kickstarter – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

Three Kickstartable RPGs

Bluebeard’s Bride is a game about the wife, left at home, exploring the strange house of her monstrous husband, gradually uncovering the secrets of the place. The players portray different aspects of her psyche, pushing her towards different actions and interpretations. When a particular part of her mind becomes too traumatized, it shatters, and that player becomes part of narrating the game’s horrors rather than navigating them.

wife

I really like the idea of the psyche mechanic, as a way to play out a story entirely about interior struggle.

Meanwhile, the premise speaks to one of the most horrific things I’ve ever experienced in real life: the discovery that someone you had liked, trusted, or cared about is not what they seem. That they’ve been lying and hiding things from you. That they are predatory, abusive, perhaps violent. That they routinely use people, for sex or for money or to prop their ego. That the past lovers they described as “unhinged” or “unreasonable” were in fact the previous victims of their cruelty.

That whatever empathetic gestures they’ve made in the past were quite possibly an act, because some of their other actions suggest a total lack of human compassion; or that they are so deep in an addiction or their own headspace that they are no longer capable of considering the wellbeing of anyone else.

That all the evidence is there, but that you haven’t let yourself see it before, or you didn’t have the experience or the wit to understand what it meant. That the connection you felt with them was just a sign of your own appallingly poor judgment. That the times you “understood” and “forgave” them were just you being played. Possibly that they see you as a dupe, or are using you intentionally.

And: that you are still (metaphorically or literally) living in their house. That their life is entangled with yours, and just because you’ve now seen, that doesn’t mean you’re free of them.

So yeah, this one seems like it might prove emotionally challenging to play. But I’m interested.

(Side note: see also Honeysuckle, Cat Manning’s Ectocomp retelling of this same tale.)

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6Quest and the Hungarian Gamebook Scene

6quest

6Quest is Hungarian interactive fiction based on a gamebook series. The creators are currently running a Kickstarter to have the app translated into English for a wider audience.

I was able to find this list of Hungarian gamebooks by Demian Katz, but I’m not even able to translate the titles, so I don’t have a huge amount to go on. So I asked Paul Muranyi to tell me a little more of the history of gamebooks in Hungary, as well as the current scene and their project.

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October Link Assortment

Upcoming meetings and events:

Wordplay in Toronto is November 7. There will be talks about text-based games, there will be demos of other games, there will be assorted IF folks. I am speaking. Perhaps I will see you there.

Also November 7, London: ProcJam launches with a series of free talks about procedurally generating things. I obviously cannot be there because I will be in Toronto instead, but I know a number of Oxford/London IF Meetup folks are planning to attend.

November 11 is the regularly scheduled Boston IF meetup. I will be there also.

November 29, Oxford: WIP Sharing meetup. If you have a piece for which you’d like feedback, this is a great place to show up and share what you have.

December 12-13, London: AdventureX is a free two-day conference about adventure games, focusing primarily but not exclusively on graphical adventures. Again, there will be some text game people there (probably including me).

What to play for Halloween?

Matthew Ritter’s graveyard-exploration piece Boon Hill is coming to Steam today, so if you’d like to celebrate Halloween by wandering around looking at some epitaphs, here’s your opportunity.

If bureaucracy and money issues spook you more than graves, you may enjoy Harry Giles’ ritual for grant-seekers, a liturgy about the process of applying for art support grants. If this sounds incomprehensible: it’s really not. Like a lot of Harry’s game poetry, it encapsulates its critiques of a system into rules and actions.

Or perhaps you’ll like Aevee Bee and Mia Schwartz’s visual novel We Know the Devil. It’s about three teenagers who struggle to be their best selves, and not to leave one another behind, at a camp where possession is a standard occurrence. Also, something of a reflection on community in its more destructive aspects. (Here’s Isz Janeway’s review.)

More in the mood to make legal contracts with demons? Max Gladstone has a new Choice of Games game out in his Deathless series, called Deathless: The City’s Thirst. He talks about it — and the challenges of writing a second work in this format — over here.

