interactive fiction – Page 72 – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

Enter the Oubliette Room Escape

Sunday a group from the London IF Meetup got together to tackle the Enter the Oubliette escape room. This was my first contact with escape rooms, though I’ve heard about a number from friends who’ve either played or worked on creating them. (If you’re in Seattle, here’s Sam Ashwell on the work of Puzzle Break. In London, I’ve also heard good things about Time Run; in fact, here’s a whole blog about escape rooms, biased towards but not exclusively focused on London, with a review that gives Oubliette five stars.)

Enter the Oubliette was put together by project members who have Punchdrunk experience, and indeed a number of things about the props did remind me of Punchdrunk things I’ve seen: the meticulous documents with retro design, paper types, and illustration; the functioning retro technology; the inventive use of sound, film, lighting, and smoke effects as well as space and objects to create a particular experience. The room wasn’t as crammed-full-of-stuff as the setting of a Punchdrunk stage production, but that was a mercy: we already had plenty to search and already had to have some strong hints to guide our attention to some missed items.

With something like this that thrives on novelty and where each person who sees spoilers is a person who can’t realistically be a customer, it seems actively hostile to give too much away. So I want to be extra careful not to do that.

If you’re just looking for advice about whether this is worth doing: we liked it. We had a great time with a mixed group; most of us hadn’t been to any kind of escape room before. We had different degrees of self-confidence about our puzzle solving ability, but we did fine and everyone got to contribute in meaningful ways. And although you might try to place it by saying it’s a bit like a cross between immersive theatre and a graphical adventure game, in practice it is still really, really different from either of those things.

Below are some fairly general comments about how this experience worked as an interactive story experience, which I will still cordon off in case you don’t want to see even those.

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GDC 2016 for IF Enthusiasts

gdc Screen Shot 2016-03-07 at 5.44.59 PM

This post contains three things: a list of talks I think are probably interesting to IF people, if you’re an IF person attending GDC this year; some thoughts about where to look for GDC-related content even if you are an IF person who cannot go; and finally some general strategies for first-time GDC-goers.

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Love Stories for High-XP Characters

Scully “I’m here.”

It’s the fourth episode of the new revived X-Files season. Scully is keeping a sad vigil in a DC hospital. Mulder has been in Philadelphia working on a series of vividly gruesome murders. But he drops that and goes to the hospital and calls her from outside the ward and says just “I’m here.” — but it calls back all the times he was there for her before, and all the times he wasn’t, and it’s one more move in a very long game.

This is a couple that had one of the longest, most artificial Unresolved Sexual Tension arcs in television history, including multiple fake-outs from unrepentant writers. They kissed but it was only a dream. They kissed but it was a hallucination. They kissed (or nearly so) but one of them was really a shape-shifter or possessed/body-swapped by another entity. (That one happened multiple times.) They were about to kiss but one of them was coincidentally just at that exact moment stung by a hybridized bee carrying an instantly-debilitating alien virus.

And just when, as a couple, they were finally moving past that, Duchovny left the show, so Mulder and Scully’s relationship went into another kind of limbo where they never saw one another.

Then there was the second X-Files movie, of which defiantly I liked the first half. No one else liked any of it, as far as I can tell. The movie skipped any further will-they-won’t-they shenanigans and went straight ahead to Mulder and Scully as long-term cohabiting partners. And now, in the new series, they’ve come through partnership and lust and mortal peril and a child they had to give up, through living together and then not living together. They are in another place now, a place that television rarely visits and where video games pretty much never go at all.

If you’re thinking that this doesn’t sound like a very well constructed show, I hear you. The writers have quite a bit to answer for, and I haven’t even gotten into how silly and inconsistent the main plot arc is. But back in the day, I used to watch it because I found Scully riveting, especially after the first couple of seasons when she stops seeming quite so nervous to prove herself. In her self-containment and determination, I saw a rare model of how to be a professional adult woman with a partially technical job. She wasn’t a Stone-Cold Female Executive, and she wasn’t defeminized or dehumanized by her nerdy knowledge. She also wasn’t doing all the emotional labor, bringing brownies to the FBI building or listening to the woes of other agents. She had connections and relatives and feelings, but also boundaries and agency and ethics. She could perform femininity but she didn’t seem to be trapped by it. And for all the tension with Mulder, for all the times she was in mortal peril, she was never, ever just the girlfriend or woman-in-a-fridge or a prize for anyone. She seemed lonely — I always wanted a larger community than Scully seemed to have. But in a lot of other respects, when I pictured what I wanted for my future self, I pictured Scully’s assurance, her absolute competence, her combination of empathy and self-preservation.

Now that she’s older and I’m older too, she’s even more of a rarity on TV: a woman who is allowed to be, and appear to be, over 35; a woman with a functioning and evolving professional life; a woman in a relationship with strata.

She and Mulder together have a relationship that is similarly uncommon, a relationship that is not about young love or bodies in their 20s but also not a cutely condescending Denny’s-ad caricature of elderly lovers.

And as so often when starving for a certain kind of story or a certain kind of representation, I’m willing to forgive flaws (perhaps a lot of flaws) in order to hear this story at all.

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Lunation Series (JJ Gadd)

Disclosure: this review is part of the IF Comp review exchange. J.J. Gadd was kind enough to review Cat Manning’s Crossroads, and to supply me with copies of her Lunation series for review.

