Phil Goes to Narrascope 2025

Day -1:

I caught the train at 8:55 am from Charlottesville, arriving in Philadelphia at about 2pm. I came a day early since I wanted to catch the Showcase and this was the only train from CVille that would work. And coming into town the day of a conference sucks anyway – no time to relax before you dive in.

For this first night I stayed in a B&B several blocks north of Drexel, since there were no rooms at the Study for that night. I had a late lunch at El Taco and Burrito around the corner, and Seamlessed some Nan Zhou Hand Drawn Noodle House noodles for a late dinner in my hotel room. Then I played some Minecraft with my wife and went to bed.

Day 0:

So I’m in a really nice B&B, which means BREAKFAST, right? So of course I have to blow it all by deciding to watch Chris Crawford’s “workshop” at 9 am. Which meant breakfast was what they could give me in a paper bag as I left the place.

A real disappointment, it turns out, since the three hours of Crawford’s rambling I stayed for weren’t what one might hope. Apparently, he believes that after a lifetime of trying, he’s solved the problem of making a true work of interactive art, Le Morte d’Arthur. I haven’t played it, so okay, let’s grant that it’s a work of art. I was interested in what his methods were more than his appraisal of what is art. But that’s where I was really disappointed, because apparently he’s reinvented choice graphs with global variables representing character traits. Then he makes the choice, based on his own theory of how stories work, that every interactive story should be essentially linear, except for the end, which is determined by the character traits you’ve built up during the story. He explains this by example; for instance, whether or not Han and Luke succeed in rescuing Leia from the Death Star is immaterial to the story of Star Wars, because the core of the story is only in its climactic scene, when Luke learns to use the force and blows up the death star. I’m no literary scholar, but this seems… wrong? to me.

Anyway, I stayed until lunch break and then took off, got a gyro at a halal truck, ate it on the lawn on Drexel’s campus, and grabbed an Uber to the Showcase down at the Friends’ Meeting House. I played a few games, but unfortunately missed the online workshop Puzzle as Story: Researching the Roottrees by Katryna Starks. I hope there is a recording going up some time.

I did catch Building Real2: Launching a Platform for Interactive Fiction, which I was kind of hoping would go into more technical detail than it did, and was more a research project into why Real2 isn’t as successful as it might be. Lots of good advice from a very thoughtful audience, I thought. The real reason, though, is probably luck, like it is for so many business concepts, games included. There’s nothing really wrong with their product; it’s not my cup of tea, but it seems like it should appeal to the right group of people.

I also caught Make (narrative) games fast with Turbo! by Alex Feigenbaum and JD Calvelli. Turbo seems a little like a Rust version of Processing, with support for multiuser out of the box. As a vehicle for low cost-of-entry game development, fast prototyping, etc., it has promise, especially if you’re into WASM. Calvelli showed off a little library he’s made for doing branched narratives in Turbo, a full-fledged demonstration of which was on the Showcase floor.

After the Showcase awards ceremony, everyone headed to Queen and Rook Cafe for a board game mixer. I had the good fortune of spending some good time with @jsnlxndrlv and @pinkunz talking about games and whatnot. Then I caught an Uber to the Study Hotel.

I have to mention Philly drivers. They are truly among the worst I’ve ever seen. I’m from the Boston area, and I’ve never seen such aggressive driving. Nor was I ever so timid to cross the street in NYC. There I expect people to stop, here I’m never confident in that. I’m glad that I didn’t drive in.

Lots of stuff to see tomorrow. Gotta get to bed.

23 Likes

This is really fun for those of us who can’t join in person - glad you’re having a good time! Though having lived in both Boston and NYC, the picture you paint of Philly drivers is blood-curdling. Stay safe out there!

10 Likes

This is a great write-up. Thanks for annotating your experience!

5 Likes

There’s an old (not really) joke about the difference between NYC drivers and Boston drivers:

NYC drivers don’t care if you get hurt.

Boston drivers don’t care if they get hurt.

Driver aggression that impresses a Bostonian? Now that’s scary.

7 Likes

Score!

7 Likes

Gah I’m tired.

Day 1:

My alarm goes off at 7am, but I don’t notice until 7:55. That’s fine, the conference welcome isn’t until 9. But I have to have something to eat and some coffee. So I go to the hotel restaurant to get take out because the nearby coffee shops are all closed. Turns out a breakfast sandwich and a coffee cost $25. And I don’t even finish the sandwich because I’m worried about being late to the welcome, which happens late anyway. I’m glad I got the coffee though, because this is the only conference I’ve ever been to that doesn’t have coffee in the morning.

The keynote Vision Keynote - “Between You on That Side of the Screen and Me on This Side”: How to Bridge the Gap Between Protagonist and Player in Interactive Storytelling by Hidetaka “SWERY” Suehiro was worth getting up for just for the trailer of The MISSING: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories on Steam. Along the way I gained some insight into how I can use some of my existing game elements to greater effect (see Beck in Galaxy Jones).

