The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction

Adventure Games Studio, Noah @swartzcr, Michael Hilborn visit with the usual suspects

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Wednesday Sept 20th.  doug, zarf,nickm, matt w, adri and anjchang welcomed newcomers Judy Heflin (judyannheflin),  noah (swartzcr) from San Francisco , our long lost founding member Michael Hilborn (biggles2k)  and honored visitors from Adventure Games Studio. AGS folks sported Tricorner hats (from touring the Freedom Trail):  Francisco Gonzalez (aka Grundislav), Gunnar Harboe (snarky),  Jess Haskins (jess_haskins) (from NYC),  and  Tom Simpson)!   to share news about games and narrative doings among Commodore 64s and ZX Spectrum mod running IF demos at the Trope Tank. Warning: what follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:

First an awesome showing by Adventure games studios visiting from their conference (aka Mittens) in Nahant.  could it be a reference  to a Witten (old english for meeting)….  also note that their meeting site’s url is americangirlscouts.org haha.

noah is organizing the Roguelike Celebration Roguelike eclipsed IRDC International Roguelike Developers Conference in the US. Commodore 64 roguelike showing anticipated

grundislav just launched lamplight city  

Cragne Manor recap– Anchorhead tribute… Last meeting we had 50% (5 out of 10) people who attended the pr-if meeting involved. They are still working on it. Three rooms left. Everyone is in anticipation to play!

Nick distributed  material artifacts for perusal. How to play if cards. Several new computer generated books in the Using Electricity Series by MIT Press. Readings Oct 17 in Cambridge and Oct 18 at Wordhack hosted by Babycastles NYC

• Machine, Unlearning   by LiLi Zilles
  
• Ranjit Bhatnagar (aka moonmilk) Encomials: Sonnets from Pentametron
• A Noise Such as a Man Might Make by Milton Läufer.

Hard West turn Computer generated based on Wikipedia about violence in American History

Boston FIG in two weeks (Sept 29th). At MIT. Two floors. One with board games. We will be hosting a table. 9-5:30pm with setup Friday before. There might be interactive props.

Hillborn talked about Nercomp. Talk. Interactive fiction talk Dec. 5 in higher education want to reach out to IFTF. Brendan Desilets at UMass. Judith Pintar U of I.  Ben Miller inform documentary. Electronic and digital literature. Scott reitberg electronic literature book. Mentioned Clara Fernandez Vara.
Hilborn will also be giving a Lightning talk for educause in Denver Colorado in October

zarf presenting some work at Different games Conference hosted by WPI –28 games, Memory block. Outsider art mentioned.

Discussion about puzzle game mechanics, puzzle theory and application to fiction by doug.
Jonathan Blow was going to compile a puzzle game mechanics resource.
Thinking into the box article by Jon Ingold about puzzle deployment in the IF theory reader

Zarf demo of python parser prototype coolness.
Non parser interface to give a parser kind of interaction for a tablet game using drag and drop.  Popup window to show contents. Verb set is fixed. Examine open add an item to existing command. Stateful.. almost parser like games but more intuition. Metaphor of filesystem and containers.
Question whether that view window is stateful. Currently not stateful but can be.
Designed with icons in mind.
Package called text jar web browser based drag and drop mentioned.
Recursed mentioned by Noah. Computer world with consequences based on how it’s modeled.
Nick mentioned adventure shell

anjchang mentioned Mass cultural council deadline Oct 15. for towns in massachusetts. Propose something narrative/game/community building for your town. You can apply if you’re from a town in ma to your local or nearby cultural council.

anjchang’s app Babyduck Day is out to help parents demonstrate literacy to their children using interactive fiction.

Nick talked about curveship narrative variation parser.  Examples and looking for collaborators to implement things in it.

The meeting adjourned at 7:30pm and people went to dinner.  The most hardcore gamer from AGS (Tom) took home a sweet messenger bag as loot.  Also  Jess  shared her newest acquisition– A brief Discourse on Eighteent Century Games. See more photos of the meeting here.

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