Jonathan Green at WordPlay London 2016

Next Saturday, 19th November 2016, I shall be taking part in WordPlay London at the British Library.

WordPlay is the Hand Eye Society's international festival of writerly games and the British Library is the ideal venue. For one thing, it’s the largest library in the world boasting a collection of over 170,000,000 items. For another thing, one of those items is the manuscript copy of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (which was later published as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland). And for yet another thing, the Beowulf manuscript (the oldest surviving long poem in Old English) is housed there.

London has been chosen as the location for this year's festival because of the wealth of interactive fiction talent in the UK, including friends of Fighting Fantasy, inkle Studios. The date, Saturday 19th November, has been chosen to coincide with International Games in Libraries Day.

The panel I'm going to be on is currently scheduled to take place from 4.15pm-5.00pm, and is called:

Worldbuilding with Words

Creators of interactive fiction, prose-forward games, Twitter microfictions and gamebooks discuss the challenges and joys of using words to evoke historical eras and weird universes.

Hannah Powell-Smith, Twine creator

Nate Crowley, dystopic Twitter writer

Helen Carmichael, historical game writer

Jon Green, gamebook author

As the focus of the festival is digital games, I think I'm there to represent the retro processed tree carcass contingent.

So, if you're interested to know how I endeavour to evoke different eras and settings using words alone (and a minimal number at that) they why not come along next Saturday?

Maybe I'll see you there.