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
Tag: games
Carrotopia: A Bitsy Arcade
I am pleased to announce the opening of Carrotopia, a very small virtual arcade consisting of games/sketches I made while quarantined, in order to learn to use Adam Le Doux's Bitsy Game Maker. To get to the arcade, head on over to the dead mall (this one), enter through the JC Penny, pass the escalators… Continue reading Carrotopia: A Bitsy Arcade
My favorite Bitsy games
I am fortunate to be employed and able to work from home. Since our shutdown began in late March, I’ve spent my weekends looking at prepper-adjacent product reviews (backpacks, camping percolators) on the internet, and trying to learn Bitsy (Adam Le Doux’s “little editor for little games or worlds”) by making small Bitsy games. I’ve… Continue reading My favorite Bitsy games
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.
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
