The Architect of Forking Paths: Developing key writing strategies for interactive writers
PhD Thesis Benjamin Philip Carey Creative Writing and Literary Studies Creative Industries Faculty Queensland University of Technology
Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Supervisors: Associate Professor Susan Carson Mr Craig Bolland
2018
Keywords
Interactive storytelling, interactive author, writing strategies, interactive narrative, narrative structure, creative writing
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Abstract
‘The Architect of Forking Paths’ examines the creative writing process involved in producing
interactive narratives. Stories that feature interaction offer a substantially different reading experience because the reader influences the order, and often the outcome, of the story. This
heightened level of participation adds another dimension to the process of conceptualising
and writing such narratives. ‘The Architect of Forking Paths’ is a practice-led project that
investigates this writing process using a number of research methods including creative
writing, interviews with practitioners, content/textual analysis, and reflective practice.
The creative component of this thesis is a 50,000 word interactive novel titled
Ouroboros. The exegesis contributes to theoretical and practical knowledge in the field of creative writing research by investigating the writing process involved in creating interactive
narratives and proposing a group of writing strategies for authors.
Currently, there is a substantial amount of scholarly analysis and reader response data
on reader interaction, but very little on the author and the interactive writing process, which means that there is limited practical knowledge that creative writers can draw on to produce interactive narratives. This project addresses this gap in knowledge by collecting and analysing different forms of data (content/textual analysis, interviews, creative practice) as a basis for the development of a number of potential writing strategies for interactive writers.
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Table of contents
Keywords ...... i Abstract ...... ii List of figures ...... iv Definitions...... v Statement of original authorship ...... vii Acknowledgements ...... viii Link to creative work ...... ix Introduction ...... 1 Chapter 1: Literature review ...... 11 The author is dead (a long time ago) ...... 12 A new hope (the building blocks of narrative) ...... 16 The reader strikes back ...... 18 Return of the author ...... 20 Chapter 2: Theory and methodology ...... 27 Methodology ...... 33 Content and textual analysis ...... 33 Interviews ...... 34 Creative and reflective practice ...... 36 Chapter 3: Content/textual analysis ...... 37 Branching narratives ...... 39 Hypertext fiction ...... 48 Conclusion ...... 55 Chapter 4: Interview findings ...... 57 Chapter 5: Potential writing strategies ...... 75 Chapter 6: Reflective practice ...... 93 Conclusion ...... 121 Bibliography ...... 129 Scholarly and creative works ...... 129 Computer and console games ...... 138 Appendices ...... 139
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List of figures
Figure 1 – Visual map of Luminous airplanes ...... 53 Figure 2 – Index of Luminous airplanes ...... 54 Figure 3 – The iterative day in Groundhog day ...... 96 Figure 4 – The iterative day in Ouroboros ...... 97 Figure 5 – Conceptual map of cyclical labyrinth ...... 99 Figure 6 – Structural map of Ouroboros (9,000 word prototype) ...... 105 Figure 7 – Structural map of Ouroboros (20,000 word prototype) ...... 109 Figure 8 – Pre-variable tomorrow segments ...... 111 Figure 9 – Post-variable tomorrow segments ...... 112 Figure 10 – Twine default text layout ...... 114 Figure 11 – Twine text layout after CSS formatting ...... 114 Figure 12 – Conceptual map of PEREM ...... 116 Figure 13 – Structural map of Ouroboros (final version) ...... 118
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Definitions
Agency: The ability to take meaningful action and see the results of those choices.
Branching narrative: A type of interactive narrative that bifurcates at each decision point, creating new paths and alternative endings. For example: Choose Your Own Adventure novels.
Co-authorship/Co-participation: The author and reader working together to produce a story. The term can be misleading because it implies an equal workload between the author and the reader.
Hypertext fiction: A form of IDN that combines creative text and non-linear computer browsing: the reader is presented with a section of text containing links which they navigate to other sections of text.
IDN (interactive digital storytelling): A type of interactive storytelling that is exclusive to digital platforms. For example: IF and hypertext. In this type of storytelling the production of an aesthetically rewarding story is a goal in itself.
IF (interactive fiction): A form of IDN where the reader interacts with the story through text commands. For example: Adventure and Zork. Also known as text adventure games and text- based games.
Interactive/Interaction: The ability to make decisions that directly alter the progression or
outcome of a narrative.
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Interactive Storytelling: An umbrella term that describes anything that combines interactive and narrative elements. For example: Choose Your Own Adventure novels, Dungeons &
Dragons, hypertext fiction, videogames.
Locative literature: A form of storytelling that uses mobile devices to tell stories in physical locations, which are commonly the setting for the narrative.
Narrative games: Games that feature an overarching story, but ultimately the player pursues a specific goal associated with winning
RAN (Reader-assembled narrative): A print-based form of interactive storytelling where the reader shuffles (or assembles) the text before reading. Also known as shuffled narratives.
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Statement of original authorship
The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.
Signature: QUT Verified Signature
Date: September 2017
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my mother, Heather, for believing in me and telling me to ‘follow my bliss’. You always encouraged me to do what I loved, no matter what. You helped me develop an incredible inner strength that allowed me to make it through the darkest parts of
these past three years and come out stronger on the other side. You are no longer with us, but
I hope I have and continue to make you proud. I love you mum.
I would like to say a massive thank you to my primary supervisor, Susan Carson.
We’ve worked together for four years now and I am in awe of how strong our partnership has
been. It has been truly unique. Completing this PhD has not been an easy road, but you always supported me, lifted me up, and kept me going in the right direction. I could not have done this without you.
A big thanks to my associate supervisor, Craig Bolland, who stuck with me through almost two years of creative dead ends until I finally found something that engaged and inspired me. Developing and editing Ouroboros with you has been a fun, exciting, and challenging experience. I always felt that you understood my writing style really well and your feedback was always excellent and helped me develop my creative work in the best way possible.
I would like to thank my girlfriend and best friend in the world, Jess, for her fierce and unwavering support. Thank you for putting up with my erratic sleep patterns, constant anxiety, self-doubt, and all the other fun stuff that comes with doing a PhD. Thank you for reading my work and producing a beautiful cover image for Ouroboros.
Finally, I would like to thank everyone who expressed a genuine interest in my project. Everyone who read through my creative work and gave me feedback or edits, thank you so much. It helped me a lot.
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Link to creative work
The creative work, Ouroboros, is hosted online at this web address: http://www.philome.la/Briz_Ben/ouroboros/play
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Introduction
“In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pên, he chooses—simultaneously—all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork”
– Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The garden of forking paths’
The concept of forking paths has fascinating implications for the reading and writing of literature. In most traditional forms of writing, such as the short story and the novel, the author determines the themes, characters, and plot of the narrative, exploring a specific, well- crafted path through the story. Of course, many creative works contain multiple interlinked narratives or the same story from different perspectives, but these are composed and arranged by the author. In contrast, a pure Borgesian garden of forking paths would be a storyworld with endless possibilities for the reader to explore. I believe that interactive storytelling allows authors to create their own garden of forking paths. Clearly, it would be impossible for the author to write every possibility, and indeed for the reader to explore them all, but interactive storytelling does offer authors and readers an extraordinary amount of freedom to explore narrative possibilities.
The focus of this project is the creative practitioner and the interactive writing process. Currently, scholarship privileges reader responses to interaction and there is a lack of discussion about the writing process involved in producing an interactive narrative. Further investigation into the writing process is important for two reasons: first, new research could lead to significant developments within interactive storytelling, and second, many aspiring authors require practical knowledge to be able to produce stories in a new form. There are many books about how to write a novel, but at present there is little practical knowledge
about writing interactive narratives. Considering the heightened interest in interactive storytelling over recent decades it is appropriate to examine the factors that contribute to interactive stories, including the reader, the technology, and the writer.
Academic scholarship is one aspect of this growing interest in the author-reader relationship. David Bolter (2001, 4) argues that during the “heyday of print” the distance
between the author and reader was magnified and the reader was seen merely as a “visitor in
the author’s cathedral”. Bolter observes that digital technology “seems to reduce the distance
between author and reader by turning the reader into an author herself” (ibid) and he
recognises a separation of author and reader in traditional print narratives, one that interactive
narratives, specifically digital stories, have the power to alter. Rob Cover1 also believes that
interactive digital narratives have played a large part in shaping the author-reader dynamic,
arguing that a “digital environment promoting interactivity has fostered a great capacity and a
greater interest by audiences to change, alter and manipulate a text or a textual narrative, to
seek co-participation in authorship and to thus redefine the traditional author-text-audience
relationship” (Cover 2006, 140). For Cover and Bolter the term ‘interactive’ seems to be
exclusive to digital storytelling. Although digital technology has certainly made interactivity
more common there are many examples of print literature promoting reader interaction and
co-participation. The term co-participation refers to the concept of the author and reader
working together to produce a story. While this is true in a sense, I argue that the term is
misleading because it implies an equal workload between the author and the reader.
For the purposes of this project an interactive narrative is a story in which the reader
makes decisions that directly alter the progression or outcome of the narrative. In this
document I use the term ‘interactive storytelling’ to describe anything that combines interactive and narrative elements. This as an umbrella term that includes everything from
1 Rob Cover is an Australian scholar, not to be confused with Robert Coover, the American creative writer.
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printed Choose Your Own Adventure novels through to games. However, this project will only cover a select area of interactive storytelling, known as interactive digital storytelling
(IDN). I argue that there is a clear distinction between IDN and other forms of interactive
storytelling, such as games. Marie-Laure Ryan offers two useful categories in this discussion:
‘narrative games’ and ‘playable stories’. Ryan (2008, 8) notes that in narrative games “the
player pursues a specific goal associated with winning” whereas in playable stories “the
production of an aesthetically rewarding story is a goal in itself”. For the purposes of this
project I refer to Ryan’s ‘narrative games’ as games and ‘playable stories’ as IDN. I do
acknowledge however, that these categories do not align perfectly. In fact, in the past decade
or so there have been several works that have blurred the lines between each field. However,
Ryan’s definition of playable stories adequately frames the type of interactive storytelling my
research focuses on: stories where there is no specific goal and in fact the process of reading,
making decisions, and exploring the intricacies of the narrative are the primary motivation for
the reader. Ryan’s categories also highlight what this project is not interested in: works that
focus primarily on winning or achieving goals.
This overlap between IDN and games causes confusion among authors, academics,
and general readers alike. Several authors in the surveys and interviews associate ‘game-like’
elements with IDN. Throughout this document I refer to the participant in interactive stories
as ‘the reader’, but some scholars and interview respondents refer to the participant as ‘the
player’.
My research focuses on forms of interactive storytelling that privilege text, and as
such the scope of this project excludes interactive forms such as games, although I
acknowledge the huge impact that games have on interactive storytelling. For instance, games
such as The walking dead (2012), The Stanley parable (2013), and Life is strange (2015) are
The Architect of Forking Paths 3 Ben Carey highly innovative and have contributed largely to the evolving field of interactive storytelling. However, including these games would create a scope too vast for this project.
According to Ryan (2011, 35) the reader’s contribution in an interactive text involves not only choice but a “two-sided effort that creates a feedback loop”. Ryan’s distinction clearly differentiates interactive storytelling from more conventional narrative forms such as the novel or poem where choice and the “feedback loop” does not exist. Janet Murray suggests, in her discussion of ‘agency’, that choice and feedback are directly related: “agency is the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices” (Murray 1997, 126). From my perspective, an action is “meaningful” if the reader is provided with adequate information to make the decision, balanced motivation between choices, and each choice advances the story in a different direction, as opposed to decisions that appear different but advance along the same narrative path regardless of the decision.
Further discussion on meaningful interaction is found in Chapter 4.
In contrast, a ‘traditional’ or ‘conventional’ narrative is one that has a fixed form and order as in the bound print novel of European origin. During the long and extensive history of the novel there has been continual experimentation with form but the novel has generally maintained a linear, print format. Espen Aarseth refers to this type of narrative as ‘nonergodic literature’ where “the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages” (Aarseth 1997, 1-2).
This is not to say that reading a traditional narrative is a passive experience. Roland
Barthes, Hans-Robert Jauss, and Wolfgang Iser each argued for the importance of the reader and demonstrated that the reader contributes as much to the process of reading and the construction of meaning as that derived from the text or produced by the author. Jauss (1970,
8) criticised the “circular system of production and of representation” in relation to classical
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literary criticism and asserted that the only way to understand the historical and cultural
significant of a work was to include a study of reception and impact (reader response).
