Boon Hill is a successful-but-still-in-progress Kickstarter for a project in which the player/reader explores a graveyard full of epitaphs. It’s an invitation to create your own meaning out of scraps of evidence, conceptually a little reminiscent of 18 Cadence.

Conversations With My Mother is a Twine piece by Merritt Kopas, in which you can click on the text to swap one piece of text for another before proceeding. It’s powerful and very brief to experience, and it does some things with Twine that go beyond typical formal features of choice-based narrative. Worth a look.

Pipe Trouble is one of those pipe-laying puzzle games… except that it’s also about the politics of gas pipelines in Canada. Connect the pipes in the wrong way and you’ll annoy farmers, cause spills, or irritate environmental protesters. And it has text by Jim Munroe.

The Quiet Year is a story game about one year in the life of a threatened community. The War with the Jackals (not explained) is just over. The Frost Shepherds (also not explained) will turn up in a year, though the inhabitants of the town don’t know that.

In the meantime, there are up to 52 turns (one for each week of the year), and a deck of cards is used as a randomizer to determine what sorts of things might happen during those weeks. Each turn, a player draws the next card, follows instructions from a chart about what that card means for the community, and then takes one of three actions: proposing a communal discussion about a particular issue; discovering something new in or around the community (which means drawing it on the map); or starting a project (also drawn on the map, but set to conclude several turns later). By the time play is over and the last card is drawn, the map is large and complex and bears signs of many events that have happened to the community.

Our story told of a group divided by religious disagreements, threats from outsiders, limited resources (especially iron, which we didn’t have much of until late in the story), and a certain amount of archaeological curiosity.

The Quiet Year is even more aggressively Not About Characters than Microscope. Each player represents some faction or group within the community who wants certain things, but they’re not tied to a specific person or personality and are not even supposed to overtly communicate their faction concept, though there are ways to hint at it implicitly during gameplay. The “discussion” activities are the closest anyone ever comes to roleplaying an actual scene, but these are highly formalized and no individual human is represented there.

In our playthrough, the groups represented were, roughly speaking: superstitious peasants; a faction who wanted to do things the way we did back before the Empire fell (the apocalypse, for us, was something like the fall of the Roman Empire); a theistic religious faction who wanted to interpret everything as the will of a single God; and a ruthlessly unity-focused pragmatic faction who mainly wanted everyone to work together to save their communal skins — or else get out.

The map is a nice focusing feature, which at first reminded me of Microscope’s evolving timeline (and I really like games that leave you with an artifact at the end, as witness San Tilapian Studies). But in Microscope the timeline kind of is the story you’re building, while The Quiet Year’s map represents a story in some ways, but is neither the goal of the exercise nor a full representation of everything that happens.

Another way to put this: Microscope is a world-building game, almost, more than a story game, and the questions that you ask yourself while playing are the sorts of questions you ask while imagining what might happen in the history of an imagined world.

In The Quiet Year, by contrast, you’re not asking yourself map-building questions so much. We did have one or two pedantic conversations about the likely relative positions of water sources and rock types, but the game mechanics aren’t necessarily about thinking geographically and extrapolating from existing map features, and lots of things get drawn or represented on the map that aren’t really map features. Every event has to be recorded on the map somewhere, even the communal discussions, so this makes for lots of symbols, stick-figures, and conceptual representations. This made me wonder a bit: what game would be to a map the way Microscope is to a timeline? I suspect it would involve a lot more “what’s here? okay, why is it there? what was in that location before? what natural resource made it a good idea to put that object there?” and so on.

From there I went on to vague wondering about storygames that built out genealogies, or subway charts, or just about any other sort of systematic representation. When would this stop being storygaming and be something else? What if, instead of a chart, you were creating via game a divination deck, the Tarot of your shared world? Or a language? Storygaming conlangs?

Anyhow. TQY does have one other feature that I associate with Microscope, which is that you can end up with a lot of loose threads and unresolved possibilities. The end of the game comes randomly — the 52 cards are shuffled within suits, so you go through “spring”, all the hearts first, but without knowing whether the next heart will be the 7 or the Ace or what; then the diamonds, clubs, and spades, again with internal randomness. When the King of Spades comes up, wherever that is in the final quarter of the deck, the Frost Shepherds are arriving and the game is over.

