The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction

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May04

May meetup — hybrid!

by zarf on May 4th, 2022 at 9:22 pm
Posted In: Meetings

The Boston IF meetup for May will be Thursday, May 12, 6:30 pm Eastern time.

The Trope Tank is once again open and operating at MIT! Therefore, we are experimenting with a cautious hybrid meeting format. We will offer a Zoom call as usual on May 12. But if you are in the Boston area and you want to attend in person, you are welcome.

The new Trope Tank is in MIT building 14, east wing, room 14E-316. This is the same building as its old location, but one floor above.

Attendees must be fully vaccinated (including booster if eligible) and not feeling any COVID symptoms. Please see MIT’s visitor policy for more details.

If you plan to attend in person, please RSVP to Angela Chang at anjchang@gmail.com. Please arrive at the northeast door of building 14 (McDermott Court, by the black Calder sculpture) by 6:30 so that Angela can let you in. The building will otherwise be locked.

We hope to see you, either virtually or face-to-face.

└ Tags: meetings
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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.

  • Speed Dating for Ghosts
  • Sunlight

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

  • Unpacking
  • Salons 4/7, 4/14, 5/12 2-4pm at the Trope Tank, PR-IF welcome

Eaten By A Grue

  • #45 reviewed Changing the Weather and Uncle Zebulon’s Will
  • Zarf listened in and was acknowledged on #44 when they reviewed Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz

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

  • Hand Eye Festival
  • My Trip to Liberty City GTA
  • Flyboy Action Figure COmes with Gasmask

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.

└ Tags: meetings
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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.

└ Tags: meetings
Comments Off on March meetup (online)
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Next PR-IF Meeting

Thursday, May 12

6:30 pm Eastern, hybrid
MIT room 14E-316

(The Republic gathers monthly. Note our Event Policy.)

Other Upcoming Dates

May 5-9: LudoNarraCon (online)

May 10: Spring Thing nomination deadline

May 20: Text Adventure Literacy Jam voting deadline

June 30: ParserComp submissions deadline

July 30-31: NarraScope (online)

Recent Posts

  • May meetup — hybrid!
  • March Meeting Post Mortem
  • February Meeting Post Mortem
  • April meetup (online)
  • March meetup (online)

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