The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Tuesday, April 13, 2021. Zarf, , Stephen Eric Jablonski, nickm , Josh Grams, Hugh Steers, anjchang, KaySavetz and Carrington (Eaten By A Grue), Thomas Mack, welcomed newcomer Zed Lopez. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:

Kay an Carrington gave a talk last night for Joco Cruise, Jonathan Colton fans. on infocom text adventures “We Played All the Infocom Text Adventures.” Will be on their podcast soon. They are currently playing Journey (barely a text adventure game) right now. Their favorite one was Trinity and Kay liked “Hollywood Hijinx.” Carrington says “Trinity” or Mind Forever Voyaging or Bayou.

Flights of Foundary is happening. Zarf and many cool people are speaking. Packed with lots of talk.

Spring thing voting going on.

Parser Comp accepting registrations.

PunyInform game jam. submissions due in 19 days.

Thomas Disch’s Amnesia. Tom Disch(lots of work) also wrote the first of the Prisoner Novelizations. Portal interactive novel Rob Swigart

Nick gave us 256 perl script game “Ely” that you can type in your command line. We had fun.

perl -pE'BEGIN{say"you ok?";$p=" something$/"}$m=$_;s/.i(\047m| am| was)\b/really/i;s/.you./what about i/i;s/.always./can i be specific/;s/[?.!,].//;s/\b(i|me)\b/you/gi;s/\bmy/your/i;.2>rand?s/.*/huh/:s/$/?/;($_="you had said$p")if.1>rand;$p=": ".$m'

People’s reactions to Aaron Reed’s blog 50 Years of Text Games. Right now they’re talking about Hitchhiker’s guide– was it a good game or bad sci-fi?

Douglas Adams was not very involved in Starship Titanic. Book mostly written by Terry Jones.

Thomas Mack played about 200+ games in one year. Read his blog with statistics analyzing his review sfrom playing all the games from IFcomp in 2019.

Discussion about what the experience of conferencing is during the pandemic. Demoparty experience, meetup format, during the pandemic. PR-IF is looking to return to the Trope Tank in September, hopefully.

Find the fish games

Visual novels. Text with faces on them

Zarf adding features to inform6 compilers.

Curveship-js update. Want to generate narratives in different languages.

Has Zilch ever been released? Yes, in some form. Discussed why Inform 7 filesize vs Inform 6.

In PunyInform creates such small files. It’s a separate library. Somewhat simpler parser and strips out class related features that require Z5/Z3 games. Discussion about interpreter and Inform6 language and OOP that are not necessarily native to the way Z machine works. Addressing in PunyInform is different.

Generative Unfoldings opening happened. Nick shared the repo for the exhibit’s open source code repository: https://github.com/nickmontfort/generative_unfoldings Many positive reviews of cursive dimensionality (Phillip Schmidt’s piece), hextal and pactracer, Check it out!

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Friday, Mar. 19, 2021

Zarf, , Stephen Eric Jablonski, nickm , Josh Grams, Hugh Steer, anjchang, welcomed Thomas Mack. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:

Started with talking about Chess, Novels that correspond to chess. Alice in Wonderland. Squares of the City by John Bruner. Talked about the BongCloud opening scandal.

Videogame in a font

Nick read a Beowulf translation, Icelandic saga Maria Headley’s Beowulf.

Spring Thing is coming up

Text Adventure Literacy Camp

ParserComp

A writer’s conference called Flights of Foundry,

Zarf doing work on the IF engine

Trope Tank items currently moving to temporary space.

Curveship JS work

Hugh porting new engine to the web

Farming Sims. Verdant Skies, Stardew Valley, Harvest Moon.

Haven – a romance of two characters. Soma is a freaky game, even when you are on “getting injured mode”.

NFTs discussion. Exhibit by Casey Reas and Generative Art.

Nick’s exhibit Generative Unfoldings opens in 5 days, opening April 1st. Opening on Gather.

Different versions of free. Free puppy “Brings joy but you have to take care of it.”

Platforms for online meetings: Video lounge, Jitsi,

Golem literary readings by Nick.

Archery is art, science, history all rolled into one. Mongolian, style double recurve bow. Are there any cats in left in Iceland.

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction convened on Friday, Feb. 19, 2021

Zarf, nickm, feneric,,  Hugh Steers, Stephen Jablonski,  Josh Grams,, Michael Verdi, and anjchang. Warning: What follows is probably not proper English, but just my log of notes from the meeting to jog people’s memories:

When you’re creating an IF game, almost every game extends ontology. Limited number of types of objects. Different games with water are going to implement water slightly differently, with different needs. Within a single game, you can choose the ontology to exactly what the game needs.

Curveship has substances, so it doesn’t automatically allocate, you create all the objects that there are at the beginning. “Take the water” means take the bottle of water. Sometimes the reference to the substance that is inside container refers to the substance inside.

In Metamorphoses, EMshort had sets of objects with every possible state. A mind forever voyaging has different locations and different rooms. They are all different throughout the different decades, but they are all objects with different descriptions. Conceptually what is the best way to do this, taking into account general ways people conceive the world.

New version of Zork, several different version within the early weeks of Zork development. One version early enough that has no sword, and killing the troll is done by different mechanism.

Aaron Reed’s 50 Years of Tezt blog has gotten up to Zork. Started with early text games (Oregon trail, Atlantis, D&D, Lunar Lander, etc.) Worth reading these essays.

Zarf wrote an essay about unwinnable states in a post. Someone asked about Zork without inventory limits. No, there is one version of Planetfall without the run out of food issue. Someone said that Wishbringer a game that is harder to get into an unwinnable state. Zarf looked it and found that it is easy to get into unwinnable state (e.g. drop object in fog and other things) in WishBringer, which prompted the essay.

We have to consider the contexts of the time in terms of limitations of the games. People were playing collaboratively and got hints externally that helped them win the game. When Don Woods was working on Adventure players were surrounded by a culture of people who gave each other hints. As much as it is often a solitary experience, IF is essentially a cooperative game, they are working together to try to solve the game. Some games were created to be won with hints from the creators.

Nick’s new computer generated book “Golem” jiust launched and he’s doing some publicity related events. March 5th, 12:30pm EST he’ll be doing a discord on ELO. Next month wordhack on March 18th at 7pm.

Generative Unfoldings curated art exhibit will launch on April 1st with 14 artworks will be released. Opening is on Gather.town. Stay tuned. Avatars a bit too representational? Likelike gallery with abstract representations of people?

Nick is leading the Curveship JS research project is a javascript narrative variation system. Anjchang is involved and the repo is open-source.

Tomorrow, Nick will give a short talk about the digital literary ezine Taper, at Pittsburgh’s WinterHack. The most recent call for issue 6 of Taper received 31 submissions from 25 author groups, a new record.

Revisited the discussion of Zork object limitations and unwinnable situations.

Anjchang played through birdland with her kid. A bit mature for a 10 year old, but we glossed over the dating bits. Avoiding mushiness in media is an unwinnable situation.

Spring Thing reg deadline March 1st, Submission deadline March 28

Might do a game jam, but no Narrascope this year

IFDB Tuesday 21s moving IFDB servers and updates are planned

Noticed that the source code of the ifdb website is on github. You can clone ifdb for your own purposes on the archive. If you want to contribute, there are a lot of suggestions and it’s open-source.