emshortif

“Flaws”

Jon Ingold has had an Undum story published as part of Interzone’s “advent calendar” of flash fiction. (Interzone is a magazine for short SF stories.)

Homer in Silicon on Life Flashes By

My take on Deirdra Kiai’s latest work. Though my column doesn’t go into this aspect, the making of “Life Flashes By” is also pretty interesting — it’s Kickstarter-funded independent work, and Deirdra has some cool posts up about it on her blog.

ETA: ~~This was up, and then GameSetWatch seems to have taken it down again. Don’t know why. Presumably it will come back again at some point.~~ And it’s back.

Talk at GDC 2011 AI Summit

I’m going to be speaking at GDC’s AI summit again this coming year, this time about the behavior and conversation modeling on a project I’m working on with Richard Evans and Andrew Stern. (Session write-up here.)

Last year was a great time, and I’m looking forward to this a lot — thanks again to Dave Mark and Steve Rabin for organizing the summit.

Congratulations, zarf!

PTT on The Warbler’s Nest

My Play This Thing! review of Warbler’s Nest is now up. As is often the case with PTT, I wind up giving away a (small) amount of what the game is about, because PTT reviews tend to be about convincing the reader that something interesting is happening from a design point of view.

Estimating numbers

An interesting argument that the IF-playing community is much larger than we usually estimate:

Gargoyle’s last release had over 12,000 downloads – double counting some folks, to be sure, but also omitting anyone who installed the Debian packages. In the last 45 days, with a single announcement on raif mired in negative feedback, the new release has been downloaded 1800 times.

These are not huge numbers on the scale of global populations, or indeed more than a footnote on Activision’s balance sheet, but they also represent only a fraction of the overall market in IF interpreters: the players passionate enough to download a dedicated interpreter and willing to use Gargoyle for this purpose. I doubt this amounts to more than 25% market share, all told, which gives us around 50,000 interested players. This is a couple orders of magnitude above the pessimistic estimates I routinely encounter. (The first approximation of community size I saw was in an article that suggested there were a few dozen authors and a few hundred players in the field.)

— Ben Cressey