More Varytale details

For those who are interested in the behind-the-scenes details of Varytale, their blog has several detailed new posts, with screenshots.

Homer in Silicon

…now has a discussion of Misfortune, a browser-based RPG with Wizardry-esque questlets and some charming art.

Escape from Colditz as Procedurally Paced Narrative

Escape from Colditz is a board game about the German castle that during World War II became a prisoner of war camp for prisoners who had already escaped at least once from some other camp. The idea of putting all the most clever and resourceful prisoners together in an old building riddled with hiding places and odd physical quirks was, arguably, not the brightest; those imprisoned found an astounding number of escape possibilities, and the whole story became the basis of a surprisingly strong British TV show. The board game doesn’t touch on the more complex issues here, but what it does accomplish is in its own way remarkable: a skillful pacing of events that creates a sense of growing narrative urgency.

Complicity: Building Interactive Narratives

London, August 24: Alexis Kennedy (of Echo Bazaar and Varytale; Failbetter Games) and I are running a day-long seminar on writing interactive stories.

We’ll be looking at concepts like complicity, exploration, and exposition in an interactive context; structures for choice-based narrative; types of choices and varieties of player roles; types of feedback for the player; ways of pacing interactive narrative.

These are all things that we’ve written or talked about before, separately and together, but this will present them in a more unified format and with space for back-and-forth discussion. The seminar will not be geared explicitly to either IF or EBZ-style games, so if your interests lie more with choices and interactivity in some other presentation format, you’re very welcome.

The Failbetter blog is one of the best places on the web to read about narrative structures in interactive contexts, and I’m very excited to be presenting with Alexis.

Event details, including a longer description of the content, can be found here.

Introcomp reviews

Some more Introcomp reviews not currently syndicated to Planet-IF: “hidden exit” and “cobaltnine”.

Introcomp 2011: Speculative Fiction

Some thoughts on Introcomp 2011 entry Speculative Fiction after the cut.

Spoilers begin partway through, and are marked.

Also, as a reminder: there are two more days to play and vote on Introcomp games, so if you were considering doing this also, now would be a great time to do so. Signing up for the voting database is easy, and if you’ve voted in an IF comp before, you should already have an entry in the system.