Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

Events

July 2 (tomorrow!), the San Francisco Bay IF Meetup gets together.

July 10, 2-4 PM PDT, is the next session of the Seattle/Tacoma IF group. It will meet via Discord, and will feature a discussion on working with the Dialog development system.

ParserComp games are now available to play and vote on through July 31. There’s a health supply of entries: I’ve not had a chance to try, but the list of entries includes a prequel to the Frenetic Five games from veteran IF author Neil deMause; also some novelties, such as a game called Gent Stickman vs Evil Meat Hand in which it appears you type your input but the game’s output takes the form of hand-drawn images. Some players are reviewing these games over on the intfiction forum.

Narrascope registrations are open for July 30-31: the event is low-cost and remote, and features speakers on many aspects of interactive narrative.

This is some way in the future, but in early September, inkJam will be running to encourage new games written in Ink.

Crowdfunding

The book version of Aaron Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games series is live on Kickstarter, but only for a few more days – if you’re interested, now’s the time to pick it up.

Articles and Publications

ICCC, the conference on computational creativity, ran recently; Alex Calderwood presented a paper on using large language models to help author generative Twine games, and released Spindle, a tool to do this that requires access to the OpenAI API.

This paper also draws on an older one studying how novelists work with generative AI tools, and I find these observations familiar:

Generated passages display a level of narrative coherence that allows the model to ‘yes-and’ the user’s apparent authorial intention, while still enabling a degree of defamiliarization that results from the composition of nearly appropriate text, an attribute of AI writing which has been said to be prized by writers including the novelists Robin Sloan and Sigal Samuel, who respectively envision an AI writing assistant as “less Clippy, more seance” and describe feeling “strangely moved” by AI ´writing (Calderwood et al. 2020)

Calderwood et al., 2020

Pedagogical IF

People interested in using IF in the classroom might be interested in EscapeIF and, especially, this talk on how to build content around specific learning outcomes.

EscapeIF is a non-computer system designed to be used by teachers with minimal classroom resources, but the design guidance about how to apply learning outcomes and work towards playable experiences could easily carry over to other types of interactive fiction.

Inform Prototyping

This is an older article, but I’ve recommended it in a few places recently, especially with Inform now open-source: Bruno Dias on why Inform is great specifically for prototyping.

Borogove.app makes it easier than ever to do that prototyping online and share it, as well, though if you try that, note that currently Borogove tends to let you do one project at a time.

And if this sounds fun but you want to be able to present an Inform prototype with choice-based input and/or other UI features, rather than a standard parser interface, check out Vorple.

Events

Games may be submitted for ParserComp, a jam for parser-based interactive fiction, through June 30; then there will be a judging window July 1 – July 31, where players can try all the games and weigh in on their favourites.

July 2, the San Francisco Bay IF Meetup gets together.

July 10, 2-4 PM PDT, is the next session of the Seattle/Tacoma IF group. It will meet via Discord, and will feature a discussion on working with the Dialog development system.

Narrascope registrations are now open for July 30-31: the event is low-cost and remote, and features speakers on many aspects of interactive narrative.

Crowdfunding

The book version of Aaron Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games series is live on Kickstarter, and has handily blown away its funding goals – but there’s still time to opt in if you’re interested. The book comes in several different formats, all of them expanding on the basic text available on Aaron’s Substack – everything from digital and PDF editions to fancy collector sets with add-on feelies.

Also upcoming, Wade Clarke will be kickstarting a game in the Andromeda series – an SF interactive series with a number of well-regarded previous entries.

Events

June 4 is the next meeting of the SF Bay IF Meetup.

June 5 is the next meeting of the Seattle IF group, 2-4 PM PDT.

Narrascope registrations are now open for July 30-31: the event is low-cost and remote, and features speakers on many aspects of interactive narrative.

