Dear people-that-send-me-email,
Sorry I’ve been uncommunicative the last couple of days, and here’s fair warning that I will probably continue to be so through the first of the year or so. It’s down to a combination of computer problems, academic year wind-up, and other features of Real Life. I wish everyone the best, and will catch up in January.
Here. (I know, I said it was best if you didn’t know too much about it. Don’t worry: the review steers more than usually clear of plot and setting issues.)
Question from Conrad Cook:
I’m wondering how you mesh variable tracking with conversation.
You’ve mentioned _Alabaster_ tracks a lot of variables, and I can
conceptualize how that would be reflected in, for example, the
artwork. But I’ve been wrestling for a while with how to use the
conversation to move the NPC’s variables, and how to have those
variables be reflected in the course of the conversation, and so far
I’m not winning that wrestling match.
Alabaster’s source is available, so it’s possible just to look at what’s going on there — but possibly more difficult to suss out exactly what the plan is throughout the source. A technical discussion follows.
Latest playing: CEJ Pacian’s brand-new game about an unlikely crime-fighting duo. It’s keyword-driven, a la Blue Lacuna but more so; that means it’s easy, but not so easy that there aren’t any puzzles at all. I think it took me 30-45 minutes to play, but I could be misestimating that. There’s mystery, there’s wacky setting, there’s light romance. Looking back over the experience, I think it’s best if you don’t know very much about what to expect (like I didn’t), so I won’t give much more detail than that. I liked it.
Here’s an interesting post about a tabletop game, Train, that explores some of the complicity issues we talk about in regard to Rameses and (especially) Rendition. I share some of the reservations of the post’s author: is a game whose chief gimmick is to make you not want to play really a game? How much depth can be wrung out of such a construction?
But I find it really interesting to see this same idea being played out in the realm of the physical board game, even if it is (as in this case) a single-edition Art board game that will never be widely distributed.
(Edited to add: the linked page has a chat app in the sidebar that seems to crash Firefox for some people. Sorry about that. Safari appears to view it safely.)
As zarf notes over here, we’ve submitted some panel suggestions to PAX East (and other people are welcome to do more). That’s Boston, March 26-28, 2010. Definitely planning to be there, besides me: J. Robinson Wheeler, Robb Sherwin, Aaron Reed, Andrew Plotkin, Mark Musante, Jeremy Freese, Juhana Leinonen, Jonathan Blask, Sam Kabo Ashwell, Jacqueline Lott Ashwell, Dave Cornelson, John Cater, David Welbourn, Iain Merrick, Jesse McGrew, Christopher Armstrong, Nick Montfort (part of the weekend); possibly Stephen Granade, Mike Rubin, and Jim Munroe; Jason Scott, almost certainly premiering Get Lamp.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 