gameshelf.jmac.orgThe Gameshelf | Independent Game Criticism and other interesting

stuff The Gameshelf Independent Game Criticism and other interesting stuff Home About Best Of Boston Essays Jmac on Games Zarf on Games Guest Bloggers Videos Gameshelf TV Other original videos Zarfplan ← Older posts Thank you for reading By Jason McIntosh on June 5, 2017 12:02 PM This is the final post to this blog. Its primary two contributors continue to write — about games, as well as other stuff — elsewhere: Jason McIntosh blogs at Fogknife . Andrew Plotkin blogs at Zarf Updates . I plan to keep all this blog’s posts online, and available at their present URLs, permanently. I reserve the right to edit various metadata and presentational trimmings of this website in the service of preserving twelve years of games writing and videos created by many talented individuals. I shall update this final post whenever appropriate, to best describe the site’s current state. The Gameshelf began as a public-access TV show in 2005, ostensibly about more obscure video and tabletop games, back when games-focused media largely limited itself to highly commercial magazines and websites. The show’s creation coincided — rather unwittingly — with both the nascency of the indie-games movement, and the rise of technologies and services that would dramatically lower the barrier of entry for those passionate about underreported subjects to create and publish their own videos to the internet. Thus do we have today’s galaxy of independent critics, podcasters, and streamers, quite well covering the whole breadth of games. I thought that was pretty great, actually, and in 2010 ceded that particular floor , declaring that this website would serve as an independent blog of games-focused essays from a number of writers, pulling talent initially from the TV show’s cast as well as a handful of guest bloggers. And we published some good stuff, that way! But it couldn’t last forever; this was always and only a passion project, and people’s passions evolve with the years. Zarf’s final post here summarizes the blog’s end-state; by the start of 2017 it had become clear to the two of us still posting here that the time had come to move on to personal platforms. So, we have, as detailed at the top of this post. I will always be proud of what The Gameshelf accomplished, first as a video series, then as an organized group blog, and finally as a humble essay-platform used only a couple of friends to think out loud about games now and again. I feel happy and fortunate that, by hosting this website myself, I can continue to share all our work indefinitely. I hope that the past contributions found here to the ongoing conversation about games can still serve some small purpose for present and future readers and creators. — Jason McIntosh ( jmac@jmac.org ), June 2017 Permalink | Comments (0) | Tweet this | Share this on Facebook I’m shifting my bloggery to blog.zarfhome.com By Andrew Plotkin on May 27, 2017 2:13 PM Nine years ago I made my blogging debut with a post titled Games that don’t exist . I’d been on the web since 1993 (really!) but 2008 was my first venture into bloggingwhich I guess I’d define as a semiregular series of nonfiction essays with an RSS feed. The Gameshelf was a group blog run by my friend Jmac. I chose to participate because, well, I wasn’t sure I’d be writing enough to sustain a blog on my own. Indeed, I never hit a daily or even weekly rhythm. But I got a couple of posts written each monthwhich adds up. Over nine years I wrote 323 Gameshelf posts , documenting games I played, IF events I attended, and the entire development cycle of Hadean Lands . But: everything shifts over time, and that includes the centers of gravity of web sites. Jmac moved his regular writing to a personal blog site . The Perl core of The Gameshelf (a Movable Type fork ) rusted until it barely functioned. (That "323 posts" link above is supposed to let you browse all my Gameshelf posts, but it doesn’t really.) A few weeks ago, a routine Perl update broke the blog software completely. Fixing it was a one-line patch (thanks Jmac) but the writing on the wall had clearly acquired BLINK tags. So, behold my brand-new blog page! It now lives at blog.zarfhome.com . I’m using blogger.com , which is, yes, part of the Google-monster. But it works, it’s free, I got the layout the way I want, and I don’t have to worry about patching security holes. And there is an RSS feed . I have imported all 323 of my Gameshelf posts. (Here’s that first one from 2008.) You’ll note that this post appears on both blogs, but it will be my last Gameshelf contribution. From now on, blog.zarfhome.com for everything. (Except that I sometimes post on the IFTF blog , and the Boston IF meetup page is more or less a blog, and... well, life isn’t simple.) I expect I’ll continue tuning the layout. There are a few remaining quirks: Blogger’s web import feature doesn’t work (at least, it didn’t work for me). I imported the old posts using Blogger’s API . Blogger doesn’t understand Markdown. O woe! My importer tool did Markdown translation, but the resulting HTML is slightly munged. So the old posts may have slightly broken formatting. All the images in the imported posts, and the cross-links to other posts, still point to The Gameshelf. The Gameshelf site will stay online for the foreseeable future, so that’s okay. I imported the blog comments too, but they appear as part of the post body. (For example, this recent post .) So the old posts all say "no comments" even though the comments are really preserved. (The Blogger API includes a verb for "fetch comments" but not "insert new comment". Why not? Who the heck knows.) The search tool doesn’t work. I think Google’s crawler hasn’t caught up with the imported posts yet. Hopefully that will fix itself. For all anyone knows, Google will nuke Blogger next year. Or next week. (It’s Google.) In that case I’ll have to change platforms again. But I’ll still host the site at blog.zarfhome.com , so no big deal, right? Quirks aside, I am pleased with my new digs and so I bid The Gameshelf a fond and good-natured farewell. Posting will continue at the usual semiregular rate. See you all on the new domain. Permalink | Comments (0) | Tweet this | Share this on Facebook Tags : blog , if , interactive fiction , the gameshelf , zarf , zarfhome , zarfplan . Hadean Lands release 2.1.0 By Andrew Plotkin on May 22, 2017 4:41 PM I have updated the Mac/Win/Linux version of Hadean Lands on Steam . These are small UI changes, mostly inherited from the past year’s worth of Lectrote updates. The gameplay has not changed, and save files will continue to work undisturbed. The same UI changes have gone out to Itch.io and the Humble Store . (Last week, really.) In the journal window, you can now sort items by name or by date (the order you discovered them in the game). Added two new color themes: Sepia and Slate. Changed the "Reset" menu item to "Reset Completely" (to match the in-game command for completely starting over). Changed the "Close Window" menu item to "Close Game" for the main game window. (Except on Mac, sorry. The Mac’s menu bar works poorly with this app framework.) Fixed a slight size miscalculation in the status window. Updated the Electron app framework to 1.4.16. Enjoy. Permalink | Comments (0) | Tweet this | Share this on Facebook Tags : hadean lands , if , interactive fiction , lectrote , steam . The history of Glk! By Andrew Plotkin on May 15, 2017 2:02 PM Last weekend I gave a short talk at BangBangCon , a small New York conference dedicated to "the joy of computing". I talked about the development of Glkfrom its Z-machine origins to modern web-based interpreters. It’s a ten-minute talk (all of BangBangCon is ten-minute talks) so I focused on narrative arc rather than detail. If you’re familiar with IF architecture you know this stuff already. If not, hey, you can get an overview in ten minutes. Text and slides Video (my segment starts at 3:36:00) Gameshelf compadre Jmac also gave a talk:...