San Francisco Bay Area IF meetups

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!

Meeting notes from Seattle meet-up

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.

Seattle IF Group April meet-up

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.

Wil Wheaton at PAX East

So the one piece of regular PAX programming that I really, really wanted to see was Wil Wheaton’s keynote. (My sister met Wheaton at Emerald City ComiCon a few weeks earlier and he mentioned to her that the keynote was going to touch on interactive storytelling, so I was especially curious to see it.) But, alas, like a bazillion other people, I couldn’t get in.

I did recently get to watch it online, though. (PAX East 2010 – Wil Wheaton Keynote from Matt Waldron on Vimeo.)

A lot of the speech is about gamer solidarity, the awesomeness of playing D&D in his childhood, and so on, but at around 40 minutes in, he starts talking about his experience playing Dragon Age: Origins. He tells about being in a situation where he is forced to do something that loses his favorite character from his game party, because of the choices he’s made up to that point about the main character’s development and alignment. And of course the fact that that moment was the product of his own decisions made it that much more powerful.

From there, he goes into a longer riff about the power and inevitable rise of interactive storytelling. Later, he gets a big cheer by mentioning Heavy Rain, and I sympathize, even though in practice I was not happy with a lot of things about the game.

It’s a keynote, not a deep analysis of the concepts of choice and complicity in gaming, but it’s definitely cool to see the narrative aspect of games singled out this way. And encouraging, too, to have a writer who is willing to stand up and speak for what interactive stories can do well. Too often even game-industry writers seem to be focused on the reverse.