Apr13

March Meeting Post Mortem

by Angela Chang on April 13th, 2022 at 5:52 pm
Posted In: Meetings, Post Mortem

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Wednesday, March 30, 2022 over zoom.   Zarf, Anjchang,  Dana Freitas, KaySavetz  (Eaten By A Grue),  Kathryn,  NickM,  Hugh,  and  Carrington (Eaten By A Grue). Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:

March PR-IF Meeting attendees zoom meeting edited with a colorful background
March PR-IF Meeting attendees

Taper Deadline

Tricks for Taper:
ternary operator javascript shorthand
How to use XOR to use only 2 memory locations, the index into an array are just pointers
so making one of the base, its the offset.

  • a^=b
  • *(a + b) is also *(b + a)

Spring Thing
Parser Comp
Text adventure literacy jam
Anniversary of Inform’s release date

What we’re playing::

Goat game
NorCo point and click

Patricks Parabox

Pipe Push Paradise

Ukraine Bundle – not really much IF in it. Here are some listed as IF in it.

Fox Harrell’s D&D Citadel built on a Terasse story announced in the Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel Anthology (Amazon PreOrder)

Trope Tank, Class visit happening tomorrow

Eaten By A Grue

The Meteor the Long
Eaten By A Grue Episodes

Milk & Honey
Rupi Kaur bestselling and successful Canadian Poet, self-published
Paper Beats Rock

Resources at the Trope Tank, books: House of Leaves, infinite Jest, where you look at the Footnotes.

Neil Patrick Harris’ Choose Your Own Autobiography

David Cage, Quantic Dream, Detroit Become Human. Fahrenehight in Europe and Indigo Prophecy in US, about things getting cold.

Like the Paul Simon song “50 Ways I Met Your Mother”

Closed Hands exploration of terror attack in the UK. You follow story threads fowards and backwards. Small interactivity for dialog decisons. Could have dialogue interacivity that go backwards, are reflective of the past.

IO is sort of like this, what you do in a supermarket you have different pasts leading up to that revealed.

Literary techniques discussed
e.e. cummings disputed as a lowercase lover

youdoyou

Jim Munroe No Media Kings – a favorite self publisher

Italo Calvino’s If on a Night A Traveler (Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore)

If On A Winter’s Night Four Travelers

Narrascope 2022 Panel Proposals are open, due April 22

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Apr13

February Meeting Post Mortem

by Angela Chang on April 13th, 2022 at 1:48 pm
Posted In: Meetings, Post Mortem
February PR-IF attendees on a zoom call
February PR-IF attendees

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Wednesday, February 23, 2022 over zoom.   Zarf, Anjchang, KaySavetz  (Eaten By A Grue), Dana Freitas, Chris Martens (NCSU), Stephen Eric Jablonski, Hugh,  NickM, Kathryn, Mike Stage, and  Carrington (Eaten By A Grue) welcomed newcomers Daniel Gaskell and Garrett. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:

Narrascope will also be online this year

Chris shares link for his workshop on intelligent writing assistance

New Authoring System seems cool

https://intfiction.org/t/has-anyone-tried-the-moiki-authoring-system/54729

Someone posted a link to the english version https://moiki.fr/en

Zarf sent a few days optimizing the Inform compiler. Found a bug (Violence isn’t Violence) in the compiler.

Nick mentions a game book called Consider the consequences. 47 endings story about women’s ability to make choices. Tree diagram for possibilities about making life choices.

Pretty Little Mistakes style story about life choices made by female protagonists.

Program Instruction – where you only progress if you solve the previous puzzle. Talked about using programmed learning for puzzle design.

Language learning. You get harder words when you get better and lose the easier ones as you progress.

Leitner system – selective repetition for memorization.

Some interesting literary works that are stacks of cards. e.g. Robert Grenier’s Sentences— index card based poems.

Robert Coover’s Heart Suit, a story told on 13 interchangeable playing cards. You shuffle the middle cards and read the story.

Maybe a Leitner system that gives hints when the user repeats an error. System presents the fundamentals when progress is not being made.

Mike used to make Flash card systems for education, where tutorial questions have different levels of difficulty. It’s a responsive system for adjusting question difficulty based on user input.

The basis for those were existing system of writing:

  • Raymond Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion poems based on mix-and-match monster body books.
  • Daniel Dafoe’s Robinson Caruso took travelogue form further. Fictional work passed off as true based on diaries. E.g. The Fall of the Site of Marsha by Rob Wittig based on diaries.
  • 19th century novel traditions where a mysterious packet arrives and all the reported entries seem true.
  • Detective stories where they take up a case that was pure fiction, not a true story. Audience had to learn that.
  • S. Morgenstern’s other book (Princess Bride) is really written by Goldman. The Princess Bride uses a gimmick where the story seems passed on from a grandfather.

Trope Tank Update – supposed to move in starting on Monday.

Angela reading the Golden Age of Pirates CYOA

Someone should make a CYOA for COVID. Angela has FOGI instead of FOMO. Fear of Going in because you might get coughed on, extra germs.

Kay tells us that a new edition of BASIC 10-liner contest has started

Kay prefers Atari 8 bit computers

Daniel Shares  Zym Z-Machine for SymbOS

Arguably one of the original motivations for PCG in games – not much storage space for big level maps, so use processing power instead to generate them. Perhaps Silent Hill was so foggy was because it couldn’t render much more than a few feet out at once.

Taper#8:8-Bit Nostalgia HTML5 2Kb digital poetry works are open. Deadline April 15th. Why 2K? It was Just right (like Goldilocks).

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Apr12

April meetup (online)

by zarf on April 12th, 2022 at 1:27 am
Posted In: Meetings

The Boston IF meetup for April will be Wednesday, April 13, 6:30 pm Eastern time.

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

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Mar09

March meetup (online)

by zarf on March 9th, 2022 at 11:27 am
Posted In: Meetings

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

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

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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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