I think it did a good job of conveying the fun of the genre. I hadn't played any non-Sherwin games in, geez, a couple years... but by the end of my trip, I'd downloaded all the interpreters and resumed playing games, and as I did before, sucking at them.

I'm also holding out hope that the cute blonde girl was jazzed enough about IF that she'll log on to this site, and then we'll get married. Or something.

(Hey! What up, J-Scott!!)

9:05 is a pretty good game to play with a room full of people. Paul and I were presenting to people who we believed may have been completely unfamiliar with IF. A game with a resolution in about 20 minutes is ideal. Oh don't get me wrong -- I have made games that have disgusted in 20 minutes... made people re-affirm their covenant with God in 20 minutes... just generally made their players quit in 20 minutes... but not really got things going and wrapped things up in that time. Hell, it takes the blind kid 20 minutes to simply hear the opening in Fallacy of Dawn thanks to the glacial pace the plug-in speaks at.

I think the audience dug playing it. Towards the end of the game you've given the choice of driving into work or continuing on the highway. One person in the crowd was not going to be railroaded into any sort of decision and said that the group should <i>not</i> go into work that day. Who says Boulder is full of lazy, scoffjob hippies? Of course (spoiler) not going to work has you killed in a horrible fireball in 9:05 (spoiler) so the game ended anyway.

Paul then rocked the mic with the comic book lettering in Earth and Sky 3. If your character is able to stomp on the ground -- and you do so -- you get that very effect coming up in the game. Originally we had planned to go through 1893 and Future Boy! but we were getting close to the end of the evening, so we switched over to Necrotic Drift.

There is a scene in Necrotic Drift that had me wary to place it on the big screen for the longest time. It's that one line about sprayers versus lumpers. I thought that it would only come up if you talked to Gibs. I could quite easily simply choose to not talk to Gibs and that line would not possibly offend an audience. I'm not a monster or anything. I don't go looking to offend people. It was the way the people in that game talked and all, but still. Since I was planning on running Fallacy of Dawn instead of ND, I never bothered to verify when the troublesome text appeared.

Well, the crowd had seen my barebones IF presentation and 9:05 in black and white. ND changes pictures every turn for the first four moves, so I thought it would be the better choice. The character Pang appears on the second or third move, and I was able to tell the entire crowd that the actor refused to put his beer down when I was snapping off pictures for the game, so I had to then incorporate that into the text. That's actually fairly common for the two games I've done regarding humans. I had to beg my brother to cut his hair when he was growing in longer in 2001 so I didn't have a main character with obvious discrepancies there. The three best pictures I had of the guy who played Yahoweh Porn were of him slowly getting sick after drinking his own beer... that's why there was a pickled body part in a keg. I wasn't dying to put pickled limbs in FoD, it just came about from the pictures.

Anyway, so that I can wrap this up, the lumpers bit is scripted so that it appears on the 5th or 6th turn no matter what you do. I didn't have my glasses on when I was presenting, so I did not notice this. I did notice that several seconds into what I was saying, a couple people chuckled, so I guess it wasn't all bad. I am just obsessing, I know.

All in all, a really fun experience. If I did it again I'd probably push for more of my and Paul's stuff to be shown to the audience present, but I think everyone there got a basic understanding of the scene. I hope that we conveyed just how approachable making IF is -- there seemed to be a mix of the creative and technically minded there and the programming concepts needed for the big three IF languages were certainly not beyond them.

Robb, I am truly sorry I missed it.

It begins!

There is a salon in Boulder that addresses the digital arts called (funnily enough) the Boulder Digital Arts Salon. There should be a link on the front page of the site if you'd like to visit.

A woman there named Danyell did some Googling regarding Interactive Fiction and Colorado and found Paul O'Brian. Paul, in turn, knows me. Not just in a typical Internet way, either, but we actually met once before all this when some people from the ifMud had their annual summer meet in Colorado. A few of us had dinner at a Nepalese place in Boulder. Letseeeeeee, who was there, it was Paul, Vitriola, Benjamin "Pinback" Parrish, J. Robinson Wheeler, Adam Cadre, Jennifer Earl and a friend of Paul's whose name I can't remember, though Ben might.

(An aside! Many more IF people were up in the mountains that weekend and I wanted to drive out and see them for a day. I tried to get the day off from my job and I couldn't because my presence there that day was apparently going to single handedly set back Moore's Law if I did not attend. I mark that day as the first day I truly became serious about leaving that place. And since doing so was the best decision I've ever made in my life, I tangentially have IF to thank for a much better quality of life. But I do regret not getting a chance to meet Emily and Inky and everyone.)

Paul gave the BDA salon my e-mail address and from that point it became a two-man venture tasked with telling a room full of people about the wonders of text games.

Paul, Danyell and I had dinner a couple weeks before the event and we had a chance to discuss what the presentation would be like. Talking about the history of IF, playing through a game, showing the crowd our games, it was going to be great. I can't think of a better representative, when it comes to the history and current climate of IF, than Paul O'Brian. He's probably played 500 IF games, at least, and he's very articulate on the subject. I wish they had taped everything, insteaf of just one Q&A.

But yeah, before the big presentation, depicted with pictures above, the BDA set up a camera and asked the two of us some IF questions. Let me speak to what that was like. It's going to hurt, though.

I am, ah.... I am someone who loves to be on TV. Even though it is a very rare occurrence. Is it the idea of TV? The anticipation of again being on TV? Because I don't really watch a lot of TV except for sports, I haven't been filmed in the longest time and I hate having my picture on the Internet. So I don't know. But when Jason Scott said "I'll be contacted" about his text game documentary I, for instance, flipped my gourd. That sort of thing. I should mention that I include any scenario where a camera is in front of me to count for this particular personality failing. I was really looking forward to a camera and mic being in my face and getting to tell people about the comic happenings of Delarion Yar and even more impressively, the Unnamed Adventurer from Saied.

Along these lines, I am also someone who will express a ton of negativity regarding the people that are on TV. Let's say that Dayna has a reality show on for a half hour one evening. I will gleefully point out every social misstep I can perceive. Well, let me say this: the camera does something to you. To me, anyway. I know it did something to people on reality TV shows, but I thought I was immune. I was nervous, answering those questions. Oh well, they will post them one day and everyone can have a good laugh at me instead of Puck, Frankie and Pedro.

The actual presentation we did was not filmed. Unfortunately. Because I thought I was much more relaxed.

I'll post the Power Point presentation tomorrow so that you can see what topics we covered. We also went through 9:05 with an audience, which deserves its own post. Actually, because I had to move the clocks ahead, it's 2:20 in the morning right now. I'll post part two tomorrow where we properly discuss 9:05 and how the crowd reacted to the beginning of Necrotic Drift being in front of them.

When will Robb tell us the TRUTH about what happened at this??

Hooray! I've been part of a Higher Education class!

I knew it would happen some day.

yeah, but did he get past the mummy?


THE
FIGGER IT OUT
AARDVARK

Some pics I took, not very well, and rather successfully improving them using image enhancement 'techniques', which really means sliding bars whose functions I only guessed up and down until they looked better.



Necrotic Drift on the Big Board!



Paul O'Brian talking about ND. Who may or may not have wanted someone posting this online.

Hey ICJ,

I forgot to ask you how your sack tuck went. Do you now have lips where your ball bag used to be?

Good luck with that!

Keep it moist!

Hey ICJ,

We forgot to discuss the IF presentation you gave recently?

How did that go man?

Give us some damn content bud!