Zarf Updates

A quick notice that I'm part of the program of Flights of Foundry, a virtual SF conference on April 16-18.

There's quite a bit of IF-related content on the schedule, in fact. I'm on two panels, but look at this:

• Saturday, 6am Eastern: Bigger On The Inside: Creating Deeper Worlds Interactively (Jon Ingold)
• Saturday, 9am Eastern: The Power of the Hyperlink (Sharang Biswas)
• Saturday, 3pm Eastern: Game Design from Outside the Industry (Aaron Reed, Andrew Plotkin, Katherine Morayati)
• Saturday, 5pm Eastern: Choice-Based Games You Should Try Out (Cassandra Khaw, Anya DeNiro, Takuma Okada, Stewart C Baker)
• Saturday, 6pm Eastern: Deliberately "Bad" Game Design (Takuma Okada, Katherine Morayati, Clara Fernandez-Vara)
• Saturday, 9pm Eastern: What Does Narrative Design Involve? (Saf Davidson, Grace Fong, Katherine Morayati, Whitney Beltrán)
• Sunday, 1pm Eastern: Narrative Game Design (Artur Ganszyniec)
• Sunday, 2pm Eastern: Games in Conversation with Academia (Artur Ganszyniec, Aaron Reed, Sharang Biswas, Clara Fernandez-Vara)
• Sunday, 4pm Eastern: Writing for Choice of Games (Kate Heartfield, Phoebe Barton, Rebecca Slitt, Bendi Barrett)
• Sunday, 6pm Eastern: What Puzzles in Games Do (Valerie Valdes, Curtis Chen, Ciaran Roberts, Andrew Plotkin)
• Sunday, 7pm Eastern: Games Writing and Prose Writing in Conversation (Stephen Granade, Erin Roberts, Aaron Reed, Monte Lin)

That is, mind you, just the narrative-related topics with names that I recognized. There are entire other tracks for SF/fantasy prose, art, poetry, comics, tabletop games, and more. The organizers have taken the idea of a virtual, distributed conference as a license to run the thing round the clock. There is, as people say, a lot.

The event is run by Dream Foundry, a new nonprofit supporting "professionals working in the field of speculative literature". This is adjacent to SFWA, the SF writers' association. Dream Foundry's idea (I gather) is to include artists, designers, translators, editors, and other such people. Of course SFWA is also trying to expand to more kinds of creators, so it will interesting to see if the two organizations develop different focuses.

The upshot is that Flights of Foundry is more professionally-focused than the fannish SF cons I usually attend, but hipper and more game-literate than, say, Readercon. Which is not to see you won't see some of the same people at all these events! But, again, different focus.

Hope to see you around that weekend.