interactive fiction – Page 93 – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

Spring Thing 2015: Mere Anarchy (Bruno Dias)

I didn’t run reviews during Spring Thing because of having my own Back Garden entry. I’ve also changed my review policy for comps: moving away from trying to be thorough (a goal at which I didn’t always succeed anyway), and focusing on covering games about which I have a fair amount to say and/or that I really want to recommend to other players.

For Spring Thing, that starts with Mere Anarchy.

Mere Anarchy (Bruno Dias) — this is a choice-based game in Undum by the author of ParserComp’s Terminator Chaser. As usual for Undum games, Mere Anarchy looks really good — Undum is still in my view the prettiest-by-default of the available choice systems, and the only real strike against it is that it offers so little by way of authoring tools. I’m impressed that Dias submitted two such complex games in such a short window. And this is a fairly complex piece: I think the state space is smaller than in Squinky’s The Play, but there’s a fair amount going on relative to most Undum games. Many early choices quietly play into the descriptive text later, even if they don’t substantially branch the story.

Mere Anarchy describes itself as “urban fantasy”, which led me (despite the title) to imagine cops-who-are-also-werewolves literature. This is less trope-y and goofy than that, but “urban fantasy” still fits. The protagonist is a magic user in a modern city environment, in which a wealthy cabal controls most of the high magic and which has been having lesser magic-users killed. The story details the preparation and execution of a strike that might be considered a terrorist attack, a coup, or a revolution, depending on your point of view. There’s not much leeway about what you will do or how it will come out, but you can choose details of how the protagonist will act and what their motivations will be. Many of the choices here are about the protagonist’s inner life rather than anything else.

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Writing for Seltani: an Aspel Post-mortem

Seltani is Andrew Plotkin’s platform for multiplayer choice-based IF. He’s written about it and its world model here, and we had an IF discussion club meet in/about it, from which the transcript is available. I’ve also been kicking around some ideas for multiplayer IF for a while, in one form or another, which I’ve previously written about with respect to Guncho and to Velvet Sundown. Versu also spent some time in multiplayer testing though that feature never reached the production phase.

So I thought I’d see what I could do with Seltani. In my view, the Seltani realms I’d tried so far, though entertaining, were essentially single-player realms where it just happened to be possible to have some collaborators along as buddies; whereas I wanted to do a story where having multiple players was critical to the way the game played and felt. (Edited to add: Barbetween is sort of an exception, but it is asynchronous, so that players never meet one another in the realm.)

Herewith is part 1 of a multi-part post-mortem of Aspel, because it turned out that building and then iterating on this over the course of Spring Thing produced a lot of discoveries. Many thanks to everyone who came along, played, and gave feedback (or just through action showed what was working and what wasn’t): it was a great help.

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April Link Assortment

The Oxford/London Meetup group is meeting Wednesday May 13 in London (conversation in a meeting space and then drinks at the pub). Please join us if you are in town and are so inclined — we’ll have some guests from the Seattle IF group this time around.

Other meet-ups for May that I know of:

SF Bay, May 2.
Baltimore/DC, May 3.
Boston/Cambridge, May 29.
Oxford, May 31 (a smaller meet than the London meet; feel free to bring WIPs to share).

Mike Berlyn, one of the original Infocom implementors and author of (among other things) Infidel, needs some assistance: the costs of cancer treatment have outrun his family’s ability to cover.

For a little under two months now, Leigh Alexander and Laura Hudson have been editing Offworld, a games site with contributions primarily from women. I’m consistently surprised by how much the site speaks to my interests, even when I’ve tended to consider those interests fairly unusual. Here’s an article about the second-person storytelling and pseudo-interactivity of ASMR videos, including an interview with one of my favorite ASMR creators. Here’s one about Anna Anthropy’s new tabletop game about witch pageantry. The site covered Mike Berlyn’s fundraiser, too.

I’m going to be keynoting ICCC 2015: The Sixth International Conference on Computational Creativity in Utah (June 29 – July 2, 2015), talking about some Versu and post-Versu work.

I’ll also be giving an hour-long seminar on the artistic possibilities of interaction more generally at IRCAM June 4. Timing on that is still being worked out.

The 2014 XYZZY Awards were given out; 80 Days won Best Game. That it’s both commercial and choice-based is something of a departure for the history of that award, and there were a surprising number of commercial nominees overall. In past years, even when a commercial game was in theory eligible, those games tended not to get many nominations, let alone win — maybe because the barrier of paying for a game was more than players wanted to invest in? But the landscape is changing.

