Category: community

Readings, News

A new post from the Echo Bazaar folk, on choices in games — including what they call the “reflective” choice, which invites the player to think about why he’s doing something, or act expressively, without necessarily expecting the game to pick up on that. We’ve seen that in IF in a few places. Certain portions at the beginning of Blue Lacuna do this thing of collecting responses from the player without using them to affect the world model — but they certainly affect the experience of playing and the meaning of the story.

PAX Prime is going to feature an IF panel and its own IF suite! (That’s Seattle, Sept. 3-5.) But tickets are selling quickly. If you want to go, you may want to make your plans soon.

Signal boost for Seattle IF

Since this reached some new people last time:

The Seattle IF group meets this Saturday the 15th at 3:30 PM, and all are invited. Our building is at the University of Washington, in the Health Sciences Building F.

Last month about 15 people attended, and you can read the minutes.

In the spirit of Seattle IF our agenda is usually up in the air. There are many TWIFComp games to play. Feel free to come with more ideas for games to play on the projector, your own IF work to discuss, or questions about anything in the greater IF world as well.

A more detailed map with our building marked as I Court is here.

The doors are locked, but someone inside will let you in. And for the May meeting mailing list thread, go here.

San Francisco Bay Area IF meetups

This was posted in comments, but deserves a signal boost to the main page:

OK, we’re finally getting things started!

Bay Area IFers, please sign up here:
http://www.meetup.com/sf-bay-area-interactive-fiction/

Our first meeting is scheduled for Saturday, May 1, at 1pm. We’ll introduce ourselves, talk about what we’re playing and what we’re working on, and discuss our plans for world domination.

Venue TBD. (We need to figure out how many of us there will be and where we’ll meet.)

Thanks!

Meeting notes from Seattle meet-up

Are now available here, thanks to Paul Furio.

It was a long discussion (three hours!), but there was particular interest in setting up events for Seattle PAX 2010 and possibly for SF/reading-related conventions in the area as well.

Another area of interest was interpreter possibilities for browsers and mobile devices (including the idea, which got a lot of play at PAX East, of having browser interpreters capable of preserving transcripts from every player, so that the author could analyze the results and tweak the game accordingly).

We also talked a fair amount about choice-based (rather than setting-based) approaches to IF design. We were focusing in particular on a draft tutorial that Ron Newcomb is writing that introduces I7 starting with the concept of beginning and ending scenes, and building up a plot. The conversation kind of spread outward from there, but I thought Ron’s ideas were pretty interesting, especially in light of some recent blog posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) I’ve been reading from Inform 7-using students who were frustrated not to be able to start implementing story immediately.

I had a great time meeting everyone who was there.

Seattle IF Group April meet-up

Speaking of local interactive fiction groups, here’s the news on this Saturday’s Seattle meet-up. (I’m in town, so planning to go, but I figured it could also use the signal boost.)

All in the Seattle area this Saturday, the 17th, are welcome to the
April meetup of the Seattle IF group.

We’ll meet at 3:30 PM at the University of Washington, in the Health Sciences Building F.

We’re planning to discuss a new Inform 7 guide in the works by Ron Newcomb that takes a different approach than most IF tutorials, and IF possibilities for PAX Prime here in Seattle this September. Works in progress, recently played games, and group play on the projector are all on the table as well. After a couple of hours we usually have pizza delivered to the building.

A more detailed map with our building marked as I Court is here.

There are entrances to the north and south of the I Court Rotunda, but both entrances will be locked. If you can figure out how to get in, you’ve earned a spot in Seattle IF…

Just kidding of course — we’ll be there to let folks in at 3:30; see this thread on our mailing list for full details.