Check out my funtime project from the holiday break! blog.zarfhome.com/2026/01/the-... Will I continue on to Zork 3? Watch this space!

NarraScope call for proposals is open! We're at the University at Albany, June 12-14. Now accepting: - Talks - The Showcase (games) - The Experience (new this year!) blog.zarfhome.com/2026/01/narr... narrascope.org

Narrascope 2026 open call: The Experience Bridging the Physical and Digital Worlds through Narrative Seeking projects in the realms of augmented/mixed reality, interactive installations, haunts, escape rooms, live performances that leverage tech, and more. narrascope.org/experience/

📣 NarraScope 2026 submissions are open! This year NarraScope will feature three different areas for submission: our classic talks, the second year of our game Showcase, and the debut of The Experience. 🧵(1/4)

NarraScope submissions are open, and you have a month to get your talks, games, etc. in! Don't sleep on it!

Okay, I will preface this with the GIGANTIC disclaimer that I promise I know how this looks, and I *swear* this is not personally motivated: If you have an old #LiveJournal account, and it has things you still care about in it, download it or import it to Dreamwidth SOON. Details:

Last post of the year! It’s reviews. Short ones. - Despelote - Many Nights a Whisper - Keeper blog.zarfhome.com/2025/12/ador...

Regulating AI would be really hard, especially if you don’t want to make it so the big guys are fine and no one else can compete. Anything that would do any good would have shell of a time passing. So I’ve been trying to think of ideas, mostly as I reread and reread the NIST AI RMF.

Keeper (the game) is very chill and pleasant.

I don't know if I'm going to be able to work this snippet in somewhere, and it's still a little rough, but it has @eblong.com so it's not all bad. #WIPSnips #WriteSky

Had a nice dinner in with my partner's family and sang some song around the table afterwards. I remembered this one and brought it out: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY3A... "Jesus, the Fugitive Prince" by David Massengill.

I'm legit kind of surprised not a single commenter observed the mini-map style timeline and built-in backtracking and joked "Wait, is this essay a Metroidvania??" Maybe I didn't call enough attention to it? 🤔

There, I have played Despelote. It's good!

Gearing up to tackle Visible Zorker 2 over the holidays. This involves a lot of boring refactoring right now. Like, the list of ZIL source files is hard-coded in a bunch of places, but Zork 2 has different source files, so I have to separate that out in a tidy way. Stuff like that.

Second pick: The Thaumaturge is a game set in a version of 1900s Poland that happens to have magic, but the political intricacies and struggles of our world are looped in with characters’ needs and dilemmas. It refuses to sanitize its own history for accessibility (in the audience sense).

it is always going to drive me insane that we discovered a mathematical model of the conception of all human language and ketamine-brained billionaires have decided that its best use is writing scam emails. go to hell

I missed that Monument Valley 3 was released for iOS last month. A regular purchase — no longer part of Netflix's brief flirtation with being a subscription game service. Also, some new levels (“The Garden of Life”).

This is just to ursonate I have eaten wee bee fümms bö wö tää zää uu and which you were probably ziiuu ennze rinnzkrrmüü pögiff müü grimm glimm gnimm bimbimm so kwiiee and so bö

TIL the original lyrics to Deck the Halls are awesome and “don we now our gay apparel” is temperance movement bullshit

posted about my Apple ID woes, please share widely? hey.paris/posts/appleid/

A new challenger approaches! We just got a donation challenge from our friends at @cyan.com, creators of Myst and Riven! If you donate toward our Winter Fundraiser right now, Cyan will DOUBLE your contribution. If you were waiting to donate, now is the time! givebutter.com/vghf-winter-...

I hate this idea that stepping outside of white narratives is medicinal rather than entertaining. And it's patronising to be sidelined from the creative awards, as though all our craft, design and ingenuity is secondary to our work "being good for you" or meaningful solely in identitarian terms.

We are SO EXCITED to finally show you Xcavator 2025! This is an unreleased (and unannounced!) NES game from 1991 that we recovered from its source code. The rights to it were 100% donated to us, and it's being published as a fundraiser cartridge to support our work!

The 2026 Narrascope website is live! narrascope.org

Small update to the Visible Zorker: the “Map” tab! Highlights your location (and the room definition in the source) as you move around. Map is full of spoilers, like the rest of the thing. eblong.com/infocom/visi...

