Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

The Walking Dead (Telltale)

I’m late to the party on this, I know, but I’ve finally finished Telltale’s The Walking Dead series.

Though I generally dislike the gun porn and grotesquery typical of zombie fiction, I got so many recommendations of this series that I had to play it. I thought very highly of it, and I thought the later episodes were significantly better than the first couple.

There has already been a ton written about the series, so this isn’t really a review or an attempt to summarize its content, as both of those purposes have been amply served already; what follows is more of an essay about the mechanics, choice mechanisms, and writing. It is fairly full of spoilers, because it’s pretty much impossible to talk significantly about this game without getting into the details. Consider yourself warned.

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XYZZY Awards 2013 Eligibility

I’m reposting this, with permission, from the intfiction forum. I did not write this announcement; it is by Sam Kabo Ashwell. But it is about how the XYZZY Awards are changing to attempt to incorporate works that weren’t promoted to or didn’t originate inside the traditional IF community, and to avoid imposing unnecessary formal barriers to people who might be interested in having their work considered.

If that’s something you’re interested in, read on.

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GDC 2013: Mordechai Buckman on Interactive Fiction Interfaces

At GDC this year, I unfortunately wasn’t able to go to Mordechai Buckman’s poster session on interactive fiction because of schedule conflicts. (At any given time at GDC there are usually at least three things I urgently want to be doing…). The good news is that he was good enough to put up a video of that talk, which can be viewed here. I’m going to talk about what he says, but the talk itself is well worth viewing.

His first point is that CYOA and text adventures, and the point-and-click graphical adventures that came after them, are strongly hampered in the types of story they can tell and the variety of pacing they can provide because the interface elements remain fairly uniform throughout and because there are strong conventions about what they can be used for. He describes parser-based games as primarily evoking disorientation in the player; he argues that CYOA games always have to be high-stakes in order to make choices matter.

Throughout this portion of the presentation I found myself raising mental objections. The possibility space with existing tools is not nearly so narrow as he argues. There are a lot of IF games that incorporate some element of menu choice at key moments, or massively constrict the verb or object space in order to focus the player, or keep things moving so that actions keep playing out. There are a lot of CYOA games that present an IF-like world model under the surface, or that allow the player to explore multiple ideas in a leisurely fashion, or that reach for a lyrical experience. Mark Marino has just recently written about how the promise of hypertext, which had seemed long dead, has revised in new forms and formats of interactive literature. In the realm of visual novels and graphical adventures, too, there is a surprising diversity these days.

Nonetheless, though I thought his generalizations were way too general, Buckman’s not all wrong about CYOA and traditional parser IF. There’s a ton of fascinating work at the cutting edge, but a lot of that is coming about precisely because people are thinking about presenting options differently, dressing stories in different skins, and so on. I’d position Buckman’s pitch here not in contrast to what the IF and related communities are already doing, but as another natural contribution to this exploration of what all we can do.

Buckman’s second point is that it would be possible to explore a wide number of other emotional and play experiences by changing up how we display player choice, not just from one story to the next, but from one scene to another in the same story. He offers examples, and laudably they’re not just Photoshop mockups, but short playable sequences you can access on his site. Dialogue buttons change size and shape to communicate how the protagonist feels about saying those things. Boring options appear on just a to-do list to be checked off. In a time-pressured context, options pop up rapidly, obscuring old text. If some of this sounds familiar, you may have run into Buckman’s Gamer Mom at some point in the past. That work moves, expands, contracts buttons to reflect mood. Most of the concepts here have to do with implicitly and intuitively communicating the protagonist’s interior experience to the player without having to spell out how the protagonist feels about things, though there’s a curious minigame example about playing a difficult decision-making problem like a game of solitaire.

Some of Buckman’s mockups work better than others.

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Tabletop Storygames: Monsterhearts

Monsterhearts is a story game set in a high school, albeit a high school attended by vampires, werewolves, and other creatures of strange powers. And it’s less about their monstrosity per se than it is about interpersonal confusions. (At one point, my character, a wiccan able to conjure up visions, had to try to explain birth control and teenage dating customs to her boarding school roommate, a werewolf who had grown up feral.) The game comes with a set of “skins” — different preset monster types you can be for the duration — and each monster naturally has its own powers and abilities.

