Mid-April Link Assortment

Events

April 17-18 will be the Flights of Foundry conference (online, so attendees can join from anywhere). The conference covers a wide range of topics, but has a number of interactive fiction/narrative related talks as well.

April 18 is the next virtual meetup of the Seattle/Tacoma IF group.

April 23 at 11 AM PT, I will be speaking at LudoNarraCon, as part of the panel Telling Dark Stories With Games. The panel is one of numerous talks that will be available throughout the convention, which goes from April 23-26.

April 25 the Oxford and London IF Meetup will be starting at 11 AM UK time – a little earlier than usual for us, but it allows us to accommodate Chin Kee Yong, joining us from Singapore as we play the opening to The Weight of a Soul. We’ll then move on to a few of the other Spring Thing games.

(As usual for us during the pandemic, this is a Zoom meeting, and folks are welcome from anywhere in the world.)

April 29 I will also be speaking at the WGGB Games Writing Festival online event Creating Narrative in Procedural Worlds, starting at 10 AM PT.

May 1 will be the beginning of the fourth annual Rayuela de Arena jam. Submissions will be open until May 30.

May 7 is the Spring Thing voting deadline.

June 21 I will be presenting to the VOLUPTAS summer school, which is working on playable experiences to teach architecture. Game designers interested in the crossover with architectural pedagogy might find this an interesting project.

New Releases

April 26, Storysinger Presents is releasing normal_fantasies.exe, following the interactions of Lynette and her “girlfriend”, the AI Girlfriend Add-On. The Twine-based game will be available on itch.io and is free to play. You can see the trailer here.

Links & Articles

If you’re prototyping deck-driven tabletop storytelling games, Story Synth offers some nice affordances for rapidly mocking up and playtesting a system. It allows you to build a deck of cards using Google Sheets and set various parameters about how you want the deck used (random draws? secret cards given to each player? different game phases drawing on different decks?). You can then create a shared session with other players of your choice.

For an example game, you can take a look at Around the Realm (a fantasy take on ‘Around the World in 80 Days’).

The Association for Research in Digital Interactive Narratives has posted a call for papers for the ICIDS November 2021 Conference.

“The theme for the conference this year is Interconnectedness and Social Impact. We encourage authors to consider possible connections to this theme in their papers, but we emphasize that there is no requirement that papers reflect the theme, either implicitly or explicitly. The theme is meant as inspiration, and is not intended to act as a constraint.”

More information is available on the site; the main submission deadline is June 25.