Barthes (1967) rejected the notion of the author as the creator of all meaning, observing that
the reader plays a significant role in ‘unifying’ the text (Barthes 1977, 148). Similarly, Iser argued that the author’s text provides a guide or set of instructions that the reader assembles and personalises (Iser 1978, ix).
However, the reader’s participation in the production of meaning is not akin to an interactive text where the reader can navigate or assemble the structure of the narrative and, in many instances determine the outcome of the story. The heightened level of activity in an interactive narrative has led some to believe that the reader’s role in interactive storytelling is more significant now than ever. Jane Yellowlees Douglas (2001, 42) argues that the role of the reader in interactive narratives is just as important as the author’s contribution in creating the work. In an interactive narrative the reader’s role becomes more complicated: they are still required to read and interpret the text, but now they must also make decisions that will have an impact on the progression of the story. Bolter and Cover assert that interactivity modifies the traditional author-reader relationship by allowing the reader to ‘co-author’ the story. While the notion of the reader as ‘co-author’ is contested by many scholars, it is undeniable that the reader of an interactive story experiences, and desires, a heightened level of participation and narrative involvement. The author’s role is complicated by many different factors, for example determining how to incorporate meaningful choices into the narrative, together with how many to include and where in the narrative they occur. Giving choice to the reader reduces the author’s power over the narrative: the author still produces the content of the story but the sequencing and arrangement of that content is determined, in large part, by the reader. A writer wanting to produce an interactive narrative must adapt to new methods of conceptualising and producing fiction in order to create a story that is
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compelling, cohesive, and offers the reader the ability to interact with the narrative in meaningful ways.
I have discussed the broader notions of the author-reader relationship with a focus on the different roles authors and readers take within traditional and interactive contexts in order to lay the groundwork for the more specific focus of this project: the creative practitioner and the writing process. A traditional narrative can be viewed as a sequential text organised in a way that develops the characters and events within a narrative. This is a strong foundation upon which the traditional forms of narrative are built and it is a part of what makes these stories engaging and immersive. However, interactive narratives, for the most part, do not share this foundation. As Ulrike Spierling, an influential interaction designer and researcher, observes: “[t]raditionally, a story is a sequence of events. Authors have to rethink the creation of event structures for an interactive storyworld” (Spierling 2009, 293). For an author, having an indeterminate story structure has the potential to be both invigorating and terrifying.
Within interactive storytelling an author is able to explore many exciting possibilities, but is also presented with obstacles that complicate the writing process. The author must now conceive a narrative that not only can be represented in various structures but that also allows the reader to interact with the story in meaningful ways. It is also important to note that including these decision points disrupts the immersive reading experience typical to prose.
Ulrike Spierling and Nicolas Szilas (2009, 59) note that “an important task in authoring an interactive storyworld is the design of possibilities for interaction and role- adoption for end-users”. The author of an interactive narrative must decide how many interactions to include and what their effect will be. Ryan (2008, 8) argues that reader decisions should be integrated meaningfully into the plot and should occur frequently because choice and feedback promote agency. Although Ryan’s point is valid, when authors include additional choices within an interactive story they generally create considerably more work
The Architect of Forking Paths 6 Ben Carey for themselves. This is a familiar problem for many interactive writers, especially in game design. The solution is often to give the reader/player the illusion of agency: providing the reader with choices that appear different, but ultimately lead down the same path.
The implications of an indeterminate story structure and reader choice are complex for the author. Sometimes, particularly with software designed to develop interactive narratives, there is a tension between the fluidity of creativity and the rigidity of the interactive narrative software. Spierling and Szilas provide a telling example of an author unwilling or unable to comply with the formal constraints involved in assembling an interactive narrative, opting to write his story segments in a word processor rather than a spreadsheet that the story engine demanded, resulting in a story that was incompatible with the storytelling software. Spierling and Szilas observe that in this case “the creativity of the author was limited by the interactive narrative formalism used within the engine” (2009, 54).
Although this is just one, quite specific example, I can certainly speak to this tension between creative fluidity and interactive narrative formalism, having spent the past four years writing interactive narratives.
Interactive authors face many obstacles because interactive storytelling is still a relatively new form. Koenitz (2015, 50) suggests that IDN does not have established conventions for structuring and presenting narrative material that compare to other fields such as literature and film. Koenitz argues that the lack of these conventions constitutes an
“important obstacle” that aspiring interactive writers and authors from traditional narrative backgrounds must overcome (ibid).
The difficulties outlined above have resulted in a relatively small amount of scholarship on the topic of the interactive writing process, which I argue is problematic for interactive authors. Of course, key scholars such as Koenitz, Murray, Ryan, and Spierling
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have engaged with this topic, as the literature review shows, but there is room for more
research in this area, particularly from the perspective of a practitioner.
Influential game designer Chris Crawford (2015) argues that there has been an
explosion of academic and creative interest in interactive storytelling over the past several
decades, but despite extensive work and experimentation Crawford contests that there has
only been one truly interactive work produced: Façade (2005). Crawford contends that
Façade was ultimately a dead end because it “didn’t lend itself to a sequel or further
developments along those lines” (Crawford 2015). He concludes that “[i]nteractive
storytelling is a really, really hard puzzle. And it’s going to take a lot of effort to solve it”
(ibid). Crawford’s argument that Façade is the only truly interactive work is highly
questionable because there is no consensus in the IDN community on what makes a work
‘truly interactive’. Despite this, Crawford makes a compelling argument that IDN is a
complex field—in terms of research and practice—and is still in the early stages of development.
I believe that a more developed understanding of the author and the interactive
writing process will contribute to solving this puzzle. At the core of this research is the
question: what are key writing strategies or methods of conceptualisation that authors can
use to create richer interactive narratives? This project investigates this question using a variety of research methods, including creative practice, interviews with interactive authors,
content/textual analysis, and reflective practice. My research aims to provide insight for
creative practitioners about the process of writing interactive narratives and develop a number
of potential writing strategies (and methods of conceptualisation) that practitioners can use to
help create richer interactive works.
The creative component is a 50,000 word interactive novel, Ouroboros, which
features someone stuck in a time loop, reliving the same day over and over. The novel
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presents the reader with a cyclical labyrinth, in which different readers may choose to explore
the many intricacies of the labyrinth or try to quickly navigate their way out. The title of the
novel, Ouroboros, refers to the ancient image of a serpent eating its own tail, which, as
Christopher Hodapp (2009, 62) observes, “represents the infinite cycle of nature’s endless
creation and destruction—life and death” (italics in original). I felt that the connotations of
the word (and the symbol) would speak to similar issues within my story. On a thematic
level, the creative work explores notions of self, routine, and choice. Ouroboros questions
how our choices impact our lives and our sense of self; the creative work also investigates the notion of routines that we find acceptable and routines that we wish we could break, given
the opportunity. The creative work tests the potential writing strategies proposed in my
research and examines the major theoretical concepts discussed in the exegesis.
The exegesis consists of six chapters: a literature review that surveys and evaluates
the literature and current critical work in the field of interactive narrative; a theoretical
chapter that discusses the narrative and creative practice theory central to the project; a
content/textual analysis section, which examines selective works of interactive storytelling; a
chapter that analyses the responses from practitioner interviews and an online questionnaire;
a chapter proposing a set of potential interactive writing strategies; and finally a reflective
practice segment that interrogates my own creative work.
My research contributes to the field of interactive storytelling by developing a set of
writing strategies based on key theory, personal interviews with interactive authors, and my
own creative and reflective practice. This project proposes seven potential writing strategies
that focus on iterative planning and experimentation; project size and scope; the importance
of agency; concise and interactive story segments; the benefits of basic programming;
inclusive language; and utilising interactive writing communities. These strategies (covered
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in depth in Chapter 5) build upon pre-existing scholarly work and provide practical information for practitioners.
Along with these writing strategies, my research reveals significant findings about writing interactive narratives. First, the process of producing an interactive story is very
different to that of a conventional narrative. I learned from the interviews and trial and error
in my own practice that the strongest approach to developing an interactive narrative is not to
adapt something already written, but to start from scratch and build interaction in from the
beginning, therefore properly integrating interaction and story. Second, thorough planning
ahead of time is essential, but so is the freedom to experiment. I found that an iterative
planning and experimentation workflow enabled me to produce my best creative work. Third,
most interactive writing software is not designed for writers. My experience with the
interactive writing program Twine was mostly positive, however, the lack of spellchecking
and proofing options make it difficult for writers to perform a rigorous editing process.
This project extends knowledge in the fields of interactive narrative and creative
writing in several important ways. First, as discussed above, the exegesis critically
investigates the gap in scholarly research around the practitioner and the writing process in
interactive narratives; second, the account produces research data from interviews with both
practitioners and readers; third, the examination proposes a set of potential interactive writing
strategies (outlined above); finally, the critical ideas are given creative life in an original
interactive novel.
In relation to traditional forms of storytelling, interactive narratives are still young. In
order to capitalise on all that interactivity has to offer more scholarship around the
conceptualisation and writing processes is necessary. The ultimate goal of this project is to
extend this discussion and offer points of further investigation to other practitioners and
researchers interested in the production of interactive narratives.
The Architect of Forking Paths 10 Ben Carey
Chapter 1: Literature review
Scholarly work that examines interactive storytelling has generally focused on either the reader or the technology and mechanics behind the stories. This review argues that there has been a lack of enquiry into the important role of the author of interactive narratives and the associated writing process. The first section briefly explores the “death of the author” and discusses what this concept means in the context of interactive storytelling. The next section considers the newly empowered reader. Finally, the review investigates the groundwork that has been done in relation to interactive authors and demonstrates a need for further research.
Addressing the lack of knowledge about the author and the writing process is important because interactive storytelling, particularly in the digital environment, is still a new form, and as such, aspiring authors face many obstacles and complications. I believe these obstacles can only be overcome through the combination of scholarly work and experimentation in practice, both of which this project employs.
This account is not the first historical survey of the field. Both Epsen Aarseth (1997) and Jane Yellowlees Douglas (2001) provide a valuable history of interactive storytelling, however, Douglas’s focus is very much on hypertext fiction and Aarseth’s focus is on what he terms ‘cybertext’. Although Aarseth’s definition of cybertext is hard to pin down he describes it as a perspective used to “describe and explore the communicational strategies of dynamic texts” (Aarseth 1997, 5). Koenitz et al. (2015) provide a fine history of interactive digital narratives; however, in the context of this project, it is useful to consider all forms of interactive storytelling, not just the digital. Although IDN is the latest and most exciting development in interactive storytelling, there is a rich history in the predecessor of this form, interactive print narratives. The most comprehensive account that I am aware of that considers both print and digital interactive storytelling is Katherine Hayles’s and Nick
Montfort’s (2012) survey of interactive narrative.
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Although there have been several histories of the field, most of these have been
conducted by scholars or technologists, whereas my perspective is that of the creative writer.
One recent exception can be found in the work of Nigel Krauth. His book, Creative writing
and the radical (2016) argues that although pre-existing perspectives are “highly useful for
viewing the overall shape of the remediation processes and changes to technological
production, these perspectives treat text mainly as disembodied phenomena and as works for
readers rather than products deriving from writers’ motivation” (Krauth 2016, 2). The
perspective of the writer produces different findings from that of a theoretical or
technological point of view because the perspective of the writer deals with tangible, practical
issues to do with the writing process. There is a history of contemporary scholarship on
practice-led research but the area of craft or style in interactive storytelling is less developed.
Considering my perspective, I acknowledge that my selection of theory and creative works in
this review is influenced by my positioning as a writer.
The author is dead (a long time ago)
With the advent of digital writing, specifically IDN, many complexities arise around the
notion of the author. Michel Foucault (1969) summarises the traditional view of authorship:
We are accustomed […] to saying that the author is the genial creator of a work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth and generosity, an inexhaustible world of signification. We are used to thinking that the author is so different from all other men, and so transcendent with regard to all languages that, as soon as he speaks, meaning begins to proliferate, to proliferate indefinitely. (Foucault 1998, 221)
Foucault observes that traditionally the author was viewed as the creator of text and meaning, which readers consumed passively. The author had an elevated status, and was often represented as more important than the reader. Roland Barthes (1967) argues that “[c]lassic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in
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literature” (Barthes 1977, 148). There was a noticeable distance between the author, who was
seen as the creator of the work and the reader, who merely read the work.
During the middle of the twentieth century there was an ideological shift away from
the all-powerful author towards a more dynamic, authorless text. As Barthes notes:
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. (ibid, 146)
Barthes believes that the reader is an important part of the storytelling process because they
are able to assemble these multiple strands of meaning. As Barthes (ibid, 148) observes: “The
reader is the space on which all of the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without
any of them being lost: a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination”.
Like Barthes, Hans-Robert Jauss was deeply concerned with the “circular system of production and of representation” used in classical literary criticism and argued that the system needed to “include an aesthetics of reception and impact” (Jauss 1970, 8). Jauss believed that the only way to understand the cultural and historical impact of a work was to include the reader, thus reshaping the circle into a “triangle of author, work and reading public” (ibid). Jauss argues that:
A literary work is not an object which stands by itself and which offers the same face to each reader in each period. It is not a monument which reveals its timeless essence in a monologue. It is much more like an orchestration which strikes ever new chords among its readers and which frees the text from the substance of the words and makes it meaningful for the time […] a literary work must be understood as creating a dialogue, and philological scholarship has to be founded on a continuous re-reading of texts, not on mere facts. (ibid, 10)
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Barthes and Jauss established that texts are dynamic entities and that readers navigate and respond to texts in vastly different ways. Iser was from a similar school of thought; he was fascinated with the dialogue between the reader and the text. Iser (1978, 21) argues that literary works have “two poles, which we might call the artistic and the aesthetic: the artistic pole is the author’s text and the aesthetic is the realization accomplished by the reader”. For
Iser, the production of meaning in any literary work occurs from the communication between the artistic and aesthetic poles. The author’s text provides a guide or set of instructions that are acted out and personalised by the reader: “the fact that the [reader] must carry out the instructions shows implicitly that the meaning of the text is something that he has to assemble”
(ibid, ix).
The influential work of Barthes, Foucault, Jauss, and Iser, among others, provided an important and well acclaimed turning point in the field of literary theory. From the middle of the twentieth century onwards the gap between the author and the reader slowly began to close, as Jay David Bolter observes:
In the heyday of print, we came to regard the written text as an unchanging artefact, a monument to its author and its age. We also tended to magnify the distance between the author and the reader, as the author became a monumental figure, the reader only a visitor to the author’s cathedral. In the late age of print, however, we seem more impressed by the impermanence and changeability of text, and digital technology seems to reduce the distance between author and reader by turning the reader into an author herself. (Bolter 2001, 4)
But this ideological shift was not entirely theoretical: there were many developments in the creative sphere that complemented the arguments being made for the importance of the reader. In the 1960s several foundational interactive narratives were published. Raymond
Queneau produced A hundred thousand billion poems (1961) where readers are presented with 14 sheets, each containing 10 lines of a sonnet, which the reader is instructed to cut out
The Architect of Forking Paths 14 Ben Carey
and assemble. This is one of the first literary examples (at least in Western culture) of an
author producing a text that allows the reader to actively participate and construct their own narrative. Stephen Bold argues that while authors of the past had treated their texts as finite,
Queneau presents his text as “the material of poems yet to be written, as potential literature”
(Bold 1998, 549-550; italics in original). By presenting the reader with an almost infinite amount of potential sonnets Queneau places control of the reading experience in the reader’s hands.
Following this development were two novel-length works of fiction: Marc Saporta’s
Composition no. 1 (1962) and B.S. Johnson’s The unfortunates (1969). Both works consist of
a number of loose leaf pages, contained within a box, which the reader is instructed to shuffle
before reading2. I refer to this style of writing as the reader-assembled narrative (RAN), and I
have observed that “for Saporta the RAN is a new way to present a complex and compelling
narrative while experimenting with his creative process [and] for Johnson it is a way to more
authentically recreate the workings of the mind” (Carey 2015, 16).
Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch (1963) employed a different type of interaction altogether,
introducing a game-like element to the narrative process offering “the reader (at least) two
reading sequences, one linear though the codex, the other through the number of sequences
offered in the work’s preface” (Hayles and Montfort, 455).
Each one of these creative works empowers the reader, giving them the opportunity to
physically engage with and manipulate the narrative. However, an empowered reader means
that the author loses some control in the storytelling process. The author is still in control of
the content of the narrative, but the reader’s interactions with the story alter the author’s
ability to arrange that material in a specific structure. As Barthes (1977, 148) states, “the birth
of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author”. Although the reader has always
2 The unfortunates has a start and end section, but the rest can be read in random order.
The Architect of Forking Paths 15 Ben Carey been an active participant in the storytelling process, the reader’s participation in interactive stories is more tangible, in that they make decisions that directly affect the narrative.
Traditionally, the reader’s participation in the narrative was internal, as in the construction of narrative and meaning. With interactive storytelling there is also an external layer of involvement.
A new hope (the building blocks of narrative)
It is necessary here to spend some time discussing how several important aspects of narratology have informed this project. The work of narratologists, such as Victor Shklovsky
(1925), Vladimir Propp (1928), Seymour Chatman (1978), and Gerard Genette (1980) has greatly developed our understanding of the way in which narrative functions. The narratological distinction between story and plot is of particular interest to my research. As
Susan Friedman (2005, 199) observes, narratologists have discussed this distinction extensively: Propp refers to story and plot as ‘fabula’ and ‘sjuzhet’, Genette refers to them as
‘story’ and ‘narrative’, whereas Chatman calls these elements ‘story’ and ‘discourse’.
Peter Rabinowitz (2005, 182) argues that “the story/discourse distinction is too simple” and suggests that “we need to supplement the story/discourse distinction with a third term: path” (italics in original). Rabinowtitz elaborates on the need for this extra term:
Seymour Chatman once claimed that “time passes for all of us in the same clock direction” (Chatman 1978: 98) – and in a certain sense, that’s true. But the Theory of Relativity makes it clear that the order of events is, under certain circumstances, dependent on the situation of the observer; and that’s the case even in our everyday Newtonian lives. Different people (or, in literature, different characters) experience events in different orders. In other words, a character’s order of experience may conform to neither the story order nor the discourse order. (Rabinowitz 2005, 182- 183)
The Architect of Forking Paths 16 Ben Carey
Rabinowitz (2005, 183) concludes that “[Path] clearly has a significant role in the novel, for it’s the order of the events as experienced by the protagonist […] but it’s neither the order of events as they happen(ed) nor the order in which the narrator presents them […] I call this order the path of the protagonist.”
For the purposes of this review I will use Propp’s terms ‘fabula’ and ‘sjuzhet’ in addition to Rabinowitz’s ‘path’. As James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz (2005, 545) note, fabula is “the sequence of a narrative’s events in chronological order; more generally, the what of narrative before it is rendered in discourse” whereas sjuzhet is “the fabula rendered in
a specific narrative discourse; the synthesis of story and discourse”. Alan Nadel (2005, 431)
argues that the audience actually constructs the fabula (story) from the sjuzhet (plot). The
implication here is that if you rearranged the events of the narrative in a different order you
would create a different version (rendering) of that story.
Seymour Chatman’s (1978, 53-55) kernel and satellite theory 3 offers a deeper
understanding of the relationship between the events in a narrative, defining core, story-
defining events as ‘kernels’ and secondary events as ‘satellites’. As David Herman (2005, 25)
notes: “delete or add to the kernel events of a story and you no longer have the same story;
delete or add to the satellites and you have the same story told in a different way”. In a way,
kernel and satellite events function as the building blocks of narrative: it is the selection and
arrangement of these events that determines the story that is produced. Therefore, Chatman’s
theory takes on special significance when viewed in the context of interactive storytelling where the reader ‘constructs’ a version of the story using the building blocks provided by the
author. For example, think of the RAN (discussed above), where the reader is presented with
fragments of the story that they shuffle before reading. This type of storytelling features the
possibility for billions of story arrangements, each of which contain the same events, but are
3 Chatman’s theory was informed by Bathes’s distinction between ‘nuclei’ and ‘catalyzers’, which was in turn influenced by Boris Tomashevsky’s distinction between ‘bound’ (plot-relevant) and ‘free’ (nonplot-relevant) motifs (Herman 2005, 25).
The Architect of Forking Paths 17 Ben Carey
organised in different ways, ‘personalised’ to each reader. This is not so different from other
forms of interactive storytelling, such as branching narratives or hypertext fiction, where the
reader determines their ‘path’ through the narrative, and in essence builds their own sjuzhet
from the building blocks provided by the author.
The reader strikes back
In the late 1970s and early 1980s the emergence of digital technology proved a highly
influential innovation for those interested in producing interactive stories. New forms, such as
hypertext fiction, began to appear, empowering the reader further and bridging the gap
between author and reader. George Landow observes that:
Like contemporary critical theory, hypertext reconfigures—rewrites—the author in several obvious ways. First of all, the figure of the hypertext author approaches, even if it does not entirely merge with, that of the reader; the functions of the reader and writer become more deeply intertwined with each other than ever before. (Landow 1997, 90)
After a period in which literary criticism concentrated on the author, the reader was increasingly recognised as an important part of the storytelling process. Jane Yellowlees
Douglas (2001, 42) argues that the effort of the reader in interactive narratives is “nearly tantamount to that exerted by the author” in creating the work. It is certainly true that there is
an increased level of involvement from the reader in interactive narratives. As in traditional
modes of storytelling, the reader has to read and interpret the text but now they also make
decisions that affect the progression and often the outcome of the narrative. However, this
greater level of reader interaction is often mistaken for ‘co-authorship’, which Janet Murray
argues is misleading:
There is a distinction between playing a creative role within an authored environment and having authorship of the environment itself. Certainly interactors can create
The Architect of Forking Paths 18 Ben Carey
aspects of digital stories in all these formats […] but interactors can only act within the possibilities that have been established by the writing and programming. They may build simulated cities, try out combat strategies, trace a unique path through a labyrinthine web, or even prevent a murder, but unless the imaginary world is nothing more than a costume trunk of empty avatars, all of the interactor’s possible performances will have been called into being by the originating author. (Murray 1997, 152)
Murray is a champion for the importance of the reader and she accepts that interactive
narratives provide the reader with much more freedom and agency. However, she asserts that
the role of reader and author are not equal, because ultimately the author creates the world, the characters, and the experiences, which the reader encounters. Espen Aarseth also argues against the notion of co-authorship (at least in the context of hypertext):
Hypertext, especially when compared to other new digital media, is not all that different from the old world of print, pen, and paper. Hypertext is certainly a new way of writing (with active links), but is it truly a new way of reading? And is all this jumping around the same as creating a new text? (Aarseth 1997, 78)
Aarseth’s somewhat provocative claims about the reader are important. Each reader’s path
through a hypertext is certainly distinctive; in fact, I argue that each reader assembles their
own version of the story. However, as Murray has asserted, that version of the story is always created by using the building blocks created by the author.
Aarseth’s notion of hypertext as a new form of writing is of great interest to this project. In this context, Stuart Moulthrop’s Forking paths (1987) is an example of both the potential of the form as well as the creative possibilities for the author. Moulthrop’s hypertext is based on a Jorge Luis Borges story called ‘The garden of forking paths’ (1941), a text that explored the concept of branching narratives. As Bran Nicol (2009, 64) observes, Borges’s story is an example of narrative functioning on levels other than the linear and causal.
The Architect of Forking Paths 19 Ben Carey
Conceptually, ‘The garden of forking paths’ could be considered a revolutionary work that
was released ahead of its time. The digital platform of hypertext, which emerged over 40
years later, allowed Moulthrop to implement what Borges may have envisioned at the time.
Douglas (2001, 51) argues that Forking paths “is a hypertext fantasy built around a skeletal
arrangement of the Borges short story, with fully fledged narratives branching off from each
of the episodes and scenarios depicted in the original print fiction”. Due to the constraints of
print narratives, Borges was unable to fully realise his vision of the branching narrative.
Hypertext provided Moulthrop with the ability to explore each of the forking paths in the
narrative in a way that Borges was not able to do when he wrote the original story.
The apparent mid-twentieth century shift away from the author and towards the reader
is of particular importance to interactive writing because of the intimate relationship between
the author and reader in this form. The emergence of reader-response theory and the
willingness of practitioners such as Saporta, Johnson, and Cortazar to explore reader
interaction in their creative works contributed to the rapidly evolving ideology of the empowered reader. The appearance of IDN provided even more evidence of the reader’s
importance in the storytelling process. However, I argue that the extensive focus on the
reader and the reading experience limits discussions of authorial process and
experimentation. The majority of interactive narrative theory has examined either the reading experience or the mechanics of the narrative; the author has largely been excluded from this discussion, as this literature review reveals.