This is lovely as a portrayal of cut threads and the arbitrariness of death. It’s maybe a little less lovely for structural cohesion, though.

Anyway, this sounds gripey, which is not a fair portrayal of my experience. I had a very enjoyable time playing TQY; but I also felt that a couple of my particular favorite storygaming experiences were not there. There weren’t any moments of major character change or discovery, because the game isn’t about that: not like you can have in Polaris or Monsterhearts or A Penny For My Thoughts. And it also doesn’t necessarily deliver a strong arc or a lot of causality.

Instead it’s — intentionally — rather chaotic, with lots of projects started and abandoned, lots of ideas pursued and left behind.

Note: This article was originally written as part of a discussion about a text that has since been revised and can in its current form be found here. Consequently, I’ve trimmed a portion that no longer makes sense.

First, I do see participation from female and queer authors and from people of color, and not just because I am female myself. I see work by Jenni Polodna, Lea Albaugh, Carolyn VanEseltine, Katherine Morayati, Emily Boegheim, and Deirdra Kiai, among others; I see Meg Jayanth and Yasmeen Khan writing for StoryNexus and Echo Bazaar/Fallen London, and Heather Albano and others for Choice of Games. I see Aaron Reed’s games, where gender and sexuality are often made a matter of player choice. I see Antifascista.

I remember that when I joined the community back in the late 90s, Suzanne Britton, Kathleen Fischer, Eileen Mullin, Papillon and other women were already prominent members of the community and already writing about female sexuality, self-image, and experiences of power, and that Ian Finley was already writing about gay relationships. Several of them reached out to me and made me feel welcome in the community.

Ian and Suzanne wrote two of the reviews I most cherish from all the reviews I’ve ever received, Ian’s because he understood and cared about what Galatea was trying to do, and Suzanne’s because she felt what I wanted to express with Metamorphoses when many others found the story elements distancing and cold. No amount of technical praise, no comp win or score, not even being hired for a job on the strength of your work or being recognized by someone famous you admire, quite compares to the feeling of achieving a human connection through something you made. This is the most precious of all jewels, because it cannot be faked.

I see differences of focus and style between trad IF about these issues and more recent material from the Twine community from Merritt Kopas, Mattie Brice, Porpentine, Cara Ellison, Anna Anthropy and others. I see a greater culture of interpersonal support in the Twine community; I see a rawness and willingness to talk about personal wounds. A lot of those wounds take the form of having not been listened to in the past, sometimes about really essential matters of identity and the right to be taken seriously as a human being. This makes criticism of such work strike that much closer to home for the authors, even when the criticism is intended neutrally or positively by those offering it.

I see that howling dogs got a lot of acclaim in many reviews, described with phrases like “dynamically beautiful”, “clear and strange” (Wade Clarke), “deep and affecting” (Yuna), “I loved both that theme and that uncertainty… In some ways it cut very close to the bone, and I always appreciate that in a story” (Orestes Drunk and Pylades Fasting), “Laughed out loud; frightened the neighbors.” (Jenni Polodna).

I do see that there is abusive email, occurring where it is hard for the rest of us to know about it to counteract or disclaim it, which directly attacks vulnerable people in bullying terms. Such responses should have no place here, and I respect Porpentine’s willingness to call it out. There are also some more public trolls, though the intfiction forum is moderated in a way that makes that contingent less prominent and less powerful than it was in the Usenet days.

I see that there are sometimes some reviews and forum postings written from an instinct of contempt: trivializing the artist because they don’t like the work, assuming that community decisions are taken in bad faith, being needlessly snarky. There are fewer truly broiling reviews than there used to be, but they still happen. Contempt is worse than hurt, worse than anger; contempt makes it easy to dismiss other people, but it also isolates the contemptuous person in bitter solitude and helps to perpetuate indefinitely the attitude that others are unworthy of attention.

I see that there are reviews and tags on IFDB that sometimes mark out games with sexual and especially queer material as pornographic, even when it is not graphic or does not exist for a primarily pornographic purpose. I see that the IF community has a long history of being bad at navigating the challenges associated with content that might need trigger warnings or not-for-children warnings. Attempts to curate sometimes get tangled up and exclusionary.

