Events
On August 3, the SF Bay Area IF Meetup will get together at the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment.
DiGRA 2019 is being held August 6-10 in Kyoto.
The second round of XYZZY voting is open from now til August 9. Anyone who wants to participate is eligible to vote on the best IF of 2018, with the constraint that people should not vote for their own works and may not canvas for votes. Congrats to all the finalists! (Since Cragne Manor with its 80+ authors was nominated, I suspect this year features by far the largest field of XYZZY nominees ever…)
August 10 is the next date for the Baltimore/DC IF Meetup, discussing Omen Exitio: The Plague.
August 11 is the deadline for submitting games to WordPlay 2019 in Toronto (the event itself takes place November 9-10).
Boston Gameloop 2019 will take place on August 17.
The IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) will be August 20-23 in London. I am keynoting.
The Foundations of Digital Games Conference (FDG) is happening August 26-30 in San Luis Obispo.
September 1 is the deadline to register your intent to participate in IFComp 2019.
If you want to submit a speaker application for WordPlay 2019, the cutoff there is also September 1.
The 20th annual European GAME-ON® Conference on Simulation and AI in Computer Games is September 18-20 in Breda, The Netherlands.
Announcements
The folks at Thorny Games have a number of intriguing projects available currently highlighted. Their tabletop RPG Dialect: A Game About Language and How It Dies is up for Game of the Year at the 2019 Gen Con ENnies. The game allows players to make (and potentially destroy) their own languages.
Dialect originally had its Kickstarter campaign in 2016, and the physical copy was shipped to the original backers last year. One of the minds behind the project is David Peterson, who created the Dothraki and High Valyrian conlangs for Game of Thrones.
Dialect is available in both a digital edition and a hard copy (and there are a few reviews out there, as well).
In addition, Thorny has a pair of other projects (also language-focused). Sign, which is based on the 1977 creation of a sign language in Nicaragua, is currently for sale. Meanwhile the upcoming Xenolanguage is currently in playtesting, but is aiming for a 2019 release.
If you’re curious about what Sign and Dialect are like to play, Sam Kabo Ashwell has just posted reviews of both.
Digital activities and classes are taking place through Oxfordshire libraries this summer. Among the offerings are classes on IF.
Texture has added a few recent features, notably: a “private library” option under the New Story button, as well as an “unlisted link” option for publishing games without making them public.
Phoenix Leicester is hosting the experimental game Langoors in the Labyrinth, a new commission by Studio Oleomingus. Designed to be played by two players across two screens, the game is set in post-colonial India, and runs until August 18. Dhruv Jani will lead a workshop on interactive storytelling via Skype on August 10, also at Phoenix. Space is limited, so if you’re interested, book in advance.
Articles & Links
Adam Cadre presents another year’s worth of most excellent prose stylings, with the winners of the 2019 Lyttle Lytton Contest.
Articy is posting video recordings of the talks from Narrascope in June, but Storygames by Aaron A. Reed is excellent and well worth a look. Also in a couple of cool pieces of news from Aaron: the recent release of Downcrawl, a supplementary tabletop RPG book, which is available this month. In addition, Archives of the Sky won a Judges’ Spotlight award at Gen Con this year.
New Releases
In the last Link Assortment, I mentioned the updated version of Nocked! True Tales of Robin Hood, which was originally created for iOS but is newly available on Steam. For additional information, you can see the press release here, which goes into great detail about the snazzy new features.
Books
This isn’t IF, but if (continuing what seems to be a theme of this roundup) you’re interested in language use, linguistics, and digital culture, you may like Because Internet, a book by Gretchen McCulloch on how language use has evolved online.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 