In The Weird and the Eerie, critic Mark Fisher explores the sense of something’s being simultaneously unsettling and fascinating. “Weird” and “eerie,” according to Fisher, are the feelings you get when, in World on a Wire, Stiller realizes that what he thought was the “real world” is actually a simulation controlled by a “realer” world;… Continue reading Weird and eerie interactive fiction
Tag: interactive fiction
Is Bitsy interactive fiction?
from madotsuki’s closet by Bagenzo Bitsy, a tool created by adam le doux, is a “little editor for little games or worlds.” Earlier this year, a question arose on intfiction.org about whether games created with Bitsy could be considered interactive fiction. The question originated in part from data about how developers classify their own games:… Continue reading Is Bitsy interactive fiction?
Spring Thing 2022 Reviews
The Fall of Asemia by B.J. Best The Fall of Asemia is a story about loss and violence and language and memory that, to me, evokes the war in Ukraine and works like Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, as well as the asemic writing of authors like Henri Michaux. In this game, you play a scholar… Continue reading Spring Thing 2022 Reviews
Making Phenomena
Phenomena began, like most creative things I do, with my favorite obsession/puzzle, the film Last Year at Marienbad. I was reading articles from BAMPFA’s CineFiles database, and came across this passage from an analysis by Freddy Sweet: "The key to understanding Marienbad is the realization that the very structure of the film is consciously designed… Continue reading Making Phenomena
There are robots in this rabbit hole, also interactive fiction
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
A Clock in its walls
Source: https://lecinemadreams.blogspot.com/2015/12/meet-me-in-st-louis-1944.html 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,… 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
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