Reviews – Page 29 – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

Windhammer Prize for Gamebooks

The Windhammer Prize is a prize for short traditional-style gamebooks: distributed in PDF, but designed to be played with a pencil and paper and sometimes dice. Windhammer contestants have to be short — no more than 100 segments allowed — and the contest is run yearly. It feels a bit odd, especially now that the IF community itself produces so much choice-based literature, that there’s so little discussion of gamebooks or awareness of the surrounding community. So as part of my continuing mission to cover IF-adjacent material, I tried out a bunch of Windhammer contestants.

Some highlights follow.

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Loose Strands (Darned Sock Productions) and Mapped CYOA

Loose Strands is a choice-based interactive story app for kids ages 9+. It tells the story of Roland Bartholomew Dexter the Third, a boy who lives in an impoverished barbershop and is never allowed to go outside. His parents fashion clothes and even food out of hair leavings. Since he can’t go outside to school, he reads books about history and dinosaurs and airplanes, but these books have been so rigorously censored that they aren’t much fun. It never seems to be his birthday.

The only bright spot, if you want to call it that, is that Roland has unusually vivid dreams about the might-have-beens, the things that would have occurred if only he’d made a different decision from the one he did take.

Loose Strands is a story about regret: about being debilitated by the desire to erase the past, or, conversely, plagued by the inability to learn from our mistakes. It handles this with a kind of Lemony Snicket gloss. The villain is cartoonishly evil, the world a fantastic rendition of a totalitarian dystopia. The characters are charming, but not enormously nuanced. Now and then the narrator addresses the reader in a condescending Let Me Tell You About The World fashion, and the pacing around the end of part 1 felt a bit slow to me. Nonetheless, it’s a story about the nature of choices that makes a strong use of the choose-your-path structure.

Whenever you get to a choice point, you can swipe the page in one of two (or occasionally three) directions in order to proceed to the next portion:

And when you’ve made a choice, the book immediately zooms to the overall story map and blacks out a bunch of spots — showing you how your decision has prevented you from ever seeing certain possible futures. It’s partly a reminder that what you do matters, a “Clementine will remember that” tag — but it’s expressed in an explicitly negative way.

Likewise, you can sometimes use the map to go to an earlier page, but if you’re trying to rewind too much, you’ll get a message saying you’re not allowed to go back.

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Weird City Interloper (CEJ Pacian)

Weird City Interloper is a parser-based conversation game by Pacian. Like some of Pacian’s previous work, especially Castle of the Red Prince, it largely does away with the traditional object and room hierarchy: here instead of navigating between places, you are moving from one interlocutor to another. As you go, you accumulate an inventory of characters you know about and topics you can discuss, and the point of the game is to discover the story by asking the right people about the right sequence of things. Because those options are always enumerated (and initially the list is pretty short), it feels as though the game could easily have been executed as a choice-based experience instead; this is an interesting one to look at if you’re studying the parser-choice borderlands.

The business of applying your topic inventory to different speakers sounds a bit mechanical, perhaps, and at some points it did seem as though I was just running around trying all my topics on all the characters. But at its best moments it felt much more organic than that, and several times it rewarded puzzle-solving leaps of intuition in a very satisfying way. The game also includes some well-timed help to give you hints if you seem to be lost, and this helped me past the couple of spots where I was feeling a bit stuck.

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Coming Out Simulator 2014 (Nicky Case)

Coming Out Simulator 2014 is a semi-autobiographical story about how the author came out to his parents. Interaction takes the form of menu-based conversation — conversation with the narrator in the framing story, and then a series of conversations with his past boyfriend and parents. The whole thing is illustrated in a streamlined, elegant way, and lightly animated, in a way that keeps you aware of the living breathing presence of your interlocutors even though most of what happens happens in text.

There are two things about this piece that particularly struck me. One is a piece of story content: when you’re discussing your sexuality with your mother, there’s a point at which she actually vomits from disgust. This sounds pretty extreme, and some of the subsequent references back to the moment are on the flippant side, but the moment itself did not strike me as totally unrealistic. Indeed, this captured something I have experienced myself in a different context: the sensation that it’s impossible to argue with someone because of the strength of their visceral reactions, together with guilt at making them feel that way (even when I felt that I was in the right). It also reminded me of Jonathan Haidt’s writing on conservative and liberal “moral foundations”, which argues that a strong sense of disgust tends to be associated with conservative values. Where one party feels disgust at something the other party does or thinks or wants, this is a very hard communication gap to bridge, because it is located somewhere other than the head.

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Fiction Crowd

Fiction Crowd is a new website that describes itself as an “alternative, interactive literary zine”. It’s probably a misnomer to describe it as a zine for interactive fiction, though: the interactivity is mostly with the zine rather than with the fiction itself.