Return of the author
To date, the reader and the technology have been the focal points of scholarly research in the genre of interactive narratives. While the reader and the technology are both crucial pieces of the puzzle, so too is the author. Hartmut Koenitz and Sandy Louchart summarise this
disjuncture as follows:
The Architect of Forking Paths 20 Ben Carey
Research in Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN), from a technical point of view, has focused on the development of advanced computational systems to enable highly reactive and/or generative experiences, mainly concentrating on Artificial Intelligence (AI) constructs. In parallel, the humanities-derived perspective has been concerned with the analysis of the resulting experiences and the creative potential of interactive narratives vs. traditional forms of storytelling. Thus far, much less attention has been given to the creative process in producing IDN experiences and how a larger community of IDN makers could be created. (Koenitz and Louchart 2015, 1)
Koenitz and Louchart highlight a lack of emphasis on the author and the writing process, which is problematic because interactive storytelling does not have the same rich history as traditional forms of writing. Aspiring writers can learn about structure, style, voice, dialogue in a number of different ways, for example: writing manuals, creative writing courses, and studying creative works. While some of these lessons apply equally to aspiring interactive writers, many lessons are simply not in the book, because interactive writers face a range of problems that are exclusive to the interactive form. Koenitz (2015, 50) suggests that while
other artistic forms, such as literature and film, have established conventions for structuring
and presenting narrative material, the evolving field of IDN has no such design conventions.
Koenitz argues that the lack of these conventions constitutes an “important obstacle” that
aspiring interactive writers and authors from traditional narrative backgrounds must
overcome (ibid).
For example, two prominent issues relating to the interactive writing process are how
to devise a possible structure and effective decision points. As Ulrike Spierling (2009, 293)
observes, “Traditionally, a story is a sequence of events. Authors have to rethink the creation
of event structures for an interactive storyworld”. The idea of structure is completely
redefined for the interactive author as the story no longer has just one predetermined
arrangement. In fact, each type of interactive storytelling has its own structural rules:
The Architect of Forking Paths 21 Ben Carey branching narratives bifurcate at each decision point, creating a tree like narrative structure, whereas hypertext fiction acts more like a spider’s web, where segments are accessible through various other points in the web. The author must now create a narrative that not only can be represented in various structures but that also allows the reader to interact with the story in meaningful ways. Spierling and Szilas (2009, 59) note that “an important task in authoring an interactive storyworld is the design of possibilities for interaction and role- adoption for end-users”. Spierling and Szilas highlight the importance of considering interaction during the design process. However, as interaction is unnatural in traditional forms of narrative, including decision points can create problems for writers who are new to the medium. As Koenitz and Louchart (2015, 1-2) observe, “the articulation of logical choices at both narrative and character levels are challenging for traditional authors”.
Although few scholars have focused on the interactive author, those who have done so agree that there are problems within the practice of interactive writing, especially for aspiring writers. Spierling (2015, 159) notes that these authoring problems are a concern of the wider interactive storytelling community as demonstrated in attempts to address these issues at annual research conferences, such as the International Conference of Interactive Digital
Storytelling. Key scholars in the field have made suggestions about how to solve these problems, but the resulting framework is still abstract and very much a work in progress. A more in-depth exploration of this theoretical framework is found in Chapter 2.
Murray (1997, 85) acknowledges that the problem of interactive writing is not only an issue with authorial capabilities or knowledge, but also the efficiency of the technology, proposing that interactive authors need more nuanced software that allows the writer to arrange story elements the way a musician arranges digital music (ibid, 208). Although there has been extensive development in authoring programs over the past 20 years, there are very few that come close to matching Murray’s proposed software. Two programs stand out in this
The Architect of Forking Paths 22 Ben Carey regard: Twine and ASAPS. Twine, a popular program within interactive storytelling, allows writers to visually map out stories on a digital corkboard and accepts anything from the basic linking of passages to high level programming. The Advanced Stories and Presentation
System (ASAPS)4 was developed by Koenitz specifically for aspiring interactive writers.
ASAPS, which has been in development since 2007, focuses on a bottom-up approach, which is “based on the idea of giving non-expert authors access to ‘building blocks’, and letting them combine them into IDN works” (Koenitz and Chen 2012, 85). ASAPS appears to be a realisation of Murray’s (1997) vision of nuanced writing software that is easy to use and allows authors to create and arrange narrative elements, and experiment with different combinations. This is certainly reflected, at least in the description of the program, which claims that ASAPS aims to “impose as little pre-determined structure as possible and let creativity run free” (Koenitz and Chen 2012, 85). Although ASAPS has been extensively used in a university and research environment, the program is not available for public use, limiting its usefulness to the wider interactive community.
However, nuanced software is only part of the greater issue of developing techniques for the interactive process. Marie-Laure Ryan (2008, 8) offers a different view of the problems facing interactive storytelling by highlighting a number of important goals for future researchers and developers of interactive narrative. In short, Ryan suggests that creators of IDN should focus on producing stories that allow the user to interact with the story in a natural way (through voice and gesture) and contain opportunities for frequent interaction, which is integrated into the story and not tacked on (ibid). Ryan also believes that the storyworld should react to the reader’s interactions as much as possible and should try to immerse the reader so that a rewarding story is a goal in itself, rather than winning or
4 ASAPS was created as a PhD project (supervised by Murray) by Koenitz in 2005. Koenitz remains the main developer behind the software.
The Architect of Forking Paths 23 Ben Carey
succeeding at a task (ibid). While these goals provide useful direction for researchers and
developers of IDN, they do not provide concrete advice for aspiring writers.
Carolyn Miller, a screenwriter turned interaction designer, provides another approach
to educating aspiring interactive writers. Miller’s book, Digital storytelling: a creator’s guide
to interactive entertainment (2014), addresses three main points: characters and dialogue,
structure, and planning. Miller (2014, 102) argues that creating nuanced characters in digital
storytelling is more difficult than in traditional media because IDN lacks conventional
storytelling techniques, such as cut away scenes and lengthy exchanges of dialogue. Miller’s
statement echoes Koenitz’s claim that interactive storytelling has yet to establish the same
sort of conventions that exist in other artistic media. Miller offers a list of ideas to help
authors create dynamic characters and develop verbal and written communication. Although
these are undoubtedly helpful, they are not so much techniques but guidelines5 that could
equally apply to any form of storytelling. For instance, Miller suggests that interactive
authors “[i]nvest time in working out the backstories and psychological profiles of each of
[the] main characters” and also suggests that the “protagonist, and other important characters should have clear goals” (ibid, 102-103). Miller provides no such guidelines for structuring an interactive narrative, which is understandable, as there are so many different forms that structure can take; instead she provides various case studies and a list of focusing questions.
Perhaps the most promising aspect of Miller’s work is her focus on the importance of planning. Miller (ibid, 183) argues that “before a work of interactive entertainment is ever built—before the interactivity is programmed or the artwork is produced, or the sound is recorded—a tremendous amount of planning must first take place”. Miller provides a detailed ten point development checklist, which she argues should be “addressed early in the development process” (ibid, 189). While this development checklist does not provide an
5 My distinction here is that guidelines are abstract guiding principles whereas techniques are specific, tangible concepts that can be applied by a practitioner.
The Architect of Forking Paths 24 Ben Carey author with any tangible strategies to create an interactive story, it is useful in the sense that it provides a nicely structured overview of all of the aspects that need to be considered when designing an interactive narrative.
Whereas Miller articulates a useful checklist, Koenitz proposes a two-part strategy that addresses this need for practical writing strategies: first, a set of generalised design aspirations that authors can follow to improve a story; and second, a concrete design process for IDN that gives authors a framework upon which to build a narrative. Koenitz’s design aspirations suggest that authors provide the reader with ambiguous choices, rather than simplistic ones, such as good/evil; small narrative gaps, so that the reader can fill in the blanks; surprises, used sparingly; and delayed consequences, causing the thrill of uncertainty as well as highlighting the reader’s influence on the outcome of the narrative (Koenitz 2015,
55). These aspirations complement Ryan’s five goals for future researchers, however, by also providing a design process Koenitz offers something much more tangible for aspiring writers.
Koenitz’s (ibid, 53) design process is made up of four phases: the paper phase, prototype phase, production phase, and the testing phase. This process encourages early planning and visualisation of the project, with a particular focus on mapping out decision points, followed by extensive testing and the production of assets. Koenitz’s model favours planning and testing over improvisation on the basis that the process allows writers to focus equally on the two most important features of an interactive narrative: a high-quality story and meaningful interaction.
Spierling, like Koenitz, has developed a set of principles that can be applied by authors when designing interactive narratives, which have been tested in several case studies with authors from various professional backgrounds (Spierling 2015, 160). Spierling identifies four design principles: abstraction, conditional thinking, early user inclusion, and
The Architect of Forking Paths 25 Ben Carey
debugging the storyworld (ibid, 160-161). These principles, like Koenitz’s process,
encourage early planning, iterative design and testing.
In summary, during the age of print the author was seen to have control over the story
the storytelling experience, the reader passively reading the text that the author had produced.
However, an apparent ideological shift occurred in the middle of the twentieth century when
theorists such as Barthes, Foucault, Jauss, and Iser began to question the all-powerful author.
These theorists argued that the reader was not passive, but actively participated in the
storytelling process and held a crucial role in the reading process. Around this time
interactive storytelling also emerged, which seemed to confirm, in a practical sense, these
concerns. The reader was now a doubly active participant in the storytelling process: the
reader was now mentally constructing the text as well as physically navigating their way
through the narrative and making decisions that affected the outcome of the story. Many
theorists, and indeed practitioners as well, became enthused with the supposed power of the
reader, promoting them to the level of co-author. The majority of scholarly work that focuses
on interactive narratives has so far focused on either the empowered reader or the technology
behind the interactive narratives, but there has been a lack of research that focuses on the author. Furthermore, as this review has shown, the research that has focused on the author has been primarily from a theoretical perspective. Murray, Ryan, Miller, and particularly
Spierling and Koenitz, have begun to assemble a framework for aspiring interactive writers; however, there is still much work to be done in this regard. I believe that in order to further
develop this work it is necessary to combine these theoretical viewpoints with a
creative/practical perspective. My research addresses this need by examining my own
creative process as well as interviewing a range of other interactive writers, both established
and aspiring. This project aims to develop the framework that already exists by combining
these varied creative and theoretical perspectives.
The Architect of Forking Paths 26 Ben Carey
Chapter 2: Theory and methodology
This chapter explores the theoretical perspectives that inform this project and the
methodology that I have developed and applied in relation to the research. The work of Espen
Aarseth in the late 1990s and Jane Yellowlees Douglas in 2001 provides a broad framework
with which to understand interactive storytelling, specifically how the role of the reader
functions in this new medium. However, because the focus of this project is on the author and the writing process, the most influential theory is provided by Janet Murray, who proposes a new type of author for a new medium, along with Marie-Laure Ryan, Ulrike Spierling, and
Hartmut Koenitz who explore the writing and development process associated with interactive narratives. Whereas the contribution of these scholars to the field is examined above, this chapter extends the discussion of their work in relation to my own theoretical framework.
Janet Murray proposes that the Holodeck from Star trek is the ideal model for an
interactive narrative environment. The Holodeck is a realistic computer simulation of a
fictional world. The user steps into this world, impersonates a character, and interacts with
the environment through language and gesture. Regardless of what the user says or does, the system is able to respond coherently and integrate the user’s actions into a story arc that sustains interest. The Holodeck model described by Murray is based on the participant having
‘true’ agency within a narrative environment. Murray argues that “activity alone is not agency” (Murray 1997, 128). She observes that although tabletop games of chance may provide the player with many interactions, they do not give the player true agency because the effects of the player’s decisions are not related to their intentions; whereas in a game such as chess, which has comparatively few or infrequent interactions, the player has a high degree
of agency because they select moves from a large range of possible moves and the player’s
decisions determine the course of the game (ibid). Murray argues that agency is crucial in the
The Architect of Forking Paths 27 Ben Carey
context of IDN because it empowers the reader, giving them the ability to make meaningful
decisions and to see the results of those decisions (ibid, 126). The author determines the level
of reader agency in a story, therefore, in my opinion, maximising agency should be one of the
primary objectives when planning and developing a narrative.
