Events
February 2 is the date for the next SF Bay IF Meetup. where the group will be playing Cragne Manor.
February 8-9 there will be a two-day conference Beyond the Console: Gender and Narrative Games. I will be chairing Friday’s event; for more information about the conference, please click here.
On February 23 the Baltimore/DC IF Meetup will look at Grimnoir and Cragne Manor.
Early registration will soon be open for the 2nd International Summer School on AI and Games, to be held in New York City, USA, May 27-31, 2019. The event is organized by Georgios N. Yannakakis and Julian Togelius, who wrote the Artificial Intelligence and Games book.
More information on the school and guest lecturers can be found at the site.
New Releases & Announcements
As of January 31, Sunless Skies is available through Steam, GOG, and Humble. (Full disclosure: I wrote for this project.) This is Failbetter Games’ follow-up to 2015’s Sunless Sea, and will be discounted for the first week of release (until February 7). PCGamer and Eurogamer have nice things to say about it.
In addition to the links above you can check out a short trailer here:
The Fourth Riddle, a game based on Puccini’s opera Turandot, came out at the beginning of the month.
Strand Games has released a revised and remastered version of Jinxter, the third game from the classic Magnetic Scrolls anthology. Jinxter Revived uses the interface from The Pawn (which Strand also remastered in 2017) and has added new sound and images, as well as reworking some bits to improve gameplay and avoid dead ends. The new version is available for Android in the Play Store, for iOS in the App Store, and for Windows, Linux, and macOS on itch.
Articles & Links
Dr. Jeremiah McCall, author of Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History gave a talk this month on games as history (the slides are available separately here, since they will probably appear too small on most screens). Among other things, his talk briefly touches on Twine projects for history teaching. Dr. McCall also maintains a site focusing on historical video games.
Several new pieces of research have been published by the TextWorld researchers (whom I previously mentioned back in September).
A bit distant from interactive fiction, but likely to be interesting to some who are around for the AI.
Crowdfunding
Magical Diary: Wolf Hall is currently being crowdfunded on kickstarter. (Playable game demo available on itch.io or on Steam.)
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
Can you talk about which parts of Sunless Skies you wrote? I love Failbetter games in general, and I think Skies has the best writing in one of their projects yet.
Two ports, Carillon and Sky Barnet; the Repentant Devil; and some nightmare content.
FBG has given me permission to talk a little more about those, so we’ll see if I have time to do a more detailed post about them.
Carillon is very interesting. One of those ports that feels like there’s more there than there probably is, if that makes any sense, what with all the different locations each with their own interactions, and all of the actions contingent on various soul flaws. Sky Barnet must be in the Blue Kingdom…I’ve yet to go there. I studiously avoid getting nightmares because that seems….bad. But I’m missing out on some fun content, I’m sure.
I hope you do have time at some point. I enjoyed reading your post about your work on Seas.