a bit too easy if ALL Dobermans were quarrelsome, and everyone would form packs with the same "ideal" dog race.
  The one thing you can't do with your pack is to leave it, because technically speaking you are the pack. To leave a pack means to leave the leader, and you can't leave yourself! If you want to start from scratch (What's the matter, have you got fleas?) you can disband the pack, though... But I'm generally thinking of packs being a bit more stable than that.
  A simple way to get rid of an undesirable dog would seem to be to chase him off. This of course assumes that there is at least one dog in the pack that the pariah is afraid of.
  Concerning the nomenclature, please read the last two lines of "The Me-Dog" again a couple of times.
  The PBM society at large must really be graphics-starved to consider my scribbles great. Someone even said the same thing about the Archipelago rulebook cover... Actually, I have never thought of my generic blocks as resembling anything at all! A lot of cities have regular layouts, but I'm not sure how many have a backyard in the middle of each block...
  Another correspondent who suggests ending the game (or level) with a disaster. Sorry, but the Oslo fjord does not overflow that often. Maybe it could be a Dutch town... [:-)] Well, seriously I'm looking for an excuse for ending a level that does not involve a disaster. Read my lips: No Regular Disasters!

  Well, one good thing: Here's a correspondent who (at least apparently) does not have any objections to the suggested title!

13/1 1991

  Our next speaker (?) should make quite a change of pace - he's the first to date who hates the game. [Actually it looks like he feels compelled to hate the game because he thinks he doesn't like me for some reason...] In spite of this, or perhaps for that exact reason, Kjetil Fridén raises a number of valuable points, most of which I think I'll summarize rather than quote - and not just because of the length of the text...
  He starts with blowing his top at the way I seem to keep picking on his favourite game (?) IaC. To put the record straight, I have nothing in particular against that game or either of its moderators. The only point I wanted to make was that my first impression of the game started a train of thought that led to the conception of IaDL. By the way, Kjetil claims that being a stray dog is a crime - any comments from the gallery?
  Kjetil is also another reader who wonders why the game isn't about cats. I'm not going to get into that again... I suppose that if I did make a game about cats, someone would ask why it isn't about dogs! [Besides It's A Cat's Life would make a bloody stupid title...]
  A bit more relevant, perhaps, is his question about why the dogs can't just go home again and what makes the first corner so attractive. That's a bit like asking why IaC punks can't cut their hair, go straight and join the Salvation Army. Or why Hypalagia (=Kjetil's game) adventurers can't just stay at home and become farmers. It wouldn't be much of a game if they all did that. Or as someone whose name evades me, asked once: What if there was a war - and nobody came to fight?
  Well, after thinking it over for a second I found the explanation: These dogs are smarter than the average. When their humans throw them out, they get the message. The question isn't why they can't go home, but why they won't, and the answer to that is obvious.
  There is nothing special about the corner where a dog starts his (her) new life - it was chosen randomly by the people in the car, see, and nobody said the dog is supposed to stay right there!
  Kjetil suggests (?) that I should go more into "the" dog's background and find out why he's unwanted. That brings us full circle back to the "plausible enough to repeat" point. Every stray dog can't have exactly the same background (born in a red house by the river, played with a little girl in a pink dress, accidentally bit her left hand during a game of tag on a Sunday morning at 9.35...), and dreaming up a hundred different backgrounds that won't affect the gameplay anyway isn't my cup of tea (I might consider it if you would write a complete life history for every character in Hypalagia... before March!), so I leave that to the players. In fact I'll even leave it to the players to decide if they need to know a dog's whole background.

