“I think that one day Rybread is going to successfully get what’s
churning around in his mind written & compiled and present us with an
absolutely stellar adventure game. And after giving us three weeks to
play it, I predict he’ll then blow up the earth.”

–Robb Sherwin on L.U.D.I.T.E.

When I first became involved in the interactive fiction community online, back in 2001, my head was blown open by the possibilities afforded by parser-based games. I dutifully tracked down a copy of Lost Treasures of Infocom to find my footing with the “canon” that most others were building from. But there was someone else who seemed to be working on the fringes of the community–who some people considered an Ed Wood-type figure making monumentally bad game after game. Many considered him the worst writer of interactive fiction on the contemporary scene. Still others, fewer in number, considered him one of the experimental geniuses of interactive fiction. His name is Ryan Stevens, but he wrote under the name Rybread Celsius.

I have to say that I found myself in the latter camp right away. Today his work is largely forgotten (which, to be fair, has happened even to many works that were immensely popular in the late 90s and early 00’s). A lot of times he appeared to be banging his head against the constraints of Inform 6, trying to bend and twist the form of the parser game into something that fit his idiosyncratic vision.

Often broken in a very real sense, rife with typos (deliberate or not?), bad default messages, and constant point of view shifts—and largely unplayable without a walkthrough—his games entered in the Interactive Fiction Competition always scraped near the bottom places.

They are eminently difficult to describe.

There’s Symetry (1997, 32^nd out of 34 places), the story of a sinister mirror and a letter opener. “Tonight will be the premiere of you slumbering under its constant eye.” There’s Lurk. Unite. Die. Invent. Think. Expire. (1999, 35^th out of 37 places), with rooms such as the “chaos hymn point” and a koan-like winning command that…okay, would probably be difficult to come up with on one’s own. There’s “Rippled Flesh” (1996, 24^th out of 26 places), an earlier effort that plays it fairly straight but nevertheless yields several surprises.

But his crowning achievement—at least for me—is Acid Whiplash (1998, 23^rd out of 27 places), its title the closest thing to an ars poetica in his body of work. In the preface there’s this:

“Rybread Celsius casts two shadows. One speaks. The other sickens. (They also have a great dance routine.)”

And there’s this:

Note: At any time, type WALKTHRU for a complete solution to the puzzle at hand.

 

>walkthru

 

Walk though what? >

It includes perhaps my favorite room description ever: “A tiny little room in the shape of a burning credit card.”

And room descriptions like this:

Hermit’s R00m Tilly The Tacky leaves here. He is a hermit. He reads “Walden” twice a year. He thinks he is cool, but he’s not, he’s snot. Currenty he is not here. The room is pretty bare. Not tacky at all.There is a beaver and a cheese cloth, prolly his bedding.

 

You can see a Tooth Beaver here.

At one point you also enter the Pope’s hat, and elsewhere into a truck dashboard while co-author Cody Sandifier and Rybread have a long conversation:

[Sandifier]: In Symetry, the response to GET IN BED is “But you’re already in the Your Bed.” I love your mixing of articles and possessive adjectives — especially since the player is actually *outside* the bed. It’s this sort of interior/exterior dualism that strikes me with a pleasant chill.

 

[RC: The bed struck you? I don’t remember coding that. Hmm, but it’s a good idea. I think the best things are that is all shielded in a thin bit o’ seriousness, just waiting to explode with the insanity of Brazil.]

The madcap humor wouldn’t work if it wasn’t so self-deprecating (and of course, your mileage may vary—it is laid on quite thick), and aware of his own status as cult figure (of sorts) within the IF community. Lots of the interviews delve into the strangeness of his games, with interviewer Sandifier providing an almost fawning, lit-crit sheen onto the proceedings. In a way, the interview becomes a retrospective of “favorite scenes from previous Rybread games,” and his work certainly invites this, because they are so hard to describe in terms of narrative. If there’s a skein of images, it becomes (somewhat) easier to pluck one or two out, since the context between the images is rather fragile to begin with.

