The second round of Cover Stories is open, art submissions are closed, and the images are available for your perusal (many thanks Mark Musante for hosting them, and to everybody who contributed images).
( Read more... )

Reviews (with sketches!) of the two remaining games from Spring Thing 2012, The Rocket Man from the Sea and The White Bull

Reviews for Sleuth and The Egg and the Newbie.

Cover Stories is a low-speed-IF / game jam / unjudged-minicomp type event for works of interactive fiction. Its interests include having fun, making pretty pictures, beautifying the sterile halls of IFDB, collaboration, echidna-juggling and long walks along the beach. Artists submit images suitable for use as IF cover art, and then authors choose covers and make games to fit them. You can take part as an artist, a game author, or both.

Phase One is now open.
Artists can submit entries to magadog (usual thing here) gmail (obvious suffix). The deadline for submitting your art is Saturday, May 4. For you eleventh-hour desperadoes, this means whenever I wake up on Sunday.

( guidelines for participating artists )

It is a truth universally acknowledged that anything popular among children in the '80s will have been reinvented in the 2000s with snarking and loving attention. There have been a good number of cynical, heavily referential CYOAs-for-adults made since the early aughts (I'm hardly innocent on this count.) I'm going to cover two female-targeted relationshippy books and one male-targeted apocalyptic action-comedy.

People who grow up with a genre or medium before taking it up themselves will, inevitably, have rather different ideas about the strengths and uses of the form than the first generation of creators. It's also worth bearing in mind that, although all the books below adopt a catchy series title that identifies them as CYOA, none form part of an extensive series.
( Read more... )

Hunger Games movie: enh. It does very well at its central function, which is making Katniss look sturdy, outdoorsy and attractive, but at everything else — storytelling, worldbuilding, character development, character perspective, all the Capital costumes, action scenes, sexual tension, eliciting emotional response — everything's too compressed to work properly, and the compression is not done well. Possibly I'm just too old to properly appreciate super-choppy action cinematography.

In other lady-violence* news, we went to our first roller derby bout; the Rat City Rollergirls play within a couple of blocks of our place. We enjoyed it immensely, and will probably be making a regular event of it. The thing that struck me most, and this is probably because it's not very popular or professionalised, was how big the range of body types is among the best jammers.

* violence somewhat less than advertised, unless you count inappropriate puns as a form of violence

Also, damn, I miss this place. I should really try to get back to following it.

Unlike IF Comp, the XYZZYs do not usually give rise to an outpouring of reviews. This is understandable, given the differences in how the events work, but it still seems like an oversight; the XYZZY nominees are meant to be the best games of the whole year, after all, so it seems as if they should reward some closer consideration.

So this year we experimented with putting together a panel of reviewers to write category-focused reviews on the finalists. Although we didn't manage to cover every category this year, I think it's been a success; we have a giant pile of reviews from Marco Innocenti, Joey Jones, Jacqueline Lott, Iain Merrick, Marius Müller, Aaron Reed, Lucian P. Smith, J. Robinson Wheeler and yours truly. Many thanks to everybody who contributed to the effort; we hope that the results are useful and entertaining.

The XYZZY Awards, the Oscars of interactive fiction, are complete for this year. Congratulations to the winners!

Best Game: Cryptozookeeper, by Robb Sherwin
Best Writing: Cryptozookeper, by Robb Sherwin
Best Story: The Play, by Deirdra Kiai
Best Setting: Cryptozookeeper, by Robb Sherwin
Best Puzzles: PataNoir, by Simon Christiansen
Best NPCs: Cryptozookeeper, by Robb Sherwin
Best Individual Puzzle: the Hat Mystery, distributed across Cold Iron by Andrew Plotkin, Last Day of Summer by Doug Orleans, The Life (and Deaths) of Doctor M by Michael D. Hilborn, and Playing Games by Kevin Jackson-Mead
Best Individual NPC: Grimloft in Cryptozookeeper, by Robb Sherwin
Best Individual PC: Mentula Macanus in Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis by One of the Bruces and Drunken Bastard
Best Implementation: Six by Wade Clarke
Best Use of Innovation: Kerkerkruip by Victor Gijsbers
Best Technological Development: TADS 3.1
Best Supplemental Materials: PDF manuals and screencast tutorials for Kerkerkruip, by Victor Gijsbers
Special Recognition: Zombie Exodus by Jim Dattilo

There was a certain amount of drama with this year's Awards; as a consequence of this, we're looking for ways that the event can be improved. If you'd like to weigh in on the future of the Awards, you can do so in this intfiction.org thread.

The finalists for the annual XYZZY Awards have been announced, and the second and final round of voting is open. You can vote for the best interactive fiction of 2011 at this finely-crafted link, or see the full list of finalists here.

Voting is open in the first round of the XYZZY Awards, which honour the year's highest accomplishments in IF. In the first round, you can nominate (almost) any game released in 2011; the top four in each category will go through to the second round. The first round of voting will end on February 10.

The categories are Best Game, Writing, Story, Setting, Puzzles, NPCs, Individual Puzzle, Individual NPC, Individual PC, and the new-ish categories Implementation, Use of Innovation, Technological Development, and Supplemental Materials. You do not have to vote for every category, so please submit your votes even if they're incomplete.

It would be great to see discussion about the games you think should win. Some years back I did a set of thinking-out-loud XYZZY-oriented reviews for the second round, and found it a really valuable process; I would be super happy if people did similar things. I'd particularly encourage discussion of deserving games that were released outside the major comps and may not have received as much attention. Every year, people don't vote because they feel that they haven't played enough games to have a valid opinion. Anything you can do to help overcome that -- suggesting games that might be worth playing, talking about your choices -- is a Good Thing.

