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My Articles

I’ve written various articles on the craft of interactive fiction, which you may or may not find useful. Many are pages on this site; others are blog posts that got a lot of response, or else articles submitted to other sites, which I list here for reference:

  • Plot, Scene by Scene: A break-down of kinds of interactive scene in IF, and some general ideas about how to approach planning.
  • Art in Competition: A discussion of how the culture of competition has affected interactive fiction and the IF community.
  • What would James Bond do?: Part of an ongoing exchange with Mark Bernstein about the kind of freedom and agency that ought to be available to the player of IF.
  • WIP Rescue: A checklist of problems that can bring a project to a halt, with some suggestions about how to resolve them.
  • Inform 7 for Fiction Authors: Discusses writing IF from the point of view of conventional fiction terminology, with tie-ins to the relevant coding information. It’s just an outline, not a fully-fleshed out work (a finished version might be book-length), but some people have found it useful anyway.
  • On Stephen Bond on Player Freedom: A theoretical discussion on the nature of freedom and agency in interactive storytelling.
  • The Making of Glass: short discussion on designing a conversation system for a particular purpose, with source code
  • The Making of Bronze: long discussion on puzzle design for Bronze, with diagrams and source code
  • The Making of Damnatio Memoriae: short discussion of world model construction using I7. Source code is available
  • Some Observations on Using Inform 7: my views on Inform 7, at the time the public beta was released
  • Creating Settings for Fantastical IF: an article on designing a setting for fantasy work

Also in roughly reverse chronological order, some interviews, some of which also have comments on craft: