Events
December 4 is the next meetup of the San Francisco Bay Area IF Group.
December 12 is the next meetup of the Seattle/Tacoma IF Group, meeting online via Discord.
The Ectocomp competition for spooky and Halloween-y games is now over, but the entries can still be played.
Or, if you’re looking for something to enter in the future, signups are now open for Spring Thing 2022, which welcomes interactive fiction games of many varieties and lengths, and is a more festival-like venue than the IF Comp.
Articles and Videos
My colleague Bruno Dias writes about power creep in long-running games (including those with a narrative component).
Verge today has an article on procedural narrative, for which Lewis Gordon interviewed me as well as a number of other usual suspects in this space.
The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain has published new guidelines for freelancing work in the game industry, establishing some norms around contracts and work in this field.
Back in October, I did a talk for the Birmingham Indies meetup about narrative design for a long-running live narrative game (namely Fallen London). That talk is now available on YouTube.
Books
Hannah Nicklin’s forthcoming Writing for Games: Theory and Practice is now available for preorder.
I’ve reviewed a bunch of books on game writing here, but I’m definitely looking forward to this one, on the basis of Nicklin’s past tutorial and blog writing on the subject. She brings in theatrical as well as game experience, and has given a lot of thought to the art of writing strong, characterful dialogue, among other things.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 