interactive fiction – Page 39 – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

Mid-February Link Assortment

February 17, the London IF Meetup is doing a Saturday afternoon workshop on using ink and Unity together. This is one of the best methods for creating professional-looking standalone IF applications, and we’ll help you get started with the tools you need.

February 21 is the next meetup of the People’s Republic of IF, in Cambridge MA.

March 1 is the deadline to register if you intend to enter Spring Thing 2018; April 1 is the date to actually submit the games themselves. Spring Thing is the second largest annual IF competition, and runs on slightly different terms than IF Comp in the fall. Among other things, there is usually an option to submit experimental, unfinished, or unusual works in the “Back Garden,” meaning that they are distributed but not ranked or given prizes. It’s a great way to get involved without the actual competition part, which isn’t ideal for all authors or all works.

March 3 is the next meetup of the SF Bay IF Meetup group.

March 4, Dublin Interactive Fiction Writing Meetup convenes for an introductory lunch.

March 5, there is a reading of procedural literature at the Harvard Book Store (Cambridge, MA) with Nick Montfort, John Cayley, Liza Daly, and Allison Parrish, at 7pm.

March 7, Oxford/London IF Meetup hears from Greg Buchanan on writing for games from IF and indie to AAA projects.

The Opening Up Digital Fiction competition runs through March 15, 2018. (Previously announced as February.) It offers cash prizes and the possibility of future publication.

March 17, Queer Code London holds a workshop on graphical uses of Twine (co-sponsored by the Oxford/London IF Meetup).

March 20, Sunderland Creative Writing Festival offers a workshop on writing choose your own ending stories (looks like it’s focused on craft and choice design, and might be non-digital).

I will be at GDC March 19-23, speaking at the AI Summit and present at the Spirit AI expo floor booth.

Through March 21, the MIT Rotch Library (77 Mass Ave, 2nd Floor) is running an exhibit about computer-generated books called Author Function.

Articles

Anya Johanna DeNiro wrote about my ancient game Pytho’s Mask for sub-q magazine.

Bruno Dias writes about controlling scope in your game.

Joey Jones has a manifesto on puzzle design and incorporating puzzles effectively into narrative.

Releases

Mike Gentry’s 1998 classic Anchorhead is now available in an updated, illustrated version on Steam and Itch, with some new puzzles. Bruno Dias writes about the release for PC Gamer. Mike is even doing a new batch of feelies for the game, including the nifty pewter charm (shown), and a map of the town. A word of warning about this: apparently the contents of the game have changed just enough that walkthroughs for the original version may be unhelpful. But if you want to get hints, you may be able to find help from the good people on the intfiction forum.

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Mailbag: IF Candidates for Porting

What IF story would be best for someone with limited time and resources to re-create as a 3D and even VR game? It would have to be under some license such as a Creative Commons license, where derivatives are allowed and preferably a license that allows commercial derivatives.

Before I answer this, I feel I’d be doing a disservice if I didn’t ask why you want to attempt this, and whether you’re sure you’ve thought it through.

Text adventures are good at evocative sense of place (and other events) on a budget; at allowing a huge palette of verbs; at geographical exploration and large game spaces; at (if desired) long play times, sometimes extending over months; at capturing a character’s interiority and viewpoint; at creating a very complicated world state that can offer persistent consequences for the player.

VR is good at intense, 10-20 minute experiences. VR works tend towards limited and simple controls, and require intense asset work for every setting. On many (especially budget) VR systems, they induce the least nausea if the protagonist doesn’t move around that much. Meanwhile, IF levels of world state in VR are a pain, because either that state isn’t visible (in which case, how does the player know?) or it is (in which case, you have to make variations on your assets in order to represent those state changes). Cut scenes and branching narrative outcomes, also cheap(ish) in text, may be very expensive in VR in that they may require animations or additional assets.

Not only that, but any game with a complex parser-based experience is going to be untenable: no one wants to type in VR; you could hook up voice-recognition but it’s likely to multiply the parser errors that are already irritating on the screen ordinarily. There are lots of great one-room IF games, from Rematch to Aisle, that rely heavily on the inventiveness of the player’s input. These would also be a poor match for VR in most instances.

Some similar things are true of 3D games in general, though less so. In a text adventure, you can write a randomized “[The character] is [one of]whistling a jaunty tune[or]staring out the window[or]playing solitaire[at random]” sentence, and you’ve just accomplished something that would take days of idle animation work in 3D.

So that raises the question of what you’re hoping to get by adapting a text game to a very much non-text medium, and whether it wouldn’t make more sense to come up with a new story suited to the affordances of your target medium. The best piece of advice I can offer here is just “don’t do this.” VR is really, really very much its own beast and even 3D console gameplay doesn’t always map at all well to that space.

But, okay. Let’s say that for some reason you don’t want to take the easier route and write a story customized to the storytelling possibilities of VR. What would be the least-awful IF game to port to VR, given minimal development resources?

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Slay the Dragon: Writing Great Video Games (Giglio/Bryant)

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Slay the Dragon: Writing Great Video Games (2015). This book builds from the following thesis statement:

The story has to involve the player. The player has to want to do and see cool things in the game world… the game mechanics (such as dragon slaying) should enhance the story, and vice versa. They have to work in concert. We’ll guide you through the coming pages so you understand how to tell your story through gameplay in an integrated fashion. (26)

The book is aimed at film writers who want to get into games, at game writers who want to improve their skillsets, and at enthusiasts who are into narrative games in general. Helpfully, the authors provide an overview (33-35) of which chapters to read if you’re coming from a particular background. There are also quite a few exercises for the user of the book, starting with designing a narrative board game and moving up from there.

