XYZZY Award For Best Writing
The XYZZY Awards are the annual awards given to works of interactive fiction, serving a similar role to the Academy Awards for film. The awards were inaugurated in 1997 by Eileen Mullin, the editor of ''XYZZYnews''. Any game released during the year prior to the award ceremony is eligible for nomination to receive an award. The decision process takes place in two stages: members of the interactive fiction community nominate works within specific categories and sufficiently supported nominations become finalists within those categories. Community members then vote among the finalists, and the game receiving a plurality of votes is given the award in an online ceremony. Since 1997 the XYZZY Awards have become one of the most important events within the interactive fiction community. Together with events like the Interactive Fiction Competition and Spring Thing, the XYZZY Awards provide opportunities for the community to encourage and reward the creation and development of new works ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Interactive Fiction
'' Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of interactive narratives or interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be " text-only", however, graphical text adventures still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles. Due to their text-only nature, they sidestepped the problem of writing for widely divergent graphics architectures. This feature meant that i ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Slouching Towards Bedlam
''Slouching Towards Bedlam'' is an interactive fiction game that won the first place in the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition. It is a collaboration between American authors Daniel Ravipinto and Star Foster. ''Slouching Towards Bedlam'' was finalist for eight 2003 XYZZY Awards, winning four: Best Game, Setting, Story, and Individual NPC (for the protagonist's cybernetic assistant, Triage). The game takes place in a steampunk Victorian era setting. Its title is inspired by a line from '' The Second Coming'', a poem by W. B. Yeats. Summary The player character awakens in an office in Bedlam Asylum. From context it appears that the character is Doctor Xavier, a doctor at the Asylum. The Doctor, however, has no memory of his past. After investigation, it becomes clear that a now deceased patient, Cleve Anderson, has infected the player character with a mental virus known as the "Logos". The virus spreads by spoken language, taking the form of a glossolalic babble uttered by the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Porpentine (game Designer)
Porpentine Charity Heartscape (born 1987) is a video game designer, new media artist, writer and curator based in Oakland, California. She is primarily a developer of hypertext games and interactive fiction mainly built using Twine. She has been awarded a Creative Capital grant, a Rhizome.org commission, the Prix Net Art, and a Sundance Institute's New Frontier Story Lab Fellowship. Her work was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. She was an editor for freeindiegam.es, a curated collection of free, independently produced games. She was a columnist for online PC gaming magazine ''Rock, Paper, Shotgun''. Game design Porpentine's 2012 Twine game ''Howling Dogs'' incorporates themes of escapism, violence and religious experience, though she has stated that it should be open to interpretation. She created ''Howling Dogs'' shortly after she started hormone-replacement therapy in 2012, in only seven days, while staying in a friend's remodeled barn. It won the 2012 XYZZY awards in ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Howling Dogs
''Howling Dogs'' is a Twine game and piece of interactive fiction created by Porpentine in 2012. The game is text-based and includes occasional abstract pixel art. In 2017, the game was included in the Whitney Biennial. Gameplay ''Howling Dogs'' opens with a quote from ''The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away'' by Kenzaburo Oe and starts off in a metal room. The game makes the user repeat basic actions, such as eating, drinking, sleeping and bathing, in a repetitive cycle. As the setting deteriorates over the course of the game, the tasks become harder to perform. The user can escape their surroundings momentarily by putting on a virtual reality visor, which becomes accessible after they perform some of their basic tasks. The virtual reality allows users to escape their cell-like surroundings, and displays a bizarre alternative world and imagery, before ending and bringing the user back to the same room. The game closes with a quote from theologian John Hull. The game's ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Yoon Ha Lee
Yoon Ha Lee (born January 26, 1979 in Houston, Texas) is an American science fiction and fantasy writer, known for his '' Machineries of Empire'' space opera novels and his short fiction. His first novel, '' Ninefox Gambit'', received the 2017 Locus Award for Best First Novel. Life When he was young, Lee's Korean American family lived in both Texas and South Korea, where he attended high school at Seoul Foreign School, an English-language international school. He went to college at Cornell University, majoring in mathematics, and earned a master's degree in secondary mathematics education at Stanford University. He has worked as an analyst for an energy market intelligence company, done web design, and taught mathematics.Interview with Yoon Ha Lee at Locus Online, excerpt posted Sunday 7 September ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
The Masquerade (Choice Of Games)
Masquerade or Masquerader may refer to: Events * Masquerade ball, a costumed dance event * Masquerade ceremony, a rite or cultural event in many parts of the world, especially the Caribbean and Africa * Masqueraders, the performers in the West Country Carnival Books * ''The Masquerader'' (novel), a 1904 novel by Katherine Cecil Thurston * ''The Masqueraders'', a 1928 novel by Georgette Heyer * ''Masquerade'' (book), a 1979 children's book by Kit Williams that sparked a worldwide treasure hunt * ''Masquerades'' (novel), a 1995 Forgotten Realms novel by Kate Novak and Jeff Grubb * ''Maskerade'', a 1995 Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett * ''Masquerade'', a 2007 '' Blue Bloods'' novel by Melissa de la Cruz Theatre * ''The Masquerade'' (play), a 1719 play by Charles Johnson * ''Mascarade'', a 1724 comedy play by Ludvig Holberg * ''Masquerade'' (play), an 1835 Russian play by Mikhail Lermontov * ''The Masqueraders'', an 1894 English play by Henry Arthur Jones * ''The Masquerad ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Meg Jayanth