There will likely be a set of XYZZY reviews covering these award categories, in time, but it usually takes a bit of a hiatus to set those up.

Sorcery! 3, inkle’s latest gamebook app, is now out, to rave reviews.

Feral Vector is a two-day conference, May 29-30, in Yorkshire; IF authors Meg Jayanth and Harry Giles will be presenting, as will the terrific Holly Gramazio. I also am going, though I’ll be somewhat hurrying back in order to do the Oxford May 31 meetup.

Andrew Plotkin has a longish post about world models and choice-based IF, talking about Bigger Than You Think (his choice-based Glulx game) and Seltani (multiplayer choice-based platform) along with other possible models.

Source has turned up for Wander, a mainframe game with text adventure propensities that predates Colossal Cave.

“A freelance QA specialist has started archiving an unusual project online that he has been working on. A mysterious company named BUCOLIC ehf, a “digital literature publisher”, is developing an interactive version of Lord Dunsany’s collection of essays about World War One, Unhappy, Far-Off Things. (Lord Dunsany is probably best known as the fantasist who was an early influence on Lovecraft.) Each essay in the collection is being tested as a “Session.” But something is not quite right with the first one.”

Alan DeNiro is releasing a serialized interactive story, Feu de Joie, which is Patreon-backed. It’s a decidedly odd piece, melancholy both in its present day narrative and in the post-World-War-I material on which it builds, and pulling together both the literary flavor of a lot of DeNiro’s work and the sinister-secret-communications-with-evil-corporation flavor of a lot of ARGs. (Tonally, it’s nothing like Alethicorp, but certain elements were reminiscent anyway.)

Bruno Dias has released a new framework for writing with Undum, which is designed to remove some of the challenges associated with coding your choice-based game up in javascript.

The new system is called Raconteur, and there are tutorials on Bruno’s site. It is still, to some extent, designed for programmers — you’ll need to install various packages to use it, and it doesn’t present a Twine-like interface to the material you’re working with — but it does significantly reduce the fiddliness of using one of the more attractive hypertext IF tools out there. For instance, to quote from the Raconteur site:

Raconteur is built with adaptive text generation in mind. Defining snippets of text that vary whenever the player sees them is easy. Raconteur takes inspiration from Inform 7, commonly used Twine macros, and other popular IF development systems. Text that varies across printings, hyperlinks that modify or insert text, and other common functionality is already there to use.

Speaking of tools and systems, Alex Warren’s Squiffy project is now at version 3, which is substantially more accessible to start with than previous versions because writers can work directly via browser. Squiffy is an entry in the choice-based space that offers a little more by way of variable support than Twine.

Wade Clarke has released Leadlight Gamma, an inexpensive commercial Glulx version of his survival horror game originally for the Apple II. He’s also, very usefully, publishing a series of post-mortem-type posts specifically focusing on accessibility concerns for interactive fiction and what he encountered in putting Leadlight Gamma together.

Interactive fiction has historically been one of the gaming forms most accessible to visually impaired players, and that’s something we should bear in mind during the current swing towards using more multimedia and providing more visually compelling experiences for players.

Richard Cobbett has a long piece on Below, which I also enjoyed and wrote about this month. Richard’s article goes into a bit more detail about the fascinating use of the Above deck in the game design.

This document on why women leave tech jobs was really interesting to me, and summarizes a lot of research.

I recoiled a bit at this section, though:

Stereotype threat is reduced if the individual experiencing it de-emphasizes the parts of their identity that are stigmatized and emphasizes those that are not. (For example an Asian-American woman will experience less STEM-related stereotype threat when she focuses on her race rather than her gender.) [Retrieved 11:27 AM BST April 30 — this is a google doc in progress with multiple editors]

This seemed to me to suggest fighting stereotype threat (the tendency to do worse when you’re conscious of being in a stigmatized minority) by focusing on the non-stigmatized aspects of your identity… in ways that leverage other personal and systemic prejudice. I want to find and root out any unconscious racism/classism/etc that may be influencing my actions, not build on it. The solution needs to be something that doesn’t actively reinforce other sick aspects of the system, something that’s available to people in multiple minority categories.

For impostor syndrome reasons, sometimes it’s hard to make use of the valid defenses here. One can always find ways to answer “Person X I respect praised me for how quickly I picked up this new programming language, and Person Y was impressed by my solution to that code problem” thoughts with reasons why you were lucky to hoodwink X and Y was for some reason deluded and therefore their positive feedback definitely does not mean that you’re in any way actually competent at your job. Nonetheless, shoring up the ability to internalize that kind of praise as part of one’s self-image would be way more useful and less destructive than trying to wield your privilege categories as a +.5 talisman against self-doubt.

