Educational challenge-based interactive fiction. Of a sort.

Back in 1993 I was tutoring my sister in algebra. Her quizzes and tests were always made of word problems with a running storyline involving many recurring places and characters. I tied the fate of the main characters to how well she did on the previous quiz, so a good performance brought them good fortune.

Unfortunately, one test she completely bombed, and, well, this is a transcription of the quiz she got next. (On behalf of my younger self, I apologize to the people of Argentina, the spirit of Goethe, and hypnotists. [Hi, Conrad.])

ETA: Didn’t anticipate this getting Metafiltered, so I put it someplace with a low bandwidth allowance, and that’s now used up. You can also see it cached and in non-PDF form here.blah

GDC AI summit talk et al

So, this has been in the works for a bit, but got officially confirmed today: I’m going to be speaking at the AI summit at GDC, in a panel with Michael Mateas and Dan Kline, on artificial intelligence and storytelling. (Unsurprisingly, I’m talking about conversation; the panel as a whole will also look at things like drama management, narrative pacing, etc.)

Scheduling information isn’t up at the GDC site yet, but is presumably forthcoming; the panel will be sometime March 9-10, 2010, at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, CA.

I’m excited to be talking alongside people whose work I’ve admired for a long time, and really looking forward to this event.

Meanwhile, PAX East plans are moving forward, with lots of IF stuff projected; there’s now an ifwiki page, if you want to check out who else is going to be there and what social plans are in the works. And Jeremy Freese and I are going to be making a speaking appearance at MIT the following Monday, as well.

Yes, it will be a full and busy March.

PAX East update

Panel acceptances for PAX East are coming out now, and there will definitely be IF content:

Congratulations, your PAX East panel submission of “Storytelling in the
world of interactive fiction” has been accepted. We tentatively have
you scheduled for Friday, March 26th from 5:30pm – 6:30pm in our Wyvern
Theatre…

We have the following title and description for your panel:

Storytelling in the world of interactive fiction

Text adventures have been quietly experimenting with narrative gaming
for thirty years. Five authors from the amateur interactive fiction
community discuss the design ideas in their games — reordered
storylines, unreliable narrators, deeply responsive NPCs — and how they
apply to other kinds of games. (Rob Wheeler (mod.), Robb Sherwin, Aaron
Reed, Emily Short, Andrew Plotkin)

Get Lamp is going to be screened later that same Friday evening — 9:30 PM, it looks like..