Month: January 2014

Oxford/London IF meetup

A couple of months ago I ran a poll to see whether people might like to have an IF meetup group in southern England, and if so whether they preferred Oxford or London. Then I went to a conference, then got a really really bad cold, then the holidays were upon us and it seemed like a bad time to add extra things to anyone’s calendar.

But! Now that’s past, I’m eager to get this rolling. The feedback about location was decidedly mixed — lots of people who could only make one of those options — so I’m going to try for alternating locations. And because Oxford is where I am and it’s easier to start here, I’ve proposed a first meetup for Feb 2, in Oxford, at the Jam Factory Restaurant. We can meet, chat, talk about what kinds of things we’d like this group to do. I will bring a copy of Blood and Laurels, my next game, for people to look at if they are interested. Please feel free to bring your WIPs or favorite games as well.

If you hate the time, the choice of day of the week, the relative lack of advance notice, I’m happy to factor all those things into future plans about what we’re doing — I just wanted to get something rolling after that hiatus.

Want to RSVP? Want to join the group to get announcements of future events? The site is here.

Edited to add: we now have space and time for a London meeting as well, Feb 18 at 7 PM. Signup at the same link.

Various IF News: Text Fiction, Inky Path, et al

Inky Path. Inky Path is a new quarterly literary magazine for interactive fiction. Founder Devi Acharya describes it thus:

We cannot currently pay authors for their work, but do hope to showcase it in an interactive literary magazine, a lit mag that leads readers to certain pieces depending on their choices. Right now the hope is for it to be a very multimedia experience. This means definitely cover art and neat graphics/layout. We also plan on running contests (hopefully paid) through the site.

About selectivity: That’s going to depend largely on the volume of submissions, but we hope to submit most of the pieces that reach the inbox. We also accept works from all different sorts of IF writers and programs, including both parser-based and choose-your-own-adventure games.

Basically, this is a way for up-and-coming IF writers to get their work shown instead of lost in the archives, as well as a way for newcomers to IF to read some great IF work without being lost on a site like IFDB or the IFArchive.

This idea of a curated, attractive space for IF has come up a few times in the past, but there haven’t been many focused attempts to actually pull it off in a sustained way. It’s something that’s very much needed: especially with IFDB seeing an increased volume and variety of submissions, and with IF being created and announced to different communities, it’s not always easy to get visibility for the best material. Perhaps Inky Path will help with that. If you want to be involved, they’re seeking both content submissions and people interested in reading for the site or contributing graphic design experience.

IGF Nominees. Speaking of getting attention, the nominees for this year’s IGF have been announced. Aaron Reed took an honorable mention in the Nuovo category for 18 Cadence, while Deirdra Kiai (known for The Play and Impostor Syndrome, among others) took four nominations for their stop-motion musical adventure Dominique Pamplemousse — including a nomination for the grand prize, in a field of some 650 indie games.

French IF Comp. IF players who read French may be interested to know that four games have been entered in the French IF competition. Votes are due February 2. If you’re not familiar with French IF idioms, you may find it useful to check out the IF instruction card in French or a full manual translated into French for help with the commonly used commands.

German IF Magazine. (Added in an edit — sorry, I meant to include this initially.) Textpäckchen presents German-language IF on a regular release schedule, and its first two games are already available. The help page includes some lists of standard verbs that may be useful for those learning German IF idioms.

Android Z-machine interpreter. Screen Shot 2014-01-11 at 10.47.40 AM Patrick Albrecht has announced Text Fiction, a new Z-machine interpreter for Android, which uses a texting-like UI for the back and forth between the player and the game. It’s already gotten quite a few positive reviews, and offers features like text-to-speech and play of zblorb-wrapped files. It’s free at the Google Play store.

IF authors on Patreon. Colin Sandel, co-author of One Eye Open, has a Patreon page now, as do sometime Twine authors Porpentine, Mattie Brice, Anna Anthropy, and Merritt Kopas. The neat thing about Patreon is that it’s a crowd-funding model that allows for smaller pieces and less overhead for creators than Kickstarter: a good Kickstarter campaign takes a month or more of hard work to run and usually requires the creator to offer a lot of rewards that themselves add to the duration of the project. (And then there’s the challenge of meeting one’s Kickstarter deadlines, which can turn out to be difficult for unforeseen reasons, even for experienced developers.)

Patreon works on the idea that you’re supporting the author rather than a specific work, and is suitable for smaller pieces, so you pledge to give a small amount of money for each new release, regardless of what that is — the author doesn’t need to put together a pitch video and reward tiers for each project, and also has an idea of expected earnings and therefore how much work it’s reasonable to put into each release. It’s also possible to cap one’s contributions per month to prevent yourself from going over budget. Credit card fees and Patreon fees take around 8% of contributions, leaving the rest for the creator. Many Patreon-supported works are then released entirely free with no further associated costs.

If you can’t tell, I’m enthusiastic about this model and I hope it proves workable, because I think it’s a great way to build up a living income for people who create outside the mainstream, but still have an interested audience. From the viewpoint of the surrounding community, it often also means new work, released on a regular schedule, typically free for newcomers — which means that people who aren’t sure whether they’re interested enough to splash out money on new work can try it out free. Win!

(There’s probably some kind of midpoint still unaddressed, between Patreon and Kickstarter: depending on patronage levels Patreon makes sense for things that might take the creator less than a month to make, and Kickstarter for things that might take a year; I’m not so sure about projects that need to be supported in the 3-to-6 month range. But still. Having more models for this is good.)

Reading and Hypothesis

I see more and more games with no story, only “backstory”. The game consists of piecing together what has gone before, and possibly performing a few anticlimactic actions to round it all off. Reviewers even speak of “the backstory” as if it’s the most important aspect of any game, right up there with mazes and hunger puzzles. It’s an outrage.

— Backstory, Stephen Bond

For authors of interactive stories, presenting most of your story as backstory is often convenient because you can tell what did happen in a place without having to code any NPCs or allow for any branching in the backstory narrative: the past is a part of the story your interactive reader can’t touch. It places those events beyond the reach of player agency. At its worst a backstory driven piece can seem soulless and lonely, as the player wanders desolate locations from which all the other humans have already fled.

But there’s also an argument to be made that the backstory mystery is one of the most natural possible shapes for interactive literature. When it sets up questions and allows the player to look for answers, it engages the reader directly with the substance of the story rather than with extraneous tasks and challenges. It encourages reading hypothetically, making guesses about what really happened that are then affirmed or disproven as one goes.

Screen Shot 2013-11-30 at 7.35.37 PM

For anyone who isn’t familiar with The Fullbright Company’s Gone Home, it’s an indie game about a girl who has just come back from a year-long trip in Europe, to a house that her family moved into after she left and that is unfamiliar to her. No one is there, so she needs to wander the house and try to work out what happened to them. The house is also big and dark and suffering occasional electrical faults, while a storm rages outside, so for a while the game plays genre tricks with whether it’s really going to be a horror story.

Many people have responded with strong approbation, or at least strong feelings of some sort: first because it’s a game that allows itself to be not-very-gamelike, to indulge purely in its fiction; second, because it’s a queer coming of age story and those aren’t exactly well represented in mainstream games.

It is also pure backstory. But before we get into how I read that, some backstory of my own. There will also be some spoilers for Gone Home.

Continue reading “Reading and Hypothesis”