game lists – Page 3 – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

2014 Retrospective

IF has been Being Noticed:

…and not just by the people keen to bash it as Not Games (about whom, the less said the better). For instance

80 Days. This game has been blowing people away in many parts of the gaming world, and for good reason. (You all saw how it topped Time Magazine’s Game of the Year list, right?) It trades on classic interactive fiction strengths — strong writing, fantastic settings that no one could afford to fully illustrate, a tight loop of input and story content so that you’re constantly involved in what’s going on — and it combines all that with a beautiful interface and a very clever use of multiplayer information. It’s accessible and very more-ish to play, and yet some of the story segments go to surprising places. As of mid-December, there’s a new Arctic route, too, so if you have the game and haven’t checked it out for a while, I recommend revisiting.

Hadean Lands. Classic old-school text adventure greatness with clean prose and some beautiful new design features. It’s humungous, but fortunately there are active hint threads on the intfiction forum, and if you must, a walkthrough by David Welbourn.

The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo. Effective Twine horror from the author of My Father’s Long, Long Legs. This did so well that it first brought Lutz’s website down, then cost him an arm and a leg in Amazon hosting fees (which people later helped him recover), happily.

Coming Out Simulator 2014: both well-told choice-based stories of difficult situations in the lives of queer people. Painful but tentatively hopeful. Also getting a healthy amount of respect in various indie circles.

Other IF I really liked this year:

Invisible Parties. Much tidied up since its Shufflecomp incarnation, Invisible Parties is a parser-based puzzle game about diverse cultures and true love, and especially about appreciating another person for their particular qualities. It features lovely writing and some of the most imaginative settings of the year.

Creatures Such as We. A dating simulator that is also a meditation on the nature of games and the relationship we have with the works that we play.

With Those We Love Alive. A dark, characteristically Porpentine-esque piece that makes powerful intimate use of having the player draw on their own body, inviting creative and personal responses from players.

Venus Meets Venus: Rawly and unforgettably honest. It’s minimally interactive, though, I think, to good effect — I disagree that it would be the same thing if done as a short story — but it has really stuck with me.

Lime Ergot. A very short parser-based puzzle game that makes maximal use of telescopic examination: you look at something and it proves to have parts that you can examine, and then you can imagine parts of those… it’s like that XKCD cartoon where you can keep zooming in forever, except a) in text and b) containing no product placement.

Krypteia. Excellent use of classical material to back up a story of late adolescence, gender identity, and monsterism.

Stuff I worked on:

Blood & Laurels — Treason and spying and cults in an alternate version of Ancient Rome. This is the biggest piece so far to come out of the Versu project, and I’m very glad that we were able to get it out into the world, after various points where it seemed like that wasn’t going to be possible.

My keynote at ICIDS was in part about what we learned from the creation process and the feedback we got from reviews and player responses. One of the major points of that post-mortem concerned signaling the ramifications of scenes. Some reviewers did not understand the role of particular characters, or didn’t fully perceive the consequences of putting characters in a particular state: perhaps they’d actually narrowly avoided having a character betray them, but didn’t appreciate that fact because they weren’t alerted to the ways a scene could end. The perceived consequence wasn’t always as strong as I wanted it to be.

So it might be interesting to have a system in which it’s actually more explicit that a scene can end in one of several ways depending on NPC mood and emotion, and give the player a sense of which outcome is currently most likely. I’d want to put this at the UI rather than the writing level, for clarity and ease of reference. Something to experiment with in the future.

Sunless Sea and Fallen London — Several stories of mine have appeared in the Fallen London universe this year. For Fallen London, that meant filling in some character backstory for the Wry Functionary, always one of my favorite in-world acquaintances. For Sunless Sea, it meant creating self-contained stories for the player to encounter on the islands of Station III and Visage. These were allowed to be their own small stand-alone pieces with their own flavor, while drawing on the background mythos of the Fallen London world, so creating them felt a bit like participating in a particularly grand shared-world anthology. The gorgeous art for these locations is inspiring as well.

I’ve written a bit about how the StoryNexus engine behind FL influences the kinds of things I write there, but the fictional setting is also a huge influence. Perhaps this is unique to me — I haven’t ever discussed this with other FL/SS writers, and perhaps they’d be surprised at the suggestion — but I find the Fallen London universe is a useful context for writing about pain.

It’s an environment full of startling and fantastic forms of suffering, but that suffering always needs a seed of genuine emotion. When I want to talk about something distressing — say, the shadow of mortality over a happy marriage, or the ways that trauma trickles down to us from previous generations — without writing a confessional piece, Fallen London offers tools: dark humor, physical metaphor, an established symbolic vocabulary.

Ultimate Quest — not counting a small auctioned charity piece, Ultimate Quest is the first commissioned parser game I’ve written since City of Secrets. Most of my freelance work doesn’t take that form. Ultimate Quest was part of an advertising campaign run by AKQA leading up to the release of the NVIDIA Shield tablet. The near-future, high-tech setting gave me a chance to include some concepts and themes I’d long wanted to get into a game, particularly around augmented reality and big data visualization; doing the project as part of a big media campaign also meant it got professional illustration and a glossy presentation that I’d never have been able to put together solo.

