IF Comp 2006

-
The annual Interactive Fiction comepetition has begun. You can download the games today, start playing and judge them. Your votes must be in by November the 15th.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

City of Secrets - Hints

-
PLEASE NOTE that this post is about Emily Short's 2003 interactive fiction game City of Secrets , NOT about Aidem Media's recent graphical adventure with the same title. I cannot help you with the latter. (But if you're stuck in that game and want to check out some interactive fiction instead, why not try the also animal-starring and family-friendly Lost Pig ? Once the application loads, type 'help' and read "How to play Interactive Fiction". It's a lot of fun.) I just finished Emily Short's City of Secrets , which is an impressive work. In fact, I am tempted to call it her best yet. Strangely enough, nobody has made a walkthrough for the game, even though there are a couple of points where you can get stuck.There are some hints on various places on the web (newsgroup postings, fora), but there's no central resource. So as a help to future players, I've decided to write down some solutions to potential problems here. If you get stuck i...
Read more

Sexism in the Realms

-
Being ill, I wanted to read an easy book this weekend. I chose R. A. Salvatore's The Dark Elf Trilogy , a set of Forgotten Realms novels describing the youth of that well-known D&D character, the good drow Drizzt Do'Urden. They were pretty bad, of course, but just the kind of light entertainment I was looking for. Except... There has been some discussion of sexism in roleplaying games on the internet, among which John Kim's interesting and shocking Gender Roles in RPG Texts . Although Salvatore's books are not roleplaying games, the fact that they are official TSR-published novels set in one of the most popular roleplaying settings in history makes them relevant to this discussion. And boy, these books are so sexist that I couldn't believe what I was reading. Not that Salvatore ever says anything like "women are inferior to men". I suspect that he is not even aware of his own sexism, and that - what is even worse - most of his readers never notice it....
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