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.

Linkage

Recent reading:

In the Company of Grues seems to be a very recently-started blog about playing and writing IF, not currently included at Planet-IF.

A three part series (1, 2, 3) on narrative structures used by Echo Bazaar (about which I’ve previously written).

Apropos of recent discussions of adaptive difficulty in IF, there’s an interesting post over at GameSetWatch about challenge levels in mainstream gaming. It mostly focuses on scaling enemy difficulty, but the idea of making a challenge easier after it’s failed the first time is not something we talked about very much at the PAX East panel.

Act 1 of Clockwords is out

Clockwords is a casual wordplay/defense game by Gabob, for which I contributed story content. It’s coming out in acts. Act 1 is now available, with more of the story, more kinds of letters, and various gameplay refinements. For those who played the prologue version, there’s now a more staged structure to the gameplay, and no microtransactions are required. (Yay! I don’t like microtransactions.)

Hard mode is really genuinely hard, too, which leads to more interesting tactical play.