PTT on Make It Good

Forgot to mention when it actually got posted, but my Play This Thing review of Make It Good is up. Its content will not come as a huge surprise to anyone following my blog, I suppose, but I mention it here for thoroughness.

Homer in Silicon for today

On Jojo’s Fashion Show 2. On the subject of which, is Gamelab really gone/completely repurposed? When I wrote this article a few weeks ago, their website was still up and running, but now — as the editorial note points out — it is completely given over to Gamestar Mechanic and there’s no sign of their other work history.

If so, I’m really sorry to see it. They were doing some of the most innovative work in the casual game market.

EnvComp results out

The results for EnvComp are now out, giving the win to C. E. J. Pacian’s entomological fantasy “Dead Like Ants”. They’re accompanied by reviews from a panel of ten judges. This is great stuff — critique from experienced players is worth its weight in… well, it doesn’t weigh anything. Still, it’s worth a lot.

The good news is that this minicomp series still has another three competitions whose deadlines are a little way out: NPCComp, SenseComp, and GameplayComp. (AbilityComp is closing May 1, so unless you’re a demon coder, …)

And while I’m on the topic of things to enter, GunchoComp has a deadline in August, for games written for multiple players on Jesse McGrew’s Guncho system.

Inform build out

Inform build 5Z71 is now out, hosted on a new website, which features, among other things, a new section on education with Inform and reports from teachers in the field; a new introductory screencast by Aaron Reed showing off some of the features of the IDE and how to get your game started; and a revised handling of the extensions allowing authors to view extension documentation online before downloading.

Pliny’s Opinion on Beta-Testing

“That man is spoiled, and no better than a stranger, who prefers to hear his friend’s book in its final, polished form rather than to help him polish it.” (Pliny the Younger, Letters 8.21.)

A followup to that last

Because I’m curious, mostly — this constitutes no promise about my own future intentions, and I have no affiliation with Matt Arnold’s idea of a workshop at Penguicon other than to help publicize the idea — it seems worth asking:

Inform Workshop Concept, Take Two

Matt Arnold is considering running an Inform workshop at Penguicon. He writes:

It seems like a perfect fit to run an Inform workshop during Penguicon, a science fiction and open source software convention that I run in Michigan. The good thing about that arrangement is that the convention covers the overhead, like facility rental, computer lab, and audio-visual equipment…

One of the keys of creating this event would be to collect the locations of those who would be interested in attending, and how far they would be willing to travel to it.

People who might be interested in such an event should write to Matt at matt.mattarn@gmail.com.

Make It Good, After

So I finished! Won! Yay!

(No, you don’t understand. That was REALLY HARD. I don’t remember the last time I was playing a game with this degree of obsessive absorption… “Blue Lacuna” was also absorbing but in a different way, as I spent a lot of time kind of floating pleasantly around and/or inactively stuck. Here I spent a lot of time actively stuck, trying and retrying solutions…)

Anyway, some only-very-mildly spoilery remarks after the cut.

The Job Market

So it turns out that this year is a terrible year to be a junior academic looking for another position, and I’m not turning out to be an exception to the statistics.

That being the case, I am looking into the possibility of doing some game-related work next year. I’d be especially interested in work that combined writing, narrative design, and game design in some way. I’ll be able to move somewhere and work full time in September, or to do contract/freelance work as soon as June.

I’ll obviously be pursuing this in more direct ways, but if you have a lead, suggestion, or just advice to share, I would of course be grateful. I’ve closed comments, but feel free to email me: emshort@mindspring.com.

Interactive and fiction, if not exactly IF

UpRightDown is a project that creates multiple versions of the same basic plot scenario. The first issue was pretty simple; this issue, though, there’s a multi-stage episodic plot that contributors can present as narrative, song, video, photo montage, game, or pretty much anything else. There are also prizes this time around for the best plot contribution ($300) and best performance of a plot episode ($1000).

Sound a bit complex? They do a more thorough job of explaining. But I know from experience that they’re open to IF implementations of plot ideas.