Another great meeting tonight with the Narratives writers group. We covered the serious topic of the current publishing market as it affects the writer. We also produced a couple stageplays of "Facade" to demonstrate to the members what all the conversation has been about at The Great Lettuce Head and here on Spinning recently.
I played the first round and promptly got tossed out of the apartment on my butt. Then James took over and he too was run out. But I think that because we had already played the game–myself, many, many times–we were having a bit of fun with it and proceeded to aggravate rather than work to help Grace and Trip with their marital differences.
One thing I noticed was that in presenting Facade as a learning tool it is difficult because you cannot really stop the action to point out strategy or concept, although I suppose if you just don’t move or question the characters at certain points, they will just obediently wait for input which would give one time to explain what is going on. And in truth, as this is an interactive piece, the reality would be that you could not, in the middle of an argument, "pause" your friends in real life either.
I think everyone enjoyed the show, and I know that a few were curious enough to ask for the website where it can be downloaded so they could fiddle with it themselves. It is addictive to a certain degree, and even though I thought I’d gotten over my own obsession, when a few new things came up through James’ playing technique it will have me going back in tomorrow for a few more rounds.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
Facade looks very interesting. I’ll download it later. Need to install bit-torrent. 800MB, wowsa.
Yeah, it’s a huge file and I wouldn’t DL it without cable or dsl. But it’s interesting in many respects–to me as a writer who’s interested in the new media format of narrative, and not really a “game” per se. Have you ever played the interactive fiction text games? Let me know what you think of it.