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Partygoers with Dave Lehbling, creator of Zork
Sep15

Night at the MIT Museum: After Dark Trip Report

by Angela Chang on September 15th, 2023 at 6:19 pm
Posted In: Events, Meetings, Post Mortem

You find yourself outside the MIT Museum on a gorgeous afternoon. It’s September 14, 2023, breezy but sunny. The After Dark party starts at 5pm, and you’re right on time. You enter through the glass doors, not knowing what to expect. You recognize a PR-IF friend, Chris Martens, as you look for the desk person to check you in. You two chat– it’s your first face to face meeting. You could:

  1. stay and mingle at the front desk
  2. go up to 3R, where the PR-IF event will be.

Although it’s still a bit early, you choose 2) because you’re supposed to be an event volunteer. It’s the first time you’ve met the MIT Museum team in person. Fiori and Kate say hello. They’ve been setting up tables and monitors. You meet Deb, the director of collections. Zarf soon joins, lugging a small collection of IF books from his private stash. You ogle the museum’s displays of Zork, IF, and old technology exhibits around the room. You get the computers setup. You take a picture to celebrate.

Biyi, Flori, Chris, and Zarf

You get a text from Jules, asking about parking. You recall what an amazing IF writer Zarf as your browse his collection, reminiscing about Shade, Dreamhold, Hadean Lands. Biyi and Alberto arrive to help. You haven’t eaten all day because of traffic and errands. You’re hungry so you:

  1. leave briefly to find some food
  2. stay and try to get the exhibits loaded up with IF games

You can’t ignore your hunger any longer, it’s going to be a long night. You choose 1) and head to the 2nd floor. The place is filling up. There is a rad DJ pumping sonic vibes into the crowd. It’s a sold out crowd tonight. You wander around and find some pizza in a volunteer room. You know the DJ, and you exchange pleasantries. It’s a good scene and you just want to chill.

DJ Phillip Tan

You can decide to:

  1. Stay and chat with the DJs, and you are into EDM
  2. Head back to the Play IF room

You feel slightly guilty enjoying the fun while knowing that others are up there ready for guests. You say bye to the DJs and choose 2). You head up back to 3R in the museum’s giant elevator. You put together the zoom names to the new faces.

It’s delightful to meet in person finally, and they’ve brought stuff to share. Chad strolls in flashing a physical copy of Suspect!

Chad

Jules has good parking karma and has brought flyers for Tempus Fugit.

Angela and Jules

The room starts to fill with animated party goers. The museum team has set up 3 tables for people to gather around 80s, 2000s, and more recent IF. Zork is at being played at one prominent table. Time passes. Much IF was consumed that night including Photopia, 9:05, and Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebee’s.

The special guests of the evening, Dave Liebling and Michael Dornbrook make an appearance. The room is awed by the presence of the creators of the Zork Empire. Michael had donated a treasure trove of Zork materials that are now on display. Dave talked about the origins of Zork, and the fun they had. They were charming and you got to experience some gameplay and feelies. You shook their hand. You were able to jot down some nuggets of wisdom about making IF experiences magical. At the end of the night, you were happy to share this celebrated favorite pastime with others, including these amazing people.

Partygoers playing Zork and listening to Dave Lebling
Partygoers playing Zork and listening to Dave Lebling
Chad, Zarf, and Michael Dornbrook
Chad, Zarf, and Michael Dornbrook
Dave, Chad, and Zarf
Dave Lebling, Chad, and Zarf

You play 9:05 a total of 6 times with 3 different groups. It was amusing to sit down with newcomers and play together. Many people wanted to experience multiple narrative branches and replayed the game. Funny how people wanted to figure out the flavor of the pop tart. And when they seem to need satisfaction from “eating” the pop tart, rather than rushing to “work” in the game. Everyone seemed happy and they took a card. You hope they come to a pr-if meeting someday, or at least sign up for the mailing list. Whoops, you had forgotten to mention the social media. Ah well!

Happy Partygoers
Happy Partygoers
Happy Partygoers playing Zork with Dave behind them
Happy Partygoers playing 9:05

You realize after the event that you didn’t take as many pictures as you would have liked. You can

  1. keep the memories to yourself because you are not a great photographer
  2. share your photo album anyway because people might want to see them. Maybe they’ll even add their own photos…

You choose 2) to share the photos, and you wake up smiling the next day with memories of the great night. You are inspired to continue writing your IF story that’s been on hold for the past n years….

└ Tags: afterdark, events, mitmuseum, post mortem, zork
Comments Off on Night at the MIT Museum: After Dark Trip Report
Aug31

July 2023 PR-IF Post Morten

by Angela Chang on August 31st, 2023 at 6:14 pm
Posted In: Events, Meetings, Post Mortem

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Monday, July 24. Zarf, Stephen Eric Jablonski, Doug Orleans, Josh Grams, hugh, Andrew Stephens, Kathryn, Dana, and anjchang welcomed Florencia Pierri (_fl0ri_) and Kate from the MIT Museum, and returning friend Chad Elliot. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories.

Stephen finished the Wand and Temple of Shorthill

https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=sgas14we0jk2fgse

https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=2jil5vbxmbv8riv1

Doug and Jmac streamed little match girl https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS-ib1CPuL7zgHKEG0WGjFQ

Flori and Kate in the MIT Museum, visit to discuss the September meeting. They have 2 big donations of materials from InfoCom. Thursday Sept 14th, 6-9pm, MIT Museum After Dark – There’ll be a DJ – Zarf has a lot of resources. Please mark your availability for: MIT Museum After Dark IF https://whenavailable.com/event/oMMi8w7SCoaTREwp7

People talked about their project in progress:

Hugh working on systems

Andrew Stephens working on a project

Josh made a discord style game for Bez, and working on Jeffrey Gordon piece.

Narrascope happened and was great. Should have videos online soon.

Chad Elliot worked on Scott Adams Game site https://adventure4a.com

Talked about the structure of Scott Adams games.

IFDB issue with InfoCom and Microsoft acquiring InfoCom. Activision gave explicit permission to put things on line.

Doug reading a thread about Hadean Lands.

Discussion that Quite a lot of people play IF on Mobile.

Kathryn playing The Outsider, diagram triangle adventure game descendants of interactive fiction as having puzzle, exploration, story.

Biran Moriarty’s Trinity & Wishbringer

Planet Fall Infocom series story. Novels of games.

Zork book (Cavern of Doom, CYOA)

Nowadays its hard for crossovers (e.g. Heroics in Zork world) Maureen Birbaum, Traction Paradox

Superhero movies vs. Ordinary Heroes. — Invisible Man Adventures. New Futurama episodes.

Dr. Who (Sylvester McCoy)

https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk

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Aug20

August meeting (online)

by zarf on August 20th, 2023 at 11:11 am
Posted In: Meetings

The Boston IF meetup for August will be Thursday, August 31, 6:30 pm Eastern time.

We will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.

Also note that PRIF people will be helping with “After Dark” at the MIT Museum on September 14th! Come see classic and modern IF as part of an evening about MIT’s legacy of game design.

└ Tags: meetings
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Jul19

July meeting (online)

by zarf on July 19th, 2023 at 3:00 pm
Posted In: Meetings

Back after a couple of months of NarraScope planning and recovery…

The Boston IF meetup for July will be Monday, July 24, 6:30 pm Eastern time.

We will post the Zoom link to the mailing list on the day of the meeting.

└ Tags: meetings
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May23

May 2023 Post Mortem

by Angela Chang on May 23rd, 2023 at 6:47 pm
Posted In: Meetings, Post Mortem

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Monday May 22 , 2023. Angela, Kathryn, Doug, Stephen Eric Jablonski, Kirill Azernyi, Josh Grams, Hugh, Mike Stage, Andrew Stephens, Cidney Hamilton, feneric welcomed Jules Pelarski. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories.

Jules wrote Tempus Fugit, a story about time travel. Here website playtempusfugit.com looking to talk about her sequel. Jules recently shared about this work on a podcast.

Josh coding a custom UI for Spring Thing prize. Josh is also working on a collab story called “Fix Your Mother’s Printer”  by Adventure Snack. Also, check out Your Post-Apocalyptic To-Do List from Spring Thing 2023. Josh also shared Inside the Facility.

Hugh, at strandgames.com, is working on a new game set in 1870s. Andrew is writing in Ink. Cidney shared that she is a (minor) contributor to Ink, which she uses as much as possible for narrative design/dialogue. https://github.com/inkle/ink Josh shared Ink’s portal page https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/

We started off talking about writing dialogue. Jon Ingold’s markup language for writing branching dialogue recommended by Josh. How do you test a game to make sure there are no dead end situations? Choicescript has a feature that plays the game for you and reports parts that can’t be reached. Creating discrete narrative passages rather than using a time loop gave Hugh more freedom. Hugh creates different constructs/modes to vary things rather than pure random for handling novelty. His dialogue can use shuffle, non-random (Inform Default without repeating too soon), quasi-random. purely at random vs just random.

Cidney also shared that she recently worked on Colossal Cave 3D, she worked with Summer Daze on Hero U ,https://www.hero-u.com/. Also mentioned her collab on The Owl Consult .

Stephen is enjoying playing The Wand, by Arthur DiBianca, a limited parser command game. First part is called escaping the castle. A pretty tricky puzzle gamer the second half. His games are also cool. Trouble in Sector 471.

Reminds us of DreamHold. DreamHold is really accessible.

Taper#10 just launched 10 Kirill and Angela have pieces on it. The issue for the next call, Parallels, due Sept. 17, is out.

Continuations in IF. We talked about experiences finishing an IF, and then having another chapter open up. These continuations add to the story. Kirill mentioned Infinite body separator that explores this.

There’s a problem with focusing on the narrative vs too many scattered threads with too many options. If a scene or dialogue is not essential should it be part of the piece at all?

Freemium models allow players to add more bells and whistles to make the game more interesting. Unlocking scenes and character interactions. Mentioned Fallout New Vegas and Alpha Protocol. In Morrowind, after you win, you can save or keep living in a cursed world. There is caution that having more random encounters might distract from the original story arc, and what if the player never finishes or returns to the canon?

How might you translate a book written in Ink into gamebook format? The book Crown of Kings recommended by Andrew and Jules. Gamebook format. Josh recommended a RogueLike Games talk about tracking items. At Spring Thing there was an IF game implemented in google forms. Kuolema was quite interesting. Three things to track: state of the game, state of your character (stats), things that you as a player know (skills you learn). Playing among those is fascinating. The Wand is another good example. New Vegas and Stardew Valley (cooking recipes) also mentioned.

Josh went to Boston FIG. Hugh won Silliest Game in Spring Thing. Kudos to actual winners. Hugh gave us a tip to use links for your submission to the live game, that way you can update the code live. Thanks to PRIF for play testing! Any tips for debugging Ink.

Josh shared an invite to the Interactive Fiction Club https://intfiction.org/t/the-interactive-fiction-club-group-and-podcast/61701 (click through to signup for the discord channel and other fun stuff). Speaking of continuations, Jon Myers and his friend somewhat recently played the Legend Entertainment game Gateway for their IF Club, and that was interesting because it kind of psyched you out into thinking the game was about over and then Surprise! There’s a third act. A player may or may not appreciate it, but it seemed like a good thing.

Comments Off on May 2023 Post Mortem
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(The Republic gathers monthly. Note our Event Policy.)

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