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!
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.
It’s come to my attention that someone is posting questions under my name on rec.arts.int-fiction. Just to be clear, that person is not me: I have stopped posting to Usenet.
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.
I’ve added links for the Seattle and Boston area IF groups, both of which meet roughly monthly (sometimes more often) to discuss IF, share works in progress, and generally cheer one another on. Are there others out there that I should be mentioning?
[ETA: some discussion in comments about getting a Bay Area meet going.]
Recent reading:
In the Company of Grues seems to be a very recently-started blog about playing and writing IF, not currently included at Planet-IF.
A three part series (1, 2, 3) on narrative structures used by Echo Bazaar (about which I’ve previously written).
Apropos of recent discussions of adaptive difficulty in IF, there’s an interesting post over at GameSetWatch about challenge levels in mainstream gaming. It mostly focuses on scaling enemy difficulty, but the idea of making a challenge easier after it’s failed the first time is not something we talked about very much at the PAX East panel.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 