Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

Interactive Digital Narrative: Practice

This is part three of an overview of Interactive Digital Narrative: History, Theory, and Practice. See my earlier post for coverage of the book’s history section and this post covering the theory section.

The last section of the book gets into questions of practice, though the articles vary: some verge on being historical surveys through the lens of a particular method or technique, while others delve more deeply into detailed design questions. I have already talked about Scott Rettberg’s “Posthyperfiction” article, though it appears in this section.

The introduction to this section is titled “Beyond the Holodeck: A Speculative Perspective on Future Practices,” and suggests three areas for future growth: the story/video game connection; location-based apps and experiences such as Whaiwhai and Zombies, Run! (a game I respect in theory but avoid in practice thanks to my dislike of (a) zombies and (b) running); and interactive documentary and news projects. MIT’s docubase is my go-to resource to find out about new interactive documentaries.

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Interactive Digital Narrative: Theory

This is part two of an overview of Interactive Digital Narrative: History, Theory, and Practice. See my earlier post for coverage of the book’s history section (and one practice chapter that I took out of order because it felt like it fit better that way).

This time we’re looking at the theory section, which addresses academic approaches to interactive narrative (including the question of what interactive narrative even is).

Again, the section begins with a brief overview from the volume editors, and this provides a fair sketch of the academic debates of the last couple of decades, together with a bibliography of a number of foundational pieces in this space. I might also have listed Jesper Juul’s half-real here, as it provides a readable and persuasive cap to the narratology vs ludology debate.

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Interactive Digital Narrative: History

Interactive Digital Narrative: History, Theory, and Practice is an academic publication from Routledge that retails for £90/$123 on Amazon, which is why even though it is completely relevant to me and my work, it took me a little while to get around to buying it. I would guess that most people who write IF as a hobby won’t buy it either, which is in some ways a shame, because improving communication between the hobbyist and academic communities would be beneficial in both directions. But a book priced for academic libraries is not the most accessible way to accomplish that.

Consequently, this is not a conventional academic book review. Instead, it’s partly meant as a high-level overview of the contents for people in the IF community who cannot afford to read the book, or who might want to know what sort of thing is in it before plunking down more than $100 for their own copy. Much of the rest is an attempt to join up what is in the book with what I know about historical and contemporary interactive fiction and narrative games.

That I spend a lot of time pointing out related IF work is not meant as a criticism or complaint about the book’s scope of coverage — which is in fact quite broad — but as an attempt to help bridge community divides and suggest points of contact between hobbyist IF and academic digital narrative.

Finally, there’s a lot of content, so I’m going to take this in chunks. This post starts with the history section.

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End of August Link Assortment

Upcoming Events

September 4, the Oxford/London IF meetup has an open problems session in Oxford. Join us if you’d like to discuss something that’s stumping you in a WIP (or give advice to people who are in that situation).

September 10, Australian IF folks are having a meetup in Melbourne. (Link is to a Facebook page that organizes the group, which might be of use even if you aren’t able to attend this specific event.)

If you are instead in the Bay Area on Sept 10, the SF Bay IF Meetup has an event that day as well.

September 10 is also the voting deadline for IntroComp, if you were considering participating. That’s a good chance to give authors feedback on their work in progress. (And if you’re up for it, reviews are great too — IntroComp hasn’t had a huge number of reviews this year so far, and it would be cool to see more.)

September 28, Boston area, PR-IF is holding its next meetup.

Finally, September 28 is also the deadline to submit games to be shown at WordPlay London, a November event centered on interactive text and held at the British Library. You may submit your own works or nominate works by other people.

IF Comp launches at the beginning of October. We’re just about at the deadline for submitting an intent to enter, but if you’d like to donate prizes, that option is still open to you.

Speaking of IF Comp, that is going to be the theme of our London October IF Meetup. Last year we played a bunch of comp games together and it was a blast, and we only wished we had a little more time available. This year, I’ve got a more central (Shoreditch rather than Maritime Greenwich), wheelchair-accessible venue in London on October 16. It’s a weekend slot rather than our usual weekday evening, so that we can afford to run for most of the afternoon rather than just a couple of hours. If you’d like to join but can’t make it right at the start, there will still be stuff going on if you arrive later.

If you’re a comp game author this year, you’re going to be in London at that time, and you’d like to see a group play your work live, let me know in advance and we’ll make sure we include your game in the mix.

Please also let me know if you’d like to volunteer as a reader (reading aloud on-screen text so that we’re all on the same page as we play) or to bring snacks (mm, snacks).

Also, please feel free to invite people! The meetup is free and public, and we always welcome new members, but especially here: this is meant to be a fun and festive intro to some of the best of what’s going on in IF right now.

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Minkette on Escape Room design; Secret Studio

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This post is a two-parter. Recently I went to Secret Studio, my third experience with room escapes; and Minkette, one of the creators of Oubliette, came to the Oxford/London IF Meetup to talk about the design and creation process.

I’d asked Minkette to come talk about the kind of storytelling she does: often location-based, often using physical props to communicate backstory or the flavor of the world you’re in.

She started us off with an overview of related projects, including Sleep No More, Wiretapper (reviewed here), and 2.8 Hours Later, a zombie chase game that runs through London. She also spoke about her own Train of Thought, an experience designed for the Underground, in which participants were able to listen to pre-recorded tracks that were meant to be the thoughts of one of the other passengers in their coach. (Here’s an audience member’s description of that experience.)

Next, Minkette took us through the process of constructing the Oubliette escape room, with lots of pictures of the various props in construction. It was fascinating to see what went into these: Oubliette featured a vacuum tube setup that (seemed to) let you pneumatically send messages to other characters, but that was actually just operated by someone pulling a magnet on a string.

But the parts of her talk that were newest to me were the ones where she talked about the psychological purpose of their design choices.

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Getting Hired to Write IF

Over the past eighteen months or so, a couple of interesting things have happened.

One: there are way more opportunities than there used to be to write interactive text and receive payment in return. I hear about a lot of these because they tend to be documented on the intfiction forum or the euphoria &if channel, because people email me about them directly, or because author requests are pitched at the Oxford/London IF Meetup group. I also have a certain number of email exchanges where I’m offered a contract I don’t have the bandwidth to take, so the asker follows up with a request for a recommendation. I’ve started keeping a list of freelancers I know in this space.

(If you freelance and you want me to know that, feel free to send me a portfolio link. I do not guarantee any particular result, and I do exercise my own judgment about whom to recommend in any given circumstance. I do not ever make the full list available to prospective clients or employers. If I pass your name along, it will be because I think you’re a viable fit for what I know of the project.)

Two: there are lots of people interested in writing IF for money who are unsure about some aspect of how to get into it. Sometimes they message me in one form or another and ask for advice. I’ve written some advice about setting rates before, and also a bit about how my own situation works, though it’s not typical (see below).

Lately I’m getting questions about how to establish your skills in this space and make yourself appealing to employers, so I will write what I know about that as well.

Note that this is mostly about work-for-hire situations rather than working for specific IF studios and publishers such as Choice of Games, Failbetter/Fundbetter, Sub-Q, Tin Man Games, etc. Where you already have a target in mind, you’re best off looking closely at their own websites for their submission requirements or job postings, and familiarizing yourself with the work they’ve already published to see if you’re a good fit.

Ready? Let’s go.

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