Welcome to our study of Interactive Fiction
Schedule
Each week we will have a little book club where we discuss the game and things it reminded us of. We can also look at the design and see how the sausage is made.
1
2
The page on the sidebar in 50 years of text games has more links about the background of the development of Depression Quest
3
4
5
6
7
8
Chapter 1 of The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus became Fiction About Jesus on Riddle Parables (optional).
9
10
Introduction
Let's study interactive fiction (IF) over the course of 16 weeks.
This course of study will include the games themselves, specific commentary on games, general ludic criticism/theory (but not too much--we are focused on craft), and exercises and ideas about game design. We will focus on choice-based fiction, primarily Twine games, for the first 12 weeks, and we will look at a few visual novel games that do interesting things with choices.
Rather than explore games chronologically, we will study them based on themes. The first unit will focus on narrative designs. We'll start with branch-and-bottleneck, a very common type of narrative design for choice-based games. Choice of Robots does a great job at making the bottlenecks feel natural. Depression Quest is another famous example. Space to Grow, one of the visual novels I helped write, also has this kind of narrative design.
Creatures Such As We has some designs elements in common with dating games, where after making a choice of which person you want to be with, you trigger more interactions with them. Some games have a more linear design, like Digital: A Love Story and Howling Dogs.
For other themes, we'll look more closely at the content of games, discussing the genre of empathy games and other types of games specific to Twine, with a special focus on science fiction and cyberpunk games, which are plentiful.
I want there to be some flexibility in our schedule to allow for illness, being busy, or exploring things that we wind up being interested in. For that reason, every fourth week will be free to allow for catch-up or digressions. One possible digression would be adventure games and "idle" games, like The Longing. Also I think we should read the chapter on tarot and procedural storytelling from Procedural Storytelling in Game Design but I'm not quite sure how to tie it in with a videogame yet.
Texts
General books with related content:
The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media
Procedural Storytelling in Game Design
Non-textbook resources
There are optional Twine exercises:
Last updated