Murray acknowledges that interactive storytelling is still in its infancy and she asks,
“What will it take for authors to create rich and satisfying stories that exploit the
characteristic properties of digital environments and deliver the aesthetic pleasures the new
medium seems to promise us?” (ibid, 185). Her own response to this question is abstract, but does provide a nice summary of the problems she recognises within interactive authorship:
We would have to find some way to allow [authors] to write procedurally; to anticipate all the twists of the kaleidoscope, all the actions of the interactor; and to specify not just the events of the plot but also the rules by which those events would occur. Writers would need a concrete way to structure a coherent story not as a single sequence of events but as a multiform plot open to the collaborative participation of the interactor. (ibid)
Murray recognises that the problem of interactive authorship is not only a problem of authorial capabilities, for example, the ability to think and write procedurally, but also the capabilities of the technology. Murray proposes that interactive authors require more nuanced software in order to create expressive and coherent interactive narratives. Murray states that
Since the writer’s task is analogous to composing a multi-instrument musical
performance, what is needed is a system for specifying story motifs that is as precise
as musical notation and that works something like the packages now available for
arranging music, that is, by letting the author specify one part at a time and then try
out the combinations and make appropriate adjustments (ibid, 208).
The Architect of Forking Paths 28 Ben Carey
As an interactive writer, the idea of such a system is very appealing, and although there has been extensive development in authoring tools over the past 20 years, there are still very few programs that even come close to matching Murray’s proposed software. Twine, the program
I have used for my creative work, is probably the closest to Murray’s vision of software that allows writers to select, arrange and experiment with narrative building blocks. In Twine writers can visually map out stories on a digital corkboard and rearrange and experiment with segments as they desire. This visual representation of the story is valuable, especially in large or complex stories. Twine is also user-friendly and accepts anything from the basic linking of passages to high level programming.
Marie-Laure Ryan dissects Murray’s Holodeck concept, separating the ideal model into its individual features, which Ryan nominates as important goals for future researchers and developers of interactive narrative. These five goals or characteristics of the ideal interactive narrative model include: a natural interface, the integration of action, frequent interaction, dynamic story creation, and narrative immersion (Ryan 2008, 8). A natural interface is where the reader interacts with the narrative environment in the same way they interact with the world, through gesture and language. The integration of action suggests that each of the reader’s actions should advance the plot and that all available interactions should have a close thematic relation to the story. Frequent interaction specifies that an interactive narrative should make interactive moments the rule and passive moments the exception.
Dynamic story creation proposes that the system respond as much as possible to the reader’s interactions. And finally, narrative immersion encourages building narratives that allow the reader to construct and contemplate a storyworld, where an aesthetically rewarding story is a goal in itself, rather than winning or succeeding at a task that has been given (as in a game).
The five goals that Ryan outlines provide valuable direction for future researchers and developers of IDN, but do not provide any concrete strategies. Ryan provides the list of
The Architect of Forking Paths 29 Ben Carey
ingredients to make a chocolate cake, but she does not provide instructions on how much of
each ingredient to use, what temperature to preheat the oven to, or how long to cook the cake.
Hartmut Koenitz and Sandy Louchart (2015, 1) observe that most research about interactive narrative has been approached from two different perspectives: technology and humanities. Koenitz and Louchart claim that the technological side has focused on the development of advanced computer systems to enable a highly reactive experience, whereas the humanities have concentrated on the resulting experiences and creative potential of IDN, however, less attention has been given to the creative process of producing interactive
narratives (ibid). Having had experience with both perspectives, I am inclined to agree with
Koenitz and Louchart. A greater focus on the writing and design process involved in IDN is
crucial because it will provide us with a fuller understanding of interactive narrative and
allow for better education of new writers.
Drawing from their many years of practice and experience teaching IDN, Koenitz and
Louchart pinpoint one of the most common design flaws. Koenitz and Louchart (ibid, 2) observe that new writers often combine traditional form with interactivity, which leads to a story with a traditional narrative structure containing a few interactive elements, or what
Koenitz and Louchart call “interactivization”. Koenitz and Louchart concede that while the process of “retro-fitting traditional narrative concepts is perhaps a natural first approach in understanding the medium, ultimately IDN will require its own concepts as a vehicle for human expression” (ibid). Koenitz suggests that while other artistic forms, such as literature and film, have established conventions for structuring and presenting narrative material, the evolving field of IDN has no such design conventions, which constitutes an “important obstacle” that aspiring interactive writers and authors from traditional narrative backgrounds must overcome (Koenitz 2015, 50). Furthermore, Koenitz observes that aspiring interactive writers are often influenced by Choose Your Own Adventure books and create linear
The Architect of Forking Paths 30 Ben Carey
narratives with simplistic branching decisions (ibid, 53). Koenitz argues that this type of
narrative does not fully capitalise on the potential of interactive digital storytelling. Finally,
Koenitz identifies “mechanistic pacing” as an issue, where the writer includes many
successive choices, for the sake of interaction, which do not actually increase the reader’s
agency (ibid). Authors who adopt this type of pacing often neglect other important aspects,
such as creating nuanced characters or developing complex narratives (ibid). The solution
that Koenitz proposes consists of three equally important elements: first, a set of generalised design heuristics or “design aspirations” that authors can follow to improve a story; second, a concrete design process for IDN that gives authors a framework upon which to build a narrative; third, a computer program, ASAPS, that targets aspiring authors and implements
the former two elements.
Koenitz’s design heuristics focus on the importance of not only the reader’s initial
interest in a narrative, but their continued motivation to keep reading the story (Koenitz 2015,
54). These principles (previously discussed in Chapter 2) complement Ryan’s five goals for
future researchers, however, by also providing a design process Koenitz offers something
much more tangible for aspiring writers.
Koenitz’s process is made up of four phases: paper, prototype, production, and testing
(ibid, 53). This process encourages early planning and visualisation of the project, with a
particular focus on mapping out decision points, followed by extensive testing and the
production of assets. This design model favours planning and testing over improvisation on
the basis that the process allows writers to focus equally on the two most important features
of an interactive narrative: a high-quality story and meaningful interaction. From my point of
view, which is informed by Murray and Ryan, a meaningful decision should A) be woven
into the fabric of the narrative, not tacked on at the end as a device to advance the plot, and
The Architect of Forking Paths 31 Ben Carey
B) allow the reader to affect the outcome of the narrative and therefore experience true
agency.
Ulrike Spierling, a significant interaction designer, has focused much of her work,
particularly in the past five years, on how to solve the authoring problems that currently exist
within interactive storytelling. Spierling, like Koenitz, has developed a set of principles that
can be applied by authors when designing interactive narratives, which have been tested in
several case studies with authors from various professional backgrounds (Spierling 2015,
160). As mentioned in the previous chapter, Spierling identifies four design principles6: abstraction, conditional thinking, early user inclusion, and debugging the storyworld (ibid,
160-161). Abstraction relates to the author thinking about the story and system behaviour as a whole, without focusing on specific decision points. Spierling acknowledges that this method of thinking is intended to be used in conjunction with more concrete techniques (such as scene creation and testing), as an author cannot write an entire narrative from an abstract perspective (ibid, 160). The principles of conditional thinking and early user inclusion focus
on “considering the effects of each possible action” and considering, from the beginning of the design process, how and where the user will interact and the extent of their influence throughout the narrative (ibid, 160-161). Debugging the storyworld involves an iterative process of design and testing, which Koenitz also highlighted in his design process.
Spierling’s design principles relate to Koenitz’s design process in a number of ways; both encourage early planning and visualisation of the project, with a particular focus on the design and integration of decision points, and both emphasise the importance of an iterative design and testing process.
The work of Murray, Ryan, Spierling, and Koenitz forms the beginning of a promising framework for interactive writers. My research extends this framework in two
6 There are in fact five design principles, however, one has not been tested like the others and therefore lacks the practical application necessary.
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ways: first, by incorporating interviews with interactive authors, and second, by testing this framework within my own creative practice. This project includes a range of interviews with
both established and aspiring interactive authors, which provides practical insight on the
writing process and the obstacles faced by writers themselves. These interviews are used to
test the existing framework: in some cases the results are consistent across the board, in other cases there are conflicts or fascinating outliers, which are all important to discuss.
Furthermore, by testing this framework in my own creative and reflective practice I gain first-
hand, practical knowledge of how these techniques work or fail to work. Using creative
practice I can explore and further develop these existing ideas in practice, rather than in
theory, which means that the resulting set of techniques should have a more useful
application for other interactive writers.
Methodology
A variety of research methods inform this project, including creative writing, content/textual
analysis, reflective practice, and qualitative research in the form of interviews with
practitioners. Each of these methods offers a distinct set of research tools; therefore, in this
section I outline these methods and explain why they are integral to the project.
Content and textual analysis
In order to build a strong framework to investigate my own creative work, the project
employs analyses on a range of existing interactive narratives, combined with critical
engagement with these texts. As outlined above, the work of key scholars such as Marie-
Laure Ryan, Janet Murray, and Jane Yellowlees Douglas provide an interactive narrative
theory framework with which to analyse the texts. The project analyses focus texts in two
different areas of interaction: branching narratives and hypertext fiction. Each analysis
consists of a short discussion of the work, including a selective positioning of the material
and a content analysis that helps identify a range of techniques in writing interactive
The Architect of Forking Paths 33 Ben Carey narratives. Content analysis offers the flexibility to assess a range of different source material.
As Bruce Berg (2007, 303–304) suggests, content analysis, as a qualitative approach, is “a careful, detailed, systematic examination and interpretation of a particular body of material in an effort to identify patterns, themes, biases, and meanings”, which provides a guide to the way these interactive stories work. Earl Babbie (2015, 334) notes that content analysis is cheap, unobtrusive, time efficient, and allows researchers to study processes over a long period of time. This final point is of particular importance to my research as I am not only looking to observe the workings of specific interactive narratives, but to observe how early interactive works function in relation to their recent counterparts.
Interviews
As the focus of this project is on interactive authors, the series of interviews conducted with practitioners is of great importance to this project. The first group of interviews focuses on a number of established authors and concentrates on the interactive writing process. The second group takes the form of an online questionnaire and examines the responses from a number of aspiring writers, as a means of contrast to the initial findings. Interviewing is a complex process in itself, as Andrea Fontana and James Frey observe: “interviewing is not merely the neutral exchange of asking questions and getting answers. Two (or more) people are involved in this process, and their exchanges lead to the creation of a collaborative effort called the interview” (Fontana and Frey 2005, 696; italics in original). For my own interview process I used a semi-structured, qualitative approach. Semi-structured interviews “involve the use of predetermined questions, where the researcher is free to seek clarification. An interview guide is developed to collect similar types of data from all participants and create a sense of order” (Doody and Noonan 2013, 30). The semi-structured interview allowed me to investigate a common area of interest between interview participants and also permitted me
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to modify interview questions in response to the individuality of each practitioner’s writing
process.
The interviews focus on the writing process, chiefly the conceptualisation of
interactive narratives, obstacles faced, and creative problem solving. These responses were
gathered in order to develop a set of potential writing strategies for interactive writers. In the
first group, I conducted four interviews with established interactive authors, two of whom
were Australian, Emily Craven and Tom Dullemond, and two were international, Paul La
Farge and Emily Short. The interviews were conducted with the approval of the QUT
Human Research Ethics Committee (approval number 1500000736).
Each interview consisted of 19 questions, which covered a range of topics from ‘the
role of the author in interactive narrative’ to ‘agency’ and ‘engagement’. In the interview
with La Farge I removed two questions that I deemed not relevant to his practice. Where
possible there was an audio recording of each interview, which allowed me to make
observations at the time of the interview that informed my later reflections on the findings.
However, my correspondence with La Farge and Short was conducted through email,
therefore I had the electronic transcript to refer back to during my data analysis process. My
primary interest was in tracing emerging themes or patterns from the interviews: similarities
and differences between practitioners and between the different modes of writing, creative
obstacles, and problem solving.
The second group takes the form of an online questionnaire, specifically targeting
aspiring authors. The questionnaire consisted of a pared back version of the interviews, containing seven questions that I and my supervisors deemed to be most pertinent to the research. I disseminated this questionnaire to a number of online interactive narrative communities: the Interactive Fiction Community Forum, the Twine Forum, the Text
Adventures forum, and the website Choice of Games. All questionnaire data were provided
The Architect of Forking Paths 35 Ben Carey and handled anonymously. My primary interest with the questionnaire responses was to collect a range of data about how aspiring interactive authors approach the writing process and what creative obstacles they faced and the types of problem solving they employed.
Creative and reflective practice
This project combines creative and reflective practice to examine the process involved in producing an interactive narrative from the point of view of a creative writer. Having had previous experience reading and producing interactive narratives, I knew how complex the process could be, so I allocated a significant amount of time to prototyping and investigating the different methods and strategies involved in creating an interactive story. The insights and observations gathered from my interviews with creative practitioners, along with the data from my content and textual analysis provided a framework (or a group of writing strategies) to build my creative work around. Additionally, the reflective practice element of the project is an examination of my creative writing process, informed by a research journal kept for the duration of the project.
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Chapter 3: Content/textual analysis
Many interactive works have contributed to my knowledge of the field and my understanding
of how interactive stories operate. With this in mind, this chapter examines a select number
of these interactive texts, including The cave of time (1979), Invaders from the big screen
(1998), Star court (2014), afternoon, a story (1990), and Luminous airplanes (2011) with a
view to establishing key writing strategies in the area of interactive narrative.
These texts were selected for a number of reasons: time period, length, availability,
and to some degree critical or public reception. I selected works from a variety of time
periods in order to best represent the development of IDN. In terms of length, I had a preference for shorter works as it made analysis of multiple texts more manageable. In addition, analysing the structure of shorter interactive works that can be read multiple times aided the development of my creative work Ouroboros. The availability of each text was also important, for instance I chose The cave of time because it is the first available branching narrative and depicts the origins of this narrative form well. Finally, there was an element of critical or public reception involved in my selection process. afternoon is often celebrated by scholars as one of the first and most important hypertexts, likewise Luminous airplanes received a lot of mainstream critical attention. While Star court received less critical attention it was very well received by readers.
Marie-Laure Ryan, Janet Murray, and Jane Yellowlees Douglas are the key scholars who have influenced my analyses because of their important and useful work in interactive narrative theory as noted above. My examination consists of a short discussion of each work, including a selective positioning of the material and a content analysis that helps identify a range of techniques in writing interactive narratives. Content analysis offers the flexibility to assess a range of different source material.
The Architect of Forking Paths 37 Ben Carey
This chapter analyses two types of interactive storytelling: the branching narrative and hypertext fiction. This investigation evaluates important aspects of the theoretical framework and explores ideas discussed further in the interviews with practitioners. Here I employ
Douglas’s definition that an interactive narrative is a text “that contain[s] episodes in the form of chunked text and a range of action accompanying a single decision” (Douglas 2001, 5).
Douglas considered a variety of definition, including those provided by Espen Aarseth, David
Bolter, and Janet Murray, before arriving at her own statement. The value of Douglas’s definition over Aarseth’s or Murray’s is that it is flexible: her definition certainly applies to all of the texts analysed in this chapter.
The analysis is also informed by Marie-Laure Ryan’s five goals for future researchers of IDN, specifically the notion of ‘frequent interaction’:
In real life, we interact with people and the world on a fairly constant basis, though there are moments when we are stripped of agency and forced to watch as spectators the events that determine our destiny. To reproduce this aspect of life, interactive narratives should make interactive moments the rule and passive moments the exception, rather than limiting agency to a few decision points separated by long stretches of passive watching. (Ryan 2008, 8)
Ryan’s point is valuable because it applies to the spectrum of interactive narratives: it is not limited to print narratives or electronic narratives alone. The following analyses concentrate on interactivity: how many active decisions is the reader able to make? How many passive moments are there (segments where there is only one available option)? And in some instances, what is the period of time between choices? Here I test this material as a participant reader to assess Ryan’s understanding of interaction in creative works.
Although the interactive elements of a narrative allow the reader to actively participate in the story, the reader must want to participate in the narrative and interaction alone will not always spark that desire. According to Murray, ‘agency’ is one of the defining
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elements of an interactive narrative, which she defines as “the satisfying power to take
meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices” (Murray 1997, 126). The term ‘interactive’ describes the reader’s ability to make choices and ‘agency’ offers a purpose for readers to participate in the story. Agency is a contributing factor towards the reader’s desire for participation and the creative practitioner should try, where possible, to allow the reader to have as much agency as possible.
Branching narratives
Branching narratives are stories that offer the reader “multiple reading paths through a codex,
the simplest form of which is the beloved children’s genre, Choose Your Own Adventure”
(Hayles and Montfort 2012, 455; italics in orginal). With this type of narrative the idea is
“simply to place the reader into the role of the main protagonist and to enable the reader to choose the direction of story pathways within the book, leading to different stories and endings” (Mundy and Consoli 2013, 217). In this section I analyse three branching narratives:
The cave of time (1979), Invaders from the big screen (1998), and Star court (2014). The selection of these texts is determined by publication date in order to represent branching narratives from three different periods.
The cave of time is the first book in the Choose Your Own Adventure children’s series, published between 1979 and 1992, which produced 185 books (in the main series, there were also countless spinoff series). Gary Westfahl (2000, 41) argues that the popularity of the Choose Your Own Adventure book series was “immediate and enormous” and that the books “struck a chord in the 1980s and 1990s”. The success and impact of the Choose Your
Own Adventure series is evident in the sales figures, which, according to Sally Lodge,
“reached an in-print tally of more than 250 million copies and were published in 38 languages” (Lodge 2007, para. 1). The series sparked an enthusiasm for reading in generations of young readers and established what would become a very popular story
The Architect of Forking Paths 39 Ben Carey format. In The cave of time the reader is an adventurer who stumbles upon a cave that transports them to different periods of time. The book claims to have 40 possible endings, which is impressive considering it is only 115 pages in length. Because of the short duration of each reading I have included an analysis of two readings in order to develop a broader understanding of how the narrative works.
In my first reading of The cave of time I stumbled through the Cave of Time and became imprisoned in a royal cell because the king did not believe my story of time travel.
This was a result of my choice of “telling the truth” as opposed to “[making] up a plausible story” (Packard 1979, 23). I then chose to jump from my prison cell and accepted the offer of shelter in a fishing village. My first reading ended when the Loch Ness Monster appeared in a lake while I was fishing and ate me. This ending was influenced by my decision not to “find
[my] way back to the Cave of Time” (ibid, 66).
In this first reading I was presented with seven points of decision. At each point I was provided with two options, one of which was generally more conservative, the other being more adventurous. I was given six active choices and there was only one passive moment.
My first reading was short, at roughly 1200 words, but it was an engaging experience. I believe this level of engagement is due to the frequent decision making and the short interval between these decisions. The longest segment was the introduction at roughly 220 words and the shortest section was 25 words. The average of each section was 137 words, which highlights the frequency of decision making.
As a writer I was surprised that Packard could develop the world so quickly and advance the plot in fun and engaging ways, but there is definitely a lack of focus on characterisation. The cave of time feels like a story that has been pared back into a barebones structure that only contains the fun and exciting elements of the story, removing the ‘boring’ sections and because this is a children’s story I feel that Packard engages with his audience
The Architect of Forking Paths 40 Ben Carey
extremely well. The barebones concept partly inspired the design process of Ouroboros.
When I first designed the story I focused on all of the exciting elements of the narrative and then began to focus on the more substantial elements, such as characterisation, themes, and motivation.
In my second reading I took shelter in the Cave of Time and found a group of “short, stocky people with straight black hair and primitive faces” (ibid, 17). I choose not to try and make friends with these people and ventured further into the cave. My second reading ended when I found myself back in ‘civilisation’ and greeted by my friends and family who
“express the greatest surprise that after eleven years [I hadn’t] changed a bit” (ibid, 51).
Looking at this reading from a postcolonial perspective, it is clear that the protagonist is of a colonial mindset, indicated by the description of the ‘primitive’ people (presumably Native
Americans) inside the cave and juxtaposed with the protagonist’s joy at returning to
‘civilisation’. The representation of Native Americans in the text is problematic because the perspective privileges a modern, Western perspective while painting an overly simplistic, black and white picture of Native American culture. In terms of story mechanics, I was presented with only four points of decision, all of which provided me with two options. This time round I was given three active choices and one passive moment. My second reading was much shorter, at roughly 900 words. The longest segment was once again the introduction at roughly 220 words and the shortest segment was 104 words. In my second reading the average of each section was higher at 150 words, which shows slightly less frequent decision making.
Based on two readings, The cave of time satisfies Ryan’s rule of frequent interaction by including many points of decision making and also making active choices the rule and passive moments the exception. The cave of time fulfils the conditions of Murray’s agency in that the reader makes decisions and they see the results of those decisions: instant results in
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proceeding segments and long term outcomes such as victory or defeat stemming from the
reader’s decisions.
In the early 1990s the Choose Your Own Adventure series ended and the interest in
this type of branching narrative seemed to subside until Goosebumps founder R.L Stine
released Escape from the carnival of horrors (1995), the first book in the Give Yourself
Goosebumps series. This new series was a reboot of the Choose Your Own Adventure format, which was aimed at a slightly older audience and emphasised themes of not only adventure, but horror. The Give Yourself Goosebumps series was a successful spinoff from the main franchise, producing 42 books and inspiring a fresh run of Choose Your Own
Adventure books, this time promoting a horror theme. Invaders from the big screen is the 29th book in the series, chosen due to accessibility. The reader is a young moviegoer who, accompanied by their best friend, discovers a mysterious cinema that transports them into the movie. The book features 28 different endings and is 137 pages in length. Based on the adequate length of my first reading I decided to only perform one reading of this text.
I chose to see ‘House of a Hundred Horrors’ at the cinema and I was given 3D glasses that sucked me into the movie. I found myself trapped in a haunted house with the protagonists of the movie who were trying to find their Aunt Kitty. After some running around I decided to “help find Aunt Kitty” rather than “find [my] way out alone” (Stine 1998,
119). Eventually I found myself in a portrait room, one of which magically spoke to me and warned that the people I was with were vampires. I then had to choose whether I thought the painting was lying or if they were indeed vampires: “If you think the twins are the vampires, turn to page 59. If you don’t believe the eyeless painting, turn to page 118” (ibid, 67). I decided to trust the twins and my reading ended two sections later when they revealed they were vampires and they stole my 3D glasses to terrorise the real world.
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In my reading of Invaders from the big screen I was presented with seven points of decision. At five of these decision points I was given two options to choose from, one generally more conservative, the other more daring. For example, after finding a dresser in a spooky room, the reader is given the choice between reaching into a drawer—which may contain something useful or “deadly”—or leaving the room and avoiding the potential threat altogether (ibid, 16). At two points I was given three options to choose from. In my reading there were very minimal active choices, only seven out of the 21 segments allowed me to make a decision, creating 14 passive moments. My reading was quite lengthy at roughly 3300 words, and it was not entirely engaging. I believe this lack of engagement was due to the frequency of passive moments and the limited number of active choices I was able to make, which is, quite literally, the name of the game. The longest segment was roughly 200 words and the shortest was 68 words. The average of each section was 157 words. The longest period between decisions was roughly 800 words, which eventuated from a chain of five passive segments.
The structure of this story is different to in The cave of time. The interaction in this story seems tacked on rather than properly integrated into the narrative structure, and as such
I often felt frustrated by not being able to make important decisions and being sent from one page to the next, as if the mere act of searching for the right page were an adequate substitute for decision making. As a result, Invaders from the big screen fails to satisfy Ryan’s rule of frequent interaction. Here the passive moments are the rule and the active choices are the exception. The combination of the high word count for each section and the time between decisions indicates that this book is a mostly passive experience, at least in relation to decision making. Invaders from the big screen does allow the reader to experience an element of agency, but this agency is weakened by the lack of choices available to the reader.
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Analysing the interactive mechanics of this story directly informed my own creative
process because it exhibited, in a practical sense, the importance of Ryan’s rule of frequent
(and integrated) interaction. As such I developed the structure and mechanics of Ouroboros
with this in mind. I did not want to prevent the reader from making important decisions in my
work or feel cheated by encountering too many passive segments and taking away their agency.
In the past two decades the development of the internet and digital technology have allowed for widespread eBook distribution as well as web publishing. Web publishing not only enables anyone to distribute writing and anyone else to read that writing, but it also creates the potential for online communities of readers and interactive writers. One of the most promising interactive communities I have found is the Interactive Fiction Database
(IFDB), where recognised and aspiring writers alike are able to create interactive stories and upload them to have them read, rated, and commented on by readers and other writers. The
IFDB is valuable for my research because there is a vast selection of interactive works as well as the ability to search by ratings (a helpful measure of popularity and influence), author,
genre, or keyword. Star court is a short piece of branching fiction that I found on the IFDB.
Star court, aimed at a young audience, takes places in a futuristic court room where the
reader has been accused of a crime and is trying to prove their innocence. The work is
electronic and has multiple endings. I have only included one reading of the text because of
the adequate length of the first reading.