The mechanics of the game emphasize the fact that characters know themselves incompletely and control themselves even less. Everyone has a “darkest self”, a side to their personality that can be triggered if things go sufficiently wrong, in which they’ll be motivated to do antisocial or outright evil things. It’s possible for any character (on winning a roll) to turn on any other: sexual attraction is not entirely at the discretion of that character, though no one else controls how the character reacts to being attracted.

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Assorted IF-related News and Links

Black Crown is a forthcoming Random House project by Failbetter. It’s not playable yet, but there’s a sign-up page here and Wired gives some additional background.

Dave Morris (Frankenstein) weighs in on whether randomness is really a help to interactive fiction, tying the question in with gamebooks and computer adaptations of gamebooks.

Deirdra Kiai gives an interview on the claymation point-and-click adventure Dominique Pamplemousse in “It’s All Over Once the Fat Lady Sings”, discussing the gender roles, inspirations from Fallen London, the claymation process, and various other features.

The XYZZY Awards are now in second-round voting, with the nominees chosen. This year’s crop includes Twine and StoryNexus content as well as parser-based IF. You can vote here; authors may not vote for their own games and are discouraged from posting “vote for me” sorts of messages, but otherwise the voting process is open to anyone through May 7.

Various people, including Warren Spector, Kevin Bruner (Telltale), Stéphane Bura (Storybricks) and me, will be speaking about interactive storytelling at the IFOG symposium May 10 in Mountain View.

Recent Interactive Reading

No-one Has to Die is a fairly easy puzzle game, framed with a textual story about time travel, secrets, revenge, and family loyalties. To my taste the puzzles are a little too easy — there weren’t that many serious “aha” moments for me — but the structure is clever, as puzzle solutions require you to experiment with which characters you’re willing to sacrifice, and understanding the story fully requires working through several variant possibilities. As to the writing, it could have been both briefer and more effective; character dialogue is very on-the-nose, and they argue exhaustively about who should be saved next and why. (Contrast all the long-winded, sterile argumentation about who should be saved here with the sparer and much more moving writing in Hide&Seek’s James Bond game.)

What’s most interesting about No-one Has to Die is the structure: puzzles used to represent significant and morally charged decisions, inventive reuse of the same puzzle levels with slightly different parameters depending on the time-travel, etc.

Alan DeNiro’s Corvidia is a brief, surreal piece in Twine, more interactive poetry than story. A man looks at a tree and sees… well, it’s hard to explain, really. Due to some CSS work, the linked words appear first, and boldest; the rest of the words, the sentences that give the links context, fade in slowly. It’s a fitting effect given that “Corvidia” seems to be describing someone fixated on a few particular images or ideas (the words linked), with only a vague and fantastical notion of what’s going on in the rest of the world. Or maybe what he imagines is true, but in that case, he lives in a universe very unlike our own.

Star Wench is a Choose Your Own Death book by Anna Anthropy. Not Choose Your Own Adventure, because (aside from the whole trademark issue) you don’t get to pick what leads up to the death:

How does the story end? Only YOU can find out! Your one choice: which page to open up to. Keep reading until you’ve suffered not one but MANY terrible fates.

The genre is lurid pulp SF, the same sort of thing parodied in Leather Goddesses of Phobos and in Anthropy’s Twine adventure The Hunt for the Gay Planet. The endings conform to genre expectations: you spend a lot of your time being tied up, or sacrificed, or eaten, or made the slave and plaything of the sinister Queen of Space. Endings are no more than a page long, in large type, though a few are doubled up with line-drawings by guest artists. Many of the endings are solid ultra-short stories in themselves. Others imply things about the story that must have led up to this point, or play on CYOA or genre expectations. (If you read ending 1, you get a stern telling-off about reading non-linear narrative in a linear way.) There’s no narratively meaningful agency, since you’re really only picking an ending by number — it’s not like you get to make in-context choices for your protagonist — but that fits as well, celebrating the arbitrary nature of both pulp fiction and old-school CYOA books.

