Category: community

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.

Screen Shot 2013-04-03 at 12.21.12 PM 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.

New SPAG!

After more than a year’s hiatus, SPAG is back with a new issue, in a new hosting space. For those who aren’t familiar with it, SPAG is a long-standing (but occasionally on-vacation) IF community zine with editorials, interviews, and, in the old days, lots of reviews. As IFDB and personal blogs collated at Planet-IF have become review hubs, SPAG’s review content has dropped off a bit: the new editorial direction is moving largely away from reviews. But SPAG is still a useful place for longer articles, interviews, and discussions, so it’s great to see it make a reappearance.

The current issue features interviews with the three top-placing authors from IF Comp, an editorial from the new editor Dannii Willis, and long-form articles about shared-world creation and about detective IF as a genre.

Female voices in games

Several people have asked, apropos of recent Twitter/Gamasutra/Metafilter/Kotaku discussions, for lists of women whose games they should know about.

So here is a short list of female authors whose work I’ve especially enjoyed, recently or in the past, with links to most-recommended works by each. It’s not even a little bit complete or comprehensive, and it skews towards indie game designers and women who work in narrative, simply by virtue of the fact that those are the areas I follow most closely. In no particular order, then:

Continue reading “Female voices in games”

Sparkly IF Reviews

Sparkly IF Reviews is a new interactive fiction reviewing site that I have started with a growing list of other contributors. The name is silly, but I’m entirely serious about the aim of the site, which is to provide a safe-for-authors space that focuses on recognizing successful or cool things in IF, cheerleading new contributors, and letting people know what was appreciated. The concept of the site is to feature positive, sincere feedback; short-form and long-form are both totally acceptable.

This project springs from my feeling that the IF community, for all its resources, lacks the nurturing aspect that a lot of fandoms and hobbyist art and craft communities have. Writing IF is hard. Putting IF in public is an act of courage. And while I think it’s important for us to be writing reviews that critique craft and conceptual content, and that curate the best work for the attention of players who might not otherwise find it, we really need the encouraging aspects also.

I want to emphasize, though, that I don’t see this as somehow a kiddie website where people review games that are not good enough to be reviewed elsewhere. Rather, it’s meant to create a different context of discussion — and that can be freeing even when you’re talking about a game that you thought was really strong. Most of my reviews are pitched to potential players as much or more than they’re pitched to the original author, and so they do a lot of explaining and describing, and attempt to catalog thoroughly any flaws or issues that I think might affect a player’s decision to play that game. Sometimes it’s very pleasant to be able to step aside from that and just write about what I liked, for the ear of the author. Possibly other reviewers will find they like that too.

And from an author’s point of view, it’s meant to create a safe context of discussion. I’ve released enough games to know what it’s like seeing a link to a review of your game and to hover apprehensively before clicking, nerved against feedback that might be exciting… or might make your heart sink. This is meant to be Not That.

Currently on the site, you’ll find reviews by me, Zach Samuels, and Sam Kabo Ashwell. They touch on Changes, Valkyrie, Escape from Summerland, howling dogs, J’dal, Signos, and Fish Bowl from the current IF Comp as well as the Ectocomp game Beythilda the Night Witch and the Andromeda Legacy game Andromeda Dreaming.

If you choose to comment, please respect the concept of the site. I will moderate as necessary to keep it a safe place. There are plenty of other places suitable for critical and unmoderated discussion.

Finally, if you like the idea, more contributors are welcome; let me know if you’d like to be involved in the project. I’d be especially pleased to get coverage of the remaining IF Comp games this year.

I would also welcome positive content about things other than games. So if you have a beloved tool, extension, feature, etc. that you want to praise, that would be suitable too. (That reminds me I should write a post entitled David Welbourn’s Walkthroughs Are Freaking Awesome.)