Nov30

November Meetup Post-Mortem

by Angela Chang on November 30th, 2021 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Meetings, Post Mortem
November 2021 PR-IF attendees
November 2021 PR-IF attendees

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Monday, November 29, 2021 over zoom. Zarf, anjchang, Kathryn, Dana, Josh, NickM, Hugh, KaySavetz  (Eaten By A Grue), Joe, welcomed Kirill Azernyi. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:

IF Comp discussion- Kidney Kwest

Emily Short and the London/Oxford IF group hosted career seminar on game writing was attended by a few of us

Heavens Vault books by Inkle studios :)

Zarf playing Overboard

Video Games for Humans

RadioK in the tradition of people writing novels

NanoGenMo efforts – Leonard Richardson , Zach Whalen Nanogenmo Tutorial
mentioned by Hannah Meades

Nick’s class studying HopScotch

“If you have instructions its probably a multi-sequential novel”

Kirill mentions Nabokov’s Pale Fire the first hypertext

using footnotes to introduce multi-sequentiality

Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker – trip on an escalator wiith footnotes.

House of Leaves Mark Danielewski

Stephane Mellarme’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (Mallarmé)

Kathryn mentions online collaborative comic –Infinite Comics, like exquisite corpse.

Zarf flashed Jason Shiga‘s upcoming multi-sequential book! Coming out soon!

Jason Shiga’s Meanwhile (book) Discussion:

Is it the #of paths, or the exploration?

Is there an age for Meanwhile. Not really, the protagonist are all drawn the same.

Blue cover is an anniversary edition. Header is the same, everything identical to the Red cover.

Trope Tank website

Nick just did a livecoding poetry thing

Middle of December will be back into the Trope Tank estimates

Jesper Juul visitors ot the Trope Tank

Jesper Juul essay about visual perception (Game of Objects), when we see pixels as objects

Play Doors a playable philosophy about in-game doors

You always put highlights on certain aspects.

Stupid deaths – outrageous actions discussion

Battle for Dream Island 20 animated objects compete for a chance to live on a dream island. Crowdsourced narrative using YouTube.

Nick’s Apple IIC discussion

Hugh made a free virtual calculator!

Joe posed a question What do you recommend to get more retro computer type things? HW/SW (physical media)

Discussion of formatting things for Nanogenmo




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Nov28

October Meeting Post-Mortem

by Angela Chang on November 28th, 2021 at 1:54 pm
Posted In: Meetings, Post Mortem
October 2021 PR-IF attendees
Oct 2021 PR-IF meeting attendees

NickM,  Zarf, KaySavetz  (Eaten By A Grue), Hugh, Stephen Eric Jablonski,  Dana,  Mark Pilgrim, Kathryn Li, and anjchang (late) welcomed newcomer (William) Joe Durkin. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:

IFComp is underway!

Star Saga 2: The Clathran Menace (being scanned for archive.org)
https://www.blackgate.com/2019/11/04/vintage-bits-star-saga-an-innovative-hybrid-sci-fi-computer-rpg-series/

https://www.jesperjuul.net/text/gameofobjects/ — academic paper presented in playable form.

Hugh recovered Temple Of Disrondu, a 1982 BBC Micro game (ported to TRS-80)
http://bbcmicro.co.uk/game.php?id=3836
https://strandgames.com/blog/temple-of-disrondu

Hugh showed off his “spineboy” demo rendering of runtime for web!
Spine (Esoteric Software) https://stvle.s3.amazonaws.com/spineboy/index.html?story=spineboy.str

Discussion about depiction of gore for better ratings

It’s November, so Nanogenmo is on

Notable IFComp games – 4×4 archipelago procedurally generated discovery game
Kidney Kwest education and reinforcement for young kidney patients
The last night of the Alexisgrad two-player IF, you and your partner each take on the role of a leader of a great nation on the last night of a war. 

Mention of Gold machine (http://golmac.org/) a blog of playthough of infocom games, more emphasis on the
literary analysis side. A recent post covered Zork – who is the thief here? You’re doing everything the thief is but you’re despoiling things.

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Nov10

November meetup (online)

by zarf on November 10th, 2021 at 12:43 am
Posted In: Meetings

The Boston IF meetup for November will be Monday, November 29, 6:30 pm Eastern time.

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

(We didn’t skip October, by the way. I just forgot to post the announcement. Sorry.)

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Sep28

September Meeting Post-Mortem

by Angela Chang on September 28th, 2021 at 9:00 am
Posted In: Meetings, Post Mortem
September 2021 PR-IF meeting courtesy of Zarf

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Monday, September 20, 2021 over zoom.  KaySavetz  (Eaten By A Grue), Zarf,  Hugh, Stephen Eric Jablonski,  Dana, NickM, Hilborn, welcomed newcomer Steve Washington (@esaevian). Thank you Zarf for providing the chat transcript below:

EctoComp 2021 has been announced: https://itch.io/jam/ectocomp-2021-english

Trope Tank is still hoping to get set up this month. MIT has set up a “Tim Ticket” system for campus visitors, so it might be possible to have an on-campus meeting in Nov or Dec. We’ll see.

