Zarf Updates

I went to GDC with IFTF, and I had a great time!

I'm not sure the conference had a great time. You may have seen that attendance was 30% lower than last year. However, I'll save the gloom-and-haruspicy for another post. All the people I talked to enjoyed themselves, and I talked to quite a few people.

As you know, IFTF had a table in the Commons area of the show floor. In fact we had three tables. Plus one Monday night at the ballpark opening event.

Two machines were running a collaborative exquisite-corpse Twine project. Everybody who came by was invited to sit down and add a passage. This was a hit -- we wound up with about 120 contributed passages.

On the flip side (literally), the Visible Zorker!

Our setup had Zork 1, Zork 2, and (as a special preview for GDC attendees) Zork 3. We mostly kept the screen on Zork 1 though.

The table next door had a bunch of 1980s computer magazines. They were kind enough to loan us an issue of Creative Computing (1982) with an Infocom ad.

Zork was less recognized than Twine. (Everybody's heard of Twine.) But the folks in the know got very excited about the Visible Zorker project. A couple of educators visibly bounced when they realized that they could use this in the classroom.

I shall hope this brings in more contributors to the Patreon!

On the personal side, I got to demo the Zorker to Tonda Ros. And to fanboy him a bit, which I'm sure he got plenty of that week, but I did my part. I also demoed to Tim Hutchings -- I really need to write up his "Old Morris Cave: A Continuous Use Campsite in Mammoth Cave National Park". (Spot the IF connection!)

I'm told that Steve Meretzky was around GDC but I did not run into him. Ah well. I'm pretty sure he's aware of the Zorker, but it would have been nice to chat about it.

So what else did you do at GDC?

I engaged with people socially!

Way more than I usually do. I'm chatty here, parasocially on the blog, but in real life I'm a stone introvert. (No surprise, I know.) But it turns out that "Are you familiar with Twine?" is a terrific icebreaker. Everybody's heard of Twine. Most people don't know that it's backed by an educational nonprofit association, though. We can talk about that! Yes, we would love donations, yes, it would be great if companies that rely on Twine helped support it. Yes, tell me about what you did with Twine, that sounds awesome.

Same thing with Zork. "Are you familiar with Zork?" (Yes, says Tonda Ros, a half-second before I read his name badge and realize who I'm pitching to.) Then we're talking about game education, or historic preservation, or TinyMUD, or wacky things that IF could do if it were doing something else. Or anything. Knot theory. (It came up.)

This wasn't just at the IFTF booth. I dropped by the Thinky Puzzle meetup in the park and had a long chat with several neat people. There were three game-history events on the GDC schedule -- a roundtable, a social meetup, and the annual "What's New in Game Preservation" panel. I missed that third one (had to help set up the table for Monday night) but I ran into Jason Scott in the hall and we caught up.

My time was mostly spoken for, but I went to a few talks. There was an interesting one by Owlcat Games about the narrative scripting tool they use for their "large, sprawling" RPGs. (I haven't played 'em but the design problems were familiar.) Don Daglow gave a great talk about his 50-year career in game dev -- he has seen some stuff in his time, and his time isn't over. Julian Cordero talked about how he turned his Quito childhood into Despelote. And there was a really neat presentation by the cultural research expert for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Did you know they looked up all the minerals of the game's magic stones to make sure they were findable in -- or trade-routable to -- the appropriate locations? I love that.

IGF awards! I wasn't at the ceremony but it's a good list. Perfect Tides: Station to Station is one that I definitely have to play. (NarraScope Showcase winner, btw.) Blippo+ has been heavily recommended to me and I must catch up. As for Titanium Court -- I played the demo. Match-three really isn't my thing, but I loved all the narrative foofaraw surrounding the match-three gameplay -- built on it -- so I may have to dig into the full game anyhow.

I was able to pay my compliments to William Rous on the show floor. Yes, I was rooting for Type Help to win Best Narrative. Ah well. Next year in Galley House, am I right?

And what else did you do in San Francisco?

I ate dinner(s) in Chinatown, of course.

I was able to get away from Moscone long enough to visit the Asian Art Museum; they have a terrific exhibit of modern Japanese ceramics. I truly love that stuff. If you do too, be sure to check out the permanent collection on the second floor.

I also poked my head into the Museum of Craft and Design, and took a turn around the Japanese Tea Garden and Botanical Gardens.

But my big discovery was the Letterform Archive. This is a tiny place up the street from Craft and Design. Just one gallery, really -- but a gallery drawn from an amazing collection of "lettering, typography, calligraphy, and graphic design".

The current exhibit is Piet Zwart, a Dutch designer ("typotekt", he described himself) who revolutionized typography starting in the 1920s.

He did telephone cable ads. That's what you're looking at. "N.K.F.": Nederlandse Kabelfabriek Delft.

Later he did other stuff. He wasn't interested in logos or brands. Consistency? Hah. All his layouts were different and they were all clearly his work.

And that's just one exhibit! Look at the previous exhibits page. Man, I would live in this place if I were a Left Coaster.

Get this: when I walked into the gallery, I heard "tap tap tap" noises coming from the back room. What? A video exhibit? Nope -- when I peered around the corner, I saw a classroom full of people with stone tablets. They were making letters with hammers and chisels. A stone-carving lettering workshop. Of course. How else will people learn why serifs exist?

So yeah. I don't know what the future of GDC looks like, but I hope I keep getting this excuse to visit San Francisco. It's such a great town to wander around it. Also terrible, because of the abyss of deprivation and human misery which you cannot look away from, right in parallel with the wealth and the art and the joy. Doesn't mean I want to stay home.

As I was getting off the BART, a Cute Young Thing turned and asked me, "Are you a guy who thinks about the Singularity?"

"No," I said, "I'm not really a fan of the Singularity." And we went our separate ways through the exit gates. I still have no idea what that question meant. Only in San Francisco, I guess.