☸️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.

Protip: The games and articles listed are hyperlinks!

Week#	Game	Primary theoretical or craft text
1	Choice of Robots	Moral Dilemmas in Computer Games
2	Depression Quest and Anhedonia	Representations of Illness in Games this review of Depression Quest The page on the sidebar in 50 years of text games has more links about the background of the development of Depression Quest
3	Howling Dogs via Eczema Angel Orifice	pg. 513 in 50 Years of Text Games (here's the entry on if50 if you don't have access to the PDF) Creation Under Captialism and the Twine Revolution by Porpentine On Links Exercises in Style
4	Digital: A Love Story	The 2010 game in 50 Years of Text Games (with an online profile here) Interview with Love.
5	Interlude: Animal Farm	review from Paste a "stale videogame adaptation" Review from The Guardian
6	Creatures Such As We	reviews by Cara Ellison and by Emily Short Entry on self-reflexivity in electronic art from The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media Read about te controversy about the ending of Mass Effect 3 on Critical Distance
7	Sense of Harmony and Universal Hologram	Entry on Cyberpunk from JHGDM "PC Personality and Motivations" by Duncan Stevens, pg. 249 in the IF Theory Reader
8	Open Sorcery; The Absence of Miriam Lane	Chapter 1 of The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus became Fiction About Jesus on Riddle Parables (optional). "Plot Types and Interactivity" from JHGDM "Landscape and Character in IF" by Paul O'Brian, pg. 261 in the IF Theory Reader and/or "Mapping the Tale: Scene Description in IF" by J. Robinson Wheeler on pg. 299 of the same book
9
10	Space to Grow

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.

The earliest interactive fiction in analog form didn't track variables. Much of it had endings that branched into completely different storylines--a time cave style of narrative. Consider the Consequences (1930) was a printed book with this structure. You Will Select a Decision is a modern digital example.

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

See our course materials folder (fair use stipulates that I not share this publicly). Books that deal with text games specifically are:

• Videogames for Humans ($10 ebook)

  • the games discussed here are in the course materials folder under videogamesforhumansgamefiles.zip (this comes with the ebook if you buy it)

• 50 Years of Text Games ($25 ebook)

  • (see also the online portal for 50 Years of Text Games)

• IF Theory Reader (online ToC; free PDF)

General books with related content:

• The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media

• Procedural Storytelling in Game Design

• Writing for Games: Theory & Practice (available in the BYU Library through Taylor & Francis ebooks)

Non-textbook resources

• Emily Short's brief bibliography and overview of IF history

There are optional Twine exercises:

⚒️pageSetting up