Of course, The Adjusters keeps being written. That's not going to change. Although I have to admit that the upcoming episode, the one I'm currently editing, is really kicking my ass. It's not coming together at all, fighting me at every turn, and I find myself needing to rewrite large swats of it. Which sucks because I know that the four episodes that follow are very good. It's just this one that I can't nail, and it's frustrating.
Meanwhile, to distract myself from that silly episodic impasse, I've been playing with Undum, "a client-side framework for hypertext interactive fiction games." It's pretty simple, in the sense that it can only be used to code up straightforward choose-your-own-adventure-style texts, but it's very well done, and the UI looks good. I've been coding up a simple story that's been kicking in my head for a while, and I've not gotten sick of it yet. Maybe I'll post the result when it's done, if it ever gets to that point.
Speaking of choose-your-own-adventure, there's a site, CHYOO, that lets writers collaborate on interactive sex stories. Now, to be honest, most of the results are rather awful, as you can imagine when a bunch of people start writing pretty much independently from each other, each free to take the current story and fork it off into some random direction. But some of the story ideas are interesting, and who knows, maybe that sort of setup will strike your imagination and you'll want to participate. In any event, have a look.
If you used to follow this blog back when it was a journal on ASSTR, you know that I have an interest in adult interactive fiction, or AIF. Not that I've done anything about it yet, but it's there, a dream that just won't die. I guess I'm waiting for the right idea to tickle my fancy. Here's part of the journal entry I wrote two years ago, to give you some background on what I'm talking about.
Writing projects still on hold because of the upcoming AIF minicomp deadline. I promised I would say something about AIF. Let's start with IF, or Interactive Fiction. Some of you might know those as text adventure games, in which you are basically thrown into a virtual world, where the description of the world is given as text descriptions. Your role is to supply instructions to the player character using short verb/noun sentences, and your actions can impact the world. The result of your actions, once again is given as text descriptions. A good starting point for discovering the world of interactive fiction is probably Brass Lantern, especially its Beginners section. Now, modern pieces of interactive fiction focus maybe a bit less on the "adventuring" part, and more on stories and interactions, with an attempt at narrative. Because this narrative is interactive, in the sense that the player can affect it, the result can be dubbed Interactive Fiction. There is a lot that has been said about the notion of narrative that arises in such a context, and if you're curious (and have a head for theoretical analyses of new media), go and check out the work of Nick Montfort.
Adult Interactive Fiction is basically the smut side of Interactive Fiction. It should not be surprising that this came about. The original pieces of AIF were, strangely enough, very Star Trek centric. Not so much anymore. Basically, AIF has the player interact with computer-controlled characters in sexual ways. Depending on the skill of the designer, and the extent to which the sex can be connected to a narrative that has some independent interest, the result can lead to a highly arousing experience. I suspect very much that there is some underlying theory of arousal and sexual release that could be brought to bear to the study of AIF and its effectiveness as, well, smut.
I strongly urge you to have look at the kind of things that are out there. Start with the IF Wiki page for AIF, and work from there. It's a little bit difficult to get started, simply because there are few centralized places were to get games and information how to run them. On the plus side, games tend to run on all platforms, partly because the game itself is just a data file, and to run the game you need an interpreter that can run the data file. There are a few systems out there that can produce games (TADS and Inform being the two big ones), and each of those systems come with interpreters for essentially all known computer platforms. Head to ... and have a look. If you're looking at good games to start, you may want to look up Moist, one of my all time favorites and a good starting point.
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