…and forgot to tell the internet about it

              So yeah, I turned 20 more than two weeks ago. Wasn’t a huge spectacle, though an old friend from PEI happened to be visiting his aunt so we brought him along to dinner. We went to a new burger place near Dad’s, which was decent. I didn’t really want to throw a party or anything, but I still didn’t have time to sit down and write. I realize nobody was on the edge of their seats waiting for me to bore them with personal junk, but in case you were, that’s my excuse.

              I feel like I should write about what happened during my 19th year, if only for posterity. Trouble is, there hasn’t been a whole lot of spectacle in my life lately. If anything, I’ve achieved a stratospheric level of mellow-ness. Still, a quick scroll down my archive has brought up a few interesting things to talk about. On an unrelated note, this is my four hundredth post. Holy crap.

              Easy cop-out solution to recapping the last year: referencing previous recaps! The last five posts of my 2011 recap happened after my birthday, so that counts. I assume 2011 in review gives a good idea of what the 2011 part of being 19 was like. I distinctly remember being very morose on New Year’s Eve, though, so that played a part in the tone of the review post. Not the recap post, mind you. Sorry about that, it’s confusing in retrospect.

              Anyway, onto more substantial discussion. I wrote during winter break about some goals for 2012, but had a hard time coming up with anything significant. I said I’d like to be consistently happy, but lamented my choice of solitary hobbies. I also said (hang on, have to re-read the sentence five times…) that “I might be miserable because I don’t have any close friends in Ottawa”, or something along those lines. “Might also be good if I were to talk to people, or spend time with them”. Hilariously enough, I resolved all those things… without… really… meaning to. Now, this might be obvious to you, but hanging out with people who share your hobbies turns out to be a two birds, one stone sort of deal. Watching anime, playing games, and reading may be primarily silent activities I do on my own - but it’s just as nice to be alone together, i.e. doing so with someone else engaged in their own game/book. Having hobbies in common also netted me a friend who is close physically as well as emotionally, and it’s nice to have that again.

              I’m also getting pretty good at gathering a group of people and hosting a relatively low-key nerdfest event at home. This allows me to safely avoid individual invitations while still gradually getting to know people. Next step should probably be expanding on the set of people I can comfortably invite to hang out individually. Which isn’t to say that I prefer quantity over quality, but generally you deal with a quantity of quality larger than one. One person is significantly better than an empty set, but it just seems like I’d benefit if I wasn’t so damn scared to say “hey we should hang out and bond over *insert shared hobby*”.

              Related to that is my post about decreasing my misery quotient, which still seems like it’s going to be a valid strategy. But aside from that, I am much more consistently pleased with life than I used to be. As it turns out, computers and video games provide a lot less emotional support (active and passive) than real, live humans. Hooray for nice people!

              I posted near the end of the school year about some goals I had for 2012 and where I was at in life. That was pretty good, and I think it’s still pretty relevant to where I am now. Regarding my second goal, I’ve been reading (thus, learning) voraciously - I cleared out almost all of my list on Read It Later (now Pocket, but the new name doesn’t give you any idea of what the service is about). And then I filled it up again. At any rate, I’m starting to put stars on things I really like and delete things that were lame, so there should be a higher signal/noise ratio in my archive. As for books, you can see what I’ve read over on GoodReads, which I like more and more as time goes on. It’s funny when I recognize names of reviewers on programming books from StackOverflow and parts of the Emacs community. All in all, I think I’ve learned a lot of good stuff over the summer.

              Something I never wrote about was that my roommate is no longer staying with us. Or speaking to me, for that matter. It’s unfortunate, but life goes on. I wish her the best, truly. Don’t be concerned by how little I’m talking about this seemingly significant event; it’s not really fit for public consumption. I’m older (lol 20 isn’t old) and wiser and have a better idea of what I should/shouldn’t post publicly. This is one of the things I shouldn’t write about.

