Planet Interactive Fiction

Dear Mr. Montfort,

I do not want to cause offense, merely offer a suggestion: would you
consider removing the parts of your blog that clearly do not deal with
interactive fiction from “Planet IF” (http://www.planet-if.com)?

While I am not saying that your posts are not intersting or that the term
“interactive fiction” should only apply to text adventure games in the
narrow sense (and while I appreciate the articles on Game Design and other
forms of interactive fiction that appear on Planet IF), the sheer volume of
your blog posts, along with “Grand Text Auto”, sometimes tends to drown out
anything else.

…

In today’s society, we rely heavily on technology to keep us connected, organized, and entertained.  Yet, how does technology work in the field of the arts? Some find it utterly disturbing and detrimental to the essence of artistry, while others see it as an exciting new tool that unlocks another world of possibilities.  So this leaves us with the question, is technology in the art world our friend? Or is it our foe?

Instead of thinking of technology as something that is trying to replace traditional forms and media, we should think of technology as a means of creating artwork that could not have been created before.  Now, our imagination has yet another outlet that has rarely been explored in comparison to art forms such as painting, sculpture, and drawing. George Whale argues in his Why Use Computers to Make Drawings that technology is a media that we can learn from and ultimately use as a full collaborator to our artistic endeavors.  This concept of learning about methods of art is one that I had never thought about before, yet I can understand how this might occur.  If I were to use technology to create a more traditional piece of art (with minimal interactivity and participation), I would need to fully comprehend various aspects about aesthetics that are also used when creating something by hand.  For example, if I wanted to code something in Processing that realistically resembled an aerial view of a tree in the foreground and a mountain in the background, I would need to apply the same principles that I apply to a painting.

1) The tree should be a lighter shade to create a sense of depth

2) Certain parts of the tree should be the lightest, indicating more dimension

3) The tree and mountain should be at certain angles to depict an aerial view

 

 

These are all concepts that I would consider when creating certain artwork by hand and thus, using technology to create other works could also be a learning process for different facets of aesthetics.   One artist by the name of Harold Cohen, created a robot named AARON in which he explored the drawing process and learned more about this process from creating the code for AARON.  Cohen explains his journey with AARON and the beauty of his creation in The Further Exploits of AARON.

In today’s society, we rely heavily on technology to keep us connected, organized, and entertained.  Yet, how does technology work in the field of the arts? Some find it utterly disturbing and detrimental to the essence of artistry, while others see it as an exciting new tool that unlocks another world of possibilities.  So this leaves us with the question, is technology in the art world our friend? Or is it our foe?

Instead of thinking of technology as replacing traditional forms of media, we should think of technology as a means of creating artwork that could not have been created before.  Now, our imagination has yet another outlet that has rarely been explored in comparison to art forms such as painting, sculpture, and drawing. George Whale argues in his Why Use Computers to Make Drawings that technology is a media that we can learn from and ultimately use as a full collaborator to our artistic endeavors.  This concept of learning about methods of art is one that I had never thought about before, yet I can understand how this might occur.  If I were to use technology to create a more traditional piece of art (with minimal interactivity and participation), I would need to fully comprehend various aspects about aesthetics that are also used when creating something by hand.  For example, if I wanted to code something in Processing that realistically resembled an aerial view of a tree in the foreground and a mountain in the background, I would need to apply the same principles that I apply to a painting.

 

1. The tree in the foreground should be a lighter shade than the mountain to create a sense of depth
2. Certain parts of the tree should be the lightest to indicate even more dimension
3. The tree and mountain should be at certain angles to depict an aerial view

 

These are all concepts that I would consider when creating certain artwork by hand and thus, using technology to create other works could also be a learning process for different facets of aesthetics.   One artist by the name of Harold Cohen, created a robot named AARON in which he explored the drawing process and learned more about this process from creating the code for AARON.  Cohen explains his journey with AARON and the beauty of his creation in The Further Exploits of AARON.

 

Yet, with these technological advances, are people losing their appreciation for more traditional artwork?  In my mind, it appears that people see paintings that depict real life (with so much precision and detail that they look like photographs!) and they breeze by them without a second look.  To me, something like Jan Davidsz. De Heem’s Still Life with Grapes is absolutely breath-taking, not only because of the beauty of the objects themselves, but because of the time and care it must have taken to produce a work of this kind.

 

When you look very closely, you notice the little insects swarming around in the entire painting.  It’s absolutely stunning! Although a work like this is centuries old, if one were to be made in today’s society, I fear no one would really care, suggesting a “been there, done that” attitude.   While I do agree that new media art is exciting and innovative, I hope that people can still appreciate works like De Heem’s because it takes just as much talent, patience, and skill to create a work like Still Life with Grapes as it does to create a work like AARON.

Our next meeting is planned for Sunday, January 29th @ 3:30, at the UW Health Sciences Building, I Wing Rotunda (directions). We may discuss The House of Fear.

I’m excited to announce that The King of Shreds and Patches is now available for purchase at Amazon in a version for the Kindle Touch as well as the Kindle Keyboard. Adapting the app to work on the small screen with the onscreen keyboard was a challenge, but we’ve arrived at last at something that both I and Amazon agree works really smoothly. If you have a Touch, I hope you’ll consider giving it a try. As always, your reviews and feedback are hugely appreciated — as are tweets, blog entries, etc., to help get the word out.

An Android version is also in the works. As shown by the picture, the game does run and is playable on the Kindle Fire and other Android tablets and phones. However, I still have quite a bit of work ahead of me to make it into a polished, bulletproof app. I hate to give myself deadlines, but with a bit of luck it may be available in the Amazon app store as well as the Barnes and Noble Nook store and of course the general Android store within a few months. Maybe.

I still get lots of questions about my future plans — which do actually involve more than releasing the same game on platform after platform. This seems as good a time and place as any to give some public answers. In fact, said answers are probably long overdue. So, if you’ll forgive my having a conversation with a straw man, let me first give some answers to some common queries.

How well is King doing on the Kindle?

Thanks largely to you guys who tweeted and blogged and got the word out, we had a pretty strong launch. Since then sales have inevitably tapered off, but the game still sells a little bit pretty much every day, and brings in a little extra money each month. All in all, I judge it a modest success. Hopefully as it appears on new platforms and as other games appear to join it (see below), we can really start to build something.

I understand that you have created an engine that can run Glulx games on the Kindle. When will you release that engine and (preferably) source to the public?