Entertaining, if not especially work-safe.

Castle of the Red Prince is parser-based gothic horror IF by CEJ Pacian. Lots of Pacian’s past work in some way sets aside a standard aspect of the IF world model: Gun Mute puts the player on a linear forward/back movement track, Walker & Silhouette can be driven largely by keyword, Rogue of the Multiverse uses auto-generated grids of space for its exploration sequences. “Castle of the Red Prince” participates in that tradition by eradicating the usual distinctions of IF space. Everything in the game can be interacted with at any time; if you try to put an object in a container many rooms away, you will move there automatically. You can look at any place on the map, any room, at any time. If you’ve ever seen something, it remains in scope for you to refer to.

The protagonist is a student of arcane arts who is able to gain new knowledge in sleep and who first came to know of this place through dreams. There are some characters, but we so easily move in and out of their space that it’s hard to feel they are equals of the protagonist, or that we’re really in any kind of ongoing social context with them. Because there’s no need to remember directions, I didn’t build up a strong sense of relative space, of where things were in comparison with other things. I also found that the lack of local description unmoored me a little, because I’m so used to moving through rooms and LOOKing if I think I might have missed something. That’s probably just my IF-playing habit fighting against the new mechanisms, though.

Narratively, the surface story is fairly trivial — collect needed objects, solve a couple of puzzles, have minimal personal investment — while the backstory remains complex and largely mysterious. There are hints of significant past battles, of entities both evil and Faery, of generations of heroes trying to put things right, but only a few outlines of their struggle become clear in the course of the game.

The whole game, therefore, feels a bit gauzy and distant, reminiscent of Ebb and Flow of the Tide or The Guardian. There’s something intriguing and pleasurable about it, and I enjoyed seeing the experiment in IF world model, but it wasn’t a very intense or compelling experience. I am likely to remember Pacian’s other work longer.

The Pulse Pounding, Heart Stopping Game Jam was a weekend-long game jam for dating sims, producing over 80 works, many in Twine, about dating or relationship situations.

Among the entries (and obviously, with 80+, I didn’t get to try nearly all of them):

Porpentine’s “UNTIL OUR ALIEN HEARTS BEAT AS ONE” is a two-player Twine game about communicating through symbol and image.

Christine Love’s “Magical Maiden Madison” (shown) is an interactive texting conversation about a Magical Maiden’s evening adventures (which I know maybe just barely enough tropes to understand).

Mattie Brice’s “Blink” tells the story of dates that go wrong, over and over, in several different ways. If there’s a way to make things go right, I never found it. Possibly that’s the point. Possibly I’m just bad at these sorts of dates.

Joseph Miller’s “Dating Folksims” is a series of rules for live-action games to be played around the idea of dating faux pas and successes.

Mike Joffe’s “Benthic Love” explores the dating options of a young male anglerfish. It is surprisingly touching and also contains a surprising number of biology facts.

Elizabeth Sampat and Loren Hernandez’s “How to Be Happy” is a rather grim metaphorical puzzle game in which you can try to find other blocks to fit with your own, but are likely to fail, sooner or later, in keeping them with you.

Leon Arnott’s “Dining Table” is a creepy story about the dating lives of dolls. The end is, I think, a little overexplained, but the premise is genuinely disturbing; my main complaint is that I might have liked to see more of the story told interactively rather than through straight exposition.

Valentine’s “Greek Mythology PPHSJam game” is a Ren’Py piece that lets you cavort with various gods, though I’ve yet to find an outcome that was really positive for me. Hermes became my dating wingman, though, which has got to be worth something.

wattomatic’s “Life on Hold” is a Depression-Quest-like exploration of a relationship in a messed up holding pattern, where the more options you get, the less you seem to be able to change anything really important about the protagonist’s lifestyle.

Leigh Alexander has also written about the PPHSJAM here, with notes about some of the games that I didn’t cover myself.