Category: interactive fiction

So I was at EGX Rezzed this afternoon — I didn’t have enough time in the schedule to see the whole conference, but I did get to check out a few things and to be on a panel myself.

Our panel: Chris Gardiner of Failbetter Games, Jon Ingold of inkle, and I talked with John Walker from Rock Paper Shotgun about narrative in games. It tended to focus (given our background) about what can be learned from interactive fiction, though we also talked about some other questions. Jon talked a bit about the highly experimental new school IF period I just recently wrote about in my history coverage, and we all talked about the challenge of surfacing ideas from indie/IF gaming into commercial games. As with any casual panel, I immediately afterward thought of loads of other things I would have liked to say, or wished I’d said better, but so it goes. The video from that is online.

Lottie Bevan and Liam McDonald from Failbetter also gave a talk on Sunless Sea, including a detailed preview of Zubmariner, which is even darker and scarier than the original Sunless. Several of the Q&A questions are basically “uh… you’re making it even darker???” I’ve mentioned this once or twice before, but what I love about writing for the Fallen-London-verse is that it provides an outrageous fantasy-horror shell within which I can safely encase real-life things I find deeply upsetting. So, perversely, I find this land of tentacles and heartmetal comforting rather than the reverse. Mostly. Most of the time.

And then yesterday there was a talk on the art of Firewatch, with artist Olly Moss and animator James Benson. Around 29:30, they start talking about how Twine played into prototyping for the project.

(Each of these videos is ca. 35 minutes of content, with some wait time at the beginning while they were waiting for the stream to kick off.)

I also got a chance to play the demo of Shadowhand, a casual solitaire game with a backing story that builds on the concept of Regency Solitaire (though it concerns other characters, including a highwaywoman). I liked Regency Solitaire for its inventive riffing on the familiar mechanics: it made me actually enjoy playing solitaire again, which was unexpected. Shadowhand takes that even further, introducing a duel mechanic in which you are recharging your weapon through card combos. Your AI opponent charges their weapon by taking cards and building combos off the same spread, so that introduces some new tactical considerations about which cards you want to leave available for them when your turn ends.

Recently someone contacted me asking to link an article explaining the difference between “old” and “new” IF. I don’t know of any such article that’s remotely up to date. Besides, this is not as easy to answer as they might have hoped, even if you agree on what we’re counting as “old” for these purposes.

But here is a sort of periodization. I’m intentionally vague about dates because people disagree about the milestones. I’m leaving a lot out because this is meant to be a digestible overview. And it’s also worth pointing out that this is a perspective taken from within a particular community, so there were other communities (adult IF, non-English-speaking IF, gamebook/CYOA enthusiasts, visual novel readers, literary hypertext folks) whose histories could usefully be drawn alongside this.

First, a couple of general histories:

The old Inform Designer’s Manual has a brief history of IF through 2000. Let’s Tell a Story Together covers IF from the beginning through around 2005. Twisty Little Passages was also released in 2005 and covers about the same period. The history section of the IF Theory Reader contains accounts of French and Italian IF, as well as Duncan Stevens on the period 1994-2004, and Stephen Granade on the trend towards shorter works of interactive fiction over the course of the late 90s.

The Brief History of Interactive Fiction was an awesome (paper! full-sized for your wall!) timeline that ran through the year 2000; I don’t think there’s a great graphical version of it online, but the list of events included can be found here.

Ca. 2011 Nick Montfort and I wrote an account of IF communities that is arguably already way out of date: at the time, Twine was only barely on our radar. Meanwhile, ifwiki has a glossary that defines a number of terms that might be relevant to reading some of the linked reference work.

Continue reading “Brief Bibliography about IF History”

Now Play This is almost upon us, at Somerset House: April 1-3, a display of many intriguing and unusual games, plus microtalks and various other goodies. Birdland will be on display, as well as new work from S. Woodson, and Matthew Moore’s tabletop game Bring Your Own Book. (BYOB is in pre-order now, incidentally, and it may appeal to people with an interest in procedural text.)