Not any time soon, I’m afraid. First of all, it wouldn’t do most of you all that much good. The only way to use this engine is by registering with Amazon as an official Kindle app developer, something that is not automatic, that takes some time even if you are eventually approved, and that as I understand it now involves a registration fee (I registered very early as a “beta” developer, at which time the fee was being waived). You will then be allowed to register a limited number of Kindles as development devices, which will be capable of running code signed by you only. In other words, there is no way for you to take my code and simply copy it onto a Kindle and run it. The Kindle app universe is, for better or for worse, very much a walled garden.

Secondly, I’ve spent a lot of time and labor developing these engines, and to justify that I really need to see something come back. If anyone wants to jump into what I’m going to optimistically label an emerging market, you’re welcome to do so. I just can’t justify handing you all my hard work. I’ve given and continue to give a lot to interactive fiction and its community; I hope I’ve earned the right to get a little bit back here. Please understand that this does not mean I want to horde the Kindle market for myself and my one game. See below for my grand vision of the future, which I like to think could benefit everyone who cares about IF.

When will you release a (commercial or free) standalone interpreter for IF on the Kindle?

Again, this isn’t going to happen. While it’s true that I do have a working Kindle Glulx interpreter, that wasn’t really the hard part of this project; the Glulx VM is pretty simple really, and by now I’ve worked with it enough that creating one for Java was pretty quick and straightforward. The challenge has been adapting IF to the very different interface paradigm of an e-reader. That requires considerable modifications to the story file, to add new GLK function calls that do things like define page and chapter breaks, to support a radically different approach to saving and undoing, and to tweak performance in places where Inform 7 is still inefficient. Creating the overall look and feel of The King of Shreds and Patches on the Kindle, which I’m gratified to say just about everyone has praised, required much, much more than just dropping a story file into an interpreter.

The next problem is that any theoretical interpreter would need to be approved by Amazon. They curate the Kindle app store very closely, looking not just for outright malware or broken programs but also deciding individually for each app whether it’s a good “fit” for the Kindle. They aren’t interested in an app that lets you run other games — that’s getting quite far afield from the Kindle philosophy of being an easy-to-use, simple device for everyday people, in addition to scaring the hell out of their legal department. (We all may know that story files cannot break out of their interpreters to do harm to the machines on which they run, but they don’t.)

To be frank, I’m not that interested in the idea either. One problem contemporary IF has is the old wheat-from-the-chaff dilemma. I would like to make the Kindle a place where only really first-class stories appear, stories that are polished and professional and worth spending a little bit of money on. Anyway, those who are technical enough to want a generic Kindle IF interpreter are probably also technical enough to jailbreak their Kindles and install one for themselves. If you want something that looks more polished than that… well, there’s really no way to give you that and also give it to you as a standalone interpreter.

What about the new base Kindle model?

All indications are that this thing is selling like crazy, but there’s just no way to make a parser-driven game tolerable on it. The only way to enter text is by laboriously selecting each letter from a menu using the five-way controller. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to play that way for hundreds or thousands of turns.

What about Europe?

I feel your pain, Mr. European Straw Man. I really do — especially because all the queries I’ve gotten must add up to quite a few sales I’m not making. Unfortunately, it’s entirely up to Amazon when and if they open up their non-U.S. Kindle stores to apps. Once the Android version is out, Europeans and others will at least be able to purchase the game in that version.

Will you release versions for the iOS devices?

The thing is, I’m just not an Apple guy. I don’t own the Macintosh system one needs to develop for those devices, nor do I own the devices themselves, nor am I excited about having to learn a new programming language and start over from scratch to develop for them. I’ve developed a good relationship with Amazon, and — even as I recognize what a huge market the Apple devices are — will be looking to build on the Kindle and Android platforms only for the foreseeable future. If someone experienced with iOS development were to express interest in developing a version of my engine for those devices, I’d certainly be ready to listen. Left to my own devices (pun intended), however, I don’t foresee taking on yet more huge programming challenges and big additional hardware expenses.

So, having told you what I’m not going to do, let me tell you a little bit of what my plans are in the short, medium, and long term.

In the short term, my immediate goal is obviously to get the Android version of The King of Shreds and Patches finished and into (at a minimum) Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and the Google Android store.

In the medium term, I want to publish other games from other authors on these platforms using these engines. I spent much of the latter part of last year developing extensions and tools to make that as painless as possible. It’s not quite a matter of “drop this extension into your Inform 7 source and you’re done,” and it never will be, but I’ve gone a long way toward building a very systemitized approach. Once I have solid engines on all three platforms (already have two out of three, of course), I’ll begin reaching out to some other authors whose games I think can work on these platforms and with these audiences. It’s not inconceivable that, authors willing, we could release half a dozen more games before the end of the year. (He says, knowing he’s likely to regret it round about December 31, 2012.)

Here’s a very optimistic vision of what could happen. The great IF community and the competitions could continue to run as they always have, with the additional incentive that those who author really great, really polished games will have the opportunity to get them published on the Kindle and Android devices. This would win them a whole lot more exposure, and would of course also give them the opportunity to earn some money back. I’m not sure anyone will be able to quit her day job, but you might just earn enough to take the spouse / significant other / family on a nice little vacation to pay them back for putting up with all those long evenings you spent alone in front of the computer rather than with them. Maybe such an incentive could lead to more games and better games, things the community could dearly use. In this vision the current IF community loses nothing. The hardcore will still have games to play, for free if they like, and all of the support and technical know-how will be as freely shared as ever. It’s just that now the community serves as a feeder system for a (hopefully) bigger market of more casual players who are just interested in playing a fun/interesting game/story now and then rather than discussing craft, beta testing (willingly or unwillingly), or trying to get through 40 or more games in six weeks for this competition thing — much less actually trying to write games themselves. Authors would retain the rights to their games on other platforms, meaning that if someone else wanted to publish them on (for instance) those Apple platforms I’m neglecting, they could feel free.

If you are interested in writing a game that can work in these markets, I’ll give you some guidelines. All of my tools are currently oriented toward Inform 7, so it’s definitely best to work in that language rather than Inform 6. (And TADS, much as I hate to say it about a very worthy system, is currently a complete nonstarter.) You also should plan to target Glulx rather than the Z-Machine. Your options for multimedia are, shall we say, very limited. You can display an occasional picture in-line with the text; in fact, that’s desirable. Not too many, though, because pictures add to the download size, using bandwidth Amazon will make us pay for out of the sales proceeds. Sound is a nonstarter for now, as are additional windows or really anything beyond the very traditional status line / text window approach that’s been with us since Zork. The screens we’re working with are just too small to get fancy here.

As far as design goes, puzzles are acceptable and, indeed, desirable, but they need to be fair puzzles. You will also need a hint system, preferably something context-sensitive like that in King. You can include a map with the app, but don’t use that as a license to create an overly convoluted geography. The game obviously needs to be very polished and well-written, and it needs to foreground a strong, interesting story with some forward drive. Genre works are great and in fact preferred, but nothing too geek-centric or esoteric. This is also probably not the market for formal experimentation or for getting too “literary,” at least right now. If interactive fiction can start to build an identity on these devices, this may change, but for right now the reality is that we’re competing against the likes of Final Fantasy gamebook adaptations. Hopefully we can do a bit better than them in the writing sweepstakes, but still, I’m looking more for solid genre novels than deep works of unfathomable beauty — Stephen King and Robert Heinlein rather than James Joyce and Umberto Eco.

In the long term, I think that the new generation of touchscreen devices offer some really interesting opportunities to get away from the parser at last without having to settle for Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style menus. I even think that (again, in the long term) this is the real path forward for IF. I’m excited by all of the experiments that have been taking place lately with alternative interface paradigms, and have some ideas of my own brewing. I’d love to bring some of these ideas together and build or help to build a next-generation IF system designed with touchscreens in mind (but still very usable with conventional GUIs). But that is of course another big, daunting technical challenge.

And, truly looking through the fat end of the telescope, I want to write another game, hopefully using that next-generation interface. Doing that, however, is kind of dependent on everything above happening first. Too bad, because I’m itching to start…

Another opportunity to discuss Interactive Fiction with teachers, educators and education types was grasped with both hands, as I meet up again with iO’s Andy Goff. Together with Alex Warren and Tom Cole (@ehesynapseuk), we gave a three part introduction to Interaction Fiction.

Headlining with ‘What is IF? Why educators should take note?‘ I covered the big picture. Tom Cole demoed his fantastic IF for Science game through an incredibly simple Prezi. Tom neatly, and visually, exampled how game design knowledge could be applied to a four room IF game, where the player could only ‘win’ if they applied their KS3 Science knowledge. Complete with guard dog and talking hamster it presented a strong case both Science and creative writing. Alex wrapped it up with an actual Quest demo, then the current web, iOS and Android opportunities before finishing up with a glimpse of what the future of Quest might look it. Feedback was very promising with interest from Honda, the BBC World Learning Service, Edexcel (Quest for assessment) and a handful of interested teachers. All in all a very positive event for IF.

I am hoping to introduce IF to the teachers of Wolverhampton, so if you are interested and are in the area, let me know.

The rest of my time was spent looking at the exhibits, dropping into sessions, and the afternoon’s Keynotes. A worthwhile day for sure. This morning, my students will be shoeless in English. We will see how that goes.

For the record, Tom is a teacher and MA Games Design student.

I have just finished sending out the Windows installer to those who volunteered to play test Eamon Deluxe 5.0. If you were on my list, please check your email for a message from Eamon Deluxe that has the installer attached. If you were on my list and did not get a copy by now, please email me and I will send another. I currently have 20 play testers and have room for 10 more, if anyone is interested in trying out the last 10 Beta copies, send an email to eamondeluxe ( at ) gmail.com

Next Tuesday, January 31st, new media curator and digital art scholar Christiane Paul will be speaking in Loew Theater at 4:30pm. She will be presenting a talk titled “Feedback: Histories of New Media Art,” sponsored by the Digital Humanities Initiative and the Department of Studio Art.

Christiane Paul is the Director of the Media Studies Graduate Programs and Associate Professor of Media Studies at The New School as well as the Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has written extensively on new media art and technology with publications like Digital Art and New Media in the White Cube and Beyond. At the Whitney Museum, she has curated shows like ”Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools” (May 2011), “Profiling” (2007), and “Data Dynamics” (2001), and the net art selection for the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

We’re so excited- hope to see you there!

Imagine that you could make a person suffer, and no one would ever know. Would you do so? Were you to pose that question in person, few if any would claim to exercise such a power. But wipe away any identifying factors, and give the respondent total anonymity—how will they respond?

As demonstrated by Wafaa Bilal’s 2007 piece Domestic Tension, the internet and anonymity evinces a more visceral response from its audience than a live performance, independent of the social norms and pressures that typically hinder our most primal desires. In this piece, Bilal accomplishes this by inviting the internet audience into his home. Bilal’s website explains that Domestic Tension allows viewers to “log onto the internet [and] contact or ‘shoot’ Bilal with paintball guns” while he is confined to the gallery space, subsisting on whatever food or drinks were donated. Bilal intended Domestic Tension to protest the suffering borne by Iraqis throughout their daily lives, subject to constant monitoring and at perpetual risk from violence. However, the piece also serves as a chilling social experiment. By providing the web with 24-hour access to his life and the power to make him suffer, Bilal makes evident the cruelty that anonymity can bring out in otherwise normal individuals. In fact, within twenty days over 40,000 paintballs had been fired at Bilal, and over 60,000 individuals had fired at him in total by the end. This was countered by a kinder movement of individuals who would wrest control of the gun from the cruel, even taking watches to protect a complete stranger.

This evidences the true power of the interaction between new media art and the internet. Since the internet vastly increases the potential audience of any performance at a negligible cost, messages such as Bilal’s can be easily spread. Not only were these 60,000 participants / audience members made aware of Bilal’s message, but they were also witnesses to the conditions Bilal protested. In other words, the integration of the web has created a new medium for artistic expression that reaches an exponentially larger audience than a mere play. Furthermore, Bilal’s piece itself communicates with us on a far more primal level: it is real, and it is the epitome of the age-old adage of “showing not telling.”

Domestic Tension also serves as a powerful social experiment reminiscent of Stanley Milgram’s obedience to authority experiments as well as the murder of Kitty Genovese. Milgram’s experiments demonstrate our capacity to do despicable things under the right circumstances. Meanwhile, Kitty Genovese’s story illustrates the Bystander Effect, whereby the crowd diffuses responsibility since each individual feels more anonymous. These two factors combine in Bilal’s piece: afforded freedom from liability due to anonymity, thousands of people did not hesitate to shoot at Bilal. Some even wrote scripts to subject him, a total stranger, to a hail of paintballs. Given the right circumstances—the opportunity and freedom from liability—they could not control themselves.

This poses a number of troubling questions. Are we truly the civilized people we fancy ourselves, governed by higher humanistic ideals, or are baser motivations such as self-preservation and social conditioning the only things keeping us in check? If we find ourselves outraged by this cruelty, as Bilal’s internet protectors clearly felt, why are we not equally outraged about larger-scale cruelties across the world, in war zones such as Iraq or third world countries?

How can art be used to raise awareness of problems in society?  There are many methods artists can pursue to address social issues, but for Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung, the answer lies in animation and digital collages.

 

 

Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung is a new media artist who specializes in creating digital collages that combines historical and popular culture references with images relating to current events in order to depict contemporary societal problems. In fact, Mary Flanagan, my professor for New Media Theories and Practices at Dartmouth College, explained that “recreating and remixing an old master artist’s artwork is a common theme in art history and contemporary art.” According to Hung, his main purpose in creating digital collages is to “explore the nature of digital communication while touching on issues such as identity, politics, sexuality and power,” as stated on his personal website. One example of Hung’s work, titled “The Fast Supper” is shown here:

 

 

In this piece, Hung satirizes the famous “Last Supper” painting by Leonardo da Vinci, which depicts Jesus Christ and his twelve disciples having their last supper before his crucifixion. Hung’s digital collage depicts Jesus consuming large amounts of fast food and unhealthy snacks, growing more and more obese until he overinflates and explodes. In the background, the epic orchestra song of Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi plays as Jesus wolfs down his food.

 

 

Obviously, this parody may be very offensive to those who feel great reverence for the Christian religion, but that controversial nature is one of the most effective aspects of the work. By choosing to satirize such a revered and sacred event, Hung is attempting to emphasize the equality in magnitude of the dire situation American society faces regarding obesity—one third of Americans are categorized as “obese”. Christianity is the most popular religion in America, practiced by over 78% of the theist population. In this piece, Hung parallels the pervasiveness of Christianity in our everyday lives with the ubiquitous nature of fast food in contemporary American society. Jesus Christ in this digital artwork can be interpreted as the representative of the United States itself, since the logos of famous fast food chains have been replaced by Christian symbols: KFC is replaced with JFC, presumably meaning “Jesus Fried Chicken”; Coca-Cola is replaced with “Jesus Christ”; and the McDonald’s French fries container has a cross on it. These examples of modern-day fast food reflect the “proliferation of imagery in a media society,” as proposed by Christiane Paul, the author of Digital Art. The reason these examples of fast food are so intuitive to us is that with the massive advertising campaigns large food corporations such as McDonald’s, KFC, and Coca-Cola run, the images of their products have made the “transition from mere representation to branding, in which [the images] are inscribed with a concept or value” (Paul). Hung is suggesting that our present culture is so dependent upon industrialized and artificially created fast food that we almost treat our penchant for consuming these products as an official way of life, a religion. Using the explosion of Jesus Christ at the end of the animated clip, Hung is attempting to warn Americans that unless we change our eating habits and stop our dependency on fat, greasy foods, we will generate health problems of enormous proportions as a population and cause America’s demise.

The way in which Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung combines the use of a collage, animation, and music to create “The Fast Supper” epitomizes the flexibility of digital media in allowing artists to aggregate different sources of technology to create works of art. The animated collage by itself would only be effective to a certain extent; however, with the combination of music, which creates a sense of urgency and impending doom, the audience is able to better appreciate the gravity of the obesity situation in America. One of the major merits of this piece of work is that it is available to anyone around the world with Internet access. “The Fast Supper” can be found on YouTube, via a link from Hung’s personal site. This ease of access makes “The Fast Supper” a superior means of conveying messages about society compared to any other methods. Also, in regards to audience exposure and costs, digital media is far more effective than traditional approaches of spreading social awareness through making speeches or running advertising campaigns—once the work is posted online, potentially hundreds of millions of viewers have access to it, and it costs nothing to post the work via video hosting sites such as YouTube. Hence, in this day and age, the fusion of digital media and art proves to be a highly effective tool to convey messages raising social awareness. Art is an increasingly popular tool to promote social or political causes, serving more than just as an aesthetic pleasure.

 

References:

http://fitmodelunion.com/malemodels/kenneth/

http://www.mos.org/leonardo/bio.html

http://www.tinkin.com/about/

http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html

http://religions.pewforum.org/reports

http://www.paintinghere.com/painting/original_picture_of_the_last_supper_3291.html

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/collage

http://www.ucpress.edu/content/chapters/10362.ch01.pdf

http://www.thamesandhudson.com/9780500203989.html

Paul, Christiane. Digital Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003.

Flanagan, Mary

 

 

Eamon Deluxe 5.0 Beta status:

For those who are waiting to play test the beta version of Eamon Deluxe 5.0, it is roughly 98% ready to send out. I'm only about a month late for when I wanted it to be ready which isn't bad in the programming world and [fingers crossed] hoping to maybe even send it out tonight, so be sure to check your inboxes. Thanks again to the play testers, and yes, I still have openings if anybody else is interested. Just email me with your preferred OS info.
-Frank

Classic Eamon -> Eamon Deluxe converted adventures chart:

The most frequent questions I have been asked over the years all tend to involve "missing" adventures. Well, I actually got around to counting the number of Eamon adventures that have been converted to EDX for the first time ever and compiled a little chart (which I hope makes sense) and even I was impressed with the sheer volume. I think in a few more years ALL Classic Eamon adventures will have been converted. Note that I haven't really gotten the hang of text formatting on this blog right yet so the text wraps around in unwanted places which I am choosing to ignore. :-)

Eamon Deluxe Adventure Conversion Chart
Update: 25 JAN 2012

Adventure type codes:
EAG = Eamon Guild Numbered Official Eamons (Apple II only)
C&P = CLONES/PORTS/MISC (Unnumbered, Softdisk, Swordthrust, PC, Atari, etc.)
EDX = Eamon Deluxe Original Adventures

Format for conversion list:
Eamon Deluxe Adventure #/Total number of adventures in set
/(Conversion Notes (+)=converted, (-)=awaiting conversion), tech notes)

