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"Finch realised what he really wanted to do; to "make things people could both use and enjoy"." Yes, that.
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"We don’t want readers to “master” our inklebooks: we want readers to nurture them. The stories they contain are precious, fragile things, that like any good story might turn at any moment." Yeah, this – moving away from "what happens" to "how it happens" as a tenet for interactive fiction.
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"A photograph has to be rational. It has to be rational in itself. It has to be rational and complete. … it is the illusion of a literal description of what the camera saw. From it, you can know very little. It has no narrative ability. You don't know what happened from the photography. You know how a piece of time and space looked to a camera." As usual, I'm reminded how much I love Gary Winogrand.
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The ninth day of the Hindu Navaratri festival, the "Worship of Implements", where "weapons are worshiped by soldiers, and tools by artisans"; "In the cross cultural development that has revolutionized the society, with modern science making a lasting impact on the scientific knowledge and industrial base in India, the ethos of the old religious order is retained by worship of computers and typewriters also during the Ayudha Puja, in the same manner as practised in the past for weapons of warfare."
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Jon is smart, and one of the best writers of interactive fiction (in all its forms) that I know. So I am looking forward to this.
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Marvellous. Can't say any more – you need to read this (very) short story – but it's really, really lovely: shivers down the spine, and something heartwarming, all at once. And: set in a slightly magical part of the world.
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"…the insight I had playing Indigo was that map-based games, while non-linear in gameplay, are inflexible in narrative. There’s nothing variable about the story that emerges in the player’s head: it’s authored, split up, and distributed across the game like pennies in a Christmas pudding. All that changes is the pace at which it appears. But in time-based games, everything the player does is story, and so that story is constant flux.
To put this another way:
Map-based games are ludicly non-linear but narratively inflexible.
Time-based games are ludicly linear but narratively flexible.
(Of course, these are spectrums: some games, like Rameses or Photopia are ludicly linear and narratively inflexible, and some, like Mass Effect, at least endeavour to be ludicly non-linear and narratively flexible.)
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Do readers want to interact, toy and play with fiction, or alter, bend and shape it?" Jon Ingold is smart. -
Really ought to make some of this sometime; I'm a sucker for onion jam/marmalade, ad it's so easy, I have no idea why I haven't tried it before.
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A short story by Jon Ingold. When I first read this, in a Cambridge May Anthology, I thought "this chap must write Interactive Fiction". It turns out he does, and writes very good IF. He's also a maths teacher now, I believe – but he also wrote this several years ago, and it's a lovely little short story about all the things you can only do in writing.