Mid-June Link Assortment

Events

June 16 (tomorrow), the Baltimore/DC group meets at Mad City Coffee to discuss the game Grayscale. This group also has a Facebook page.

Also June 16, 2 PM Pacific time (tomorrow), Dylan Holmes at the Sacramento Public Library is running the first of three monthly book club meetings about video game related topics, via Twitch. (So people from all over are welcome to join online.) They are starting with Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design.

June 17 (day after tomorrow), London IF Meetup has another Character Engine workshop available, as there were a number of interested parties who were not able to come to the first of these. This is a chance to learn about the tools we’re building for AI-driven dialogue and narrative, and to join an indies-and-academics-focused development program.

June 20, the People’s Republic of IF in Cambridge MA meets.

June 21, Wonderbly hosts its Strange Tales talk series in London, this time focusing on puzzles and games. I’ve attended (and spoken at) this series in the past — it’s lots of fun and looks at the intersection of conventional publishing and interactive work.

June 20-21, there is a free two-day event at University of St Andrews, University of Glasgow & Abertay University on the topic Literature and Video Games: Beyond Stereotypes. Speakers include Rhianna Pratchett and Simon Meek. This looks to cross over academic approaches and experiences from professional video game writing.

ICCC, the International Conference on Computational Creativity, runs June 25-29 in Salamanca this year, and Spirit AI is sponsoring its industry crossover panel. I will be there, talking about what we’re doing at Spirit and checking out the other interesting work in this space.

The July 4 meeting of the Oxford/London IF Meetup will feature Leigh Alexander presenting on the narrative design process of Reigns: Her Majesty. We will start the session by playing through a bit of the game, so please do feel free to come even if you’re not familiar with it.

(And can I just say how pleased I am with this method of celebrating Independence Day, by hanging out in London with other expats playing a game about being a queen.)

July 7 is the next Meetup of the SF Bay IF group.

Gothic Novel Jam is a jam for games or works inspired by the gothic novel in any fashion, and is running throughout July. IF and related narrative games are welcome.

IntroComp is now accepting intents to enter. IntroComp is a competition in which you can submit just an excerpt of an unfinished interactive fiction game, and receive feedback from players about what they liked or didn’t like about it. If you’d like to participate as an author, register with the site before June 30. Games themselves must be submitted by July 31 and judging will occur during August.

This is well in advance, but November 10-11, AdventureX will return, this time at the British Library. AdventureX is a conference focused on narrative rich games, whether those are mobile or desktop, text-based or graphical; it’s grown significantly in size and professionalism over the last couple of years, and last year pretty definitively outgrew its previous venue. I am mentioning this well in advance because they’ve mentioned that tickets will be cheaper for early bird buyers — so it’s something to keep an eye on if you think you’ll want to go.

Crowdfunding

Art Deck is a game in which you draw cards that instruct you in how you should draw, as part of a group collaborative project. Its stretch goal, at £15000, includes some card input from Viviane Schwarz, Leigh Alexander, Pippin Barr, and me.

Releases

Bruno Dias’ XYZZY-nominated, procedural-text-rich exploration game Voyageur is now available for desktop and with a soundtrack.

Six Ages is a major new work, available for iOS, from the developers of King of Dragon Pass. It’s set in the same general universe, but thousands of years earlier.

Articles

Graham Nelson spoke to the London IF Meetup this month about what he’s been doing recently with Inform, and the slides and text of that talk are available here.

Lynda Clark has wound down her Nottingham-based IF meetup, and writes about why.

For Sub-Q, Bruno Dias writes about what narrative design even is, and Anya Johanna DeNiro talks about Andrew Plotkin’s Space Under the Window, a poetic, hypertext-but-not work from an earlier era of interactive fiction.