01: 06/00/01 = 07 (+06 EAG, +01 EDX)
02: 09/07/00 = 16 (+09 EAG, -07 C&P:SwordThrust)
03: 05/00/00 = 05 (+05 EAG with 50% New EDX-original Material Integrated)
04: 20/00/00 = 20 (+20 EAG technically the last 2 were EDX Originals First)
05: 05/01/00 = 06 (+02 EAG, -03 EAG, -01 C&P:Unnumbered)
06: 04/00/00 = 04 (+00 EAG, -04 EAG missing)
07: 03/01/00 = 04 (+03 EAG, +01 C&P:Softdisk)
08: 09/00/00 = 09 (+09 EAG)
09: 15/03/00 = 18 (+05 EAG, -10 EAG, +03 C&P:SoftDisk)
10: 07/00/00 = 07 (+07 EAG)
11: 19/00/00 = 19 (+19 EAG)
12: 15/00/00 = 15 (+02 EAG, -13 EAG)
13: 21/00/00 = 21 (+21 EAG)
14: 21/00/00 = 21 (+21 EAG)
15: 20/00/00 = 20 (+04 EAG, -16 EAG)
16: 20/00/00 = 20 (+00 EAG, -20 EAG missing)
17: 20/00/00 = 20 (+00 EAG, -20 EAG missing)
18: 14/00/00 = 14 (+10 EAG, -04 EAG missing)
19: 21/00/00 = 21 (+21 EAG)
20: 00/00/01 = 01 (+01 EDX)
21: 00/00/01 = 01 (+01 EDX)
22: 00/00/01 = 01 (+01 EDX)
23: 00/04/00 = 04 (+01 C&P, -03 C&P:Atari & unnumbered)

Total: 254/15/04 = 274
Converted: 164/05/04 = 173
-----------------------------
Conversions left: 090/10/00 = 101

(Conversions currently in progress: 05/01/00 = 06, leaving only 95 left to convert)

So there you go. 173 fully converted/EDX original, 6 in progress and 95 left to go.




Eamon Deluxe Updated Adventure List:

This is my most recent list which shows the current Eamon Deluxe Library (including "missing" chapters in their proper placement):

;(Lists updated: 25 JAN 2012)

LIST 1: EAMON DELUXE ADVENTURE LIST

Adventure # Eamon Deluxe Classic Adventure Conversion Sets
-------------------------------------------------------------
00 Eamon Deluxe 5.0 System Environment
01 Beginner's Adventures
02 The Donald Brown Adventures
03 The Jim Jacobson Adventures Deluxe
04 The John Nelson Adventures
05 The Tom Zuchowski Adventures
06 The Pat Hurst Adventures
07 The Frank Kunze Adventures
08 The Nathan Segerlind Adventures
09 The Sam Ruby Adventures
10 The Roger Pender Adventures
11 The Robert Parker Adventures
12 Best of the Classic Adventures
13 Classic Eamon Adventures, Vol. 1
14 Classic Eamon Adventures, Vol. 2
15 Classic Eamon Adventures, Vol. 3
16 Classic Eamon Adventures, Vol. 4
17 Classic Eamon Adventures, Vol. 5
18 Classic Eamon Adventures, Vol. 6
19 Worst of the Classic Adventures

Adventure # Eamon Deluxe Original Adventures
-------------------------------------------------------------
20 Journey across the Muerte Sea
21 Realm of Fantasy
22 A Runcible Cargo
23 The Lost Treasures of Eamon

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Radical Books of 2011, 10/10

Big Questions, Anders Nilsen, Drawn & Quarterly, 9781770460478

Anders Nilsen has done exquisite sequential art, a.k.a. comix. I’m particularly fond of the trembling outlines and barely-representational figures in The End. The trade book of Big Questions is more conventional in style, but it binds 658 pages and 15 volumes of Nilsen’s work together in an extended, amazing story. In it, birds speak, but aren’t very smart. They devise their own ideas about a piece of unexploded ordnance, for instance, imagining it as an egg. An elderly woman dies in a plane crash; the idiot man-boy she has been caring for survives, as does the pilot. He also doesn’t seem too smart. The drawing style, which passes for simple at times but is nicely composed and filled with rich details, keys into the story, an animal tale that passes beyond childish simplicity. There are none of the mainstream superheros and no hint of the indie comics memoir in these ten years of work by a master of this art. Comic readers should love it; radical readers who wish to try out comics should try it.

Jon Ingold of inkle has released a new game, called A Colder Light, that I recommend highly as a short, satisfying quest with a fun central mechanic.

A Colder Light is also a descendant of the hyperlink-only web interface that was elaborated in prototypes here, here, and here. I beta-tested the game and I think that, in addition to being a good game, it provides anice sense of how a parser-based game with a hyperlink UI can differ from a CYOA-style game with a hyperlink UI.

A Colder Light

The last light has gone. The stars are coming out in the black sea above. Many are hidden by ice-fingered winds. My father is still not returned and the fire is almost gone.

But this is how life is: always an edge. A thin sheet on a diving-deep pool.

I hope he will return soon. I cannot summon him.

A Colder Light is now available to play online.

A Colder Light is my first released game since 2009′s Make It Good and The Shadow in the Cathedral. This one is considerably shorter and easier than both of those. It’s also my first text adventure to use no keyboard input. It’s a short tale of magic, courage, animism and ice.

No save is implemented, although the game is short enough that you shouldn’t need it.

The game doesn’t work nicely on phones, but should play okay and runs dog-slow on an iPad.

Comments in the comments, and bugs to the address in the help text, if you please!

Silas Warner was born in Chicago on August 18, 1949, the first and only child of Forrest and Ann Warner. Their family situation was fraught, with Ann and Silas allegedly suffering physically and mentally at the hands of Forrest. Although they couldn’t prove it, it’s a measure of how bad the situation was that both believed that Forrest attempted to kill them by tampering with the brakes on Ann’s car when Silas was 5. Shortly after, they fled Chicago to return to Ann’s home town of Bloomington, Indiana. With the support of her family, Ann earned a degree in education from Indiana University and began teaching. Silas never had any personal contact with his father for the rest of his life.

Ann never remarried, but rather built her emotional world around Silas. She could happily talk for hours about her son, whom she devoutly believed was “special,” destined for great things. As evidence, she claimed that he had already begun reading at the age of two. Later she would brag about his alleged perfect score on his SAT test, or his scholarship offers. She encouraged him to immerse himself in books and intellectual pursuits even as he physically grew up to be a veritable giant, almost seven feet in height and well over 300 pounds in weight. The portrait that emerges on a site offering reminiscences is of an intellectually prodigious and essentially good-hearted but — to put it mildly — socially challenged person. He often struck others as just a little bit sad. A cousin writes about playing on visits with the elaborate train set he’d constructed, but also says that “it was really hard to talk to him. He didn’t seem to know how to carry on a conversation or even really how to ‘play.’ I have to say I just felt sorry for him.” His mother didn’t help the situation by actively discouraging him from having much contact with even his cousins, whom she judged “not up to his caliber of intelligence.” With his social ineptitude, his weight, and the clothes that Ann made for him because she couldn’t purchase any big enough, Silas had a predictably rough time of it in high school. Even a flirtation with football only left him with an injury that would bother him for the rest of his life. On the other hand, his size was intimidating, and he could display a vicious temper when sufficiently roused; he knocked at least one bully unconscious.