Even when the images did their best to break:

But what really interests me about these games now is looking at them through the lens of the recent “Twine Revolution”—the wide swath of games made in Twine and other mostly choice based platforms that elide concrete meanings, use langauge like buzzsaws, and take huge cognitive and temporal leaps from one passage to another. The key here is passages, of course. The core unit of organization in a work of Twine (a passage of text) is usually very different than in Inform (a room). But Rybread’s work is the closest parallel to an experimental hypertext work in parser form—and he was doing it 16 years ago.

But Rybread was enamored of the parser form. He clearly loved the history of interactive fiction, and loved riffing off Infocom (“Caecilius est pater. Metella est mater. The last lousy point can be won by… but no. That would be telling. Well, what the hell, I’ll tell. The last lousy point is rot13.”) he writes in the >AMUSING section of Acid Whiplash.

And the games are rife with puzzles. They are, most often, broken puzzles, but the design form that Rybread was working with absolutely took its cues from the Infocom classics and the “first wave” of the hobbyist IF community in the 90s.

Authorial intent is often tricky to discern—but what did Rybread mean to do with his games, after all? Maybe then it would be possible to intersect those aims with those of more recent Twines. I was pleased to find the closest thing to a more-or-less coherent “artist’s statement” by Rybread in the IF Theory Handbook:

Myself, I have ideas. And try to express them. But it’s like some sitcom father trying to get all the clothes into suitcase. They overflow, wrinkle and escape. What’s left is some sad ready-made. The line between a bad game and a Dada game need not exist, they share the same Venn diagram. But the attributes expand. There is the sense of the uncanny and stupid, without stepping into the realm of surreal (a more fleshed out plane), but ghosting its border. … Grammar mistakes and coding ineffiencies paint miniscule portraits of the author’s states.

This idea of “ghosting borders” is certainly one that some experimental Twine games play with—“glitching” a game to provide a heightened sense of fracture or confusion. For example, in b minus seven’s Inward Narrow Crooked Lanes, the if/then statements are embedded within the player’s field of vision. The scaffolding highlights the sense of playing a game (in fact, during the 2014 IF Comp when this game was released, it became a discussion point as to whether this was intentional or not; whether it was a “bug” or not):

Leaving “broken” pieces in plain sight is of course a technique that has a long life from early Joycean modernism to postmodern cut-up. So perhaps the closest similarities don’t have to do with content, but rather process: bending an interactive fiction platform to get at something. The words and connections appearing to rush out of control because of an inner state that needs to be expressed. Of course, no game is “immune” from this—even the driest puzzle fest is an attempt to communicate an interior desire by the author. But in both Rybread’s games and later “personal” or more experimental Twine games, the author is trying to disassociate the player in order to convey a mental state or something “uncanny”, and giving the player an opportunity to navigate this disassociation. In Porpentine’s Cyberqueen (2012), language melts  (“thousandfold armlungs breathing datapotence) as you the player-character become more and more trapped, more and more caught in the visceral embrace of the Cyberqueen. For Porpentine’s signal works, the word disassociations are at the service of a profound, almost unbearable sense of alienation, while for Rybread it’s more for anarchic play and, in later games, a winking awareness of his own status in the interactive fiction community. Maybe this is the difference between tragedy and comedy in gaming. (Though games like Crystal Warrior Ke$ha and High End Customizable Sauna Experience certainly display Porpentine’s wicked—and invitingly collaborative–sense of humor.)

