The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Tuesday, Feb 24, 2025 over Zoom. Andrew Stephens,, anjchang,  Stephen Eric Jablonski,  Mike Stage,  Matt Griffin,  Josh Grams,  Hugh,, Michael Hilborn, Doug Orleans, and zarf welcomed newcomers Abby and Ender Minyard. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories.

The original 2009/2010 PR-IF members Hilborn, Zarf, and Doug were present. Zarf has passed on running the PR-IF meetings to Mike Stage. The current plan is to front-load some discussion topics from a thread off the google group. Today’s meeting will have two discussion topics. After the discussion topics, we’ll plan on a more freestyle discussion. The proposed format is still in flux, and we might alternate pre-planned topics with freestyle meetings as well.

Matt Griffin, Narrascope, organizer shared updates on the conference. Matt also just published an interview with Jordan Magnuss in the latest ChoiceBeat Zine 13.

Andrew shared that last year’s spring thing game, Launch of The Marigold, won awards for bunch of categories in the IFDB Best of 2024 Awards. Congratulations Andrew on winning Audience Awards for the Best Sci-Fi, Best Adventure, and Best Artwork! Go play it if you haven’t!

Doug shared that Ryan Veeder released his patreon game for beta testing a real-time game.

Josh read Jordan’s Game Poems book (it’s free) and it seemed like he had some fairly concrete ideas to talk about, and we’ll try to talk about it next time.

Josh showed a quick overview of Sunless Sea (wiki)and StoryNexus’s arrangement and point out a couple patterns in the visualizer https://joshgrams.com/visualizer/ We looked at the storylets and how the different choices are analyzed in the story. Discussion about which things are encoded in/gated by the story engine versus the gameplay of where the locations are placed that and enemies, that can be observed with the visualizer. StoryNexus Reference Guide. https://sunlesssea.fandom.com/wiki/Map#Map_Generation

Hugh talked about the unification of parser and choice. He showed a cool demo of the experience where the objects afford reactions, and the player can make choices to interact with the objects within the text and also in a choice menu at the bottom.

We discussed ways of reducing the number choices when there are a lot of things that could potentially be acted on. Hugh showed a demo that offered a middleground between the tradeoff of choices in parser games ( there’s the opportunity to interact with many items) vs in choice-based games ( there is often only a limited selection). Very cool demo! Mentioned for having many choices: Slay the Princess

Frontloading is a topic in itself. For “rogue-like” IF with frequent death, the start of the game had better be interesting. For more “plot-based” IF that is designed to be played once, you can ease into the story.

There are a few chat questions we didn’t get to that might be good topics for future meetings or the google group:

• We discussed what to do when people take offense at the subject matter of your IF game? Has that ever happened to anyone here? It can be discouraging to authors. One of the chat answers “I know there’s been a bunch of back-and-forth in fandom communities about what kinds of stories people “should” write. Another answer “write whatever you think needs writing”
• Potential for a chatbot for https://rez-lang.com coded with AI?
• What is the story arc / plot structure (if such a thing exists) of a storylet? One reference — storylets are more an implementation detail that’s separate from the story structure- see Emily Short’s Pacing Storylet Structures recommended for reference.