The 19th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition is going on right the heck now. Go look at it. I’ve entered two games:
Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder is about pirates. The cover art above was created by Caitlyn Harris.
Robin & Orchid is about high school newspaper students who are looking for a ghost. I wrote it with Emily Boegheim.
There are a ton of other games as well. You should play as many as you want, and then you should vote in the competition before the voting period ends on November 15.
I finished a new doll! It is a California Condor, Gymnogyps californianus. There are more pictures at the bottom of the good old plush toys page.
I wrote this ghost story last week. Please print it out and read it to your friends around a campfire or in another suitable context.
A titanic brawl in the depths of the sea! This installation of mine will be on display at the Plaid Peacock in Waterloo, IA throughout the month of June. The photo above appears courtesy of my dad, and there are numerous additional images on Facebook. Continue reading
I’ve got a new text adventure for you! It’s called “Wrenlaw”.
You can play it online here. It’s a pretty tiny game, as IF goes.
I’d love to say more about it but I should probably just let you experience it for yourself!
Please click, and view a huge version
I drew this map of Koholint Island on one of those paper tableclothes at a local pizzeria last night.
Koholint is the setting of the fantastic Game Boy game The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, released in 1992. Given limited space, I had to exclude many of the details, but the eight main dungeons are there, along with Kanalet Castle, Yarna Desert, and of course Mount Tamaranch. That guy in the lower left is Link, the famous left-handed hero of Hyrule, and that vague curvy shape at the top is a seagull.
I’ve uploaded some browser-playable versions of my IF games—the ones that aren’t already hosted at PR-IF.org (since the versions there are so pretty already). Crucially, Taco Fiction didn’t have any online play available anywhere, at all, so that has been fixed.
If you haven’t had a chance before, I hope you’ll give them a shot. There’s an introduction to Interactive Fiction (c/o the authors of Inform 7) that might help you if you haven’t played this kind of game before.
And please let me know if something is screwed up!
You can play Dig My Grave or The Statue Got Me High at The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction, and while you’re there you should check out the rest of the Apollo 18+20 Tribute Album games.
With a gilded finger the sun traced a lingering line up her leg, and her stomach, and across the brass mirror of her shoulder, so that she shone like a reclining Colossus on that dusty beach. All the men gazed on her, and all had to shield their eyes.
“Are you maybe like from Greece or something?” a babbling boy asked.
“No; I am from Montana,” she said, and the crowd hummed in disbelief.
“I didn’t know they had pretty girls in Montana,” another joked, from his seat behind the woman, where he could see down the top of her bikini. From there, he knew, he had no need to fear her frightful glare.
But she twisted her radiant body around like a lithesome cat’s amber tail on her stripèd towel, and fixed him to the spot with sunglass-lenses burning like twin suns: “The girls of the State of Montana are as beautiful as its horses,” she said. “That’s why the girls and the horses get along so well.”
“I’ll tell you all about it,” she said.
The other day, prolific interactive fiction critic “Peter Pears” posted an excessively complimentary review of my IF “cover” of They Might Be Giants’s “The Statue Got Me High”. [Update, September 2014: that review is not there anymore] In the review he called out an aspect of the game that not everybody notices, namely that I stole the plot of the game from the finale of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
The rock song and the Don Juan myth both deal with statues, fire, and cosmic justice, but the similarities apparently are coincidental. A fan must have pointed them out to John Linnell after the song was released, leading him to introduce the song at a show in 1994 saying: “This song is based on the life of Don Giovanni, which I didn’t know when I wrote the song.” Yes: The game is a ripoff of two different artists’ work, and even drawing a connection between the works wasn’t my own idea. Continue reading
2013 marks the twentieth anniversary of the film Groundhog Day, directed by Harold Ramis and starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell. Since the movie’s release, the real-life holiday has been inextricably linked with Sonny, Cher, and temporal disturbances. But there’s more to Groundhog Day than Groundhog Day, isn’t there?