I was accused of stealing a miniature city and immediately asked whether I wanted to
“hire a good lawyer”, “accept the Public Defendroid”, or “Act as [my] own counsel”
(Anthropy 2014, “PRISONER!”). I hired a lawyer, and, following their counsel, pleaded not
guilty. During the trial the prosecutor called a professional criminal as a witness and I
decided to “[q]uestion the validity of a professional criminal’s testimony” (ibid, “The
The Architect of Forking Paths 44 Ben Carey
Prosecution”), and then asked my lawyer to run a background check on the criminal to
discredit their testimony. I was then required to call two witnesses of my own, one to provide
an alibi and one as a character reference. My reading ended when I was found guilty due to
poor witness testimonies. I was then sentenced to “1121 years in an abandoned space station
adrift in deep space” (ibid, “You are hereby sentenced”).
Star court follows a similar barebones structure to The cave of time, which made it
highly engaging, however I feel that this story in particular really capitalised on the element
of humour that was missing from the previous two stories. There were several segments that I
found funny (either in a clever or an absurd way) and I think that increased my engagement
with the narrative. In my own creative practice I explored using humour, on both a story-level and on a decision-making level. For instance, instead of apologising for an argument with your partner you have the option to apologise for Adam Sandler’s acting career. I have since removed this option because tonally it did not work with the rest of the scene, but I have kept the story-level humour.
In my reading of Star Court I was presented with 16 points of decision. The amount of options ranged from two up to 10, with an average of three options per segment. There were predominantly active choices: 16 passages provided active choices, leaving nine passive
moments. The following is an example of one of these passive moments: “The Judge unfolds
the paper, looks at it, squints at it, folds it back up, and places it aside. They clear their throat
to speak. Receive verdict (ibid, “Order in Star Court”; my italics to represent reader’s only
choice). My reading was medium length at roughly 1800 words, and I found it engaging. I
believe it was the wealth of choices provided and the brevity of segments, which allows for
more decision making. The longest segment was 125 words and the shortest was 21. The
average of each segment was 74 words.
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Star court satisfies Ryan’s rule of frequent interaction. Active decisions are predominant in this narrative and passive moments are limited. The text is composed of a number of short fragments of text, which allows the reader to not only breeze through the narrative quickly and effortlessly, but reach the next point of decision more quickly. The reader experiences agency in this text as they are able to make choices and see the results of those choices. Additionally, they can use three favours throughout the story to achieve different goals, for example, hiring a good lawyer costs one favour. Using these favours correctly adds to the engagement of the narrative and directly relates to the reader’s sense of agency: if the reader uses one of three favours on a decision they expect a specific and positive result from the narrative. Star court also features a number of variables: the crime the reader is accused of changes between readings, as does the witness that the prosecution calls.
These variables permit even more individuality between readings, and sometimes even shape the way the reader approaches the narrative.
The comparison between The cave of time and Invaders from the big screen shows an interesting development in the branching print narrative in relation to decision making. Of course, these are just two of many texts, but they are indicative of the era in which they were produced. It appears that The cave of time values choice over narrative development as opposed to Invaders from the big screen where story is favoured over decision making, a trend that has been previously documented:
Interaction designer Christian Swinehart (2009) has analysed the genre by quantitatively evaluating a set of twelve books from 1979 to 1986. His analysis shows an increase in linearity over time, a result suggesting that, after the novelty of the genre wore off, readers preferred fewer decision pages […] and more narrative development. (Hayles and Montfort 2012, 455)
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This shift towards linearity does not, however, directly relate to reader preference as Hayles
and Montfort argue. The increase in linearity could have also been due to author preferences
or publishing demands. In any case, this trend holds true not only for the later books in the
Choose Your Own Adventure series (as observed by Swinehart), but also for the Give
Yourself Goosebumps series, of which Invaders from the big screen is the 29th book. This trend does not apply to the third and most recent text, Star court. This could be due to the
digital nature of the text or the fact that it was self-published and not held to the same criteria
as the conventional publishers would have imposed on the authors of the first two texts.
The branching narrative that came to life with the Choose Your Own Adventure left a
notable legacy, which was continued by R.L. Stine in the Give Yourself Goosebumps series,
beginning in 1995. Stine’s series ended in 2000 and for five years the branching narrative
seemed to lose traction in the market. However, in 2005 Chooseco began to republish and
update (text, artwork, and titles) numerous classic books in the original Choose Your Own
Adventure series and released a new series targeted at even younger children. More recently
in 2014 there has been a staggering amount of interest in the branching narrative. A series
called Choose Your Own Ever After was released, updating the classic format to target teenage girls, and in a similar vein Nicola Jane released an adult romance novel called Follow
your fantasy (2014). Finally, there was a fascinating twist on the autobiography genre with
Neil Patrick Harris: Choose your own autobiography (2014). Not only does the frequency of these titles indicate a continuing interest in the branching narrative, the spread between classic adventure, horror, romance, and autobiography shows a diversification of the narrative format. In the section below, a further platform, hypertext fiction, is examined in relation to the continuing expansion of the interactive narrative form.
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Hypertext fiction
Hypertext fiction is a digital form of interactive narrative that combines creative text and non- linear computer browsing: the reader is presented with a section of text containing links which they navigate to other sections of text. Murray offers a useful analogy about how hypertext fiction operates: “[Hypertext is] like a set of index cards that have been scattered on the floor and then connected with multiple segments of tangled twine” (Murray 1997, 132).
In a hypertext narrative the reader generally makes a decision on every page, which guides the progression of the story. In this final section I analyse two works of hypertext fiction: afternoon, a story (1990) and Luminous airplanes (2011). I selected these works because they are from vastly different periods of time, which provides a contrast in writing styles.
afternoon is considered one of the first works of hypertext fiction, written by Michael
Joyce in 1987, but not published by Eastgate Systems until 1990, and some scholars, such as
Brian McHale, claim that Joyce’s work is “the best-known of all hypertext fictions” (2007,
43). afternoon has received critical attention from key scholars in the field, such as Murray,
Aarseth, and Douglas. afternoon generated considerable interest from academics and general readers alike, and also promoted hypertext as a field of scholarship and creative practice.
Anne Mangen notes that “the publication of afternoon sparked a great interest in hypertext both aesthetically and theoretically, involving a number of prominent authors and literary scholars, such as Robert Coover, George P. Landow, Jay David Bolter and N. Katherine
Hayles” (2008, 407; italics in original). afternoon is aimed at an adult audience and allows the reader to navigate a whimsical work of prose, exploring many different places and character perspectives: the work is made up of 539 segments of text and 905 connections between segments, and according to Douglas, has at least five endings, or “points of closure”
(2001, 40). It is due to the expansive nature of this text that my analysis is based on a selection of roughly 3000 words.
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Reading afternoon was an interesting but ultimately fragmentary experience. The
story begins with a colourful, somewhat ambiguous description of winter that sets up a
wealth of story paths: “By five the sun sets and the afternoon melt freezes again across the
blacktop into crystal octopi and palms of ice—rivers and continents beset by fear, and we
walk out to the car, the snow moaning beneath our boots…” (Joyce 1990, “Begin”). From
this introduction there are 16 paths that the reader can explore, such as the links ‘winter’,
‘crystal’, and ‘blacktop’. I navigated thorough a number of conversation fragments between
the protagonist and someone called Nausicaa and then encountered a fragment of poetry (or
the protagonist’s unedited thoughts): “had a wife once used to love me in the heat called me
lover as porpoises in the dog days slap and salt” (ibid, “I had a wife”). My reading ended on a
rather ambiguous and intriguing note: “The investigator finds him to be at fault. He is
shocked to see the body so beautifully there upon the wide green lawn. The boy is nearby”
(ibid, “white afternoon”).
afternoon is an interesting exploration of the literary technique of fragmentation and
to some degree Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony. While fragmentation has been
explored extensively in Modernist and Postmodern fiction this has generally been done in a
physically linear manner, whereas Joyce’s work reinterprets this technique for the digital and
interactive form. Joyce’s exploration of fragmentation inspired my early experiments with
IDN, especially my investigation of the RAN, which explores both internal narrative
fragmentation as well as the fragmentation of physical form. Furthermore, afternoon speaks
to Bakhtin’s (1963) theory of polyphony, which applies to texts that employ multiple voices
without bias to any particular character. afternoon presents a multitude of different voices,
which all carry equal weight in the narrative: at times the story feels like an intermingled collection of diary entries and poetry from a number of different characters.
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In terms of mechanics, in afternoon I was presented with 21 points of decision. The amount of options at each decision point ranged from two up to 16, with an average of three decisions per segment. In my reading there were primarily active choices: 21 passages provided active choices, resulting in 12 passive sections. I found the reading quite engaging and I believe this was due to the wealth of choices provided and the brevity of segments, allowing me to make more decisions. The longest segment was approximately 165 words and the shortest was seven words long. The average of each segment was 91 words.
afternoon fulfils Ryan’s rule of frequent interaction. Active decisions are the rule in this story and passive moments are the exception. Much like Star court the text consists of many short fragments, which allows the reader to traverse the narrative quickly and easily, at the same time as providing many points of decision. However, the reader receives minimal direct feedback on their actions, which restricts their agency within the narrative.
Furthermore, although some segments provide many options to choose from, I would say the agency the reader has in afternoon is somewhat limited because there is often no causal connection between segments, as if chance or juxtaposition determines the order, rather than the reader.
Luminous airplanes is a recent hypertext that began as a print novel. Paul La Farge published the novel in 2011 and later that year uploaded the material from the novel and extended it in the form of hypertext. The Luminous airplanes website claims that the hypertext “both complements the novel and continues it into the present” (2012, para. 2). The evolution of La Farge’s story from a print novel into a digital hypertext speaks to the potential of this interactive digital form, particularly with its ability to continue expanding.
This demonstrates the power and flexibility of digital narratives, such as hypertext, to which
Aarseth refers. Luminous airplanes is written for an adult audience and the reader navigates the memories of the narrator. The narrator describes the work as “a memorial” for his late
The Architect of Forking Paths 50 Ben Carey
aunt Celeste (La Farge 2011, ‘Patriot Day’). This is a multimodal work that consists of text fragments and pictures, all presented in their own nodes in a reader-navigated network of memories. Although the work is likely to have a point of closure, this story is more about the
act of exploration, the process of navigating a sea of digitised memories. The narrative fits
within Ryan’s ‘playable stories’ where the creation of a rewarding story is the primary goal
of the reading experience (Ryan 2008, 8). This analysis is based on a selection of 3265
words.
Luminous airplanes begins with the narrator reminiscing about the 2008 recession,
describing his job at an office supplies company, and then beginning the story of his Aunt
Celeste: “My aunt Celeste died eleven years ago today, almost to the hour. If she had not
died, Luminous airplanes would not exist, at least not in this form. (In fact, if Celeste hadn’t
died, I would have gone to Turkey to see Yesim, and my life would be completely different,
but that’s another story)” (La Farge 2011, ‘Patriot Day’). This first section, which consists of
three pages, provided me with eight potential reading paths. The path I was interested in
exploring was one that readers hear frequently but are rarely able to explore, “but that’s
another story”. Following this path led me further down the rabbit hole of the narrator’s memories, an adequate description of the whole experience of reading Luminous airplanes.
My reading ended with a four page description of one of the narrator’s past relationships:
“Alice and I were like people who had lived through a disaster together: it didn’t matter,
really, whether we were compatible, and it certainly didn’t matter whether or not we were in
love” (ibid, ‘Like a Vessel Hurtling Through Interstellar Space’).
In my reading of this work I was presented with 11 decision points. The amount of
options at each point ranged from two up to four, with an average of two decisions per
segment. There were primarily active choices: 11 passages provided active choices, leaving
four passive segments. The reading was, for the most part, captivating, but at some points I
The Architect of Forking Paths 51 Ben Carey was glad to have the ability to skip to another, more interesting section. I believe this was due to the fact that Luminous airplanes does not provide the reader with a large amount of options per section and the average length of each segment is quite long. The longest section was 450 words and the shortest was nine words long. The average of each segment was 218 words.
Although the text does not present the reader with a lot of choices at each point of decision, there are many different ways in which a reader can navigate Luminous airplanes.
First, the reader can approach the text through the introduction and the subsequent hyperlinks. Second, the reader can navigate the narrative via a visual map (Fig. 1). Finally, the reader can access each segment of the text via an index, which categorises each section into labels associated with people, places, or events (Fig. 2).
