As part of a new project I'm working on, I’ve been exploring the structure of Last Year at Marienbad and The Invention of Morel in terms of a branching narrative--or perhaps more accurately, a kind of fractured narrative. I hope to write more about that later. But first, I wanted to do a little bit… Continue reading There are robots in this rabbit hole, also interactive fiction
Category: interactive fiction
A Clock in its walls
My annual Christmas re-watching of Meet Me in St. Louis, coupled with, well, all of 2020, has gotten me thinking a lot about time, and the way that the passage of time is both communicated and experienced in choice-based interactive fiction (for a great discussion of time in parser games, see this). Specifically, I’ve been… Continue reading A Clock in its walls
Cement is the flour, concrete is the bread: making So Are the Days
By the time the SNES came out, I had pretty much stopped playing videogames. This is why So Are the Days’s overall conceit is based on games from 30+ years ago: besides Twine games, those games (e.g., StarTropics, Bubble Bobble, Super Contra, Duke Nukem, DOOM, Wolfenstein 3D, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?) are… Continue reading Cement is the flour, concrete is the bread: making So Are the Days
New game: So Are the Days
I just finished So Are the Days, tiny stories about sand and stories that behave like sand. It is a back garden entry in the 2020 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction. I hope you like it! Take care.
A made place: Interactive fiction and “location-based poetry”
The “space” inhabited by a poem has been conceptualized in terms of music or sound (e.g., Tracie Morris, John Cage), in terms of painting (e.g., Gertrude Stein, John Yau, John Ashbery), in terms of ritual (e.g., Bhanu Kapil, CAConrad). But what about in terms of, well, space? I was at the No Fair/Fair at AWP… Continue reading A made place: Interactive fiction and “location-based poetry”
Where one endless corridor follows another: thoughts on translating Robbe-Grillet into Inform 7
Background I’ve been learning more about parser IF lately, and what I think I like most about it (and what I liked most about lurking around LambdaMOO back in the day) is exploring space that is at the same time imaginative and rule-bound. Learning to write parser IF in Inform is especially interesting and exciting… Continue reading Where one endless corridor follows another: thoughts on translating Robbe-Grillet into Inform 7
Making ROUND / SQUARE
Well, I have covered myself in hundreds of index cards again! This time to make ROUND / SQUARE, a micro game I submitted to sub-Q Magazine’s #subQjam. The prompt was to tell an interactive story about love in fewer than 1,000 words--1,000 words across ALL paths. In the way it distills each choice into two… Continue reading Making ROUND / SQUARE
ROUND / SQUARE
I just finished ROUND / SQUARE, a porous taxonomy created for #subQjam 2018. It's a 100-choice micro game on the subject of love. I hope you like it!
Favorite necropastoral games
I have spent much of this October making a silverfish costume out of duct tape and re-reading Joyelle McSweeney’s The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults. In the book (and on the now-inactive blog Montevidayo), McSweeney explores a variety of texts that employ necropastoral strategies: Sylvia Plath's Ariel, CAConrad's The Book of Frank, Jack Smith's Normal Love,… Continue reading Favorite necropastoral games
Making REALLY, IF / REALLY, ALWAYS
REALLY, IF / REALLY, ALWAYS was put together with spreadsheets and scotch tape. I started working on it sporadically in early 2016, and finished in April 2018, in time to plant it in the Back Garden of the Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction, and to have it published by the Orange Juice Public Library.… Continue reading Making REALLY, IF / REALLY, ALWAYS
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