IF Comp 2012: Living Will (Mark Marino)

Living Will concerns a will that changes dynamically in response to the reader, with the possibility that taking different paths through the will may result in different legacies and messages from the deceased.

Per tradition with my IF Comp reviews, I will have some non-spoilery content after the jump; then if there’s anything spoilery I wish to discuss, it will be separated from the rest of the review with spoiler space.

Disclaimer: I saw this game originally in an unreleased version prior to the comp, at which time I gave some feedback on it. I didn’t bang on it long or hard enough to really claim the title of beta-tester, but nonetheless my comments should be read in light of this favorable predisposition.

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Choice of Games: Eerie Estate Agent (Gavin Inglis)

Eerie Estate Agent is a newish piece from Choice of Games, created by writer Gavin Inglis. The premise is that you’re an estate agent (or realtor, in American terms) and you’re responsible for getting 57 Crowther Terrace rented out. Your unpleasant boss is just looking for an excuse to fire you and the other employees around the office don’t exactly have your back, so the stakes are high. The problem is that no one seems to want to stick around the place for long, possibly because of all the spooky stuff that happens there.

Inglis identifies as a writer more than a game designer, and that shows, in ways both good and bad. I’ve often thought that the actual prose quality was a bit of a weak spot in many Choice of Games offerings: the text in Choice of the Dragon, for instance, is typically utilitarian, and though some of the later works become more ambitious, the results are not universally happy.

Eerie Estate Agent has a much more distinctive and engaging voice than these: breezy but well-controlled, lightly humorous, sometimes casting the protagonist as a not entirely nice person. There’s a good sense of the Edinburgh setting (not perhaps surprising, as Inglis seems to know the place well). In the eerie happenings, he tends to hit a good middle ground between the creepy and the funny, going for paranormal indications that are amusing but that would probably be distinctly unnerving if they happened a lot in real life. (Rooms that periodically fill up with the scent of tea? Indications that seem to resemble the scurrying of a dozen ghostly rodents?)

A down side is that Eerie Estate Agent doesn’t deliver very strongly on Choice of Games’ traditional strength: lots and lots of agency.

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IF Comp 2012 is now open

It is That Time of Year again: IF Comp games for 2012 are now available: 28 games this year, which any non-author may judge, assuming they submit their votes before November 15. Many of these can be played online directly through the IF Comp site.

Assorted reviews are already beginning to appear on various IF blogs as well. Links to many review sites may be found here, for the interested. I have also posted my own overview.

First Draft of the Revolution Released

First Draft of the Revolution is now out, available to read through the browser or as an epub. (This is the project trailed here and here.)

First Draft is an interactive epistolary story I built with Liza Daly, with subsequent design work by inkle. Set in the universe of the Lavori d’Aracne, it tells a story from the beginnings of that universe’s French Revolution, when certain anti-aristocratic forces are finally discovering how to break the magical power that has kept the nobility in power for so long.

For those interested in the concept of interactive epistolary story, there’s a fairly long author’s note on the website. This bit may suggest how First Draft compares with choice-based narrative:

[I]nteractively revising text involves multiple simultaneous choices which influence one another. Instead of asking the reader “then what did the character do?” or “what happened next?”—as choose your own adventure stories do—First Draft of the Revolution asks the reader to consider a number of simultaneous decisions, try them out, take some of them back, and finally settle on an acceptable version before moving on.

inkle’s blog also contains some discussion on the technical implementation.

The Holographic Story

…this illusory experience of living the story in time is not the only thing that is going on dynamically as we read. All the while, we are simultaneously building up a mental model of the story as a whole. And unlike the first model, this image of the story is timeless: it includes everything that ‘has happened’ and a great deal that ‘is going to happen’. At the point we have reached in our journey through the text, there are still large areas of the map that are blurred or blank. We know some, but not all, of the events already ‘past’ — who found the body, perhaps, but not yet who committed the murder…

This narrative model does not develop in the timelike way that the text does — as if a curtain were rolling back and exposing everything to view an inch at a time. Rather, its linear development is holographic: from an initial blur to increasing focus and clarity. From the start of our reading, it is a total picture of the story, with successive details filled in as we go along. It is finally complete only when the story is ‘over’ — that is, when we read the last word of the text.

Thus N. J. Lowe, in The Classical Plot and the Invention of Western Narrative, p. 23.

Lowe is a classicist, and a good deal of his book is concerned with the way that story works in specific ancient works and genres, but he is interested also in how stories work in general. One of his points is that, while reading a story, the player is constantly building up an understanding — a gamelike understanding — of the rules that pertain to this story world, what to expect next, and what sum total of information or event would make the story feel complete.

I find Lowe’s concept of the holographic story model constructive because it presents a way to think about plotting without reference to a taxonomy of temporal structure: stories told in linear order, mysteries that are about discovering what happened at an earlier time, stories with foreshadowings and flashbacks, braided narratives looking at multiple points on the timeline simultaneously, and so on. Such taxonomies describe a range of craft techniques all serving a common goal: to bring the story into focus for its reader or player in an order that will be maximally satisfying.

The holographic concept makes it easier to understand a variety of interactive story models that don’t map well to static fiction: works that are given meaning by their losing endings, works that need to be replayed several times to be understood fully, works whose authors expect their players to compare notes to arrive at a communal understanding of the story. Indeed, a number of interactive story techniques are about letting the reader/player control the focus knob in some way. What do you want to look at? What is the final point that will bring the story into focus for you? How slowly or quickly do you want to reach that understanding?

(And an aside: the whole discussion made me think about an interactive story concept where the whole plot is presented in a sentence or two and then elaborated by the player choice, rather than unfolding in time. I made a small sketch of what that might look like in inklewriter, which I’ve mentioned elsewhere: Holography.)

Choice-based Narrative Tools: inklewriter

A little while back I did an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun which included, among other things, a question about what I thought of inklewriter, the branching narrative tool from inkle studios. That interview was published in a funky CYOA format, which was cool, but it means that it’s hard for me to point people at my answer to that question. And people ask me pretty frequently about different branching-narrative tools that might be out there.

Fortunately, Cara Ellison who did the interview was kind enough to say that I could reprint my answer here. It is attached below, along with some extra thoughts based on a little more work I did with inklewriter after the interview. (Also, if you’re here because you’re interested in checking out a variety of related tools, see the list in the interview as well as my previous thoughts on writing for Varytale.)

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