But other aspects of the document’s analysis rang really true with me, especially the parts about reacting to feelings of self-doubt by putting in a lot of solitary labor, trying to catch up in secret so no one will know you’re having problems. It took me most of grad school to learn to ask for help as soon as I needed it, and I could have saved a lot of heartache by not trying to play that game.

Beneath Floes (Bravemule, Pinnguaq)

Beneath Floes is a folk tale of Inuit culture, created in collaboration with Inuit contributors. (There’s a browser-based play option as well, but at the time of writing, that version wasn’t serving audio well, so you may prefer the download.) Recently a Kickstarter raised the funds to have Beneath Floes translated into Inuktitut (an indigenous language of the eastern Arctic) and Anishinaabemowin.

It is both a story and a meditation on story-telling, one which starts by explaining to the reader how much is going to be under the reader’s control. Not a lot, as it turns out: you mostly get to change small details, details that explicitly don’t branch the plot, while the horrible core story is beyond the player’s capacity to change. But the effect is very different from, say, the also very linear interaction in My Father’s Long, Long Legs, or the fact-mingled-with-fiction of Coming Out Simulator 2014.

Nonetheless the small details that you’re allowed to affect are not selected arbitrarily. Does evil, in your mind, have a hooked nose or a button nose? Do you associate yourself with an indigenous hero or with Superman? Perhaps we’re allowed to make these choices because we inevitably see reflections of ourselves in the stories we’re told, no matter who the teller is. Elsewhere — a dark sort of joke — you can pick which of two strings of gibberish numbers and letters the qallunaat, the white people, have assigned you as your identifying marker; or, in another place, you can change (by one year) the date associated with an anthropological recording. History is slippery, but the fundamentals hold.

I appreciated, too, the passages where material that relies on cultural context is presented just clearly enough for someone not native to the Arctic to understand, but yet not overly explained. A favorite passage:

It’s said that your father shot a caribou and failed to kill it, but that’s one person’s belief—not a well-liked individual, either.

From context, it’s clearly a scandalous thing to fail to kill a caribou. A whole ethos is implied but not explained.

Beneath Floes is not completely linear, however. There are at least two endings that I found, and as far as I can tell, what makes the difference is what you decide about the protagonist’s willingness to do violence.

Interactive Narrative GDC Talks (Part 3)

Previously 1 and 2. Here are a few more — the last set, for now, though I note that the GDC Vault has made a lot of past years’ material free, so I may go back and dig out some recommendations from those as well.

Anyway!

Microtalks 2015, Richard Lemarchand, Emily Short, Lisa Brown, Matt Boch, Naomi Clark, Tim Rogers, Holly Gramazio, Celia Pearce, Cara Ellison, Rami Ismail. (Recorded talk.) This includes me talking about why everyone should play tabletop storygames. It also contains hilarious microgame concepts, some beautiful reflections on intimacy in play, art in games, recommendations about workflow, and reflections about how badly games reach out to non-English speakers. This was an enormously fun session to be part of.

The Design in Narrative Design, Jurie Horneman. (Slideshow only.) Jurie makes the case for how systems design and narrative design must be integrated, which is something of a hobby-horse of mine as well.

Computers Are Terrible Storytellers — Let’s Give Humans a Shot, Stephen Hood. (Slideshow with notes.) Addresses limitations in computer-based story-telling, and looks at card-based storytelling games, tabletop RPGS and (yay) storygames again. Gets into more detail about Fiasco than I had time to in my microtalk, and talks about how these relate to their game project Storium.

Below (Chris Gardiner)

Below is a StoryNexus world by Chris Gardiner. Chris is part of the Failbetter team, but Below is released (as I understand it) as his own personal project. He describes it thus:

…it’s a story-driven, dungeon-delving online card game you play in your browser. You play Below cards to explore the dungeon and Above cards to renew your spirit. But the more you draw on the Above deck, the more dire the plight that drove you into the dungeon.

Its inspirations are Beowulf, Moria, the Tombs of Atuan, and a whole pile of folklore. You can learn the Giant-Tongue, speak at the Althing, bargain with the White-Handed Lady who is sometimes called death, forge a Lion-Helm, hunt outlaws in a haunted barrow, outwit a Troll-Wife, and leave legacies for those who follow you (like a Streak of White Hair, Words of Caution, or Family Secrets).

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