announcements – Page 8 – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

Assorted Interesting Projects

Tim Fowers — for whom I worked on Clockwords back in the day, and who has produced several other board and computer games — is doing a deck-building word game called Paperback. It looks like a terrifying collision of Scrabble and Dominion.

Coin Opera 2 is a book of poems about computer games, poems that emulate formal features of computer games. There is even a two-player poem. (I have no idea what that looks like in practice: chorus vs chorus leader? But it’s intriguing.)

Skullduggery is a twist on storytelling RPGs of the kind I sometimes talk about here, only (a) competitive and (b) oriented towards villainy. (Actually, some storytelling RPGs are already oriented towards villainy or at least petty crime, but usually not to quite the same degree…)

Now in its final hours, the Boss Fight Books series takes on classic video games one at a time. I’m especially pleased to see that Anna Anthropy is writing for this series.

Kickstarter politics comments after the jump.

Continue reading “Assorted Interesting Projects”

Assorted Releases and Events

inkle has been posting for some time about their Sorcery! project with Steve Jackson, and it’s now available for iOS. I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, but it looks gorgeous, with fun gamebooky play, a revamped combat concept, and a really attractive map. Here’s more about the making of, including discussions of the combat system and the creation of the user interface. It looks gorgeous, however, and is getting rave reviews at the app store, as well as positive coverage at Pocket Gamer. One unfortunate note: it’s not (yet?) really playable with VoiceOver.

The People’s Republic of IF in Boston is organizing another IF meetup this year, September 14-15, coordinated with the NoShowConf and the Boston Festival of Indie Games. This is an opportunity to hang out with other IF authors, share in-progress concepts, demo to the public (at Boston FIG), and attend game design talks (at NoShowConf). There may be some IF-specific programming there, though this isn’t finalized.

I’ve mentioned this before here briefly, but I’m speaking next week at the Inventing the Future of Games conference put on by UC Santa Cruz. That’s in Mountain View May 10. I’ll be talking about tools for interactive narrative creation, drawing on experience with Inform, Versu, and (to a lesser degree) various other IF tools.

XYZZY Award voting is ongoing through May 7. If you want to participate, check out the nominees and voting page.

XYZZY Awards 2013 Eligibility

I’m reposting this, with permission, from the intfiction forum. I did not write this announcement; it is by Sam Kabo Ashwell. But it is about how the XYZZY Awards are changing to attempt to incorporate works that weren’t promoted to or didn’t originate inside the traditional IF community, and to avoid imposing unnecessary formal barriers to people who might be interested in having their work considered.

If that’s something you’re interested in, read on.

Continue reading “XYZZY Awards 2013 Eligibility”

Assorted IF-related News and Links

Black Crown is a forthcoming Random House project by Failbetter. It’s not playable yet, but there’s a sign-up page here and Wired gives some additional background.

Dave Morris (Frankenstein) weighs in on whether randomness is really a help to interactive fiction, tying the question in with gamebooks and computer adaptations of gamebooks.

Deirdra Kiai gives an interview on the claymation point-and-click adventure Dominique Pamplemousse in “It’s All Over Once the Fat Lady Sings”, discussing the gender roles, inspirations from Fallen London, the claymation process, and various other features.

The XYZZY Awards are now in second-round voting, with the nominees chosen. This year’s crop includes Twine and StoryNexus content as well as parser-based IF. You can vote here; authors may not vote for their own games and are discouraged from posting “vote for me” sorts of messages, but otherwise the voting process is open to anyone through May 7.

Various people, including Warren Spector, Kevin Bruner (Telltale), Stéphane Bura (Storybricks) and me, will be speaking about interactive storytelling at the IFOG symposium May 10 in Mountain View.

Assorted News and Events

First round voting in the XYZZY Awards is open through April 15. This is a nomination round, and a list of eligible games, interactive fiction, CYOA and choice-based games of other types can be found on the website. There will be a second round to pick winners from the nominees. Anyone may vote, though you’re encouraged to have played several eligible games (ie, not to vote tactically just for one or two special favorites). But please don’t think you need to have covered all the eligible options to vote; it’s a really really long list and no one’s played all of it. The XYZZY Awards also now recognize innovation and technical tools released during the previous year, so if there’s a great interactive fiction language, tool, or piece of documentation you would like to recognize, feel free to write in your nominees.

Second: now available are the three games entered in Spring Thing 2013. This year includes “Encyclopedia of Elementals” (Adam Holbrook, Quest); “A Roiling Original” (Andrew Schultz, Glulx); and “Witch’s Girl” (Mostly Useless, Twine). If you want to vote in Spring Thing, you’re encouraged to make a good faith attempt to at least try all three games, but there are no other requirements, and if you can’t get something to work on your platform, that’s fair enough. Voting is open through April 28.

Third: there now appears to be an interactive storytelling meetup group centered in Ottawa, looking at various types of content including hypertext, IF, and tabletop games.

GDC 2013

…starts Monday! I will be there:

I’m giving a game design postmortem about Versu Friday morning (10 AM, Room 3005 West Hall). I’ll be talking about several aspects of the design, including some UI issues with presenting text games that I haven’t previously blogged about here.

Richard Evans and I will be showing Versu gameplay off at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop (Friday, 2:30-4:30 PM, Room 2014 West Hall). As that’s always one of my favorite sessions, I’m especially happy to be doing it. The EGW always features a surprising and cool collection of gameplay styles and concepts.

And finally

I will also have a shorter stint at the Indie Soapbox, where I will talk some about text games. (Tuesday, 4:30-5:30 PM, Room 2005, West Hall.)

Several other sessions caught my eye as potentially interesting for IF folks:

Clara Fernandez-Vara, a Boston PR-IFer and IF outreach advocate, is part of the Game Educators’ Rant session.

Porpentine (howling dogs et al) and Terry Cavanagh (Don’t Look Back, Super Hexagon) are talking about indie game curation and outsider voices.

There is a poster session by Mordechai Buckman about the potential of interactive fiction using “a tool for turning story scenarios into intuitive gameplay.” I’m not sure what to expect from this one, but we’ll see.

Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy talk about the evolution of Kentucky Route Zero from a largely puzzly graphical adventure game to its somewhat more mysterious current form.

Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin on Telltale’s The Walking Dead also sounds very much worth a look (I’m especially vexed it’s scheduled opposite the Game Design Challenge session, which I typically make a point of attending — but hey, it’s all about presenting the player with hard choices, right?).

I usually enjoy the GDC Microtalks, a brain-dazzlingly rapid presentation by numerous speed-talking speakers. This year the lineup includes Anna Anthropy, Leigh Alexander (a games journalist who, among other things, has written extensively about IF and text gaming), and Tom Bissell.

And, of course, there’s the entire Game Narrative Summit, moved to San Francisco GDC this year. Formerly it was a feature of GDC Online in Austin.