Meeting Robb Sherwin

This appears to be a faithful account of that time the author went to Denver to attend Robb Sherwin's wedding, translated into interactive fiction. We begin at the airport's railway station, progress through an evening spent knocking back beers, to the morning of the wedding, to hanging about at the wedding reception. As a journal entry or a blog article, it works fine. As a story or as a work of interactive fiction, however, there are issues.

The problem, as I see it, is that all of this actually happened, and the story here wants to adhere too closely to the actual sequence of events. As a result, we're practically led by the nose, with the story explicitly telling us what we should type to continue or to overcome whatever obstacle has gotten in our way. While it is possible to miss the wedding entirely, I feel like there ought to be greater scope for knocking around the world and poking at things and affecting the story somehow.

It would have been nice to be able to interact more with the characters, too, but I can understand the difficulty when all the characters are real people and friends of the author. Perhaps a different design that took character interactions out of the hands of the player entirely? And yet, I would suppose that the main highlight of the experience was not so much the wedding itself, but the opportunity to meet the various IF personalities that the author has, until now, known primarily via an online forum.

It's a bit like having a slice of someone else's wedding cake for breakfast. It means something to someone who isn't you, and though there's technically nothing wrong with cake as a breakfast food, that's not what this cake was made for.