The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction

Feb 2024 PR-IF Post Mortem

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by

Angela Chang
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Feb 2024 PR-IF Meeting Attendees

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Friday, Feb. 23, 2024 over Zoom. Zarf, anjchang, Kirill, Stephen Eric Jablonski, Sara, Josh, Kathryn, Hugh, Hilborn, Dana, Doug, Bill Maya, Mike Stage, welcomed newcomers Matt Griffin and Keltana. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories.

Zarf mentions you can get a 300GB download for internet archive https://ifarchive.org/misc/whole-archive.html.

Josh shared many fun projects:

Anna Antropy discussion. DnD Streaming COLECO procedural generation dungeon game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Dungeons_%26_Dragons%3A_Cloudy_Mountain

ChoiceBeat 10 (a zine focused Interactive Fiction, Visual Novels, and lots of oddities that are narrative!) https://choicebeat.wordpress.com/issues-2/ Matt wrote the Joey Jones interview — and the full interview (which was like 18k wordcount, wayyyyy too long) includes several k words just on Sub Rosa and his history of parser games. A choicescript interview could be cool, allowing people to wade through all the interactive fact material. Josh mentioned that the Seattle IF group did a playthrough of part of Sub Rosa last year and Joey and Melvin came and hung out and did some of the reading and reminisced about making it and that was a lot of fun. Matt is planning on developing a choicescript novel for Choice of Games about the interview.

You can find out Matt’s links and his listen to his @talkingnarrative podcast https://www.talkingadditive.com/ about 3D printing. Anj is also into 3D printing, teaching classes and running a 3d printing club at her local library.

The Game and Interactive Software Scholarship Toolkit https://gisst.pomona.edu/ a frontend tool and backend repository software that allows for the citation and retrieval of references to computational states and replays. You can run old versions of DOS and many old PC games.

Mike Stage be going to Narrascope to talk about teaching! Narrascope talks have been chosen! Registration will be open pretty soon. Narrascope was where Matt Griffin found out about PR-IF.

Katherine working on a game with chess! Just back from Japan! Shared a cool book. Stephen is a chess person. Stephen mentioned he had programmed a game called Lost in the Amazon but the game has been lost. Sounded cool though, and meta!

Anj saw Josh present his Ink Visual Novel Template on Twitch. https://joshgrams.itch.io/ink-vn-lite no Ren’Py but it’s a fun little thing Geoffrey and Josh gave a talk at the Hand Eye Society’s SuperFest and that’s linked from the the itch page. You write just basic Ink and drop the compiled JSON file into the VN template, and then there are a couple hashtags that you can put into your Ink code to control the VN sprites and background image

Josh shared very cool visualizations (originally from 2009?) of the CYOA novels and and having fun paging through those again: https://samizdat.co/cyoa/

Sara nominated for a Nebula award, Congratulations Sara!

Spring thing is the next comp thing on the list! Bill Maya submitted to Spring Thing. Contact him if you want a link to his beta, or just go and play!! Deadline for Entry is Mar. 29

ELO deadline extended until March 1st./. some games might be good for online exhibitions!

Josh ran across another interactive non-fiction piece recently that was an interesting musing on historical architecture thing: https://kitbuckley.github.io/bottlejack/a_significance_for_piggly_wiggly_parking_lots.html
Angela actually lived in a town where there was Piggly Wiggly! What memories.
Matt teaches at NYU IDM and also in biofabrication.

We talked about parents writing IF for their kids. Will Crowther wrote Colossal Cave Adventure for his kids too. Some remember their parents writing IF for them as a kid. Good memories of playing IF in the olden days….