Category: interactive fiction

Mark Bernstein on Hypertext Narrative

Literary hypertext has a long history that isn’t always well understood or well acknowledged by interactive fiction authors, even though with the growing popularity of Twine and other hypertext tools, the techniques are more than ever relevant to us.

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Recently Eastgate released Storyspace 3, a new version of software used to produce many canonical works of literary hypertext; and, to accompany it, their chief scientist Mark Bernstein wrote a book, Getting Started with Hypertext Narrative, in which he discusses the challenges and the craft of writing in this form.

Whether or not you are interested in using Storyspace or writing literary hypertext, the book is worth reading, not least because it offers terminology and insights from a body of work IF authors seldom study.

In the exchange below, Mark and I discuss various sections of his book, together with other relevant tools in the space. We find some common structures and implementation strategies that cross over from one tradition to the other, and notice that Storyspace 3 might be a viable alternative to StoryNexus for people who want to experiment with quality-based narrative structures but don’t want StoryNexus’ art requirements or styling: what Mark describes as “sculptural hypertext” shares a lot in common with QBN.

All blockquotes are from the text of Getting Started with Hypertext Narrative: I sent these to Mark with my comments, and in some cases he had thoughts in response, so this is actually sort of a three-cornered conversation between the book, the author, and me. Thanks to Mark for supplying the text and taking the time to answer, and also for his patience with how long it took me to bring this together.

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Notes on New and experimental IF Tools

Last night the Oxford/London IF Meetup had a session on three tools, and I promised to write up some notes for the benefit of the people who weren’t able to attend.

inkle’s ink, the open-source, Unity-compatible language used by inkle for 80 Days and other projects. If you’re curious about ink and missed the session, there’s always Joe Humfrey’s GDC talk on the subject; but Jon also talked to us about The Intercept, the new free and open source ink/Unity game.

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Jon was a bit apologetic about the fact that there is currently no specialist ink runner, meaning that if you want to create (say) an ink entry to IF Comp, you will need to use Unity to build standalone apps. But to me, this is also partly a selling point, in the sense that ink is designed to build custom, professional-looking apps and doesn’t constrain the author to something a bit bland.

Doing this doesn’t have to mean figuring everything out from scratch. What I hadn’t realized about The Intercept until that conversation — and it’s very useful to know — is that the whole Unity project is open-source, not just the ink script that goes into the game. This means that if you want to build an ink/Unity game of your own but you have very little Unity experience, you could download the whole thing and then copy or gradually adapt The Intercept‘s look and feel. (Also worth saying: a personal Unity license is free if you’re not making significant money from your projects.)

Edited to add: on Twitter, I learned about the existence of Blot, a rough and ready alternative Unity project using ink that has fewer genre-specific features than The Intercept. So you have options, even!

Personally I’ve found working with an existing Unity project to mod it into something of my own to be a great route into learning how Unity works, because it means I don’t have to tackle understanding every type of asset at once. So if you’re in the same boat, that might be a way to get an ink game functioning, and then later you could start to figure out things like changing the fonts and presentation. (If you want to! Because it’s open source, you could just keep the way it looks, too.)

Indeed, you may want to play The Intercept even if you have no interest in using ink yourself: it is a short piece, short enough to play through (if not necessarily win) in 5-10 minutes, and it makes interesting use of the conversational options, as in the above example. Especially early in the game, we’re offered the chance to lie without really knowing ourselves what the truth is; and I found myself hesitating over whether I wanted to take the course that seemed safest or whether I wanted to steer towards the option that might reveal most about the story. Did I trust the protagonist, or not?

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Counterfeit Monkey Transfer

Cover art for Counterfeit MonkeyThis has been announced elsewhere, but for reference here as well: I haven’t been in a position to do the kind of upkeep I would like on Counterfeit Monkey, and consequently I’ve released the full source for community maintenance, at the kind suggestion of Dannii Willis. The source is at Github, and there is an official issue tracker, which is now where you should go with any bugs you encounter. (I will try to go through my own bug report backlog and add the rest to this list, when I have the aforementioned time.)

Script Lock podcast with me, Rob Morgan

Last weekend Rob Morgan (games writer, including for Fallen London) and I recorded an episode of Script Lock, the podcast that talks about game writing and game narrative, run by Max and Nick Folkman.

Our conversation is pretty wide-ranging: we talked about why coding knowledge can be useful for game writers (and how it’s easier than you might think to get started); about VR, an area where Rob has vastly vastly more experience than I do, so I welcomed hearing more about that; and some of the ideas in my Beyond Branching post and how different narrative designs can be combined.

Thanks to Script Lock for having me on the show!

Passion

Thanks to a cruel editorial by Alex St. John and a rebuttal by Rami Ismail, the conversation about crunch is making the rounds again.

St. John’s editorial gains extra overtones if you also look at his amazing guidance about hiring, which is all about how to leverage people’s personalities, relationships, and neuro-atypical conditions in order to maximize profit. If you’re prone to making obscene gestures at the screen when you read something bogglingly sexist, you might want to limber up your fingers before you click through to those slides.

I was already thinking about this topic because of my own recent attempt to evaluate time use, and because one of the comments about that basically said “hey, you’re incredibly lucky that get to do what you care about!” with an implication that I shouldn’t be looking into how I’m doing it, or whether I’m doing it in the most efficient possible way, because that would be questioning this god-sent gift.

I am incredibly lucky that I get to do things I care about. I said so in that post and I’m happy to say so again. But that’s not the only thing to consider.

So let’s talk about time commitment and “passion.”

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