Regarding the new topic of the thread – I also taught a course at Wellesley once upon a time that was about how to create and appreciate games, and here were the things that were on the “required playing” list that are interesting from a narrative point of view (and also freely available, the tricky part of such a part of the curriculum) –
Photopia – Excellent intro to parser IF for people who haven’t done it. A sweet sad story told out of order that uses the color of its text to good effect, and which is a cross with CYOA in style.
Alter Ego – Play from life to death, the 1985 or so classic shipped as two different titles, one for male PCs and one for women. Dan updated the code (but not the content, IIRC) for the web. Huge influence on Choice of Robots if you care about that. This was the first game in the syllabus, to shake up students’ ideas about what games could talk about and about whether making games was something they could do.
Star Control II – Great characterization of NPCs through dialogue tree interactions.
*Spider and Web – Unreliable narrator IF. I don’t actually remember whether this was on my curriculum at the time, hence the star, but I’m pretty sure you don’t care.
Adventure/Adventure – Contrasting the first text adventure with the first Atari game to try to emulate its gameplay, which itself launched a genre that led to Zelda; a lesson it trying to play to your medium’s strengths, since there were pure text adventures for the Atari that were very clunky.
Choice of Broadsides – This was the one CoG I required (there weren’t many more when I taught the class); the way it flips the world’s gender roles upside down to accommodate the reader remains very interesting.
Passage – Jason Rohrer’s short song without words is best unspoiled; it’s free and can be played almost as fast as I can summarize it.
There are of course even more options to choose from now, and if I thought your students were going to go deep in one direction, like gamebooks (Cretan Chronicles!) or IF (Galatea!) I’d have more recommendations, but those are the things I can remember assigning.
No problem. In fact, I should point out to other New England readers that I Will Talk At Your Thing (Probably), even if it’s a little bit of a drive. (“Probably” because if your thing has an attendance of one and/or is in your basement, then probably not.) I like writing talks, meeting fans, and thinking about games, so if talking at your thing lets me do those things, great.
If you’d like to expose the students to a different form of IF, I’d like to suggest the Telltale games. They act on the same general principal as CS games except with graphics and active-time choices. It would make for a good compare/contrast discussion, as well.
I know Lifeline was hugely popular. It’s a pay for game though. (One I own but haven’t ever played.) I did like the idea of how it brought the messages into the real time with your phone beeping at you as messages from a real person, or something. .
Might I propose as an introduction to IF games you can do a unit on MUDs and their evolution into MMO’s? MUDs still exist - the one I play still has 100 - 150 people on daily. MUDs defined a great deal of the gaming industry in the late 80s and 1990s. Sadly, it has been dying out as a medium due to university banning outward bound connections and IP ports but it would definitely give you a ton of material in leading up to Choice Games. I know the first time I ever played as a woman on a MUD and the first time I saw gender norms challenged was through playing MUDs. It’s been refereeing to see that prevalent in CS games now.
I can see this morphing into a whole new and exciting conversation, but I can also imagine an introduction to IF games (although not one focusing on technology) having a unit on LARPing.
My own introduction to creating interactive narrative came right out of larp writing; I still do it, writing detailed character sheets (often 10-20 pages) for thirty or so players. There’s a great annual larping convention close to me (http://interactiveliterature.org/Q/) and we run all sorts of short, theater-style games. I’m running a game set at a Roman orgy this year.
It is very hard to swap back and forth between writing a larp character sheet and a Choice Of game. The skills sets overlap just enough to really screw me up sometimes.
This is the sixth time we’ve run this particular game, so I know it works, but it always makes me nervous. Luckily we have a lot of very experienced larpers at our convention. I don’t think I would run it, say, at someone’s house. A hotel function space is public enough to allow social norms to operate.
The orgy part is the hook, but it’s not the topic of the game, just the setting.
did you write this? I feel like you’re a guy that would really like the runequest setting and you would have a fun time with the mechanic of HeroQuesting. Of course in the game’s world that is a really big deal and the players may end up never doing it but it’s something that would be up your alley. Because when they do it the characters become hero and that classic Greco-Roman sense and if I’m not mistaken they can actually start developing a Hero cult.
In a weird way they are almost opposites now that I come to think of it. In a Choice Of, I have to keep the MC rather vaguely defined in my mind. I don’t want to assume things about the MC that might clash with the player’s view of the character they are playing. But then, once the game starts, I know what sort of adventure they are going to have. There are obviously choices, but the adventure is going to follow certain parameters, and certain conflicts are going to happen. So for me, there’s a deliberate vagueness about the MC, but the adventure they will go on is more defined.
In a larp, I know everything about the character I am writing (often even the specific player who is likely to be cast in that role). I give them a detailed personality, backstory, contacts, secrets, and so forth. They have a defined sexuality, for example, if that is important to the story in question. But then, once the game starts, I have no control over where the plot goes. I can guess, but I don’t know.
If I write a CoG, I can be certain the game will end in one of these twelve endstates. In a larp, who knows? There are infinite.
Writing a thirty-person larp is like setting out a bunch of billiard balls on a pool table, and then taking a shot. I can set the balls up so that I can increase the likelihood of certain things happening, but once the game starts, they go everywhere.
But the basic skills of planning and writing complex, interweaving narratives that take a year to write really helped me with Choice Of Games.
And now I feel like we probably need a larp-talk thread. We’ve gone a bit far afield.
) What different sort of things do you need to bear in mind?