The Electronic Literature Organization is currently calling for presentation proposals and submissions of artists’ work for a conference in late May of next year. I know they’re interested in interactive fiction, so if you have something you’d like to submit to their gallery, now is the time — the submission deadline is November 30th. Artists selected are expected to attend the conference; some financial assistance is available.
Category: interactive fiction
Play It Yourself
On a previous post, we’ve been discussing what makes a game feel like work to play, and what doesn’t — and a lot of the answers come back to matters of polish. Is the game bug-free, or close to it? Are puzzles well clued? Are there responses to lots of unexpected commands? Are boring, repetitive actions omitted? Is the space easy enough to understand that the player doesn’t need to map? Does the game help track important clues for the player, so he doesn’t have to take notes?
People keep recommending beta-testing as a way to find and correct such flaws. This is good advice, but it misses a point I think is just as essential:
Play it yourself.
Competition Results
Congratulations to the winners of IF Comp 2007!
Art in Competition
One of the questions I semi-routinely get asked on interviews about interactive fiction is whether I think the annual IF Comp is a good thing for the community. I find the question hard to answer: the competition is so essential to the community identity that I have a hard time imagining it away, and besides, my opinion wouldn’t change anything; it’s like someone asking whether the human body would be more aesthetically appealing if it didn’t have a spine.
Nonetheless, I’m constantly conscious of the con arguments brought up a few times a year: that the competition siphons off attention from other games released at other times; that it produces a trend towards small games rather than epic works; that there is something wrong or unfair about the voting scheme (opinions vary on what that might be); and — my least favorite — that “real” artforms, like novels and paintings, are not produced primarily for competition, and that therefore competition is an unhealthy or unnatural context for artistic production, and we’d be better off without it. (Here we touch another of my pet peeves: people who make sweeping statements about “real” art are usually talking about [what they know about] commercialized artistic production in the early 21st century. I run into something similar with freshman mythology students: they’re often convinced that “originality” is the defining feature of good art, and so object to the fact that ancient authors reused mythological material. Their conceptions about literature have been shaped by market forces and copyright law in ways they don’t recognize. They also, if pressed, don’t have a very clear idea of what originality means, other than perhaps refraining from reusing the same plot and cast of characters from another work.)
Lately I’ve been reading two books that have helped clarify my visceral sense about this problem into something I can articulate.
Just a reminder
The 2007 IF Competition is winding down now: votes are due by the 15th, so if you wanted to play and vote, you’ve got one weekend left. The voting minimum is five games, so there’s still time even if you haven’t played many yet.
IF Comp in Public T-Shirts
George Oliver is selling t-shirts in celebration of playing IF Comp games in public. You might want one even if you play all your IF at home alone, though. Check out the art.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 