What I mean: the first story up in the table of contents is “The Bad Hotel”, which consists of a sort of “about this hotel” page and then three write-ups of different rooms in said hotel, all posing as hotel website copy. There’s a very zoomed-in Google map of the hotel’s location, which you can zoom out enough eventually to discover that it’s meant to be on a dead-end road on the India-Pakistan border. You can also participate in a customer-satisfaction poll rating your stay experience from “Fatal” to “Euphoric”, and leave your own guest book comment. Some of the guest book bits left by other users are cool:

I didn’t think I would have to pay extra for the faceless man that is always in the periphery of my vision.

…but some of them don’t hit the mark so well, which I suppose is to be expected when you invite a bunch of people to come along and riff on your premise.

“The Infinity Corporation” is a story that consists of three nominally unrelated documents from different viewpoints; it’s basically a straight epistolary short story. “Collective Dream Journal” is a page on which several different authors have contributed dream narratives. “Doomsdates” is a collection of flash fiction about really unpleasant dates. “The Parallels” does have a point-and-click interface for exploring part of the story; but this felt a bit clumsy to me, a rather rough picture linking objects to descriptions on another page. Many of the stories are illustrated or supported by mocked-up images of Twitter exchanges and text screens from phones — again, something of an epistolary instinct.

Then: the “literary” bit. The writing in these stories often feels self-conscious and effortful to me:

An increasingly lucid gaze over moonlit wavelets provides a spacious interlude of counterpoised anxiety and calm. (“Collective Dream Journal”)

Or they tell jokes that are mis-paced and land wrong:

It seems that while he was President, Lincoln would frequently engage in inappropriate, some might even say randy chit-chats via telegraph with women of ill repute. Several of the women were so scandalous they were over the age of 13 and not yet married or widowed. (“Urban Legends”)

Or stretch too hard for their whimsy:

This week, a Roman Centurion and a Zeta Reticulan from the 23rd century are among the guests discussing Russell Brand and the apathetic masses that lap up his cheeky Dickensian fop banter. (“Tune In Next Week”)

These are by various authors, and some have a tighter style than others, but overall the type of prose featured here suggests an editorial taste that I don’t quite share.

This overview feels like it’s come out largely negative, but there are some things about this website that do attract me. The cues for future writing feel a bit like a rolling version of the IF community’s themed minicomps (ShuffleComp, ECTOCOMP, the Apollo 18 Comp, the cover art comp, etc). The design itself is rather slick. Some of the work is that style of speculative fiction that uses a few brief references to suggest an alternate universe very different from our own. It’s Patreon funded, which I think is not always a great model for every type of endeavor (specifically, I worry that it encourages some creators to do shorter, less ambitious works than they really want to because Patreon rewards creators with a steady stream of frequent output), but Patreon makes a certain amount of sense for a regularly-released zine.

Appointment with FEAR (Tin Man Games)

Appointment with FEAR is an adaptation of a Steve Jackson gamebook, available in various mobile formats and also on Steam for desktop machines. It’s been polished up into a graphical-novel style interface — a juicy one that slides panels into place and makes stats expand bouncily when you click on them – but it retains a slightly disorienting early-80s mentality: there are jokes about “Michael Jixon”‘s new release “Chiller”, and “Vulture Club”‘s lead singer “Georgie Boy”. This kind of thinly-veiled reference is symptomatic of its sense of humor.

Content-wise, it’s straight parody superhero fiction. You have an alter ego who has a newspaper job (which you rarely have time to attend), and when you’re “in disguise”, your avatar wears a pair of Clark Kent-style glasses. There are various villains with various unlikely costumes. For yourself, you get to pick from a roster of jokey auto-generated names. I played first as “Sparse Manifestation”, a mind-reading black female superhero with amazing breasts but no other body fat, and then as “Apathetic Chicken Leg”, a flying white female superhero with amazing breasts but no other body fat. Once I had a fleeting chance to name myself “Absolute Chaos”, but I misclicked the show-more-options button before I could select it; that was pretty much the least bizarre title I was ever offered.

Goofiness aside, I’m struck by the colorful energy of the interface here; it really feels as though it has projected you into a superhero universe with BAF and BOW animations. The mechanics are on the simple side, but have been carefully blended into the story. There are combat sequences, in which you can pick from a range of easy-but-weak or risky-but-powerful attacks, and these get some context-appropriate narration. There is a detection component to the game, in which you gather clues from various events and use them to solve additional problems you run into: when there’s something you might be able to resolve with clues, you go to your clue notebook and pick the clue you think applies, in good Phoenix Wright style. There are some simple stats: luck, stamina (hit points by another name), and Hero Points, which track successes along the way.

I never played the original gamebooks, so possibly I’m about to take issue with something that is fundamental to the whole historic experience. But despite the surface polish and the similarity to a number of games that I do enjoy quite a lot, I found myself pretty frustrated by this as both a game and a piece of narrative design.

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