Category: community

A moment

Yesterday I was at a GDC Online narrative summit talk by Alexander Seropian and John Scalzi. At the end of it, they announced they were going to have some audience participation and needed three volunteers.

I thought: I should really put my hand up. I never put up my hand in circumstances like this, because I find volunteering for random things in front of a big group uncomfortable; you never know what you’re getting into. In the event, discomfort won and I kept my hand down.

So they picked three guys. A picture of a gruff male space marine went up on the slide screen, and each of the volunteers was invited to say a line (provided by Scalzi) with the accent and delivery he thought best suited the space marine. The audience picked the volunteer who sounded most plausible, and the marine character got named after that volunteer.

Then I wished I had put my hand up.

IF Community links and resources

Recent reader email prompted me to revise and expand my guide to ways to get involved with the IF community. But the IF community (or communities, I should say) have been dramatically expanding and diversifying in the last couple of years, and I’m sure I’ve omitted some useful content. Did I miss things you think I should have covered? Events or venues people should know about? Please feel free to comment and I’ll update with whatever seems like a good fit.

No Show Conf, Boston July 14-15

There wasn’t an IF conference alongside PAX East this year, but people may be interested in the No Show Conference, an indie game conference running on the MIT campus July 14-15. It will have something of an IF community presence. (Not me. But other people. Note the talks by Clara Fernandez-Vara, Deirdra Kiai, and Jim Munroe.)

In particular, if you liked last year’s IF Demo Fair, you may be pleased to hear that there’s a demo hall as a significant part of the conference. Interactive fiction games and interface demos are welcome.

A Small Roundup of Interesting Things

Storybricks, now fundraising on Kickstarter, is an AI project to allow users to create generated stories in an MMO environment. The project provides an authoring tool for establishing characters’ desires, relationships, moods, and basic conversation:

The engine then brings the results to life within a 3D fantasy kingdom. The Storybricks team has posted a public demo that you can try out for yourself.

Playfic, Andy Baio and Cooper McHatton’s website for playing and writing Inform games online, has had a successful three months, with hundreds of new games posted and (collectively) around 85,000 play sessions. Now Playfic has added the ability (crucial, in my opinion) for authors to include extensions from Inform’s extension site, meaning that supported games can be more complex and make use of a wide range of pre-existing tools.

Cover Stories is a minicomp pairing artists and authors of interactive fiction. The first phase (now over) collected dozens of pieces of cover art; during the second phase (now running), authors may select one of the submissions and write a short game suitable for that cover. There are still some cool images unclaimed. Rules and details may be found here.

IF Comp 2011: More on Andromeda Awakening, and comp reviewing in general

This started out as a response to a blog post by Francesco Cordella (here’s the version in the original Italian), but it got much too long for that context.

Continue reading “IF Comp 2011: More on Andromeda Awakening, and comp reviewing in general”