Lunation is a five-book series about a fantasy land in which, five hundred years before the beginning of Book 1, the moon was magically constructed as a prison for the queen Marama. In the present day, her descendants include a yellow-eyed boy with powers of sorcery who dreams (literally) of finding a way to free her. He soon meets up with a young female relative who is able to see the future by gazing into smoke and then, trance-like, weaving or embroidering an image that represents what she saw.

The first three books in the series are technically CYOA-structured, though in the very lightest sense: book 1 contains no branches until chapter 6, when you can pick which of two characters to follow, into 6A or 6B; at the end of 6A, you’re invited to read 6B as well if you’re interested. Book 2 works similarly, with a few sections following each of the two main characters. Book 3 jumps backward to tell the story of Marama herself: the “initiation journey” in which she is cast out of the castle where she grew up in order to familiarize herself with her people. In Book 4 (diagrammed), we reach the point where all the characters so far are reunited — Marama, now released from the moon, joins the fight of her descendants 500 years later. And at this point the structure becomes slightly more complicated than before, though it is still a matter of choosing which character we most wish to follow. Book 5 is roughly similar in complexity to Book 4.

Compared to something like Arcadia, the which-character-to-follow? choice structure in the Lunation series is still tightly constrained. Sometimes we have an option of which chapter to read first out of a set of two or three parallel adventures, but the tracks soon rejoin; there isn’t the dizzying sense of having to piece together the mysteries of the narrative ourselves from numerous complicated components. Instead, in Lunation, this feels like an attempt to mediate for the volume of text: to let the reader choose favorite elements of a story that perhaps runs long, but that is too dear for the author to let any of it go.

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Readerly Experiments in Narrative Form

Sometimes people write to me asking for suggested lists of interactive fiction that fit particular criteria. When that happens, I like to publish the results to my blog rather than just answer by email — both in order to establish a resource for other people in the future, and in case commenters here have additional thoughts that might be useful.

Yesterday I was on a panel that included Richard Beard. He is an author of novels (including the OuLiPian Damascus, which constrained itself to use no words not in a specific issue of the Times) and nonfiction, as well as a contributor to PAPERCUT, an enhanced ebook app. Today he wrote to me for suggested IF — perhaps prompted by my vehement assertion during the panel that there’s lots of interactive fiction that is not simply an enhancement of a pre-existing static text:

I’m particularly interested in any experience that is excitingly different from reading a book, but still recognisable as reading (rather than, say, wordy gaming). This would seem to mean experiments with narrative, with new ways of enfolding form and content and new ways of enlivening conventional storytelling techniques.

“Recognisable as reading rather than wordy gaming” seems to me to exclude parser-based works, since those require typed input: probably not a “reading” activity. Otherwise I would include last year’s Map and Midnight. Swordfight., both of which are certainly experimenting with allowing a plot to be radically reshaped (but within a predictable system) by the reader’s actions. I’d also mention Analogue: A Hate Story for its compelling use of a database narrative structure; Lime Ergot for evoking the reader’s curiosity and telling its story through telescoping descriptions; What Fuwa Bansaku Found for its reweaving of translated Japanese poetry into a new story. Alethicorp‘s storytelling via a faux corporate website probably also includes too many non-reading actions.

The request suggests that the writer might not be looking for something like 80 Days, which — though very much an experiment in narrative and remixable vignettes — bears enough game markers in terms of scores and goals that it might be off-putting to a readerly audience. Anything from StoryNexus is probably off the table, thanks to the card metaphor and overt mechanics. The emphasis on reading would also seem to exclude interactive film, interactive audio, and interactive comics.

Even the Choice of Games catalog — though almost purely textual — might seem too game-like, given that there are success and failure possibilities and some stats-tracking is expected if you want to get the best outcome. (Otherwise, as a first taste of CoG for someone interested in readerly merits, my picks would be The City’s Thirst for general prose quality and imagery, and Slammed! for its investment in its character arcs.)

And given the desire to actually try the works in question, I unfortunately also cannot suggest anything from the Versu project, since those apps are now unavailable.

So now that I’ve eliminated many many honorable mentions:

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Incommensurate Wages

One of the sources that influenced The Frequently Deceased is this essay about the lot of maids and nannies in Victorian households, written by a contemporary reformer. It’s longwinded, in Victorian style, but one of the key bits is this:

Money is assumed to confer more than the mere power to buy the time and labour which others have to sell. It is assumed to buy the whole being–liberty, affection, mind, freewill, and creed.

And this also:

Even in the case of a nurse who stands nearest to the family, and who has to give more than mere time and professional deftness–a loving care that wages cannot buy nor repay–if she is to the mind of her mistress she is kept during the baby years when she is wanted, but no sooner is the nursery empty than she is found superfluous and dismissed… With what conscience then can we demand, as we do, energies, devotion, self-sacrifice beyond the stipulated tale of tasks, when we give on our side absolutely nothing but the bare bones of our enforced obligations?

Loyalty can’t effectively be measured, or bought—or, for that matter, sold, even if one has run out of other things to sell. If you want a servant motivated by something other than money, you’re probably going to have to pay in some other currency, too. But in a place like Fallen London, someone would be very likely to try anyway, using their own perverse metrics.

(The Frequently Deceased is turning out to be a favorite on the Fallen London forums — if you are interested in playing, an Exceptional Friendship subscription for a month is a better deal than buying the story several months from now as a stand-alone unlock.)