So far, I’ve got the following folks listed for possible liaised Q&A, but about half of them are from myself. I am following up on this, so please include anyone you’d like to see included on this list. No one too small or too big or too tangential to suggest:
Steve Meretzky
Dave Lebling
Adam Cadre
Sam Barlow
Charlie Brooker
Emily Short
Andrew Plotkin
Arthur DiBianca
Michael Townsend & Amir Rajan
Neven Mrgan
Arvi Teikari
Raph Koster
Mark Crowe & Scott Murphy
Steve Saylor
Mark Brown
I’ll give this until the end of the month before I try to start reaching out to individuals and assessing interest. For those folks that are amenable, I’ll create separate individual specific topics to collect community questions; I’ll probably leave them up for 2-4 weeks. After that, I’ll consolidate and format them into a single document and forward them to relevant parties. As soon as any one of them returns a response, I’ll post it up under the Authoring category for all to see.
Assuming this works out at all, I’ll probably keep this topic alive for ongoing suggestions. Perhaps we can even make it a regular thing; that’s dependent on community response.
Aaron Reed might be interesting to add to the list - beyond organizing Spring Thing and his recently-completed 50 years of text games series, I think there’s potentially a lot to dig into around his efforts to make IF more accessible and how/whether his current work in pen and paper rpgs connects with how he thinks about IF.
Carl Muckenhoupt a.k.a “baf” is an IF old-timer and worked at Telltale Games. Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw of Zero Punctuation wrote three Inform games (and lots of point-and-clicks). Rian Johnson, film director (The Last Jedi etc) is an Infocom fanboy.
Another idea would be to get in touch with @GiannisG about his video series “Learning from the Finest”. If you knew what game he was going to do next, it would make sense to do Q&A with that author, if they’d be willing, and release their answers at the same time as the video.
As you’ve probably found out, the videos come out quite sparsely due to the whole thing being a side project—and I’d rather take my time and enjoy the process than get stressed with something I love.
No dates, no reason to increase your stress, but if we planned this correctly, it could actually reduce the number of crickets you hear when releasing your videos.
We could let folks know that we are collecting AMA questions for a specific author (with that author’s consent of course) in anticipation of a future video release in this series. It’d be a great way to increase buzz and engagement with the video without committing to a release date. I’d be sure to post the AMA results the same day you announce the video and I’d also crosslink your video announcement inside the AMA post.
If this sounds amenable to you, please feel free to discuss this further through direct message.
For what it’s worth, during today’s ClubFloyd session, Pinkunz suggested that my name might be added to the list. And I said I’m agreeable, but I can’t promise that anything I’d have to say would be all that impressive or useful. And it’s likely you’ll all learn how much of an idiot I really am, how many biases and how many blindspots I have. But it could be interesting, I suppose, since I’m more of a player than an author, and the questions for me would likely be somewhat different than the usual ones.
You certainly have an immense amount of play experience, and likely could answer author questions about optimal game structure from the perspective of writing walkthroughs. You basically analyze games and puzzle structure from the opposite end than the creator, and certainly could provide valuable insight - even if it may not seem that way to you.
Garry Francis @Warrigal was recommended by Tristin Grizel Dean @Grizel and Chris Ainsley @adventuron was recommeded by myself. Both have graciously accepted and were added to the list at the top of this thread.
Additional point, I will be adding an asterisk to those folks who’ve preemptively accepted, and will strike those who preemptively decline. The remaining haven’t been contacted yet because we’ve got a little over a week yet.
There are so many interesting characters in the IF world that I don’t know where to start. As I’m more into the retro scene, I’d like to see some of the old timers interviewed. I would have suggested John Wilson of Zenobi fame, but, unfortunately, he passed away last year. I think adventure historian Gareth Pitchford @8bitAG would have some interesting stories to tell. I would love to hear from Peter Kirsch, author of many of the SoftSide Adventure of the Month series, but I doubt that he is still in the IF scene. Does anyone know how to contact him?
Some of the Infocom implementors are still accessible. Marc Blank, Michael Berlyn, Brian Moriarty and Bob Bates are obvious ones to include. Scott Adams, Brian Howarth, the Austin brothers (Level 9 Computing), Peter Killworth and Jonathan Partington were prolific authors.
As I scan the list, I note an absence of female contributors. How about Dorothy Millard, Doreen Barden, Sue Medley and Amy Briggs to name just a few. There are many, many more. Jam winners Tristin Dean Grizel @Grizel and Dee Cooke @dee_cooke did a very interesting podcast with Chris Ainsley just recently.
Others that spring to mind are the reclusive Graham Nelson (author of Inform), David Kinder @DavidK (maintainer of Inform 6 compiler), David Griffith @DavidG (maintainer of Inform 6 standard library), Johan Berntsson @johanberntsson and Fredrik Ramsberg @fredrik (PunyInform), Hugo Labrande @mulehollandaise (Tristam Island and Remember newsletter).
And please try to include some of the lesser known authors. I’m sure they all have interesting stories to tell.
Speaking of Adrift, Richard Otter @rotter, Finn Rosenløv @Finn_Rosenlov and Kenneth Pedersen @Denk come to mind. And you must get Larry Horsfield @Lazzah. He’s been around since the Spectrum ZX days (e.g. Axe of Kolt) and is still writing adventures in Adrift.