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.

When was the last time a piece of interactive fiction blew you away with the fact that it was even possible? What was the last game where you thought, “I can’t believe that was made in _______?”

Parser interactive fiction has a long, if currently stagnant history—something between a tradition and a parlor game—of mangling the standard text-adventure format to recreate Space Invaders or Sokoban or Super Mario Bros.-style platformers. Twine, too, has plenty of experiments, from creating elaborate in-game spy puzzles to glitching out Hugo’s House of Horrors.

But you don’t have to want to make a flashy gimmick to make innovative IF. Nor do you need to be an expert hacker—coding skills certainly help, but are more learnable than you probably think they are. What you do need is a certain level of determination (perfectionism and stubbornness also help), and a desire to break things for fun and innovation. A few tips on how:

Start with a story or game idea, not with a platform.

I have never sat down and thought, “I’m going to make an innovative piece of IF.” Nor have I thought, “Now I’m going to make a Twine,” or “I’m going to try Ink now.” Or rather, I have thought these things—and it went nowhere. It’s like thinking “I’m going to use a stove today” without a recipe: All you do is burn gas.

More subtle, but often more pernicious, is that a platform is only as good as the ideas you bring to it. When you think “I’m going to make a parser game,” you start designing around a platform’s limitations—or probably just what you think are its limitations—and not around an idea. And people respond to ideas, not tools.

So ask yourself: In an ideal world, if you could magically make your finished story appear, what would it do? How would it progress? How would it be structured? This stage is just brainstorming. Some of what you envision might be impossible. Some may not be the greatest way to tell your story. Some of it might get tossed out for scope. But more than you think will be possible, and maybe even easier than you expected.

Figure out how “breakable” your system is.

Of the more common non-commercial IF platforms:

• Some platforms, like Texture or ChoiceScript, are relatively limited. The system does one set of things, and if you want to do those things, that’s great. But if you want to do other things, you’re out of luck.
• Twine is theoretically very customizable with CSS and JavaScript; however, some story formats make this much harder than others. On the easier end of the axis is Snowman, explicitly designed for those familiar with code. On the other end is Harlowe, where it’s possible to incorporate JavaScript (most of Human Errors does), but it requires digging through many files of deliberately undocumented code.
• There is a lot going on in Inform 7 just out of the box, and it’s versatile enough that you can theoretically work in it for years without ever touching some of its features. (I tend to use scenes and text substitutions often.) If something really seems impossible, and you can’t figure out any way around it, you can dip into Inform 6, the more traditional programming language behind the scenes. Finally—and much of this is new—you can add multimedia, tooltips, and even JavaScript code directly within Inform.
• Platforms like Ink and Undum, being open source, are as customizable as you have spare time and desire to disembowel someone else’s code.

Don’t reinvent the wheel.

Your ideas, of course, can be anything you can imagine. But the mechanics to implement those ideas are often fairly simple: tracking a few variables, triggering a few lines of code. Even something as simple as tweaking the default CSS can make your story appear far more innovative than it would otherwise.

Remember, you’re not tinkering for tinkering’s sake—you’re doing it to get your story to work the way you want it to work. And chances are, someone else has also wanted their story to work that way. If you want a certain text effect, is there a macro or an extension to do that for you? If you want to track how often a reader interacts with a particular passage, or has “seen” a piece of text, or has moused over something, JavaScript examples abound.

Often, you can just look directly at what others have done. CSS code on websites can be viewed via most browsers’ Inspect Element feature, Twine stories can be loaded into the online editor, and many parser games have their source code available. Obviously, the idea here is not to plagiarize others’ work. But it can help you see that a lot more is possible than you may have thought.

Test even more thoroughly than the thorough testing you were already planning.

The more you experiment, the more you delve into things your system might not be designed to handle. Plan for this. Sometimes this can mean adding fail-safes—if you’re tinkering with a passage manually via code, are you loading the right thing? If your game has a finite amount of text, is it possible to run out, and have you provided a buffer of extra text and/or a way to generate more?

Do extra testing on your custom mechanics, of course, but also test the story as a whole, thoroughly. When you break one thing, other things tend to break as well. (An example: Inform 7 executes an unexpectedly huge number of rules when processing commands. Any one of those rules can be the thing that, purely hypothetically, makes your story crash instead of ending.) It’s a bit of extra work, but you’ll never know when it might be worth it.

The post Experimenting in IF appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

In prose, it’s very natural to simply peer into a character’s inner thoughts. But that’s not the only option, and in interactive writing, there are often broader constraints and variant formats that change how we approach character interiority. Interactive writing often needs to be shorter and more matter-of-fact. Often, we want to situate what we’re writing in the here and now and avoid delving into digressions or literary devices like italicized thoughts.

