Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

IF for the Lengthening Nights: Beautiful Dreamer (S. Woodson); Witches and Wardrobes (Anna Anthropy); Winter Storm Draco (Ryan Veeder)

Late fall hasn’t always been the greatest time for me. Like a lot of people, I’m responsive to the amount of sun in my life; on top of that, when I was a junior academic, that was the point at which real panic set in about finding a job for the next year.

A couple of those years I was living in the midwest, too, as a really unprepared coast-native. My colleagues in Minnesota took pity on me and gave me a down jacket to wear, a hand-me-down from one of their wives, because I had somehow not grasped that it was going to start snowing and keep snowing and not stop with the snow for the next four or five months. The jacket was enormous and teal. I looked like an 80s-themed reskin of the Michelin Man. As the winter went on, I also needed gloves and silk long johns and a ski mask because, with wind chill, it would get to twenty below sometimes on the way to work. I didn’t have a car. Getting groceries was a problem. I wasn’t sure how much I should be running the heater because, having just moved into this apartment, I didn’t know how efficient the system was and I was afraid of getting slapped with a huge bill I wouldn’t be able to pay.

Now this was all hard to navigate, because things that make me sad include: being thousands of miles from my family, friends, and significant other; being uncertain about my job future; getting very little sunlight; being cold a lot; being hungry a lot; falling down on the ice and bruising myself (at least once per trip). Oh, and I had a fun medical emergency at one point, too.

That was the year I started taking a survivalist approach to mental health. One of the stupid things about sadness is that it gets harder to remember how to make yourself less sad. I gathered my anti-sadness devices and I put them in one cabinet in the kitchen: chocolate, favorite books and candles to light and gifts from friends and things that made me happy to look at. I made anti-sadness playlists. I had a perfume, essence of blood orange, that I’d wear for protection when things were particularly bad. (“For protection”: I’m not ascribing magical powers to it, but even just finding the desire to protect yourself can be important, depending on your state of mind.)

On the front of the emergency anti-sadness cabinet, I taped a postcard from a French town where I’d spent a week with my partner. I didn’t quite go so far as to write “Hey, dumbass, if you are sad, >OPEN CABINET” — but that was the meaning of the card, an inescapable in-plain-sight reminder in case I was too sad-stupid to remember on my own.

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of introducing a couple of games that touch on some of those feelings and that (at least for me) are ultimately comforting.

Continue reading “IF for the Lengthening Nights: Beautiful Dreamer (S. Woodson); Witches and Wardrobes (Anna Anthropy); Winter Storm Draco (Ryan Veeder)”

Sleep No More (Punchdrunk)

Sleep No More is an immersive theatre and dance production based on Macbeth that has been running in New York for a number of years. Recently they extended their run to include a time I was actually going to be in the city, which meant that I could see it, finally; until now, the only Punchdrunk show I’d been able to see was Against Captain’s Orders, which I felt was fun but too controlled and linear.

The same criticism certainly can’t be applied here. Sleep No More takes place in the big, multistory “McKittrick Hotel” (not an actual hotel). The audience is masked, but free to wander. The whole place has been dressed as a complex set, with furniture and scenery features representing everything from a graveyard at night to an early 20th century mental institution. Scenes from Macbeth are staged as physical vignettes with no or almost no dialogue: these vignettes are mimed or (in some cases) danced, often in slow motion. There were some additional vignettes where it wasn’t clear to me how what I was seeing related to the plot of Macbeth, as well. Indeed, understanding a plot wasn’t really the point of the experience, as far as I could tell.

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Dynamic Fiction via Some Examples

“Dynamic fiction” is a term suggested by Caelyn Sandel some months ago to describe her work, especially but not limited to her serial story Bloom.

As I understand it (and I hope I’m not misrepresenting too much here), the term is chosen specifically to get around some of the expectations people have when they hear the phrase “interactive fiction.” Dynamic fiction allows minimal plot branching, if any: the reader is not being allowed to change the course of events, which may be completely linear. From a CYOA structures perspective, we’re talking about structures that either look like a friendly gauntlet without delayed consequence, or structures that actually literally are a straight line.

Instead, the interaction in a dynamic fiction story is doing something else: it’s providing pacing, it’s creating a sense of identification with the protagonist, it’s eliciting complicity with what happens or demonstrating the futility of the protagonist’s experience.

To answer the question “why isn’t this just a short work of static fiction?”, I’ve picked out what I consider the best exemplars of each of the major dynamic fiction effects I’m aware of.

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PRACTICE 2015, Hamilton, and the power fantasy

So I’m at PRACTICE, one of my favorite game design conferences.

This year it has featured a lot of people talking in various ways about narrative design and the power fantasy: Meg Jayanth on the unfairness and hidden statistics in 80 Days; Erik Svedäng talking about fragile game design in the intentionally breakable else Heart.Break(), where it’s very possible (or even easy) for the player to wander the game world at length without making any progress; Anna Kipnis on the narrative power of simulation as exemplified in Dear Leader; people on Twitter discussing the fantasy of violence demonstrated in Ben Ruis’ talk about Aztez. There’s been lots of discussion about the appeal of reducing the power of the player character in order to express the experiences of marginalized people, to allow the NPCs to speak (such as the side characters in 80 Days), and to demonstrate problematic systems.

The constraint-and-powerlessness theme comes up a lot in interactive fiction. And often to good effect! Squinky’s mechanics exploring social awkwardness, IF works about mental illness and slanted systems; my own experiments in Bee with getting the player to accept that they can’t win the spelling bee and that pursuing that goal isn’t necessarily rewarding.

Sometimes, though, I feel like this is still too easy. It’s challenging to accept that there are situations where you can’t do anything useful, but once you have accepted that fact, you’re off the hook. I don’t feel responsible for the misfortunes of the side characters I met in 80 Days, since it is impossible to alter them. I don’t really feel complicit in the system that makes their oppression possible. In real life, recognizing that the system around me is broken can become a reason to withdraw and disengage from politics and activism of any kind.

So I’ve realized from this discussion that there’s another kind of player agency experience that I also want to explore. I mentioned this during the Feedback Loop session yesterday, but it was a new enough set of thoughts that I’m not sure I articulated it very well. Specifically: the situation where you have limited but not zero power.

This is, I think, the reality of democracy. I am morally responsible for the actions of my government and for the oppressive social systems I belong to. I did not design them, but I have not dismantled them. It is, of course, impossible that I could dismantle them singlehandedly. In fact, it’s unlikely that I will ever make any visible difference. To the extent that that there are obviously effective ways for one person to change a large system, most involve extremely violent or disruptive actions that would be a net negative. Nonetheless, the difficulty of making a difference does not remove the responsibility to try to improve both the immediate situation of the marginalized and the system itself.

Counterfeit Monkey is about this topic, but it does let you make a major difference, even if there’s ambiguity about whether that difference was the right one to make. Cape gets at this a bit — one of the things I really liked about that game — but largely through story, and via a protagonist who does take violent action.

So I’m curious whether there’s a possible game about the citizen power that is so slow and so often unsatisfying that one is tempted to just give up.

This sounds like terrible game design, though, right? I mean, who wants to play a game in which the majority of your actions sink in silence, never yielding any perceivable consequence, and yet the game harangues you for your failings if you don’t keep plugging on? What if the only win is that things don’t get as much worse as they might have otherwise? What if the only win is that the protagonist feels slightly less guilty at the end? Is that even a useful metric?

Last night I missed the PRACTICE party in order to see Hamilton. Two weeks ago I’d heard of Hamilton because I had various friends obsessing about it, but I hadn’t actually listened to it. Then I stayed with friends in Columbus who played me the cast album, and it immediately became a must-see, which was awkward because the show is sold out pretty much through March. Still, too much money later, I had a mezzanine ticket for Saturday night. (It was great, by the way. If you go, though, I recommend you listen to the cast album a few times first: the delivery is so rapid and energetic that you’ll be grateful that you already know the lyrics.)

One of the many themes of Hamilton is the idea that leadership (or good democratic citizenship in general) is slow and hard and murky work; that neither the people in the moment nor those looking back from the perspective of history can really judge the value of those efforts.

Maybe this is something that we can only address narratively. Maybe it’s too hard to express in mechanics. But I’d like to think about how one might try.

Order (Selfcontrolfreak)

Order is a five-episode interactive short film series, created in the Netherlands (but with English subtitles). The protagonist, played by Selfcontrolfreak, lives a tidy but bland life. His apartment is decorated almost entirely in white, and minimally furnished. At first we watch him go through simple routines, listening to the radio, having breakfast, reading the newspaper, setting off on some door-to-door collection task that is apparently his job. He also has a long-distance romance, and every day he receives a postcard from his beloved, which he pins to the wall. His wall is covered with postcards which tile together to create larger images.

From time to time he goes into an idle, and interaction is required, either clicking or dragging on some portion of the screen. In each case there’s an element of discovery; the click or gesture is different from last time. But it’s rare that these interactions offer significant choices. We can either perform them or not perform them, most of the time, and in many cases not performing them just means that the story doesn’t go forward.

Initially the function of our interaction is benign and cooperative. We decide what the protagonist should eat for breakfast, what he should listen to on the radio. We establish routine to be repeated later. At this point, while the segments aren’t filmed from Selfcontrolfreak’s perspective, we can identify with him and suppose that we’re guiding him, or that he’s our avatar in the story.

Later the story becomes stranger and our interaction with it more malevolent.

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IF Comp 2015 Guest Post: Lucian Smith on Ether

This post is part of an ongoing project to bring more voices to the IF Comp conversation. I have been reaching out to players and authors who aren’t part of the intfiction community, and also to some veteran intfiction denizens who might not have time to cover the whole comp but who are likely to have especially useful feedback in particular areas.

Lucian Smith — now becoming a bit of a veteran of the guest post format — writes here about Ether by Mathbrush.

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