              There’s one small benefit of the above, though - I’ve got my own bedroom back at mom’s. Which is kind of nice, because living in the basement sucked in subtle ways. Meanwhile, I’m getting an awesome place in the basement at my dad’s. It’s still under construction, but I expect it will be nice to have when it’s done.

              Anyway, things are winding down for my work at HotSoft. My project didn’t yield a lot of fruit this summer, but we’re on hold for a week or two to await some information about some of the software we depend on. If the information doesn’t show up, we may plot a fairly different course from here. We’re having a picnic tomorrow and I’m bringing delicious cake. So that will be nice!

              Classes start a week from today, so between now and then I’ve got a couple hundred bucks to drop on textbooks and some time to spend on my own stuff. Not sure yet what I’ll focus on, but I’ve been getting Emacs set up for Python programming lately. Spent hours looking into it and I’m still not done, because there’s literally three solutions to every problem. Sigh.

              Oh, right, I ordered a new laptop! I’ll post more details when it arrives, which should be soon. It’ll be a good opportunity for me to sit down and get digitally organized. This post is mostly about life, though, so I’ll save the tech for another post.

A few years ago, I came across a game on Steam called Winter Voices. It was an episodic RPG for PC by a small French developer, but they only released Episodes 0-4 (with 5 and 6 unreleased) before going bankrupt late last year. Because the company dissolved, the game has been removed from Steam and most honest digital distribution platforms. I don’t know what the game’s sales were like, but it didn’t get very much press and most people couldn’t recommend the game wholeheartedly. The rough state of the game at launch and bittersweet press response probably hurt the game a lot. But for the people who played it, Winter Voices provided a unique experience that truly deserved more exposure than it received.

        The game stars a young woman whose father has just died. She has returned to the small northern village where she grew up in order to attend his funeral, with the implication that she had gone off to make the most of her life elsewhere. Winter Voices begins when she arrives - correction: when you arrive - at the village a few hours before the funeral. [correction: I e-mailed this post to the game’s author, and the heroine did *not* leave the village - that was a miscommunication with the people who made the game’s intro video] You choose a variety of stats relating to your character’s personality, like humour and memory, and set off to talk to people and wander around the village.

        Whenever you run into nostalgic or otherwise emotional situations, you enter grid-based battle arenas where you struggle against shadows representing grief, painful memories, and other psychological trauma. However, there’s no “combat” as such - you can’t defeat grief by brute force. All you can do is try to withstand it. Most battles have goals like “get to the other side of the map” or “survive for 5 turns”. It’s a great metaphor, and Winter Voices may be the only game to imbue these common battle mechanics with actual meaning.

        It gets even more interesting when you see the game’s skill tree. Here’s an image of your initial skill choices, courtesy of Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

        The skill in the very center is Repulsion, which lets you push enemies a very short distance away. Generally, they can move much farther than you can push them, so it’s a fairly ineffectual defense - but initially it’s all your character is capable of mustering. As you gain experience from dealing with your emotions and talking to others, you can gain new skills that are connected to the ones you’ve already learned (in the above image, the highlighted circles are skills that player is able to pick). To quote the description from RPS:

You start at the centre, and each direction represents a different way of dealing with grief. See the yellow-looking skills towards the bottom right? They relate to regressing into your own imagination. The orange skills above those are all to do with being sociable, and the power of friends. An example of a skill that lies between both of those areas is Imaginary Friend, which summons an ally that will hold enemies back.

        The skill tree is another beautiful metaphor, and I think it makes for an awesomely individual experience for each player. Instinctively, you might think that everyone will experience the same “story” when playing Winter Voices - the one the game’s writers came up with, focused a woman dealing with the death of her father. However, the important story in Winter Voices - what I think of as its “narrative” - is the one enabled by the gameplay mechanics. Everything that you do in a game contributes to its narrative, and most designers and writers ignore this at their peril. Almost every game in the strategy/RPG genre relies on generic player statistics like strength, agility, etc. and skills that focus on faster or more exciting ways to kill things. This makes it very difficult for them to have a narrative that doesn’t involve faster and more exciting ways of killing stuff, because that’s the main form of conflict resolution. Then the writers are forced to craft a story with a lot of combat opportunities, stifling a huge swath of meaningful stories and narratives.