IF can also promote a much fuller identification between protagonist and reader; we have a player character rather than simply a viewpoint character. In some pieces, it can feel intrusive or just clumsy to give that figure thoughts by direct narration.

I come from a film background, and film has developed an entire language of circumlocutions to show what a character is thinking without resorting to overly literal dialogue or overbearing voiceover. Editing, cinematography, imagery and acting are all part of a complex system of signifiers used to give audiences an impression of what a character is thinking or feeling.

The first IF tool we have to communicate protagonist interiority is simply the world. How we describe the player character’s environment is a major element. Film will establish a scene to suggest what is important to the protagonist, or edit an actor with a shot of a prop to communicate something about that character’s thought process.

In IF, we view the world through the eyes of a player character, and that should tint what we see. What’s important to the player character? What are the associations, implicit and explicit, present in their environment? This can be thought of as a matter of editing the environment into what matters; of choosing what to describe, what detail to linger on, based on its significance to a character.

The baseline here is describing the world from the character’s viewpoint, but you can do one better: you can model the protagonist’s interior state and vary description in accordance to that. This can be as simple as changing “the back door is ajar” to “the damn back door is ajar” to “your asshole roommate left the back door open again” as the player character’s aggravation mounts. If a game has multiple playable characters, each might see the same place in entirely different terms.

The other major tool we have is interaction. As always, choices presented to the player imply a lot about who the player character is. About what the boundaries of their action are; about what their beliefs are. There’s a gulf between “Say everything is okay” as choice text, and “(Lie) Say everything is okay.” If the game is mechanically modelling the interior state of the player character, that could change which choices are available or how they are presented.

This raises an important question: How variable is your player character? Is your player simply guiding a defined persona through the story, or are they helping define who this person is through their choices? This is a key issue to consider when designing an interactive story, and it’s heavily highlighted by the question of interiority.

Here are some models for how the player relates to the player character:

Inhabitant: The player inhabits the player character, defines and lives through them. Maybe the player character is created by the player, as in many RPGs. Either way, the player is in the driver’s seat of defining how the player character thinks and acts. Maybe those choices will narrow as the story goes on, letting the player “lock into” a particular path; but either way, the player is building the player character as they go along. Here, evincing interiority is about responding to the player; how the PC sees the world is a function of the choices that the player has made previously.

Choice of Games adopts this format. As the protagonist is developed alongside the player, this lends itself well to tracking the player’s choices and using them to color what they see as they progress through the story.

Actor: The player is interpreting the player character. Reflective choice (choices that are about how you feel or what you’re thinking rather than what you do) are a valuable tool in achieving this. Think of how characters that have been played by many different actors – Richard III, Sherlock Holmes, Superman – draw different interpretations in each telling. Maybe it’s defined that the player character will do something, but the player’s choice is about what that action means, how it feels.

This way of looking at it interests me because it hasn’t been tried very often but seems perfect for short pieces and particularly for adaptations. The Baron is a classic example of this model, but it could be taken in any number of directions. Consider a spy thriller where the player character always does the same things, but the player is choosing whether they are a double agent or not. Consider a game about choosing between a traditional and a revisionist interpretation of a Shakespeare play.

Guide: The player is in dialogue with the player character, suggesting their actions as an angel (or demon) on their shoulder. This is the perspective traditional graphical adventures like Monkey Island adopt; the PC has a clear, fixed viewpoint, and the player is there as a facilitator.

In this model, interiority often emerges from how the player character interprets the player’s directions or even refuses them, argues against them. Classic point-and-click adventure games had a combinatorial mechanical model, where you could “use” any item in the game with any other item; most combinations would fail entirely, usually with some amusing response from the player character. This very clearly creates a separation between player and player character; the PC is acting as a filter on the expressive possibilities of the game mechanic.

This is a complex subject with a lot of room to learn. As always, I encourage you to experiment and think about it deeply as you pursue your own projects. Ask yourself: How does the player relate to the player character? How do I give the player a glimpse into the player character’s mind? And, most of all: What tools do I have to do so?

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 Making Interactive Fiction: Interiority appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

Emily Short’s First Draft of the Revolution is a pretty straightforward example of how to do this. It’s an adaptation of epistolary fiction, where the interaction consists of drafting and redrafting letters. The story uses the interaction prompts themselves to reveal more and more of its characters and its world, a complement to the core idea of the epistolary novel as a narrow window into the lives of its characters.

Not all genres lend themselves so readily to this kind of translation, of course. Many attempts and iterations have been made on constructing an interactive mystery story, and those have met with difficulty. In a way, the mystery novel already relies on a form of interactivity (given the expectation that the reader might tease out the solution ahead of the characters), which, when made explicit as actual interactivity, loses its expressive power. Jon Ingold’s Make it Good presents itself as a detective story, but contains a twist that recasts it into a different type of narrative entirely — that twist enables it to have the trappings of a detective story while shaking off the expectations that might render it nonfunctional.

