interactive fiction – Page 31 – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

An Incomplete List of Things I’d Need to Know In Order Not to Be A Total Impostor

In honor of folks freaked out about how many things they “have to” do to advance their career, I present a very partial list of things I’ve been encouraged or expected to do/know since I got into games.

Not shown: which of these were fantastic advice, which were legit job requirements, and which were gatekeeping.

history and canon of literary hypertext in the 90s
improv technique
theories of narratology
all works of Infocom, Scott Adams, Melbourne House, Magnetic Scrolls, etc
canon and design trends in CYOA and gamebooks
who’s who in Oulipo
history of text adventures in languages other than English
state of digital humanities as a field
Prolog, Answer Set Programming, and other logic programming approaches
general history of table-top roleplaying game development and some rough concept of what goes on in LARP design both North American and Nordic
Agile dev practices and a bunch of specific associated software and systems
every game ever submitted to the IF Comp in its 24 years of history
transmedia: what are/were the major projects, what are/were the tools, why haven’t we heard so much about it lately
running safe and inclusive spaces, codes of conduct and the arguments concerning these
nonprofit fundraising and institutional development
JavaScript
who is working on narrative games, game AI, or procedural generation at the academic, indie, and AAA levels in the US and Europe and ideally elsewhere also
freelance scheduling, billing, networking, insurance, accounting, marketing and time-management strategies
recent developments in interactive video and audio
conversational pragmatics
stage magic techniques
C#
norms of participation in academic conference program committees and journal reviewing
marginalized authors in games and IF, and standout works that capture unusual experiences
the landscape of London games/writing/journalism/TV/radio personalities specifically
escape room design and canon
interactive documentaries, canon and tooling
roguelites
the complete oeuvre of Telltale
locational games, canon and tooling
Lua
every game that’s nominated for an IGF narrative award or other industry writing award, whether or not I was on the judging panel at the time
uses of interactive storytelling in museums and cultural heritage sites
who’s who in speculative fiction and what they’re doing these days
standard wisdom about running startups, MVPs, and attracting investment
ontology and knowledge representation
writing for voice actors
accessible app design for narrative-heavy apps
art direction
educational game design and requirements for school-facing projects
design practices for VR and AR
how to deal with being interrupted repeatedly, and other apparently gendered behavior that is hard to call out in the moment
TADS, StoryNexus, StorySpace, Varytale, Twine, ink, Tracery, Texture, Unity, Unreal, GameMaker Studio, Hugo, Alan, Quest, Ren’Py, AIML, ChatScript, and assorted specific modding tools; how to plug these together, in some cases
physical object storytelling, both in terms of common practice and in terms of production methods
theme park design
assorted visualization tools, now mostly JavaScript-based, though at one point there was a trend for Processing
IF and narrative game publishing venues
government grant application processes
typography and layout
Tableau
public speaking skills
board games with a narrative or storytelling element
every “blockbuster” AAA game
natural language processing methods; NLTK, assorted online APIs
attend GDC, SXSW, PAX, PAX East, E3, IndieCade, Practice, GamesCom, Amaze, Develop, EGX, AdventureX, Feral Vector, ELO, ICCC, ICIDS, FDG, AIIDE, DiGRA, INT, et al. (yearly)
narrative content design for MMOs
history and current status of academic research programs in procedural narrative
trends and marketing concerns in children’s interactive ebooks
machine learning methods and tools
how to write a literary novel that would garner respect, e.g. by winning the Man Booker Prize
everything that would be taught in an undergraduate computer science course
immersive theatre, what the major shows are and how they work
assorted specific culture references, especially Westworld, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones
advergaming and viral marketing game tie-in methods
how to write a popular novel that would make buckets of money and appear on the NYT bestseller list
assembly language
narrative design for free to play systems
alt controller design
how to wear clothes as a woman at an industry event
current market size and revenues from interactive fiction games and narrative-heavy games
Alexa skill creation
Personal Brand development
computational creativity theories and practices
dozens of books of writing and design advice for game writers, screenwriters, novelists, etc, etc
computational paralinguistics
which parties to go to at GDC and how to get in
detailed CV of the person I just met, who is no doubt famous, but unknown to me
C++
Zizek

End of August Link Assortment

inkle studios has announced ink jam, a jam for people writing in ink, running August 31-September 3. (So basically right away, if you want to be part of that.)

