💡Ideas for other games to read closely

Unit ideas

AI and Cyberpunk - September

Universal Hologram

• memorably weird

• see also consciousness hologram and Computerfriend by the same author

Open Sorcery

• same author as Absence of Miriam Lane

Sense of Harmony

• 10th place in 2020 IFComp

• cyberpunk sex work

Occult/magic and bodily transformation - October

The Absence of Miriam Lane

• "puzzles" in Twine; also free range of movement

• "feminine" topics in videogames (could go in a unit with Space to Grow and Creatures Such As We)

With Those We Love Alive

• game that engages player in physical ritual of drawing on their arm

SABBAT

• make sacrifices, get weird body

Removed and We Know the Devil by Aevee Bee

• accompanying essay

• about lacking body parts

• chapter in Videogames for Humans

• interview with Aevee Bee from a book called The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games

General horror (I can't remember if it deals with corporality): My Father's Long, Long Legs; five paragraphs on familial memory in the game by Kevin Snow

Mama Possum by Kevin Snow

Nature/environmentalism - use as interludes/intermissions?

Alba (adventure game - not just text-based)

Free bird (and other games on this list of games about birds; also You Bird and (Birdland--kinda long and drawn out))

Adaptations of literary works - November

80 Days

• game that re-imagines the 80 days book

• lots of criticism of 80 Days, including "Around a more diverse world in 80 days" in the Offworld game journalism PDF on diversity and an entry in IF50 https://if50.textories.com/portal/games/80Days.html

• this game got a LOT of attention from news outlets and stuff

• Ethics and Adaptations in 80 Days from Writing for Games: Theory and Practice by Hannah Nicklin

Animal Farm - VN

The Cherry Orchard - VN

Omen Exitio: Plague is "Lovecraftian", has a gamebook "feel"

The 39 Steps - based on a novel, is a visual novel

The Whisperer in Darkness - based on a Lovecraft story; a visual novel

Dagon, One Summer Night, and the Tell-Tale Heart in one VN bundle

Humor - December

You Are Spamzapper 3.1

• humor, playfulness, examples of non-human characters

FISH & DAGGER

• won an XYZZY award for best use of media, it is really cool-looking

• it gets a bit silly, I guess that's the point

SPY INTRIGUE

Unusual choice-based designs

Theory: Form-led Design from Writing for Games

Tarot as procedural storytelling by Cat Manning mentions Emily Short's project to create a procedurally-created tarot: https://emshort.blog/2018/06/26/parrigues-tarot-draft/#more-38472

Text here https://www.dropbox.com/s/o9hrwrdv7zcnv2e/ShortDeck.pdf?dl=0

Update https://emshort.blog/2021/07/18/the-uncanny-deck-co-authoring-with-gpt-2/

First Draft of the Revolution

• dev thoughts from Liza Daly

• games about writing, how can we make the player feel that they have a choice, but also how to show a character's personality through their writing

• sidenote: I want to play Harmonia (also by Liza) for its utopian connections?

Penrose - in-browser demo and on the App store/Google Play

• experimental form with changes to the story based on "choices" to change things in the text

• hints

Solarium - still need to play this Cold War nonlinear story

The Domovoi and the author's chapter on Uncanny Text from Procedural Storytelling in Game Design

Slice-of-Life

-Concierge game

-

Beyond text

• Disco Elysium

• The Sea Will Claim Everything - point-and-click text adventure, I am just a big fan of Jonas's work (also it's interesting how he includes his political ideas about Greece)

• Her Story

  • not IF, video and keyword-search adventure/mystery

  • check out that GA Wikipedia page

Lists to look at

Overview of 2010s in Aaron's book has lots of choice-based games on it

Mathbrush's list of Twine games on IFDB

Great Twine/Choice games for those skeptical of the format - Recommended Listifdb.org

IFDB Top 100 (includes a lot of parser-based games)

IFDB Top 100 - Recommended Listifdb.org

Horror recommendations:

Horror IFThe Interactive Fiction Community Forum

List of other games I'm thinking about

• I highly recommend that we each judge 5 games in this year's IFComp in October

• Fallen London

  • horror, browser-based, freemium

  • https://if50.textories.com/portal/games/FallenLondon.html

• reProgram

  • it is nsfw. not a lot of choices. A really good example of Twine as a personal game though (a new iteration of the perzine?).

  • offworld article by the author

  • also has a chapter in Videogames for Humans

• A Long Way to the Nearest Star also from IFComp2022, also appears to have free range of movement

• Book of Mormon Adventures

  • use Nephi's Journey in Twine Tutorials to do two things: 1) figure out how to download and look at a game and 2) examine the branch-and-bottleneck setup/code

• Your Lover Has Turned Into a Flock of Birds

  • poem, short

  • chapter in VfH

• Eden

  • there's an alien in it, but actually it's not as weird as I hoped

  • chapter in VfH

  • short, "action" game. example of player-chosen gender and sexual identity

Games with articles about them

Offworld games journalism collection

• "The new mistress of horror" by Leigh Alexander looks at the games of Kitty Horrorshow: CHYRZA, Hornets, and Rain, House, Eternity. Hornets is a Twine game.

Notes on outside readings

IF Theory Reader

• craft-centric chapters on map management in games with large locations and puzzle design

• "Landscape and Character in IF" will go well with a location-based game (actually, maybe for Absence of Miram Lane)