Please do!!
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OK I HAVE SOME MORE 
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Maybe a look into new IF/IF-adjacent programs, like Decker or Bitsy (I know that one has been out for a while now, but it’s “new” for IntFiction).
One thing that I like about Fiction-interactive.fr is that we have those like “first-look”/talk about the bases of unconventional programs. -
I think it would be interesting to take a (maybe critical) look at projects like the Text-Adventure Literacy Project, and talk about how/why it was started, what came out of it, whether it had influence on IF (like the inclusion of tutorials/hints/walkthroughs in parsers)… (and why we really should care about this if we want new/younger peeps to make parser/IF)
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I don’t know if it’s even feasible, but a craft article about making good NPCs/Characters in game. Or looking at Characters/NPCs that won a XYZZY Awards and why they did (like why people like them).
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Speaking of the XYZZY, maybe a History of the XYZZY
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Yeah. Or something on decisions about characterization. What kinds of games call for strongly characterized PCs, versus empty PCs intended for the player to see themselves in? Or PCs with traits selected by the player? From occasional bursts of conversation about this, it seems that older players like me dislike creating their own PCs, whereas younger players want that. But I’m gleaning that from a half dozen comments scattered across threads about other things, so that could be wrong.
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I’d guess games with any sort of Romance component or where the game tend to track your “emotions” (doing things the stoic way instead of being emotional, intro/extraverted…) would see more “select-traits” PCs than characterised ones, letting players the possibility to insert themselves into the story (You are romancing the NPCs, not the Character in the game).
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That knowledgeable person would be you, Garry. I can’t think of a more qualified person to do it.
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I’m not sure it’s an older vs newer distinction so much as different communities with different conventions. To radically oversimplify things, I’d say the Choice of Games crowd expects to choose their character’s eye color as a standard feature just as much as the parser players here expect to be able to X ME—it’s just a convention that’s so deeply ingrained that it’s the default, and you don’t break it without a reason.
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On which note, actually—it would be fascinating to see a writeup of what the “archetypal” game from some of these communities would look like. What’s the Platonic ideal of an Inform game, a Twine game, a ChoiceScript game? What things are considered the defaults so that any variation from them is taken as a conscious artistic choice?
I could try to describe the archetypal Inform game, but I don’t have nearly enough experience with the others to draw contrasting pictures of them!
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I don’t think there is an “archetypal Inform game”. Is there? Perhaps that would be the crux of the article. And if there is an archetypal Inform game, then surely it would have changed over time to reflect what was in vogue at the time.
For example, compare the old Graham Nelson games (before marriage to Emily Short), which are very hard, cruel text adventures reminiscent of the Phoenix mainframe games that came out of Cambridge University. Then compare these to the later narrative-heavy games of Emily Short (after marriage to Graham Nelson) and the obvious influence she had on both Inform and the direction of interactive fiction in general.
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As someone who has been on the CoG side and on the parser side, there are some conventions that have since become standard:
For CoG: character customization (gender, hair, eye, romantic orientation)- this one is more pronounced in romance-heavy HC (Heart’s Choice).
For parser: go into a room/area, L, then X whatever you can find- X ME is not strictly necessary, I, TAKE ALL, N/S/E/W into another area, rinse and repeat.
The reason why is that being a member of different communities, with different underlying structures to the authoring systems used, you naturally get different conventions. Moreover, the crowd at CoG and parser is different as well. The former tends to be considerably more laid back and tends to feature a lot of WIPs, with fantasy the most popular genre. The latter tends to be more formal, but has several “factions”: the old-school type who grew up with Colossal Cave Adventure and the like, the late 1990s-early 2000s IF participants (Leon Lin, Emily Short), and those who were introduced to this more recently.
I don’t consider myself as belonging to either side; I pretty much adopt a big-tent approach when it comes to IF: use whatever is most appropriate.
Probably giving some more discussion about my style somewhere else.
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It’s sort of both, but the more granular detail is definitely a newer thing. I played a couple of very early Choice of Games games when they were first out in 2012 or so, and then got into them in 2014. Most of them didn’t include very detailed PC personalisation (by which I mean flavour like appearance rather than personality traits that shift based on player choice). I started making Twine games with more defined protagonists, but have been making CoG projects for about eight years now.
When the bestsellers Wayhaven and Fallen Hero: Rebirth came out in 2018, they jumpstarted a number of trends that continue to ripple through that part of the IF community, especially the Hosted Games releases and WIPs. One of them was very granular PC appearance choices, in particular height - I’d never seen height options being available before Wayhaven and then they were everywhere in Hosted Games (less so in Choice of Games and Heart’s Choice, whose authors tend to be less active online), including people asking me to implement it. I notice it being requested a lot, not just from me - in Ink and Intrigue, the detailed hair/eye colour choices were added in response to forum player feedback.
Although it isn’t always something I feel passionate about, and I wince at the way it slows the pace (and try to spread it out/vary how it’s framed/not go so granular that the PC feels like a jigsaw) I’ve increased the amount of appearance customisation I put into my games over time. Partly so I can be more specific and help avoid me writing in assumptions about, for example, a PC being white or thin - which I do feel passionate about - but also in response to audience expectations.
All that said, I do like to balance those expectations with my preferences and leave some things up to the imagination - ironically the more granular it becomes, the more risk there is of leaving something out. I’ve seen huge lists of different shades of brown hair where “brown” would cover all the bases, and it makes my eyes glaze over.
