Results tagged “interactive fiction” from The Gameshelf

The last PR-IF playing event was very successful, so we’re trying it again, this time with a more modern piece of interactive fiction: Lost Pig. Come join us this Sunday, September 12, from 2-5 pm at MIT in Building 1, Room 135. For more information, including live stream information, check out the PR-IF website.

Our August meetup will be on Monday, August 30, at 6:30 in 14N-233 at the MIT campus. See our website for more details about the group. This month’s agenda:

• We’ll be the first to check out a new adventure game from GAMBIT.
• We may check out a few bits of GET LAMP.
• If it’s out in time, we’ll likely flip through some of the new book on writing IF, Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7.
• We’ll play the IntroComp 2010 games that we didn’t get to last month, and we’ll discuss the results of the competition (which came out this past weekend).
• If our Tufts contingent is represented, we’ll talk about how planning for IF month at Tufts (October) is coming along.

As usual, around 8 or 8:30, we’ll head over to the CBC to continue the discussion over food and/or drinks.

All are welcome, and please feel free to come with your own suggestions for things to do/discuss.

It's been a crazy couple of weeks in IF, and we're expecting several more months of crazy on the horizon.

• Aaron Reed's book Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 has gone to the printer. You can pre-order it through Amazon. This is an I7 tutorial which concentrates on -- well, as the title says, on creating interactive stories. It's not a programming reference manual, and it assumes no knowledge of programming. I haven't seen this yet but by all reports it is fantastic.

• Jason Scott's movie GET LAMP has gone to the printer and come back. You can order on the web site. He says that they'll start shipping out next week.

• The Gameshelf's own Jason McIntosh posted his own IF video... oh, wait. You already saw that.

• We invited people to get together at MIT and play Zork (the original MIT mainframe version). A whole lot of people did! It was a bunch of fun and we will be continuing the IF-playing series.

Please enjoy Episode 8 of The Gameshelf’s video series. It’s about modern interactive fiction.

Interactive Fiction (a.k.a. text adventures), a curious cross-medium blending videogames and literature, defined computer entertainment at the start of the PC era. While it’s been decades its commercial heyday, the web has allowed passionate fans and creators to revive the medium through a resurgence of groundbreaking new work.

However, few gamers — even fans of more mainstream adventure games — know that this movement even exists.

In this ten-minute video, Jason McIntosh demonstrates some examples of modern interactive fiction, ponders the challenges that the medium faces in today’s digital-game landscape, and offers some starting points for players first discovering this unique kind of game.

Download it as a high-quality Quicktime file.

Additional credits, links and notes below:

For the Zork-playing event I mentioned earlier, there has been a slight change. It turns out that the room we were going to use didn’t have a projector, so we’ve acquired a new, better, easier-to-find room. It’s still at MIT, but it’s in Building 1 Room 135. Hope to see you there.

Sorry for the short-ish notice. This is our second attempt at an IF playing group to complement our IF writing group.

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction Presents: ZORK

July 25th, 2 - 5 pm
MIT Campus: Bulding 1 Room 135. NEW ROOM!

Come and play Zork where it all started. We will be venturing together into the dungeons of the Great Underground Empire.

Inspired by Adventure / Colossal Cave, Zork was one of the first text adventure games, developed by a team of students at MIT back in 1977 on a PDP-10. If you’ve never played a text adventure game, this is your chance to experience the joys of playing through the command prompt by joining others in the adventure. If you’re an old Zork hand, help us track down in-jokes and historic references.

Also, we’ll be trying to broadcast the session on Ustream: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/people-s-republic-of-interactive-fiction-zork.

I can never resist the chance to follow up on two Gameshelf posts at once, so here you are:

The Silver Lining is a fan-made King’s Quest game that, as Kevin noted back in March, found itself cease-and-desisted earlier this year by the company that owns that IP. Rather than vanishing quietly, the project’s fans got the word out, bringing global attention not just to its legal plight but to the fact that the project existed at all. Certainly, the first I’d heard of Silver Lining was its “Sorry, we’re shutting down now” announcement page, concluding with a heartbreaking image of game-protagonist King Graham’s trademark cap lying abandoned in the dust. And somewhere nearby lay a link to a petition…

Today, I learn via a review by John Walker in Rock Paper Shotgun that the project has ridden the resulting wave of new fan support to overcome its legal disputes, and has also followed through and made its first episode available for play. It’s a short review, but then, it sounds like a very short game. It does make clear that the game attempts to pack a lot of narrative into tight quarters in novel ways:

Look at a vase in the halls of the castle and you won’t hear, “It’s a vase.” You’ll instead hear a tale about the Queen when she was young, playing in these hallways. Look at the floor and rather than being dismissed you’ll likely listen to lines and lines about how King Graham feels about the situation he’s in - his son and daughter-in-law’s wedding being interrupted by a mysterious, cloaked figure, who has put the pair into an undisturbable sleep.

