Hey, everybody! BoingBoing is having a 100-word fiction contest.

The theme is: FOUND IN SPACE.

There are prizes! “The prize is a $700 HP MediaSmart EX495 PC, set up as a Windows home server, with 1.5TB of storage and Mac/Time Machine support. The winner shall be chosen at arbitrary whim. Runners-up get something random from the gadget dungeon.”

So, write your 100-word-long story on “FOUND IN SPACE” and post it in comments at BoingBoing.

Good luck!

Here’s a small selection of different mashups in different media. Though video and audio mashups seem to dominate the field online, there are lots of different sorts of mashups, and yours can take whatever form you think will be most interesting.

• Star Wars Religious Images
• More Star Wars etc. Mashups — Patrick King
• Married to the Sea – Drew & Natalie Dee
• Wondermark – David Malki
• Rick Astley/Nirvana (Creepy, but oddly compelling)
• Britney Spears vs. B52s – Toxic Love Shack
• Love Story (Taylor Swift) meets Viva La Vida (Coldplay) – Piano Cello
  - by Jon Schmidt (much more vanilla than the others)
• Thru-You (Kutiman remixes YouTube)
• A RIP! A Remix Manifesto. It is about an hour and a half long, but it is a great talk piece about audio remix and copyright.
• Pride & Prejudice & Zombies
• A Softer World
• Shining
• Minimalist Movie Posters
• Auto-Tune the News
• Here’s another graphic mashup: Zombies + Scoobie Doo!
• Adam Richardson’s “Invaded Space” photomashup

As you can see, there’s really no end to the possibilities. Your only constraint here is that you to remix something, mashing it up with either something else or with other parts of itself to create an interesting new thing.

Hey all, here’s the result of all of your hard work!

Right-click on the links to the games below and save the files onto your computer. Unzip the archive (if you’re on a Mac this will happen automatically when you click on the file. If you’re on a PC you may need to use a program to unzip them.) Clicking on the .inform files once you’ve downloaded and unzipped them will open the game in Inform, and you’re ready to play!

• Dorm Mystery
• Haunted House
• IF Project
• Interactive Fiction
• The Gross House

And, for your reading (and playing) pleasure, here is a document I made compiling all of your walkthroughs for the game. So, if you’re stuck, here’s help. (I was sneaky and made the text of the walkthroughs invisible on the page, so you’ll need to select the text and change its color from white to something you can read.)

• Walkthroughs

Have fun!

For Thursday’s class — now that you’ve played the games, vote for the ONE game you think was the best. (Your criteria for “best” may vary.) Put your vote and your rationale for your vote in comments to this post.

Sorry for the late notice, but I’m bravely fighting off the plague and would rather not share said plague with you. So, class is cancelled today. We’ll meet again on Tuesday.

I’ve updated the Course Calendar to reflect this. You’ll see that the Interactive Fictions and Walkthroughs are due on Tuesday, November 10th, as I said they would be in our last class. We’ll have about 15 minutes to do some final debugging, and then your game goes gold, as they say in the gaming industry. That means that you’ll be releasing your game to the public (which, at this point, are your classmates) to play.

This means that this weekend you really need to work out the kinks in your game. If a kink persists, it may be time to try something less complicated for that aspect of the game. Don’t think of it as selling out your vision, but as a pragmatic, practical response to the hard reality of deadlines.

I hope you’re all feeling better than I am, and that you have a great weekend.

See you Tuesday.

For Thursday’s class, try to get your interactive fiction game to be as playable as possible. That means that when you hit “play,” Inform doesn’t throw a bunch of errors at you.

If there are problems you cannot solve, write them down and bring them with you to class.

The final version of your game will be due on Tuesday the 10th, and you will need to have a playable (bug-free) version of your game AND a walk-through solution for your game by then.

Taylor tracked this down, and it’s pretty helpful. Check it out!

Thanks, Taylor!

Your next blog tally is now due.

E-mail me the URLs for:

• 8 Blog Posts you composed
• 8 Comments you made on other peoples’ blogs

This should bring your total number of posts and comments to 16, if you’re keeping track.

Please get this to me by the end of the weekend. Thanks.

So today we’re back to see which blog is top dog. Same procedure as last time — vote for your favorite, and give a link to your favorite post from the past two weeks.

Good luck!

For Tuesday’s class, your group will need to produce:

• A map of all of the spaces of your game, showing the connections between rooms/spaces
• Descriptions written for at least 16 rooms/spaces in your game (or all of your rooms/spaces if your game has less then 16 rooms)
• A list of all of the items and other characters that will be important to your game

On Tuesday we’ll start porting and coding your descriptions into Inform. If you’re so inclined, the Inform program has a very detailed manual included with it. You can read through some of that to get a sense of what we’re going to do.

If you need help figuring out how to describe your rooms/spaces, go back to the Interactive Fiction competition and play through a few rooms. You’ll notice different writing styles and different levels of helpfulness and mystery. Try to figure out what balance and tone fits your style.

Our next project takes us into the steamy jungle of Interactive Fiction! IF is a (mostly) text-based gaming system that dates back to the 1970s, really flourished in the 1980s, and then sorta kinda died out.

But like all the good movie monsters, IF wasn’t dead! No, a devoted band of programmer/player/writers resurrected it, creating interpreter programs that would allow classic IF games to run on today’s computers, and writing their own IFs.

Right now voting is open for the 15th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. These are all games that have been submitted by people who, like you, are being forced to compose your own IF. Just kidding. Not about the fact that you’re being forced to compose your own game. About them. They actually like writing these things. And maybe unlike you, they’re very, very good at it.

So, for class on Tuesday you are to head to the playable games page of the competition and play through the games. As these are all web-enabled, you can play these on any computer with an Internet connection and Java installed (which is most of them). You don’t have to play through all of them all the way through. Get a feel for what each one is like, what each one demands of you, how they differ from each other, and what structures they may share.

In class on Tuesday we’ll talk about these games, so be prepared. I will ask you which you liked the best, and why. Hint, hint.

You may also want to start thinking about what story/problem you want your game to explore. We’ll be starting work on the games themselves (which you’ll be working on in groups) on Thursday, so it’s not too early to start hashing out some ideas.

I encourage you to pick up ideas (of things you want in your game as well as things you don’t want) from the entries in the competition. There are more entries, but they’re not playable online and require an interpreter, which may not be feasible for you.