Reviews – Page 21 – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

Prospero (Bruno Dias); Writing with Raconteur

Prospero is Bruno Dias’ retelling of “The Masque of the Red Death”, implemented in Undum/Raconteur and published for Sub-Q Magazine.

As one might expect of both the author and the venue, Prospero is a typographically attractive piece of work, rendered in white text with red progression links. Links that merely expand the existing text appear in bold white, instead. The distinction between stretchtext links and movement links might be old in literary hypertext terms — I’m not certain — but it’s not consistent in the Twine and Undum world. I find it very useful to know whether the link I’m clicking is going to tell me a little more information or whether it’s going to move the whole story forward.

Prospero is also a beautifully textured piece at the level of prose. Dias has a gift for the specific detail — seen in Mere Anarchy in the variety of magical tools available to the protagonist, or here in Prospero in the scenery and the protagonist’s possessions.

The original Poe story goes like this: there’s a plague in the land, but the prince Prospero has a lot of money, so he walls himself up with his favorite courtiers and various resources, and they try to keep the plague at bay. (In contrast with the religious community in Vespers, he seems untroubled by the implications of shutting out the rest of the world.) During an elaborate party Prospero throws, a creepy masked figure attends, who turns out to be the embodiment of the plague. Despite their decadence and indifference to the world outside, the whole party dies. It is possibly a story about the inevitability of death, or possibly about the comeuppance of the wealthy classes.

Dias’ version keeps a great deal of that structure, but moves the action to something closer to the modern day, with cars and modern architecture and electric lighting. He casts the player as the Red Death, with the ability to choose the final outcome. This feels like a surprising choice, given that Poe’s version is so much about inevitability. And I think it would have been fatal to the concept of the original story to give Prospero any choice about whether he lived or died. As the Red Death, we can move among different parts of Prospero’s party, meet different party-goers, and decide whether to spare them all, or one or two favored exceptions, or no one.

Two of Dias’ previous projects, Mere Anarchy and Terminator Chaser, deal with resistance against wealth and power. Prospero raises some of the same issues, particularly the idea of the rich who imagine that they can remove themselves from the rules that apply to everyone else. In contrast with Mere Anarchy, it is comparatively merciful; it allows you to grant forgiveness, if you’re so moved. But I found that I didn’t entirely want to. Perhaps my own favorite ending was to spare one woman who seemed not to belong to the wealthy decadence around her: this suggested a universe with some moral discrimination.

If you like Prospero, you might also enjoy Peter Nepstad’s adaptation of stories by Lord Dunsany, or Caleb Wilson’s anachronistic gothic Six Gray Rats Crawl Up the Pillow.

Prospero was built with Raconteur, Dias’ system for creating Undum content. Undum builds beautiful hypertext with elegant typography and link transitions. However, it’s not particularly easy to use out of the box, so Raconteur provides a way to build for it without having to go direct to the javascript; and Dias has released the full source for Prospero as an example case. So in addition to reviewing Prospero, I’d like to take a moment to look at the experience of writing with Raconteur here.

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Games about Community: Ohmygod Are You Alright? (Anna Anthropy), Hana Feels (Gavin Inglis), Tusks (Mitch Alexander)

Ohmygod Are You Alright? is a flash-augmented Twine piece by Anna Anthropy about the experience of being hit by a car and the recovery process afterward. The details of physical pain and the dehumanization of the hospital are unpleasant enough, though I suppose they could have been even worse.

But the game’s most lasting and unresolved pain pertains to how Anna feels about her community: lonely, cut off from support, no longer enjoying the energy and communal celebration of her earlier time with Twine. She touches on this in the ruleset for A Wish for Something Better, but Ohmygod goes into it more deeply. She mentions feeling surprised by the forlorn hope that being hit by a car will make people pay attention again. There’s wistfulness, too, about having been at the forefront of a movement that now contains a lot of other practitioners.

If games are not great at NPCs and individual relationships, they’re often downright terrible on communal responsibility and community formation, but Ohmygod made me think about two other games I’ve played recently that touch on the function of community in our lives.

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Contradiction (Pneuma Films)

Contradiction is a murder mystery game set in a small English village. You control the movements of police inspector Jenks, who wanders around interviewing suspects, finding contradictory elements in their statements, and pressing them for more. Conceptually it’s akin to Detective Grimoire or (to a lesser degree) Phoenix Wright; the twist being that it’s interactive film, with live action segments for the interrogation scenes and for many of the transitions as Jenks wanders the village. It’s available for the iPad, and for Mac/PC via Steam. Though I have some criticisms of the design, I enjoyed it quite a bit; it is vastly better than Tender Loving Care.

