Events
February 3 is the next meeting of the SF Bay Area IF Meetup.
February 3 is also the next Baltimore IF Meetup, where participants will be playing Known Unknowns by Brendan Patrick Hennessy.
February 7 there’s a reading of computational poetry at the MIT Press Bookstore with Nick Montfort, Rafael Perez y Perez, & Allison Parrish, 6pm.
February 11 is the deadline to submit projects to Game Happens 2018, a conference taking place in Genova, Italy, May 25-26. The conference is cross-disciplinary and looks at game design alongside architecture and urban planning. Here’s a little more about what they’re seeking:
We are looking for innovative projects and different points of view that will help us explore and discuss concepts such as narrative, diversity, ethics, game design, world building; we particularly encourage new and emerging topics.
For our EXHIBITION AREA, we are open to the following kinds of project:
– digital games
– board games
– pervasive games
– mixed-media games
– mixed-media performances
– VR & AR experiences
– alternative controller games
– interactive installation
Conference talks are also a possibility (see the link for more).
February 12 in Leeds, there is a ticketed but free workshop on Twine.
February 17, the London IF Meetup is doing a Saturday afternoon workshop on using ink and Unity together. This is one of the best methods for creating professional-looking standalone IF applications, and we’ll help you get started with the tools you need.
The French IF Competition is running and accepting votes now through February 25. Hugo Labrande writes:
There are 5 entries, and no two are the same : there’s a great deal of variety and diversity this year, which is awesome! There’s z5, Glulx, Vorple and Unity games ; parser, multiple choice, hyperlinks or another mechanic ; fantasy, SF, horror, or steampunkish ; long and short games, by newcomers and seasoned authors! It is amazing to see the French IF scene getting bolder and using so many different tools to tell stories!
March 1 is the deadline to register if you intend to enter Spring Thing 2018; April 1 is the date to actually submit the games themselves.
March 2 is the deadline to send pitches if you would like to be an artist in residence at the MetaMakers Institute in Cornwall, working with generative game design. There’s quite a lot of detail about what this pitch involves, and it’s more in the computational creativity end of the space than IF-specific, but may still be of interest to some readers.
The Opening Up Digital Fiction competition runs through March 15, 2018. (Previously announced as February.) It offers cash prizes and the possibility of future publication.
Articles
Mike Cook writes about a Civ V mod designed to communicate (perhaps disingenuously) about the risks associated with powerful AI. If that sounds like a complicated premise, look at it this way instead: it’s an article about how games persuade and communicate, and in particular how they communicate about risk; and also about how we see artificial intelligence and what we might be inclined to fear.
Beth Malmskog, on her American Mathematical Society blog, writes about her experiences playing interaction fiction in the 90s, as well as Mike Spivey’s math-focused IF Comp entry A Beauty Cold and Austere.
Sergei Mozhaisky has translated into Russian my blog post on the endangered art of parser IF.
Of late, the Rock Paper Shotgun column Unknown Pleasures has been featuring (among other things) visual novels and other items in the interactive fiction orbit.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 