        Rather than following the combat-focused trend, Winter Voices makes a metaphorical narrative out of your choice of which skills and stats to invest in. Every player builds their own, personal narrative about who the main character is and how she learns to cope with (and hopefully overcome) her emotional anguish. It’s possible to play Winter Voices without thinking about the story behind your gameplay choices - your narrative - but I expect that few players would. It’s just more fun to construct a story to make sense of the choices the game has provided for you, and that’s what makes Winter Voices so amazing. The sheer size of the game’s skill tree (you can only see a fraction of it above) also contributes to this phenomenon, because there are a lot of valid ways to play the game. Since they’re all equally efficient, the player will probably wind up making some personal choice in how they decide to play. Metaphorically speaking, each potential set of choices represents a different coping strategy.

        This sort of narrative complexity, which is generated by a mechanical system, fits poorly in other mediums. There are twelve mechanically (what they do for you) and narratively (what they say about your character) distinct skills you can choose when you gain your first skill point, and the number of possible paths only expands from there. That level of choice enables a wide variety of narratives, and it would be difficult to provide all of them in a single traditional novel or film. Moreover, the systems in Winter Voices provide an environment in which to make interesting choices. The skill tree in particular provides a handful of meaningful choices, each time you level up, about how your character deals with her emotional problems.

        On the other hand, it also provides constraints that make each choice more meaningful. If you could have every skill in the game at once, your choice of skills doesn’t really matter in the long run to the narrative. If you could have ten arbitrary skills from the entire set, the choice would have less narrative meaning - there would be less logical progression in the way that your character solves her problems. The end result is that your character builds on basic, foundational skills to learn more advanced and more effective abilities, which have a logical grounding in what she chose to learn in the past. The choices and constraints in Winter Voices enable a wide variety of possible narratives, and that’s what makes it so fascinating. To me, that’s the essence of video games.

        Having played Winter Voices when it was on Steam, I think it provides a valuable experience. If you spend an hour or two playing Winter Voices, you’ll experience a powerful argument for video games being art. The sort of argument you just can’t convey by letting people look at (but not touch!) games in a museum. It’s not a game for everyone, but you can get the game’s prologue for a few dollars, and I guarantee it’s worth at least that much money and a few hours of your time.

        There’s roughly three reasons why I wrote this post: one, the game is set to be re-released soon with a plethora of improvements from when Rock, Paper, Shotgun played the game. Two, I was disappointed by the Smithsonian exhibit linked above and I wanted to provide a compelling argument for why games are art. And finally, Extra Credits just released a compelling two-part series about game mechanics as metaphors.

        Regarding the first point: Some members of the original development team reformed under a new name, bought the IP back from the French government, and are currently running a beta test of a huuuuuuuuuuugely improved version of the game through Steam. If you’d like to try it out after reading this post, you can send them an e-mail at betatest@innerseas.com with the subject “Winter Voices EP5 - Beta Test”, with at least your Steam user name in it (maybe with some info about your computer’s hardware and such, too).

        It sounds like they’re looking for people to test the game from start to finish right now because of a big engine update a few days ago, so they’d probably be happy to have your help. Otherwise, they’re hoping to have the game back on Steam in a couple of weeks. So even if you don’t get into the beta test, please do give the game a shot - with the improvements they’ve listed in the Steam forums, I expect I’ll be able to recommend the game without any reservations now.

[Thanks to Vael Victus, M-. and Sarah for reviewing and helping me edit. Also, if your viewing experience sucked, you’re probably using the Tumblr dashboard - blame their elimination of a lot of basic HTML stuff.]

We’re doing what?

