I’ve added links for the Seattle and Boston area IF groups, both of which meet roughly monthly (sometimes more often) to discuss IF, share works in progress, and generally cheer one another on. Are there others out there that I should be mentioning?
[ETA: some discussion in comments about getting a Bay Area meet going.]
Clockwords is a casual wordplay/defense game by Gabob, for which I contributed story content. It’s coming out in acts. Act 1 is now available, with more of the story, more kinds of letters, and various gameplay refinements. For those who played the prologue version, there’s now a more staged structure to the gameplay, and no microtransactions are required. (Yay! I don’t like microtransactions.)
Hard mode is really genuinely hard, too, which leads to more interesting tactical play.
PAX East is awesome, though with the frustration that rooms are too small and things fill up before everyone gets in who wants to. I was sorry to miss the Wil Wheaton keynote, which was reputed to be cool.
I was also sorry (though kinda surprised!) that there were a bunch of folk standing in line who got turned away from the IF storytelling panel. I’m assured that the panel was recorded and will be made available in the future, though; and there are some notes online courtesy of Jenni Polodna.
In other news, if you’re at PAX East and would like to chat with IF people, you should come on up to the IF suite. (Open Saturday from noon to midnight or thereabout.)
That’s in the Hilton, room 2305. (Leave the Hynes in the direction of the food-courty stuff, go through the Sheraton, cross the street to the Hilton. No, I don’t know the compass directions. You don’t need a PAX badge to get in.)
Due entirely to the efforts of people who are not me, PAX East has even more IF content than expected.
— The Get Lamp screening will be accompanied by a panel featuring Andrew Plotkin, Brian Moriarty and Steve Meretzky.
— The recently-announced PAX schedule also includes a session of ACTION CASTLE, an RPG where the GM plays a human IF parser.
— The IF hospitality suite will host a panel on IF outreach to the indie and casual gaming communities featuring Jason McIntosh and Andrew Plotkin with Chris Dahlen (who has written up some IF for the Onion AV Club) and John Bardinelli (regular contributor to Jay Is Games coverage of IF)
— There will also be an unofficial panel on adaptive difficulty strategies, featuring Jim Munroe and Aaron Reed talking with Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games. Gilbert’s work includes a number of excellent graphical adventures, including Emerald City Confidential.
I’m especially pleased about the latter two events: it’s cool to revisit IF’s roots, but we want to look forward as well as back. Thanks to everyone who’s worked on putting this together.
So, this has been in the works for a bit, but got officially confirmed today: I’m going to be speaking at the AI summit at GDC, in a panel with Michael Mateas and Dan Kline, on artificial intelligence and storytelling. (Unsurprisingly, I’m talking about conversation; the panel as a whole will also look at things like drama management, narrative pacing, etc.)
Scheduling information isn’t up at the GDC site yet, but is presumably forthcoming; the panel will be sometime March 9-10, 2010, at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, CA.
I’m excited to be talking alongside people whose work I’ve admired for a long time, and really looking forward to this event.
Meanwhile, PAX East plans are moving forward, with lots of IF stuff projected; there’s now an ifwiki page, if you want to check out who else is going to be there and what social plans are in the works. And Jeremy Freese and I are going to be making a speaking appearance at MIT the following Monday, as well.
Yes, it will be a full and busy March.
Panel acceptances for PAX East are coming out now, and there will definitely be IF content:
Congratulations, your PAX East panel submission of “Storytelling in the
world of interactive fiction” has been accepted. We tentatively have
you scheduled for Friday, March 26th from 5:30pm – 6:30pm in our Wyvern
Theatre…We have the following title and description for your panel:
Storytelling in the world of interactive fiction
Text adventures have been quietly experimenting with narrative gaming
for thirty years. Five authors from the amateur interactive fiction
community discuss the design ideas in their games — reordered
storylines, unreliable narrators, deeply responsive NPCs — and how they
apply to other kinds of games. (Rob Wheeler (mod.), Robb Sherwin, Aaron
Reed, Emily Short, Andrew Plotkin)
Get Lamp is going to be screened later that same Friday evening — 9:30 PM, it looks like..
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 