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Feb23

January Meeting Post Mortem

by Angela Chang on February 23rd, 2022 at 9:41 pm
Posted In: Meetings, Post Mortem

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Thursday, January 27, 2022 over zoom. Zarf,  KaySavetz  (Eaten By A Grue), Anjchang,  Stephen Eric Jablonski, NickM, Hugh,  Dave Thompsen, Josh Grams,  Mark Pilgrim (writer of Pitch Dark), Kathryn, welcomed back Mike Stage. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:

After Introductions, there was much Canine Love as participants’ furry friends said hi over zoom.
CGI Utah keypots
Stephen “tempest in a teapot”

Spring Thing is happening

Mystery Hunt happened. There was a Zork company clue but no IF-style puzzle this year. Check out this year’s Mystery Hunt web site at starrats.org Reminiscing about fun undergrad challenges. Mike Stage talked about Stack Competition at CalTech.

Kay finished Zork Zero. It was mostly fair, big, with a lot to do. Graphic aspect seemed unnecessary. Could have been a text-only adventure. Dave liked the map aspect. They shoehorned it in!
Infocom and Mines of Titan – old infocom/activision stuff. They’ll be passing it on to Microsoft soon. Whomever bought Infocom.xyz (tm owner) is planning to make games. Repackaged loadrunner as opensource linux games. Check out the preview video. Valor and Immortals is ending the golden quest trilogy. Infocom games list so far.
How much is Infocom tm (trademark) worth?
Nick likes the Infocom Font
Does anyone at MS even knows they own Infocom? Kathryn actually read something a while ago which speculated about Microsoft bringing infocom back bc of bill gates being an infocom fan.
What if Windows 12 interface was a parser?
What if “Lost Treasures” is 64 bit?
Zarf would like old infocom games back on Gog!
Anj Loves Win95 interface, so if they could bring that back…
Liked Insycryption, but that was too hard.
Anj playing with kids Human Resource machine
7 Billion
Unpacking – wordless simple placing object mechanic
Is there a text-based IF about unpacking?

Tux and Fanny -serialistic glitchy adventure game with MSPaint Style
Academic Pursuits (as Opposed to Regular Pursuits) game unpacking while you’re moving into your office by Rugiyah
Quick poll: How many people playing the game and also writing? Or how many are just playing? How many just writing? In IF Comp, average number of votes per game is not enormous. Same as in other genres (dance, writers). She’s asking why you do it. Dana merging two different things together?
Dana got copies of MeanWhile. Great recommendation.
Hugh looking into IF for visually impaired people. How do you make them so screen readers will work? Many screen readers are like spyware. Official MS library to do this. For IF, if you’re using nonstandard GUI, standard screen reader doesn’t work. Having a cursor that lets you ID the text under it. Detours API.
Anj uses Siri Speech to Text by highlighting. Hugh shared NVDA add-on automatic speech output for interactive fiction interpreters.
Zarf Winproc stuff should work. MacOS has screen reading built in.
MarkP can’t turn off accessibility to turn off malware.
RenPy is just drawing stuff. There are bunch of visually impaired people on the Intfiction forums to talk to and betatest anything you make.
Check out a group called able gamers. Outside of text game field, accessibility is truly terrrible.
In the Unpacking game, the developers went out of their way to build in accessibility. Mark read off all the features they were lauded for.
Zooming and serial mechanism (not click+drag).
Accessibility APIs can be utilized to present hints and data for accessibility.
Did anyone talk to Mexabel who posted on the list about interviewing an IF creator?
Kathryn – comment on previous topic: for me IF is like…when you need more interactivity than what writing communities typically offer but also more theory than what game dev communities typically offer
Dana interactivity authoring is so much more satisfying.

Josh- There are some blind gamers on Twitter who do some pretty impressive things and also maybe do some accessibility consulting, e.g. https://twitter.com/sightlessKombat
TidByt Poetry text piece – Kay making apps on TidByt, riffing off Nick’s ppg256-4. We oohed and ahhed. He also made a river level display and a Conway’s game of life display.
Kay is generating stuff on raspberry and pushing it to display over the internet.
Segment Display love – example of Modular font
Stephen – isn’t every font a modular font

Stardew Valley -anj’s whole family is playing the expanded mod right.

Taper7 Submissions of small (<2Kb) HTML5 digital poems open.

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Feb12

February meetup (online)

by zarf on February 12th, 2022 at 5:44 pm
Posted In: Meetings

The Boston IF meetup for February will be Wednesday, February 23, 6:30 pm Eastern time.

We will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.

└ Tags: meetings
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Jan25

January meetup (online)

by zarf on January 25th, 2022 at 11:26 am
Posted In: Meetings

The Boston IF meetup for January will be Thursday, January 27, 6:30 pm Eastern time.

We will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.

