The Boston IF meetup for November will be Wednesday, November 16, 6:30 pm Eastern time.
This meeting will be both-ways: Zoom and in person at the Trope Tank.
For those who plan on visiting us the Trope Tank for the meeting, please contact Angela in advance, either by email or through the mailing list. (So, okay, by email.) She will be setting up a mobile ticket to get into the building. Please provide an email address and phone number to send your ticket to.
For the online crowd, we will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.
The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2022 over Zoom. Zarf, anjchang, Rourke Bywater, Stephen Eric Jablonski, Kirill Azernyi, Josh Grams,Mike Stage, Hugh, Feneric welcomed newcomer Kyler HE. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories.
Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebees was a surprisingly fun bite-sized silly thing (and has a surprising amount of “things-go-differently” if you do things in different orders)
Kyrill planning a panel about the User experience and tools.
Discussion about co-authorship by the user. Mention of “Death of the Author” and Max Kreminski’s Gardening Games concept for procgen
User-ship vs Authorship– are they the same — do game designers and players have the same tools in the game
In “Death of the Author” 2nd half introduces the idea of the “Birth of the reader”, the author is one of the many readers of the text. Every reader brings their own experience to the reading.
Max Kreminski’s Gardening Games concept for procgen, the idea that the player in the simulation are co-creators of the narrative.
If we have a tool not being used currently, can we say that this tool is not quite a tool. Heidigger and Jesper Juul’s ideas about usable and unusable objects in the game.
Role playing, and how we hope and assume the user knows what to do with objects. the Intention of the creator to enable others to create. Author have to be highly skilled and have the intention. In teaching, you create a lesson that is something between a book and a stage play. A spectrum that is single author vs multi-author with varying degrees of intention to allow people to create the story.
Idea of Skill “agōn (gr)” constant competition. Hard to tell whether authors are helping others develop the skills correctly. You need to be an author who is also a user.
If you’re writing a sonnet, are you an author, or are you first a user? As a coder, you have to be a good user of code. With coding, you’re first of all users before you become authors.
Zarf working on new game based on Jason Shiga Leviathan. Discussion of Hobbes Leviathan and Disco Elysium . Reminds us of 9:05 by Adam Cadre, where you could use a little more freedom but author tells you “you’d rather not do X.” In Disco Elysium the body is not yours (hangover),mind or body is not a great tool.
Is narrative impotence a fault of the medium? Or is it the author’s challenge to maximize the user’s agency? Why not let the readers input entire lines into the system? Otherwise we concern ourselves too much with verbs (imperative). Could there be more freedom in the player’s agency? Imperial relationship might be desired when interacting with small objects in front of you. But you can do interesting stuff all along the spectrum from linearity to whatever else.
Games that break imperial relationship, or are interesting with respect to player agency.
Jason Rohrer Passage game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passage_(video_game)
The body issue– is it limiting or freedom. When we know the verbs we use in an IF is that enough freedom?
Allowing people to do crazy things but then fail/die spectacularly so that the game ends quickly.
Irrellevant vs reasonable behavior,
Broken Legs https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=ii0k5l53vhghqyh6
Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebees was a surprisingly fun bite-sized silly thing (and has a surprising amount of “things-go-differently” if you do things in different orders)
Some papers on frustration/uncertainty and their role in games. I haven’t gotten around to reading them yet, so can’t attest to their quality, but may be interesting to look at:
The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Tuesday, Sept 27, 2022 over Zoom. Zarf, NickM, Dana Freitas, Josh Grams, Hugh, Stephen Eric Jablonski (+ guest dog Teala), Chris Martens (+ guest cat Nimbus) from NEU, anjchang, Kathryn, Kirill Azernyi (from Haifa), and Mike Stage welcomed newcomer Rourke Bywater from NEU. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories.
Recap since last meeting:
Narrascope happened. Josh and Kathryn spoke and the conference was awesome.
Some members have moved locations (or moved in) to places, or gotten jobs. We liked to hear of everyone safe and in good places (from Russia to Haifa or NC to Boston or Boston to SF or single to with significant other). Congratulations!
Hugh just got back from hearing Jon Ingold talk about narrative deduction mechanics at London Interactive Fiction Group. Jon also spoke at GDC recently.
Dana is learning Spanish, and we had a short discussion about IF in Spanish.
Upcoming dates of note:
The Saugus Halloween IF competition is upcoming Oct 21. This might be the last year unless new people volunteer to help judge.
Zarf collecting donations for prizes for IF Comp tomorrow. We saw a sneak peak of the new IFcomp logo. It was very cool! Hugh is planning an upcoming IF comp entry! Go Hugh!
Discussion We started talking about how hard it is to have new people create parser based games. How can we get students to write IF? How can platform designers “think of the students”– what considerations should there be about examples, syntax, and game creation. Is there interest in new parser based IF engines? Dialog is another parser based library, a Prolog-inspired IF language at https://linusakesson.net/dialog/ . Also see https://intfiction.org/c/authoring/dialog/60 on the forum. You want something that is a little beyond just choices but not a complicated world model (compass, objects, room). Low step, high potential language would be great and is a hard problem.
Twine support innovation more easily than Inform? Recommended reference for writing Inform–Aaron Reed’s book for a step by step learning process, but it’ a bit outdated. It’s hard to learn examples from games would be cool to examine. e.g. fog going from room to room getting thicker. E.g. Ad Verbum. Contrast with p5.js, affordances of sharing and linking works. Chris proposes I7.js? Is the Z machine ecology necessary? That ecology is essential to creating IF. You can build a homebrew (python) system of your own, but it isn’t compatible with other frameworks. The remix-reuse template was used for infocom games. Stephen suggests maybe a very simple programming language can be done. Although TADs isn’t simple, it’s an alternative model. Glulx, PunyInform stretching the interface. Mike says the time expectations and experiences of playing IF has decreased. With Inform, one needs to invest in learning the platform. Writing for any IF platform is a long haul commitment. Maybe ZZT-OOP https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/ZZT-OOP language was created by Tim Sweeney or another Mud-like programming language. Josh has been looking into visual model interface for parser interface. Zarf mentions Seitani scripting tool. His experiments with visual interfaces. It’s okay if the engine is not parser based, but then it’s something else. Chris Kline’s approach to Twine, throwing away the narrative model. Emshort has a blog post about hybrid interfaces (e.g Brewster) Chris interested in building a natural language interface to his language ceptre… https://github.com/chrisamaphone/interactive-lp Ceptre is very cool! Dan Fabulich’s post on the subject and Grue script https://intfiction.org/t/announce-gruescript/52104/ Ren’Py is a success story for “use Python underneath a Domain-Specific Language”, though. So in some domains it’s possible…. Nick says his students have used it. It takes a lot of extra assets to make a visual novel but using the system is not tough for beginners. People seemed positive about using a easy-to-learn parser interface if someone were to make one. A Dating game with Chess Pieces was mentioned…but I’m not sure if this is the right link. LMK if you have an update or corrections!
