Some small bugs that were preventing the Inform 7 extensions RSS feed from appearing quite right under Firefox and Safari (two different bugs) have now, we think, been resolved.

I knew you’d be thrilled.

Recently someone emailed me with the following question:

Going on the assumption that if you like to write, you must also like to read, I was wondering if you would be willing to share any books/short stories/writings — anything non-IF — that you really enjoyed or perhaps even inspired your style of story-telling.

I’ve had a pretty busy week and haven’t gotten around to answering, but I thought it might be an interesting one to throw out here, and see what other people think about IF-inspiring conventional writing.

So, a couple answers of my own:

• Borges. His stories are often thought experiments about memory, narrative, or language, with implications that are evocative for interactive storytelling. For related but not identical reasons, Italo Calvino.
• Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. Tartt has a special gift for choosing evocative details — little sights or sounds that capture a whole mood or carry a wealth of connotation.
• Annie Dillard’s essays (not the fiction, which I’ve never been able to get through). Dillard writes deliciously musical prose, and describes landscape beautifully. The opening of An American Childhood remains one of my favorite passages of English prose.
• John Crowley, mainly Little, Big, for the symbolic weight and metaphysical power it gives to simple objects; this was a non-trivial influence on Metamorphoses.
• Plato’s Symposium. Often dry or archaic in translation, in Greek it is witty, sly, sweet, sad, sexy and beautiful; it describes vividly and presently people now millennia dead. The dialogue that is both intellectual and personal has great resonance with me.
• Copenhagen, by Michael Frayn. Again: dialogue both intensely intellectual and intensely personal. And, I would also observe, dialogue that is not very naturalistic. I tend to write somewhat stylized dialogue for IF, and I think in this I’m influenced a bit by my diet of plays (both ancient and modern) and my sense that an interactive dialogue needs to be more compact than our rambling conversations in real life. (Not, I hasten to add, that I imagine myself on Frayn’s level, or anywhere near it. Copenhagen I consider one of the masterworks of the past century.)
• Mote in God’s Eye. I just finished this a few weeks ago, so it’s not so much a longterm favorite as something I recently have been thinking about. What impressed me about this one was how intensely compelling I found it. Which got me thinking more about how to inspire and use the player’s curiosity as a motivating force to get him to keep playing.

For those who are interested, the introductory article and blog post for the Guardian’s text adventure project:

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/games/archives/2008/05/06/spaceship_launches_a_new_wikigame_emerges_from_the_ashes.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/30/textadventure

When I plan plot-heavy IF, I think of it in terms of a sequence of scenes. This doesn’t mean that the gameplay needs to be rigidly linear: scenes can occur in varying orders, or there can be plot branches, or scenes that can be skipped depending on player action. But I nonetheless do the organization in terms of scenes. A scene has a definite beginning and a definite end. It usually has to take place in a specific area of the game map (which may mean that the player triggers it by entering that area [as in City of Secrets] or that I move the player myself when the scene is scheduled to start). Following some writing advice I got long ago, I try to make most of the scenes end with some kind of clear hook. At the end of the scene, the player should ideally have a new take on what is happening, or a new problem to solve, or a new question about what is going to happen next. Exciting the player’s curiosity about something is especially powerful in getting the player to keep playing.

But the conventional writing advice tends to be insufficient when it comes to the types of scene that IF supports. I find that in interactive fiction my scenes tend to come in several styles, identifiable by the sort of interaction I expect from the player.

In rough order of intensity, they are

Atmosphere. The scene is about setting a mood for the player: it’s usually a short transitional sequence of a few turns, during which there is not actually anything important to do other than to observe the surroundings, examine a few things. I find atmosphere scenes especially useful when I need to show that the player character is in a strange or dangerous situation; they make a good pacing element between two more active scenes, as well. If every scene in a game has lots of dramatic action, then (by a curious reversal) none of them feel that important.

In some games, dream sequences, unconscious moments, visions, or fits of delusion also fulfill this function. (City of Secrets has a number of dream sequences, which are there partly to provide mild hints but also partly to offer the player a different flavor of interaction.)

The challenge about this sort of scene is to make the most of the limited number of turns the player has at his disposal: just about every action he can take during the scene needs to do the scene’s work. Sounds, sights, object interactions all need to underscore the mood of the moment. To prevent combinatorial explosion, it’s often a good idea to focus the player on just a few objects; besides, if you give the player only two or three turns in a space that is obviously very densely implemented with many items, you may make him anxious that he missed something important.

