Mid-March Link Assortment

Events

March 21 is the next meeting of the Baltimore/DC Area IF Meetup, to discuss Barkdull and Borgard’s Black Sheep.

March 22 will be the next meeting for the Seattle/Tacoma IF Group.

April 4 is the next meeting of the SF Bay Interactive Fiction Meetup.

NarraScope organizers set dates of May 29-31 for the annual conference. While NarraScope was originally supposed to take place live in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, the event has been moved to a virtual-only model, due to concerns surrounding COVID-19. You can read the official statement here.

The London IF Meetup is also not doing any more in-person gatherings for the immediate future. We are looking into the possibility of an online event, perhaps where we can play some Spring Things games––we will announce more about that when we have it settled.

New Releases

Sam Kabo Ashwell just posted this week about the new release of Scents & Semiosis. The game follows a perfumer with a private collection of scents, and it is up to the player to determine their meaning. The game is available here on itch.io.

New Re-Releases

A recent announcement by inkle studios has accompanied the re-release of inklewriter as an open source project. No longer in Beta and now completely free, the tool is available at its new site.

Some time has obviously passed, but for anyone looking for some background on inklewriter, I shared some of my thoughts in a write-up back in 2012.

Competitions

Entries for Spring Thing 2020 are due March 29. The festival officially kicks off on April 2, and winners of the competition will be announced on May 3.

Presentations, Podcasts, Articles, etc

Here are Carl Rauscher and Chris Conley giving a talk for MAGfest on Games as Story Machines.

And in a just-recently posted article, Sophie Sampson explores the question “Can AI Help Us Write Better Stories?” with particular attention to the tool Charisma.ai from the games studio To Play For.