Zarf Updates

The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction presents a Special Halloween Event: The Lurking Horror

• Sunday, October 31st, 2 - 5 pm
• MIT Campus: Building 4 Room 145

Get ready for Halloween and come to play The Lurking Horror, an interactive fiction piece that brings Lovecraftian horrors to G.U.E. Tech, a fictional version of MIT. Dave Lebling, author of The Lurking Horror and Zork, also an MIT alumn, will join us as we fight the creatures of the Unspeakable. After playing, we will offer a campus tour of the different locations that are (approximately) in the game.

If you have not played interactive fiction (a.k.a. text adventures) before, this is your chance to learn the basics. If you already know how to play, come and experience how fun it is to play interactive fiction with a room full of people. If you've heard the call of Cthulhu, this is the place to be.

The event will also be broadcast online via ustream.

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We've got four other IF events coming in the next two weeks. We announced these earlier, but now the times and locations are set:

Collaborative IF Playing Event

• Thursday, October 21st, 7:30 pm until everyone's done having fun
• Tufts, Center for Scientific Visualization, Anderson Hall -- the Viswall
• Flourish Klink and the PR-IF crew will present several IF games to play in groups. The game is up on a projector screen; somebody reads, somebody types, and everybody can shout out suggestions. We've done this a couple of times at MIT, and it's a lot of fun. (List of games to be announced.)

PR-IF Meetup

• Monday, October 25th, 6:30 until we're hungry
• MIT 14N-233
• Our regular monthly meetup. We will look at this year's IFComp entries, watch a surprise video, and discuss whatever else is up in the IF world.

IF Writer's Workshop

• Wednesday, October 27th, 7:30 - 9:30 pm
• Tufts Mayer Campus Center -- the large conference room
• I (Andrew Plotkin) and the PR-IF crew will host an IF writer's workshop. Please bring a work in progress! (Any amount of progress, even just an opening room. Any IF platform.) We will try out each work for a few minutes, and then discuss how it plays.

Clara Fernández-Vara on Storytelling in Games

• Thursday, October 28st, 6:00 - 7:15 pm
• Tufts Halligan 111A
• Clara Fernández-Vara (GAMBIT Lab, MIT) gives a guest lecture for Ming Chow's Game Development class. It is open to the public. This is not specifically about IF, but about narrative in game design in general.