The requirements writing this were different than they are for most hobbyist IF. We wanted to build something that would be genuinely challenging even if people were sharing information, and would feel like a full-sized, non-gimmick game, while not assuming that people were seasoned IF players. There were obviously other constraints on scheduling, content, tech and social media integration just because of the nature of the project. Often the combination of factors meant making design decisions that cut against the trad-IF norm, and exploring some different territory — which frustrated some core parser IF players, but also attracted some new non-parser folk.

Probably the most stylistically productive constraint was the need to make all the output text fit in 140 characters or less. Sometimes this was maddening, especially when I was trying to cope with long inventory lists, but it inspired an absolutely cut-to-the-core writing style that forced me to pick the best, most vivid details I could think of.

Because it required a Twitter tie-in and because it was being run as a timed contest, I was engaged with the player body in real time, determining when hints were needed and tweeting in-character from NPC accounts. There were a handful of players who actually carried on multi-tweet conversations with in-world characters this way, which was very fun to see. That was challenging, but it gave a performance aspect to the whole project. While the website still exists, I think the game is not quite the same for someone who isn’t playing as part of that context.

Here:

The last two months or so, I’ve been posting a lot more than I usually do outside of competitions. This is not a fluke. In the wake of things said in the IF community at the beginning of IF Comp season, I decided to spend the end of 2014 doing more outreach — not outreach of the “here, play OUR stuff!” kind, but of the “we’re listening to you” kind. To recognize that there are gamebooks and book-form CYOA and interactive narrative apps of many kinds out there that we almost never talk about on the intfiction forum. To connect what is going on in the IF community to other indie and hobbyist communities, as well as the academic community via ICIDS, and to look at some of the procedural edge cases. To showcase just how much commercial IF work is happening right now. To give some coverage to artists who might not be getting enough attention. That agenda seemed important enough to be worth doing in lieu of any personal creative work in that time.

I didn’t succeed as completely as I would have liked. It would have been nice to cover more from the visual novel community (though I was very glad to see Sam Ashwell’s review of Long Live the Queen). I would have liked to talk about Codename Cygnus and about Kentucky Route Zero. I’ve got about half a post on narrative chatbots written. I’ve spent some time with Patchwork Girl (an old piece, but newly available for Mac again from Eastgate), but not yet enough to write about it. Under other circumstances, I would have included some more Telltale work in the mix, too, but I’m currently contracting with them, so that would get too far into conflict-of-interest territory to do well, even with maximal disclaimers and disclosures. But if you’re interested in interactive stories, you should absolutely be tracking what they’re doing.

Games of Comfort and Consolation

By Naomi Alderman with Holly Gramazio and others, The Sun Stands Still is a piece about depression and, in particular, the connection with other people that is sometimes the surprising consequence of our own sadness. Gameplay consists of navigating home, store, and work environments, where you can turn on lights (or accidentally trip over junk on the ground) and find objects that you need in order to perform basic self-care tasks. As the game goes on, your home environment gets more and more oppressively messy, and it gets increasingly hard to play without frustrating slips. Nonetheless, you are not entirely alone, as the final scene shows.

Continue reading “Games of Comfort and Consolation”

Thieves’ Gambit, Psy High (Choice of Games)

Thieves’ Gambit: Curse of the Black Cat is a Choice of Games title in which you, as a great cat burglar, have to pull together a team of co-adventurers to attempt to steal a particular cursed gem. As usually for CoG, you can pick your sexuality and gender, as well as specialize in one of several types of theft-related skill. You can also decide which other characters to pursue romantically, which turns out to be one of the more significant aspects of the game, affecting not only how you feel about other characters but how your team forms up and how you approach the heist.

There’s enough bushy branching in the structure that you can experience significantly different scenes during both the break-in and the preparation, and overall the story felt quite responsive to my decisions. I might have liked to see more development of the romantic leads before I was forced to choose which options to pursue, but once I had made a choice, I noticed a number of subsequent points that had been unobtrusively tailored to reflect those decisions.

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IF Comp 2014 Roundup

I have now reviewed all the comp games I am going to review, which is to say, all of them except a Windows-only work I am not able to play. Most recent years I’ve done an end-of-comp roundup (2013, 2012, 2011, 2009, 2008, 2007) in which I talk about standout games, as well as some trends I noticed arising from the competition.

What follows will not spoil any games, but will list some favorites and give some general thematic information.

Continue reading “IF Comp 2014 Roundup”

A (Mostly Recentish) IF List, For Breadth

At the London IF Meetup this week, several people mentioned that they’d like to get a better sense of the range of what IF can do. This is a list I’ve put together to suggest the variety of what is out there — different types of play, different ideas about how interactive storytelling could possibly work. Notice that this list includes fiction and nonfiction, many different genres, and many different target audiences.

I’ve also leaned especially toward work that is by people who are part of the meetup group — starred pieces are by people you might run into at one of our meetings.