The list of games, compiled by the stalwart David Welbourn, is here. That list is as comprehensive as we could get it, but as IF continues to branch out into different corners of the web, it becomes ever more difficult to account for everything. If you know about any games that are missing, please tell us, point us to where we can find 'em, and we'll fix it as quickly as possible. (Releases that are not intended to be complete -- open betas, Introcomp entries -- don't count.)

Dicking around with Fitocracy. It is a strange thing; gamification with as little game as possible. As the ifMUD folks have chewed over at length, the idea of a game where you replace in-game grinding with real-life tasks is totally genius, but grinding for its own sake has (at least, for a significant set of players) a limited shelf life. In a fairly short time I'm going to be feeling the lack of content. Hopefully someone can cross-breed it with Echo Bazaar, which has awesome content but really wretched grinding requirements. But for now it's successfully motivating me.

Also, they really, really want you to do barbell exercises. (Our little apartment-complex gym has no barbells.)

*

One of the most useful concepts in cooking (props fairymelusine) is More X Than You Think You Need. In this case, how much liquid to drain off when making pizza sauce from fresh tomatoes.

*

I have somehow never done an Implicit Association Test before, although I've been aware of them for years. Apparently I run counter to their average responses in that I associate Native Americans with being less foreign than white Americans; have roughly equal attitudes to Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Islam; have no association between gender and the sciences/humanities split; and have slightly more positive associations with gay people than with straight. But I'm around the mode in having slightly negative associations with fat people and moderately negative associations with black people. (That last I'm not sure about; it's the most widely-reported IAT result, so I suspect, aheh, a degree of confirmation bias was involved. Certainly it's the one where you're most inclined to flub one item and then panic because OMG I'M RACIST and then flub a bunch more because of panicking, which is probably an accurate representation of the typical white experience of race.)

The Cave of Time was among the most beloved of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, but it wasn't enormously typical of the series. R.A. Montgomery (who I should look at separately at some point) in particular seems to have prefered more linear, constrained plots with lots of no-choice jumps. Part of this might have been the natural shape of divergence: Sugarcane Island and The Cave of Time are such strong examples of their type of CYOA that there wasn't much room for variation in that direction. Still, the company seems to have developed and abided by a structural house style, as it did with tone, content and motifs like the Cave.
( Read more... )

Earlier this year I played Cryptozookeeper, Robb Sherwin's epic tale of ill-mannered losers, evil aliens and rambunctious homebrew biotech. Shortly thereafter I had a great many Excited Critical Thoughts about it: it is, by a creditable margin, the most rich, weird, ambitious game Robb has done to date, and it ain't like the guy has a scanty portfolio. I started writing up stuff about it, and I noticed that weak-ass constructions like 'the intent here might plausibly be something like' kept creeping in.

And I thought, we are not exactly talking Philip K. Dick here, I have had beers in the same general group as this guy and also it is well-known that despite the leather jacket and the edgy alternative community and the cult-like dedication to grody colours-on-black colour schemes he is basically the sweetest guy in IF and would in no way nut yer soon as look at yer. So it seemed kind of chickenshit to be all 'presumably Sherwin's motivation' about things when I could just ask the guy. So! Long story short: interview. Plenty spoilers.
( Read more... )

Beet the Devil. Keepsake. The Guardian. Ted Paladin and the Case of the Abandoned House. The Hours. Cursed.The Play.

And finally, a summary and overview.

Well, I'm all done with games, my votes are in, and results will be out in about a week.

( spoilage for pretty much everything )

Professor Frank. Dead Hotel. Return to Camelot. Andromeda Awakening. Cana According to Micah.

Fundamentals of Rock-Climbing at REI. Basically an extended belay class plus one Pinnacle climb. (Yes, I'm aware of the irony of taking a belay class at a location that won't let you belay.) Now feeling awesome.

Somewhat distracting: one of the instructors was a dead ringer for Anya from Buffy. Particularly if you account for Not Actually Hollywood. Hair, face, facial mannerisms, voice. I'd bet money that it was intentional.

Also, you do things on-rope that you would never, ever try without one, and this is pretty weird. I do not have a problem with heights, per se, but from scrambles on hikes and bouldering as a kid I have a fairly good sense of what is sane and what isn't, and climbing on a belay rope requires you to violate that all the time. So, not fear exactly, but a disconcerting feeling that things weren't being done quite as they should be.

So the next step is finding a climbing buddy and a good, bus-accessible wall before I forget all this stuff again. One of these things is harder than the other.

Portishead: portisheady. Which is to say, excellent but not in a they're-so-damn-awesome-live kind of way. More, yep, that's Portishead all right.

Best fan moment of evening: in a brief lull between lusty howls of "BEEETH", "I LOVE YOU BETH" and "BETH YOU'RE AMAZING", deadpan utterance of "I like the whole band". Others: howl in a more decorous fashion, do not side-boob as a contact sport, do not sing along tunelessly and slightly off, and get off my lawn.

Vestiges. The Binary. Last Day of Summer. Awake the Mighty Dread. Playing Games. Operation Extraction.

Six. The Death of Schlig. The Life (and Deaths) of Dr. M. Fan Interference. Tenth Plague.

It. Blind. PataNoir. Kerkerkruip. Calm.

How Suzy Got Her Powers. The Elfen Maiden. The Sentencing of Mr. Lidell. Cold Iron. Ship of Whimsy.