(I also struggle to think of a way that an eye colour choice would feel fun to me, to play or write, even though I’ve been occasionally asked to implement it. I probably won’t unless there’s some kind of magic or plot related reason to do so - somehow it feels less important and visible to me than hair colour and I don’t want to use up a precious choice page on it 
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The question of blank vs set vs player-defined protagonists, and the tolerance and expectations around them, is really interesting to me. Some players on the CoG forum are really strict in their definitions! For example, I’ve seen folks suggesting that if a PC has a backstory defined by the author, but the player can define their name, gender, appearance and personality is an example of “a set protagonist”, or close to one, which isn’t what I would think of at all. (This is perhaps my cue to write something up formally and submit it to The Rosebush. If I had some time I’d totally do a deeper dive into when this became more common over time…)
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I’ve briefly skimmed the CoG forums at various times over the years and it always feels like a “vocal minority” sort of situation, especially with the (sometimes conflicting sets of?) very strict black-and-white “requirements” that a lot of players there seem to have.
I doubt there’s any way to really tell, but I think it’d be fascinating to see some thought around how those vocal preferences shape the games and how well that lines up with what the larger player base cares about…
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Same for Twine honestly. Especially considering you have a bagizillion formats.
I think ChoiceScript games might have more of a code when it comes to making games, since ChoiceofGames have rules/guidelines if you want to publish (through them). And so users tend to co-opt those.
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Yeah, the thing with CoG/HC/HG games is that there are so many overlapping and contradictory voices giving input that there isn’t really one broad “CoG audience” with universal views. You can see it anytime people discuss player agency, or how preferable it is for a romance interest to make the first move. I don’t know if there’s necessarily one broader player base to draw from. However: there are a fair number of people who don’t enjoy bad things happening to their PC, but the highest-selling games contain plenty of that, so I don’t think that’s applicable across all players by any means.
I agree broadly… but I’d also say a lot of the HG games are doing their own thing or deliberately going against the CoG guidelines (although the base code/look/capabilities will be the same because of the nature of the coding language).
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The way I see it is, Arthur DiBianca’s Inform games definitely aren’t archetypal, right? But they still involve putting in commands in an elaborate world model that reacts according to regular rules. So what exactly makes them so unusual?
It might be hard to pin down what exactly an archetypal bird is, but if we look at an ostrich and say “yeah that seems like an unusual bird because it doesn’t fly”, that shows that the archetypal bird does fly.
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Some of the meowmeows in the NeoInteractives chat expressed interest in a Rosebush article concerning autobiographical works of interactive fiction- with some ideas floated around about doing interviews of authors and digging into more of the craft aspect of why they chose to explore autobiographical elements in their work and ways how to do so.
There was some chatter about how it would be interesting to read in comparison to the essay about trauma games up on the site at the moment, as that one explicitly stayed away from discussing autobiographical aspects to that body of games.
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10 Ways to Leash the Dogs of War: stop manufacturing tension between interactivity and narrative
/clickbait
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What’s that about? …or do I have to wait for the article? 
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I’m mostly joking: it’s common to frame story and interactivity as being opposing forces (“at war” with each other). We don’t see that as much in this community but it happens a lot in video games in general, especially in newer narrative designers or people coming from programming.
And I think that’s… an unhelpful framing? There are some ends of the spectrums where certain kinds of storytelling don’t work well with certain definitions of player “agency” but there are plenty of interesting ways they work together and I think a lot of the times when they “clash” are more a failure of storytelling craft (you’ve failed to communicate what kinds of interactivity you’re offering, and you’ve failed to get the player onboard with that design) than capital I Interactivity and Narrative actually being in tension most of the time.
And framing it as a war tends to put the focus on people taking sides and continuing the argument rather than putting that energy into exploring and celebrating the possibilities. So I thought, what if there was a humorous article talking about some of the ways that’s not true and the techniques people use to make them work together?
We’ve been had! The Great War between Interactivity and Narrative
is a hoax! Look, I’m not saying they get along all the time, but
who does? If you never disagree, you start looking around for
the brainwashing machine, right?
What triggered this was noticing that LudoNarraCon was yesterday and today, and seeing that the schedule has not one but two panels totalling (7 different narrative people) that set story and gameplay up in opposition (The Ongoing Tension Between Story and Gameplay yesterday, and Balancing Storytelling in Games with Player Choice today).
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I think that’s a clever way to get at the truth of the matter and let the reader decide. Pit two opposing views, paint them as completely naive to each other and let the insults and accusations fly in such an over the top manner that the middle ground is the only sane place to stand. Maybe it could be a fun, recurring format for contentious issues.
I mean, if an aphid and a sawfly were arguing about the state of interactive fiction on The Rosebush, I’d read that article in a heartbeat!
You see, that’s funny because both insects are detrimental to the health of rose bushes so it’s like both camps are bad to be in… and… middle ground… and stuff…
I’ll stop monologuing now. 
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Was thinking it might be fun to interview a handful of authors who are creating work that occupies a similar micro-niche. Sort of like a silly little round table discussion thing. The original idea came about from Tabitha remarking ey would be interested in reading an article from me about the LGBT or gothic themes in my work, and a review I got in Ectocomp that directly compared my and Charm’s entries- which was very flattering and exciting: I’m a big fan of their work, and love to see another fellow meowmeow making work in homage to earlier, body horror drenched works in the scene. But it’s just a thought…
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