Assorted Releases and Events

inkle has been posting for some time about their Sorcery! project with Steve Jackson, and it’s now available for iOS. I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, but it looks gorgeous, with fun gamebooky play, a revamped combat concept, and a really attractive map. Here’s more about the making of, including discussions of the combat system and the creation of the user interface. It looks gorgeous, however, and is getting rave reviews at the app store, as well as positive coverage at Pocket Gamer. One unfortunate note: it’s not (yet?) really playable with VoiceOver.

The People’s Republic of IF in Boston is organizing another IF meetup this year, September 14-15, coordinated with the NoShowConf and the Boston Festival of Indie Games. This is an opportunity to hang out with other IF authors, share in-progress concepts, demo to the public (at Boston FIG), and attend game design talks (at NoShowConf). There may be some IF-specific programming there, though this isn’t finalized.

I’ve mentioned this before here briefly, but I’m speaking next week at the Inventing the Future of Games conference put on by UC Santa Cruz. That’s in Mountain View May 10. I’ll be talking about tools for interactive narrative creation, drawing on experience with Inform, Versu, and (to a lesser degree) various other IF tools.

XYZZY Award voting is ongoing through May 7. If you want to participate, check out the nominees and voting page.

XYZZY Awards 2013 Eligibility

I’m reposting this, with permission, from the intfiction forum. I did not write this announcement; it is by Sam Kabo Ashwell. But it is about how the XYZZY Awards are changing to attempt to incorporate works that weren’t promoted to or didn’t originate inside the traditional IF community, and to avoid imposing unnecessary formal barriers to people who might be interested in having their work considered.

If that’s something you’re interested in, read on.

Assorted IF-related News and Links

Black Crown is a forthcoming Random House project by Failbetter. It’s not playable yet, but there’s a sign-up page here and Wired gives some additional background. Over at The Literary Platform, Alexis Kennedy mentions the game as well in a longer article about the possible relationship between books and games.

Dave Morris (Frankenstein) weighs in on whether randomness is really a help to interactive fiction, tying the question in with gamebooks and computer adaptations of gamebooks.

Deirdra Kiai gives an interview on the claymation point-and-click adventure Dominique Pamplemousse in “It’s All Over Once the Fat Lady Sings”, discussing the gender roles, inspirations from Fallen London, the claymation process, and various other features.

The XYZZY Awards are now in second-round voting, with the nominees chosen. This year’s crop includes Twine and StoryNexus content as well as parser-based IF. You can vote here; authors may not vote for their own games and are discouraged from posting “vote for me” sorts of messages, but otherwise the voting process is open to anyone through May 7.

Various people, including Warren Spector, Kevin Bruner (Telltale), Stéphane Bura (Storybricks) and me, will be speaking about interactive storytelling at the IFOG symposium May 10 in Mountain View.

Assorted News and Events

First round voting in the XYZZY Awards is open through April 15. This is a nomination round, and a list of eligible games, interactive fiction, CYOA and choice-based games of other types can be found on the website. There will be a second round to pick winners from the nominees. Anyone may vote, though you’re encouraged to have played several eligible games (ie, not to vote tactically just for one or two special favorites). But please don’t think you need to have covered all the eligible options to vote; it’s a really really long list and no one’s played all of it. The XYZZY Awards also now recognize innovation and technical tools released during the previous year, so if there’s a great interactive fiction language, tool, or piece of documentation you would like to recognize, feel free to write in your nominees.

Second: now available are the three games entered in Spring Thing 2013. This year includes “Encyclopedia of Elementals” (Adam Holbrook, Quest); “A Roiling Original” (Andrew Schultz, Glulx); and “Witch’s Girl” (Mostly Useless, Twine). If you want to vote in Spring Thing, you’re encouraged to make a good faith attempt to at least try all three games, but there are no other requirements, and if you can’t get something to work on your platform, that’s fair enough. Voting is open through April 28.

Third: there now appears to be an interactive storytelling meetup group centered in Ottawa, looking at various types of content including hypertext, IF, and tabletop games.

GDC 2013

…starts Monday! I will be there:

I’m giving a game design postmortem about Versu Friday morning (10 AM, Room 3005 West Hall). I’ll be talking about several aspects of the design, including some UI issues with presenting text games that I haven’t previously blogged about here.

Richard Evans and I will be showing Versu gameplay off at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop (Friday, 2:30-4:30 PM, Room 2014 West Hall). As that’s always one of my favorite sessions, I’m especially happy to be doing it. The EGW always features a surprising and cool collection of gameplay styles and concepts.

And finally

I will also have a shorter stint at the Indie Soapbox, where I will talk some about text games. (Tuesday, 4:30-5:30 PM, Room 2005, West Hall.)