Silas entered Indiana University’s physics program in 1966. (It’s a funny thing that so many hackers — Will Crowther and Ken Williams also among them — first entered university as physics majors in the days when computer-science programs and computer access in general weren’t so common. It must have something to do with being attracted to complex systems.) At university Silas continued his eccentric ways. A fellow student speaks of him “walking campus in his long black trench coat reading advanced chemistry and physics textbooks only inches from his face.” More surprisingly, he became “a reporter for the campus radio station, toting his portable reel-to-reel tape recorder gathering stories.”

He also discovered computers at Indiana University. In fact, he found a job working with them before he even graduated, dividing his senior year between his studies and a contract programming job developing accident-analysis software in COBOL for an IBM mainframe. After finishing his degree in 1970, he stayed at the university as an “undergraduate assistant,” an interface of sorts between the student body and the arcane world of the university’s computer systems. That put him in an idyllic position when PLATO came to Indiana University.

I’ve had occasion to mention the PLATO system before on this blog when I described the earliest computerized adaptations of Dungeons and Dragons that were hosted there. I’ve also mentioned Control Data Corporation, who built the mainframe and custom graphical terminals that ran PLATO in addition to giving a young Ken Williams his entree into the computer industry. What I haven’t done, however, is describe the link between the two.

CDC’s co-founder and CEO through its rise, glory years, and eventual downfall in the 1980s at the hands of the new microcomputers was a man named Bill Norris, who refused to accept the currently fashionable business dogma that a corporation’s only duty to society was to maximize profits and shareholder value. An odd combination of shrewd businessman and dreamy idealist, he attempted to use CDC as a force for social good by opening factories in economically depressed areas and funding experimental wind farms amongst a multitude of other projects. Even the Control Data Institute that gave Ken Williams his start was something of a do-gooder project of Norris’s, founded to give bright kids without university credentials a chance to build a career in the computer industry as well as to provide a pool of inexpensive workers for CDC. At a time when even most of his fellow computer-industry executives saw the machines primarily as tools of business, he believed that they could also be a source of social good. He therefore signed CDC on to be the technological and industrial partner of the PLATO system in 1963, just three years after Donald Blitzer had produced the first proofs of concept at the University of Illinois. With steady funding from the National Science Foundation, PLATO grew rapidly from there, with much of its development taking play at a new independent entity, the Computer-Based Education Research Laboratory (CERL), which stood halfway between the business pole of the program (CDC) and the academic pole (the University of Illinois). It would be silly to claim that CDC had no legitimate business interest in PLATO; CERL and PLATO delivered a steady stream of innovative new technologies and ideas to the company. Still, the relationship also reflected Norris’s unique approach to business with a social conscience.

As I wrote in that earlier post, PLATO really came of age with the PLATO IV iteration in 1972, which brought graphical display terminals out of Illinois for the first time to hundreds of institutions spread around the country and, eventually, the world. One of the first of those institutions was the University of Indiana, where Silas helped to set up the first terminals. Soon he was not just administering the system but contributing major pieces of courseware and other software. For instance, he authored “HELP,” a standard tutorial and introduction to the system for new users, and a “massive lesson menu system named IUDEMO.”

PLATO programs — optimistically called “lessons” — were programmed in a language called TUTOR that was accessible to every user. This relatively easy-to-use language enabled much of the creativity of the PLATO community. It allowed educators and students with no knowledge of the vagaries of bits and bytes to design serviceable programs while also being powerful enough to create some surprisingly elaborate games, from dungeon crawls to flight simulators, board-game adaptations to shoot-em-ups. Many if not most of these games were multiplayer; you simply navigated to a “big board” of eager players, found a partner (or two, or more; some could support more than 50 simultaneous players, amounting to virtual worlds in their own right as well as games), and dived in. In addition to his more legitimate activities, Silas became deeply involved with this generally tolerated-if-not-encouraged side of PLATO. He helped John Daleske get started developing Empire, an early — possibly the first — multiplayer action game. Later, he developed his own variant of Empire, which he called Conquest. Another project was possibly the world’s first multiplayer flight simulator, called Air Race. On the theory that guns make everything more fun, Brand Fortner built from Air Race the multiplayer air-combat simulation Air Fight, which became one of PLATO’s biggest hits as well as one of its administrators’ biggest scourges; 50 or 60 active Air Fight players could bring PLATO’s million-dollar CDC mainframe to its knees.

CERL and CDC sometimes hired particularly promising PLATO programmers to work for them. That’s how Silas came to leave Indiana University at last in 1976, moving to Baltimore to work for Commercial Credit, a consumer lending company that was, oddly enough, wholly owned by CDC. Silas came in to develop various in-house training programs on PLATO, such as “Sales-Call Simulator,” an “educational adventure.” While he was about it, he also created his first hit game, Robot War. Each player would program the AI routines for her own robot, using a language Silas devised for the purpose that was essentially a subset of the TUTOR language that virtually every serious PLATO user already had at least some familiarity with. Then the robots would go at it, while the players watched and hoped. Robot War was the first of its kind, the first of a whole genre of programming games that remain a beloved if obscure preoccupation of some hackers to this day. (I’ll have much more to say about Robot War soon).

Silas became particular friends with two other Commercial Credit employees: Ed Zaron, a programmer in the credit scoring department; and Jim Black, an accountent in the billing department. Zaron describes his introduction to the always eccentric Silas:

Silas is one of a kind. I’ll never forget first meeting him. Silas is a big guy, maybe 6’8″ and say 320lbs. Here’s the picture, he was walking down mainstreet in downtown Baltimore wearing a huge, sagging sports coat. He had a car battery (yes, car battery!) in one pocket, a CB radio in the other pocket and a whip antenna stuck down the back of his jacket. He was occasionally talking on the CB as he held two magazines open in one hand. One of Silas’s favorite things was to read two mags simultaneously, kinda one inside the other, flipping back and forth.

This was just about the time that the microcomputer trinity of 1977 arrived. Silas, Zaron, and Black all became very early Apple II adopters; Silas, for instance, ended up with serial number 234. Like Scott Adams and others with the programming skills to make the machines do something at least ostensibly fun or useful, the three decided to form a company — Muse Software. Their first products were, like most early Apple II software, programmed in BASIC.