Releases

Hannah Nicklin’s Writing for Games is now available:

Focussing on the independent videogames sector, this book provides readers with a vocabulary to articulate and build their games writing practice; whether studying games or coming to games from another storytelling discipline. Writing for Games offers resources for communication, collaboration, reflection, and advocacy, inviting the reader to situate their practice in a centuries-long heritage of storytelling, as well as considering the material affordances of videogames, and the practical realities of working in game development processes.

The book version of Aaron Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games series is coming to Kickstarter – you can sign up to be notified of the launch.

Also upcoming, Wade Clarke will be kickstarting a game in the Andromeda series – an SF interactive series with a number of well-regarded previous entries.

Generative Projects

Lynn Cherny’s newsletter Things I Think Are Awesome continues to be a great resource on generative art and text projects right now – and there’s a lot going on in that space.

Lynn was kind enough to hook me up with an invite to Midjourney, which I’ve been enjoying greatly. Here, for instance, is what it offered for “allegorical figure representing fermentation, wine, beer, effervescence, yeast, bread”:

Volunteers Wanted

Spring Thing is seeking a new volunteer organiser. The Thing has been running for many years now, and is a respected second competition for the IF community, after the yearly IF Comp.

Events

June 4 is the next meeting of the SF Bay IF Meetup.

Events

May 1 (tomorrow!) the London IF Meetup plays Spring Thing games together, 2 PM-5 PM British time.

May 4, the Unnamed IF Book Club meets, also discussing Spring Thing games – though very possibly a different set of them. There are lots of entries this year.

LudoNarraCon, May 5-9, is an event running on Steam focused on narrative-rich games. It showcases various games and demos, and features a line-up of talks and panels.

May 7 is the next meeting of the SF Bay IF Meetup.

Spring Thing is running through May 10, so if you’d like to play and nominate games for ribbons, that’s the place to look. Many folks on the intfiction forum have also been posting reviews, if you’d like to see how other players are approaching the work.

May 15, Ryan Veeder, Lance Campbell, and Polyducks are speaking to the Seattle IF Meetup.

Inform

Inform is now available in a new version in open source; the source is available to read here. This version does not offer huge feature changes at the front end, but it does offer enormous changes under the surface – specifically, that Inform can now compile with other outputs, for instance turning an Inform program into C code.

Andrew Plotkin has some notes on the compilation process.

If you’d like to try playing with it without compiling it yourself, it is available online at Borogove; the traditional apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux are scheduled to be available in mid-May.

Talks and Podcasts

Jude Kampfner interviews different creators about their processes on Creative Confidential; recently she spoke with Matthew Seiji Burns about the thinking behind the visual novel Eliza, which tells a story of an AI-driven therapist.

“The Future of Games is Fan Fiction”: Jake Forbes talks about fan culture and writing games for people from underserved audiences, and the strengths of fan fiction.

Books, Upcoming

Neither of these is available yet, but I’m looking forward to both.

Aaron Reed is working on a book version of his 50 Years of Text Games series; if you’re interested in following that and being notified in time to join in crowdfunding, I recommend following his substack.

Meanwhile, Hannah Nicklin’s forthcoming book Writing for Games: Theory and Practice becomes available for pre-order May 3, and starts shipping after May 24.

While I’ve not yet read the book, I’ve seen a few excerpts, and have also very much appreciated some standalone workshops Hannah has shared, especially one about writing dialogue. I routinely refer people to the resources there – so I’m looking forward to seeing the book.

Events

ParserComp 2022 is soliciting games that use keyboard input:

ParserComp defines a parser game as one where the primary input method is the keyboard, commands are typed in, the computer uses a parser engine to understand commands and then outputs text to screen describing the results.

Games for ParserComp may be submitted from May 1 to June 30.

May 7 is the next meeting of the SF Bay IF Meetup.

The annual Spring Thing festival is now open, meaning that you can play the games and submit ribbon nominations. Nominations will close May 10.

Articles and Videos

AI and Games has a great video on the making of Oskar Stålberg’s procedural toy/game Townscaper and the wave function collapse approach that supported the design.