Meghna Jayanth is a video game writer and narrative designer. She is known for her writing on ''80 Days'' and ''Sunless Sea''. Jayanth worked at the BBC before becoming a freelance writer, and has also written for ''The Guardian'' on women and video games. Early life While growing up Jayanth lived in Bangalore, London, and Saudi Arabia, attending a total of 12 different schools. Her first gaming experiences included ''Disney's Aladdin'', ''SimTower'', and '' Civilization II''. Jayanth studied English literature at the University of Oxford, where she directed The Oxford Revue, following which she worked at the BBC in the department responsible for commissioning video games. Jayanth first became interested in writing for video games via online text-based roleplaying games in which she built worlds and characters. The first playable game she wrote was ''Samsara'', a choice-based narrative game set in Bengal in 1757, which she has yet to finish. Jayanth is particularly intereste ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Inkle (company)
Inkle is a video game development company based in Cambridge, United Kingdom that specialises in interactive narrative, i.e. text-focused computer video games. They are notable for games such as '' 80 Days'', which was ''Time'' Magazine's Game of the Year in 2014, and ''Sorcery!'', a recreation of Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! gamebook series. Inkle has also created ''inklewriter'', a tool for creating interactive fiction that was online from 2012 until 2018. ''inklewriter'' was subsequently revived as free and open-source software in 2019. History Inkle was founded in November 2011 by Jon Ingold and Joseph Humfrey. Their first project was an interactive, choice-based version of Mary Shelley's novel ''Frankenstein'', written by gamebook author Dave Morris and published by Profile Books. It received mixed reactions, earning a Kirkus Reviews “Best of 2012” star, while The Guardian described it as “digital butchery”, noting its “bewildering” format and how, despite ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
80 Days (2014 Video Game)
''80 Days'' is an interactive fiction game released by Inkle for iOS platforms on July 31, 2014 and Android on December 16, 2014. It was released for Microsoft Windows and OS X on September 29, 2015. It employs branching narrative storytelling, allowing the player to make choices that impact the plot. Plot and gameplay The plot is loosely based on Jules Verne's 1873 novel ''Around the World in Eighty Days''. The year is 1872 and Monsieur Phileas Fogg has placed a wager at the Reform Club that he can circumnavigate the world in eighty days or less. The game follows the course of this adventure, as narrated by Phileas Fogg's manservant Passepartout, whose actions and decisions are controlled by the player. After leaving London on an underwater train to Paris or a mail carriage to Cambridge, the player can choose their own route around the world, travelling from city to city. Each city and journey contains unique narrative content. The developers estimate that on one complete ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Cryptozookeeper
''Cryptozookeeper'' is an interactive fiction game written and self-published by American developer Robb Sherwin in 2011. Cryptozookeeper was written in the cross-platform language Hugo and runs on Windows, Macintosh OS-X, and Linux computers. Cryptozookeeper was released under a Creative Commons license and contains more than 12 hours of game play. Cryptozookeeper combines both traditional elements of story-based interactive fiction while adding in fighting elements. In the game, players assume the character of William Ezekiel Vest and must splice together DNA samples to form a stable of fighting cryptids, all while solving puzzles in the off-kilter town of Christmas City. In an interview with BlueRenga, Sherwin described the game as "a game that lets the player assemble various DNA snippets that they pulled out in a Zork-style treasure hunt, into the various monsters of legend and cryptozoology. At the same time, I am hoping to have character interaction in the game that mak ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Jeremy Freese
Jeremy Jay Freese (born March 15, 1971) is an American sociologist and author. Work life Freese is a professor of sociology at Stanford University, where he is also the co-leader of the Health Disparities Working Group in the Stanford Center for Population Health Sciences. He previously served as professor of sociology at Northwestern University from 2007 to 2015, where he chaired the Department of Sociology from 2010 to 2013 and served as Ethel and John Lindgren Professor of Sociology from 2013 to 2015. Video game design In 2008, he created the interactive fiction computer game Violet, which won the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition The Interactive Fiction Competition (also known as IFComp) is one of several annual competitions for works of interactive fiction. It has been held since 1995. It is intended for fairly short games, as judges are only allowed to spend two hours pla ... and multiple awards. Blogging He began blogging in 2003 because he was bored. In 2007 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Violet (video Game)
''Violet'' is a work of interactive fiction by American author Jeremy Freese. It is a one-room puzzle game. Plot The protagonist of ''Violet'' is a graduate student trying to write 1,000 words for his dissertation. The protagonist's girlfriend, Violet, threatens to leave otherwise. The protagonist faces a stream of distractions, including a window with a view of the campus, and a computer with access to blogs and webcomics. In the course of the game, the protagonist must "reconsider—and risk wrecking—" his career and relationship. Reception A reviewer for ''The A.V. Club'' described the puzzles as "smart but logical" and "fitingthematically into the story." The reviewer also called out the ability to disable "'heteronormativity,' so you can play as Violet’s girlfriend" as something that makes the game "Worth playing for". A second review also observes this option, noting that at least one puzzle changes based on the choice. A writer for Jay Is Games called out ''Vio ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |