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We’re meeting on Monday, December 12, at 6:30 pm in Nick Montfort’s office at MIT (14N-233). Everyone and anyone is welcome to attend. We currently have no agenda other than to simply chill out on a cool December evening, but after our meeting, we’ll celebrate with food and drink and the usual conversation at the the Cambridge Brewing Company.
The 17th annual Interactive Fiction Competition has come and gone, and the members of PR-IF were heavily involved this year, submitting no less than five games to the total of 38 games entered. A quick glance at our contributions:
In addition to contributing to the competition, four of the authors undertook a secondary mission: To write a super-secret bonus puzzle that spanned their games. A tip of the hat from the man with the hat to Andrew Plotkin, who generously retold this tale of intrigue (sans spoilers) in a post on the Gameshelf. Congratulations to everyone involved, and we hope to continue to see entries from PR-IF in next year’s competition.
Interactive fiction came to the Pollard Memorial Library in Lowell, Massachusetts on November 2 and 9, 2011, as a group of high school students played Admiral Jota’s “Lost Pig.” Originally, a “mystery club” for middle-schoolers had planned to read “Mrs. Pepper’s Nasty Secret” on those dates, but the older participants appeared at the right place and time, and the younger ones didn’t. With the help of young adult librarian Beth Brassel and IF enthusiast Brendan Desilets, the high school kids laughed and problem-solved their way through the story of Grunk the Orc and his quest to keep his job. During the November 9 session, the students used the “How to Play Interactive Fiction” postcard, a printed map of most of the “Lost Pig” locations, and hard-copy descriptions of the murals and tapestries that provide important hints in the story.
The interactors, all of them new to interactive fiction, enjoyed the sessions enough to ask that the library create an interactive fiction club, so that they could read more IF stories and eventually learn to write IF. The library may well establish such a club.
In the coming months, interactive fiction will also play a role in a young adult book club for sixth, seventh, and eight grade students. Likely selections include “Mrs. Pepper,” “Winter Wonderland,” “Aotearoa,” and “Escape from Santaland.”
It’s been a few months since we posted an update, but that doesn’t mean the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction hasn’t been busy. Listed below is a sampling of how we finished up the spring and started up the summer…
We held our monthly meetings, one on Monday, May 9, a second on Monday, June 13. On both occasions we filled Nick Montfort’s lair with approximately a dozen IF enthusiasts. Our agenda focused on the plethora of competitions out there, including the Spring Thing, the Indigo New Language Speed IF, and IntroComp (voting concludes in just under a week!). We also test-drove a few of our member’s games, the first a work-in-progress by M. Flourish Klink, the second Zarf’s contribution to the Speed IF competition: The Matter of the Monster, a game written in Undum. And per our usual, after each meeting, we sauntered off to the Cambridge Brewing Company for libations, comestibles, and additional confabulation.
On Saturday, May 7, as part of the 2011 Cambridge Science Festival, several of us attended Story and Play: Interactive Fiction for Children. Hosted by our own Brendan Desilets, the event involved a group of children playing Mrs. Pepper’s Nasty Secret. Although we didn’t discover the aforementioned secret or its nastiness (we only made it a little more than half-way through the game), the children were entranced, some of them enough to request even more games. Perhaps Zarf summed up the experience best with his tweet: “The sound of little voices shouting ‘Oo, pull the switch!’”
On the same day as our Cambridge Science Festival event, Nick Montfort hosted “Adventuresome Creations: Interactive Fiction Graphical Adventures & Electronic Literature”, the final session of this spring’s Purple Blurb series. Our own Clara Fernández-Vara discussed the design of two of her games, Symon and Rosemary. Although Brian Moriarty of Infocom was scheduled to attend, he unfortunately could not make it to the session.
Several of us are currently pounding out games, so Jason McIntosh generously outsourced his home as the site for a Grue Street gathering on Sunday, June 12. The single condition for attending Grue Street is that you must have at least one “interactive situation” implemented that we can play and critique. During this particular Grue Street, no less than seven authors arrived with their works-in-progress! We hope to continue encouraging authors to create games with yet another Grue Street, but no additional plans have been made.
The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Tuesday, April 19, a nice respite from filing taxes the night before (nobody needed a respite from the marathon since none of us ran it). We had enough people to fill Nick’s office, including two new enthusiasts who felt brave enough to attend our forum after having survived our activities at PAX East. To our new friends: Welcome aboard. We hope to see you again.
Our agenda first focused on an informal discussion about the numerious competitions going on in the IF community, including Spring Thing (the entries are in; vote by May 15), the SpeedIF Jacket (it’s all finished; so speedy!), and the Indigo New Language Speed IF (learn a new language; entries due on April 30). And don’t forget that intents to enter IntroComp are due May 31.
We also discussed a few upcoming events:
We also explored Undum, the hypertext IF engine designed for HTML5 and CSS3. A tutorial game is available, as well as Flaws, a tale told by IF author Jon Ingold.
Finally, we had a brief post mortem on our mini-convention at PAX East 2011, and initiated conversations about the gathering’s future. Zarf has eloquently summarized our thoughts in a post on our Google Forum. The upshot: It’s going to happen, but the what and how is to be announced. Heck, we’ve got a year. How long can putting something together like this take? (Cue ominous music)
Mar 1: IF theory chat (online, IFMud)
Mar 1: Registration deadline for entering Spring Thing
Mar 3: IF reading at UMass Lowell: Arrival by Stephen Granade
Mar 6: Programs at an Exhibition, opening reception (software art show)
Mar 9: XYZZY Awards nominations due
Mar 10: Páll Thayer: Microcodes (Purple Blurb, MIT)
Apr 9: Spring Thing entries due
Jun 13-15: @party (demoscene event at MIT)
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