[Purple-Blurb] Interactive fiction readings from Short and Freese TODAY 5:30pm

[Nick Montfort]

Dear Purple Blurbers, *today*, March 29, we have a reading of interactive 
fiction from two award-winning authors, Emily Short and Jeremy Freese. 
Presentations of interactive fiction in a reading format are rare and 
delightful, and we are extraordinarily honored to have these two authors 
with us to share their work with us. I hope you can make it.

The event is free and open to the public.

  5:30-7pm, TODAY
  MIT's room 14E-310 (Building 14, where the Hayden Library is also housed)

JEREMY FREESE

Violet is an interactive short story about romance and procrastination in 
which the main character is struggling to complete his dissertation. The 
things that happen in the simulated graduate student office are narrated 
to the player by the (imaginary) voice of the main character’s Australian 
girlfriend. Violet won several XYZZY awards in 2008, including the award 
for Best Game, and was the winner of the 2008 Interactive Fiction 
Competition.

Jeremy Freese is a professor in the Department of Sociology, School of 
Communication, and Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern 
University.

EMILY SHORT

Alabaster is a fractured fairy tale by John Cater, Rob Dubbin, Eric Eve, 
Elizabeth Heller, Jayzee, Kazuki Mishima, Sarah Morayati, Mark Musante, 
Emily Short, Adam Thornton, and Ziv Wities, illustrated by Daniel 
Allington-Krzysztofiak. This interactive fiction is an experiment in open 
authorship. The introduction to the story was written and released by 
Short in 2008. The game is implemented in Inform 7 using a conversation 
system, developed by Short, that will be released for general use by 
Inform 7 developers. There are eighteen possible endings to Alabaster.

Emily Short is author of or collaborator on more than two dozen 
interactive fictions, including Galatea (winner of Best of Show in the 
2000 IF Art Show) and Savoir Faire (XYZZY Award for Best Game and in other 
categories, 2002) and Floatpoint (winner of the 2006 IF Competition) along 
with other XYZZY award-winning games: Metamorphoses (2000), Pytho’s Mask 
(2001), City of Secrets (2003), and Mystery House Possessed (2005). Short, 
who is a classicist and a scholar of attic drama, has worked on the 
development of Inform 7, has reviewed dozens of games, and writes the 
column “Homer in Silicon” for GameSetWatch.

-- 
-   Nick Montfort         nickm at nickm.com     http://nickm.com
--
-   Associate Professor of Digital Media
  -  Program in Writing & Humanistic Studies, MIT
--  77 Massachusetts Avenue, 14N-233, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307