While I was researching a post I’m working on (you’ll see it soon, I’m really proud of it), I took a bit of time to look into interactive fiction. This led me to a Stack Overflow question with a lot of good answers about IF tools/systems, and I realized once again how cool Inform 7 is. I’ve also been listening to episodes of a Destructoid podcast called “Sup, Holmes?” (itunes, feed with mp3s), and in a number of episodes (episodes 15-18) he has interviewed people from the Toronto indie game community. They all spoke of things they had worked on at various game jams in Toronto, and I thought that sounded pretty cool. A game jam is just a bunch of people gathering (often physically, but sometimes digitally) and working on a game for a set period of time. At the end, you have a thing that probably sucks but gosh darn it you made it and you’re going to be proud of it!

Light bulb: why not combine the two?

So here’s what I’m proposing:

• Date: Monday (Labour Day)
• Time/length: From 12 pm until 4 pm, Eastern Standard Time - we all have other things to do, and we don’t all get up early. Note that I originally had allocated a lot more time for this; but I didn’t want to exclude people who have, you know, adult responsibilities. Next time we’ll do five hours. Perhaps it will be a two-part event, e.g. we all work on the same story next time.
• Who’s invited? I’ll get a few interested folks from Ottawa in my living room, but distant participants are welcome - I’ll set up some kind of video chat through Google Hangout/Skype/TinyChat/something so we can taunt each other and discuss stuff
• What do you make? The day of, I’ll announce the theme we’re going to write on by pulling one of several candidates from a hat - I’m open to suggestions on what our criteria are for a “finished” story, as I don’t necessarily want one person to write 10,000 words and someone else to write 300
• Then what? Then everyone works on their story all day, in whatever way they see fit!
• What happens when I’m done? We’ll use Inform 7’s export thing to put what we’ve made online!

This is meant to be difficult, because to the best of my knowledge I don’t know anyone who writes interactive fiction. The random theme aspect is designed to make it that much more challenging. What you produce doesn’t have to be awesome; it will probably be more fun to create than to play. At any rate, it’s just meant to be a fun event for us to hang out and do something interesting. I literally have no experience with this, and haven’t written creatively in a while, so I expect this to be really difficult. But you’re up for it, because you’re awesome!

Resources

I’m going to be continually adding resources that seem useful here, if you want to do a bit of research. Just try not to show us all up by reading everything like some kind of genius, alright?

For a practical introduction to Inform 7, check out this screencast by Aaron Reed. I’d forgotten about this video, actually; this was the first thing I ever saw about Inform 7 and it’s really quite impressive. He paints the system in a more prose-based light than some of the other more programming focused resources below. So at a bare minimum, give that a watch and then grab things below that seem useful.

One programming-language-y thing that I expect to be quite useful is rulebooks. I expect he’s right that using rulebooks as much as possible is a good idea, so do give that post a look and consider making use of them. Thinking about it a little, rulebooks are kind of like quirky interfaces - you have some behaviour that you want a bunch of things to share, so you put it in a single place and have them “consult” with the rulebook on what to do. Depending on the approach you take, this will either be incredibly useful or utterly irrelevant.

For in-depth tutorials on Inform 7, there’s a section on their site. The Recipe Book seems particularly useful.

For those of us with the background, Inform 7 for Programmers is long but informative. I actually find it to terse to a fault in some ways; it’s not very good as reference material to flip through.

If you’d like to see some source code as an example, check out the bottom half of this page which implements Cloak of Darkness, which seems to be an IF “hello, world” sort of story.

One of the StackOverflow answers recommended the section on design from the old Inform Designers Manual, Fourth Edition (DM4). So I’ve extracted that into its own PDF, which I’ve uploaded here.

Inform has an extensive library of extensions (shut up I am normally better at writing than that), which you can check out here - once you’ve got an idea of what you’re going to do, you might want to look around in there.

If you’d like to write a fight-y sort of game, you can check out an extension for Inform called ATTACK.

He also has a series of posts about designing a text-based dungeon crawler in Inform 7, if that’s your jam: pt 1, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4

If you run into anything interesting that I haven’t directly linked to, please do send it around to the rest of us. We’ll probably all be doing wildly different things, but you might inspire someone to change direction with whatever wonderful extension/blog post/whatever you’ve found.