Category: interactive fiction

Homer in Silicon

Thanks to Simon Carless, I have a biweekly GameSetWatch column now. I’ll be using it to talk about games and storytelling — sometimes drawing on IF, sometimes not.

The column title (besides the obvious) is a reminder that storytelling hasn’t always primarily taken the form of written text on a page, even though that’s what we currently tend to revere most (with books getting more respect than movies, and movies more than video games). Oral narrative was flexible but sometimes formulaic, and the teller shaped it somewhat to fit the audience.

Bespoke IF

Greg Costikyan recently ran a post about GMing as bespoke tailoring — the idea that having your game run by an individual human with an interest in your tastes is the ultimate high-end in gaming experiences, with digital RPGs and MMO games as the equivalent of ready-to-wear stuff.

I don’t GM, but this interested me because I do enjoy what you might call bespoke IF authorship: writing a game (usually tiny, though not necessarily joky) for a specific person or small group of friends. Obviously, there’s usually no expectation that what I create is going to be of value or interest to anyone else; it’s more like writing a letter than like a literary exercise. The reason I find it so satisfying, though, is that it’s much easier to get the balance right if you’re addressing the game to a particular person’s play style.

Does anybody else do this? Or is it my own private form of crazy?