Jun30
The Boston IF meetup for July will be Thursday, July 7, 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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The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction
Boston's IF interest group
Play games from a list of Interactive Fiction titles selected by the People's Republic.
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Jun30
The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Wednesday, June 16, 2022 over Zoom. Zarf, Hugh and anjchang, met up online. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:
Nick sent in an article about IF by someone who has been part of PR-IF and mentions several people in the Boston area: https://expmag.com/2022/06/these-video-games-are-based-on-nothing-but-words/
Hugh is working on a game about a tin mug and we talked about how people enjoyed making choices even if they didn’t further the narrative. Hugh’s story contained scenarios around what happens in a kitchen. It reminded Anj of Chi’s Sweet Home, a series of books from the point of view of a kitten. The narratives examine the everyday conflicts in mundane life. In Hugh’s game, a combination of anthropomorphism with the Slice of Life Genre provide interesting narrative explorations .
We talked about text scrolling problems in beta testing Hugh’s game. Sometimes, having an image within the text causes problems because the image loads after the text appears, causing the image to jump into focus after the text loads. This causes the user to have to scroll back to read the full text and access the choices.
Angela has rebooted her a copy of Sanitarium and is enjoying creepy scenarios with her kids. The game presents an alter reality that is nightmarish but intriguing to explore.
Perhaps there’s opportunity for more stories connecting with mythologies and folklore, such as Lochness, Bigfoot and Egyptian Mythology. Hugh mentioned that Egyptian hieroglyphics were mainly for simple ideas, such a sign posts and the laymen. Apparently, Egyptians had a cursive script (such as hieratic and demotic script) for writing more complex ideas and detailed legal documents.
We talked about the joy of lexical variations, and how nice it is to readers encounter new and unusal words. From a practical standpoint, it makes it easier to type alternatively spelled words than different adjectives with nouns repeatedly. For example, typing in tumbler vs. mug is preferable to “big cup” “little cup” “medium cup.”
We talked about how much hinting is useful for puzzles. Hugh mentioned giving successively more hints to help people solve a puzzle. Zarf says he usually doesn’t give out hints to his puzzles if people write him, because the answers can be found elsewhere. Also, having predictive hint suggestions while typing can spoil the exploration of the game. Angela is currently stuck during beta testing a puzzle, and the developer has given some hints, but it’s not enough to finish her testing. What to do?
We talked about IF copyright. Usually people use a code copyright license. If you want to be serious might use lawyers to draft a version of your code with a placeholder text.
Angela shared a link to plan for the next meeting in Early July. Please fill out by June 22, 2022 AoE. FYI, the next virtual meeting will be July 7, 2022 from 6:30pm-7:30pm. Hope to see you there!
Apr13
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:
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
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
- 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
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
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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