  Mentioning what is known about a dog brings us neatly to the next subject, where Kjetil puts his finger on an omission in part one (only he doesn't exactly put it that way...). When describing the different characteristics of the underdogs I had meant to say that of course you aren't told the exact numbers, but you may get a fair idea about a dog's personality by observing it in action (or lack thereof). If a dog runs and hides when he sees a mouse, for instance, that would be a sure sign of low courage.
  Next, my self-proclaimed enemy goes into overdrive and unleashes a plethora of aliens, clones, cyborgs and polar bears (!) in a frantic attempt to twist the basic concept into something totally ludicrous, whatever that is supposed to be good for. That kind of exercise can be done with any game concept and doesn't do any good. Why don't you have giant icecream robots in Hypalagia, Kjetil? (See what I mean?) Anyway there's still a point or two in the deluge of nonsense, so let me make this straight: IADL is not science fiction or straight fantasy. If you have to genreize it, call it animal fantasy. [1999 note: Today I would probably have called it furry... ;)] The characters are smarter than the average dog and can communicate extensively, but apart from that they're plain Canis familiaris. [I've got an unwritten scenario somewhere called Cyberdog, but that's not for a game...]
  "While you're quarreling about heat periods, I can introduce the Pill and abortion laws." I feel tempted to offer my "dear enemy" a free game just to find out how a dog would go about getting an abortion! All of which seems to be rather beside some point or another - currently we've got more trouble with making bitches pregnant than keeping them out of that condition! Anyway I don't believe that dogs would be very concerned about birth control in any case.
  "I am sure drug dogs can discover something that prevents pregnancy." But there aren't that many drug dogs that go stray, are there? Besides you don't have to be a drug dog to find "drugs" - a drug dog is simply a dog that has been trained to search for illegal drugs and let the humans know about it.
  "You have made movement too complicated. [Which version? Having trouble with counting up to five?] Why not just say you go to a place rather than just do this-and-that to get there?" Experiment time again, it seems. Hey, Rover?
"Yeah, Boss?"
Where are you right now?
"In a street. One block ahead I see a pack of tough-looking mongrels. They haven't seen me yet, fortunately. Behind them I can see a butcher shop."
Okay, go to the butcher shop.
"Uh..."
  See? If I just tell Rover to go to the butcher shop he won't know if I mean to plow straight through the unfriendly pack and most likely get into a fight, or sneak around them. And which way should he sneak around them?
  "Why not admit that NYC isn't square? And where's the river?" Huh?? Can't remember mentioning NYC in connection with this game concept, and certainly not claiming that the game is set there or any other place in particular (Malcolm thinks it's set in Oslo, but that's his opinion...) The river is a special case that I haven't described yet, just as I haven't described parks, sewers, railways or the city dump in detail either. We're just discussing more or less vague ideas here, not trying to make a complete scenario right ahead!
  "You talk about turning around to get around a small street corner, and now about moving between towns. How can a dog find another town?" You mean you don't turn around when you change direction? Remind me to come and watch you walk through the town some time - sideways and backwards! A possible way of moving to another town has already been discussed in supplement 1. I suggest you read it.
  "Does the weather really have any effect on the game? What if the legend is true that says there's a storm coming when the dog sneezes? But does the weather really have any effect on the game? Unless you have one-day turns it certainly hasn't."

5/2 1991

  Not quite finished with Kjetil's letter yet, I've just been doing a couple of other things for a while to preserve my sanity... He sets a new record in side-tracking when he starts with mentioning the lack of victory conditions and ends up three lines later with a suggestion about advertising in a dog magazine! Well, at least that's more original than advertising in Flagship... And it gave me an idea for a slightly self-ironic ad/slogan: Have you ever wondered what it's like to be a dog? Play It's A Dog's Life and don't find out! Another ad idea [I later made a draft of the second idea, you have already seen it at the start of the intro]...
  In a different part of his letter Kjetil takes up the very original idea of a coordinate system. I have already explained why IADL hasn't got one (A little sidetrack: The newly released (in Europe) game Monster Island does not have a coordinate system either, and the writer speaks sarcastically about other games having "coordinate numbers stencilled into the ground"), but since we're throwing all kinds of new ideas around here anyway, here's another possible interpretation of Kjetil's remarx. Suppose the dogs use a local coordinate system for describing their moves, where 0,0 is always the (imaginary) square the dog starts in, and "east" (right on the map) is always the direction the dog starts facing (I've decided that making east the "zero direction" rather than up provides for better continuity if each block you pass through is mapped and more than one map are printed side by side). Then movement "4" on the diagram in part 2 of this would become M(1,0)(2,0)(2,-1)(2,-2)(2,-3), or as, Kjetil seems to prefer, M(2,-3), which requires the dog to make up his own mind about whether he wants to round the corner or pass through the backyard. I don't know - is this supposed to be simpler?
  Kjetil also didn't like the complicated nomenclature (you-dog etc.) and suggests (?) calling the player's dog "you". Hmmm... That's the pronoun I would use when talking TO a dog, and what would I call the other players' dogs? His you, her you and all the other yous?

17/2 1991

  An idea for movement that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with this game. Most games have the player characters wandering around on a grid of squares and hexagons and using more or less complicated code sequences to describe the movement. But now that so many different computers have "pointing devices" (light pens, mice/mouses etc.) it might be an idea to invent a game that has no movement codes or grids at all. The player describes his movement simply by drawing a line on last turn's map (printed on the turnsheet) and the person feeding his orders to the computer copies the line by redrawing it with the mouse (or whatever). This kind of game could even get rid of the grid system and let the player move freely through a homogeneous landscape. The computer should have no (well, few) problems figuring out exactly what the player sees from each point on his route, and gives the player a map fragment shaped like an irregular blob rather than one built up of squares or hexagons.

  What this has got to do with IaDL? Well, the part about drawing a route could perhaps be used here as well, but I am not quite sure how. Perhaps the turnsheet could have a stylized map printed on the back with a "You Are Here" in the middle. The player would then simply compare with his own detailed map and draw a line to show where he wanted to go, perhaps indicating where he wants to stop and do something else. The trouble is that the scale of this turnsheet map would have to be small enough for the player to move his fastest dog as far as it can run without passing the edge of the map. Another problem is that the starting point would be different depending on whether the you-dog is in a street or in an alley - I don't like the thought of a map saying "You are here - or perhaps here!"