The Ritual (Edward Turner) is a comedy Lovecraftian piece where you need to replay to see all the endings. It’s rather sweet, assuming you’re not too bothered by exploding your acolytes and raining shattered flesh over the land. A quick and entertaining play.

I can also recommend any of the Comp games I’ve reviewed in the last week or so, especially Brain Guzzlers from Beyond! if you want goofy 1950s aliens, Arcane Intern (Unpaid) if you want a little witchcraft, Darkiss for an old-school vampire.

Or, again, you might like Tailypo by Chandler Groover, published this month on Sub-Q: it’s a short horror piece. No branching, but a good example of what dynamic fiction can do. (I have a horrible sneaking feeling that I’m actually starting to quite like horror genre IF, even if I’m not really a fan of it in books or movies. And as long as there aren’t any zombies in sight.)

And there’s Anna Anthropy’s Witches and Wardrobes, run earlier in the month: I’m planning to write about this one a little more later. It’s more personal and less suspenseful than Tailypo but unsurprisingly also excellent.

IF Comp is still running! If you want to get in on the action and vote on some games, you have a couple more weeks to do so. In addition to all the reviews here and at ifwiki, you might enjoy The Short Game’s podcast coverage of the competition.

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[Top Secret] (James Long) and a play-by-email IF tool

James Long is Kickstarting an interactive story game called [Top Secret], played via email, which explores the Snowden story:

A fresh recruit to the National Security Agency (NSA), you have a new mission: find out who’s leaking TOP SECRET documents to the press. Stop them by whatever means necessary.

A single selector (phone number, email address, name) is all it takes for your team to surveil a target. It’s your job to decipher the intel, and follow the trail to its source.

But surveillance has a price…

In the paranoid world of the NSA, anyone can become a target, and soon your friends are in the firing line.

Part of his project is also to finish and release the play-by-email storytelling tool for general use, so I invited him to talk a little more about what that is and how it will work.

ES: Aside from (obviously) the Snowden concept, what sorts of stories do you think would lend themselves to this presentation?

JL: One of the great things is that it is truly “real time”. So with the Snowden story, I want to roughly match the 2 weeks in the run up to the leaks as they happened. It allows the author to pace the story and give time to the player to make choices and reflect on what’s happening. You can also inject meaning into the time between messages as well as content. e.g. if someone is excited, or angry about a conversation they may reply quickly, whereas disinterest, low spirits, or just being busy may result in delayed responses.

So I think there are rich mechanical opportunities to explore, but to be honest, I’m not sure what’s best for it – I’m discovering as I go!

I know there is a game called Lifeline on iOS which was app-based but also real-time. I haven’t played it (don’t own an iPhone), but I know that used time to give a sense of progression. e.g. the player would decide where the character should go, and several hours later, the character would ping to say they’ve arrived. (I’m sure they did more interesting stuff than this).

ES: How is your system deciding what to send back to players? Is it doing a simple keyword search on their email response, or is something more going on here?

JL: Yes, I can specifiy multiple keywords (or keyphrases) and trigger events when the keyword/keyphrase is detected. Such events include:

– sending a new message in the current email thread
– sending a new message in a new thread
– spawning concurrent email threads
– emails which are sent if none of the keywords are matched
– emails which match against any response

All the data is generated by a client-side web application I have created.

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A House of Many Doors (PixelTrickery)

In A House of Many Doors you are an explorer, poet and spy. Mount an expedition to explore a vast dimension of procedurally-generated nightmare architecture. Assemble a dysfunctional crew, build their morale, uncover their secrets, and try desperately to keep them alive. Travel in a train that walks on mechanical legs, and write procedurally-generated poetry about the things you encounter.

The House is a parasite dimension. It steals from other worlds, and can contain almost anything within its endless walls. The player’s journey is a process of constant discovery – there’s always something strange around the next corner.

Harry Tuffs is a member of the Oxford/London IF Meetup, and currently using incubation space at Failbetter Games. He’s just launched a Kickstarter for House of Many Doors, an IF + exploration game. The screenshots are a bit (or, in some places, strongly) reminiscent of Sunless Sea, but this is not a roguelike. I asked him for a bit more detail about the game, and he was kind enough to fill me in.

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