End of September Link Assortment

IF Comp is here!  As of October 1, games are public and will be available for play and review.  Voting ends November 15.

From Now – February 24, 2019, the Victoria and Albert Museum is featuring an exhibit on contemporary video games.

On October 3, Tellables CEO Amy Stapleton is speaking on conversational storytelling at Digital Book World in Nashville, TN.  Stapleton also writes the Voice First Fiction blog.  The conference runs October 2-4.

October 6 is the next SF Bay IF Meetup.

October 6 is the Oxford and London gathering to play games from IF comp.

Also October 6-7, Roguelike Celebration is coming up in San Francisco — this is obviously a bit different from IF material, but there’s some interesting procedural storytelling work that comes up in this space. This year their speakers include Tarn Adams, Pippin Barr, and Max Kreminski, all people who have turned up on this blog/in IF circles before.

October 11 is the next Boston IF Meetup.

October 12-14, Worcester Polytechnic Institute is hosting the Different Games Collective, focusing on diversity and inclusivity in games.

October 19-28 is the submission window for the fifth annual PROCJAM, seeking entries for generative software.

October 20 is the Oxford and London workshop in the Ren’Py tool for building visual novels.

October 22 is the deadline for Saugus.net’s 21st Annual Ghost Story Contest.  They accept both traditional prose entries and IF.  Official rules can be found here.

Ectocomp is taking both Spanish and English-language submissions for their competition from October 26-30, but if you want to start work on your game through the site, it is open now.

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. (Incidentally, they’ve published their exhibitor list and it’s pretty sweet.)

December 2 is the deadline for entering the Russian Language IF competition KRIL.

December 5-8 in Dublin is the next ICIDS, the international conference on interactive digital storytelling.

This is long in advance, but NarraScope is a recently-announced conference for IF and narrative games to be held in Cambridge, MA June 14-16 of 2019. Here’s how they describe it:

NarraScope is a new games conference that will support interactive narrative, adventure games, and interactive fiction by bringing together writers, developers, and players.

For users of   ‧ AGS ‧ ChoiceScript ‧ Hypertext ‧ Inform ‧ Ink ‧ Quest ‧ Ren’Py ‧ Storyspace ‧ TADS ‧ Twine ‧ …add yours? ‧

“Interactive fiction” has many meanings. It describes many kinds of games and many diverse communities of practice. It’s time to bring those communities together to hang out and chat exchange ideas!

For fans of   ‧ Zork ‧ The Walking Dead ‧ The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo ‧ Syberia ‧ Sorcery! ‧ Portal ‧ Photopia ‧ Patchwork Girl ‧ Oxenfree ‧ Myst ‧ Meanwhile ‧ Loom ‧ Lifeline ‧ Howling Dogs ‧ Gone Home ‧ 80 Days ‧ Dream Daddy ‧ Device 6 ‧ Counterfeit Monkey ‧ Choice of Broadsides ‧ The Blackwell Legacy ‧ Analogue: A Hate Story ‧ Adventure ‧

We are still finalizing the details of the venue and schedule. We expect to be in Cambridge, in coordination with MIT’s Comparative Media Studies and Writing department. A call for speakers and talk proposals will be posted soon.

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New Releases

Mad science raised you from the dead!  William Brown’s 200,000-word interactive Gothic horror novel Mysteries of Baroque is the latest title on Choice of Games.

Charles A.F. King has released the underwater adventure Soviet Seafloor Station Ustritsa, a Choose Your Own Fate gamebook set in the Cold War-era Atlantic.

Lamplight City is a point-and-click detective adventure with a steampunk flavor, just recently out.

Google also has made an easter egg text adventure which you can find if you follow the instructions outlined here.

Articles and Podcasts

Bruno Dias talks about writing scenes in IF.

 

Crowdfunding

The Colossal Fund is raising money for IF Comp prizes this year, and also to support the regular work of the IFTF — including archive support, Twine development, and accessibility improvements for interactive fiction games and tools.

You may also like the look of Nighthawks, the Vampire RPG, featuring the writing of Richard Cobbett (Fallen London, Sunless Sea, et al) and created by Wadjet Eye (numerous point-and-click adventures).

Publishing

Mythaxis is seeking IF to include in its upcoming February 2019 issue; however, it does not pay.