And for me, since coming into the IF community in 2001 and joining Team Rybread, I have definitely changed as a player and creator, and I think I’ve grown as well. In 2001 I was 28 years old, still only a few years removed from poetry grad school in a homogenous college town and, well, still fairly precocious. My first forays into interactive fiction were in the parser form (ALAN, actually). Now in 2016, I’m a parent to four-year-old twins, I’ve recently come out as transgender and what excites me about interactive fiction has certainly evolved. Recent games—both choice and parser-based have a depth and breadth that is unparalleled in history of the field. And in particular, interactive fiction works from queer authors have certainly sustained me when I still wasn’t ready to articulate who I was in public.

So I have complicated feelings about my own devotion to Rybread Celsius’ games. I still love them, particularly Acid Whiplash, but I’m also acutely aware of their limitations—not in terms of experimental content, but in terms of heart, and putting risky content (which might confuse your audience) at the intersection of the emotional and the political.

But I have to remind myself that influence doesn’t happen in a straight, neat line most of the time. I have to give myself permission to have complicated feelings about things that I liked when I was in my 20s. And I encourage you to try out some of Rybread’s games yourself—perhaps you’ll take your own inspiration from them, in a way that couldn’t even be conceived 15 years ago. That’s perhaps the beauty of interactive fiction as a living, breathing tradition—one that the “Twine Revolution” is certainly a part of.

A. Johanna DeNiro is a two-time XYZZY Award winner and the author of IF works such as Solarium, Deadline Enchanter, and Feu de Joie. She can be reached at www.goblinmercantileexchange.com and @adeniro on Twitter.

The post The Works of Rybread Celsius: A Critical (Re)Assessment appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

Lisa Shininger

Kerstin Hall: Dinosaurs or robots?

Lisa Shininger: Dinosaurs, because I’m fairly confident they won’t reach for the nuclear codes on gaining sentience. But who knows?

Kerstin: So you are pretty involved with Apex Magazine and podcasts and things. Want to tell us what that entails?

Lisa: I love working on Apex‘s podcast! It’s been a wonderful experience using my voice to bring such great stories to life. The editor, Jason Sizemore, put out a call for a new podcast producer a little over a year ago. Julia du Mais and I had been doing Bossy Britches for a few months, so I sent him my resume and a sample of the podcast. And he liked it enough to give me the job.

Every month Jason sends the story he wants to feature for the next month’s issue, along with the author’s bio and some ad copy. I read through it all a couple of times, try to get a sense of the characters and narrator’s voices, then record. Sometimes I use pronunciation guides, in the hopes that I don’t mess up someone’s name or a word in a language I don’t speak. The original recording usually winds up with a lot of tongue-twisting and cursing that I have to edit out!

Kerstin: But this was your very first fiction sale? How was that experience for you?

Lisa: I can’t tell you how exciting it was to get the acceptance from sub-Q. I’ve been writing forever, but only got serious about submitting in the last year or two. The rejection slips have been piling up! At a previous job, we had some sales training where we were taught to count the no’s, so I set up a whole filing system in Gmail for those. When you and Tory emailed me about this project, I realized I’d never set one up for yes’s! That was a fun thing to do.

This whole process of working with sub-Q has been a fantastic experience. When I initially developed the project, there were a handful of beta testers who were a big help, but you gave me suggestions that helped to clarify various threads of the story. Getting to sit down and work through all the sequences again with fresh feedback let me see where the story accomplished what I wanted it to, and where it didn’t.

Kerstin: Do you have a lot of experience in the interactive fiction realm? Where did your interest in the medium come from?

Lisa: You know, I’d totally forgotten about this until a couple of weeks ago, but I was completely obsessed with Infocom’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when I was a kid. I don’t remember ever getting past the room on the Vogon ship with the Babel fish dispenser. Which happens early in the game. So, obviously, I was very good at that one.

Another Day in Seething Bay is my first and only interactive fiction so far. I wrote it for a digital media class last year. We had a choice of IF frameworks to work with, and Twine made the most sense to me. So I sketched out a preliminary story idea and started mapping it. It morphed into something completely different when I realized I had no idea what I was doing!

