Grand Text Auto – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

Assorted News

There is indeed an IF Art Show again this year; deadline, May 2.

Play This Thing! is reviewing Photopia (not my review, this time, but I thought people might be interested).

Jeff Nyman has another interesting post on his IF classes, this time on why his next class will be using TADS 3 rather than Inform 7.

Grandtextauto points to Hypertextopia, a program especially for the creation of “axial” hypertexts — there’s one main line of narrative to follow, with what might be considered footnotes, expansions, or embellishments. I wasn’t thrilled with the couple of examples I briefly looked at, but it represents a possibly-interesting alternative take on how hypertext design might be done.

Expressive Processing

Over on Grand Text Auto, Noah Wardrip-Fruin is running an interesting experiment in peer-reviewing: a blog-based peer review. Visit the site to read portions of his text and comment on them.

IF in the ACM literature, Part Two

Grant Tavinor, “Video Games, Fiction, and Emotion,” ACM Conference Proceedings, Vol. 123, 2005. 201-207.

Mr. Tavinor’s work is focused on how we feel about the games we play, and how games evoke those feelings; he talks a bit about interactive fiction (though, I think, defining it a bit more broadly than as the text-based form I tend to mean on this site). But his conclusions leave out a lot of possibility. Here’s a sample of what I mean:

Emotions are involved in the affective framing of fictional worlds, making salient the goals and needs of those fictional worlds, so that our interaction in them is motivated and enhanced. The player of a video game feels angry at their inability to overcome the massive fiery lobster monster, frustrated by the difficulty of completing the platform-jumping task, fearful of possible loss, or elated at defeating the hordes of mutants or crazed chimpanzees. Consequently, the emotions seem to guide participation in the fictional world of the video game by boosting attention and concentration to deal with these challenges. The emotions we have for video games are framing devices that channel our interaction with these fictions.

Continue reading “IF in the ACM literature, Part Two”

Persuasive Games

Those who follow Grand Text Auto are presumably already aware of this, but Ian Bogost has published a new book on persuasive games. So far, I’ve only read the chapters available in PDF, but this looks like an extremely interesting discussion of the ways in which simulations can argue for a position or an idea about how a system works.