In contrast with Steve Ince’s take, Bryant and Giglio are optimistic about where story is going in games and excited about the possibilities. While AAA games and development processes get plenty of attention, that’s not their only point of interest. They call out successes in the independent game space (for instance profiling all the best narrative IGF nominees from 2014) and even in IF. (In the spirit of full disclosure: this blog gets a mention.)

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Next-Generation Design Tools for Narrative Content

This Friday I had the pleasure of speaking to the AAAI workshop Knowledge Extraction from Games, which focused on gathering information from games and putting that information to use: for instance, studying level design in a platformer in order to find standard rules about platformer design or to propose alternative level designs that the creators might not have considered.

I was invited to talk about this topic from a designer’s perspective, looking particularly at how these techniques could be valuably applied to narrative games. And the problem, as I outlined it, was as follows:

Games that aspire to offer a lot of narrative agency often face the following challenge: they need a number of distinctive, hand-authored units of content (whether those are dialogue lines for Character Engine, storylets in a quality-based narrative system, or choice nodes in a ChoiceScript game) where each individual unit may both affect and be affected by the underlying world state.

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End of January Link Assortment

Events

February 3 is the next meeting of the SF Bay Area IF Meetup.

February 3 is also the next Baltimore IF Meetup, where participants will be playing Known Unknowns by Brendan Patrick Hennessy.

February 7 there’s a reading of computational poetry at the MIT Press Bookstore with Nick Montfort, Rafael Perez y Perez, & Allison Parrish, 6pm.

February 11 is the deadline to submit projects to Game Happens 2018, a conference taking place in Genova, Italy, May 25-26. The conference is cross-disciplinary and looks at game design alongside architecture and urban planning. Here’s a little more about what they’re seeking:

We are looking for innovative projects and different points of view that will help us explore and discuss concepts such as narrative, diversity, ethics, game design, world building; we particularly encourage new and emerging topics.

For our EXHIBITION AREA, we are open to the following kinds of project:
– digital games
– board games
– pervasive games
– mixed-media games
– mixed-media performances
– VR & AR experiences
– alternative controller games
– interactive installation

Conference talks are also a possibility (see the link for more).

February 12 in Leeds, there is a ticketed but free workshop on Twine.

The French IF Competition is running and accepting votes now through February 25. Hugo Labrande writes:

There are 5 entries, and no two are the same : there’s a great deal of variety and diversity this year, which is awesome! There’s z5, Glulx, Vorple and Unity games ; parser, multiple choice, hyperlinks or another mechanic ; fantasy, SF, horror, or steampunkish ; long and short games, by newcomers and seasoned authors! It is amazing to see the French IF scene getting bolder and using so many different tools to tell stories!

March 1 is the deadline to register if you intend to enter Spring Thing 2018; April 1 is the date to actually submit the games themselves.

March 2 is the deadline to send pitches if you would like to be an artist in residence at the MetaMakers Institute in Cornwall, working with generative game design. There’s quite a lot of detail about what this pitch involves, and it’s more in the computational creativity end of the space than IF-specific, but may still be of interest to some readers.

The Opening Up Digital Fiction competition runs through March 15, 2018. (Previously announced as February.) It offers cash prizes and the possibility of future publication.

Articles

Mike Cook writes about a Civ V mod designed to communicate (perhaps disingenuously) about the risks associated with powerful AI. If that sounds like a complicated premise, look at it this way instead: it’s an article about how games persuade and communicate, and in particular how they communicate about risk; and also about how we see artificial intelligence and what we might be inclined to fear.

Beth Malmskog, on her American Mathematical Society blog, writes about her experiences playing interaction fiction in the 90s, as well as Mike Spivey’s math-focused IF Comp entry A Beauty Cold and Austere.

Sergei Mozhaisky has translated into Russian my blog post on the endangered art of parser IF.

Of late, the Rock Paper Shotgun column Unknown Pleasures has been featuring (among other things) visual novels and other items in the interactive fiction orbit.

Reigns: Her Majesty (Leigh Alexander / Nerial)

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Reigns is a piece of interactive narrative with a Tinder-style mechanic (swipe left or right to accept the requests of your various friends, advisors, and enemies) and story snippets unlocked by where your stats are so far. At all times you need to keep your stats from reaching maximum or minimum, or your current incarnation will die — so trying to keep your current character going requires sometimes making individual choices that wouldn’t be what you want; and sometimes there’s a narrative-progressing move you could make… but you can’t afford to do it right now without dying in the process. Meanwhile, choices give you a clue what they’re likely to affect, but it’s not complete information — you can sometimes guess wrong about whether an option will raise or lower a particular stat, and thus kill yourself by accident.

The story experience that emerges thus feels a bit capricious but often entertaining. It’s not roleplaying of the kind where you can choose a protagonist personality and pursue it consistently, because consistently heading in any direction will get you killed.

There’s also a long-term way to win, but I never figured it out, in part because I wasn’t enough into the story to keep messing with it.

Reigns: Her Majesty takes that same simple concept, re-centers it on a queen protagonist, and makes it much much funnier.

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