An Adventurous Get-Together
Nov. 10th, 2014 06:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerKeeping up with the Planet IF aggregator, I managed a while ago to pick up on some announcements of a get-together about "interactive fiction" at a thoroughly convenient day-trip distance from me, and resolved that even though I don't play anywhere near as many "text-based" games as I could, it would still be interesting to go to. Last Saturday, I got on the train and headed into the big city, where I then headed north to the reference library and the get-together.
More chairs had to be set up at the back as things got under way, which I suppose is a reasonable sign. The ice-breaker was an "group play-through" of a famous "one-move" game, and then I stayed for a speech by Andrew Plotkin, one of the notable figures of the modern "non-commercial" era. He had, however, made things a bit more "commercial" by raising funds through Kickstarter to develop a text adventure for iPhones. Since he took four years to finish the game, though, some people in the audience did seem inclined to point out further avenues that had opened up in those four years to promote "indie games" through (which may have been more philosophically acceptable to them, anyway). I checked out some game rooms with iPad and "keyboard" games on display, realising I'd even managed to play "Thomas Was Alone" (although that game did seem to me to be more of an "ironically minimalist arcade game," it does have a fair bit of "story" to it), and then returned for three special presentations on how to create your own "writerly games."
When I'd started looking up information about this get-together, I saw something about a workshop teaching Twine, which develops "hypertext" games that might be classed with "Choose Your Own Adventure" books at first glance. (Quite a few years ago, I was experimenting with Hypercard and created something in it that might conceivably be recreated in Twine, only to discover the "combinatorial explosion" in trying to reference my impressions of the adventure games I'd only heard about then; I do wonder if this might have been called "cargo cult programming.") I prepared myself for that by installing Twine on my "travelling" portable and starting to learn a few basic things about it, and then realised I'd managed to see information about a presentation from last year. In any case, though, I did get to see a bit of information about "ChoiceScript" (which was what made "Mecha Ace"), Inform 7, which develops full-scale text adventures in the grand tradition, and a new tool called Texture which tries to strike a fresh balance between the links of hypertext and the "verb-noun" interface. As much as I can suppose I ought to play more games to get ideas of how to make them, what I did see was invigorating and different.
More chairs had to be set up at the back as things got under way, which I suppose is a reasonable sign. The ice-breaker was an "group play-through" of a famous "one-move" game, and then I stayed for a speech by Andrew Plotkin, one of the notable figures of the modern "non-commercial" era. He had, however, made things a bit more "commercial" by raising funds through Kickstarter to develop a text adventure for iPhones. Since he took four years to finish the game, though, some people in the audience did seem inclined to point out further avenues that had opened up in those four years to promote "indie games" through (which may have been more philosophically acceptable to them, anyway). I checked out some game rooms with iPad and "keyboard" games on display, realising I'd even managed to play "Thomas Was Alone" (although that game did seem to me to be more of an "ironically minimalist arcade game," it does have a fair bit of "story" to it), and then returned for three special presentations on how to create your own "writerly games."
When I'd started looking up information about this get-together, I saw something about a workshop teaching Twine, which develops "hypertext" games that might be classed with "Choose Your Own Adventure" books at first glance. (Quite a few years ago, I was experimenting with Hypercard and created something in it that might conceivably be recreated in Twine, only to discover the "combinatorial explosion" in trying to reference my impressions of the adventure games I'd only heard about then; I do wonder if this might have been called "cargo cult programming.") I prepared myself for that by installing Twine on my "travelling" portable and starting to learn a few basic things about it, and then realised I'd managed to see information about a presentation from last year. In any case, though, I did get to see a bit of information about "ChoiceScript" (which was what made "Mecha Ace"), Inform 7, which develops full-scale text adventures in the grand tradition, and a new tool called Texture which tries to strike a fresh balance between the links of hypertext and the "verb-noun" interface. As much as I can suppose I ought to play more games to get ideas of how to make them, what I did see was invigorating and different.