Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

Mask demo!

This month’s link assortment is a few days later than usual; that’s because I was focused in the first half of February on launching the demo for Mask of the Rose, the new game I’ve been working on at Failbetter.

Mask of the Rose is set in the Fallen London universe, but decades earlier than the other games in the series: even if you don’t know the game universe, it would be a safe place to jump in. It’s also much more focused on relationships (romantic and otherwise). I spoke about the project with Fraser Brown for PC Gamer, and that article captures a lot of our thinking about what the game should do.

Even if you’re not a fan of the Fallen London universe, if you are interested in my procedural narrative work, Mask might interest you. The fundamental narrative arc is designed rather than generated, and the vast majority of the text is also hand-written. But in between those layers are a host of systems that handle different aspects of

• NPC responsiveness – from how they decide whether to honour your requests to how they pose and move during a scene
• Protagonist characterisation, allowing the player to build out a social persona with different social “moves” available
• Selection of narrative chunks (scenes and sub-scenes that happen automatically, and those that are offered to the player to explore)
• Procedural text generation to describe the outfit you’ve chosen each day, or stories that you invent as part of gameplay

I’ll be going into more depth about Mask‘s internal features, and especially the way it makes NPC reasoning into part of the storytelling, for the AI Summit at GDC next month.

Continue reading “Mid-February Link Assortment”

Events

February 5 is the next meeting of the SF Bay IF Meetup.

February 20 is the next meeting of the Seattle IF Meetup, and will be held via Discord, so people are welcome to attend remotely. It will feature a guest appearance from Daniel Ravipinto, one of the authors of the classic parser IF game Slouching Towards Bedlam.

If you wish to enter Spring Thing this year with a new work of interactive fiction, you have until March 1 to submit your intent to enter, and March 31 to complete your game.

Games

The Winter TADS jam for games written in TADS has now entered its judging phase; there was only one entry, Past Present by Jim Nelson. It’s getting some good buzz from players, though – you can check that out here.

Nominees have been announced for the 2022 IGF awards, with some especially strong contenders in the narrative category this year.

I have not yet played all of these games, but I very much enjoyed Overboard! (a classic interactive fiction story in mobile-friendly form) and Unpacking (which contains almost no text at all); and I was intrigued by what I’ve played of Closed Hands.

Andrew Plotkin has written about many of these games on his blog, as well as some of the other contenders that didn’t make it to nomination.

Books

A user guide to ink is now available in physical form from inkle, including all the guidance you might find in the online documentation, but some extra tips as well. My copy arrived today, and it’s lovely – and already proving itself useful.

Jobs

Failbetter is hiring a Senior Writer/Narrative Content Designer – details here. The position is open to applications through February 7. We do hire remotely, but note that there are core working hours and that the job may be tougher fit for someone outside Europe/Africa timezones.

Events

Feb 5 is the next meeting of the SF Bay IF Meetup.

If you wish to enter Spring Thing this year with a new work of interactive fiction, you have until March 1 to submit your intent to enter, and March 31 to complete your game.

Releases

chiaroscuro is a short, low-fantasy IF novella from Kim Berkley, author of Harbinger’s Head, about a young American artist in Rome, choosing her artistic and personal path.

Events

Running for a week starting January 1 on itch is the Historically Accurate Game Jam. This isn’t specifically an IF competition, and games of all types are welcome, as long as they’re written in a week and address the chosen time period or event of the jam. If you’ve had a craving to contribute to the tradition of historically-themed IF, though, this might be a place to do it.

Also starting Jan 1 on itch: Gaming Like It’s 1926, a jam for games riffing on material that has just come into the public domain from that year.

January 8 is the next meetup of the SF Bay Interactive Fiction Meetup.

January 9, the Seattle/Tacoma IF Meetup is getting together.

Talks and Articles

Back in November the Oxford/London IF Meetup did a talk and panel on freelance game writing and narrative design, with guests Florencia Minuzzi, Allie Bustion, and George Lockett. That session is now available on YouTube.

Aaron A. Reed has published the last posts in his 50 Years of Text Games series, covering A.I. Dungeon and Scents and Semiosis, looking at two very different types of generative storytelling. Though the series is now over, you may want to keep an eye on his substack a little longer, as he’s also going to announce plans for a book of the series.

Meanwhile, Lynn Cherny’s newsletter is now also a substack – and the first post covers everything from graphical AI tools to the mythology of angels.

If you have access to the December Italian version of Wired, you may find that there’s an interactive interview with cybertext and interactive story scholar Espen Aarseth inside. The interview was conducted by Sara Uslenghi, but I restructured it into an ergodic experience (drawing a little inspiration from Meanwhile for how to present a short choice-based piece in a visual, large-page format).

Tools and Platforms

TWIST is a platform for interactive audio stories from Ear-Reality; it’s currently in closed beta, but people interested in building content for it can apply to the beta program.

Liza Daly has released a new version of Windrift, her tool for writing hypertextual interactive fiction, along with some sample pieces that show off what it can currently do. By her own description, she’s expecting Windrift more to inspire other systems than to be adopted widely itself. She’s now working on a version of the tool to support multiplayer stories, which sounds exciting to me; there is, I feel, a lot of room for interesting new development in multiplayer IF.

Events

January 8 is the next meetup of the SF Bay Interactive Fiction Meetup. [Edited: originally it was listed as Jan 1, but it’s been moved to avoid holiday clashes.]

[Edited to add:] The next meetup for the Seattle/Tacoma IF group will be on January 9.

Running for a week starting January 1 on itch is the Historically Accurate Game Jam. This isn’t specifically an IF competition, and games of all types are welcome, as long as they’re written in a week and address the chosen time period or event of the jam. If you’ve had a craving to contribute to the tradition of historically-themed IF, though, this might be a place to do it.

Events

December 4 is the next meetup of the San Francisco Bay Area IF Group.

December 12 is the next meetup of the Seattle/Tacoma IF Group, meeting online via Discord.

The Ectocomp competition for spooky and Halloween-y games is now over, but the entries can still be played.

Or, if you’re looking for something to enter in the future, signups are now open for Spring Thing 2022, which welcomes interactive fiction games of many varieties and lengths, and is a more festival-like venue than the IF Comp.

Articles and Videos

My colleague Bruno Dias writes about power creep in long-running games (including those with a narrative component).

Verge today has an article on procedural narrative, for which Lewis Gordon interviewed me as well as a number of other usual suspects in this space.

The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain has published new guidelines for freelancing work in the game industry, establishing some norms around contracts and work in this field.

Back in October, I did a talk for the Birmingham Indies meetup about narrative design for a long-running live narrative game (namely Fallen London). That talk is now available on YouTube.

Books

Hannah Nicklin’s forthcoming Writing for Games: Theory and Practice is now available for preorder.

I’ve reviewed a bunch of books on game writing here, but I’m definitely looking forward to this one, on the basis of Nicklin’s past tutorial and blog writing on the subject. She brings in theatrical as well as game experience, and has given a lot of thought to the art of writing strong, characterful dialogue, among other things.