• Rob Dubbin and I entered a game into 2009′s Interactive Fiction Competition. The game is called Earl Grey (ifdb page), and you can download it here; here’s a (mostly) positive review from Victor Gijsbers. The game was awarded fifth place in the competition. Rob and I are working on a new version that has a number of fixes and enhancements, so stay tuned.
• I have been working at Socialbomb as a programmer for some time now. The most recent project of interest that I’ve worked on over there is called Tagnic, which is a kind of social microsyntax for Twitter.
• Warp Skip is a new group blog about video games that I’m participating in, along with a couple of knuckleheads from the old ZZT days. My first piece over there is this Brütal Legend review/essay/extended sandwich metaphor.

LATE EDIT: Andy Doro is exhibiting the Networked Byte Organ, which we worked on together, at Taller Boricua.

New information to me: Curveship takes the form of a Python framework. Even if this were Curveship’s only innovation, it would still be a huge step forward. Imagine how much easier it’ll be to prototype and author interactive fiction in a well-known, extensible and powerful language like Python, rather than learning a domain-specific language (Inform 6/7, TADS, etc.).

It looks like the framework’s main innovation, though, is that it inserts a layer of indirection between things that happen in the world—”actions”?—and the way those actions are rendered as text.

I’m excited to get my hands on it!