I’ve been meaning for a long time to play Jason Devlin’s “Vespers”, and today is the day I got around to it.
It wasn’t quite what I expected. From various references to it, I had thought it was going to be a game about moral choices in a Christian (or coherently anti-Christian) framework, when in fact it’s pretty theologically dubious; it’s perhaps better described as a horror story with morally-framed puzzle solutions.
But more after the cut.
Jeff Nyman recently raised the idea of having a guide to Inform 7 specifically written for an experienced fiction author without background in IF, and I posted a brainstormed outline for such a project. The formatting was pretty ugly on Usenet, though, and I had a few ideas for revisions, so here is another, longer and better-laid-out version of the same thing, with more links to relevant games and articles.
This still isn’t nearly into the shape I would use if I were actually going to write this book — and I don’t have time to do any such thing right now anyway; I have a bunch of things to do for Inform 7, feelies.org, and the long-neglected theory book before I could take up a project of this magnitude. (And I’d like to have a little time to work on a WIP of my own — IF support work has pretty much wiped out my time for that kind of thing lately.) But possibly people will find the brainstorming interesting, even if it isn’t worked up into a complete document.
Stephen Bond recently (very recently, I think) posted an essay on player freedom, essentially arguing that IF shouldn’t be about offering the player moral choice, and that not forcing the player to make a specific choice is a kind of artistic abdication, giving up the opportunity (or the responsibility) to Say Something.
Now I’m about to disagree with him, at some length.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 