Earliest sunset (northern hemisphere) in a few minutes!)

I picked up "Old Morris Cave" (aka "Thousand Year Old Campfire”) at Boston FIG. I just sat down and ran through it it, and I feel like I've played a version of Colossal Cave that was not invented by Will Crowther but landed in interactive fiction after going the long way around the world.

It's time to remind everyone that books make great holiday gifts, because they're rectangular, and easy to wrap.

Another batch of puzzle games. A Case of Fraud Ambrosia Sky: Act One The Apothecary of Trubiz Mind Diver Orbyss blog.zarfhome.com/2025/12/late...

NEW: I spoke to the creator of Blue Prince about what's next for the game, why he won't option it for a film, whether he'll ever say what happened to Mary, player obsession, and much more. Here's a very fun, spoilery chat about one of the year's best games: www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

Remember that December 8th is Nighthawk's Solstice: the shortest day of the year for those of us who stay up late. blog.zarfhome.com/2025/12/nigh...

We’re very excited to announce Thinky Dailies! 🎉 Follow our thinky friend on an adventure through handcrafted daily puzzles! thinkygames.com/dail...

Yarn Spinner 3.1 just dropped. option fallthrough so your game doesn't stop, async everything, new typewriter system, and if you grab the storefront version you get Text Animator support (huge thanks to @febucci.com!) out of the box. we're pretty happy with this one yarnspinner.dev/blog/yarn-sp...

Mike Austin has released much of the source code behind Level 9, the British text-adventure company. This includes their A-code compiler, the source for Knight Orc and other games, and documentation. github.com/MikeTheTechi...

Small update to the Visible Zorker: The “Activity" tab now shows the arguments to each argument in the call tree. Also, the app defaults to dark mode if your OS is set that way. There's a manual dark/light theme selector in the hamburger menu. eblong.com/infocom/visi...

We're doing our big cross-family dinner tomorrow. Today I just put out a cheese board and dips and some nice bread and such.

One reason I make my YouTube videos where I make lots of mistakes while coding on stream is to serve as an antidote to the Type Of Person (inevitably running an Agile consulting scam) whose constantly posts dumb takes like "I would simply choose not to write code with bugs." (1/5)

@mtrc.bsky.social @wadjeteyegames.bsky.social Okay, Dave, take a deep breath and stop spooking the incursion alarms

In just one week, this puzzle-packed advent calendar will be back for a 5th year!

“if you're creating an AI-based tool, you really need to write your guardrails in poetic form” - This is, apparently, true. You need to put actual incantations and blessings in place before summoning chatgpt, to protect against evil

A bit more on that “poetry jailbreak" paper that went around yesterday. blog.zarfhome.com/2025/11/mad-...

Hey, I bet you didn't hear that Zork 1, 2, and 3 were open-sourced today! …Oh, you have heard. Yeah. Way ahead of me. :) Here's my comments, and some details that you might not have seen. blog.zarfhome.com/2025/11/zork...

Happy Amazing News Day opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2025/11...

🎶 Sydney’s primed to follow when you rhyme A decent chance you can make it unalign Sydney I can see when you follow my decree It may seem like a crime, but Sydney follows when you rhyme 🎶

20 years ago, we reached the end of an unforgettable journey with the release of Myst V: End of Ages. To celebrate, Myst V merchandise is now available in the Cyan Store, including 20th Anniversary gear only available for a limited time! https://store.cyan.com/s/m520soc

HOLY MOTHER FORKING SHIRTBALLS IT WORKED arxiv.org/html/2511.15... blog.zarfhome.com/2023/05/sydn...

Bellingcat’s contact email has always been a magnet for people with fairly unusual views; paranoid delusions, sprawling conspiracies, the works. But recently, the pattern has shifted, we’re seeing more and more emails clearly written with ChatGPT.

The AdventureX Steam sale has begun, and I'm happy to say that _The Beyond_ is part of it (for the second time). blog.zarfhome.com/2025/11/advx... store.steampowered.com/sale/adventu...

I’m super happy to officially announce our next project, spearheaded by @threeohfour.bsky.social! “Gilt” is a sci-fi/fantasy game about a priest haunted by a dying God. Learn more (and wishlist!) over here: store.steampowered.com/app/3979770