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).