@manonamora did a great interview with Chandler Groover (@CMG), this year’s IFComp winner with anti-fascist superhero parody The Bat, also the author of Eat Me, Toby’s Nose, Midnight. Swordfight. and a number of Fallen London storylines.
Whenever I learn that one of my games introduced somebody to IF, that makes me feel like, Okay, yes, I can go to the grave in peace. This medium isn’t something from the 1970s or 80s for me. It’s not nostalgic. I discovered it in the 2010s, and it opened my eyes right there in the 2010s. I hope it’s still exciting for new generations in fifty or a hundred years. And when people are inspired by my games to make their own — that’s really all you can ask for.
I think this part is some fantastic game design advice:
But there is a little science, in a way. You release a game. You see how the audience reacts. You release another game, with tweaks. Repeat. Repeat. I’ve made something like 20 commercial games at this point. The Exceptional Stories for Fallen London alone have provided a massive testing pool. You need to really listen when players say: “This is how X felt for me.” Don’t argue. Accept and analyze. Even if X doesn’t feel that way for you, it does feel that way for players, and you may need to adjust your design.
I still didn’t understand how the “awards circuit” worked in the IF world. I remember someone contacting me after Spring Thing and telling me that, if I had waited to submit Toby’s Nose to IFComp, it might’ve won IFComp. At the time, I thought: “Why would that matter? What difference does it make?”
In my mind, all these contests were equal. They were just a way to distribute my games to potential players. Winning the Spring Thing certainly bolstered my confidence as a designer, but I didn’t appreciate what it really meant until more time had passed.
This is also how I want to view the contests and jams around here, even though my brain thinks I shouldn’t. Great interview!
Great interview! There were some really interesting points there. Eat Me is hands-down my personal favourite IF piece. Some of that advice I may need to use myself …
Thanks for the interview, @manonamora ! Very interesting stuff.
I really like the description of the naïve innocence with which @CMG stumbled into IF, and how it was all one big collection of interactive text, no boundaries between choice and parser, no hierarchy between comps.
That’s a great way to view and experience IF, and one worthy to try to follow.
The superhero genre has normalized “heroic billionaires” for decades, but the very concept of a “heroic billionaire” is a poisonous oxymoron. The Bat is my attempt, small though it may be in this niche corner of the world, to inject pop-culture with an antidote. It’s not enough to criticize billionaires, or kings, or dictators. The criticism doesn’t stick. People still worship the money, the power; and if they can’t have it, they try to ally themselves with it; they want to enjoy it vicariously, by association. It must be pulled down, stripped bare, and revealed as ridiculous, petty, and weak. People should flinch and recoil, as they would from an infected wound.
