Messages

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General Discussion / Submit to sub-Q!

« on: October 08, 2015, 07:15:03 PM »

Hey there!

I'm here to talk about sub-Q, a new literary magazine for interactive fiction! We are up and running now, and are currently accepting submissions! sub-Q pays authors and developers for original work and reprints made in any of the various IF tools out there.

We are primarily looking for works of speculative fiction (fantasy, sci-fi, horror, or genre-bending) but are open to seeing what you've got. You can find out more about sub-Q by checking out our submission guidelines here: https://sub-q.com/about/submissions/

Thanks for your time, and looking forward to seeing your work!

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General Discussion / Re: IF Lit Mag Musings

« on: January 05, 2014, 11:42:50 PM »

UPDATE:

We are now accepting guest blog post entries for Inky Path's blog. If you want to write about the state of writing, fiction, or interactive fiction today, or post any reviews for IF pieces, this is the place you can do it! We will also accept re-posts of entries you might have already posted to your own blog.

We are also still accepting submissions for Volume 1. Remember that your piece can be published elsewhere, and we accept most types of interactive fiction.

For guidelines on submitting your interactive fiction piece, or your blog entry, check out the submission guidelines here: http://inkypath.wordpress.com/submissions/

Hope to be hearing from you soon!

--

Inky Path: http://inkypath.wordpress.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/inkypath
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/InkyPath
inkypath[at]gmail.com

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General Discussion / Re: IF Lit Mag Musings

« on: December 16, 2013, 10:58:21 PM »

Okay, so time to make this thing a reality:

Hello, you wanderer of the internet! I've started an interactive fiction literary magazine, Inky Path.

What is Inky Path?

Inky Path is the first literary magazine that showcases interactive fiction and provides readers with the tools to create their own game. It is about fostering a community of thought and discussion around IF works, seeing pieces for more than their entertainment value, and providing greater exposure of IF to the literary world.

What are you looking for?

We are looking for talented IF writers like yourselves to submit your interactive fiction to the site. There can't be a literary magazine without submissions, so we welcome everyone to bring forth their best work!

It's fine if your work is published elsewhere. You can also submit excerpts or the beginnings of pieces if you want. We welcome pieces of all lengths, types, and flavors. Bring us your best hypertext historical fiction, or parser-based paranormal romance. Or get even more experimental and send in some multimedia medley that defies all convention or classification. Have fun with it.

Check out the submission guidelines for more info on submitting. We are accepting year-round.

NOTE: We are also currently looking for more readers and graphic designers to help staff the magazine. Click here if you would like to know more about becoming part of the staff.

How can I help?

Since this is a relatively new publication, please, spread the word! Even if you are not personally interested in submitting, pass on the info to someone you know would love to. Since this really is the first of its kind, I'm hoping that it will succeed--I think it's something that the IF community has needed for a long time.

If you want to help fund the project, we also accept donations .

--

Thanks! Please submit your work and share with friends! For questions, comments, etc. you can reply here or email the mag at inkypath[AT]gmail.com.

Inky Path: http://inkypath.wordpress.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/inkypath

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General Discussion / Re: IF Lit Mag Musings

« on: December 03, 2013, 10:26:39 AM »

Haven't seen Brainy Gamer before, but it looks neat!

It would be suboptimal for a film critic to review all the cutscenes in video games - it would be cool, but also missing out on an essential dimension - that which makes the game a game, rather than a movie with some buttons in it.

True, very true. I hadn't really thought of it that way before. I agree that the most desirable thing would be to have a community of writers and thinkers that could discuss interactive fiction and its role in the world. This is a bit tricky, though, seeing as IF walks a very thin line between "game" and "narrative" and oftentimes there are definitely distinctions as to how these two mediums are treated today. I'm not sure if there's anything inherently wrong with viewing IF as one or the other, but I'm also finding it difficult to fathom treating it as something completely independent of either games or literature. Of course with more reviews/analysis/promotion of IF a new style and treatment of the medium will probably happen naturally.

Update on literary journal news: after some more in-depth research, I've found that there actually were some literary journals or something of the sort dedicated to interactive fiction, but most are closed down now or no longer updating. It'd be neat to see who else might be interested in getting something together.

The nice thing is that the medium lends itself to online display; it'd even be possible to tailor the stories the reader views to the reader's own choices or desires. Although it's just speculation right now, I wonder what a print version of this "journal" would look like.

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General Discussion / IF Lit Mag Musings

« on: November 15, 2013, 09:51:30 AM »

I've been doing a lot of searching in the publishing industry, especially the world of literary magazines. As far as I can tell, there's really not any literary element aiding in the distribution and promotion of interactive fiction as a literary medium.

Right now, many sites dedicated to IF--think ChoiceofGames or Textadventures.co.uk--seem to focus mainly on the "game" aspect of the genre rather than other uses of the medium. It's not that I don't think literary works can't be entertaining or that games can't be literary, it's that this tends to exclude a large range of IF--IF can be used for more than the narrative structure, for instance. There are remarkably few examples of, say, poetry or vastly multimedia works without these traditional IF elements--but I think that there is a lot of untapped potential for the genre. Some of my favorite IF games are ones that mess with tradition (think The Space Under the Window [http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=egtt6j8vif0plzrc])--the same as the role of innovative new fiction of any sort.

