Spring Thing 2006

-
It has commenced: the Spring Thing 2006. Four pieces of interactive fiction have been entered, among which is my The Baron.

I am not allowed to discuss the game during the voting period, which lasts until the 23rd of April, but I sure hope you will take a look at the offerings. Unfortunately for those who are new to IF, you need no less than three different interpreters (Z-code, Hugo and Adrift) to play these four pieces, but following either the instructions on the Spring Thing page or here, you should be fine. (And it works under Linux too!)

The best place to talk about these pieces is the IF newsgroup: rec.games.int-fiction. (Which you can either access through a newsreader, a good mail-program like Thunderbird, or a webbased interface like Google groups. There are actually two IF newsgroups, the other one being rec.arts.int-fiction, but the latter is for authors and the former for readers.)

I definitely recommend you to play all four pieces and submit your votes before the 23rd. :)

Comments

  1. Victor Gijsbers31 March 2006 at 22:48

    To be clear, I am not allowed to publicly discuss my piece. You can always ask me questions in private by emailing me. (Domain: lilith.gotdns.org; user: victor; syntax: user@domain.)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous1 April 2006 at 06:39

    Heh! I didn't know you were into IF.

    So that's two things we have in common, now, that and the Forge. Cool. :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Victor Gijsbers1 April 2006 at 10:48

    It is even in the subtitle of my blog. ;)

    Do you hang out on the rec.games/rec.arts newsgroups, and if so, under what name? (Mine is, ubsurprisingly, Victor Gijsbers.)

    What kind of IF are you most interested in?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous2 April 2006 at 06:56

    Regarding r*if, used to, a while ago, under my real name as well, Joao Mendes. In the meantime, real life got a stranglehold of me and I had to let go of something...

    I may get back when Mike Roberts finally releases T3. (I get the development mailing list, so I'll know... :) (Although, I'm hearing interesting things about I7 as well... we'll see)

    As for IF, I like easy games, both long and short. Puzzleless is cool, but so is puzzley, as long they're easy puzzles and they support the story. My favorite so far is Tapestry, although I absolutely loved All Things Devours from IFComp'04.

    Speaking of which, I still can't believe Blue Chairs won that Comp...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Victor Gijsbers2 April 2006 at 10:44

    I liked All Things Devours, too. In fact, it was perhaps the only IF game I ever really enjoyed for its puzzles. (Which obviously proves that the "hard but logical puzzle" is more to my liking than the "don't forget to examine everything and freely associate in a bizarre way puzzle".)

    Actually, I don't think Blue Chairs was bad at all. I quite liked the first 1/3 and last 1/3, and it was only the middle part, with its surreal and - to me - uninteresting puzzles that turned me off.

    I still remember with fondness the point in Blue Chairs where the protagonist realises that a t-shirt saying "127.0.0.1 There is no place like home" is not exactly cool.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous3 April 2006 at 04:56

    :)

    By the way, in case you care:

    My Comp04 Reviews...

    I had fun writing these. Alas, I didn't get through playing even half of Comp05. Pity...

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Keeping the narrative pressure on

-
I played another session of Trollbabe yesterday, and I would like to take the opportunity to write a little bit about GMing this game (and similar narrativist games). This is not a worked out manifesto so much as an attempt to think through an approach that I've been taking more or less instinctively. First, some context. This game was online, with two people I had never played with before: Judith and Katy. Actually, it's not quite true that I never played with Judith. I've known her for some 38 years, and possibly the first roleplaying I was ever engaged in was on a vacation with her family and my family. She acted as a kind of story guide, and I and her brother Adriaan played characters in an unfolding short story. I was thrilled by the possibilities inherent in such an activity, but it would take more time before I really discovered the world of tabletop RPGs. Both Judith and Katy played a bunch of roleplaying games before, though as far as I can judge they were all fai...
Read more

Walter Benjamin, "Der Erzähler" (The Storyteller)

-
In the comments to my last post, Ian mentioned an essay by Walter Benjamin , Der Erzähler ( The Storyteller ). Benjamin was an important German philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century; he wrote on a wide range of topics, but his best-known work is probably his essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (it is widely cited as The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction , but The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility would have been a better translation). Der Erzähler is a very rich and complex essay. It claims to be a reflection on the work of Nikolai Lesskow (in English known as Leskov, I believe); but it also touches on the difference beween a story (in the sense that a storyteller tells stories; Erzählung , not Geschichte ) and a novel, on the communicability of experience, on the role of death in modern life, on the nature of wisdom, on the relation between man and nature, and on several other topics. All...
Read more

Thoughts on a Trollbabe session

-
Yesterday, I played a second session of Trollbabe with Erik and Michiel, even more delightful than the first. ( Trollbabe . I dislike the title of the game, to be frank, but it's the only thing about it to dislike. Let me stress that the whole point of the game is that you're playing strong, independent women. With horns.) To give you an impression of the context, let me say that both Erik and Michiel are very good friends of mine, and that we've done a fair amount of roleplaying before, though mostly D&D. In fact, the two of them have played various editions of D&D almost exclusively, and neither had any previous GMing experience. That was about to change. In the first session, I GMed their characters Rolda (Michiel) and Vekir (Erik), who were together in a single adventure -- something that is not a given in Trollbabe . This time, we were going to do the same thing, but in addition I would also get to play a character, one adventuring at a different location. Mi...
Read more