Much as I did at the conference itself, I’m going to follow in Phil’s footsteps here to provide a summary of my own experiences.
Friday and Saturday
On Monday the 16th, I was called in for jury duty. The judge advised my group of 30 that the trial was likely to last until Friday; while I’d signed up for a few of the Friday workshops, this didn’t feel like sufficient justification to request exemption from the selection process. I hoped we’d be able to get through the trial quickly, but the circumstances didn’t favor this outcome. Deliberations started Friday morning. By the afternoon, we were still at an impasse, but the judge eventually notified us that our continued requests to re-examine the submitted evidence lead to the accused accepting a guilty verdict to a less severe version of the charges.
By the time I got out (and caught an eastbound bus, and ran to the Arch St Meetinghouse—), the showcase was almost finished. I joined the people lingering outside the room as the awards were announced, sweaty and winded. I tried to check out the exhibits afterward, but people were packing up for the day, so I eventually left for the offsite meet-and-greet.
I’ve been to a couple of board game places around Philadelphia, but this was my first time at Queen and Rook. It was pretty nice! I spoke with Phil and Pinkunz, as reported, but I overtaxed my voice due to the noise level. After my group scattered, I got to talking with @DougOrleans, but between my poor hearing and my rasping voice, I wasn’t much of a conversational partner at that point. I decided to call it a night.
SATURDAY
I was a little surprised when I first heard that SWERY would be doing the Vision Keynote before the conference. I’d played the original Deadly Premonition, and while I backed The Good Life through crowdfunding some years back, I had no familiarity with any of his subsequent work. The talk felt like a straightforward overview of some of the reasoning behind the character choices he made in various games. One thing that stood out to me was his clarification that, while Deadly Premonition’s protagonist has obvious parallels with Dale Cooper of Twin Peaks, the real inspiration for his constant asides was actually Ferris Buehler.
I attended Philip Conklin’s panel, “Inferring Intent or Agency without Traffic Lights.” This was a brisk overview of interactivity’s relationship with narrative in games, and as the talk progressed, I thought that we might be working toward a discussion along the lines of Ken Levine’s Narrative LEGO. Instead, Philip broke down how their team used made each major game verb a context-agnostic tool that influenced two bi-modal variables. (Imagine a D&D-based game with four verbs: “attack” makes you more chaotic and more evil, “pick lock” makes you more chaotic and more good, “cast rebuke” makes you more lawful and more evil, and “cast cure” makes you more lawful and more good. The innovation here would be to mix up the contexts in which you would find e.g. attacking useful; a player who wants to behave in heroic manner might be expected to mainly cast cure, but they would also find opportunities in which the heroic choice would be to cast rebuke, or to pick locks, or to attack.) This interested me, because my games like The Exigent Seasons were envisioned toward a first step toward something similar, but it seemed risky to try to derive too much intent from such ground-level actions. I couldn’t get past the idea that players are likely to choose the verb that works the best regardless of roleplaying intent or character concept. I want to check out the game they made to see how people reacted to it.
My second talk of the day was Samira Herber’s “Designing Dictatorships: Two research-based approaches to highlighting the techniques of authoritarian institutions through games.” The two approaches turned out to be the games QUANTUM TIES and Silencer. This was an interesting talk; I didn’t manage to get down all the referenced research materials, but I did note Robert Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. A problem from the early development of these games: the obedience techniques the games employed were too successful—players didn’t want to break the rules! By removing evident win conditions (and correspondingly incentivized behavior), by avoiding binary choices, and by providing narrative rewards for noncompliance, the games encouraged players to experiment and begin to defy the diegetic rules that had been established.
Lunch was loud and hectic, but there at least seemed to be sufficient food and drink for everyone.
In the afternoon, I attended Paris Buttfield-Addison’s “Yarn Spinner Toolbox: Making Your Narratives Sparkle with Free, Open-Source Tools.” This was a technical demonstration of the tool originally built for Scott Benson’s work on Night in the Woods. As a hobbyist, I’m not proficient with most of the systems Yarn Spinner is designed to complement, but it was still an enjoyable session; the tool is very reminiscent of Ink or Twine. I particularly liked the option to export all lines of game dialogue to a voiceover recording spreadsheet to organize recording work and simplify localization.
At 2:15, Alyssa J Rodriguez presented: “Your Dating Sim Doesn’t Need to Subvert the Genre.” This was a fascinating breakdown of the dichotomy between “traditional” otome games and the “prestige” games that achieve mainstream success by parodizing what is otherwise a niche genre. I’m familiar with plenty of games in the latter category, so it was a treat to learn more about how redundant a lot of that category’s innovations truly are. (By way of comparison: consider the popularity of the romance novels, and then recall how celebrated Chuck Tingle’s work is. Imagine discovering that romance novels were already incorporating storylines just as radical as the most unhinged of the Tinglers.) I couldn’t write down as many titles as I wanted to, but I noted Mystic Messenger as well as Love and Deepspace before the talk concluded.
After a coffee break, I sat in on Charles Huang’s “Journaling Games: A History and Design Framework for Unlocking Player Creativity.” I picked this in part because of how much I’ve enjoyed RPGs (solo or otherwise) that incorporated journaling, such as The Quiet Year and Thousand Year Old Vampire, which is a little ironic because he admitted that he had little familiarity with these kinds of games. His approach included three components: first, journaling games need to be PERSONAL. The player must mine their own experiences for their engagement with the game. Second, the use of journal PROMPTS should be open-ended, but not too directionless. The prompts are the scaffolding which invite consideration. Finally, the games must be PROSOCIAL: player trust is paramount! Since this is hand-written writing of a personal nature, the player should not fear that data collection is occurring. I found his approach and methods pretty intriguing.
“Local IF Meetups Supergroup”: we had representatives from Seattle, London, Boston (the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction), Oakland, Club Floyd—I’m probably missing some. People relayed their experiences getting started with these meetup groups, some of their experience playing games, how they administer group play, etc. I’ve joined Club Floyd once or twice, and while the prospect of an in-person play group has its appeal, I would probably stick with the online option if I were to do something similar in the future. Fun talk, though; the idea of playing games on original hardware like the PR-IF folks did sometimes seems pretty cool.
The last talk of the day was Dylan Ogden’s “How (and Why) to Bore Your Players.” Dylan immediately arrested my attention with an illustration drawn from The Beginner’s Guide, a personal favorite. The following discussion ranged over the various ways to inflict boredom on a player, reasons why it might be preferable to do so, enumeration of games which embody these principles… Despite my sparse notes, this was one of my favorite talks from the day. My current WIP dabbles in boredom, and I found myself reconvinced that the path I’m charting is the right one.
After the talks ended on Saturday, we grabbed a meal at Shake Shack before making our way to Post for the Philly Game Mechanics after-party. I was having trouble hearing again, but I did manage to play a game of “Flip 7” with Ann-Marie, Colette, Jacob, June, and Lucas. I might have talked with some folks who weren’t wearing name tags…? I don’t remember. I went home not long after that.
A summary of Sunday’s panels and activities will have to wait, as it’s past time for me to go to sleep.