Eventually it clicked that Twine was just a new box to put choose-your-adventure stories into. My friends and I were obsessed with those when we were kids, so it was a lot of fun figuring out how to write one of my own.

Kerstin: You said you received advice from other people in writing Another Day in Seething Bay. How did that influence the development of the story?

Lisa: The folks who volunteered to beta were so helpful. I also got some guidance on developing the IF itself from my professor, Trevor Dodge. Honestly, though, the development of the story was mostly due to the limitations of my skill in Twine. I knew where I wanted Adanna to wind up, and what she should encounter along the way, but I didn’t know how to do the really fancy things&emdash;for example, replacing text within the same passage based on clicking certain words. So that moved it in more of a classic choose-your-adventure direction.

Kerstin: What do you do for fun?

Lisa: Lately it’s binge on old Law & Order episodes! I love to travel and I’m hoping to visit every contiguous US state by an arbitrary deadline. Most of my free time at home is eaten up with writing, reading, trying to keep the cat from falling off things, and spending way too much time on Twitter.

Kerstin: Give me one unusual factoid about yourself.

Lisa: My mom swears that the only thing that would get me to stop crying as a baby was Walter Cronkite’s voice. To this day, if a movie or something uses his voice, I will completely stop whatever I’m doing before I even register that it’s him.

Kerstin: Where do you live and where did you grow up?

Lisa: I grew up and still live in Dayton, Ohio.

Kerstin: What shapes or influences your writing?

Lisa: I read constantly, everything from cereal boxes to fanfic to whatever novel I can get my hands on. You can definitely tell when I’ve been reading a lot of the same author, or when one has made a big impact on me, because everything I write starts to sound like them. Which can be great! I’d give a lot to have the same facility with conversation and dialogue as my favorites. I don’t think I’ve developed a distinct voice of my own, so that’s something I’m working on.

Kerstin: How bad are your Mondays?

Lisa: Bad! I got a little too used to long weekends over the holidays.

Kerstin: So Seething Bay. It’s not really an easy game to win . . .

Lisa: I’m actually delighted that you would say that. This might not be entirely true, but I’m convinced I never made it out of a choose-your-adventure book alive without cheating.

Kerstin: Players of Seething Bay certainly get to relive that difficulty curve. So many ways to die! What were you trying to say with the piece?

Lisa: You know, it was originally going to be a story about a character trying to get out of a regular old Earth office building at the end of a workday and running into all these obstacles. Like Dilbert meets a Klingon gauntlet, minus the weird sexism and the pain sticks.

When I started it, I was in school full-time and long-distance, and I’d recently taken on a new role at work. So Seething Bay was born from that frustration of just never having enough time, and the pressure to get things done so I could relax for a few minutes.

As the story took on more of a sci-fi future setting, I thought about what it might mean for the people working for these huge companies on the moon. In the end, it didn’t seem like it would be much different to nowadays, where most people are dependent on the value a company places on their work ability. Just, on the moon, you have much less of a safety net.

I took all these things that are bubbling under the surface in America – late capitalism and racial and class inequality, and what happens when you aren’t afforded the incredible privilege of being more than one paycheck away from ruin. All of which led to a grim and depressing view of the future that’s really at odds with what I hope for humanity.

Kerstin: When did you first fall in love with sci-fi? Can you remember the book?

Lisa: It was definitely The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. It was so goofy and fun that I didn’t notice it was completely over my head for the most part.

Kerstin: What would you say to an author of traditional fiction who was considering trying out IF for the first time?

Lisa: Do it! I definitely recommend sitting down with a big sheet of paper to map out the flow of your story first though, even if you’re not generally an outliner. Or index cards. Something you can get messy with. Most of the IF tools are fairly easy to pick up if you aren’t a programmer, but it’s easy to get lost in the technical, so you need to have a good grip on your story. And if you need someone to be a game beta, hit me up!

Kerstin: What are your goals for the future?

Lisa: To keep writing and working on projects I love, and to spread the word about authors and books and media I love. I wouldn’t say no to a big lottery jackpot either, as long as it’s not the Shirley Jackson kind.

Kerstin: When you were six years old, what did you want most in the world? What do you want right now?

Lisa: When I was six? For Care-A-Lot to be real, and to climb into the Millennium Falcon to go on adventures with Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewie. These were not necessarily independent wants.

Right now, I can’t stop thinking about beating that Hitchhiker’s Guide game.

Kerstin: If you had a million clowns, a million dollars, and a million litres of soda, how would you take over the world?

Lisa: Get the clowns jacked up on caffeine and turn them loose on major population centers. The plan fizzles out there, though, because now I’ve got to figure out how to turn a million dollars into enough caffeine to keep them going. Also, to be perfectly honest, I’m going to drink most of the Diet Coke myself.

The post Author Interview: Lisa Shininger appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.

This interview took place over Skype.

Kerstin Hall: Let’s start with the basics. When was One More Story Games founded?

Jean Leggett: OMSG was founded in July 2013, incorporated in Dec 2013.

Kerstin: How have things been going so far?

Jean: Good. We’ve been bootstrapping the development of our engine this whole time – and we’re now in beta. The engine is only available for PC at the moment, but published games play in browsers, on Facebook, and on Android.

Kerstin: According to your website, at OMSG, story comes first. How do you make this a reality in practical terms?

Jean: Because we’re less focused on the graphics in the game, the focus naturally falls on the story. We’re not about building a platformer or puzzle game like Candy Crush. When you play one of our stories, you’ll see that narrative is central. We work with writers and game devs from all over the world to create story-driven games.

Kerstin: All over the world? Which countries have come up thus far?

Jean: France, USA, Germany, India, Thailand. They’re in various stages of development.

Kerstin: That must add such interesting dimensions to the work you publish.

Jean: We’re exceptionally passionate about diversity in games—we want people from many different cultures to share their stories on our platform. For example, I’m hard of hearing and my whole family is deaf. There’s never been a game with deaf characters as the central figures. We’re working to develop a game that is delivered entirely in ASL—American Sign Language. That’s a perspective in games that has never been available to date, but our engine makes it possible.

Kerstin: With the previous answer somewhat pre-empting this, what do you think is lacking in gaming currently, both in the mainstream and more generally?

Jean: Games are the most pervasive they’ve ever been—half of Canadians have played a game in the last four weeks, according to reports—and what’s missing is the diversity and focus on storytelling.

I think that waiting on big studios to deliver diverse stories is a mistake. Look at Hollywood. They’ve been around forever and it’s still very white, very male. Diversity is an issue.

Kerstin: As evidenced by the Oscars. I think there’s more pushback against normative frameworks in general. A productive environment?

Jean: Indeed. And games are an art form. People still think games are exclusively for 17-year-old boys, but the largest segment of consumers are women over 18. Plus, women over 30 are fast becoming the largest consumer base. So we think, based on reports and our own feedback, that women love stories and deserve better than Candy Crush (I’m on level 1494 or something).

I think that when we make tools available to storytellers with diverse backgrounds, we’ll start to see more diverse stories. I watched this great TEDtalk by a woman from the Nigeria. She talked about how, growing up, she read children’s books that were imported from the USA. She never saw Nigerian storybooks and thus never saw her culture represented in books. How tragic is that?

Kerstin: Was that “The Danger of a Single Story?” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie?

Jean: YES!

Kerstin: Africa, taken as a whole, has limited opportunities to access the international gaming or writing scene. So I’m happy you guys work on making this stuff accessible.

Jean: We were sponsors of a screenwriting conference this past September. There was a sizable contingent of writers from Joburg and Cape Town, and they asked if we could come and teach our software. I’d LOVE to do that—because anyone anywhere can create story games.

Kerstin: I will be so on board. At sub-Q, we work with Twine. At OMSG, it’s all about StoryStylus, your proprietary software. What are the pros of StoryStylus over other programming platforms?

Jean: Ha! Yes, back to the software!

First, SS is WYSIWYG and we’ve broken down the elements of story into Lego bricks—people, places, things, conversations, relationships, etc. We call those entities. Going through and adding each of those components to your story world is fairly simple. We have built in some really cool features like rapport and requirements to unlock access to other entities. For example, in order to unlock a location, you may have to sweet-talk a character to a certain rapport level, or you may have had to discover the attaché case in the attic…

We’re currently working on serialization of content. Creators can put requirements on Story 2/3/4 that were the result of player actions in Story 1. For example, you were rude to the neighbour in story 1? You may have to work extra hard to win them over in story 5. We’re building story worlds where your consequences as a player really matter.

Plus we’ve also built in the marketplace. Most content will be shared via direct link, and then exceptional content will be published in our marketplace with royalties returned to those games.

Kerstin: So people can earn real money?

Jean: Heck yes. Now that we’ve built the engine and it is more or less complete (VR is something we’re looking into for 2017, and multiplayer, too), we’re ready to switch into digital publisher mode.

Our job is to develop great content for people to discover. Last week we announced we’re working with #1 New York Times Bestselling author Charlaine Harris. She’s best known for her Sookie Stackhouse series that went on to become HBO’s True Blood. We’re adapting a book called Shakespeare’s Landlord into a story game.

Our goal is to have that game complete and ready for sale by early 2017 or sooner. So the great writers we find and nurture between now and then will have their content published in a small, select marketplace next to someone who has millions of fans and has sold over 36 million novels.

Kerstin: I’ll get back to the exciting Harris development, but first, OMSG is headed by you and your partner. What’s that like?

Jean: 24/7 with your spouse is an interesting way to start up a new company. We’ve been together for nearly 20 years now. I think we’re a good team—we complement each other well. He’s the techie, I’m the talkie. The visionary and the evangelist.

What makes us a particularly good team is that he has degrees in computer science, philosophy, political science and English, and I also have an English degree. We’re building the games we want to play, but in the end, it’s about our users, not us.

Kerstin: At present, your flagship game looks to be “Hard Vacuum Lullaby”. You seem to have many, many female characters in a setting that is generally depicted as having none (or maybe one token woman).

Jean: That’s intentional. I feel, as an indie studio, we have a responsibility to create the missing content. In “Skycarver”, we also have a female protagonist.

Kerstin: A LOT of visual and sound elements contribute to the gaming experience. It’s more of a point-and-click adventure than a typical text-based game. How does this play into your story-centric goals?

Jean: Funny you should ask that. In September 2014, I went on a tour across North America and asked writers, screenwriters and game devs to come see our rough prototype. The strictly IF people did not like what we’d built. We still encounter that resistance.

This isn’t IF. It’s an adventure engine—I guess—that isn’t genre-limited. Mystery, adventure, sci-fi, romance, fantasy… if you have crafted a story that is about discovery, it will work.

Honestly, I didn’t mind that our first couple of games didn’t have sound, but we’re going back and adding sound effects and soundtracks to the earlier games. With “Hard Vacuum Lullaby”, we’re told that it really adds to the intensity of the experience.

Kerstin: How long does it take to develop a game like “Hard Vacuum Lullaby”?

Jean:  I’d say the art was done over 30 hours by one of our in-house staff. The game was written almost exclusively within our engine. I would recommend people write the story in Word as much as they can, then cut and paste as appropriate. I believe 80 hours would be a good approximation, plus testing time.

Kerstin: That’s actually much less than I guessed. Which says good things about both the engine and the game.

Jean: This was Sutherland’s 3rd game with us. So he’s a pro at the engine.

Kerstin: The elephant in the room (shooting fireworks and trumpeting the national anthem) is obviously your new and exciting partnership with Charlaine Harris. This is an author who has sold enough books to exceed the GDP of small countries. How did this wondrous thing occur?

Jean: We met her at Bouchercon (a mystery writer/reader conference) in Long Beach, California in November 2014. I went up to her in a quiet moment and asked, “Have you considered turning one of your books into a game?”

She replied that they had done that before, but that the company went out of business before they finished the games. I replied, “Is that something I can help you with?” and I will never forget her response: “That would be lovely, dear.”

It was as simple as asking. And in fact, there is another international bestselling author we met who wants to create original content with us. It means their fan base would have to come to OMSG to play their latest story…

Kerstin: That’s kind of adorable.

Jean: It is.”That would be lovely, dear” is going to be a chapter heading in my biography.

Kerstin: And the other mystery bestseller is…?

Jean: Unnamed.

Kerstin: Damn.

Jean: They’ve had several books adapted into film. They see games as virgin territory for writers. I mean, how many mainstream writers have had their work adapted into games?

Kerstin: Seems like you guys are going really big places. People should get autographs now.

Jean: Fingers crossed. I’m excited because a large American organization that teaches teens how to make games wants to use our engine in 2017. Imagine, thousands of young minds using StoryStylus to make multi-media games? YAY!

Kerstin: Adaption will be a different challenge to writing original stories. Who is taking charge of transforming the static novel into a more fluid storytelling experience? What do you see being the greatest challenge?

Jean: We have some great people on our storytelling team. You can see detailed bios on our website under “Storytellers”—we’re working with Will Hiles, Neal Hallford, and Sande Chen. Each of them has come from a narrative design and writer’s perspective over a traditional game designer perspective.

They all understand that what we’re trying to accomplish first and foremost is story. Clickable things are part of the story, but we aren’t building a hidden object game. I want it to feel like a Tex Murphy or Gabriel Knight game, driven by character and plot.

The greatest challenge for the average writer is building a more complex narrative structure than they’re used to. We’re going to start offering online discussions and webinars in March with narrative designers to show how to do this. Also, those following the Charlaine Harris project can visit www.lilybard.com and sign up for the behind-the-scenes access. They’ll see how we deconstruct her narrative and turn it into our game. What are the steps, how do we create this living, breathing interactive world. We want to engage her audience and make them story game fans from the beginning. Many of them may have never played a game like this before.

Kerstin: How can people (ordinary-ish ones, not Ms Harris-types) get involved with OMSG?

Jean: I recommend that people first play our games. More than one of our games—they’re all different. Some have LONG narrative pieces before any interactivity. Some have short. Some have puzzles. Some have photographs. Start thinking about what your story game looks like.

Then go build something. Our engine is free to use for 90 days. After that, there’s a hosting fee for storytellers. Paying that annual subscription doesn’t guarantee that we’ll sell your content—it gives you access to create story games and share them. Build a following. Uplevel your writing!

Kerstin: Shakespeare’s Landlord is coming out in 2017. What can your audience look forward to in the mean time?

Jean: Will Hiles is building the most amazing supernatural mystery set in late 1800’s New England. I am currently looking for an artist. It is a phenomenal story—when I saw his story bible for the series (yes, a series!), I had no words!

We have a cyberpunk thriller coming out by the first week of March and a comedic take on Dante’s Inferno. Lots of different stories are on the way!

Kerstin: Quite a bit of variety in subject matter too.

Jean: Absolutely. Variety. Diversity. Stories for the new world.

Kerstin: I think I’m out of questions. Anything you want to still talk about?

Jean: I think we covered it all. My main points are diversity, women in games, democratizing game publishing and getting writers paid.

Kerstin: Excellent points all. It’s been lovely talking to you.

Jean: Thank you for taking the time to interview me. I hope you’re as excited as I am!

The post Interview: Jean Leggett of One More Story Games appeared first on sub-Q Magazine.