Interactive Fiction
It is Wednesday, my dudes
Turns out I send this out on Wednesdays now. Who could have predicted that would end up being my newsletter day? Not me that’s for sure.
I'm diverting slightly this week from our fun topic-at-hand apophenia to talk about interactive fiction (which is definitely still related - but then of course everything is to me).
I was very fortunate last Saturday to take part in an intro to interactive fiction, taught by the talented artist/game maker/writer Dan Hett whose work I am a big fat fan of. The event was put on by HOME as part of Push Festival 2021. Dan directed the recently released CLOSED HANDS, a brilliant and complex piece of interactive fiction that you can download right now on itch.io (or maybe wait until you’ve finished reading this but then definitely go and do it).
For anyone unfamiliar with the term, interactive fiction is basically a form of non-linear storytelling where the reader/viewer/player/audience has agency. In the most broad sense of the term, which was the perspective presented in this workshop, this can range from old school Choose Your Own Adventure books to full on open-world RPG video games where the player has the opportunity to influence the narrative direction.
In part of the workshop we spent some time learning to use Twine, which I'm super grateful for as I've always wanted to use it but it felt somewhat daunting to me. For those who don’t know, Twine is a free tool for non-linear storytelling. It was actually used in the creation of probably the most well-known recent example of interactive fiction, the Black Mirror special Bandersnatch. I really liked what Dan had to say about how open source and free systems like Twine and Ink can enable almost anyone to create and share stories. It doesn't have the same barriers to entry that something like Unity (or another game engine) would do, and so provides a platform to a wider range of voices. I think that's a cool way to think about it.
Personally I've been thinking a lot about interactive fiction lately, because (spoiler alert) I'm working on making a game of sorts. The workshop made a whole bunch of interesting things pop up in my mind so I'm going to share some of those with you today - this is sort of a glorified link dump, but I hope you’ll enjoy it.
This very vague memory flashed in my head during the workshop and I had to quickly Google to be sure it actually existed and I hadn’t dreamt it - The Neopian Adventure Generator.
If you’re no stranger to me and my work you’ll be well aware of the impact Neopets had on my life in terms of being the reason I first got into coding for the web, as well as my first introduction to making any kind of digital images. In short, Neopets was a pretty big deal (for me, at least).
But until Saturday’s workshop I had managed to completely forget that it was also my very first venture into branching storytelling. I can tell you now I’m almost certain I never actually finished a story, although I’m sure I started several. I remember the interface as clunky and the process quickly feeling unwieldy as soon as you had more than a few pages. I wonder if this is actually the subconscious underlying reason I avoided things like Twine for so long. Turns out of course they’re nothing alike.
You need to make an account to access the page but it turns out the Neopian Adventure Generator actually still exists. Amazing.
Sidenote: did you know Neopets has been excluded from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine? This presumably means that the owners of the site have requested it not be archived, which I’m seriously gutted about. They’re excluding such an important part of history (in my opinion).
I’d like to start this section by saying straight away - I love Dear Esther. Whether one can call it a game or not isn’t really relevant in my eyes. It’s as much a pointless distraction as the ‘but is it art?’ debate. Just set that aside for a moment please. That and the heated drama around the notion of walking simulators.
I first encountered Dear Esther as Dear Esther Live - so not as a player of the game but as an audience member, watching it played, and scored, live. It was honestly breathtaking, and so interesting to see a video game brought to a live audience. But as much as I enjoyed the performance, I got a much richer experience when I played the game myself. I really enjoyed the fact that the choices I made - where I explored, the paths I chose to take, and in what order - impacted how I experienced the narrative. So whilst I couldn’t significantly influence my surroundings in any way (and there was no element of challenge, which might be what the ‘proper gamers’ are mad about with this genre), I came away with a personal reading of the narrative unique to my experience. Looking up other people’s interpretations of the story then added another interesting layer to it all - as I could see how differently others took the same ‘game’.
Dear Esther was one of a few influences in my life that led to me creating the work Ode to Somewhere Else. I would definitely recommend you experience Dear Esther if you never have, and also check out some of the other key players in the walking simulator genre.
Thirdly, in this list that can only be described as “interesting things that I thought about last Saturday”, I would like to mention Hypnospace Outlaw. This one is definitely a game, so there is no fighting to be had here about that. I bring it up in relation to interactive fiction because it does something that I’m intrigued by, and want to incorporate into my own work, but I envisage as potentially very hard to do.
In Hypnospace Outlaw you play the role of a volunteer moderator in Hypnospace, an alternate history version of the internet. It’s honestly an incredible game, aesthetically and mechanically, and I’d already planned to talk about it in detail in a later edition of this newsletter. For now I’m only going to briefly touch on it to highlight this one point. To retain an element of controlled story progression, it is split into ‘chapters’ of sorts - but within those sections, you have loads of freedom. You can do what you want - and there’s a lot to do - much of which doesn’t necessarily directly connect to the central narrative. You have the opportunity to explore the game with what feels like a lot of freedom, and it somehow shifts invisibly between being just a cool alternate world to explore and actually telling a central story. It’s this that intrigues me. It’s a story but it doesn’t feel like one. It feels like more than turning the pages of a book or clicking through links in a text adventure, yet at its core it is a fixed story, and you don’t actually have any influence over the direction it ultimately takes.
So what I want to know is - how do you do this and can anyone teach me?
And finally…
I would like to mention my own first little foray into interactive fiction.
After the workshop on Saturday I made a very very tiny story in Twine that I’d like to share with you. It’s not really a game - there’s no winning or losing - just different ways of interpreting a few short minutes in someone’s life.
I hope it can stand alone without too much context. All you need to know is that the ‘you’ whose life you momentarily inhabit in the piece has lost a friend, and has arrived to say goodbye.
You can have a go here: ediejomurray.co.uk/signs-and-symbols
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about this topic as much as I’ve enjoyed putting this together for you.
Much love pals
Edie x
Loved your story. Lots of other interesting things to explore and try out, thanks to your recommendations. Keep posting x