This is new. I just came across this mentioned on Nick Montfort's blog, a new website, launched yesterday(?), for the programming environment some of you have been working in (or toiling with -- depending on how much success you've been having). It's a whole new presentation for Inform 7, complete with some new documentation, screencasts, and a bunch of complete working examples. If you're still putting some finishing touches on your IF project (if you're doing an IF project), you may very well find something useful.

I've only looked at the site briefly, since I wanted to get this post up, so please take a look. And if you find anything on the new site that you think is particularly helpful or that leads to any epiphanies, post it in a comment here so others can benefit as well!

Many IF works, including most of the ones we are playing in this class, involve some degree of puzzle-solving. In some cases, those puzzles are explicit within the game world, like the dam control puzzle in Zork. In other cases, the puzzle or riddle may be more subtle, like figuring out just what exactly is going on. In Snack Time! for example, it may take the player a while to discover just what she is playing as in the game.

I've noticed that many of you have been writing blog entries about Snack Time! and Everybody Dies, which is great, but in the interest of allowing everyone to solve the puzzles on their own, I am requesting that from now on you try and avoid posting spoilers or solutions to puzzles.

Sometimes, of course, you need to talk about the ending of a game, and that's fine. When you do, however, make it clear to your reader that you're going to reveal something they may not want to have revealed just yet. Keep in mind that the individual reading your blog entry may or may not be in this class. Maybe someone googles Everybody Dies to see what people have said about it; that person may not want to see it explained to them.  read more »

Have you ever noticed something out of place? Something that just seemed a little odd at first, but after a second look and a third, it expanded into a world that transformed your everyday reality into something else entirely?

Well, I haven't, at least not in the real world. In terms of the real world of the web, however, you can, add something to your browser to imbue your daily information streams with the potential for cracks to open up between your world and another. Tumbarumba itself is not electronic literature, per se, and the stories it delivers are not technically interactive or hypertextual in any of the ways we've been studying in class. But the way it inserts itself into your life is certainly uniquely electronic.  read more »

Today's class was an experiment in collaborative decision making. I asked you all to work together on documents that defined a list of key terms from Montfort's chapter. This was an experiment from my point of view, and probably yours as well.

I liked what you all produced, and I appreciated that EtherPad made it easy to jump right in to editing a page.

I'll paste the final version of each document below, and I welcome your comments on the experience of real-time collaborative authorship. For my part, I think it's interesting how some of the definitions become more like conversations than direct statements.  read more »

Thanks all who joined me in MaryMOO yesterday morning. It was another lightning round of conversation that went in a lot of interesting directions. I do have some thoughts, and there are some things from yesterday that I want to continue discussing, but for now this is just a short blog entry to provide the transcript of our session, which is attached below.

Make sure to spend some time with Twelve Blue before Tuesday.

I enjoyed our session on maryMOO yesterday, and I want to thank you all for contributing and helping keep the conversation relatively focused. You all brought up some good questions and ideas that I hope you'll bring up when we next meet. I've uploaded the transcript of our session as an attachment (below). If you weren't there or weren't able to log in for some reason, you'll want to review that.

Speaking of access, I know there were some people with login problems. If that's you, please e-mail me (please do not post as a comment here) and let me know what the problem was. If you've forgotten your password, I can reset it, but I can't access it directly.

On Thursday, please return to maryMOO at 11:00 for a continuation of our discussion. We'll mainly be talking about "Penetration", but I'll be interested to hear how you think it relates to Garden of Forking Paths. There's a similar "organic" theme in play, for instance.

Other than that, don't forget to keep blogging.

I'll "see" you on Thursday!

Blogs are a popular medium for publishing and sharing ideas, and as a form of writing, blogging carries with it its own set of conventions and expectations on the part of the audience. In this blog, I want to provide you with some ideas about what good blogging consists of, both with regard to the specific blog requirements for this class as well as with regard to blogging in general.  read more »

What to write about

As you are aware, I will be in Orlando next week and therefore will not be physically present to teach class on Tuesday or Thursday. We will, however, continue to have class through the medium of the MOO environment I've set up for this purpose. This is our chance to try out a little bit of distance learning. For what it's worth, interacting with MOO is similar enough to interactive fiction that this will be good practice for what's coming later on. There are some major differences, but the basic idea of typing commands into a text parser is the same.  read more »

This will be your central gathering place for everything related to this class. Right now, it still needs a bit of work, but you should feel free to look around. Most importantly, if you're a student in this class, please create an account if you haven't already. Here's how:

First, create an account. This is a process with a few steps:  read more »