Spring Thing 2011 is now on, with six entries. Which means that there are reviews! Today’s is Bonehead, by Sean M. Shore.
Category: interactive fiction
IF Demo Fair: Desiring Flights and other interactive poetry
Desiring Flights (Barry Moon and Chris Danowski) is a word-centric work, though with strong visual elements in two of its three levels; I might be inclined to call it interactive poetry, but I’m not sure that’s the best description given that the words were as often props as they were objects of contemplation in their own right. To the extent that this piece belongs to an existing genre or formal tradition, though, it’s not one I know especially well; so rather than attempt a more formal critique, I’ll just give some subjective impressions.
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IF Demo Fair: Lessons Learned
Several people have suggested to me that we should do more demo fairs in the future. I’m not done wrapping up the last tasks for this one — I’m still finishing the SPAG coverage, and I owe mail to some authors — so the prospect of running one again myself is vaguely daunting. But in case it’s useful in the future, here are some postmortem thoughts.
IF Demo Fair themes: procedural generation
A couple of the submissions to the Demo Fair focused on procedural generation of content or of surface text. (There was meant, in fact, to be another demo to do with narrative generation that didn’t get finished in time; a real pity.) This wasn’t something I’d explicitly suggested as a focus for the program, but it emerged from the process a bit.
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IF Demo Fair: “what if im the bad guy?”
Aaron Reed’s contribution to the IF Demo Fair was introduced with the following description:
Exploring a frozen battlefield moment from a half dozen violently conflicting perspectives, this prototype (part of the author’s work towards a digital arts MFA) merges traditional IF with video, sound, and web conventions. Inspired by the currently unfolding trials of six US Marines accused of committing war crimes in Afghanistan, the project asks what interactive stories can say about contemporary, real-world events, and wonders if there can be such a thing as an IF documentary.
This should warn the player that what they’re in for is not going to be a happy fun romp. The piece — game is certainly the wrong word — is a series of short vignettes involving an ambiguous wartime shooting. It uses the strength of text to shift viewpoints in a way that graphics alone couldn’t: the same objects are described in different ways each time.
“what if im the bad guy” makes some of the heaviest and most successful use of multimedia I’ve ever seen in IF. The image with this post isn’t cover art. It’s a screenshot. It really might be fairest to say that this is a piece for which the IF parser and text output are a component, rather than that it’s IF with add-ons. All of the elements of the experience are essential. (I don’t know exactly what underlies all this technically. It may well be that the project is too complicated to be distributed effectively online and can only really be run as an exhibition piece.)
@party Interactive Fiction Competition
A signal boost for a competition accepting IF:
@party 2011, a demoparty held in Harvard, Massachusetts, 30 minutes outside Boston, has an interactive fiction competiton.
Remote entries are due June 13, 2011. Onsite entries are due 12:30 PM on Saturday, June 18.
Rules
* Games cannot be more than approximately a half-hour in play length.
* Most formats are acceptable, but Z-Machine is preferred.Check out our website, atparty-demoscene.net, for more info.
The same competition last year is the context for zarf’s Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 