I’ve written various articles on the craft of interactive fiction, which you may or may not find useful. Many are pages on this site; others are blog posts that got a lot of response, or else articles submitted to other sites, which I list here for reference:
- Tightening the World-Plot Interface: or, Why I Am Obsessed With Conversation Models: A broad article on the gap between world model and plot, and why better conversation modeling is one approach to dealing with it.
- Writing in Collaboration with the System: Thoughts about how the process of writing for a particular interactive story system shapes the output and directs creativity.
- Review of Best Individual Puzzles 2013: Coverage of the games nominated for Best Individual Puzzle in the 2013 XYZZY Awards, but including an essay on types of puzzle effect as well.
- Interactive Fiction Communities From Preservation through Promotion and Beyond: Co-written with Nick Montfort, an article on the evolution of the IF communities.
- An Alternative Taxonomy for Interactive Stories: On roles the player plays when interacting with a story.
- So, Do We Need This Parser Thing Anyway?: On the challenges of text-in writing; what the parser buys us, and what the alternatives might be. Comments and pingbacks link to a number of interesting experiments in interactive fiction UI.
- Idea to Implementation: On approaches to strategizing the creative work. (There’s input from other authors about their approaches in the comments, as well.)
- Exercises in generated prose: On ways of modifying the default output of room descriptions in order to make the results more writerly.
- “Sub-Facade”: on conversation modeling.
- Preparing a game for testing: On things to look at before sending your game to beta-testers.
- Scaffolding and Scene-based Design: On the progress from plot outline to code, using scenes.
- Plot, Scene by Scene: A break-down of kinds of interactive scene in IF, and some general ideas about how to approach planning.
- Art in Competition: A discussion of how the culture of competition has affected interactive fiction and the IF community.
- What would James Bond do?: Part of an ongoing exchange with Mark Bernstein about the kind of freedom and agency that ought to be available to the player of IF.
- WIP Rescue: A checklist of problems that can bring a project to a halt, with some suggestions about how to resolve them.
- Inform 7 for Fiction Authors: Discusses writing IF from the point of view of conventional fiction terminology, with tie-ins to the relevant coding information. It’s just an outline, not a fully-fleshed out work (a finished version might be book-length), but some people have found it useful anyway.
- On Stephen Bond on Player Freedom: A theoretical discussion on the nature of freedom and agency in interactive storytelling.
- The Making of Glass: short discussion on designing a conversation system for a particular purpose, with source code
- The Making of Bronze: long discussion on puzzle design for Bronze, with diagrams and source code
- The Making of Damnatio Memoriae: short discussion of world model construction using I7. Source code is available
- Some Observations on Using Inform 7: my views on Inform 7, at the time the public beta was released
- Creating Settings for Fantastical IF: an article on designing a setting for fantasy work
Also in roughly reverse chronological order, some interviews, some of which also have comments on craft:
- Interview in Huffington Post, parts 1 and 2.
- Article on video game AI for Edge: based extensively on a talk I did at GDC 2012, with some subsequent followup. I talk about social behavior AI and its potential in gaming.
- Choose Your Own Interview II: a talk with Rock Paper Shotgun about text gaming and interactive fiction. Also features input from Adam Cadre and Andrew Plotkin.
- Is It Time For a Text Game Revival?: an interview with Leigh Alexander about text-based games.
- General advice for the Guardian’s IF project: I wound up being a little rushed to answer these questions, but they’re mostly about how to get started on something new.
- Reworked article from Edge magazine: this appeared in print some time ago and has now been published online with revisions by the author, Kieron Gillen.
- Gamasutra: about Savoir-Faire, and writing IF in general
- SPAG, on Floatpoint: largely about Floatpoint, which won IF Comp 2006
- SPAG, with Graham Nelson: an interview on the release of Inform 7
- Computer Games Magazine: answers to some interview questions asked for an article (not all published in the final story)
- InsideADRIFT: interview for a newsletter on the ADRIFT system
- Armchair Arcade: an interview with an angle towards retro-gaming and feelies
- Magic Words: Interactive Fiction in the 21st Century: part of an introduction to interactive fiction for gamers; includes interviews with a number of other IF authors
- PC Gamer UK: answers to an interview for a print article
- SPAG, on Savoir-Faire: mostly about the writing of the game
- Brass Lantern: about the SmoochieComp competition for romance games
- L’avventura è L’avventura: interview in an Italian IF ‘zine
- SPAG, on Metamorphoses: mostly about Metamorphoses, which took second place in IF Comp 2000
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 