Category: interactive fiction

It is the time of year when IF Comp opens intents for new entries — meaning that if you’re an author and want to release a game as part of the October/November competition, you may now sign up.

This year, there’s a new feature: an organized initiative to fundraise prize money, together with running costs for the IF Technology Foundation. In past years, cash prizes for the comp have depended on the generosity of individual donors; usually they’ve ranged from $250-$400 as a top prize down to $15 or so, and usually there’s only been enough for the top-placing authors to receive any financial reward for participating. (The supply of other interesting prizes typically lasts quite a lot further down the list — but those aren’t all equally useful to the potential winners.)

Given that Comp placement tends to feel a little bit arbitrary, and authors are sometimes separated only by a very small score difference, it feels a little unfair to have a really steep drop-off in rewards. And often really novel or experimental work places not in the top three (that position tends to go more to crowd-pleasers), but somewhere in the top 15-20.

The fundraiser aims to help address some of those issues. The money raised will be distributed to the top 2/3 of authors, with a minimum prize of $10. If the fundraiser reaches its target, the top prize will be over $300, but the drop-off will be pretty shallow, with prizes above $100 for everyone down to 19th place. (The math of this is… highly specific. If you’re curious, check out the explanatory blog post.)

And what about the percentage donated to the IFTF? That goes to IFTF running costs. The IF Technology Foundation supports infrastructure for both the comp itself and the IF Archive, as well as sponsoring initiatives to improve accessibility in IF tools, and assisting to provide resources for Twine.

Events

July 1, IF Comp 2017 opens for intents-to-enter.

The British Library is running an Interactive Fiction Summer School as a weeklong course in July, with multiple instructors from a variety of different interactive narrative backgrounds. More information can be found at the British Library’s website.

First round voting in the XYZZY Awards for 2016 is open through July 4. If you liked some games that came out last year, you may vote to nominate that work now; the second round of voting will choose between the nominees. You may nominate up to two games in each category; you may not vote for your own work. There are no special requirements to be eligible to vote, though you should read the rules (as always).

July 19, the London IF Meetup gets together to talk about writing IF for money.

IntroComp is under new management but is still running this year, an opportunity to share the opening section of an IF piece with players and get feedback. Intents to enter are accepted through end of day today, with the intros themselves to be due July 31. This year for the first time the comp accepts an excerpt that might come from somewhere other than the beginning of the game.

August 14-17, Cape Cod, MA is the Foundation of Digital Games conference, including a workshop in procedural content generation. The PCG workshop has a theme this year:

What do our generators say about the underlying systems we have designed and the designers who create them?  Our theme aims to explore the biases inherent in PCG and the potential with which to subvert it.

Registration will continue to be available through August, but the ticket price goes up to “late registration” rates on July 4, so participants will save $100 by booking before that deadline.

New Releases

Sub-Q has Footnotes in Ashes, a new piece by Jeremy M. Gottwig about grief and loss; the memories keep intruding on the main text through clickable footnote links.

Articles and More-than-Articles

This article describes the recovery of original Magnetic Scrolls data, with a lot of careful manipulation of the original backup tapes.

Oliver Lee Bateman writes for the Paris Review about the proportion of story in games.

Aaron Reed’s dissertation is now available online. Entitled “CHANGEFUL TALES: DESIGN-DRIVEN APPROACHES TOWARD MORE EXPRESSIVE STORYGAMES,” it looks at a range of approaches in his own work and other people’s, including highly procedural projects like Façade, Prom Week, Redshirt, Siboot, and Versu; “sculpture fiction,” which would include quality-based narrative approaches such as StoryNexus but also Aaron’s own 18 Cadence and Ice-Bound Concordance; and collaborative storygames, both tabletop and digital, including attention to the work of Dietrich Squinkifer.

Tools

Chris Crawford has written an Encounter Editor to go with his prototype Storytron project; he very much hopes that people will use it to contribute content to his story world. I wrote more about this earlier in the month, and Crawford himself replied to that post.

Bruno Dias has released a major upgrade to Improv, his procedural text engine.

Talks

This is a few months old, but here’s Chris Klimas introducing Twine for novices, and also giving a little background on interactive fiction.

Elsewhere

Here are some recommendations of escape room games you can play at home, as opposed to the kind you have to go out to visit.

I mentioned earlier that Procedural Generation in Game Design is available, and that I have a chapter in it. I’ve now had a chance to look at a few of the chapters that I didn’t read previously during the publishing stage, and wanted to highlight a few of these as especially relevant to IF readers.

Joris Dormans’ chapter on Cyclic Generation talks about design patterns for procedural dungeons, including the most systematic section on the deployment of locks and keys I’ve recall seeing anywhere. He identifies concepts such as single- or multipurpose keys, consumable and reusable keys, asymmetrical and “valve” doors, safe and unsafe locks and keys, and other concepts; if you’re looking for design patterns for puzzle games gated on geography, this has a lot of ideas you might want to raid. You can get some of the same material from Dormans’ lecture at PROCJAM last year in Falmouth, but the article gives you more reference material.

Ben Kybartas writes about story and plot generation using expansion and rewriting grammars. The rewriting rules (“secondary rewrite rules” in Kybartas’ terminology) take a simple plot and then add complications to it based on what elements already exist in the game world: for instance, a simple plot about someone cheating at poker could be expanded with a complication that they have an accomplice in cheating — but only if there is someone with emotional ties that would make them willing to participate in such a deception. Rewrite rules could even add nodes to the story that provide player choice. I would have welcomed more information from finished games about how this method goes down in practice.

Jason Grinblat’s article on Emergent Narratives and Story Volumes talks about how procedurality can be used to define the themes of all the possible stories to emerge from that system; it ends in a close study of the tabletop storygame Fiasco, but also includes examples from Caves of Qud.

Mark R. Johnson writes about several aspects of Ultima Ratio Regum, but in particular about the procedural generation of dialogue for different character types and personality styles — something that’s obviously of strong interest and ties into some of the work I’m doing at Spirit AI as well as in my own practice.

(PS: 2017 PROCJAM Kickstarter fundraising is in its last days; you still have an option to help kickstart it.)