Trap. This scene is about the player being stuck and unable to do anything, and I list it immediately after Atmosphere because the two are quite similar in their effects — except I think of a trap scene as one in which the player is restricted from doing anything interesting. The limousine ride partway through When in Rome 1 is like this; the opening moves of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; the carriage ride in Masquerade… there are doubtless others.

Classic Puzzle/Manipulation. The scene is about the player accomplishing something, usually solving a physical manipulation puzzle. In plot-heavy games, I tend to use these sequences sparingly — because they are not inherently very plotty, because they can take an unpredictable amount of time to solve (and thus throw off the story-telling pace), and because it is not always easy to come up with a good reason to include puzzle challenges in the middle of a largely narrative work.

That said, they’re not useless. Several testers said that they liked the (very few) passages of physical interaction in Floatpoint because these grounded them in the environment in a way that all the talking and sightseeing and computer-chip-reading did not: and as setting is one of the things that IF does naturally and well, it seems a pity not to take advantage of this.

One option, if true puzzles seem out of place in a work, is to offer the player some easy but rewarding physical interaction. Make it obvious what to do, but make the doing of it interesting — that is, write in interesting sensations as a result; have NPCs around comment on the activity (Lost Pig gets enormous mileage out of letting Grunk do obvious things while the gnome and the pig react); have a seemingly straightforward action reveal some rather unexpected outcome. (Act of Misdirection is a great one for this: it leads and prods the player through performing a magic act, getting him largely to perform actions that the game has more or less laid out, but the outcomes are fascinating.) It is remarkable how much richer one can make a game feel just by writing special responses to ordinary actions. How does the bar of platinum feel when you pick it up? How does the player character feel about taking it? Can we come up with something better than “Taken”?

Attention to these details can make even fairly standard puzzle-game kinds of interaction into something with a fair amount of narrative content.

Exploration. The scene is about the player finding out something, or perhaps seeing some series of clues. The scene ends when the player has found out everything the player needs to find out. This can be about exploring a physical space, or solving a research puzzle with books or character conversation or a computer database.

More than any other, this scene is about hooking the player with curiosity and then making the curiosity pay off. Anchorhead does this brilliantly — though the structure of the game is not always fully delimited into scenes, there are several puzzles that are about making the player curious about something even though she also dreads the answer. An artful chain of clues is especially important here. Done right, an exploration scene can build suspense and anticipation for later scenes.

Travel. The scene is about the player arriving in a new location, even if he takes some side trips along the way. This is useful to give the player a feel for the setting, including a sense of distance between one place and another; if the game features a very large and open map, giving the player a specifically routed trip through it the first time can provide some orientation.

The opening of Floatpoint is like this: I wanted to begin the game with the player experiencing this alien world, both so that he could appreciate how strange and unfamiliar and also beautiful it was, and because I wanted to dramatize his coming into town as an outsider: alone, unescorted, and uncomfortable.

Pacing is the difficult part of a travel scene: on the one hand it is desperately heavy-handed if one forces the player along, but on the other if one lets the player make the movement commands (and stop to look at scenery) he may get distracted and spin out the travel for a long time — perhaps longer than the author really intends. In Floatpoint my solution was to set an appointment for the player character, and remind him periodically that he was supposed to be keeping it — which isn’t very subtle, and of course it was possible for the player to go off and do other things anyway.

Another approach is to give the player another character as escort. This is sufficiently common that the TADS 3 library specifically provides for it, for instance. City of Secrets has several sequences where the player is taken somewhere by another character, who keeps the player from wandering off track (on an otherwise fairly open map). An Act of Murder also begins this way, with an introduction in which the player is introduced to all the characters and most of the locations of the game before being turned loose to wander on his own. I found there that it was almost too much of a whirlwind tour — there was so much information conveyed at once that I had a hard time keeping track of it all. But it did serve some important purposes by giving me a clear sense of the shape of the map and of the people in it.

Movie. A sequence of events has to play out in the player’s presence, but there isn’t much the player can do to disrupt this. As the author, I have an exact sequence I want the player to be present for — like overhearing conversation between other characters, or watching a setpiece play out.

The trick here is generally to give the player something to do while the movie rolls to its inevitable conclusion turn-by-turn — and this is something IF authors have been doing with variable success for quite a while. One of the more successful demonstrations of this is Christminster, which finds a variety of ways to ground the player in one place while other characters converse near or in front of her. Sometimes she’s hiding, listening to something nearby, afraid of being exposed; sometimes she’s present but preoccupied.

