June Update: Creaky Gears

Hey team! Let's chat.

This Has Been An Ordeal

As of a couple days ago, you have the rough cut for the next video. It is very, very rough, and this week will be dedicated to polishing it into something I can release publicly. It needs some script adjustments, a bunch more footage, a lot of graphics and titles, and a few other bits and bobs. After a rocky few months, I've settled into a (mostly) consistent work routine and things are coming along better now.  But now we're further behind schedule than before!

I came into 2019 owing you two videos from last year, and was hoping to get ahead of schedule by a couple days every month until I'd squeezed in enough room for an extra video by July, and then do the same thing in the second half of the year. It is now July, and I haven't put out a video since March.

This comic is relevant.

I asked for amnesty for April, but I still feel I owe you for May and June, which puts me an entire four videos in the hole. This is not great. But I have some ideas for how to get back on track.

The Recent Past

A few things have happened since March. There've been a couple neat milestones - Innuendo Studios crossed 200k subs, and I'm inching towards 20k Twitter followers - but the thing I wanna talk about is NarraScope.

NarraScope was a Boston-based narrative games convention put together by Andrew Plotkin and a few other local interactive fiction nerds. Boston has been a hub of adventure game production and philosophy ever since INFOCOM grew out of MIT. Andrew's thinking was that we've had these all these different groups: the IF crowd, the Twine crowd, the adventure game crowd, the narrative-designer-for-traditional-games crowd, and several other subgroups. Why not create a space where they can all share information with each other?

You can imagine, this was extremely my jam.

Talks were hit-and-miss, but Emily Short, Dave Gilbert, and Aaron Reed are always fascinating thinkers, and I came away with several pages of thoughts in my notebook, and an idea for a series of small videos about narrative.

I've had a lot of little tidbits about narrative theory and interactivity that have never found a place in a video. I always figure they'll be an aside in a video about an adventure game, or maybe just a Twitter thread I get around to one of these days. But I came out of NarraScope wanting to give them their own videos, and I think they can be how we get back on track.

One rule for this series: every video has a hard limit of 5 minutes. My videos keep getting longer, which is fine for what I'm doing, but I want to challenge myself to be brief. The goal is to explore a single idea. The closest analogue would be Story Beats, but, while the subjects are interrelated and will build on each other, they won't necessarily be building up to a larger point, or have a concrete ending.

My hope is that, here and there, I can sneak a 5-minute video out alongside one of the main videos, especially if I bank a few scripts early on. My usual rule is that a video has to be at least 10 minutes to count, but I'm going to ask your permission to suspend that rule while I play catchup.

I'm thinking of calling the series Protagony.

The Near Future

Playing catchup over the summer is going to be tricky, though. In one week, I head to Anaheim for VidCon. And, a few weeks after that, I'm making a personal trip to the San Francisco Bay for about a week and a half. I think I can have the new video up before I leave next week, but I'm not sure I can have the next one out before I leave again. It'll depend on what the subject is; I've been kicking around a few ideas for a fun 200k video, but then I cannibalized some of those ideas for Protagony so I'm not 100% sure what's next. We'll see!

I also may finally run that GoFundMe for a new laptop so I can work during my second trip, but before I go asking for more money I should probably release a video...?!?!

Then, in August, there are at least three events I usually attend: the Boston Festival of Indie Games, GameLoop, and Shine. I'm not sure what the dates are for any of those - FIG broke itself into a few events, separating the indie games showcase from the talks, and I usually just attend the talks (Boston has a lively indie game scene, but I personally don't feel there's enough exciting stuff to fill a whole festival), and Shine (a Smash tournament) is sometimes scheduled opposite GameLoop, in which case I have to make a choice.

In any case, the next couple months are extremely busy, so I can't even promise the schedule won't slip further, much less get caught up. But I will continue to do my best. Any missed videos will be made up when my schedule calms down, even if it takes a little while.

A Few Good Things

Some stuff since last we meaningfully spoke:

I resumed #IanLivetweetsHisResearch, and am about halfway though David Neiwert's Alt-America, a history of the Alt-Right's origins.

I played Myst IV, Parts 1 and 2 of The Fall, Life is Strange: Before the Storm (finally), and TSIOQUE, which was delightful. There'll be write-ups for some of these, probably, but they were all varying degrees of good, or at least interesting.

I started reading novels regularly for the first time in years? I've gone through Nova by Samuel R. Delany (of course), Vurt by Jeff Noon, and am working my way through Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. Delany was a thoughtful blast, Noon was a trip, and Butler is amazing. Been mostly sticking to sci-fi. It's familiar and comforting.

A Captain Falcon main won a supermajor. Then, two weeks later, a Pikachu main did the same.

That's it for me, folks. Talk soon.