Charity Auction followup

Many thanks to those who participated in this past weekend’s auction! Thanks to the high bidders and some particularly kind people who made bidless donations, we brought in a total of $918 towards school supplies from Donors Choose, supporting

  • construction paper, paintbrushes, dry erase markers, and crayons
  • posterboards and resource books for a science fair
  • a Dell laptop
  • two Lego Mindstorms kits
  • worms for teaching about composting, terrarium supplies, and three live frogs
  • five pre-packaged STEM lab projects, an electricity activity set, and an inflatable solar system demonstration set
  • thermometers, beakers, pipettes, and other basic lab supplies
  • a non-fiction selection of science books and biographies
  • classroom subscriptions to TIME for kids and SuperScience magazine

(Some of these projects also received partial support from other Donors Choose donors.)

I really appreciate the response. This is a cause that means a lot to me. [ETA: and someone anonymously added a donation for a planetarium field trip, bringing the total to an even $1K. Thank you, anonymous benefactor!]

Jon Ingold interview, Ice-Bound design details

indieorama.com has an interview with Jon Ingold about the fate and future of inkle, Jon’s feelings about parser IF, and commercial IF prospects in general.

Meanwhile, the Ice-Bound project (Aaron Reed and Jacob Garbe) has started posting blog entries about the combinatorial narrative design there.

Flash Charity Auction: 1, 3, 5 hours of work time

I am auctioning off some work time — 9 hours in total, in chunks of 5 hours, 3 hours, and 1 hour — in support of Donors Choose, a charity that provides educational supplies to underfunded classrooms in the US. Bidding runs through 5 PM Pacific today (1 AM British time) and the work is to be done this weekend.

How does this work?

Between now and 5 PM Pacific time, you can comment here to bid (in dollars, please).

Highest bidder gets the 5-hour chunk, second place the 3-hour, third place the 1-hour. So if you’re the only person to bid, you could wind up with the 5 hours for a super-low price. When time is up, I’ll determine who the winners are and comment with that information. It’s then up to you to fulfill your bid by donating here and letting me know what specifically you have in mind. I will start work tomorrow and will aim to have the tasks done by Monday evening.

That’s very little notice! Hardly any, in fact!

I know. It’s pretty unusual for me to know way in advance that I’m going to have a free weekend, though.

What if no one goes for this?

I make cookies instead. Mm, cookies. (Honestly, I have no idea whether this will produce any interesting results. It’s an experiment.)

What would that get me?

Some things you could have me spend time on include:

  • betatesting your WIP
  • giving feedback on a game design document or concept
  • making some (photo and text-based) cover art for a game
  • revising prose written by a non-native speaker
  • writing a review of a freeware game of your choice (it needs to be short enough that I can both play and review in the time slot, and needs to run on Mac OSX)
  • creating a custom I7 extension to tackle some irritating code problem (again, within limits — something like Threaded Conversation is not a 5-hour project)
  • curating a list of IF specific to an interest of yours
  • writing a short essay about an IF- or game-related topic
  • writing a tiny custom speed-IF (in the 1 hour slot this would probably need to be choice-based)

…but I’m open to other possible uses of time as well, if you have something else in mind.

So basically you’ll do what I say?

Er, within certain limits. Obviously: no illegal activities, no pornography, nothing unethical (such as having me write a glowing review of a work without disclosing the funding source). No hacks that aren’t really labor exchanges (“spend one hour mailing me your laptop”), or that would cost me additional money to perform unless we’ve talked it through first. If you have doubts about whether your request is reasonable, feel free to request clarification.

Why Donors Choose?

This gets long and is not about what this blog is usually about, but if you’re interested:

Continue reading “Flash Charity Auction: 1, 3, 5 hours of work time”

Assorted IF-related reading

I wrote a piece on the Best Individual Puzzle nominees from the 2013 XYZZYs. It is also an attempt to pull together some thoughts about how puzzles can be good in completely different ways and for different reasons — something I think last year’s spread of nominees demonstrates particularly stongly.

Meanwhile, Sam Ashwell has just posted a (long!) post about types of player agency in games. There’s lots there, but I’m especially interested in Sam’s ideas about the importance of author-player trust, and the effect that that trust can have on how well mechanics work for the player.

And speaking of off-site reading, it’s probably a good time to remind people about the Phrontisterion blog, which has a fair amount to say about IF despite not being aggregated at Planet-IF. It’s specifically taking an outsider’s view at the IF community and IF tools, from the perspective of people interested in Chris Crawford’s work.

Next Oxford/London Meetup: Oct 20, London

This time we’re experimenting with an unconferencey sort of setup where we break into interest discussion groups. The IF Comp games will be out by then, so that’s one thing we might talk about, but there’s room for lots of others. Join us!

More details here: http://www.meetup.com/Oxford-and-London-Interactive-Fiction-Group/

Transcript Posted (Game Audience discussion)

The transcript for the (admittedly brief) theoryclub meetup on game audience is here. Due to travel I was only able to be online for a bit in the middle, so thanks to Zach for logging the session.

What shall we take on next? The next meeting is Oct 11; proposed topics include

Puzzles and story: what puzzles are most satisfying, and most useful, from a storytelling perspective? Are there types of narrative experience that can be generated only through puzzles?

Replayable IF: what makes a game satisfying to replay, especially in an often narrative and puzzle-based genre?

Preferences and alternative suggestions welcome over the next week or so; then I’ll pick something.

Edited to add: We’ve now settled on replayability. Some possible starting points for discussion are as usual listed at the Discussion Club page.