If you’re planning to enter IF Comp, you should submit your intent to enter pretty much now: the deadline is upon us.

September 7 is the deadline if you want to submit a paper to CC-NLG, a one-day academic workshop on computational creativity in natural language generation. To quote the call for papers, topics of interest include

Poetry Generation
Story Generation
Generation of Metaphor, Figurative and Rhetorical Language
Generation of Verbal Humor
Personality and Emotion in NLG
Creative Data-to-Text Models
Interactive Language Generation
Character-based Generation
Style Generation
Digital Literature

The event itself will take place in Tilburg, Netherlands, November 5.

September 8 is the next SF Bay Area IF Meetup, rescheduled from one week earlier.

Also September 8, the London IF Meetup hears some puzzle design post-mortems from Jon Ingold and Joey Jones (and possibly one other).

September 19 is the next Boston IF Meetup.

September 22 is the next Baltimore/DC Are IF Meetup, discussing Kevin Gold’s Choice of Magics.

October 22 is the deadline for Saugus.net’s 21st Annual Ghost Story Contest. They accept both traditional prose entries and IF. Official rules can be found here.

November 10-11, AdventureX will return, this time at the British Library. AdventureX is a conference focused on narrative rich games, whether those are mobile or desktop, text-based or graphical; it’s grown significantly in size and professionalism over the last couple of years, and last year pretty definitively outgrew its previous venue. I am mentioning this well in advance because they’ve mentioned that tickets will be cheaper for early bird buyers — so it’s something to keep an eye on if you think you’ll want to go.

Continue reading “End of August Link Assortment”

The Mermaid’s Tears (BBC R&D)

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The Mermaid’s Tears is a short radio play (really, just a few minutes long) that allows the listener to switch audio positions and hear the story from any of three perspectives: as Dee or Bill, police officers, or as Lesley, the mother of a sick child.

Dee and Bill have questions about how the child got sick, and the chief question of the piece is whether Lesley is responsible in some kind of Munchausen-by-proxy scenario, or whether the whole thing is just an accident.

As the listener is just choosing what to listen to, there’s no narrative agency here. The structure is reminiscent of Sam Barlow’s WarGames (interactive film with a choice of strands to follow) or Iain Pears’ Arcadia (interactive novel with multiple viewpoint characters and locations) or perhaps a Punchdrunk production. All of these works belong to the category Hannah Wood would call Story Exploration Games, or games of dynamic syuzhet. But in all but Arcadia, there is an extra component: film, theatre, and radio are temporal media that have to be moving forward in order to convey meaning. A player/viewer/participant who chooses to pay attention to one stream is choosing to give up attention to another.

So player decision-making in The Mermaid’s Tears is about choosing what we want to know at the moment — do we keep listening to the conversation of two characters in the living room, or do we eavesdrop on a third who has stepped away for a moment? What do we feel we can step away from without missing anything important? Continue reading “The Mermaid’s Tears (BBC R&D)”

Subsurface Circular (Bithell Games)

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Subsurface Circular is a game of puzzle conversation. The look and feel are quite polished — nice animations, sound effects, a sense of three-dimensional place, a UI representation of how far you are along your subway journey — but your activity in the game is talking to your fellow robots on a subway car, mostly picking dialogue options.

For Plot Reasons, you yourself are never allowed to leave the subway. But other riders come and go, and you can interrogate them for as long as they’re seated near you. The subway ride also functions as a measure of your progress through the story, in an elegant understated way: you know where you started, and roughly how far you are from completing the loop.