(Rather reminds me of IF games like Bronze, actually, but that’s another rack of bells.)

I consider this news a twofer because Gameshelf reader JayDee offered up the site as a source of solid game reviews, one of several great responses I got to my previous post asking for exactly this.

I note with interest that the site seems to divide its reviews into two categories: “An Hour With”, providing initial impressions soon after a game is released, and (as is the case with this piece) “Wot I Think”, essays written after the reviewer has spent enough time with the game to fully digest it, perhaps weeks later. Many titles eventually get representation in both categories. I find this dichotomy an interesting tactic of dealing with the fact that games can often take a long time to absorb well enough to properly comment on, while acknowledging the reality of the pressures a review-based publication faces to react quickly to the appearance of new works.

It’s that time again. We’ll be having our monthly meetup at 6:30 on Monday, July 26, at the MIT campus in 14N-233. See our website for more details about the group. On the agenda so far we have:

• Talk about how Zarf’s Readercon talk went and what we might want to do regarding other local conventions.
• Take a look at some of the IntroComp games.
• Talk about what we might want to do for PAX East 2011 (it’s been confirmed for Boston for the next 3 years).
• Watch the latest Gameshelf episode! We’ll be watching the YouTube-sized Gameshelf #8: Modern Interactive Fiction.

As usual, we’ll head to Cambridge Brewing Company afterwards (usually around 8:00 or 8:30) for food and/or drink and more informal discussion.

And as always, everyone is welcome, even if you don’t know anything about interactive fiction and just want to sit and observe.

I have a new theory about IF. Okay, no. It's an analogy. It's not even much of an analogy, but let me change the subject. Pacing!

Let's talk. About pacing.

(Time passes.)

IF authors think about pacing all the time -- in a sense, everything an IF game is pacing. Why is there a puzzle at that point? Because you want the player to stop and engage with the story at that point. Why is some object in a closed (not even locked) chest? Because you want the player to slow down and take in the environment before proceeding. Why did you set up an implicit open action for that door? Because you don't want to slow down the player as he dashes through. Every decision about what to implement, what to split out, and what to bundle together, is a decision about how much attention you want the player to invest at that point.

This sort of pacing has its analog in the world of traditionally-written fiction. When writing a novel, you decide how many words to spend describing each plot event, each character and detail. That's familiar ground.

But then there's the broader sense of pacing: when is the character running for his life, and when is he catching up with his friends? When is she manipulating a hostile alien god, and when is she in the burn ward recovering from the consequences? In other words, how do you arrange different kinds of story action?

As we enter midsummer, the interactive fiction landscape continues its long thaw out of a decades-long winter of deep obscurity. This is an exciting time to be a fan of the medium one could call indie games’ indie games, and I feel privileged to live in one of its geographic activity centers.

To my eye, much of this motion comes from the continuing fallout from PAX East and the unexpectedly potent meeting of the minds that happened that weekend — not just among established IF authors and critics, but with lots of interested newcomers as well, many of whom help sustain the medium-transforming conversations begun in March.

The last few weeks alone have seen a rich mix of IF-related activity and discussion, which I shall now attempt to summarize:

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The most recent SPAG leads with Harry Kaplan’s “How Suite it Was”, a lengthy retrospective of the goings-down at PAX East’s IF Hospitality Suite last March. Beyond Harry’s reporting, the piece collects and recounts various attendees’ memories of the event, and the impressions it left upon them.

The story also served to remind me of my own excitement about the possibilities of writing and publishing serialized interactive fiction, an idea I floated during the IF Outreach panel’s lengthy digression into the thorny topic of the medium’s commercial potential. Just a spitballed notion at the time, the idea grew on me quickly, and I filled several notebook pages with thrilled scribbles on the topic before PAX ended and therefore wiped the whole thing from my brain-cache. Rediscovering it months later, I find it just as thrilling of an unexplored area. Look for a column-length bloviation on the subject later.

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Emily Short and Nick Montfort led an interesting exchange about IF interfaces on their respective blogs last month. Emily — one of the lead developers of Inform 7, which I will risk calling modern IF’s most popular language — wondered out loud if the bare-naked command-line prompt, while iconic to IF’s form, might have outlived its usefulness. Working from her notion of the command prompt as false promise (one of my own favorite takeaway notions from PAX), she explores many experimental player-input routes that other text-based games have investigated over the years, and proposes some new directions to try.

