I thought I would be nervous about the interactive fiction event but I consoled myself with the thought that everyone would be interested in Dan (who is a legitimate professional game designer) or Andrew (who is a legitimate interactive fiction luminary). When I arrived I was feeling pretty relaxed.
Then I saw my game running on a wall-mounted 40-inch LCD monitor. Two guys were seated in front of it. “Oh you wrote this? We’re stuck on the last waiter.”
The event turned out to be great, actually. It was a nice small roundtable of people genuinely interested in this little niche of game design. I had things to say and only a few of them were carefully rehearsed. The discussion ran overtime and no one minded. I got excited about IF all over again.
One of the topics was the small size of the audience and how it’s diminishing every year. “Three digits, tops, and low three-digits,” Dan said. “Maybe two hundred.”
“But we’re friends with a significant portion of that audience,” I added, “and I think if YouTube and Facebook have taught us anything, it’s that people mostly care about the opinions of their friends.”
(As I was typing this, Dan said, “Hey Emily listed your game under Comedy That Works“, and I thought, “Awesome!”)
After the formal Q&A I wandered into a conversation between a game developer and the sole other woman at the event. The game designer was describing an experiment he was working on involving some computer-generated characters with a certain amount of artificial intelligence.
“But you don’t need special AI,” the woman said. “Look at Liza’s piece — there are all these waiters and they have unique behaviors and responses. If the writing is of high quality, it can completely obscure the fact that the characters are just scripted.”
“Thanks,” I said, embarrassed. When I had hastily replayed my game the night before I had found dozens of obvious typos and bugs.
“Oh yeah,” she added, turning to me. “I wanted to tell you that I really enjoyed your game.”
So the actual size of the audience: two hundred and one.