Zarf Updates

I wasn't blogging in 2006, but I was a regular commenter on the Nielsen Haydens' blog Making Light in the year and on the morning that I read "Mike Ford is gone."

I found the comment which I posted twenty years ago today:

I saw him just one or two times, at conventions. I never spoke with him. I admired him desperately and furiously.

I started with reading Just the Planet in a Crown Books, because I couldn’t justify spending my allowance on it. After a while, I started to worry they’d throw me out — not for finishing a book in the store; for laughing too loudly.

I finish, as a lot of us have, by waiting for Aspects.

-- me, that thread, Sept 25, 2006.

Aspects is available, such as it is. The Dragon Waiting and The Scholars of Night and Growing Up Weightless have been reprinted. Web of Angels has been reprinted, just a couple years ago -- ancient time; I forgot that edition was on my shelf. The Trek novels have remained in print, ironically, because they were work-for-hire and not subject to the long weird story of Ford's publication rights.

I also own The Last Hot Time and The Princes of the Air and The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues (a Paranoia module). I have the Tor Double that includes "Fugue State". I have the two short story collections and the Bordertown story collection. I hope those get reprinted. I have a tiny small-press collection of Ford's poetry. It includes "Winter Solstice, Camelot Station", which Ford legendarily wrote as a Christmas card and subsequently won a stack of awards.

(Camelot Station, under its Mittel-modern barrel-vaulted glass roof, comes 'round again as the Grand Terminus of Aspects.)

I need to reread the lesser-known stuff. I've been rereading Aspects recently, piecewise out of order, as I have now and then since 2021. "Comfort reading," my spouse diagnosed correctly. I can't spend all my time in the comfort zone, though.

A few years ago I wrote an essay about language in Aspects. I thought about writing another essay, as a twenty-years' memorial, but I don't have enough pieces. Or too many, incomplete. What did happen to the Moon? How does the book's Book (its Tarot deck) echo the plot? The rules of Battleboard? Goddess, her aspects and consorts? The way Silvern and Edaire's telepathic conversations are always perfectly transparent to the reader? The omnipresent and unspoken theme of "Every story can be told two ways"?

All of that is in there, but none of it is finished and I don't see how it works. Teresa Nielsen Hayden (the book's editor) described it as having "(was going to have) (damn it) a fiendishly complicated plot." I don't even know what the plot was! I don't know if she does!

I have figured out a few things about Aspects, and since I'm not writing an essay, I'll just list them.

Three mysteries... or games which are mystery-shaped, at least. Plus one which doesn't fit the theme but does fit the symmetry group.

• The Mermaid Mask
• This Bed We Made
• Cognition Method
• He Who Watches

Back in April I took a look at the Hugo Award finalists, with an eye to seeing how the votes might divide up. I did this because the 2025 Best Game voting showed an interesting split between "indie" and "big company" voters (in some sense of those very subjective terms).

Well, the 2026 Hugo Awards were announced this weekend, and the results are... boring. No! I don't mean boring; we got a great lineup of new works across SF media, and I was excited to see them. But as statistics, there's not much to say.

(The 2026 Hugo Full Statistics report can be found on the LACon Hugo Award site.)

September is upon us, and with it that least regarded of the early Infocom games: The Witness.

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license. In addition, I've posted high-resolution scans of the original folio manual and feelies.

I am always happy to see another Rusty Lake game. It's not a high-velocity studio, but they're reliably high-quality and enjoy experimenting with their chosen form. (Co-op gameplay! Short film!)

I am also always happy to see another Rusty Lake knockoff. These are pretty common; creepy-haunted is not a complicated vibe. I've got a whole folder on these on my iPad. The Strange Case series; Hotel Orpheus; Forgotten Hill...

...My folder is labelled "Submechanical", because when I first played a Rusty Lake game -- or "Cube Escape", as it was titled back then -- I decided it was a Submachine knockoff. It turned out to be a speciation event instead; but of course that's hindsight. My point is that there's nothing wrong with being a knockoff, especially at three bucks on the mobile store.

Now I have played both the new Rusty Lake and a new batch of "if you enjoyed that, why not try...?"

• Servant of the Lake
• Hidden Town (series)

Apparently today is the worst possible day to post about Zork the text adventure? See articles about Duskbloods if you don't follow FromSoftware news, which, to be clear, I don't. Spoiler: everybody's hot for a playable goon named "Zork".

But I shall defy the Trending News gods! I have deployed a new Visible Zorker feature: a search box in the Source pane.

Back in March I made a lot of hay about the decline of GDC. I didn't confidently predict that GDC'27 would be cancelled, but cancellation wouldn't have surprised me.

Well, GDC'27 isn't cancelled. Which we knew. They would have had to announce a cancellation at or immediately after GDC '26. Turning a ship of that size takes a year of lead time, minimum.

Instead, as Cmdr. Takashima almost once said, GDC '27 is open for business. There's a shiny "What's New" page. To quote a couple of lines:

• Introducing a new Business Hall at Moscone West, built specifically for meetings, networking, partnerships, pitches, and getting business done.
• Opening the Festival Hall Tuesday through Thursday (previously Wednesday through Friday).
• Making several pass and pricing changes designed to provide more accessible ways into GDC.

Oh, and I was right about Ball-Park Monday being a flop. That's off the list.

The important part is the new price list. $500 standard; $300 for student/indie; $150 for the expo hall alone; $100 for the "business hall" alone.

In some sense, this completely contradicts GDC's new mission statement:

The GDC Festival of Gaming is where the entire B2B games industry comes together.

That's from an og:description metadata tag on their front page, which is surely the most official possible source. It used to say "the game industry's premier professional event", but this "B2B" language came in last year. Similarly, their 2025 rebrand announcement talked about "the world's premier B2B gaming industry event".

Two articles have popped up in the wake of Cyan's fandom-rattling pitch reel for Anglerfish.

To recap from last week: Anglerfish was the Myst-universe project that Cyan started prototyping in 2024. They teased it as "PREFALL" because it was set in the golden age (and Age) of the cryptic D'ni civilization, centuries before Atrus and his family.

Cyan spent four months building a fully playable prototype of Anglerfish. They pitched it to publishers. They did not get funding. They shelved the game and laid off half the company. Phooey.

Last week, Wired published an article with more details. What we learn here is that Cyan pitched the game in early 2025, at DICE Summit and GDC.

Cyan hoped it would come away from the conferences with a funding agreement between $1 million and $10 million to finish building Anglerfish. But even though the demo was positively received by most publishers, Cyan went home empty-handed, put Anglerfish on ice, and soon laid off 12 people, roughly half of its staff.

-- from "No One Can Afford to Make Myst Games Anymore", Adam Morgan via Wired, 05-Aug-2026

August brings us Suspended, Michael Berlyn's cryogenic nightmare.

As usual, the source code repository is also live, licensed with the open-source MIT license.

The rest of my 2026 Mysterium report. (See part 1 for the Cyan news.)

All the videos are currently available on Mysterium's Twitch channel. They will be archived on their Youtube channel pretty soon.