New SPAG!

After more than a year’s hiatus, SPAG is back with a new issue, in a new hosting space. For those who aren’t familiar with it, SPAG is a long-standing (but occasionally on-vacation) IF community zine with editorials, interviews, and, in the old days, lots of reviews. As IFDB and personal blogs collated at Planet-IF have become review hubs, SPAG’s review content has dropped off a bit: the new editorial direction is moving largely away from reviews. But SPAG is still a useful place for longer articles, interviews, and discussions, so it’s great to see it make a reappearance.

The current issue features interviews with the three top-placing authors from IF Comp, an editorial from the new editor Dannii Willis, and long-form articles about shared-world creation and about detective IF as a genre.

Female voices in games

Several people have asked, apropos of recent Twitter/Gamasutra/Metafilter/Kotaku discussions, for lists of women whose games they should know about.

So here is a short list of female authors whose work I’ve especially enjoyed, recently or in the past, with links to most-recommended works by each. It’s not even a little bit complete or comprehensive, and it skews towards indie game designers and women who work in narrative, simply by virtue of the fact that those are the areas I follow most closely. In no particular order, then:

Interview with Porpentine, author of howling dogs

Throughout the competition season, I’ve been talking with Porpentine, the author of howling dogs — about Twine, about participating in the IF Comp, and about the meaning of various passages. After a little while it seemed like a good idea to ask for a straight-up interview, which Porpentine was kind enough to agree to.

Twine

ES: You and I have spoken a lot lately about how you feel Twine makes authoring interactive stories possible for people who hadn’t been in a position to do that before. What about Twine makes it especially awesome at that? Do you think it’s more effective in that respect than other hypertext or CYOA tools?

Porpentine: I’ve agonized over which tools to use, lately there have been so many, and despite everything that’s come out this year, I keep coming back to Twine’s ultra-minimal elegance.

1) Twine isn’t owned by a company. It isn’t going to restrict part of its functionality behind overly specific social networking sites that not everyone has access to (ahem), start charging to modify the HTML (ahem), or dramatically change in any way. I like that Twine simply exists and doesn’t belong to anyone except everyone.

2) Twine is the simplest game maker on the planet while scaling with the whole legacy of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, stuff that’s super well documented and easy to learn.

3) Instant feedback from the node map showing you the shape of your story as it forms, beautiful, spatial. Stories written in Twine have their own unique structure, like creatures under a microscope or root networks carrying information. I feel most in my aesthetic element when I’m working with Twine.

4) I can work with Twine when I’m too tired to deal with anything else. You don’t have to wrestle with anything between the emotion and the page, your fragile thoughts survive.

Sparkly IF Reviews

Sparkly IF Reviews is a new interactive fiction reviewing site that I have started with a growing list of other contributors. The name is silly, but I’m entirely serious about the aim of the site, which is to provide a safe-for-authors space that focuses on recognizing successful or cool things in IF, cheerleading new contributors, and letting people know what was appreciated. The concept of the site is to feature positive, sincere feedback; short-form and long-form are both totally acceptable.

This project springs from my feeling that the IF community, for all its resources, lacks the nurturing aspect that a lot of fandoms and hobbyist art and craft communities have. Writing IF is hard. Putting IF in public is an act of courage. And while I think it’s important for us to be writing reviews that critique craft and conceptual content, and that curate the best work for the attention of players who might not otherwise find it, we really need the encouraging aspects also.

I want to emphasize, though, that I don’t see this as somehow a kiddie website where people review games that are not good enough to be reviewed elsewhere. Rather, it’s meant to create a different context of discussion — and that can be freeing even when you’re talking about a game that you thought was really strong. Most of my reviews are pitched to potential players as much or more than they’re pitched to the original author, and so they do a lot of explaining and describing, and attempt to catalog thoroughly any flaws or issues that I think might affect a player’s decision to play that game. Sometimes it’s very pleasant to be able to step aside from that and just write about what I liked, for the ear of the author. Possibly other reviewers will find they like that too.

And from an author’s point of view, it’s meant to create a safe context of discussion. I’ve released enough games to know what it’s like seeing a link to a review of your game and to hover apprehensively before clicking, nerved against feedback that might be exciting… or might make your heart sink. This is meant to be Not That.

Currently on the site, you’ll find reviews by me, Zach Samuels, and Sam Kabo Ashwell. They touch on Changes, Valkyrie, Escape from Summerland, howling dogs, J’dal, Signos, and Fish Bowl from the current IF Comp as well as the Ectocomp game Beythilda the Night Witch and the Andromeda Legacy game Andromeda Dreaming.

If you choose to comment, please respect the concept of the site. I will moderate as necessary to keep it a safe place. There are plenty of other places suitable for critical and unmoderated discussion.

Finally, if you like the idea, more contributors are welcome; let me know if you’d like to be involved in the project. I’d be especially pleased to get coverage of the remaining IF Comp games this year.

I would also welcome positive content about things other than games. So if you have a beloved tool, extension, feature, etc. that you want to praise, that would be suitable too. (That reminds me I should write a post entitled David Welbourn’s Walkthroughs Are Freaking Awesome.)

A moment

Yesterday I was at a GDC Online narrative summit talk by Alexander Seropian and John Scalzi. At the end of it, they announced they were going to have some audience participation and needed three volunteers.

I thought: I should really put my hand up. I never put up my hand in circumstances like this, because I find volunteering for random things in front of a big group uncomfortable; you never know what you’re getting into. In the event, discomfort won and I kept my hand down.

So they picked three guys. A picture of a gruff male space marine went up on the slide screen, and each of the volunteers was invited to say a line (provided by Scalzi) with the accent and delivery he thought best suited the space marine. The audience picked the volunteer who sounded most plausible, and the marine character got named after that volunteer.

Then I wished I had put my hand up.

IF Community links and resources

Recent reader email prompted me to revise and expand my guide to ways to get involved with the IF community. But the IF community (or communities, I should say) have been dramatically expanding and diversifying in the last couple of years, and I’m sure I’ve omitted some useful content. Did I miss things you think I should have covered? Events or venues people should know about? Please feel free to comment and I’ll update with whatever seems like a good fit.