My talk on "IF for Writers"

Authoring General Design Discussions
1

I gave a talk on IF at Readercon this weekend. Readercon is a science fiction convention focussed tightly on written SF; but one of the organizers is interested in IF (he’s quoted in Get Lamp!) so he was willing to run some IF events, including a Get Lamp showing and my talk.

Given the venue, I tried to describe IF for writers (and readers) of traditional fiction.

eblong.com/zarf/essays/if-for-writers.html

(Some of this is cribbed from my Gameshelf post from last week: gameshelf.jmac.org/2010/07/if-an … ide-b.html . Which you can also, y’know, read if you want.)

2

This essay is really helpful and interesting, one of the best explanations of IF that I’ve ever read. I’ve been looking for a way to introduce novel people to IF. Can I have permission to link to “A Writer’s Guide to Interactive Fiction” from other forums?

Thanks for putting it together. It must have been really effective as a speech.

3

You may link it, absolutely.

It wasn’t a big crowd, but they seemed interested and asked good questions afterwards. Unfortunately I didn’t have a projector, so I was reduced to reading the bits of transcript off my laptop.