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Blue Lacuna: Lessons Learned Writing the World's Longest Interactive Fiction
Blue Lacuna is an ambitious new long form interactive fiction comprising nearly 400,000 words of prose and natural language source code. The longest work yet produced in the Inform 7 language, it is also among the most substantial text-based story games in existence, an interactive novel with an average play time of fifteen to twenty hours. In development between 2006 and 2009, Blue Lacuna features several experiments of interest to creators of long-form interactive stories. This paper describes these experiments and performs an anecdotal post-mortem on what succeeded and failed in the project's realization. I focus on how successful I was at achieving my three principal goals: 1) simplifying the IF interface so those unfamiliar with the medium can easily participate, 2) telling a story which revolves around the player's ability to make choices with real dramatic repercussions, and 3) creating a character able to form a complex relationship with the player across the span of a novel-length story.
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 11:24
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Process-Intensive Fiction
Unlike digital poetry, which has pursued process-intensive directions throughout its history, the dominant directions of digital fiction make relatively light use of computational processes. Whether one looks at the traditions of hypertext fiction, interactive fiction, or video games, the primary model is a set of connections (traveled in different manners) between largely static chunks of language. This panel explores a set of alternatives to this model. The suggested potential panelists include the author of the first book on this topic, published in 2009 (Wardrip-Fruin); one of the authors of Facade, the first fully realized interactive drama (Mateas); the creator of Curveship, a new interactive fiction tool that introduces discourse-level variation as a first-class parameter (Montfort); a prominent author, commentator, and tool builder (Short); the author of Blue Lacunae, a vast, highly variable interactive fiction (Reed); the creator of new algorithms for literary variability based on conceptual blending (Harrell); and the author of the mainstream game industry's most ambitious project in this space, Far Cry 2 (Redding).
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:39
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Determining Literariness in Interactive Fiction
Questions whether the world presented in interactive fiction is a "literary one." Defines "literariness" as quality of "making strange" that which is linguistically familiar. Randall presents study of: "Mindwheel,""Brimstone,""Breakers,""A Mind Forever Voyaging,""Portal," and "Trinity." Suggests that the literariness of interactive fiction comes out of its concern for "making strange" what is familiar and vice versa.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 29.06.2013 - 09:42
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Towards a Theory of Narrative in Interactive Fiction
The current paradigm for synthetic reality based interactive fiction features familiar kinds of worlds realistically presented. This approach is unsatisfying in that it excludes several interesting classes of worlds, such as worlds where the user experiences the subjective reality of a character with a substantially different personality. We wish to extend the current
paradigm to include classes of worlds such as these. To achieve this, we survey cinema technique and develop a theory of narrative and roughly sketch a system architecture to support enriched interactive fiction based on analogy with film techniques. This work is significant because it brings us closer to our goal of making interactivefictioninto a rich, high
quality artistic medium.Jill Walker Rettberg - 02.07.2013 - 22:31
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Face It, Tiger, You Just Hit the Jackpot: Reading and Playing Cadre’s Varicella
ABSTRACT: We consider a specific character, Princess Charlotte, in the 1999 interactive fiction work Varicella by Adam Cadre. To appreciate and solve this work, the interactor must both interpret the texts that result (as a literary reader does) and also operate the cybertextual machine of the program, acting as a game player and trying to understand the system of Varicella’s simulated world. We offer a close reading focusing on Charlotte, examining the functions she performs in the potential narratives and in the game. Through this example, we find that in interactive fiction — and we believe in other new media forms with similar goals — works must succeed as literature and as game at once to be effective. We argue that a fruitful critical perspective must consider both of these aspects in a way that goes beyond simple dichotomies or hierarchies.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 02.07.2013 - 23:06
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Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation
Currently in game and digital culture studies, a controversy rages over the relevance of narratology for game aesthetics. One side argues that computer games are media for telling stories, while the opposing side claims that stories and games are different structures that are in effect doing opposite things. One crucial aspect of this debate is whether games can be said to be "texts," and thereby subject to a textual-hermeneutic approach. Here we find the political question of genre at play: the fight over the games' generic categorization is a fight for academic influence over what is perhaps the dominant contemporary form of cultural expression. After forty years of fairly quiet evolution, the cultural genre of computer games is finally recognized as a large-scale social and aesthetic phenomenon to be taken seriously. In the last few years, games have gone from media non grata to a recognized field of great scholarly potential, a place for academic expansion and recognition.
Scott Rettberg - 09.07.2013 - 00:24
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Galatea’s Riposte: The Reception and Receptacle of Interactive Fiction
Type enough questions, Lisa Swanstrom suggests, and "Galatea" answers Socrates' ancient call for a poetry that talks back. Using Emily Short's interactive fiction as a model, Swanstrom argues that the khora - the strange Platonic intermediary between form and copy - might serve as a guide for understanding the peculiar nature of literary interactivity itself.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 27.08.2013 - 11:18
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Digital Games and Electronic Literature: Toward an Intersectional Analysis
The line between electronic literature and digital games has started to blur more than ever. For example, Christine Love’s 2012 Analogue: A Hate Story can be read as a literary “story” that builds on the visual novel form. However, critic Leif Johnson (of IGN) reviewed Analogue as a “game-like experience” and even a “game” that “neatly sidesteps the label of mere ‘interactive fiction’ like Love’s other games thanks to some smart design choices.” Phill Cameron (of Eurogamer) describes Analogue repeatedly as a “game” and also reflects on its deviation from the “interactive fiction” category. The slippage between the language of fiction and games, in such mainstream reviews, reveals a fascinating taxonomic undecidability. Though Analogue’s “textual” focus makes it a natural boundary object between electronic literature and digital games, this tension extends to games that incorporate minimal text or even no text at all. In this presentation, I focus on Thatgamecompany’s third and most critically-acclaimed game, Journey, which was also released in 2012. In Journey, the player guides a mysterious robed avatar through a desert and up a mountain.
Stig Andreassen - 25.09.2013 - 14:46
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Tierra de Extracción: How Hypermedia Novels could enhance Literary Assessment
Howard Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences suggests that there are at least eight different types of intelligence. Due to genetic variation and personal experiences, no two people have the same combination of intelligences. These do not only signal the way we interpret and cope with the world around us but the way we react to it. It is no coincidence that Reader Oriented Theories focus on the role of the reader in processing and interpreting text and not solely on textual perception. As readers and students of literature, the act of interpreting is key to understanding; but limited by outdated methodologies of assessment the opportunity to demonstrate what has been learned is practically bound to their linguistic intelligence. With the change of medium, from paper to screen, literature has undergone a kind of art and media hybridization that far from being something new and original recovers and allows the coexistence of multiple means of storytelling that extend the concept of reading, understanding and expression.
Scott Rettberg - 04.10.2013 - 11:02
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Digitally implemented interactive fiction: A systematic development and validation of Mole, P.I., a multimedia adventure for third grade readers
"Interactive fiction" has been used to describe many of today's multimedia products. In reality, there is not a universal understanding of what interactive fiction is or what it should entail. The meaning of "interactive" is often interpreted in different ways. Many stories are considered to be interactive because they are placed on the computer. Meanwhile, such stories may lack most of the essential qualities for good literature. Interaction fiction should be upheld to the same standards as traditional texts. Following this belief, this research covers the underlying theories of interactive fiction, examples of misleading "interactive fiction" studies, and guidelines for design pulled from the fields of writing, children's literature and instructional technology. I have used these guidelines to develop a prototype of interactive fiction, which was be tested and revised in several cycles. First, I revised the prototype based upon reviews by several groups of experts from the areas of instructional technology and childhood education. The prototype was then pilot-tested by two participants from the target market.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 25.04.2014 - 04:59