Conceptually, this doesn’t stray that far from its graphical adventure inspirations: you run into locked doors and have to find the key elsewhere, or dark rooms that need a light, or so on. Most of these puzzles are pacing devices and aren’t tremendously difficult, though it’s possible to get stuck because you haven’t noticed a useful object.

That issue is compounded by the fact that the game is divided into one hour segments: “after 5 PM”, “after 6 PM”, and so on. The clock advances automatically when you’ve reached critical plot beats. This allows the game’s creators to move characters around, make the pub and houses open and close at different times, and give a sense of life to the village. There are sometimes new cut scenes when you go someplace you haven’t been already that hour, opening up new information. The downside is that this means you really need to revisit every location during every hour, even if Jenks doesn’t have a good reason to do so at the moment. Not realizing this is what got me a bit stuck several times in the early game. There is a TIPS panel you can open to get advice about what you’ve missed exploring recently, but I found it was occasionally buggy in the late game.

“Always nice to randomly find a key on the floor.” — Jenks’ voiceover, at one of the more credulity-stretching coincidences

Finally, the logic of the investigation is very much game-logic rather than real-world logic or even TV investigation logic. There are a lot of things that we discover simply because Jenks finds a set of keys and decides to do some warrantless searching. He has no compunctions about small acts of petty theft. Sometimes he decides that objects are interesting and worth pursuing even when they’re not yet of any obvious relevance to the investigation — a point that stands out the more because of the realism of the sets. In an animated graphical adventure, it feels semi-plausible that the protagonist interacts with the one object in the room that has a hotspot, especially if (as is often the case) the setting is otherwise a bit bare. In Contradiction, Jenks will often wander into a storage room crammed with objects, as storage rooms often are in the real world, and light on the one piece of paper that he has arbitrarily decided is going to matter, even if at first glance it says nothing about anyone involved in the case. And of course, he’s right — but it’s weird. One just has to suspend one’s disbelief.

The contradiction mechanic is also constrained, in that you can only ask people about contradictions in their own statements, not challenge them when you’ve heard some contradictory news from another character. This probably keeps the game within the bounds of playability — even as things stand, by the end of the game I was struggling to juggle all the things I was supposed to remember being told — but it means that some very obvious avenues of investigation are closed. A character admits having an affair with another character? Fine, but you can’t go asking that second character about the affair. You’re never even allowed to bring it up. I’m guessing that real police don’t operate that way.

Then there are restricted pieces of evidence. Jenks takes a loose view of property ownership, but he’s strict about keeping confidences. If a character has told him not to reveal something to another witness, you don’t have the opportunity to bring that up with said witness, even if it seems like it might be a good idea. This, again, is probably to avoid letting Jenks cause scenes that might branch the investigation plot, but it feels artificial.

But if the mechanics are only moderately innovative, the FMV presentation makes it distinctive. The village is rendered with lovely atmosphere and attention to detail, and many of the locations have idle loop film with a much stronger sense of presence than a still image. The live footage of rippling lake water and of the trees blowing in the wind makes the outlying areas of town both attractive and sinister. By the end of the game I was intimately familiar with the glass in the pub door, the steps to a character’s cottage, the gates around an out-of-town mansion.

There are no deeply absurd puzzles of the sort where you make a fishing rod from a rope and a banana, because anything that Jenks needs to do has to be filmed, and so the solutions can’t rely on physical impossibility. Perhaps the author wouldn’t have been inclined to include those types of puzzles anyway, but dedication to the FMV aspect provides limits. (Contrast the also-FMV Missing, which incorporates various unlikely actions and then just doesn’t film the actor performing the ones that would be hardest to replicate in real life. I didn’t finish the first episode of Missing because it was doing too much with hidden object mechanics and implausible puzzles, and not enough with convincing plot, characters, and setting.)

As for the character performances, they’re not realistic in style, but they are fun to watch. Jenks has a way of cartoonishly widening his eyes at people and exaggerating all his movements. Many of the witnesses are entertainingly passive-aggressive about being questioned. Some feel that Jenks is bugging them or wasting their time, and I can’t say I blame them, after I have knocked on their door for the fiftieth time to ask them about, say, a random business card I found on the ground. Paul Darrow’s performance is especially hammy and entertaining, as he plays a no-ethics businessman, unencumbered by tact, who has a snarky word to say about everyone. There’s a quality to these interactions that would be very hard to capture in animation and voice-over.

Per genre, Contradiction is the sort of story in which pretty much everyone is up to at least one or two things they shouldn’t be doing. There are some references to drug addiction, alcoholism, and mental illness, and these aren’t always handled tactfully by the characters, though the game itself doesn’t necessarily endorse the views of the witnesses. I’d like to say a little more about the plot, but since this is an entertaining piece of work that you might well want to play first, I’ll put that after spoiler space.

Disclosure: I played a copy of this game that I bought with my own money.

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Secret Agent Cinder (Emily Ryan)

Secret Agent Cinder is a retelling of the Cinderella story, except not: though you dress up and dance with fancy people, it’s really about espionage and sneaking about at Versailles shortly before the French Revolution.

It belongs to that small but growing category of Twine games — with Hallowmoor, Krypteia, and This Book is a Dungeon — that feature a world model and a map you can get to know. There are some light puzzles, and you can reach a sudden bad ending, though the game will then automatically restore you to the last reasonable checkpoint to replay. At the end, you get a rating for your stealthiness, revolutionary violence, and zeal. The result is short, polished, accessible, and quite a lot of fun.

Besides having a map, Secret Agent Cinder uses illustration as a primary channel for storytelling: the pictures aren’t just a gloss on the text, but give key information about, say, the locations of guards. If you don’t pay attention to them, you’re likely to get caught. Many of the jokes are embedded in the imagery as well; it plays more like an interactive web comic than most things I can think of.

Mildly spoilery discussion of the humor follows the break.

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Digital Narratives of Time, Death, and Utopia: Arcadia (Iain Pears) et al

I began Arcadia – a novel conceived and written for an app – over four and a half years ago when a lot of people were musing about digital narrative. After working my way through three publishers, two designers, four sets of coders and a lot of anguish, I am no longer surprised that few others have done anything about it.

Thus Iain Pears , on why his latest novel is an app and why it took so long to build. His “few others have done anything about it” is characteristically dismissive and makes me grit my teeth. There is so much going on in digital narrative and related fields that it’s challenging to keep up with the variety. What Pears apparently means is that few novelists with London literary agents have done anything with digital narrative, and possibly that he doesn’t regard anything outside that circle as worth checking out. That is his prerogative, but a little more awareness of the world outside might have brought tools to his attention that would have lightened the workload.

It is true, though, that Arcadia is different in structure, scope, and conception from a lot of other interactive literature. The piece is a series of short scenes about many different characters, together with an app whose narrative map allows the reader to follow one character at a time or leap across time to seek the answers to questions. This puts it in a category with Snake Game and The Strangely-Browne Episode in that it is primarily letting the reader choose a course through the story, not alter the plot itself: it is not linear and the reader does have important agency, but that agency affects the reading experience, not the development of events.

Further, Arcadia takes place in three separate settings — Oxford of the 1950s and early 60s, a fantasy world invented by one of the Oxonian characters, and a technocratic dystopia of the future — though over the course of the plot, the reader may come to question whether these are in fact alternate universes and whether the fictional world is less real than our own. Another reading strategy might be to read all the events in one setting first, then pursue those in another.

The app

Pears has said that he wants reviewers to focus on the content of the work and not on its structure, and that he wanted the app to avoid being gimmicky and flashy. It does succeed in being fairly transparent, but I have a few thoughts about it nonetheless, before I go on to the content or the structure of the piece.

The app’s narrative map reveals some intriguing things if you study it carefully. One line splits in two when a character is in two places at once. (This is a story of time travel and alternate universes, after all.) Elsewhere a fresh line comes into being when a new character is introduced to the story. Crises in the story are evident because so many character threads come together and intertwine.

In the reading interface, though, the app downplays these important moments. When you read a chapter whose characters subsequently split up, the page looks like this:

…and you have to swipe sideways in that last quarter of the screen to check out what the alternative continuations might be. It’s understated, even possible to miss. In this particular case it is both striking and narratively important that either of your two next pages will belong to the Young Girl’s Tale, but you don’t see this at a glance. I could see aesthetic arguments for playing this subtle, but I think I myself would have preferred something that more clearly showed what was happening at this moment.

Meanwhile, once you’ve started reading a new chapter, you can’t jump sideways to any of its siblings unless you first go back to the top-level map. That’s something that I often would have liked to do. And if you swipe to go back a page when there are multiple strands leading to where you are, you also don’t get a choice of which backward step to take. At least once, I’m pretty sure I tried to back up to a vignette I’d just been reading but accidentally switched tracks and wound up confusing myself further. So the navigation here, while conforming somewhat to Pears’ declared desire for simplicity, did still miss some functionality I would have liked to have.

Routes through the map

There are many, many possible ways to read this — by which I mean not just that the combinatorial numbers are large, but that there are multiple reading strategies one might pursue. Follow one character to the end first? Read about events in one of the settings, then go to a different one? Switch back and forth between strands frequently, to try to get contemporary events at the same time?

I experimented with several of the characters, but soon settled on the story of Angela Meerson, a time-traveling scientist whose experiments in the future apparently precipitate a lot of the rest of what happens — though of course, as always with a time travel story, the question of cause and effect becomes rather tangled.

Once I’d read all of Meerson’s story, I went back and started filling in what had happened to some of the other characters. Other reviews I’ve read don’t center their discussion on Meerson, but focus instead on Professor Lytten (the Oxford man who has written the fantasy story) and on a young woman named Rosie — which seems to bear out Pears’ remark

Minor characters can become major ones at will, and central characters become bystanders equally easily.

In my readthrough, Meerson took on a primacy that she might not have for other readers. I chose to start with her because I thought her understanding of events would be the most authoritative, and would then give me the structure that would let me understand the more subjective, confused, and often emotionally richer experiences of the other characters. Her scenes are also, uniquely, narrated in the first person when she is alone.

I then filled in a lot of the events set in Oxford and in Willdon (the main scene of action in the fantasy universe of Anterwold), and last of all the strands for the characters who remain in Angela’s future world. Here, again, I was chasing the bits of the text that I thought might answer whatever questions I had next.

I can also see, though, why one might start with Lytten, the 1960s don-and-spy living in North Oxford who has designed Anterwold. We first meet him telling his story to a group of Inkling-likes in a setting not obviously distinguishable from the Eagle and Child, though a few years after the historical Inklings had stopped meeting there. He is friends with Tolkien and impatient with Lewis, and his comments on both sound a lot like authorial ventriloquism. Of all the characters, he seems most likely to offer Pears’ own perspective on events.

That these diverse reading approaches work is a tribute to Pears’ meticulous construction. The storyline of each character does make sense read through by itself, though it may appear full of startling coincidences. Each character line does come to an emotional conclusion. But the book is also seeded with hints of what might be found elsewhere. Towards the end of the Willdon section, a character mentions that there is a long story to explain something she has done, and it was immediately evident where I should go look for that explanation. Elsewhere there is a mystery laid out so that you might discover either the culprit or the significance of the act, but not both at once. It remains mysterious regardless of which end is up.

The effect is also down to Pears cheating — or, at least, not quite keeping the implicit promise of the narrative design. You can follow most of the characters from one vignette to another using the narrative map, but there are a few who go uncharted, including one very significant character.

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Against Captain’s Orders (Punchdrunk / National Maritime Museum)

Against Captain’s Orders is an interactive theater experience run by Punchdrunk for the National Maritime Museum in London. It’s designed for a group of about 30 kids. Most of the productions require an adult to be accompanied at least one child between the ages of six and twelve, but they do run a special evening edition of the show for adults who are members of the museum. I’ve never been able to get to Sleep No More or any of Punchdrunk’s other work, and I was curious enough about them that I got a museum membership largely to be able to go to Against Captain’s Orders without having to obtain a child first.

The show has been reviewed as a piece of theater: the Guardian gave it ***, said it wasn’t dangerous enough; the Evening Standard an ungenerous ** and called it confused; Timeout went with ****, thought it was good but mostly for kids. The Register assures readers that the show provides value for money, which is true, but a grim sort of review of any sort of art. None of those reviews really gets into the interaction design side very deeply, though.

At the end of the show they ask you not to reveal too many of its secrets. I’m not going to give away the absolute ending, but it’s hard to analyze without spoiling a bit. So I’m not publishing this blog post until after the show finishes running. Still, if for some reason you want to avoid spoilers for a show that you can’t see now anyway, you should not read on.

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