(Footnote from Zarf: Even if this is possible, I am thinking we should stay with zoom meetings through the end of the semester. We can re-evaluate for January.)

NM is working on a new Curveship (JS) release — focusing on narrative style rather than parser-style IF.

Nick Montfort to Everyone: Curveship-js 0.4 coming soon!

Hopefully some version will be fun to develop & create stuff with before long

Adam Sommerfield posted about an abandoned attempt to work on a Deadline sequel with Dave Lebling and Marc Blank.

https://intfiction.org/t/cancelled-project-spiritual-successor-to-deadline-witness-etc-may-be-of-interest-to-someone/52525

Hugh set up a repository and did some very quick map sketches for this:

https://gitlab.com/jkj/39years

Talked a bit about different detective game models.

Kay Savetz to Everyone:

Puny Inform v3.0 is out — https://twitter.com/FRamsberg/status/1440011822313185280

https://github.com/johanberntsson/PunyInform/releases

Experimental work adding WebAssembly output to the Inform 6 compiler:

https://intfiction.org/t/inform-6-says-hello-webassembly/52399/12

This is very preliminary; not much of the I6 class system is implemented yet.

Emily Short ran a Seltani jam: https://emshort.blog/2021/08/22/seltani-jam/

Zarf was the only person who contributed anything, but we had about a dozen people show up for a Seltani tour.

Zarf’s post about the new experiment:

https://blog.zarfhome.com/2021/09/a-plenitude-of-alchemical-domains.html

Andy Baio posted about a lesser-known Jason Shiga interactive comic, Hello World:

This uses a split-page system to track game state and permit a “menu” of different choices in each state.

Also mentioned Knock Knock (Zarf showed off his copy).

Zarf also showed Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider(Aaron Reed, Anastasia Salter, John T. Murray).

Ryan Veeder’s Mud Warriors has been ported to GameBoy:

https://intfiction.org/t/the-release-of-ryan-veeders-mud-warriors-on-gameboy/52534

Screenshots:

Gameboy emulator:

https://www.bannister.org/software/kigb.htm

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Sep27

August Meeting Post Mortem

by Angela Chang on September 27th, 2021 at 9:00 am
Posted In: Meetings, Post Mortem
August 2021 PR-IF Attendees
August 2021 PR-IF Attendees

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on  Tuesday, August 31, 6:30 pm. Zarf,  Hugh (StrandGames),  Dana, Carrington (Eaten By A Grue), NickM, Stephen Eric Jablonski,  Josh Grams,  anjchang, and Dan Boris welcomed newcomer Kathryn Li.


IFComp submissions open. Now you can vote on the games Real problem is voting against others.

publicity for ifcomp?

taper#7 submissions deadline moved sept. 15th

In-person meeting update– covid protocols are stringent and lab space issues at the moment

kay reading monsters!

zork zero!

Inquiring minds want to know “What will be next” for Eaten By A Grue?
Maybe–Works that happened by the authors after they left infocom?
Zork_the_undiscovered_underground
infocom.xyz is still up–it’s not the original infocom
Retron77 machine
Activision/Infocom discussion history
Inspired by Adventure
When Atari came up with Atari VCS, they didn’t expect it to be such a huge hit for decades. No concept of DRM back then. No 3rd party games for the system- it was all inhouse.
David Crane and “Chess for atari maker” -no royalities, no salaries
Four people just left and founded Activision, solved the problem of how to program ATARI VCS.
Rob Fulop did that with iMagic. After that people started doimg stuff without having the insider background, by reverse engineering the chip!
ET was the worst video game ever but then others fixed the bugs.

Check out GrueScript:a tool for creating point-n-click parser-like text adventures/interactive fiction. See the announcement here https://intfiction.org/t/announce-gruescript/52104

Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives Book is out
https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/ms35tb924

A History of Adventure Games Book is out
https://bookshop.org/books/adventure-games-playing-the-outsider/9781501385827

EmilyShort game jam in seitani on September 19th
https://www.meetup.com/Oxford-and-London-Interactive-Fiction-Group/events/280273311/

Cyan released a VR game called Myst, reimagining Myst in 1993. It’s very very pretty

Josh grams reports that Stacey Mason just finished her PhD. It’s called “Exquisite Corpse” He’s been attending the #fortnightfictionjam she hosted. Josh and others made the Exquisite Poem Generator — Check it out!

Staceys new game about narrative things was mentioned, but might not be available yet

Carrington workimg on a game in PunyInform. A bug if you create a verb and an object with a life routine, verbishness disappears somehow. Zarf says verbs should take precedence. Could be a scope or version problem (debug vs release)? V3 compiler.

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