For the sake of an object example, I want to walk through adapting in a different direction. Rather than looking to literary genres and adapting into interactive fiction, I want to think of video game ideas and adapt them into interactive fiction. To pick up on last month’s column about building climactic moments, I’d like to consider the boss fight.

Boss fights work poorly in a lot of games. Often they seem tacked on, nothing but an enemy with an exceedingly long health bar. But where they work well — as in Dark Souls’ gallery of grotesques, or in the Monster Hunter series where the entire game revolves around elaborate boss fights — they can be a real anchor for what a game is about and how it feels to play it. I’m not interested, here, in the fiction of fighting a large monster, but in the underlying mechanical ideas and how we might plunder them for our own use. Maybe the Monster Hunter hunt could be a basis for something else — an emotional confrontation with a character, perhaps.

Monster Hunter’s monsters are, in themselves, complex systems with many mechanics attached to them: they can become enraged, exhausted, or hungry; they can flee in fear; hunters can stun them, make them flinch, mount them, trip up their legs to bring them down or attack their wings to keep them from taking flight. But what makes the hunt a useful example to me is that each one of those systems is individually very simple and straightforward, and they all work in orthogonal ways that are comparable to each other. Stunning the monster is done by dealing “KO damage,” which comes from hitting the head with an impact attack. Mounting the monster is done by dealing “mounting damage,” by attacking it from above, and so on. Those values are hidden to the player (indeed, Monster Hunter tells you almost nothing about the monster’s state explicitly, preferring to use animation and diegetic cues), in much the same way a lot of IF uses underlying variables that are hidden. Tripping, stunning, or toppling the monster creates a big opening to deal damage and move the fight towards its conclusion, but the special damage needed to bring it down increases each time, making it hard to repeatedly employ the same tactics.

How do we think about this in terms of a different kind of story? When trying to persuade someone, or walk them to some emotional catharsis, we might have different weapons we can bring to bear: appealing to their reason, their guilt, their emotional attachments, the opinions of third parties, their better angels (or worse devils). Maybe some of these choices are made ahead of time, before the confrontation even starts; we choose what we bring to the table, much like a hunter chooses which weapon to take into a hunt.

We build a cycle of threat-response-reaction. The adversary starts to make a move, argument, or direct the conversation; the player character responds in some way; the adversary reacts to that response, concluding their original move. In a way, the two characters are talking past each other, each one trying to make their point separately — mimicking plenty of real arguments I’ve been in.

Successfully reacting to a move might create an opening for the player character to insert their own appeals into the conversation, whatever it may be; concluding that argument might break down a barrier that allows the conflict to progress. The characters start by circling around each other warily, but their responses gradually get more aggressive, desperate, and involved. On the adversary’s side, as they approach exhaustion (or catharsis, depending on your story); on the player’s side, as they employ and then discard each tactic available to them in turn.

Of course, this is a very adversarial, even cruel, framework to apply to interactions between two people — maybe that’s right for your story, or maybe not. But I hope the underlying idea is helpful: You can find models for building story mechanics in strange places, and sometimes there’s serendipitous consonance there.

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 Making Interactive Fiction: Adapting from Other Genres appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

When a specific scene plays a pivotal role in the story – a key bit of setup, a major confrontation, a climax – it’s often valuable to give that scene a different interaction and mechanical treatment from the rest of the story. Changing how the player interacts can highlight a change of stakes: two characters that were dancing around each other enter open confrontation; a situation that was merely worrying turns dangerous; the monster steps out of the shadows.

This change in the language of interaction we’re using opens up some risks. New mechanical ideas might seem tacked on or underdeveloped, and in a choice-driven story where underlying mechanics (like variables tracking the story’s direction) aren’t shown to the player, the change in rules can seem arbitrary or hard for players to grasp.

But it’s also an opportunity to harmonize the story to the interactivity. A significant scene might have more variability and offer the reader a different class of choices from what they’ve been used to. This consonance between having some richer choices, and the significant story moment surrounding those choices, is very useful in simply allocating your resources. We can only include so much variation and branching in a project, and having the most pivotal story moments vary more dramatically across playthroughs is a good rule of thumb.

Here are a few common ways of thinking about climactic scenes in interactive narratives:

Cashing in chips: The player spends the entire story building up to this moment, accumulating something that feeds into this confrontation. This is a classic adventure-fantasy structure — we spend the book collecting macguffins that all feed into the final boss fight — but you can use it in other ways, too. Mystery stories (how much evidence do you present at the moment when you accuse the culprit?) are another example.

Sorting: The player’s overall decision-making is judged, and the story branches (possibly into an ending) from there. There’s a complex continuum in IF between role-playing as a character making choices and making choices to define who your character is. In stories that lean towards the latter, it’s often helpful to have an explicit moment when those choices are “locked in” and we find out what this person really is made of. Marrying that moment to an climactic story beat makes it read as logical and earned.

Shifts in interaction: If a story is mostly about wandering and exploring, transitioning into a conversation sequence can immediately suggest that the rules have changed. Similarly, moving from conversation to an action sequence, or to a different scale of decision, can reset the stakes and the expectations for a new scene.

Freedom (or constraint): Changing how wide-ranging the viewpoint character’s actions are can highlight a tense moment. If up until now we’ve only had dialogue choices, and suddenly we’re given the option to scream, or throw things or run away, that helps raise the tension. Conversely, the player character might find themselves suddenly constrained – suddenly a game with a variety of moves available to the player turns into a strict dialogue funnel. This can reflect some diegetic element of the plot (eg, the player character is tied to a chair), but it doesn’t have to.

Gauntlets: Climactic scenes often involve self-contained choices that have significant effects on the subsequent story. If done poorly, this can make the rest of the story seem inconsequential as it gets flattened by the outcome of the endgame. But it’s still a useful tool for raising tension. Having the bulk of the story feed into the climax somehow – by opening up more alternatives, by shifting the attitudes of different characters, or just by coloring how this section is viewed by the player character – is a good way of tying everything together.

Hopefully these examples get you thinking. A lot of IF establishes its mode of interaction and its mechanics right from the start and never shifts them, which can make those interactive components feel like they don’t have an arc to complement the arc of the story. Thinking both from a big-picture perspective, and in terms of each individual scene, can make for a stronger composition of interactive elements.

In essence, you can think of key scenes as miniature interactive narratives within your overarching narrative, with their own rules and preconditions: working this way can help you use a broader palette of ideas about interaction and agency without those getting muddled.

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 Making Interactive Fiction: Scenes appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

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 use the term differently. But this is how I approach it: narrative design comprises the structures, mechanics, and dynamics that convey a story to a player.

Narrative design is about the whys and hows of story. It approaches the twin problems of how you deliver story (Are there non-player characters in the game? Can they talk? Do they talk spontaneously or only “in conversation” with the player?) and how story functions (Can the player change what happens in the story? Are there branching paths and/or an underlying world model?).

There’s a lot to say about how to build these structures, but a starting point is to think about them in terms of specific questions.

When you use a tool like Twine, for instance, you’re relying on a set of assumptions that essentially make up a narrative design for you — first-time Twine authors often write a narrative that relies on path branching for its underlying logic, because Twine pushes for that. To think like a narrative designer, you’ll need to make those choices into conscious decisions.

Here are some questions to ask:

Structure: How is the story organized? Are there explicit “chunks” of content that are self-contained (chapters, passages)? Can those be seen in different orders? How does the order vary? Is there a single overarching structure to the whole piece, or are there different “sections”?

Time: Does the story always move forward, or does the player have to do something specific to advance it? Are player actions limited by some resource or constraint? If the story isn’t always moving forward, what is the player doing other than advancing the story? Is there action going on in the background, independent from the player, or is all action tied to the player’s actions?

Choice: Is the player making choices as they advance the story? How are those choices presented? How does this presentation limit choice? How many choices do we want to give the player at once? What are the choices about: courses of action, emotional valence, player character self-expression, several of those, or something else entirely? Do choices feed into some underlying system? Can choices branch the story? Can choices be hidden or disabled? If so, under what circumstances?

Model: Is there some underlying simulation that impacts the story? How is the state of it surfaced to the player, if at all (for example, Choice of Games stories have an explicit stat screen)? Can the “world model” branch the story? Affect the choices you offer?

Gating: Does the player have to perform certain actions, accrue certain resources, or put the game into a certain state to advance the story or access certain branches? What happens if they fail or delay? What are we putting behind those “gates”: critical parts of the story, optional scenes, better story outcomes?

Goals: What is the player trying to do in this story? Are they trying to get the best outcome possible for the player character? Are they trying to implement a certain value system or express their own from a range of choices? Are they simply observers or low-agency participants in a process, with a goal to understand or explore? How do we make it clear to the player what their role is?

If this seems a bit overwhelming — well, yeah. The goal here is just to point out that interactive narrative is variable, and you really start to see things when you examine your assumptions. I hope this gets you thinking.

[Editor’s note: Part 2 of this post will go live Tuesday, July 10th — be sure to check in with us then for more on this topic!]

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 Making Interactive Fiction: Narrative Design for Writers (part 1) appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.