Nick Montfort has passed along some info on the status of returning to in-person meetups at MIT. The upshot is that it is still not possible for the fall semester.
The Trope Tank has not yet been moved back out of storage. There are a couple of possible spaces where it might move to, but neither will be ready until October, and it will not be fully moved in for a few weeks after that.
On top of that, MIT policy now requires that visitors be escorted by campus members when entering buildings. They are working on an event system which will allow visitors to register for events (see “Tim Tickets” in the FAQ) but this is not yet available.
The upshot is that in-person meetups are still too much hassle and risk for the rest of this year. We’ll check back in early 2022 and see whether the situation has improved. Until then, Zoom meetings will continue!
July 2021 PR-IF meeting: Zarf, anjchang, Dana, Carrington, Hugh, and Kay.
The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Wednesday, July 28, 2021. Zarf, Hugh, Dana, KaySavetz and Carrington (Eaten By A Grue), anjchang. attended. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:
Kay & Carrington KansasFest happened! This year’s buzz- an Apple 2 game in unity with virtualized Apple 2, Next year July 19th-24th mark your calendars.
Kay read Meanwhile, and bought the App. Looking for disparities between print and digital version. Zarf shared his story of working on it with Jason Shiga. On the digital version, the giant squid has to be reached by selecting squid panel manually.
Kay and Carrington — Zork Zero being played on Eaten By A Grue “It’s kicking my butt” says Carrington!
Should interactive fiction support note taking or map making? Hugh exploring map making- what’s the ideal map? What about running to the edge of the paper? Carrington puts forth helping the reader with a “hypothetical map orientation suggestion” Hugh what about up of down, how do you know where you start on that next paper. Rooms help you keep examining every object all at once. Hadean lands, room count function of number of items in the room description.
Zarf on his drag & drop IF project, redid the interface based on tabs rather than fake, tiny windows in the web browser. He submitted a proposal talk about it to Rogue Like Celebration in September.
Working on 1933-era C memory management compiler project
Angela working on coloring duck story for parents to read to their kids. Chicory, cartoon puppy with paint brush. It’s a children’s story talking about deep topics. Baba Is You is technically a parser based text adventure. A block pushing parser, zarf & anj enjoyed it.
Hugh put forward a proposal about publishing knowledge related to Interactive Fiction. Nick talked about publishing in academia, adventure games, narrative design. Dana talked about codifying knowledge by not having competing standards, Kay sent a link https://xkcd.com/927/
The Boston IF meetup for July will be Wednesday, July 28, 6:30 pm Eastern time.
We will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.
Note: Nick Montfort is checking into the possibility of returning to in-person meetups at MIT. This may be possible for September. (Our August meeting will defininitely still be online.)
We don’t want to lose track of our online friends, so we’re considering running both kinds of meetups in the future, perhaps alternating. What are your thoughts? Please let us know on our mailing list.
