Author: emshortif

More Views on Games, Narrative, and Character

People who were interested in Second Person but didn’t buy the hardcover copy may be interested to know that many of the articles are now being presented online over at electronic book review, as a continuation of the First Person thread. Since there’s a large amount of content here and it may not be immediately obvious which of these articles are IF-related, I’ve also added to the Second Person page over at ifwiki with links directly into the IF-specific stuff.

Along similar lines, Dennis Jerz has an interesting summary of Chris Crawford’s talk at Hypertext ’08.

Continue reading “More Views on Games, Narrative, and Character”

Links and Various Small Things

— Speaking of browser-based IF, this post has a surprisingly large collection of links to old-school games playable through a browser; a lot of it is Zplet stuff, but there’s also access to some old Scott Adams games, The Hobbit, and Oregon Trail (not strictly IF, but I have fuzzy nostalgic feelings about it all the same).

— The Guardian’s wikigame project continues apace — there’s room to contribute small amounts (even object descriptions, etc) even if you’re not interested in attempting to code or participate at a broader level.

— According to my inbox, the Australasian Interactive Entertainment conference 2008 has put out a call for papers and demonstrations. Papers are due July 18th, demonstration abstracts August 1; the conference itself will take place in Brisbane, December 3-5, 2008. They’re interested in several IF-ish topics, including “interactive digital storytelling” and (for people using IF in school projects) “e-learning and the role of games in pedagogy”. I don’t expect to be in Australia in December myself, but maybe others will want to participate. (The website seems to be a bit temperamental about coming up, but that is definitely the URL I was given.)

— Following up on Jeff Nyman’s RAIF post a few weeks ago about the lack of readily-accessible, indexed information about previous projects, I added a bunch of “making-of” article links to ifwiki’s Craft page. I probably missed lots, though. Feel free to add more. (I also keep thinking it would be great if the interpreter page were updated to reflect the existence of Flaxo, Parchment, et al., but editing access to that page seems to have been restricted due to spammers.)

— I’ve very minutely updated the I7 syntax document: it still included “inventory listing”, which has been removed from 5T18. Thanks to Sarganar for pointing out this documentation bug.

Tutorial Mode

Uploaded to the Inform extensions site a small extension that adds some tutorial advice to any game: specifically, it introduces LOOK, EXAMINE, TAKE, DROP, INVENTORY, and compass directions, as well as the meta-commands, in an order that depends on the opening layout of the game.

The tutorial mode can be turned off (of course), and its specific advice may be replaced with alternative instructional rules.