November Link Assortment

Upcoming events:

Boston, Dec 2: Purple Blurb at which Christian Bok will read from The Xenotext.

Copenhagen, Dec 2-4: ICIDS conference meets, with keynotes by Chris Crawford and Paul Mulholland. This is an academic conference in digital storytelling that in the past has looked at procedural narrative, character modeling, authoring tools, augmented reality experiences, interactive nonfiction, pedagogical applications of IF, and assorted related topics.

Boston, Dec 10: PR-IF meets.

SF Bay, Dec 12: Bay Area IF meetup.

London, Dec 12-13: AdventureX, a convention for adventure games including text adventures.

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IF Comp is over, and that means lots of discussion, post-mortems, and additional reviews. There was an extensive post-mortem discussion at Euphoria, a new, still-in-development threaded chat space that includes a room for interactive fiction.

Here’s some of the authorial writing that has come out since the comp closed:

Astrid Dalmady on Arcane Intern (Unpaid)

Brendan Patrick Hennessy’s postmortem on Birdland

Piato’s postmortem for Duel

AvB’s postmortem for Gotomomi

Tia Orisney on Kane County (plus some questions about where to go on a post-comp release)

Katherine Morayati’s postmortem for Laid Off from the Synesthesia Factory

Glass Rat’s postmortem for Seeking Ataraxia.

Joey Jones’ five-part series on Sub Rosa [Planning, Puzzles, Cut Content, Setting, Wrap]

An interview with Chandler Groover about Taghairm and his postmortems for both Taghairm and Midnight. Swordfight.

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The Windhammer Prize for gamebooks has also concluded, with first prize going to Felicity Banks for After the Flag Fell. I didn’t have a chance to play either of the Merit Award winners, but here’s Sam Ashwell’s review of Merit winner Sabrage.

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Liza Daly writes about her NaNoGenMo project this year, a computer-generated cops and robbers script that uses some IF-style world-modeling.

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The Games by Angelina blog is running posts summing up interesting recent work in game AI, including narrative AI — for instance, this piece about a knowledge representation system developed by a team at UCSC.

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New York magazine collects a list of particularly entertaining Twitter bots, as recommended by other botmakers. Includes some interesting thoughts about what makes procedural juxtapositions fruitful or funny, even if it doesn’t mention Harry Giles’ @LilSpellbook, my personal favorite.

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And meanwhile, here’s an IF game jam themed around that same idea, run by Jason Dyer.

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Ryan Veeder has started a comp for games that will appeal to Ryan Veeder. It will be judged by Ryan Veeder and the prizes awarded by Ryan Veeder. An important rule is that you are not supposed to communicate with Ryan Veeder about his comp.

Even if you do not like this idea and do not want to enter it, it is worthwhile to view the video in order to see the costuming.

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IF Comp author Marco Vallarino has written several other pieces, including an Inform piece in Italian designed to introduce students to the features of possible schools — this newspaper article covers the project and includes screenshots.

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Here’s Bruno Dias (Cape, Mere Anarchy, et al) on Emily is Away, as part of the ZEAL project.

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Adam Cadre has issued a complete rewrite of his novel Ready Okay!.

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If you’re interested in writing German-language IF, the IF Grand Prix for 2016 has been announced and intents are being accepted through March 1 2016.