I just noticed an amusing synchrony. In the late 1970s, when Crowther and then Woods were writing the first parser game, a New Wave SF writer named George R. R. Martin was writing short stories about far-future humanity among the Thousand Worlds. I, very young, was a fan of both. (Nightflyers, 1980, is still a […]

This is part one of a two-part series about narrative design aimed at traditional-media writers and IF authors. First things first: What is narrative design? The real answer is that the role of “narrative designer” is relatively new in the games industry and has something of a fluid or even vague meaning. Different teams will […]

As an author and avid reader of prose fiction as well as the interactive kind, I often wonder what it is about the two media that makes them so engrossing. For me, at least, one of the key elements of interactive fiction is how it involves the reader in the tale it’s telling. The best […]