Mid-April Link Assortment

Events

April 16 is the next meeting of the People’s Republic of IF in Cambridge.

May 14 is the deadline for submitting short papers to the IEEE Conference on Games (CoG).  The conference itself will be August 20-23 in London.

May 22, the London IF Meetup hears from Chris Gardiner about the narrative direction of Sunless Skies — how the Failbetter team set a course for their content, how they developed it, and how/when they chose to course-correct.

The 2nd International Summer School on AI and Games will be held in New York City, May 27-31.  The event is organized by Georgios N. Yannakakis and Julian Togelius, who wrote the Artificial Intelligence and Games book.  More info can be found at the site.

Narrascope is set for June 14-16 in Boston, MA.  This is a new games conference that will support interactive narrative, adventure games, and interactive fiction by bringing together writers, developers, and players.  More information can be found on NarraScope’s home site.

ICCC 2019 takes place on June 17-21 in Charlotte, NC.  The event is in its tenth year and is organized by the Association for Computational Creativity.

Articles and Podcasts

The Story Fix carries an interview about the creation of Star Wars-themed choose your destiny stories.

The Narrative Innovation Showcase from GDC 2019 is now available as free content, if you’d like to see short talks on a number of interesting narrative design and interactive storytelling solutions.

Not a single article but a whole website: Can I Play That? is a site dedicated to reviewing games for their accessibility, including “how I play” articles about accessibility adaptations (such as using voice recognition to play games whose usual controllers would cause RSI problems for the player). There’s also an ongoing series of deaf game reviews.

Announcements

Heaven’s Vault is out as of April 16, and will be available on Steam.

Spring Thing is now open, if you missed that announcement. There are a whole bunch of new works to play, both choice-based and parser-based.

The festival will be open until May 6, so plenty of time remains to survey this year’s offerings. For those interested, a few impressions can be found on the intfiction board here, here, and here.

Also worth a look is the new interactive fiction Lies and Cigars by Katherine Morayati, written as a commission for Now Play This.

Orihaus has publicly shared the hypertext tool used in some of their past work:

Jobs

Wharton (yes, the business school) is hiring an interactive fiction coder to help with an educational narrative project. This is a full-time job with benefits.