Character entrances and exits are gated in such a way that, as far as I can tell, it’s not possible to fail at an important conversation beat because you’re too late and the character leaves the train before you’ve talked to them. The frame structure provides just enough sense of passing time to imply a little urgency, but not so much as to actually get in the way of success.

As you do so, you gather “focus points” — a topic inventory that you can deploy whenever your current strand of conversation runs out, unlocking new menu items. Your focus point buttons highlight when you have any available gambits associated with them. And there are also a handful of things to figure out, passwords you can extract from one character to use on another and so on.

Continue reading “Subsurface Circular (Bithell Games)”

Ways to Support Interactive Fiction Tools and Creators

I get a fair amount of email from people who are working at commercial game studios or other for-profit industrial contexts who want to chat about interactive narrative — the tooling, the markets, where to hire authors, what they should think about if they’re setting up a particular project, editorial standards and practices, et al. This used to be a fine opportunity to reply with “Thanks for thinking of me; here’s my day rate.”

Now I have a full-time job at Spirit AI, so I’m not seeking new consulting opportunities and I don’t really have time to take on loads of these conversations for free. I do occasionally fit one in, and lately I’ve started asking companies, in lieu of paying me directly, to give money to the IF Technology Foundation to support the IF community — because the expertise I have, the people I might recommend, and the tools that exist in this ecosystem would not exist without huge amounts of donated community labor over the past two or three decades. And I’d like to strengthen that connection in their minds.

I want this for a variety of reasons. But here’s the argument to people who represent commercial entities: this is about sustaining an ecosystem that feeds you.

The IF community (or, really, the constellation of related IF communities) trains new authors who go into games writing with polished interactive pieces in their portfolios. It develops theoretical foundations for talking about narrative structures, procedural systems, text generation, and types of choice. It builds tools that are used for free to prototype, research, or even finish and release commercial work. It tries out lots of experimental concepts, functioning as an experimental laboratory for interactive narrative.

All of that helps related industries grow, have a pipeline of established workers, and discover interesting new creative angles in a low-risk way. (I’m absolutely speaking from experience here. Spirit — working in the conversational and narrative AI space — has hired multiple people from the IF community. Andrew Plotkin and Aaron Reed both work on my team. We benefit daily from their decades of hands-on experience making authoring tools and dealing with natural language interactions of various kinds. We also include interactive fiction authors in our tool testing.)

The IF community also needs resources. And the commercial success of interactive narrative cuts in several directions — quite a few people who used to do IF as a hobby (including me) now do interactive narrative for games as a job. That’s good for us individually, and I think it’s good for the industry, but at the same time, it removes some of that energy from the hobbyist community.

So. Suppose you want to help sustain and grow amateur and not-professional-yet interactive fiction. What might that contribution be? There are lots of possibilities, but here are some possible starting points.

Continue reading “Ways to Support Interactive Fiction Tools and Creators”

Mid-August Link Assortment

August 22, the long-dormant Seattle IF group is meeting at 7:00 p.m. at Four Generals Brewery in Renton. The plan is to play through Ryan Veeder’s new game “Curse of the Garden Isle.”

August 23 is the next meeting of the Boston IF group.

Introcomp is live, and invites you to play and judge excerpts of longer interactive fiction games based on how much you’d like to play the rest of the game. This is a long-running IF community tradition that lets participants collect early feedback on their game concepts and works in progress. If you’d like to participate, the games are available here, and voting runs through August 31.

inkle studios has announced ink jam, a jam for people writing in ink, running August 31-September 3.

September 8 is the next SF Bay Area IF Meetup.

If you’re planning to enter IF Comp, you should submit your intent to enter before the beginning of September, as well.

October 6-7, Roguelike Celebration is coming up in San Francisco — this is obviously a bit different from IF material, but there’s some interesting procedural storytelling work that comes up in this space. This year their speakers include Tarn Adams, Pippin Barr, and Max Kreminski, all people who have turned up on this blog/in IF circles before.

Continue reading “Mid-August Link Assortment”