Muse debuted with two games. There was Zaron’s Tank Wars, a multiplayer arcade-style game similar to the Atari 2600′s original Combat. And there was a maze game by Silas, which presented its world to the player via a first-person, three-dimensional rendering, possibly the first such ever crafted for a microcomputer. The concept was, however, old hat on PLATO, where similar so-called “maze runners” were a popular genre. Indeed, Muse’s PLATO experiences would proof to be a fecund source of inspiration, as they continued to adapt ideas born of that system’s flourishing games community for the little micros. Within a few months Silas had expanded his maze game to create Escape!, the game which inspired Richard Garriott to make 3D dungeons a part of Akalabeth and, by extension, the Ultimas. Escape! killed productivity inside Apple itself, as described by David Gordon, the man responsible for introducing it there:

On one of my first trips to Apple Computer in 1978 I took with me a simple maze game called Escape by a fledgling company called Muse. Apple had 50 or 60 employees at the time and I created a work loss of approximately 60 man weeks because everyone at Apple was playing that game instead of working. They were charting out the mazes and trying to solve the puzzle.

Muse’s simple programs, which they pumped out at a prodigious rate and packaged themselves using art provided by Black’s girlfriend, proved to be surprisingly popular. Weary of spending their evenings copying cassettes and their weekends touring the East Coast trade-show circuit, Zaron and Black soon quit their jobs at Commercial Credit to make a real, entrepreneurial go of it, although a more cautious Silas stayed on there until 1980. With public-relations skills like this, maybe it was for the best that Silas didn’t have so much time for the shows:

I remember in the early days of MUSE, I attended a “Computer Show” in Philadelphia with my dad and Silas. He had just written that Voice/Music program for the Apple II, which attracted a pretty big crowd. The big thing then was selling and trading programs recorded on cassette tapes. Hilarious! Anyway, it was great to see Silas pitching the programs and working with people. You really got to see what they were made of when he would stop talking, reach into his nose and pull out a gigantic booger, and then wipe it on the underside of the nearest table or chair, and continue with the demonstration. He was really great.

Muse’s early catalogs contained a shambolic line of programs typical of other early software houses like Adventure International and On-Line Systems. In addition to the games, there were drawing programs, programming utilities, educational drills, text editors. By 1980, however, disks and the spacious 48 K of memory that came in the Apple II Plus were becoming the accepted standard, and customers were beginning to expect more of their software. Muse created a development system of its own that allowed them to write fast assembly language programs while still having access to some of the conveniences and structure of higher level languages. With Silas on board full time at last, they also moved from their first office, a cramped space above a gun store, to lease a two-story building for themselves in downtown Baltimore. The top floor housed the business and software development arms, which now consisted of half a dozen employees, while the lower floor became the “Muse Computer Center,” a retail computer store selling Muse’s products as well as those of others. One non-obvious advantage of operating a store was that it allowed Muse to order products at dealer prices, making it easy to keep up with the competition’s latest in the fast-moving game of oneupsmanship that the Apple II software market was becoming.

In that spirit: Muse’s two major products of 1980 both advanced the state of the art. Zaron’s Super-Text was the most powerful and usable of the early Apple II word processors. And Silas’s The Voice let the user, incredibly, record her own voice and play it back, after a fashion, on the Apple II’s primitive sound hardware. This was absolutely unprecedented stuff. Both programs would play a big role in Silas’s two landmark games of the following year, about which more in my next post.

Radical Books of 2011, 9/10

Pale Fire: A Poem in four Cantos by John Shade, Vladimir Nabokov, Ginkgo Press, 9781584234319

Extracting the poem (which only exists as a sort of in-joke in the radical novel Pale Fire) from what is perhaps (according, e.g., to Larry McCaffrey) the major English-language novel of the 20th Century? It’s at least a very extreme move. This edition drops the prose like a bad habit, makes like a banana and splits it off, makes like a tree and abandons House of Leaves prose for Leaves of Grass verse. Does it work in the sense of presenting a beautiful poem freed from its chrysalis? No. Much of it is still most notable for building up, and then comically deflating, the explicitly implied author, John Shade. It’s better as part of a narrative than as language trembling between sound and sense. But John Shade’s “Pale Fire” is not too bad of a poem qua poem, and reading it alone can certainly enhance one’s appreciation of the truly incredible novel that has been shucked off here. I haven’t read the included commentary, but must note that including commentary is an absolutely hilarious idea.

Since the release of Inform 7 6G60 quite a few bugs have been fixed in the Windows front-end, and a few new features added. As a result, a new Windows build has been released. (Note that this only affects the Windows front-end: the compiler itself is unchanged).

What’s been changed:

* Elastic tabstops are now available as an option in the Format menu. When elastic tabstops are enabled, tabstops are automatically sized so that columns in tables line up.

* The font settings are now respected in the HTML based panes (that is, the index, errors and documentation) when Internet Explorer 9 is installed.

* There is now a Headings sub-menu under the Edit menu, which matches the similarly named sub-menu on OS X.

* The front-end attempts to sensibly replace spaces with tabs in text that is pasted or dropped on the source tab: if a table is detected its elements are separated by tabs, and leading spaces are also converted to tabs.

* The Glulx interpreters in the game tab now support the additions to Glk in versions 0.7.1, 0.7.2 and 0.7.3 of the Glk specification.

Radical Books of 2011, 8/10

You Can’t Have Everything… Where Would You Put It!, Bruce Andrews, Veer Books

There is no way this book will get past your spam filter:

facework cootie itsier-off
we are the dream sequences in your conventional cultural life -

Indeed we are. Here’s verbal salad (French dressing? Russian dressing?) shot through at times with lines of split and reassembled words:

zy^rit
sect^in
sing^franchi
cres^offi

It’s a delight to apprehend such text, passing words beneath one’s eyes, thinking about what it all might mean and sound like. Looking back now, I wonder if I should have flipped this open and read at random when I encountered it originally. Instead of plodding through, I might have thought for days about a line such as “tractor the Real.” But, as it happens, I can still do that. Although I have everything, I had nowhere to put it. I have to delve in again for specific examples of juxtapositions that Bruce Andrews fashions. The book is no doubt worth reading, scanning, or hashing into – however you want to have it all.

Since we announced inklewriter two weeks ago it’s been getting a lot of attention, which is really exciting for us. When we first started work on it, the idea was simple – we make interactive stories, but when we tell people that, they don’t always get what we mean. So we thought, let’s make a web-tool that lets people find out for themselves.

What we didn’t expect was that, alongside all the people who want to know if “interactive” means “contains video clips and pictures”, there’s a whole bunch of people who already know what interactive mean, and who want to get involved. We’ve heard from writers – some veterans of adaptive literature, others fresher but intrigued and interested – and we’ve heard from teachers, interested at ways to get students interested in reading. We’ve spoken to educationalists, lecturers, publishers, authors. People are keen. They want to play.