On his own blog, Nick — a champion of interactive text by profession — provides some pushback, defending pure-text input as being a natural pairing for pure-text output, and offering skepticism that any other system would ultimately prove easier for a new player to learn. The discussion bled out onto various other blogs and fora from there, and remains ongoing — see, for example, Horace Torys’ alternate interface mockups, and Sarah Morayati’s critique of IF’s library responses, the (in)famous I don’t see that here-type messages that are also, unfortunately, iconic to IF.

Two recent bits:

• Following the success of the IF summit at PAX East, the Seattle IF group is organizing some IF content at PAX Prime in Seattle this September.
• IF newcomer Neophyte has teamed up with IF veteran Juhana to build a game that will act as an IF trainer, teaching people what they need to know to play other IF games. They're collaborating on a wiki for everyone to see. Right now they have some of the initial concept done, and they're hoping to have the game done by September 1 (just in time for PAX Prime, although I think their timing has more to do with the annual comp than PAX).

Distant early warning for our June meetup, since we (read "I") have been a bit late lately getting the meeting time settled. So, our next monthly meetup will be on Monday, June 28, at 6:30 in Nick Montfort's office at MIT, 14N-233. Agenda to be determined, but we'll likely talk about a couple of June conferences/meetings that will have taken place, the ELO_AI conference and @party. All are welcome, regardless of your experience with or knowledge of interactive fiction. Afterwards, usually around 8:00 or 8:30, we head over to the CBC for food and/or drinks.

I'm sure we'll also be talking about two PR-IF splinter groups that will have met for the first time. This Sunday is Grue Street, the first meeting of an IF writer's group. And then on the day before the meetup, Sunday June 27, we'll have the first meeting of an IF reader's/player's group. Links to information on both of these (as well as a link to our mailing list) can be found on our website.

Time again for the monthly PR-IF meetup. We'll be meeting on Monday, May 3, at 6:30 in Nick Montfort's office at MIT, 14N-233. On the agenda for this month is talk about the new release of Inform 7 (if it is out by then) and some play of the TWIFcomp entries (for which voting will be over by then), some of which are by people who will be in attendance at the meeting.

As usual, we'll head over to the CBC for food and/or drink afterwards (we usually head over there around 8 or 8:30).

All are welcome. If you've got something you'd like to show off or suggest that we all play or look at or discuss or whatever, please feel free.

Proving the notion that few things breed creativity like constraint, the TWIFcomp - a challenge to write a work of interactive fiction in 140 characters or fewer (modulo whitespace) - just posted its sixty-one (61) entries online. In contrast, this year's Spring Thing, a themeless IF contest meant to provide an antipodal counterweight to October's annual IFComp, was cancelled due to receiving zero entries.

Many of the TWIFcomp games (particularly those programmed in Inform 7) can be played online; just follow the links. Don't expect to get much joy out of these little games if you're not already well acquainted with the medium; 140 characters means all punch and no context.

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Speaking of playing IF online, Andrew Plotkin has just made all his games playable in-browser. This is possible by way of a modified version of Parchment, complemented with layers of handrolled, game-appropriate CSS he wrote to make them pretty.

I am very happy to see this happen. Interactive fiction needs to ditch its reliance on downloads and confusing third-party interpreter programs in order to reach all the people who ought to experience it, and it's great to see a major author of modern IF get this boulder rolling.

This week I complete my writeup of the stuff I hoovered off the merch tables outside the very first PAX East expo hall last month. As I mentioned last time, almost everything I bought at this game expo was some kind of printed matter.

Meanwhile, by Jason Shiga

I don't understand how I haven't run into Jason Shiga's work before last month[1], where two of his self-published books lay among the Printed Works of Interest on display at the PAX IF Suite. One of them, a black-and-white, intriguingly dogeared comic book called Meanwhile, caught my attention immediately, and I was delighted to discover that a brand-new full-color hardcover edition had not only just been printed but was for sale at the expo. For my money, it is a best-case scenario of print-based interactive fiction.

Here is the video my Flip camcorder shot of three of the IF-related PAX East-ish events. I apologize for the wobbly quality; I didn't arrive at PAX with plans to record anything, but found myself deputized into a videographer role after I was noticed fooling around with my brand-new camera-toy. As such, I (and other individuals I roped in to help me) struggled to figure out how to best use the device even while shooting these videos.

Two of these videos cut out prematurely, because it turns out that the Flip doesn't offer much in the way of a battery-life indicator. On the plus side, the audio is as good as you can hope to get from a little box located yards away from the subject. So: not very good at all, actually, but at least it's audible. Next time I do something like this, I'll plan ahead and bring both a real camera and mic setup, and more of a clue as to their use. (Taking, perhaps, a page from Ben Collins-Sussman, who took some great photos of PAX's IF activity.)

