I mentioned Life’s Lottery
Life’s Lottery is an older piece, first published in 1999; it tells the story of a young man growing up in southern Britain. The details of his life chime with stories I hear from my in-laws: the critical importance of the Eleven-Plus exam in deciding which school you’ll be tracked into, Doctor Who on television, decisions about O-levels and colleges and universities, the Falklands war and the ascent of Thatcher.
“This author sent me a review copy of his CYOA novel.” I took the book out of its wrapper and held it up.
“Nicolas Bourbaki doesn’t exist,” my husband said. “He’s an invention.”
Someone had handwritten the enclosed note. I shrugged. “Maybe this guy really has that name.”
We were both wrong, as it happens; as this interview explains, Bourbaki-the-author assumed, with an extra h in the first name, a shadow of Nicolas Bourbaki the collective of pseudonymous mathematicians. His book, If
If sometimes embraces, sometimes rejects standard CYOA practice. It’s written in the second person, mostly, except when a first-person narrator crops up by surprise and many pages into the story: this first-person character is a bully, and for as long as we remember that he exists, the whole narration feels like a mean-spirited harangue against the protagonist. The main character also floats between characterization and Faceless Protagonism: he has a gender and passes through a specified series of ages, but some characteristics are intentionally withheld. On page 192, a character refers to him by name, though on page 194 we discover that this was a false identity anyway.
But having a name would probably pin the protagonist down in the wrong way. If belongs to that particular subgenre of IF whose overt hook is the opportunity to reach radically different life outcomes from the same starting point: works like Life’s Lottery
Someone emailed me today to ask for books with which to learn about storytelling in choice-based games, and this reminded me that I haven’t yet mentioned A Game Design Vocabulary: Exploring the Foundational Principles Behind Good Game Design
It’s a collaboration by Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark, and is intended for student-level use — each chapter ends with review bullet points and some suggested study activities.
“Introductory” doesn’t mean shallow, though. For instance, the section on game storytelling covers a number of standard topics (the structural challenges of a branching storyline, emergent vs authored stories) but also brings in a lot of more recent indie and IF community thought on things like reflective choice and shared storytelling. It includes coverage of parser IF, Twine pieces, and Choice of Games works, among others. (Full disclosure: Bee and Floatpoint both get a mention.) There’s also a solid appendix of further playing content. Recommended.
Recently someone emailed me with the following question:
Going on the assumption that if you like to write, you must also like to read, I was wondering if you would be willing to share any books/short stories/writings — anything non-IF — that you really enjoyed or perhaps even inspired your style of story-telling.
I’ve had a pretty busy week and haven’t gotten around to answering, but I thought it might be an interesting one to throw out here, and see what other people think about IF-inspiring conventional writing.
So, a couple answers of my own:
on interactive fiction is now available. Jeremy was kind enough to let me read a draft a few weeks ago, and I found it quite enlightening. The introductory chapters, where he re-evaluates the timeline of IF and discusses the role of academic criticism in studying new media, I found pretty convincing.
More challenging is his argument that the term “player character” should be abolished entirely, on the grounds that it conflates several different kinds of relationship that the player can have with the characters in the game, and that using the terminology makes it unnecessarily hard for us to distinguish those different functions. I’m not sure whether this will change anyone’s long-held habits, but the argument is intriguing and worth a read.
Finally, Douglass offers several extended readings of specific works of IF, and especially a very long analysis of Andrew Pontious’ Rematch. This is great stuff, and I haven’t seen much IF criticism like it.
The book is not a small one and will take some time to go through, but it’s worth the attention. If at some point I come up for air from other tasks, I may address the substance of it at more length here — we’ll see.
In the mean time, congratulations to him for finishing, and thanks for making it available for everyone to read!
One of the questions I semi-routinely get asked on interviews about interactive fiction is whether I think the annual IF Comp is a good thing for the community. I find the question hard to answer: the competition is so essential to the community identity that I have a hard time imagining it away, and besides, my opinion wouldn’t change anything; it’s like someone asking whether the human body would be more aesthetically appealing if it didn’t have a spine.
Nonetheless, I’m constantly conscious of the con arguments brought up a few times a year: that the competition siphons off attention from other games released at other times; that it produces a trend towards small games rather than epic works; that there is something wrong or unfair about the voting scheme (opinions vary on what that might be); and — my least favorite — that “real” artforms, like novels and paintings, are not produced primarily for competition, and that therefore competition is an unhealthy or unnatural context for artistic production, and we’d be better off without it. (Here we touch another of my pet peeves: people who make sweeping statements about “real” art are usually talking about [what they know about] commercialized artistic production in the early 21st century. I run into something similar with freshman mythology students: they’re often convinced that “originality” is the defining feature of good art, and so object to the fact that ancient authors reused mythological material. Their conceptions about literature have been shaped by market forces and copyright law in ways they don’t recognize. They also, if pressed, don’t have a very clear idea of what originality means, other than perhaps refraining from reusing the same plot and cast of characters from another work.)
Lately I’ve been reading two books that have helped clarify my visceral sense about this problem into something I can articulate.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 