To Stewart Baker, who brought together more authors, readers, and supporters than I could have dreamed, thank you. Your ideas and energy brought sub-Q to the next level of polish, creativity, and engagement. I am in awe of what you built sub-Q to be.

To Natalia Theodoridou, whose work it is as much of a pleasure to read as it is to publish, thank you. I am so grateful for your willingness to help grow sub-Q into its next phase. I hope that phase is yet to be. In the meantime, count me another loyal reader.

To our other editors and first readers, thank you for your work these past five years. It moves me that you volunteered so much time and skill to keep sub-Q in steady supply of quality content.

To our creators, thank you for giving sub-Q the chance to publish your work. Every issue has been a delight.

To our subscribers, thank you for your kind and generous support. It’s because of you we made it this far.

It has been an honor to be on this team.

If you’re reading this, you too played a part in sub-Q‘s success. Thank you. None of what you see here would have been possible without you.

More information will follow as we conclude publication. For now, all I have to offer is thanks.

Take care, and write on.

The post A Thousand Thanks for Five Years of sub-Q appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

There were 82 games entered this year. With this embarrassment of riches, some curation is required to find games that might speak to you. Fifteen years ago, there was a much more centralized lexicon (if not quite a canon) of what constituted interactive fiction. Today there are many interactive fictions and many ideas of what it should be and try to accomplish, and all of this heterodoxy is presented together in the Competition. Which is not to say that it’s not valuable to venture outside your comfort zones once in a while. I am guilty myself of scanning the list of authors for familiar faces in the Comp. But very few people are going to be able to play all 82 games.

On that note, I wanted to focus on two games that didn’t make the top 10 that—while not perfect—really struck me, and definitely warrant your attention.

Iamb(ici) by Jo Lourdez (40th place)

This game is essentially what I imagine Emily Is Away would look like if it wasn’t borderline toxic and manipulative. It’s also delightfully weird in its recursiveness. You are a neophyte poet logging into a poetry chat room and engaging in critiques. Much like other conversation-based games, the inflections of tone and responses will have a huge impact on the kinds of interactions you have with the other people in the chatrooms, who definitely (in quick brushstrokes) have their own sense of agency. What powers this narrative is the soap-bubble intensity of a tiny community, for better or worse. There are a ton of rich endings available, so if you are looking for a game with a wide variety of choices available to you to unlock, as well as a subversive musing on the power of creativity in a tight-knit circle, you might really enjoy this game.

The Good People by Pseudavid (19th place)

The post Two Gems from 2019’s Interactive Fiction Competition appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

Unlike most roleplaying games, Planescape: Torment never gives you the option to pick a name. Much like your character’s combat role (which can switch freely) and history (which depends on which of your innumerable memories you unearth) your name remains inchoate, a formless potential that you can choose to define much as you define your journey. If your name is a blank canvas, perhaps so is your destiny?

* * *

Names give shape to thoughts, provide a skeleton onto which ideas can be strung. In the popular Dungeons & Dragons podcast The Adventure Zone’s “Graduation” season, the party becomes almost paralyzed with indecision when one of the protagonists refused to either give a name or to accept a nickname from the others [2]. ‘How do we refer to you?’ their hesitation asks. ‘How do we organize you in our thoughts?’

The act of naming is non-trivial. “Names can connect children to their ancestors, country of origin or ethnic group, and often have deep meaning or symbolism for parents and families,” write Rita Kohli and Daniel G. Solórzano [3]. By bestowing a name, we bestow the rudiment of form, a way to conceptualize our creation. For a player, creating a name for a character can be part of what Aaron Reed calls “expressive input,” allowing players to “express their distinctive intentions through it,” and to feel “feel ownership, discovery, or surprise.” [4] By naming my rival “Idiot” in Pokémon Red Version [5], my 10-year-old self was imposing a bespoke order upon the Pokémon world, an imperious order, one that reflected a protagonist determined—nay, prophesied—to “be the very best, like no one ever was.” By allowing me to name the monographs my scribe character pens in Chronicon Apocalyptica [6], the game offers me the chance to make my own, unique a mark in the world. The contents of said monographs will forever remain nebulous, but their naming instantiates them in myth.

* * *

A New Old Name

a durational microlarp

by Lucian Kahn

You already changed your name. Now change your old name. Decide what name you would rather have had before you changed it. Whenever someone asks, “What was your name before?” answer with your new old name.

-Lucian Kahn [7]

* * *

The power of naming in games extends further, into the system level. As Robert Yang notes in his blog post Queer Game Studies, “On FeministWhorePurna and the Ludo-material Politics of Gendered Damage Power-ups in Open-World RPG Video Games,” the naming of skills and abilities in videogames, what with such mechanics representing the will and power of the player, absolutely contributes to the political argument the game makes [8]. Yang notes that in an early build of the game Dead Island, the character Purna, an Aboriginal woman of colour, could learn a skill titled, “Feminist Whore” to gain a damage bonus against male characters. While Yang delves deeper into mechanics and representation, the name itself—later changed to “Gender Wars” in the released version of the game—betrays an argument about the identity and motivation of a feminist is: a woman worthy of our disgust who wants nothing more than to hurt men.

Indie RPG Disco Elysium [10] hurtles headlong into wild territory when it comes to naming players’ attributes. While your character can level up their “Logic” or “Reaction Speed,” they can also invest points in skills such as “Inland Empire,” “Shivers,” “Esprit de Corps,” and “Physical Instrument.” In the delightfully weird game about an amnesiac cop, the esoteric naming of one’s own capabilities mirrors the confused soul-searching and frantic battling of one’s own inner demons that the protagonist undertakes throughout the story.

* * *

Names have power. They reveal intent, hope and desire. Even at their very least, they help us conceptualize a thing, help us formulate thoughts about it. In the realm of interactive fiction, where action and drama occur not within screen pixels but within psychic, literary landscapes, names are not just tools, but potent ones at that.

“Your name should be deep gold and orange, like a forest fire on the horizon, but mixed with the stench of liquor rising from your breath.”

-Disco Elysium

Works Cited

Sharang Biswas is an award-winning game designer, an internationally exhibited artist, and a published writer based in New York. He has exhibited work at numerous museums, galleries, and art fairs including the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and the Toronto Reference Library. He has designed curricula for the Museum of the Moving Image, created learning games for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and written about games, interactivity, and culture for publications including Kill Screen, Sub Q, ZAM and First-Person Scholar. His two food-based games, “Feast” and “Verdure”, have garnered numerous accolades, including an IndieCade Award and and IGDN Indie Groundbreaker Award. Sharang has lectured or taught courses on game design at various universities and cultural institutions including Dartmouth, Columbia Teacher’s College, New York University, The International Center of Photography, and the Museum of the Moving Image, as well as spoken at conferences such as Game Devs of Color, GaymerX, Living Games, IndieCade and Boston FIG Talks.

Sharang holds a bachelor’s in Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering from Dartmouth College and a master’s in Interactive Design from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He is the Experience Designer for The Medici Group, a consulting firm focusing on diversity and innovation.

You can find him on Twitter @SharangBiswas, his website https://sharangbiswas.myportfolio.com/ , or on his Itch IO page https://astrolingus.itch.io/

The post This Essay on Names has no Title appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

Sometimes, the moments that stick with you from a game—for years, even decades—are not significant moments in the game itself. Instead, they’re the off-hand moments when a space is created inside a game that feels extremely ephemeral.

I worked in the college bookstore and taught composition at a university an hour away. Since I couldn’t write another poem to save my life, I started writing science fiction but instead of talking about that much, I would go to parties with the writing program still—scratch that, “receptions,” because visiting writers would be received. There was usually beautiful carpeting and a colonnaded balcony and free booze. Or it would be the ramshackle grad school housing on boulevards crammed to the brim with people coming, or going, or moving far away, or remaining rooted in the small city forever. Then I’d go back home to Erie it would be trailer parks and bar-fight bars and broken-down houses built during the time of the McKinley administration.

I didn’t feel at home in any of those places.

Robb Sherwin’s games are glorious messes—sprawling, jagged, often a bit on the broken side, yet packed with the kinds of writing that set off fireworks in my brain. The metaphors and descriptions collide into each other, and help create portraits of intermittently unpleasant people with deep scars.

Scars which you could see on the outside, sometimes.

What makes Cryptozookeeper probably his best game isn’t the Pokemon-style cryptid battling (although that can be fun), or even the long superstructures of story that drive the plot forward (although those are rich and rewarding). What makes it great is its sense of camaraderie in the midst of deep displacement, of people who (for one reason or another) are where they’re not supposed to be. If Fallacy of Dawn is about the allure of old-school video games, and Necrotic Drift is about the potency of Dungeons and Dragons, Cryptozookeeper is about how hard it can be to learn and grow and make friends when everything around you is literally crumbling. (That, and crafting werewolves and harpies.)

It’s also important to note that the scene would have been a lot poorer had it not been for the women who inhabit these spaces. Jane, Deanna, and Bleem shine in the Red House scenes and Cryptozookeeper as a whole, and considering Robb Sherwin’s first game is called Chicks Dig Jerks, this is a whole evolutionary era of character development in his writing.

And at the Red House (after traversing a shattered abandoned landscape), yes, there’s a feline humanoid acting as bouncer, and yes, there’s an alien autopsy going on in the study. (Or “study.”) And yes there’s a pamphlet on alcohol abuse somewhere in the place. And yes—quite so—there may, or may not, be an exorcism. But mostly you have your friends, and you’re drinking together in an ought-to-be-condemned house. You even have your frenemies. But very few of you are students anymore.