└ Tags: meetings
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Jan24

December Meeting Post Mortem

by Angela Chang on January 24th, 2022 at 9:30 am
Posted In: Events, Meetings, Post Mortem
December 2021 PR-IF Meeting Attendees

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Monday, December 29, 2021 over zoom. Zarf, anjchang, Stephen Eric Jablonski, Josh, Hugh, Kathryn, Kirill Azernyi, NickM, and KaySavetz  (Eaten By A Grue) attended. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:
We opened with a Haiku. Angela had attended a haiku comics at the sequential artist workshop. Her Haiku was about temperature:

“Cold in my toes,
Water seeps into my shoe,
Holey-socked Winter”
(implies there’s also a hole in my shoes…)

Bashō –Old pond — frogs jumped in — sound of water.
How to say in Japanese? “Raid kills bugs. Dead”
Zarf on the translation of the “Q” into English haiku –

Four short lines,
Iambic pace,
It’s like haiku,
For your face

Kirill – logomatics ; What can we do to enhance the input complexity in the IF
the input is could be more intuitive? Player actions are habitual, so as a body system–
As an entity the player represents a not very complex unit.
Wonders if we could make it less habitual.
Make it more complicated and unexpected.
What if we could contribute more input into it?
What if we could give the user options that are not very certain in terms of what we could do?
E.g., give them haikus to choose from, or lines from poems/fiction to choose that are uncertain.
this would contribute more complex idea of a players entity and there is a code in TADS3 (from 2 years ago) that Allows you to add more and more directions in the tags?
Could we introduce new and weird directions to implement, and to interact?
How this would work in terms of constituting a players entity?
Add uncertainty to the feedback.
Traditional IF is a ping-pong with a decisive effect. What if input was broken or weird?

Kathryn shared (an old professor of mine writes amazing nonsense poems for children)

We were discussing Zork from the feedback of the computer. If we did not know what we were expecting, then we reflect on the player. If we say “g north, south” you know you can do that. You don’t question the self. This could help us reflect on the uncomfortable nature of being a human or being alive. For instance, how many limbs do I have, even though I know my tools and my intentions.

The reader is pretty much elusive and uncanny and uncomfortable.

Kathryn said reminds her of a game from IF comp, The Library. You go through the plot of different books. Each character expresses something they are looking for by walking through other books and seeing if that game world is useful for a character from another books.

Nick – Amnesia Trope where the character is not cognizant of their own history or identity. Photopia – wings flying above the maze.

Whatever happens with interaction. there has to be a framework where people agree. Dungeons & Dragons Framework where you say a command and it’s handled.

Hugh- it comes back to whether in games it is YOU in the story or are you directing someone else. In the early days, it was someone else you were telling them what to do. The characters could refuse what you wanted them to do.

Stephen- Failsafe, it matters that you are different from the character you are giving commands on
Fear- basic commands, the guy’s afraid.

Kirill- Indirect control of the character can define a safe place, but we don’t have direct control. We are not 100% in charge of what is going on. We instantly retain the safety by means that it is not us. While experiencing uncertainty, having a conduit.

Zarf – Lifeline, directing an astronaut

Kirill, We do need a framework. D&D where the master retains control of the world. If you are not even imposing rules, the world would collapse.

People with dementia try to maintain their identities. When we feel estranged from our tools. We can’t take control of our limbs around us. But first we take ourselves for granted.

Angela Those games where you don’t know what or where you are and you wake up and have to figure it out.- Eternal Darkness— Amnesia — Tomas Dishes – SOMA

Descending into dementia. people going crazy to undo sections what happened. Like in Eternal Darkness where your game gets deleted. When things didn’t work like you thought it would –you thought it was a cheat or your game was messed up.

Zarf- Winners of this year’s IF comp, IFCOMP2021 results are up
https://ifcomp.org/comp/2021

Joshua- attended to Nick Martin’s IF class final presentation. Play them here https://itch.io/jam/csc-582-fall-2021-showcase/entries. A variety of platforms, phasor things, interactive experiences on Twine and Unity,

Zarf – Last major website is going under IFTF umbrella. Infrastructure wiki ismoving to IFTF server. Now people are talking about updating the ifwiki. Getting more regular schedule updated in games. IFDB only covers games and cultural background stuff of IF world. https://www.ifwiki.org

Talking about ideas for games:

Half bakery. Catspeak would be awesome
Zarf’s Craigie Manor Entry where you have to figure out and utter spells.
Memento’s instant layer to access memory. The guy was moving memory. Have fun exploring the surroundings through developing your nervous system.

On the one hand we have the world. The interface that is always uncertain, always being dessolved and tested by the uncertainties. It could be models with liquids that we do not know much about. Nethack‘s identify scroll and unknown potions.
Nethack: The Greatest Game You’ll Ever Play https://www.thegreatestgameyouwilleverplay.com

Anj – a modern, more flash-like version is The Impossible Game. I watched a middleschool kid play 100 levels of memorized answers. Every time you fail, you have to start over from level one. He failed many times and was eager to keep going.

Pony Island exploring and interacting with “corruption.” Zarf playing Inscryption
(wiki) by same developer (Daniel Mullins)–card game for your soul. The enemy tries to trick you in various places.

└ Tags: meetings, post mortem
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Dec13

December meetup (online)

by zarf on December 13th, 2021 at 9:50 pm
Posted In: Meetings

The Boston IF meetup for December will be Thursday, December 16, 6:30 pm Eastern time.

We will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.

Update on MIT: In-person meetups at MIT are now possible, but not practical or (in our opinion) advisable. We hope things ease up later in the spring.

└ Tags: meetings
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Next PR-IF Meeting

Thursday, May 12

6:30 pm Eastern, hybrid
MIT room 14E-316

(The Republic gathers monthly. Note our Event Policy.)

Other Upcoming Dates

May 5-9: LudoNarraCon (online)

May 10: Spring Thing nomination deadline

May 20: Text Adventure Literacy Jam voting deadline

June 30: ParserComp submissions deadline

July 30-31: NarraScope (online)

Recent Posts

  • May meetup — hybrid!
  • March Meeting Post Mortem
  • February Meeting Post Mortem
  • April meetup (online)
  • March meetup (online)

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