Several other sessions caught my eye as potentially interesting for IF folks:

Clara Fernandez-Vara, a Boston PR-IFer and IF outreach advocate, is part of the Game Educators’ Rant session.

Porpentine (howling dogs et al) and Terry Cavanagh (Don’t Look Back, Super Hexagon) are talking about indie game curation and outsider voices.

There is a poster session by Mordechai Buckman about the potential of interactive fiction using “a tool for turning story scenarios into intuitive gameplay.” I’m not sure what to expect from this one, but we’ll see.

Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy talk about the evolution of Kentucky Route Zero from a largely puzzly graphical adventure game to its somewhat more mysterious current form.

Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin on Telltale’s The Walking Dead also sounds very much worth a look (I’m especially vexed it’s scheduled opposite the Game Design Challenge session, which I typically make a point of attending — but hey, it’s all about presenting the player with hard choices, right?).

I usually enjoy the GDC Microtalks, a brain-dazzlingly rapid presentation by numerous speed-talking speakers. This year the lineup includes Anna Anthropy, Leigh Alexander (a games journalist who, among other things, has written extensively about IF and text gaming), and Tom Bissell.

And, of course, there’s the entire Game Narrative Summit, moved to San Francisco GDC this year. Formerly it was a feature of GDC Online in Austin.

Introducing Versu

Versu is a new interactive storytelling platform Richard Evans and I have been working on at Linden Lab. Some of you may have seen lead-up presentations about it at GDC (possibly long enough ago that it was still called Cotillion).

Today, the first four Versu stories are available for iPad. Clients for Kindle and Google Play will follow, as well as stories in other genres and by other authors, and both character- and episode-authoring tools will be made available to the general public in the future.

Versu focuses on character interaction as its primary form of play. The Versu platform can do rooms, objects, movement, and the “medium-sized dry goods” interaction of a typical interactive fiction engine, but it’s primarily designed for interactive stories about people: how they act, how they react to you, how they talk to you and talk about you, the relationships you form with them. The social landscape in which you act is constantly changing.

Versu uses an AI engine designed by Richard Evans, the lead AI designer for Sims 3, which allows each character in a story (and in some cases a drama manager AI) to act autonomously or be played by a human player.

Because there’s a strong social model at work in Versu, it’s possible to form relationships with characters that the story author did not explicitly create. In play, you can decide you want to pursue a romance or make an enemy, and that outcome can occur even if the author did not write an arc specific to those two characters.

Versu has a choice-based interface, but it’s very unlike standard CYOA. At any moment in the story, you can choose to act, or wait for others to act. If you choose to take action yourself, you’re offered a set of options drawn from the world model at that moment, from taking a bold stand to giving someone a significant sideways glance. Just about everything you can do affects your character’s opinion of the other characters, and theirs of you, altering the playing field for what’s to come. Inaction can be a powerful choice.

Versu offers moments of narrative emergence. Late in testing, one of my characters was talking to another in confidence when a third party wandered in. Because the speaker didn’t feel comfortable around that third person, he fell silent and didn’t continue the conversation — there was an awkward pause and dialogue moved on to other things. I’d never written the “awkward pause when X walks in on a private conversation” outcome — just an engine that knew when the characters would be willing to discuss those topics, and also that it was awkward for someone to stop talking about a conversation topic when others were expecting them to go on.

This can happen elsewhere too, in large and small ways. The degree to which emergent character behavior affects large story outcomes depends on how flexibly the author has written the overarching plot. “The Unwelcome Proposal” is an example of Versu being used very conservatively, capturing as much as possible of the story text from a scene in Pride and Prejudice, and allowing for few deviations from that story. “House on the Cliff” and “A Family Supper” have a much broader spectrum of possible results, depending on character choices and relationships. Even more sandbox-like experiences are in the pipeline.

Versu allows for characters who act distinctly. A social model is only interesting for building fiction if it doesn’t make everyone act like identical automata. In Versu, different characters are built with different abilities and parameters — not a handful or a few dozen character traits, but a potentially infinite range of quirks and habits. It is possible to craft social behaviors that are unique to just one character — giving one guy the ability to get under people’s skin more than anyone else, say — or to make a character who hates being in a crowded room.

In addition, because characters are defined as separate entities in this way, they could be transferred from one story context to another, and even cast in stories that weren’t specifically written for them.

The stories we’re releasing today are just a taste of what is possible with this engine. I’ll post more of my usual analysis content over coming weeks — what it’s like to write for Versu, the difference between authoring characters and authoring stories, details of the conversation modeling system, and more about what we’re expecting to see in the future.