Events
January 7, the
SF Bay IF Meetup gets together; last I checked the agenda was still somewhat tentative, but this may have become more definite since.
January 11, 18, and 25, and February 1, Boston/Cambridge: the People’s Republic of IF is hosting
a series of IF readings of top-placing games from IF Comp 2016. It’s a group-play format, so you can go along and participate if you wish!
January 12 in Nottingham is the first meeting of a new interactive fiction writers’ group associated with the National Video Game Arcade. Here’s the announcement:
As Nottingham is a UNESCO City of Literature, and the National Videogame Arcade loves games of all kinds, we’re launching our very own text game writing group, Hello Words. Never written anything interactive before? That’s okay, we can start with the basics of branching and discuss the easiest tools to use to bring your vision to life. Already know your way around Twine? That’s okay too – bring your latest work in progress and we’ll act as your eager beta readers!
In our first session, we’ll be reading a few different examples of interactive fiction and discussing what we like about them. We might even start writing some interactive fiction of our own if we’re feeling brave!
We’d love it if you could join us at the NVA’s Toast Bar as we make worlds with words, 6:30-8:30pm on Thursday 12th January (And the 2nd Thursday of every month thereafter).
Please bring your own laptop or tablet, paper and pens.
You can sign up via the Eventbrite or RSVP to lynda@gamecity.org.
January 29, Oxford, the
Oxford/London Meetup is getting together to talk about IF and share work in progress.
New Releases
Not All Things Make It Across is a parser-based end-of-year piece by Bruno Dias. It’s a contemplative little work about what you choose to keep and what you throw away, a ritual for the end of the year. It refers to a number of Bruno’s previous works, so the specific allusions will make the most sense if you’ve already played those. But the broader sense probably comes through with or without that aspect. A little reminiscent of
Barbetween or
Detritus; it doesn’t take more than a few minutes to play.
Just Talk to Them (Raymond Vermeulen) is a freshly-released Twine about trying to pick someone up at a bar. It represents the challenges (getting over embarrassment, having quick reflexes) using short quizzes of real-world knowledge totally unrelated to bars.
The Anachronist is a Twine piece by
Peter Levine. It’s long, and paced like a novel rather than like a short story or a poem; it very much belongs to
the category of readerly IF. Some individual passages of text run to several pages before there’s a link, though they are also enlivened with period illustrations.
As for what it’s about, that is a little more difficult to describe. The protagonist is being burned at the stake in 1598 (perhaps), but in the moment that she stands in the flame, her mind wanders. She imagines her surroundings in Oxford, or possibly a painting of her surroundings; she thinks about alchemy, the art of memory, the intellectual commitments of a former teacher.
Your task is an abstract one, to do things that globally increase knowledge or decrease entropy. Part of the gameplay involves recognizing and selecting anachronistic references; those links aren’t highlighted for you, but if you succeed in finding something, that counts against entropy.
The knowledge aspect is a little trickier. Most of the choices at least in the early stages of the story are choices either to look more closely at some aspect of the world or else to move onward. My impression was that looking more closely would often increase knowledge, but I’m not certain how consistently that was applied. Some choices overtly claim to have changed your knowledge/entropy status, but I’m not sure that there aren’t other, covert alterations.
I have not yet had the time to read the whole thing. One of the themes so far is a meditation on cultural contact, on how people portray and understand those from other cultures. But that is definitely not the only thing going on, and I’d need to finish the piece in order to say much more.
Meanwhile, Alex Warren is actively seeking a new maintainer for the venerable (and similarly named)
http://textadventures.co.uk. This site began as a hub for Quest games, but expanded to host works from a number of other languages, including Alex’s own hypertext tool Squiffy, as well as Inform and Twine pieces. Alex explains the importance of the site:
textadventures.co.uk is the place people come when they search for text adventures on the web, so it’s a big gateway to the world of interactive fiction. Taking on the website doesn’t have to be about taking on Quest.
I’ve only got Alexa rankings to prove it (so take them with a pinch of salt) but the site appears to be bigger than other IF sites like IFDB, intfiction.org and Choice of Games. It’s how a lot of people start out making text adventures – in fact, it’s introduced a lot of people to programming in the first place. It’s used by schools to get children into coding and creative writing.
It’s not strictly about IF, but I enjoyed Squinky’s piece about
writing a game specifically for Pippin Barr, since I’m interested in games written for individuals, and because I happen to know enough about these particular individuals to add some extra interest to the question of how one would write for the other. (I’ve never met Pippin, but we’ve corresponded.)
Crowdfunding
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
Thanks for the shout-out! I nearly missed it.
What Felix said, thanks for noticing me!
Just a mention that in addition to the textadventures.online gallery games, IFDB links Hugo games to the web interpreter (the “play on-line” button) so almost everything on the list at http://ifdb.tads.org/search?sortby=ratu&newSortBy.x=0&newSortBy.y=0&searchfor=format%3Ahugo can be played online directly from IFDB.
Thanks very much for starting The Anachronist and for your perceptive comments. Critical thoughts are also welcome. – Peter