Pigeons in the Park

Pigeons in the Park is a conversation piece (game is probably the wrong word) by Deirdra Kiai, somewhat in the mold of interactive fiction conversation works, but designed in the Wintermute engine and accompanied by graphics and sound. (I gather. I played it with the sound muted because I needed to avoid disturbing people around me, but others have mentioned that there’s a soundtrack.)

Pigeons in the Park is at the extreme hypertext-like end of the interactive conversation genre. There’s no text parser, just a short menu of options to speak, and since the amount of content is relatively small, you can run through most of the interesting options in the dialogue tree in ten minutes or so of play. It also reminds me of some of my own earlier work in that it’s quite self-referential: most of the actual content of the conversation is about story-telling in games. The protagonist is also a bit of a blank slate.

Embedded in the conversation is a question: how do we make these exchanges emotionally affecting? How do we write interactive conversation that is moving as well as amusing or arty?

I still think the answer has to do with not starting from scratch, but beginning with characters who already have some history. But I’m really intrigued to see this kind of problem being addressed in other media than textual IF.

The Reprover

The Reprover is a piece of digital art; or a lightly interactive comic book; or a French film whose pacing you control yourself; or a story written on the surface of a polyhedron. Or perhaps it is most accurate to call it a hypertext, but, if so, it is considerably more coherent and satisfying than most literary hypertexts I have encountered before.

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Narrative in Casual Gaming: Miss Management

For some time I’ve been arguing that the way forward for interactive storytelling is to heal the long-standing breach between narrative and puzzle, and make the interactive parts of a game reinforce and enhance the story. The player’s action should in some way help him better understand the characters, explore the constraints of the circumstance in which they find themselves, or intensify his feelings towards the participants and the outcome. (There are probably other possibilities too, but those are the obvious ones that present themselves.)

The casual game Miss Management accomplishes all that surprisingly well.

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It’s Not All Chocolate

After my recent good times with Chocolatier 2 (and, I have to confess, a string of stressful working days that left me too brain-dead to want to work on IF in the evening), I decided to try some demos for other games being sold by Big Fish and PlayFirst. Sadly, none of them were nearly as cool as Chocolatier 2, though not all were quite as maddening as Mystery in London, either. The run-down, for people who enjoy reviews no matter of what:

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Mystery in London, and Incompetence as a Design Goal

Recently I tried Mystery in London, a search-for-lost-objects game. I’m not sure what possessed me to do this; possibly it was the pretty screen shots, or possibly it was curiosity about what this genre involved.

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