New Game: Provizora Parko

Dawn

I just finished Provizora Parko, a surreal wandering game where you explore a (semi) abandoned bird park. It's a back garden entry in the 2024 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction, and it was inspired by the animated film Ñokto de la Galaksia Fervojo/Night on the Galactic Railroad, and Paradise Park in Mānoa. I hope… Continue reading New Game: Provizora Parko

Weird and eerie interactive fiction

Dawn

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

New games: Food truck in the Garden of Earthly Delights (and two other Alone hacks)

Dawn

I've just finished my first three solo RPGs: Food Truck in the Garden of Earthly Delights (and two other Alone hacks). They are solo journaling games about cooking for demons, speedrunning your dreams, and the wrestling with the moon. They are all  hacks of Takuma Okada’s Alone Among the Stars, and were created for the… Continue reading New games: Food truck in the Garden of Earthly Delights (and two other Alone hacks)

Is Bitsy interactive fiction?

Dawn

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?

Making Phenomena

Dawn

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

Dawn

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

Dawn

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