Because I was doing scheduling before I had NPT’s schedule, there is also an IF Open Problems Meetup April 3 at the Red Lion in Oxford. If you have an issue of interactive narrative that you are stuck on or want to solve, bring us a description or demo of your problem that you can present in roughly 3 minutes. This could be anything from “how do I fix this puzzle in my text adventure” to “how to I get this multiplayer open air scenario to work”: we will brainstorm. If you do not have a problem, you are still welcome to come and answer others! If we run out of problems to talk about, we will declare victory and have snacks.

Also April 2, the SF Bay IF Meetup is gathering.

EGX Rezzed, April 7-9, London. Mostly a broader sort of games conference, but it includes the Leftfield Collection, an eclectic selection of curious things, as well as a panel featuring Jon Ingold (inkle) and Chris Gardiner (Failbetter Games); a talk on Firewatch; and a Sunless Sea retrospective.

April 7, nowhere in particular, also brings us the release of this year’s Spring Thing games.

Bot Summit, April 9, will be a set of presentations at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

London April 26 there is an IF Meetup focusing on tools: this time inkle presents ink, James Long presents the Top Secret tools designed for play-by-email narratives, and Matt Thompson presents a domain specific language similar to Inform, but designed to describe stories in terms of tropes. Please note that Failbetter Games has moved to a new location and that we have moved with them, so if you’re used to coming to North Greenwich for meetups, note the new address.

Boston’s PR-IF meetup is still to be announced, but it’ll show up here when there’s a date.

May 5 there is an event in London called Invisible Wall:

Invisible Wall is an event for women (trans inclusive) and gender minorities who want to work in this brilliant and fascinating medium, whether that’s as a journalist, critic or developer. We’ve brought together several women who already work in games writing to talk about their jobs and experiences, including Keza MacDonald, UK editor of gaming site Kotaku, Meg Jayanth, writer of award-winning narrative adventure 80 Days, and Olivia Wood, editor at Failbetter Games.

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This isn’t really new news, except that I didn’t know about it and so didn’t mention it sooner: there’s also an LA Meetup group for interactive fiction. I don’t see any events planned for this month, though.

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Failbetter Games’ funding initiative Fundbetter is accepting applications for support to develop narrative games, especially text-centric ones. (This is an investment, not free money; be sure to read the instructions and conditions about how it works.)

In particular, they note they’ve gotten almost no applications from women so far, and would welcome more. I find it hard to believe that the proportion of women writing narrative games is that small. I suspect the issue may be more about women’s tendency to disqualify themselves.

For those of you who might be inclined to self-disqualify: if you’re enthusiastic about your project and think it has potential, but feel like there are a couple questions on the question list for which you have less than perfect answers, I’d encourage you to a) seek advice/do research and see if you can polish those answers up, and then b) go ahead and submit, maybe even if one or two bits are things you’re still not sure about.

If you are having trouble thinking about their questions on UI, here’s a Pinterest collection of UIs from IF and text-based narrative games. They’re not all great! Which is itself something to think about.

Business and marketing plans are not so much my main area of expertise, but for what it’s worth, here’s a summary of one of an indie summit 2016 talk on strategies for the current market. One might Google the speakers to see if they’ve written more in-depth coverage elsewhere.

Meanwhile, over here Filamena Young is blogging about the process of applying to Fundbetter… complete with thoughts on the questions, and resources she’s using.

If you want a supportive place to talk to other IF authors, some of whom write for money, the euphoria &if channel is active. Even if you don’t want to go into detail about your plan in a public place, you may find a couple sympathetic listeners you can contact privately for further feedback. The channel is used very frequently for discussing work opportunities and beta-reading requests and other topics associated with being a semi-pro IF writer, so your request will not be out of place there.

Perhaps the polishing may not be enough to render your pitch sparkling and flawless in every regard, and that might be okay. If there’s something compelling about the project, Failbetter does sometimes work with people who have promising but not-quite-there pitches, to help them refine the marketing and the hook and other things that might need work. To be honest, just getting this advice might well be worth as much as the money they kick in.

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If you didn’t get enough GDC coverage with my posts, here’s Liz England’s take. Aaron Reed has also written up his thoughts, and Andrew Plotkin has his.

Wrong conference? Here’s Nick Montfort on the panel we did at SXSW, along with Allison Parrish and Daniel Temkin, on IF, esolangs, bots, and other ways of hacking language.

Continue reading “March Link Assortment”