The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Thursday Sept 26, 2024 over Zoom. Hugh,, anjchang, Stephen , Zarf, Andrew, Matt, Josh, Keltana, and Mike Stage attended. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories.
Welcome to Autumn! Walking in the rain will not hurt you. Drinking Tea. Thai Tea. What is Builders tea? It’s a blend drunk by laborers. Yorkshire Gold Tea is the best of the non-special teas. PGTips isn’t too bad. Typhoo tea, not quite as good. Quality and how we measure it. In Britain, McDougall Flour is good. Expensive flour is often finer milled and bleached more. Cheaper flour is heavier with more moisture or “bloated.”
Is there a weight analog for IF, perhaps some texts have more “words” analogous to flour, perhaps some have more plot twists. Sometimes publishers look at the number of words as the marker of quality, although we know that is not necessarily the case. Choice of games readers may want to value other metrics, as a reader, the choices/branches or different structures.
Angela was part of a collab called “Revenge of the Castle Freak” with Generative IF where people were asked to submit their logs as they navigated a virtual castle full of gemerative IF rooms. 500,000 words of logs were submitted, and the worthy bits are being compiled into a book. https://x.com/incastellated/status/1818667626337325510
Shade, which has the a short amount of text is very enjoyable.
Lost words game. Angela initially liked the word manipulation mechanic, but the story dragged on longer and she hasn’t finished. Zarf did finish it. Animations were beautiful. Novelty of the mechanic with interactive words was interesting.
What’s up the trope of carergivers in these stories dying? The early version of the Grimms fairy tales. Key component of the relationships were different, e.g. it was the mother and not the step-mother that was mean. Disney eliminating backstory and “orphaning” characters with a newfound family. The original stories Grimm were really quite dark and then are rewritten and derivated until you get the happier versions we know today. Early stories had unpredictable arcs, unexpected things happened. Moralistic, powerful ideas from the past got watered down. Not all of the original stories are that good. A few are weird ones that don’t jell. Mixed-up stories that were written down by the oral historian.
Some amazing English translations of Japanese ghost stories — and they aren’t that far off the slice of life stories, just more death:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8128
African folk talkes (The Eggplant Girl and other tales) where the ending is not so happy. Moralistic. Angela loves Slice of Life. Angela resonated issue 13 of Yotsuba&! about the girl and her grandmother. The Walking Man by Jiro Taniguchi. Just a series of walks the author takes in his district of Tokyo.
Stith Thompson’s Motif Index is a reference for navigating stories. The full selection of volumes here: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001276245
Angela shared her recent “slice of life” digital poem called “cakepops” based on her confusion as a child. She read about the “bakers dozen” and was confused by the bad superstition of 13 with the good (yet unrealized) hope of a bakers dozen. In the poem, she dreams of having a baker’s dozen of mini-cake bites. All you need is a little.
IFCOMP discussion. People are playing and voting will end Oct 15. Did you know you can search the entries in ifdb for the entries using the IFComp 2024 tag? The intfiction forum “life judging” can easily sorta be browsed here: https://intfiction.org/c/competitions/7
Ectocomp starts Oct 1 and ends Oct 31st.
How long does it take to write IF stories? For a 2 hour game, maybe takes us a few months. Talked about CS Forrester (knows the whole plot and writes it in one go) vs Stephen King ( a concept and pursuing a plot and changing it as he writes). How much editing do you have to do, and then the challenge of balancing interactivity. Imagine writing Nanowrimo in one day! Editing and dealing with plot holes is more complicated with IF, and if there is more text.
We also talked about published books one might read that need further editing. Which version do you want to see? One can sign up for netgalley.com and give feedback on books in preprint. Tidbits about editing….Myla Goldberg (author of Bee Season, Wickett’s Remedy) raced to prepare a paperback version after the hardback was published. She realized that the original didn’t take the route she wanted. Apparently, you can only change 30% of text between hardback and paperback. House of Cards was changed to match the TV show. Financial reason for that, since the British TV version allowed for sequels. Gilbert Sorrentino would take the same plot of the novel but then rewrite it ten years later(e.g. Steelwork and Crystal Vision). Someone self-publishes erotica book series rewritten from other characters perspectives. Orson Scott Card did it with Enders Game series. Games are often reworked over time.
Head canon phenomena in Choice of Games based games. Some part of the completed structure becomes the “cannon” and is difficult to take a different route. The emphasis on making the story your own vs different views of the same puzzle (more traditional IF). Delayed branching and fallback, “recommended style” and then later you test those choices. Different approach to end states. Making sure that every reader has a satisfying experience.
How stats are used in ChoiceScript games — Emily Short has a good rundown of it here: https://emshort.blog/2016/02/15/set-check-or-gate-a-problem-in-personality-stats/