Offering the player a minor puzzle to do while the action continues sometimes helps, though then one has an additional challenge: what to do if the player takes too long to finish the puzzle? or not long enough?

If the player is able to interact with and alter the scripted sequence, then what you have is not a movie but a timed puzzle or an interview.

Timed set-piece puzzle. Again, I tend to be sparing with the puzzle challenges in a plot-heavy game, but a timed sequence can be quite effective at focusing the player during an emotional crisis during the game.

Several mid-school games (Anchorhead, Christminster) make a lot of use of these during the most tense moments of the plot. In more recent games, designers have tended to move a bit away from using this technique because it can be seen as cruel or unfair to the player: these scenes are intense on the first playing, but if the player fails and has to redo them over and over, they lose some of their impact. IF isn’t the only medium that has this problem: I ran into issues with exactly this when I played Portal.

The tedium of replaying a timed sequence is why I made the timed set-piece at the end of Savoir-Faire deliberately much easier than many of the late-game puzzles: I wanted there to be a sense of urgency but for the player to win the first time anyway. On the other hand, some players complained that it was too easy and this undermined said urgency.

I now think my error was in not making the final steps narratively powerful enough. If the actions required to solve the puzzle were easy for the player but difficult for the player character — acts of sacrifice, pain, or emotional resonance — then the scene would have more clout. Heroine’s Mantle — in other ways a very broken game — does I think get this right, though in a kind of silly and over-the-top way. After lots and lots of fiendishly difficult and unfair puzzles, the final stages (at least as I recall them, some years later) are intellectually easy but emotionally colorful.

Interview. The scene is a conversation with an NPC, and certain things need to get said before the scene can end. Sometimes, those things can be said in a variable order. Sometimes the player can introduce tangents. But the shape of the scene is essentially determined by the things the NPC needs to say to the player, and the things the NPC wants to hear back in return. (If it’s undirected conversation aimed at letting the player find something out, I consider it an exploration scene instead.)

Combat and romantic scenes are also a kind of interview scene, in the sense that they are about pursuing an interaction with a main character to its natural conclusion (or perhaps one of several natural conclusions). Pytho’s Mask features conversation, a dance, and a sword fight, all of which I would consider interview scenes, though technically the player is doing different things in each.

Interview scenes lend themselves well to branching and choice-making: it’s fairly natural for conversation (or combat) to be able to go one of several ways, offering the player an emotionally or even morally charged set of options. I find that the majority of mine are about a question (the other character(s) want to find out something from the player) or an argument (the other character(s) are struggling with the player, and the struggle comes to a positive or negative conclusion).

Interviews tend to be extremely plot-rich. Every move introduces new information and offers the player new choices. That makes them feel intense — and it can mean that you don’t want to stack too many interview scenes one after the other, lest you create fatigue in the player or simply erode his ability to care. Quiet, mood-building scenes offer a respite and also give the player a chance to dig into the story and setting; without them, the story will be high in drama but not have the impact it should.

===

When I go to structure a plot, I make a list of the scenes that need to occur: what are the major turning points in the story? Leading up to those, what does the player need to know in order to get the most out of them? What does he need to be emotionally invested in? What questions should he want answered?

Is my sequence of scenes too densely made up of all the same sort of thing? Too many intense events in a row, or too many relaxed ones?

Am I giving the player enough to wonder about? Are there, in fact, hooks at the ends of the major scenes which give the player a reason to want to come back and find out more? (Many of the most successful IF stories are hook-rich: Anchorhead, Christminster, Delusions, Act of Misdirection all offer the player some major questions early on and subordinate mysteries along the way.)

Is the story best served by a single perspective? Or do I need the player to hear multiple versions of the same event? Can I introduce the alternate versions through conversation or exploration? Should I instead consider shifting to a different viewpoint character for some parts?

At any given point, who gets to make the difficult choices? Maybe that person should be the viewpoint character for that scene.

At any given point, who is moved by very strong feelings, especially grief or passion? Maybe that person should not be the viewpoint character for that scene — exactly because it is so hard to guarantee that the player will identify. Television shows often use a technique I mentally label “distance from grief”: when a character learns about a death or something similarly awful, the camera pulls away, letting us see a long shot, the body language of devastation, rather than a close-up of the face and the sounds of sobbing. That distance makes the grief universal and sympathetic rather than specific and voyeuristic. It lets us fill in our own experience of loss, without the accompanying embarrassment that we sometimes feel when we’re around crying people. Similarly in IF, I suspect (though I’m short on examples at the moment) that it’s more effective to (a) let the player know in advance how much a character will be devastated by the bad event to come but then (b) pull back a little and let the player be outside that character’s head when the storm hits.

===

This all describes a process for writing a fairly linear game. Of course, that is not the only way a plot-heavy piece can work. A number of games consist of open exploration with more directed scenes embedded in the whole — Plundered Hearts triggers interactions with your romantic interest, with the villain, etc., when you get to key points or solve important puzzles, and quite a few later games also follow the same basic structure. City of Secrets starts and ends with sequenced scenes, but the midgame allows the player to wander fairly freely, stumbling into events but then returning to the betwixt-and-between state.

Still. Lately I find a lot of my WIP planning turns on this kind of thinking.

The source code for When in Rome 1 and 2 has been updated so that it will compile under the latest build; this is the first time in a while that that has been true.

…is up. This is a milestone in a number of ways: it’s the 15th Birthday edition of Inform, and it finishes a number of things that have been in progress since January of last year. The Mac IDE comes with a simply awesome table of contents, which lets you view just a small section of your code at a time, or zip back up to the top level; this will filter through to Windows as well. I already find this so essential that during the testing phase I hated those occasions when I had to go back to using the last official build to test user problems…

…and we’re done! I’ll be contacting authors by email over the next week or so (I have a bunch of addresses I need to look up first), and obtain permission for as many of the submissions as possible. If you’re an author who has yet to respond to a piece, feel free to drop me a line ahead of then, though.

I am thrilled with both the quantity and quality of the submissions, and I want to thank everyone who pitched in: between you, you made sure that art was offered for every single game on our request list and that we ended up with well over 100 games accounted for. For context, when this started, there were at my estimate around 130 games on IFDB with cover art of any kind; scrounging around for commercial covers and posting art from people’s private websites, etc., boosted that to around 240; and now we’re at nearly 300, with a number of covers still to be added if the authors approve them. Admittedly, that still leaves a huge majority of IFDB un-covered — over 3000 games are listed — but I think there’s now enough there to make the site on the whole feel a bit less spartan.

I don’t know that I’ll do this again — it was loads of fun, but I don’t want to promise to make it a yearly event or something. So I wanted to write a few notes in case anyone else wants to do another one later. (There are a bunch of bits where I say “…and this would save the organizer time” — this isn’t meant as a complaint, but I suspect it would be worth streamlining the process if it were going to be a repeat event.)

Details follow the cut.

Setup. My biggest mistake with this process was simply underestimating the scale of the project. I had expected to get significantly less participation. Now, it’s possible that subsequent drives would get less participation simply because a number of the most eager authors have already received covers — but on the other hand, new games are frequently being released, and there are, as mentioned, still thousands of art-free games on IFDB. So maybe not.

If I’d realized the scale of this, I would have organized it a little more formally. I wound up having to do a lot of hand-editing of lists, and that could be made more efficient: that might be as simple as setting up a wiki page so that authors could add their names and games to the request list themselves.

Which introduces the second point. Some authors had specific ideas about what sort of art they wanted, and said so; some had specific ideas, and didn’t say so; some had specific ideas, and felt that therefore they shouldn’t participate. I think this whole arrangement would work better if there were a way for authors to offer some preliminary comments, as a brief to the artist: “Here’s the style/scene/image I’m most eager to see represented.” Or: “These games are a series, so I would prefer a consistent set of art for all of them.” If the author really had no preferences, this could be left blank.

I have the impression that some authors think they shouldn’t be dictating terms when artists are donating time and effort already — but I suspect most artists would prefer to have some idea whether they’re on the right track. And, of course, if the brief is too difficult, artists are free simply not to attempt it. In general, though, I think the advantages here would be greater than the disadvantages, both in preventing wasted time and in getting authors results that they were really happy with.

Some kind of wiki/upload system might also be a good idea for art submissions, as well. It might spare the organizer having to maintain the list of which covers are included. Such a process would also be useful because

• It would give the artist/uploader a chance to fill out any licensing details (such as whether the image is based on CC-BY art and needs to be accompanied by attribution). Many artists did give me this information, but I didn’t have a uniform way of handling it. I tried to remember to put any critical licensing data into the image’s information, but in at least one case I forgot at initial upload and this had to be added later by the artist. (Sorry, Eric.)
• It might be good to offer the artist the chance to append some comments. A number of people wound up having some kind of note they wanted to attach — explanations of what they were doing with the image, offers to change specific features if the author preferred, etc.
• It would allow the artist to supply contact information for the game author, if he happened to know; this might save the organizer some time at the end of the drive.

