The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Tuesday, April 13, 2021. Zarf, , Stephen Eric Jablonski, nickm , Josh Grams, Hugh Steers, anjchang, KaySavetz and Carrington (Eaten By A Grue), Thomas Mack, welcomed newcomer Zed Lopez. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:

Kay an Carrington gave a talk last night for Joco Cruise, Jonathan Colton fans. on infocom text adventures “We Played All the Infocom Text Adventures.” Will be on their podcast soon. They are currently playing Journey (barely a text adventure game) right now. Their favorite one was Trinity and Kay liked “Hollywood Hijinx.” Carrington says “Trinity” or Mind Forever Voyaging or Bayou.

Flights of Foundary is happening. Zarf and many cool people are speaking. Packed with lots of talk.

Spring thing voting going on.

Parser Comp accepting registrations.

PunyInform game jam. submissions due in 19 days.

Thomas Disch’s Amnesia. Tom Disch(lots of work) also wrote the first of the Prisoner Novelizations. Portal interactive novel Rob Swigart

Nick gave us 256 perl script game “Ely” that you can type in your command line. We had fun.

perl -pE'BEGIN{say"you ok?";$p=" something$/"}$m=$_;s/.i(\047m| am| was)\b/really/i;s/.you./what about i/i;s/.always./can i be specific/;s/[?.!,].//;s/\b(i|me)\b/you/gi;s/\bmy/your/i;.2>rand?s/.*/huh/:s/$/?/;($_="you had said$p")if.1>rand;$p=": ".$m'

People’s reactions to Aaron Reed’s blog 50 Years of Text Games. Right now they’re talking about Hitchhiker’s guide– was it a good game or bad sci-fi?

Douglas Adams was not very involved in Starship Titanic. Book mostly written by Terry Jones.

Thomas Mack played about 200+ games in one year. Read his blog with statistics analyzing his review sfrom playing all the games from IFcomp in 2019.

Discussion about what the experience of conferencing is during the pandemic. Demoparty experience, meetup format, during the pandemic. PR-IF is looking to return to the Trope Tank in September, hopefully.

Find the fish games

Visual novels. Text with faces on them

Zarf adding features to inform6 compilers.

Curveship-js update. Want to generate narratives in different languages.

Has Zilch ever been released? Yes, in some form. Discussed why Inform 7 filesize vs Inform 6.

In PunyInform creates such small files. It’s a separate library. Somewhat simpler parser and strips out class related features that require Z5/Z3 games. Discussion about interpreter and Inform6 language and OOP that are not necessarily native to the way Z machine works. Addressing in PunyInform is different.

Generative Unfoldings opening happened. Nick shared the repo for the exhibit’s open source code repository: https://github.com/nickmontfort/generative_unfoldings Many positive reviews of cursive dimensionality (Phillip Schmidt’s piece), hextal and pactracer, Check it out!

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Friday, Mar. 19, 2021

Zarf, , Stephen Eric Jablonski, nickm , Josh Grams, Hugh Steer, anjchang, welcomed Thomas Mack. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:

Started with talking about Chess, Novels that correspond to chess. Alice in Wonderland. Squares of the City by John Bruner. Talked about the BongCloud opening scandal.

Videogame in a font

Nick read a Beowulf translation, Icelandic saga Maria Headley’s Beowulf.

Spring Thing is coming up

Text Adventure Literacy Camp

ParserComp

A writer’s conference called Flights of Foundry,

Zarf doing work on the IF engine

Trope Tank items currently moving to temporary space.

Curveship JS work

Hugh porting new engine to the web

Farming Sims. Verdant Skies, Stardew Valley, Harvest Moon.

Haven – a romance of two characters. Soma is a freaky game, even when you are on “getting injured mode”.

NFTs discussion. Exhibit by Casey Reas and Generative Art.

Nick’s exhibit Generative Unfoldings opens in 5 days, opening April 1st. Opening on Gather.

Different versions of free. Free puppy “Brings joy but you have to take care of it.”

Platforms for online meetings: Video lounge, Jitsi,

Golem literary readings by Nick.

Archery is art, science, history all rolled into one. Mongolian, style double recurve bow. Are there any cats in left in Iceland.