There’s a lot to say about writing compelling dialogue in an interactive format, but for this month’s column I want to drill down to the question of player intentionality as it relates to dialogue. Intentionality, of course, is the player’s ability to not only have goals within the fiction of the game, but to knowingly […]

Intrigue! Banter! The promise of danger around every corner! These things—along with memorable characters and unusual settings—are some of the things that always make me stay up late reading. Perhaps not surprisingly, the two games in this month’s issue also have these things in common. In Eleanor Hingley’s “A Tragedy of Manners,” you’re thrown into […]

Piled in a corner, at the nexus of walls and floor, are hundreds of multicolored pieces of candy. The cellophane wrappers glint in the light. Your docent invites you to take one. To eat part of this sculpture, to slowly diminish its weight until, dozens and dozens of visitors later, there’s little left of the […]

Eleanor Hingley has been writing and gaming, and writing about gaming, for longer than she cares to remember. Find more of her interactive fiction at https://magpie-elle.itch.io/ and non-interactive fiction at https://shadowplaytheatre.wordpress.com/. She writes reviews of role-playing games and comment on gaming culture at https://theanxiousgamer.wordpress.com/. Eleanor is the author of “A Tragedy of Manners,” from our […]

Nin Harris is an author, poet, and tenured postcolonial Gothic scholar who exists in a perpetual state of unheimlich. Nin writes Gothic fiction, cyberpunk, nerdcore post-apocalyptic fiction, planetary romances and various other forms of hyphenated weird fiction. Nin’s publishing credits include Clarkesworld, Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, The Dark, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Lightspeed. Nin is […]