Nonetheless, these videos are filled with smart people saying interesting things about interactive text games, so please do enjoy them! If you're well-behaved I'll end this post with related videos shot on better equipment by someone more skilled.

Dispelling the Invisibility: IF Outreach

IF Outreach panel - PAX East 2010 from Jason McIntosh on Vimeo.

This took place in the IF Hospitality Suite (a.k.a. Zarf's room in the Hilton) on Saturday evening.

Panelists, from left to right, include Andrew Plotkin (author), Chris Dahlen (journalist), John Bardinelli (critic), and Jason McIntosh (me). The moderator, seated in the middle, is Harry Kaplan. Fellow PR-IF member Jake Eakle operated the camera. The video ends abruptly when the camcorder runs out of storage (it's a long discussion), but the panel wound down soon after.

We're post-PAX, and we should all be fully recovered by Monday, April 12. Come join us at 6:30 in Nick Montfort's office at MIT, 14N-233.

The big news is that we're now officially the People's Republic of Interactive Fiction, and we have a cool new website, thanks to the efforts of Michael Hilborn and Andrew Plotkin. Mostly what's there now are meeting announcements and a big red "PLAY" button where you can play a sampling of IF games on the web.

Right now, it looks like the meetup will mostly focus on PAX and the website. Here's a tentative agenda:

• Talk about PAX. Lots of good stuff happened there, so there will be lots to talk about.
• Talk about the PRIF Hospitality Suite. This was the focus of IF activity at PAX, and it was certainly the best part of PAX for a lot of us.
• Play some of the PAX Speed IF games. There was a Speed IF run at PAX, where 9 games were made in a short amount of time.
• Discuss the PRIF website. Now that we've got our spiffy new website, what do we want to do with it? There was a lot of talk at PAX about IF outreach, and maybe we can find a way to fit into that.

As usual, we'll head to the Cambridge Brewing Company after the meetup to continue the conversation over food and/or drink.

We seem to be entering a nexus of documentaries about games. Far be it from me to do anything but encourage further flowering in this field! Witness:

Lorien Green has released a clip of Gone Cardboard, a film about board games -- particularly Eurogames, by the looks of it -- and the people who play them. She expects to release the final cut in early 2011. (Link via Kevin Jackson-Mead.)

The enigmatically named Spinach hopes to produce a doc about people who create digital games, called You Meet the Nicest People Making Videogames. That link leads to the project's Kickstarter fundraising page, which includes a teaser he filmed at GDC. Mr. Spinach approaches this endeavor from scratch, and needs help covering both equipment and travel costs, a position I can certainly appreciate. He's a quarter of the way to his goal, so far... (Link via Anna Anthropy.)

And of course, just 49 hours and 15 minutes after I type these words, I plan on attending the world premiere of Jason Scott's Get Lamp at PAX East. It is part of the interactive fiction track which is of course the real reason to attend the show, ho ho. Jason's been working on this film for years, and I was privileged to see a clip a few months ago at a Boston IF meetup. It's gonna be a goodie.

It's that time again. Boston IF Meetup at Nick Montfort's office at MIT, 14N-233. Tuesday, March 2, 6:30. After chatting and whatnot, we'll head over to the Cambridge Brewing Company for food and/or drink.

Two specific things we're likely to talk about:

• PAX East plans (PAX is less than a month away).
• The recently finished Jay Is Games IF competition (where our very own Andrew Plotkin tied for second!).

All are welcome.

You may have heard of Kickstarter. A number of independent game developers have used it to fund various projects. Here's another example, and I'll let Heather speak for herself:

Before You Close Your Eyes is a game/interactive story about personalities
and consequences. It is intended as an immersive, story-rich vehicle for
introspection and understanding the choices made by others. It is
presented in a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style and will be available on
iPhone, Android and Web.

I am attempting to fund this project on Kickstarter, which is a cool web
platform for "crowdfunding". Crowdfunding is what happens when lots of
people are willing to put their money behind something that they love and
think should exist in the world. The Kickstarter model works a bit like a
PBS pledge drive. Backers declare how much they would like to contribute to
the project and receive 'Thank You" gifts that the person asking for funding
had defined.

You can take a look at my project site here:
http://bit.ly/dreamgame

Just about 10 hours to go, and she's raised $8010 out of her $8500 goal (which represents 2 months of time to work on the game). And as with most Kickstarter projects, lots of fun gifts for pledges of various amounts.