I [Jon] used to be a teacher, and I’m quite excited about the idea of something like inklewriter in the classroom. I don’t think it’s going to solve the nation’s shortage of computer programmers – the kids who want to fill those shoes need to learn Javascript and make stuff for themselves – but I think a tool like inklewriter provides a nice chance for creative types to think logically, and logical types to think creatively – and maybe even some logical and creative people to get together and collaborate. And that’s a particular kind of collaboration that I do see missing in a lot of jobs and industries.

We’ve tried to design inklewriter to be great for serious writers too. Writing on a computer can be hard – there are so many distractions, so many things you can accidentally click. A good writing tool should get you settled fast and then get out of your way, and we’ve tried to make sure that, when you’re using inklewriter, 88% of everything you do is typing words that people will read, and only 2% of your time is spent tying together the threads of your story. (We’ve left you 10% time to think of what to say.)

Also, it helps if a writing tool is pretty to look at, since if you’re a writer you’ll be staring at it for hours and hours and hours…

Sadly, this isn’t the post where I announce that inklewriter is ready to go. It’s close. Very, very close. We’re hoping to get something out to some early-bird alpha-testers – you know, the kind of people who don’t try to sue if our server bursts into flame and they lose an hour’s work. Good people – in the next week or so.

And when it passes alpha, we’ve got a big list of “wouldn’t it be great it if did…” ideas – widgets – that we hope to get a little started on before pushing the big GO button for the first time. (But the great thing about web-apps is, even after we release it, we can keep adding more goodies).

But one thing I do want to say now is: we’ve got a cute idea for how to pull everyone together. We’ve spoken to our publisher friends and our game-dev friends, and we think we think we’ve got a nice opportunity up our sleeves. So, if you’re a writer looking for a challenge, you might want to start thinking…

 

The beta version of Eamon Deluxe 5.0 is just about ready to send out to those who volunteered for play testing. I'm hoping for maybe tomorrow night, so be sure to check the inboxes for the emails you sent me. I apologize for all the delays, I had to take a week off of working on it to deal with some domestic issues. Thanks again to those who offered to play test, and I still have openings if anybody else is interested.
-Frank

Quick tip of IF.

Whilst you should use the walkthrough feature to take you to certain points in the game, in the early stages I found it quick and easy to just move the player manually to where I needed to test. Of course, where game actions, objects or player status attributes define player progression in the game, the walk through as the way forward. For examples, I may not let Lil Red get on the bus without sufficient money to pay for a ticket, it would be pointless to just move her to that point in the game.

In my efforts to reveal player progress in ’Lil Red’ I coded a rewards ladder applying XPs when players did something positive  and ‘charging’ players for hints and deducting points for questionably actions or decisions. For example collecting the useful objects, completing tasks or sections or puzzles are awards XPs whereas throwing the mouldy lasagne on the floor instead of depositing in the waste bin and calling up game hints cost XPs. Simple enough right.

Until our Network Manager asked if I had found any ‘game exploits?’ ‘Game exploits’ I mimicked? Our Network Manager, an experience online gamer, went onto explain that exploring, sharing and exploiting the game or game bugs is all part of the entertainment. He in fact encouraged I write in some permissible ‘sploits,’ because ‘the kids will find ‘em, its all part of playing the game.’

The action of pretending to obey the rules of the game, while secretly subverting them to gain advantage over an opponent . Johan Huizinga ^[*]

Our Network Manager may well be right, the young player may well expect an opportunity to bend the rules to their advantage. And it was with minimal effort I discovered wide ranging debates, with a significant number of contributors more knowledgeable than I am, contesting the ethics of gameplay, complete with its own diction.

I may well include a planted ’spoilt’ here and there before I finish the game, but for now I have more game to build and the task of testing my current game to ensure its integrity. Sadly, it did not take long to find my first bug or exploit. By picking up objects with XPs, dropping and picking them up again I was able to rack up XPs a plenty, levelling up at will. The answer, set a flag when the object was first taken, then adding a check to see if the objected is unflagged before attributing XPs to the player progress attribute.

Another lesson learnt, and a new lesson to be added to a SOW. What great fun the students will have trying to exploit one anothers games, either revealing the exploits of others or proudly defending their game integrity. This IF journey just keeping on teaching me new lessons.

Ever stumbled across something you’ve been looking for for a long time while you’re doing something else entirely? Well, I’ve just found the digital equivalent of my cat’s favorite toy which I found last week while reaching under the television stand to try to reset our infernal TV box. I’ve found the game Escape!, the Apple II maze game that inspired Richard Garriott to program the 3D dungeons of Akalabeth. Turns out it was written by Silas Warner of Muse Software, about whom I’ll have much more to say shortly. In the meantime, I’ve updated the old post on Garriott to reflect my discovery. Or, if you’d like to cut to the chase, here’s a screenshot and a disk image for ya. Type “RUN ESCAPE” after booting the disk to get started.

brasslantern: Via @rfreebern: Picaro Miniature Adventures. http://t.co/Nh9tgh5L

Learning Without Frontiers (LWF) is at London Olympia on Wednesday 26th and Thursday 27th January, and alongside the (expensive) main conference there is a free festival, featuring a variety of sessions on digital learning.

On Thursday from 10.30 – 12.00, iO are hosting a session on Game Based Learning at Salon Bourdieu (S2):

This session will cover three different areas of the use of games in learning and most importantly games creation in creating learning opportunities for students. The session will draw on practical experiences that have already taken place in schools, refer and develop thinking based on newly released research outcomes, and give delegates solid starting points for them to take away and develop in their schools or organisations.

As part of this, myself, Kristian Still and Tom Cole will be talking about Interactive Fiction and Quest.

This session will explore how classroom practitioners have enabled their students to start writing, creating and engaging with Interactive Fiction games. The speakers will examine how disengaged readers are now reading and even better engaged in writing games. Examples of how IF is being used in other subject areas such as Science are being explored and developed.

Register for the festival – it’s free.

More details are in the full schedule (annoyingly there seems to be no way to link to a particular session, so scroll down to Game Based Learning at 10.30 on Thursday. Also for some reason the programme has me down as “Alex Ward”).

Hope to see you there!

New transcripts have been uploaded for the Hugo Open House Competition.

New transcripts have been uploaded for the penultimate not numbered New Year's Speed IFs.

I have been working on adding the map to WebRunner, bringing a large chunk of ADRIFT functionality to online play. It is not interactive like using the Runner application, so you can't move or rotate it, or click on individual locations, but it will update as you move between locations.


I will get this released to online play soon.