On the other hand, one thing I did like about the Flickr-based approach is that it allowed us to offer an RSS feed, for people who wanted to follow the art drive in their blogging software. So I don’t know. Stuff to think about.

Publicity. I didn’t handle this as well as I could have done. Several people raised objections — in one case rather angrily — because they thought I was planning to add art to IFDB/etc. without authorial permission. This was never the idea, but I can see why it raised hackles. Probably the rules should foreground this point very clearly.

It might also be worth reaching out to some related communities where IF is played, beyond rec.arts-int-fiction. TIGSource kindly posted a link to the drive, and that brought in new artists — but that occurred quite late in the process, and it might have been better if I’d thought to reach out to them earlier.

Technical Guidance. Another thing I didn’t do a great job of, and this was mostly through ignorance, was providing authors with information about how to incorporate the submitted art into their own work. I did throw in there a little bit of advice on how to use Inform 7 to blorb files with new metadata, but that’s because that’s what I happened to know how to do. There are a bunch of other options, including separate blorb software, which I might have explained. Future drives might offer a section on how to apply cover art to a game in the major systems that support it. Eric Eve has mentioned that he has ideas about how the process could be better documented for TADS 3, as well, so possibly there will be some formal instructions to point at by the time any future drive rolled around.

Author/Artist Communication. This is complicated and I’m not quite sure how best to address the issues that arose. One is that a few artists wanted to be — and remain — anonymous, for various reasons. A wiki-posting situation might actually complicate that, though I suppose artists could give themselves pseudonyms. As organizer, I pretty much had the task of making sure that I knew who the submitters were and that I was confident that I could trust them about copyright issues, and pass on any licensing information that needed to be passed on. Again, this wasn’t really a problem, but I can imagine it becoming one in the future.

And, of course, the first thing authors always asked about anonymous art was “Can I find out who did this?”

Conversely, sometimes authors wanted to request a small (or medium) change to submitted work, and felt variously comfortable about doing that. I can’t read everyone’s mind here, but I strongly suspect that the artists in question minded less than certain authors feared they might. (Speaking purely for myself, if I spent two or three hours working on a design and another 15 minutes of tweaking would take it from “like” to “love!” for the author, I’d be more than happy to put in that effort.)

Besides, my own experience of working with illustrators (volunteer or hired) is that it’s natural for there to be a bit of back and forth about a work of art, and that professionals have learned not to take this personally. We’re not professionals here (or at least, some of us aren’t), but I suspect it would be good for the art drive to foster the understanding that friendly feedback and requests for minor alteration are fine and normal. (And also, of course, that the artist is free to decline to offer an alternate version. But the author should feel free to ask.)

Anyway, there it is, for future reference.

There are an increasing number of IF-related blogs, and now they have their own Planet, so you can find and follow all the news at once. Check it out — and if you also have a blog you think should be included, notice that the right-hand column includes contact information for Christopher Armstrong, who put this together.

I’ve been asked to announce, for people who might like to participate or look on, that The Guardian’s gameblog is doing a group IF project. The language of choice is Inform 6, but it looks to me as though it’s possible to participate in a non-coding capacity as well, if I6 is not your thing. I have the impression that they would be glad of participation from some IF veterans.

The project is due to be officially launched tomorrow, but there is already content at http://textadventure.org.uk.

Dreaming Methods is a site I ran into over the weekend because it tags itself as interactive fiction. Which it is, if you take that term in the most open-ended way. Each (of the stories I tried, anyway) presents an environment made of panning still photographs; with a mouse you can direct movement across these photographs as though you were turning around in a room, but the range of motion is limited. In each scene there are a few hot spots to click on.

Meanwhile — defying the sense that this is a very budget sort of graphical adventure — lines of text float through the environment at various distances. Sometimes they appear far off and small; sometimes, so close to the viewer that they are out of focus, hard to read. The effect is like encountering unacknowledged thoughts, things that one has never brought into focus in one’s own mind. It’s unsettling.

The two stories I tried (Capped and The Flat) are short, atmospheric, with very little in the way of plot; only a slowly unfolding discovery of past events. I never did feel that I understood The Flat; Capped makes sense if you’ve seen the Tripod series, but probably not very much otherwise. On the whole, these seemed to me to have accepted a hypertextual idea of what interactive fiction can be: most often an exploration of thoughts and memories of past events, with little or no foreground action.