Making The Crimson Diamond: How I Put the Words In, and How I Got the Word Out was essentially a post-mortem of The Crimson Diamond, a parser game with very nice pixel graphics written in Adventure Game Studio. The author, Julia Minamata, included some nice details such as how she did her research into the place and time of the game setting, and how she hired a cultural sensitivity consultant for her portrayal of a Cree character.

Need to find coffee and breakfast before day 2 starts. I’ll write more about day 1 later on.

11 Likes

Grrr the university guest WiFi sabotaged my last post.

2 Likes

I’m going to go out of order here. I’ll get back to a linear account later.

day 2: Local Hero Keynote - Change Reality: Fighting Futurelessness with Interactive Storytelling by Dain Saint

A really powerful address. Dain Saint, instead of spending a lot of time talking about games per se, talked about the nature of reality and how we construct stories to create reality. He talked about current events and the world we live in and how we can create stories to change it. He talked about “futurelessness” and its prevalence among today’s young people – a lack of (positive) shared stories about what the future promises. A very moving talk. I wish I was a better writer so I could communicate the strength of Saint’s ideas better!

12 Likes

More day 1.

Puzzle Process: Making Games At The New York Times by Heidi Erwin. A fun look behind the scenes of the NYT puzzles department. A bit off topic for the conference, but I’ve done a bit of professional puzzle making so I had to attend. Packed and enthusiastic audience. Nothing new here, but interesting.

7 Likes

Day 1: Bedquilt: Bringing IF to Rust and Rust to Glulx by Daniel Franke

Unfortunately not a well-attended talk. I’m
Not sure about Bedquilt itself, because I’m always dubious about new parser IF engines, but Daniel’s Wasm2Glulx technology is interesting — essentially a wrapper around WASM code to make it loadable into Glulx.

7 Likes

Okay so it’s over, so I’ll try to speed through the rest of what I enjoyed.

First, the lunch catering was excellent! Sandwiches and salad, both really good.

How (and Why) to Bore Your Players by Dylan Ogden

An examination of how “boredom” – intervals during which little or nothing happens in a game serve narrative. I got some good ideas of how some “boring” parts of a future game I have in mind can work really well to create a more effective story.

The day was rounded out by a very loud time at the Post, a local bar, at a party hosted by local gamedev group Philly Game Mechanics.

5 Likes

Finally on to day 2. I already mentioned Dain Saint above.

Mathematically Proving Your Stories Have No Bugs by Paris Buttfield-Addison of Yarnspinner

Paris demonstrated Yarnspinners tool to determine reachability of all nodes in a branching narrative graph. Ir’s based on logical constraint solving, and as such is nothing new, but their solver is a very nicely designed tool. Paris thought it might be made available to indie devs at some point.

Social Democracy: A Postmortem for an Alternate History by @cchennnn (Autumn Chen)

I’ve never been able to make it through an Autumn Chen game (for me those are Archivist and Social Democracy) because they’ve come to my attention at times when I wasn’t able to handle such intense games. So I was excited to see Autumn talk about her work. And she didn’t disappoint. I really like dev stories so it was fascinating to hear about her research, her thought processes and inspirations.

8 Likes

Last (x3) on the talk schedule was a series of lightning talks:

Revisiting “Chaotic Fiction”: Chaotic Play in the Slenderverse Blog Community
Alex Hera

Ergodic Narrative: A Brief Exploration of Multimodal Video Game Engagement
Alexandra Leonhart

Crafting Kissable Characters (Whether Your Game has Romance in It or Not!)
Alex M. Lee

Not a lot to say here, but the format was excellent for injecting a bit of fun into the proceedings, and I hope the organizers (@mifga is the only one I know is on here) take note and keep scheduling these, and preferably in the middle of the day, not at the very end of the conference.

4 Likes

Finally, there was a public postmortem at which the conference-goers were invited to make comments on what worked and what didn’t. As far as I know this is unique. There were a lot of interesting comments and suggestions. They seemed important, so I declined to mention my minor annoyance (no coffee in the morning). I mean, coffee at 3 is fine, yes, but for those of us coming from a hotel without coffee in the room (e.g., the conference hotel), feel kind of desperate around 9am when everything’s about to start. Fortunately the second day I managed to find a place that served coffee. They opened at 9am, and the program said the conference started at 9am, but it turned out nothing really started at 9am, so I guess I’ll just blame whoever printed the program. Damn them.

Finally finally, we all sang a sea shanty and went home. That was fun.

I am currently sitting for 2.5 more hours (total 4 hours) in the train station because it’s the only option in 100F heat. I’ll see you all later.

10 Likes

Thank you for the on the spot thoughts!

3 Likes

I really enjoyed chatting with you and Jason Love as well, although, I do remember wishing that Queen and Rook (and especially the Post) were a little quieter as it was difficult to hold a sustained conversion at that background volume. Lunch at the URBN center was similar.

6 Likes

If it hadn’t been so incredibly hot, I would have suggested going outside!

It was great to meet you and Jason and @bg.

2 Likes

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.

11 Likes