18 Cadence, by Aaron Reed. Play with snippets of story, construct your own, share with other people. A physically beautiful work that touches on themes of oppression and civil rights, grief and change, love and growth, without being particularly heavy-handed about any of it. Instead, it leaves a space for you to discover your own strands of meaning — and it also happens to include some cool procedural text reworking.

howling dogs, by Porpentine. A sometimes disorienting but powerful sequence of vignettes; it is difficult to explain this one in advance, but this is one of the pieces that really got people paying attention to Twine.

* Aisle, by Sam Barlow. A one-move parser-based game that allows you to type any of many, many different commands in order to discover what to do next. This is one of the older pieces on the list here, but Aisle functions so well as an introduction to what’s fun about parser IF that I’m including it anyway.

* Fallen London, Failbetter Games. A massive sprawling browser-based exploration of a world in which Victorian London has been stolen and taken underground by space bats. (Sort of.) Free to play; lots of lovely prose; many small plot arcs within a very long ongoing world exploration.

Solarium, Alan deNiro. A gripping Twine piece about the madness of the Cold War.

maybe make some change, Aaron Reed. IF augmented with video and audio effects, about a true war-time event. It uses the mechanic of player-typed commands to express fundamental points about the actions that we’ve learned and the terminology with which we think about people and situation.

My Father’s Long Long Legs, by Michael Lutz. A very linear, tightly focused piece of Twine horror that explores how effective it can be to make the player responsible for moving forward through the story, even when there are very few choices.

* Black Crown, Rob Sherman. Uses similar underlying mechanics to Fallen London, but to tell a more focused and darker story. Body horror and strange smells abound.

Choice of the Deathless, from the long-running Choice of Games line. This one is about a magic-using, demon-contract-making law firm. In general, games in this series do a lot with player character customization, providing lots of ways to experience similar issues and problems. Choice of the Deathless has an especially strong premise and setting. Choice of the Deathless is for pay; Choice of Games also offers some freebie experiences, though in my opinion they are a bit less good.

Conversations with My Mother, Merritt Kopas. A reflection on interpersonal relationships in the context of a trans experience, with links outward to actual tweets and real-world documents.

Analogue: A Hate Story, Christine Love. An illustrated science fiction puzzle-story about piecing together what happened aboard a damaged generation ship.

* First Draft of the Revolution, Emily Short, Liza Daly, and inkle. An interactive epistolary story where you play in the juncture between what people want to say to one another, and what they actually dare to say. The player’s role is to revise the letters being sent between characters.

* Moquette, Alex Warren. A somewhat melancholy slice of life story about a dissatisfied man riding the Underground. Features some neat procedural effects for creating the stops on the journey and the characters who get on and off the train.

Lost Pig, by Admiral Jota. A light-hearted, deeply implemented parser game about a lost orc called Grunk.

* Sorcery!, Steve Jackson and inkle. An old-style gamebook updated as a modern app, and one that has gotten very widespread appreciation.

* Bee, Emily Short. A real-life story about a homeschooled girl training for a national spelling bee. It’s built on the Varytale system, which means that the player gets to select which snippets of the story to read next, then make choices within each subchapter.

* Frankenstein, Dave Morris and inkle. A modern retelling of the Frankenstein story that explores what was going through the minds of all the major characters.

Kerkerkruip, Victor Gijsbers et al. A highly randomized dungeon-crawl story with rogue-like mechanics, but textual descriptions of events. Illustrated with a map and other colorful features.

Edited to add: in case it’s of interest, here is an old post, with screenshots, listing text-based games of various kinds. Some are interactive stories; some are interactive poems or other types of games that happen to use text.

A Few Underplayed Pieces from the Archive

Recent discussions got me thinking about some rather substantial games that rarely get mentioned, and that I suspect a lot of people may not have played. Here are a few I liked but rarely hear people talk about:

First Things First, J. Robinson Wheeler. Many years in the making, this is a time-travel story — but unlike Moebius, All Things Devours, Vicious Cycles, and many other examples, it runs on a long loop rather than a short one. Instead of jaunting a few minutes back and forth at a critical time, you’re taking a leap of decades, seeing trees be planted and grow, seeing the building of a house and then what it looks like when completed, and so on.

Adventurer’s Consumer Guide, Øyvind Thorsby. One of my favorite games that not very many people seem to have played. An unabashed puzzlefest, but a highly enjoyable one: not too linear, with several interesting objects that have multiple uses. Thorsby has a theory about IF that doesn’t need the player to overuse the EXAMINE verb, which means that the feel and pace of this one is a little atypical — but it’s a strong design and well worth trying out.

Return to Ditch Day, Mike Roberts. A puzzle fest, and an extremely polished one, with lots of conveniences built into the gameplay. It was a flagship example of what TADS 3 could do, and its quality still outshines a lot of what’s out there.

Blighted Isle, Eric Eve. An expansive game about a shipwrecked man and a strange isle that seems somewhat out of time. There’s a lot to do in this one, and several possible paths through major plot points.