You’re someplace else in your lives.

But sometimes it does.

The post Cryptozookeeper: Inside the Red House appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

Except that this text isn’t meant to be seen as poem. Or at least, not just a poem.

I encountered the words as an installation dominating the walls of a gallery at the New Museum in New York. The letterforms are large and made of tubes of neon light. The edges of the text are fully justified, the words perfectly aligned at either end, creating what are sometimes called “rivers” or “wormholes” between words—ugly gaps that protrude from the text. The verse is underlined with a glowing azure light, again in neon. “[Neon] is a material that people feel sort of obligated to interact with,” the poet-artist Sable Elyse Smith says [2], and the scale of the glyphs, the garish, white light they give off, the gentle, only occasionally perceptible hum their physical material makes, these all ensure that the installation is at once seductive—and a little off-putting.

The piece’s rigid horizontal alignment, its glowing form, and its blue underscoring—like the sky, like the sea—are more prominent when you learn its title: Landscape III. We’re invited to look at the poem but also through it, as prisoners gazing longingly through the gaps in the prison-bars towards the clear blue sky.

Much of this would be invisible if the words were merely ink on paper.

* * *

In stories, important words aren’t just written down. They’re inscribed, emblazoned, or illuminated. They’re carved into mountainsides such that only moonlight can reveal their presence or smeared in blood onto a corridor wall and framed by a petrified cat.

That a text gains power from more than just the words that comprise it has been an important concept for humans from the birth of written language. Sometimes, this idea is taken quite literally. In his 2nd-century medical treatise Liber Medicinalis, physician Quintus Serenus Sammonicus prescribes the magic words “Abracadabra” as a cure for malaria—but only if attached to the neck on an amulet and repeatedly written out in a very specific cone-shaped form [3]:

Abracadabra
bracadabra
racadabra
acadabra
cadabra
adabra
dabra
abra
bra
ra
a

Another spell in the British Library’s Collection, this time from 18th-century Ethiopia, has the power to transform you into a lion… or a python… or an eagle, all depending on where on your body you wear the same incantations [3].

Meaning is clearly more than written morphemes. As Ellen Lupton rhapsodizes in her book Thinking With Type, “Text can be viewed as a thing—a sound and sturdy object—or a fluid poured into the containers of a page or screen. Text can be solid or liquid, body or blood.” [4] In my first essay for this column, I wrote about how different texts are read differently; their context, form, visual substance, and material quality all influence how we read them. [5]

Beyond visual art or magical medicine, thinking about this sort of thing can offer writers of interactive fiction powerful tools with which to engage readers, to increase emotional affect, and to better reflect their worlds and themes.

A simple use of this can be seen in Abigail Corfman’s excellent game Open Sorcery [6]. The game casts you as an elemental of Fire and…C++. Yes, you’re a programmable magical spirit of protection, complete with a control panel, backups, and system analytics. Sometimes you try to dream.

Corfman enhances the feel of your character and world using a number of visual cues. A monospace typeface set with white on black makes you feel like you’re programming in a text editor of some sort. Locations are referred to not by their full names but by codes: “Cherry Orchard Rest Home” is “ChORet”, while “Decker’s Apartment” is “DkApt”. When you scan an area for intruding spirits, a “Searching” message flashes on-screen like a progress meter. Finally, when you actively seek out a spirit, the most “magical” part of your work, your neat, horizontal script suddenly tilts diagonally, a restructuring of the ordered world that only the supernatural can account for. Beyond her exposition and plot, Corfman uses simple visual cues such as these to situate you in her world of magical technology, revealing character and setting through the form of the text.

Kicking it up a notch with typefaces, Astrid Dalmady in Cactus Blue Motel [7] employs two colors of neon light, the symmetrical, rounded glyphs of the Comfortaa font for headings, and a mouseover effect that diminishes the glow of neon text as you hover over it, to give her teen-road-trip-game added oomph. Similar to that in Sable Elyse Smyth Landscape III, Dalmady’s use of neon is at once inviting and uncanny, reflecting the game’s primary setting: the eponymous motel in the middle of the desert. But coupled with a dusky blue background, the neon elements also evoke nostalgia, a longing for a rapidly receding past, the aching yearning for a precious childhood moment to stay preserved in its own bubble of time, perhaps in the middle of the desert, untouched and unspoiled by time and “growing up”.

Finally, Nyamyam goes even further with theatrical tricks in their quirky visual novelesque Astrologaster [8]. You play as “Doctor” Simon Forman in Shakespearean London, who uses astrology to cure his patients’ various medical (and sometimes domestic) complaints. What instantly attracted me to the game when I encountered it at PAX West, however, was the enthusiastic singing of a fully voiced madrigal at the beginning of each scene. Far from necessary to the plot or gameplay, the musical rendition brings a smile to my face at the start of every scene and reminds me of the theatrical, somewhat farcical nature of the Astologaster’s world. Additionally, while the game could easily have gone with traditional A, B, C choices on a menu, it instead places the choices on a star map, and illustrates for you which star constellations (and their subsequent astrological meanings) your choices draw from, deepening the characterization of Simon Forman as a… err… legitimate astrologer.

* * *

“The play experience,” writes Mary Flanagan, “has, for thousands of years, been intertwined with aesthetics.” [9] This statement is as applicable to the ancient board games that Flanagan proceeds to describe as it is to a stylistically illustrated, fully voiced contemporary visual novel. If games, like other art forms, are to be considered conveyors of emotion, we must consider all of their components, not merely the mechanical. Think about old video games that were considered gems in their time but that modern audiences have difficulty fully appreciating due to the dated look of their graphics. Or consider the endless clones of “connect-three” games, whose representational tweaks, from jewels to candy to laid-off workers [10], can change the feel of the entire game. Similarly, if the “mechanics” of interactive fiction include the reading and writing of text, one must look beyond just the words and engage fully with artistry that encompasses any piece of IF. Our words may not form a landscape as literally as Sable Elyse Smith’s verses, but a blue underline may just accentuate our description of one.

Works Cited

1. S. E. Smith, Artist, Landscape III. [Art]. New Museum, 2017.
   http://www.sableelysesmith.com/Landscape-III-New-Museum
2. New Museum, “218 “Trigger Gender As a Tool and a Weapon” Audio Guide: Sable Elyse Smith,” New Museum, New York, 2017.
3. British Library Board, Harry Potter: A History of Magic, The Official Companion to the British Library Exhibition at the New-York Historical Society Museum & Library, New York: Arthur A. Levine Books, 2018.
4. E. Lupton, Thinking With Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students, 2nd Revised and Expanded Edition, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010.
5. S. Biswas, “Rituals, Cheating, and The Dream of Possibility,” Sub-Q, February 2019.
   https://sub-q.com/rituals-cheating-and-the-dream-of-possibility/
6. A. Corfman, Open Sorcery, Open Sorcery Games, 2016.
   http://abigailcorfman.com/Home/OpenSorcery
7. A. Dalmady, Cactus Blue Motel, 2016.
   http://astriddalmady.com/cactusblue.html
8. Nyamyam, Astrologaster, Nyamyam, 2019.
   https://www.astrologaster.com/
9. M. Flanagan, Critical Play, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2013.
10. Tiltfactor, Layoff, Tiltfactor, 2009.
    https://tiltfactor.org/game/layoff/

Sharang Biswas is an award-winning game designer, an internationally exhibited artist, and a published writer based in New York. He has exhibited work at numerous museums, galleries, and art fairs including the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and the Toronto Reference Library. He has designed curricula for the Museum of the Moving Image, created learning games for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and written about games, interactivity, and culture for publications including Kill Screen, Sub Q, ZAM and First-Person Scholar. His two food-based games, “Feast” and “Verdure”, have garnered numerous accolades, including an IndieCade Award and and IGDN Indie Groundbreaker Award. Sharang has lectured or taught courses on game design at various universities and cultural institutions including Dartmouth, Columbia Teacher’s College, New York University, The International Center of Photography, and the Museum of the Moving Image, as well as spoken at conferences such as Game Devs of Color, GaymerX, Living Games, IndieCade and Boston FIG Talks.

Sharang holds a bachelor’s in Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering from Dartmouth College and a master’s in Interactive Design from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He is the Experience Designer for The Medici Group, a consulting firm focusing on diversity and innovation.

You can find him on Twitter @SharangBiswas, his website https://sharangbiswas.myportfolio.com/ , or on his Itch IO page https://astrolingus.itch.io/

The post Neon Landscapes & Spell Pyramids: Visuals and Form in Interactive Fiction appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

Intentionality, of course, is the player’s ability to not only have goals within the fiction of the game, but to knowingly take actions that meaningfully advance their those. It can be a slippery idea when it comes to dialogue. A lot of dialogue in interactive media, particularly when stories are not themselves dialogue-driven, is very expository. Traditional RPG “dialogue trees” play out as a simple question-and-answer session. This isn’t deep enough to hang an entire game on, even if it is a common and useful pattern in games that are not primarily focused on dialogue.

When writing dialogue scenes for static fiction, we’re usually driven by the idea of character goals and subtext: What are those characters superficially talking about; what do those characters want; how do their wants and their relationship emerge in this conversation even when they’re not being explicitly discussed. Adult drama, realist fiction, and some YA fiction runs on this idea of subtext; characters are always talking about quotidian things as a way of evincing deeper or more complex feelings that are usually not discussed explicitly.

Making this work in an interactive format is challenging. For one thing, the way we present dialogue as choices tends to flatten. Choice text has to be concise and easy to apprehend, whereas rich dialogue often relies on a character talking superficially about one thing when they mean another. Here’s the problem: “These eggs are overcooked, Martha” is a perfectly adequate line of dialogue in a play about a marriage falling apart. As choice text, however, it’s overlong and not expressive of what the character actually wants to convey by talking about the overcooked eggs. Dialogue is often best when it asks the reader to make an interpretive leap in understanding what a character is really talking about, but that interpretive leap can become a stumbling block when a player has to do it for every dialogue choice they’re presented with.

This kind of dialogue choice also does a poor job of expressing character intent beyond the immediate moment of the choice. Even if it signals to the player what the subtext of a given line is, it doesn’t necessarily get across what the direction of the conversation is. What does your player character want to get out of a conversation? Are your conversation choices about what the player character wants, or about how they go about getting it? How does the player direct the conversation to express that intent?

A common solution to all those problems is to use more explicit choice prompts or some kind of abstraction to help the player make choices. This is very common in dialogue-driven games that feature some kind of systemic mechanic in their dialogue. Of course, this means that if your choice prompts within dialogue are abstracted in some way, it can suggest to players that your game has some kind of underlying dialogue system, which might not be true at all. Turning dialogue into an abstracted game mechanic will not suit every game or every story.

Even when using a traditional branching-dialogue design, there are things that can be done to make conversation a more engaging part of interaction. Going in with an understanding of what conversations in your story are about and how the player exerts agency over them can guide many small but significant decisions, such as where to put dialogue branching points and where to allow the conversation to flow without player input.

Traditional branching dialogue can be satisfying, both narratively and interactively, but that requires real attention to how your material is written and what it’s trying to accomplish. Of course, systemic or abstract approaches have their own pitfalls and are not going to fit with every project.

As a very general rule of thumb, the more consistent the conversations in your story are, the more suited your game may be to a systemic dialog mechanic. If they’re all interrogations, or negotiations, or flirting, that makes it easier to build out a dialogue model than a game where a character engages in all kinds of conversations. Branching dialogue is a generalist tool that can be used successfully for a myriad of scenes. Its familiarity and versatility keeps that structure in widespread use.

Even if we can’t find the One True Prescriptive Way of writing dialogue in interactive media, we can ask ourselves these questions to inform our projects, and avoid “auto piloting” through the process of writing dialogue-driven material.

Bruno Dias is a writer and narrative designer based in São Paulo. His work has appeared in video game publications (Waypoint, PC Gamer), games (Where the Water Tastes Like Wine) and interactive fiction on Sub-Q and elsewhere.

The post Dialogue and Player Choice appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

Some people spit out the candy.

In the evening, museum technicians refill the pile to an exact 175 lbs., Ross’s ideal body weight. Perhaps this rejuvenative act grants Ross perpetual life. Or perhaps it chains him to corner like Prometheus, whose liver was devoured every morning by an eagle only to regrow overnight for another day’s gruesome snack.

Eat. Regenerate. Eat. Regenerate. The cycle of actions is Art.

At the inaugural Narrascope conference at MIT earlier this year, Aaron Zemach delivered a primer on drama theory. Synthesizing an array of thinkers, from Aristotle to David Ball, Zemach discussed the primacy of the “action” in a play and how a play is a series of actions, verbs, or processes that convey meaning to an audience. A playwright never writes moral quandaries, internal thoughts, or dramatic conflict, Zemach argued. They can only craft a sequence of actions that produce these metaphysical phenomena in the minds of the audience. He then extended his thoughts to games: “It’s easy to figure out a moral argument by looking at which actions were rewarded and which actions punished.” [3]

Even if Zemach hadn’t been explicitly drawing parallels between theatre and games, the connection between his and Bogost’s thoughts on the semiotic function of action and process is particularly glaring. Be it through the meatspace actions taken by players in LARPs, actions in the psychic space of tabletop roleplaying games, or those encased in the silicone back-end of interactive fiction, the verbs we partake in during our gaming activities become powerful vectors of emotion and meaning. This may partly explain why the “illusion of choice” (or “dream of possibility’ [4]) model for interactive stories work so well. Noting the correlation between an action and its consequence appears to be less important than simply taking the action itself.

Zoe Quinn’s interactive story Depression Quest is famous for providing readers with choices that are crossed out and inaccessible. The choices are dangled tantalizingly in front of players but are forever out of reach. Are they even real choices? By deliberately showing players what they cannot do, Quinn attempts to convey how depression can render one powerless to perform even basic functions [5].

Kathryn Hymes and Hakan Seyalioglu’s widely lauded LARP Sign forces players to convey complex emotional truths via pantomime and a crude, improvised sign language—no talking or writing allowed. If you grow frustrated about your signs not being understood, you have to mark yourself in ink, a bodily reminder of your inabilities. The game conveys the frustrations that come with simply trying to be understood by others, while also giving players some idea of the challenges facing deaf children in Nicaragua in the 70s. [7]

The choices in Laura Michet’s interactive story Swan Hill focus more on the setting and emotions than on your actions. You do make decisions about what to do, but many of the interactive, clickable elements are about changing the scenery or your interpretation of the scenery. Michet weaves a tale of nostalgia, guilt, and regret by making you choose how to look at your present surroundings and their relationship to your past.[8]

Consume. Build. Consume. Build. The cycle of actions is humanity.

Maybe it’s for the best that games overload action with meaning. Maybe games can help us pause in our voracious appetite for doing, pause and think about the candy we’re eating, even if it means spitting it out.

Works Cited

[1] F. Gonzalez-Torres, Artist, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.). [Art]. The Art Institute of Chicago, 1991.

[2] I. Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.

[3] A. Zemach, All the World’s a Screen: How Improv and Playwriting Can Inform Digital Narrative, Cambridge, MA: Narrascope Conference, 2019.

[4] S. Biswas, “Rituals, Cheating, and The Dream of Possibility,” Sub-Q, February 2019. Available: https://sub-q.com/rituals-cheating-and-the-dream-of-possibility/.

[5] Z. Quinn, “Depression Quest,” 14 February 2013. [Online]. Available: http://www.depressionquest.com/.

[6] W. Beltrán, M. Kelly and S. Richardson, Bluebeard’s Bride, Magpie Games, 2017.

[7] K. Hymes and H. Seyalioglu, Sign: A Game About Being Understood, Thorny Games, 2012.

[8]L. Michet, “Swan Hill,” 2012. [Online]. Available: https://lauramichet.itch.io/swan-hill.

[9] J. Wyatt, R. J. Schwalb and B. R. Cordell, Player’s Handbook, Seattle: Wizards of the Coast, 2014.

Sharang Biswas is an award-winning game designer, an internationally exhibited artist, and a published writer based in New York. He has exhibited work at numerous museums, galleries, and art fairs including the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and the Toronto Reference Library. He has designed curricula for the Museum of the Moving Image, created learning games for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and written about games, interactivity, and culture for publications including Kill Screen, Sub Q, ZAM and First-Person Scholar. His two food-based games, “Feast” and “Verdure”, have garnered numerous accolades, including an IndieCade Award and and IGDN Indie Groundbreaker Award. Sharang has lectured or taught courses on game design at various universities and cultural institutions including Dartmouth, Columbia Teacher’s College, New York University, The International Center of Photography, and the Museum of the Moving Image, as well as spoken at conferences such as Game Devs of Color, GaymerX, Living Games, IndieCade and Boston FIG Talks.

Sharang holds a bachelor’s in Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering from Dartmouth College and a master’s in Interactive Design from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He is the Experience Designer for The Medici Group, a consulting firm focusing on diversity and innovation.

You can find him on Twitter @SharangBiswas, his website https://sharangbiswas.myportfolio.com/ , or on his Itch IO page https://astrolingus.itch.io/

The post Actions, Verbs, and Processes: Games and Being Human appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

Why had a few stray words that Rowling had let slip in response to a fan question so changed my outlook of an entire world—a fictional world, a world constructed in the imagination, but a world nonetheless. Dumbledore never really talks about his sex life in the books; I could have just decided for myself that he was gay and basked in my own version of the Potterverse, but no, hearing the author declare unequivocally that Dumbledore was gay—that made all the difference.

Which is weird.

“We prefer the imagined integrity of a metaphysical object to the stable version that we observe,” writes Espen Aarseth, referring specifically to our idealized notion of a “transcendental text” [2]. And apparently, authors have tremendous power over these psychic ur-texts, even though we as readers and film-goers construct much of the story in our own heads. The idea of “canon” in stories—that there’s one “true” version of a fiction, the fiction that “really happened,” and that it is controlled by the author—is potent.

Partly because we revere canon as the inviolable writ of an omniscient Author, we feel betrayed when the story deviates too much from what we expect or when beloved characters do things contrary to what our perspectives dictate. Game of Thrones fans, for instance, were so upset at HBO’s handling of the show’s 8th season that they started a petition to remake the season [3]. Again though, notice that the fans required another authored version of the story for it to be considered “real.”

The thing is, as Aarseth puts it, “textual integrity…is a cultural construct.” He continues to say “so is our notion of what constitutes a text itself—not only our conception of its function, but also what it appears to be made of and what conditions have to be met for us to acknowledge its existence.” [2] We create stories in our heads. Yes, they’re based on breadcrumbs authors may leave for us, but the experience of a story is a personal one. Evan Torner and David Jara go so far as to support “an understanding of fiction as a form of make believe and role-play.” [4]

This is somewhat true for all kinds of stories, even those we consider to be nonfiction. We love being told about the past, for example. Only if events are written down by someone are they crowned History, capital ‘H’ jaunty and gleaming. But the lines between history and mere story are blurry. Rebecca Slitt, partner and editor at Choice of Games, happens to have been a professor of history in a previous career. When I asked her how her academic training had informed her work with interactive fiction, she mentioned that what really helped her was the understanding that “historical narratives are always constructed by the person writing them and by the society in which that person lived.” Diving into her scholarly publications shows that her research echoes this sentiment. In her article, The Two Deaths of William Longsword: Wace, William of Malmesbury, and the Norman Past, Slitt writes about two specific chroniclers who not only dissent from the mainstream biographies of the second duke of Normandy but also deliberately shroud their assertions in historical doubt in order to protect themselves from backlash; to Slitt, “the question of historical accuracy versus invention is a thorny one.” [5]

I wouldn’t be writing this, of course, if games didn’t come into the picture. Games are funny when it comes to canon because we don’t simply consume the narrative in a game: we shape it (or at the very least, we feel like we shaped it). I’ve mentioned in a previous essay, Rituals, Cheating, and the Dream of Possibility, that my (and many folks’) tendency to give primacy to one version of events in a game, even though I’m aware of the directions into which the narrative might branch [6].  EA’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic famously boasted multiple endings [7] and while the series considers one of them to be “canon” with regards to sequels, I can’t help but think of “my” ending as the real one. More modern games go a step further and implement technology to import players’ choices and make them canon: your choices within Dragon Age: Origins’ [8] complex, branched plot carry forward into its sequels. Even on the IF front, titles such as Choice of Games’ Superlatives: Shattered Worlds [9] allow you to import data from its prequels.

In certain types of LARP, the idea of canon is flung even further out the window, what with each of the dozens of participants seeing only a small portion of the whole story tapestry, and that too is filtered through a backstory that only they know about (having imagined it themselves). In the first sequel to 2016’s New World Magischola, for example, in order to account for the various convoluted plotlines that players had created, designers Maury Brown and Ben Morrow were forced to introduce into the canon the idea that various alternate realities and timelines had come apart and tangled in on themselves [10].

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fred.

-Terry Pratchett, The Truth

Works Cited

[1]D. Smith, “Dumbledore was gay, JK tells amazed fans,” The Guardian, 2 October 2007. [Online]. Available: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/oct/21/film.books.

[2] E. J. Aarseth, “Nonlinearity and Literary Theory,” in The New Media Reader, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2003, pp. 762-780.

[3] L. Bradley, “Thousands of Angry Game of Thrones Fans Call on HBO to Remake Season 8,” Vanity Fair, 15 May 201. [Online]. Available: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/05/game-of-thrones-season-8-remake-petition-hbo.

[4] D. Jara and E. Torner, “Literary Studies ad Roleplaying Games,” in Role Playing Game Studies: A Transmedia Approach, New York, Routledge, 2018, pp. 265-282.

[5]R. Slitt, “The Two Deaths of William Longsword: Wace, William of Malmesbury, and the Norman Past,” in Anglo-Norman Studies XXXIV: Proceedings of the Battle Conference , Woodbridge, 2011.

[6] S. Biswas, “Rituals, Cheating, and The Dream of Possibility,” Sub-Q, February 2019. https://sub-q.com/rituals-cheating-and-the-dream-of-possibility/

[7] C. Avellone, D. Karpyshyn and J. Ohlen, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Electronic Arts, 2003.

[8] B. Knowles, M. Laidlaw and J. Ohlen, Dragon Age: Origins, Electronic Arts, 2009.

[9] A. Ripley, Superlatives: Shattered Worlds, Choice of Games, 2019.

[10]M. Brown and B. Morrow, New World Magischola: Yuletide Escapade, Newbury Township, OH, 2016.

Sharang Biswas is an award-winning game designer, an internationally exhibited artist, and a published writer based in New York. He has exhibited work at numerous museums, galleries, and art fairs including the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and the Toronto Reference Library. He has designed curricula for the Museum of the Moving Image, created learning games for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and written about games, interactivity, and culture for publications including Kill Screen, Sub Q, ZAM and First-Person Scholar. His two food-based games, “Feast” and “Verdure”, have garnered numerous accolades, including an IndieCade Award and and IGDN Indie Groundbreaker Award. Sharang has lectured or taught courses on game design at various universities and cultural institutions including Dartmouth, Columbia Teacher’s College, New York University, The International Center of Photography, and the Museum of the Moving Image, as well as spoken at conferences such as Game Devs of Color, GaymerX, Living Games, IndieCade and Boston FIG Talks.

Sharang holds a bachelor’s in Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering from Dartmouth College and a master’s in Interactive Design from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He is the Experience Designer for The Medici Group, a consulting firm focusing on diversity and innovation.

You can find him on Twitter @SharangBiswas, his website https://sharangbiswas.myportfolio.com/ , or on his Itch IO page https://astrolingus.itch.io/

The post Dukes and Dumbledore: Truth and Canonicity in Stories appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

(And if you haven’t played Aisle before, do yourself a favor and give yourself twenty minutes or so to dig into it.)

No player, even in the most open sandbox world, can do everything they want. But here, in this shopping aisle—for one moment at least—there is freedom.

Aisle’s emotional core comes from the exhaustion of all possibilities. This is a root gameplay experience of parser games from the beginning—in a puzzle-based game, if you’re stuck, the hints recommend that, perhaps, you haven’t tried the right command. When this becomes an unpleasant, frustrating experience it becomes a “guess the verb” problem. But all parser games, to an extent, are guess the verb games, unless (in a version of minimalism on another axis), most of the commands themselves are stripped away. But in Aisle, this becomes a rich set of possibilities. Because it is one glimmering moment in time, one that can also stretch back into the past through memory recall, it invites the player to try everything. And it duly rewards the player with rich bits of story with seemingly throwaway commands (“jump” is particularly harrowing). By making Aisle so dense with story in its “default” responses, more elegantly than most games that have become before or after, it hints at the freedom of a gaming environment that is, by definition, about constraint. No player, even in the most open sandbox world, can do everything they want. But here, in this shopping aisle—for one moment at least—there is freedom.

Aside from the one-move conceit, I think Aisle also points towards a greater shift in design philosophy, in a much more expansive view of what interactive fiction could be. Almost in spite of itself, it is like an alternate-reality version of a mobile game before the entire architecture of mobile gaming was even invented. (Of course, interactive fiction was available on handheld platforms like the Palm Pad and the Apple Newton long before the iPhone.) While still a parser game, and the tactile sensation of typing in the various commands lends a lot to the context of each move (compared to clicking or touching a series of choices), the experience of time in the game feels similar to a game that you might play for a few minutes while waiting for the train—one in which you can get a complete experience.

The fact that this experience is deeply touching and emotionally reaving once the entire mosaic of Aisle’s protagonist comes into view is more an indictment of what mobile gaming has failed to become (with notable exceptions), rather than making Aisle seem dated or out of touch.

The post Aisle: Twenty Years Later appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

Failure is part of life, and it’s an ingrained feature of storytelling. Writing-101-type story structures often incorporate some aspect of failure: heroes make mistakes or are set back by their inability to deal with adversity, before ultimately moving on.

Failure has always been a tricky subject to approach in game narratives. Games often introduce the possibility of failure on the part of the player, and then have to figure out how that will play out narratively.

In a visual novel, for example, you might not want a skill component to the game. In a choice-based narrative, asking a player to make the “right choice” without some underlying system or methodology that players can learn to use will feel like a guessing game. We usually don’t write branching narrative to test the player in this way, but given a traditional character arc, we do need to write points of failure for the character. How do we square those two?

It’s easy to fall into a trap of suggesting to a player that they did something wrong. We do so much to make the player believe that their choices have significant outcomes for the characters in the story; when those characters face a bad turn, how do we make this a satisfying narrative beat and not an invitation to reload a save? And in games that do have a skill component or some mechanical aspect that allows for failure (such as an action game or an RPG with random rolls), how can we think about failure in more narratively rich ways?

Watching things burn – This is where Sunless Skies lives a lot of the time. If your failure branches bring the player a gruesome, perverse pleasure; if the player character breaks open like a cross-sectioned cake, showing his interior to the world in the process; if the player can be made to feel more as an agent of chaos than of a particular agenda… then there might not really be such a thing as failure. Failing forward gives your player safety to do risky (or even reckless) things; the related principle of entertaining fires means that players are rewarded for going there. Interactive comedy can get a lot of mileage out of those ideas.

Choosing your poison – This is a more serious approach that is found in a lot of Choice of Games pieces. Here, we look less at failure so much as paying a heavy price. We give the player multiple priorities and ask them to juggle; when they drop a ball, it’s the ball they chose to let go of.

As always, those are a starting point to think about the issue: Failure is a fact of storytelling (and life). And so it’s also another lens through which to look at the sewing together of mechanics, structure, presentation, and story.

The post Failing Forward appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.