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Interactive FictionReading online with friends?
Adam Clare
www.RealityisaGame.com
Why?
• Back to our roots. It’s like the digital campfire, but
with cheesier analogies.
• Write scripts and dialogue for your game
• Prototype, of course
• Become a better writer and game designer
• Challenge yourself!
History
• Books.
• Two main types of interactive fiction:
• Parser
• Click adventure
• MUDs
Famous IF
• Zork (1980)
• The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (1984)
• 80 Days (2014)
Puzzle Vs. Story
Engines
• StoryNexus
• Inform 7
• Versu
• Twine
Links
• For links to engines and more see:
• http://www.realityisagame.com/archives/2963/gettin
g-started-with-some-interactive-fiction
StoryNexus
StoryNexus
• Proprietary software made for the web
• Followed the development of earlier game engines
• Online library of games made on their software
• Like other proprietary systems, no common
language :(
‘Storylets’ - also called ‘cards’ - describe events that might happen:
• an argument with an old flame
• a fight on a hilltop at sunset
• a long bath
• midwifing wolves or kittens.
A storylet consists of a starting event, one or more choices (usually), and the results of those choices.
‘Qualities’ describe effects that have happened:
• the fact that you had that argument
• how serious were the wounds you suffered in the fight
• how much soap you have left after the bath
• how many wolves (or kittens) you brought safely into the world.
A character has a quality at a specified level - 1, 5 or 200, for example. (It doesn’t always display as a number, but
more on that later.)
To put it another way, storylets model choices, and qualities model consequences.
Inform 7
Inform 7
• Can create ‘relations’ between objects in the game
world
• “The room next to us is the Ball Pit”
• Character creation for interesting responses
• Cascading IF statements
• Library of extensions to expand functionality
• Collaboration tools with collaboration built into their
approach
• Export to PDF, web, z-machine, and Quixe
• Host anywhere
• Runs on any system
Versu
Versu
• Proprietary software based on Inform 7
• Thus similar in concepts
• Starts with genre and works outwards from there
• “Story files” (roles, premise, and context)
• “Character files” (descriptions)
Concerns About These
Tools
Concerns:
• Copyright issues
• No fan fiction
• Abide by the ToS
• We’ve all read them, right?
Concerns:
• Who owns what you create?
• What if you want to sell your story?
• What happens if the website dies?
• Etc.
Concerns:
• Ontology!
• You’re using somebody else’s approach
• These all take effort to learn like any other system.
• We’re still repeating the same mistakes as before.
Twine!
Why I Love it
• Visual
• Easy
• Accesible
• Open source
• Active, helpful, community
I’ll just show you
• Let’s play Twine!
Issues With Interactive
Fiction
Issues:
• Length!
• Easy to create means that there’s a lot of 50 Shades
of writing
• Screen reading compatibility
• ROI (if you care about that)
Issues:
• Out of control IF statements
• Debugging can be difficult
Adam Clare
www.RealityisaGame.com