The problem with promoting IF as a literary genre is the same as any medium that has been used in the past primarily for entertainment. As far as the literary world goes it might even be "lower" than so called "genre fiction" especially for the low caliber of writing and production for much time--the old CYOA books were not exactly fine literature, and IF is infamous for parser bugs and "guess-the-verb" nightmares.

On another tangent, what about other mediums? There are clearly many examples where "entertainment" genres have been groundbreaking and done more than just entertain--I'm thinking of rock opera, but there are many other examples. Could there be a "literary album?" Could web comics be considered fine literature?

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Contests / Re: Proposal for Adventure Cow Compo

« on: August 12, 2013, 01:58:31 PM »

The 2-6 time slot should probably work too. I went ahead and registered.

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Contests / Re: Proposal for Adventure Cow Compo

« on: August 11, 2013, 12:23:13 AM »

Since I work from 12-3 (central time) that day, would it be possible for me to drop in in the morning for an hour or two, and perhaps after I get back home as well? Or should I just wait for the next compo? (I thought it would be running all weekend, so I'd have more time to spare and not miss the majority of it)

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Contests / Re: Proposal for Adventure Cow Compo

« on: August 10, 2013, 09:11:05 AM »

That could work too.

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Contests / Re: Proposal for Adventure Cow Compo

« on: August 06, 2013, 09:50:11 AM »

Sounds good to me. Do you think we can garner enough support/participants by then?

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Contests / Re: Proposal for Adventure Cow Compo

« on: July 30, 2013, 09:58:50 AM »

Any status update on this, Chris?

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Discussing Game Design / Re: Characters, Complicity and Caring: Jo Walton's speech at Wiscon

« on: June 25, 2013, 05:43:49 PM »

I've definitely found this to be true--not just about interactive fiction, but stories in general. This is difficult, because it's quite difficult to balance character complexity and making characters exaggerated versions of human traits. It's even more difficult in IF because making a fully-functioning character who will react to you is often not the key goal behind a creator's mind, and more often than not NPCs are left out altogether--if not just providing one or two lines.

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Discussing Game Design / Re: Self-imposed design limitations to stimulate creativity

« on: June 25, 2013, 05:28:58 PM »

I've worked with inform before on a very small project, and I agree that it's an entirely different mindset than working on an extensive narrative, for instance. It's quite difficult to pull of anything without heavily relying on rooms and the basic IF format. The same goes for other interactive fiction creation tools--Choicescript, for instance, has very effective use of statistics but you cannot change the looks as much as in Twine and you cannot hyperlink like Twine does. I've found myself having to plan projects around the strengths and restrictions of engines before.

Twine to me seems like a pretty open program, though, compared to other IF programs. It allows for rooms or choices within a narrative, and is openly acknowledged as capable of much more than just creating stories. I think this is why so many people are drawn to it.

On a related note, self imposed restraints apply quite well to noveling too: http://blog.lettersandlight.org/post/53522431708/use-self-imposed-constraints-to-write-how-to

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Contests / Re: Proposal for Adventure Cow Compo

« on: June 25, 2013, 05:17:04 PM »

I think August would work nicely as well--still the summer for students, and it's before any big holiday rush through the rest of the winter.

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Workshop my Game / Re: First ever "Workshop my Game" thread - "Thank you for your cooperation"

« on: June 25, 2013, 05:15:31 PM »

I haven't quite decided how I feel about this game yet. It's not the type I'd usually go for, but I must say it's interesting. I didn't play through all the endings, but I think that my primary objection with this game is what you intentionally made a huge part of the gameplay--the fact that the player's actions have little if any effect on the outcomes. My favorite part was probably the way various ends did tie together (the kid getting kidnapped/the car driving into the woman's house, for instance). This, at least, made the gameplay feel like it had some overall connection and feel more like IF than reading a narrative.

I didn't really see the piece as a satire (though it was humorous); to me the revelation that you were a character manipulated into making choices for someone else's entertainment more of a horror/psychological thriller type thing, although it was breaking the fourth wall.

While a comment on IF, I found myself personally trying to find (perhaps futilely) the connections, story, and the things that do make the genre matter (ie choices affecting action) rather than observing how it defies the very genre in which it was created.

Just a note as well--it seems the apostrophes and quotation marks have the weird bug from when you copy/paste them from Word or another text processor that makes them come out funky in the html build. There's a fix for this here: http://forums.adventurecow.com/index.php?topic=49.0

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Contests / Re: Proposal for Adventure Cow Compo

« on: June 07, 2013, 05:27:05 PM »

Would love to participate, but I will be unavailable on the weekends of the 29th, the 6th, and the 13th. You don't have to work around my schedule, though; I'm sure there'll be plenty more opportunities to come.