I see people in a position of institutional power — those who moderate the intfiction board, run the XYZZY awards, and set the rules for the IF comp — changing the way they do things in order to respond to input about accessibility. I see the rules for XYZZY eligibility being made clearer and more open, so that people who think they should be eligible can opt themselves in, rather than hoping to be noticed. I see Emily Boegheim reaching out on Twitter to try to help those who are having trouble with the intfiction forum or feeling marginalized there. I see Sam Ashwell inviting people in the larger indie community as XYZZY reviewers. I see an increasing amount of coverage, on Planet-IF and the intfiction forum, for material that might formerly not have been considered IF. I see things like the online Quest developer and Playfic offering a new more more accessible route to creation and sharing of classic parser IF, because they expect and require the absolute minimum of platform resources or expenditure. I see lots of people doing lots of hard work, on languages and interpreters and webpages and blog back-ends, often for relatively little acknowledgement.

I see people making live meetup groups where there used to be none, and people having dinner together at conferences, and people flying to be together because they want to talk about interactive narrative.

I see the IF community as only one locus of discussion or power. I see Porpentine on freeindiegames and RockPaperShotgun, Kirk Hamilton at Kotaku, Leigh Alexander in various venues, bringing attention to IF not just occasionally but repeatedly and systematically. I see academics and games conference organizers reaching out to the IF community and asking us to speak. I see games companies looking to hire experienced IF writers. I see inkle, Failbetter, and Choice of Games, among others, advancing the cause in the commercial space; I see people doing related projects in transmedia groups and in ebooks. We are being listened to now more than we ever have been before; and the indie, commercial, academic and even publishing worlds are more than ever doing things that are relevant to our interests.

I see the value of our past. At GDC I heard more than one talk that presented as new information observations about choice, consequence, narrative, and puzzle structure that have been well-discussed here for nearly two decades. There is a great deal of experience and craft knowledge about IF that deserves to be carried forward from this community, not lost, even if the community itself is changed beyond recognition. I see that we’re having a bit of a crisis about who and what we are, and that there are people who don’t understand where parser games will be supported and appreciated, if “IF” now primarily refers to CYOA, hypertext, and other unparsed interactive text. There are others who see the whole insistence on the parser as inherently and pointlessly elitist. For myself, I am eager to see growth and attention in all of these areas and do not think it needs to be a zero-sum game.

I see that there’s awareness about technical accessibility issues — are we supporting screenreaders? providing tools for inexpensive platforms as well as costly ones? — but that there isn’t always enough available manpower or skill to address those problems, and some people continue to have less access than we would like, and sometimes it is hard to parse the difference between “I can’t do that for you” and “I don’t care about you.” Because I don’t want to send the latter message, I sometimes overcommit and attempt more than I can do, which is a dual failure: people do not get what they expect, and I exhaust the resources I need to be of use to anyone.

I see that when I posted my first post on this topic, several people were hurt and angered by what I said, in ways I hadn’t anticipated and perhaps should have foreseen. I strongly suspect that more people were upset than chose to speak with me about it. I am sorry to have caused that hurt. I don’t regret that I said something about this, but I regret that I did it in a way that made it sound as though I blamed people I don’t blame, or that I was angry at people I’m not angry at, or that I don’t credit the contributions of people who work hard on these matters.

I see that though several people were very hurt or very angry about what I said, they wrote measured, polite, and non-inflammatory email to me about the fact and left me the space to explain myself. Those people extended me the benefit of the doubt, at the cost of making themselves more vulnerable, and I am grateful for their discretion and good faith. In each case I feel I have come to know those people better and think more highly of them. Grace comes even out of painful things.

I am challenged by the language of destruction. In my experience, when communities turn ugly, often it is not because something needs to be torn down, but because not enough has yet been built.

What would make us healthier is more. More centers of interest, more voices, more communication, more ways of presenting and talking about IF, more ways for people to find what fits their own background, and to be invited to contribute when there is so far nothing like them at all. More tools for creating more types of experience. We have had a star — often a rather small cold star, very far from any other — where we need a constellation.