Concordia
Elizabeth Matter’s Concordia and a Whistle-Stop Tour of Inklewriter
Elizabeth has already written a really great post about Concordia and the process of writing it, so I’ll try not to repeat too much here. Concordia asks you to take on the role of a space colony’s AI, and, as we discussed in the session, your perception of how an AI might deal with a refugee crisis will have an effect on how the story pans out. Do you believe an AI capable of compassion, or would it assess such a situation with cold logic? Or do you prefer to play as you would hope an AI might act? Either way, there are multiple endings for the AI, the colonists and the colony itself depending on your choices.
Concordia was written with Inklewriter and as it’s not a system the rest of us are familiar with, much of the session was spent drilling Elizabeth on how the editing interface works and what code shortcuts are available. Elizabeth’s overall assessment was that Inklewriter makes adding attributes (and having those attributes affect choices and text) far easier than Twine.
I tried Inklewriter out about three years ago and didn’t really get on with it, but it looks like it’s had a lot of updates and edits since then (or perhaps I’ve just gotten more used to interactive fiction tool interfaces, that’s a possibility too!) and this has really fired me up to give it another try. (Also, returning to the game I had started in there and abandoned as a broken mess, I find it now works perfectly…)
This session was a little different to the usual, as we were joined by Left Lion’s photographer, Nigel King, to take photos of us for a forthcoming article. The link will go up on here as soon as we have it! We gave our full range of photographic model poses, from ‘listening intently to one another’ faces, to ‘saying rhubarb and laughing more than any normal human would during an actual conversation’ play-acting to ‘just chillin’ in the Toast Bar’ stances.
The idea of a collaborative project was also floated and it looks like we may have our first joint effort Hello Words Productions game coming soon, so watch this space for that too.
Next month we’ll be playing my very own Happy Pony Valley Riding School. I apologise in advance for the sweary ponies. If you’d like to join us in reviewing my silly game, discussing story-games more generally, and getting our new collaborative game underway, you can sign up here or just turn up. We’ll be in the NVA’s Clubroom on Thursday 11th May from 6:30pm as usual.
