My favorite indie game of the year so far is easily Christine Love's Digital: A Love Story, a PC adventure/mystery/romance title set in the late 1980s and presented through bulletin board systems -- what other game lets you "crawl BBSes, uncover conspiracies, commit telephone fraud, and fall in love" in just a couple hours?

Jason Scott, the admin behind BBS archive Textfiles.com (one of Love's primary resources while creating Digital) and director of films like BBS: The Documentary and Get Lamp: The Text Adventure Documentary, recently interviewed the developer during a talk about her game at hacker conference The Next HOPE, and posted this video of the Q&A.

Here, Love talks about receiving hate mail, the tools she used to create Digital, and other topics. She also shares why she chose to focus on BBSes for the game instead of other online social platforms like Twitter or Facebook:

"It's not just a love story; it's also a mystery story, and I think that's the real important thing. For this mystery, I wanted to put it in a more mysterious age, I guess. It seems like a weird thing to say, but in the '80s and on these bulletin board systems, everything seems so much more isolated. And I think that is definitely conducive to telling a love story.

Making a connection when everyone's on the internet is a little less interesting, whereas if you play up the isolation... This is very much a story about an adolescent searching for some sort of connection, and I think putting it in the '80s [and] putting it on bulletin board systems really helps that."

In other Digital news, Bret Victor actually created fanart for the game with some ASCII art, which you can see after the break: