Welcome to Text Club!

Q: Oh, cool. What is Text Club?
A: Text Club is like a monthly book club for interactive
fiction. We'll choose three interactive fiction games each month to
play and then discuss.

Q: Why not just one game?
A: Artworks are best analyzed in the relation to other work, and if we
all agree each month on a few specific works, we'll have a shared
context to do that.

Q: Why not two, then?
A: Comparisons involving only two things encourage boring binary
thinking.

Q: You don't think that will be too much, though?
A: It might. Let's try it. Maybe we try to limit the total required
play time by choosing one long game and two short ones or something.

Q: How will we pick the games?
A: Let's keep a public list of games we want to play together in a
google spreadsheet. Each month we'll choose a different one of us to
play moderator. That moderator chooses the games we'll play that month
(helped along by our master list), and also helps lead the discussion.

Q: What counts as "interactive fiction"?
A: Let's keep it as open-ended as we can. Parser-driven text
adventures, Twine, old Infocom games, '90s hypertext net.art,
choose-your-own-adventure-style gamebook PDFs ...

Q: How will we discuss the games?
A: Let's talk about them on Imzy. It's kind of like Reddit without the
frog nazis. We'll set aside the last week of each month for
discussion. Prior to that, we'll just use the Imzy board to help each
other with technical issues, hints, etc. -- we'll give everyone time
to get through the games before starting the conversation in earnest.

Q: What about an email list?
A: Man nobody wants more email right now.

Q: What about a chat room?
A: Unlike a chat room, a message board like Imzy is asynchronous, so
our schedules don't have to sync up & it's easier for people with
small kids, etc. who have trouble blocking out a chunk of time without
distraction.

OK! Let's start on March 6th. That's right after GDC. I'll play
moderator this first month, and then we can figure our shit out from
there. The IF Imzy board has graciously agreed to host us:
https://www.imzy.com/if

If you have any other uestions or ideas, hit us up there!