This text showed me how diverse interactive narratives can be, in terms of content
(inclusion of text and pictures), and also presentation (the various methods of navigation outlined above). In some of my early experiments with IDN I played with multimodal storytelling that was heavily inspired by both Luminous airplanes and Jonathan Safran Foer’s
Extremely loud and incredibly close (2005). I was also inspired by the way in which La Farge integrates multiple reading paths into his story, which is cleverly structured around memory, in a similar way to how B.S Johnson uses memory as a form of structural scaffolding in The unfortunates (discussed briefly in Chapter 1).
Luminous airplanes satisfies Ryan’s rule of frequent interaction because active choices are made far more frequently than passive moments are presented. The reader experiences agency in this text and often receives direct feedback from the text based on the reader’s choices: for example, there is a hyperlink to ‘Jean-Luc’s car’ and if the reader clicks on the link they are presented with a section introducing Jean-Luc (La Farge 2011, ‘Bleak
College Days’).
The Architect of Forking Paths 52 Ben Carey
Figure 1 – Visual map of Luminous airplanes
Although there is an extensive history of narrative in the print medium, digital technology, such as hypertext, has had a powerful impact on the way stories are written and read. As
Aarseth (1997, 10) suggests, digital technology introduced “a new textual system” that was
“potentially more flexible and powerful than any preceding medium”. Aarseth’s statement applies to the author and the reader of hypertext. The writing process involved in creating any
interactive narrative, but especially a hypertext, is drastically different from producing a non-
interactive print narrative. In the same vein, the reader of a hypertext experiences something completely different to a traditional narrative, not only in how it is presented to them, but
The Architect of Forking Paths 53 Ben Carey because they are allowed to make decisions that shape the narrative. Theorists such as
Barthes, Iser, Jauss, and Eco have long argued the importance of the reader, and the heightened level of activity in an interactive narrative has led some to believe that the reader’s role in the interactive narrative is more significant than ever. Douglas (2001, 42) argues that the role of the reader in interactive narratives is almost as important as the author’s in creating the work. However, scholars such as Murray (1997, 152) argue that this increased level of interaction should not be mistaken for co-authorship. I argue that true co- authorship is rare, even within interactive storytelling, but even so, the reader does seem to have a more active and influential role in this form of narrative.
Figure 2 – Index of Luminous airplanes
The Architect of Forking Paths 54 Ben Carey
The analysis suggests that hypertext fiction provides the more interactive experience of the
two forms tested. Both hypertext narratives provide the reader with the most choices and
potential interaction, especially Luminous airplanes, which consistently provides the reader
with agency in relation to their decisions (afternoon less so). But despite the potential of
hypertext, few works are produced in this area, particularly by known authors. Hypertext may
have just been a passing fad or perhaps it was ahead of its time and the literary world was not
ready to fully embrace the form. Either way, the legacy of hypertext can still be seen in
various forms, from video games and visual novels to transmedia narratives. Novels such as
Mark Danielewski’s House of leaves (2000), that contain multiple strands of narrative and
actual hyperlinks, pay homage to hypertext and the ever growing potential of IDN.
Conclusion
In order to develop my key writing strategies I used Ryan’s ideas of frequent interaction and
Murray’s notion of agency to analyse a selection of interactive works. The analysis suggests
that earlier branching narratives struck a balance between interaction and immersion, whereas
20 years on branching narratives appeared to favour narrative development over interaction.
However, the most recent branching narrative, presented in a modern digital branching
format, provided a similar balance of interaction and immersion to the early print versions,
suggesting that perhaps the level of interaction in branching narratives is increasing. Finally,
this chapter analysed hypertext fiction and found that although this form provides the most
potential for reader interaction, it is not always fully utilised. Although each text provides
many reading paths there is often a weak causal relationship between the reader’s choice and
the reading path.
I believe Ryan’s rule of frequent interaction is central to creating richer interactive
narratives. The stories analysed that did not satisfy this rule felt inherently less interactive, for example, Invaders from the big screen. The stories that did make “interactive moments the
The Architect of Forking Paths 55 Ben Carey
rule and passive moments the exception” (Ryan 2008, 8) were far more interactive, for
instance, The cave of time and afternoon. But as we have also discovered, interactive
elements alone do not account for engagement or narrative immersion, which is why this
chapter also tested Murray’s notion of agency. The stories that provided the most reader
agency were The cave of time and Luminous airplanes. I argue that the combination of these
two principles, agency and frequent interaction, is at the core of writing successful interactive
narratives. These two principles will be tested further in the creative and reflective practice chapter (and later on in practitioner interviews) in order to investigate, from a practitioner’s point of view, the practical merit of these potential writing strategies.
The Architect of Forking Paths 56 Ben Carey
Chapter 4: Interview findings
The practitioner interviews and surveys conducted for my research are foundational to this project. The interviews focus on a small group of established authors, while the surveys
consider a number of aspiring writers, as a means of contrast. I defined established authors as
writers who had published at least one novel through a traditional publishing house or who
had a history of writing interactive stories professionally.
The emphasis of this research is on the writing process: the conceptualisation of
interactive narratives, obstacles faced, and creative problem solving. The findings from the
interviews and surveys respond to the questions raised in the literature review and the theory
in Chapter 2, and they reveal some unanticipated but valuable insights about interactive
storytelling.
I conducted four interviews with established interactive authors, two of whom were
Australian, Emily Craven and Tom Dullemond, and two were international, Paul La Farge
and Emily Short (for interview transcripts see Appendices 3-6). Each interview consisted of
19 questions, which covered a range of topics from ‘the role of the author in interactive
narrative’ to ‘agency’ and ‘engagement’. In the interview with La Farge I removed two
questions that I deemed not relevant to his practice.
Emily Craven is a Brisbane-based writer who has published five books in print and
eBook formats: three Young Adult novels, one screenplay, and a non-fiction book, E-Book
revolution (2013), aimed at helping aspiring writers achieve success in the eBook market.
However, it is Craven’s work in the interactive sphere that is valuable to this project. In 2012,
Craven ran “the world’s first physical choose your own adventure event in Adelaide,
Australia” (Craven n.d, para. 3). Craven’s team “used posters with QR codes on them
scattered around the city to run the adventure. Readers would scan the code to read a section
of the story and were given choices as to where they could go next. Each section of the story
The Architect of Forking Paths 57 Ben Carey
happened in the location the reader was standing” (ibid). In 2013/2014, Craven was “hired by
the Brisbane City Council, to produce Street Reads, a Choose Your Own Adventure style
event run in the Brisbane CBD” (ibid, para. 4). In 2014, Craven received a “$25,000 Brisbane
City Council Innovation Grant to turn [the Street Reads] project into a GPS app called Story
City (ibid).
Tom Dullemond is based in Brisbane and has published over 20 short stories and a
novella. He co-authored a fantasy novel, The machine who was also a boy (2013), and co-
edited a non-fiction book titled The complete guide to writing fantasy (2003), which provides
advice to aspiring writers. In 2014, Dullemond produced an interactive story for Craven’s
Street Reads project in Brisbane called ‘Guardian of the Nexus’.
Paul La Farge is an American writer based in New York City. La Farge has published
four novels, more than 10 short stories, and several essays on topics such as digital media and
Dungeons & dragons. La Farge’s latest novel, Luminous airplanes (2011) was published as a
book and a hypertext. In the author’s own words, “[t]he book tells the story of our young
man, now a computer programmer, and the house of relics and trash which he sorts through
in the fall of 2000” and “[t]he hypertext, or “immersive text,” as we’re calling it (hypertext
got a bad name back in the 90s) both complements the novel and continues it into the
present” (La Farge 2012, para. 2; italics in original). Both versions of the book were critically
acclaimed, receiving positive reviews from New York Times, The Boston Globe, The
Economist, Time Out New York, Time Out Chicago, and The New York Observer.
Emily Short is a British writer based in Oxford, best known for her first interactive
work, Galatea (2000). Short has published over 35 interactive works on IFDB, making her
one of the most prolific authors in the interactive community. Short is active and influential
within the interactive storytelling community, speaking at events, running workshops, frequently engaging with community websites, particularly The Interactive Fiction Database
The Architect of Forking Paths 58 Ben Carey
(IFDB), and running her popular blog ‘Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling’. This blog
contains insights into her own forays into interactive writing, but also a wealth of resources
for other interactive authors, such as a list of: useful blogs about IDN, websites that collect
interactive stories, conferences and events, creation tools, and interactive community forums.
Short also played a large role in the development of Inform7, an authoring program used to produce Interactive Fiction7.
In addition to the interviews with established authors, I conducted an anonymous
online survey targeting, but not limited to, aspiring interactive writers (see Appendix 1). The
survey contained seven questions that were focused around obstacles, planning, and problem
solving. I uploaded the survey to a number of online interactive narrative communities: the
Interactive Fiction Community forum, the Twine forum, the Text Adventures forum, and
Choice of Games. I received 68 responses in total (see Appendix 2). Survey responses are
referred to by the number of the participant and the question on the survey from which the
response was drawn: for example R66Q7 refers to Respondent #66 responding to Question 7.
Broadly, respondents said that IDN provides them with an open platform with which
to experiment freely with their creative practice in seemingly endless ways. One participant
said that writing IDN gave them the ability to explore possibilities and ‘what-ifs’ (R44Q3).
Another writer was just as fascinated by the possibilities of IDN, saying that their interest is
“conceptual”:
I want to play with the format/medium. Interactive fiction promises endless possibilities, but of course, the author can't write endless possibilities. So, how does [sic] I deliver on some of that promise, and make a decent plot with decent pacing, etc.? How can I make interesting decisions and game-like elements with just text choices? (R50Q3)
7 It is important to note that the term Interactive Fiction, when capitalised, refers to a specific style of storytelling. This term is not synonymous with much broader terms such as interactive narrative.
The Architect of Forking Paths 59 Ben Carey
Respondents also remarked that interactive forms allowed them to explore possibilities
unavailable to them in traditional modes of writing. One respondent argues that “interactive
writing affords techniques and effects which are not possible in static forms” (R3Q3). In a
similar vein, another writer noted: “I began writing interactively because I have had ideas I wanted to bring to the world which, prior, I had no means by which to do so” (R45Q3). These writers felt that working with interactive stories allowed them to explore different possibilities in their writing.
Finally, some respondents mentioned that IDN was simply more suited to the types of
stories they wanted to write. One author, for instance, said that “[t]he medium is more
suitable for the stories I'm writing” (R9Q3). Similarly, another participant (R11Q3) said: “I
honestly just think that [Interactive Fiction] is a better fit for my strengths and interests as a
writer, and I find it a fascinating medium”.
This section identifies a number of problems that face the practice of interactive
writing. These problems are informed by the literature review, the theory discussed in
Chapter 2, and substantiated by research data collected from the interviews and surveys.
1. Scope of interactive narratives and writer workload
One of the most frequent obstacles that interactive authors discussed was the size and scope
of interactive narratives and that giving the reader more decisions almost always equates to
more work for the writer. One survey participant argues that it takes a lot longer to write IDN
than traditional fiction (R43Q4) and another observes that “[s]mall stories get a LOT bigger
when you make them interactive, at least if there's a lot of meaningful choice” (R11Q2;
capitals in original). I experienced this complication frequently in my own creative practice,
particularly with the story I worked on before Ouroboros where I had created a large amount
of decision points branched too liberally. In turn, these extra choices threatened to vastly
increase the word count of the story and make the project unrealistic in terms of workload.
The Architect of Forking Paths 60 Ben Carey
Speaking directly to this concern, one respondent speaks argues that “[t]he more you
accommodate the player by providing significant choices, the more you increase the labour of
writing the story lines and scenes to support those choices” (R49Q2).
Generally, interview and survey participants agreed that writers have to produce
significantly more content for interactive stories. Tom Dullemond observes that:
If you're going to write an interactive piece of fiction like a Choose Your Own Adventure story, you may want to have eight different endings. If you want to give the reader eight full story experiences you're basically writing, it's not eight full stories but the word count multiplies quite rapidly. (Personal interview, November 19, 2015)
This exponentially increasing word count was referenced frequently as an issue specific to interactive narratives. One interactive author (R45Q2) argues that writing an IDN increases the amount of writing by “an astronomical amount”, claiming that the story they are currently working with “contains over one-hundred sixty thousand words for chapter one alone”. This sentiment is echoed and elaborated upon by another survey participant, who notes that:
For a traditional hundred-thousand-word book, you write a hundred thousand words, edit, and you're done. For interactive fiction, I tend to have about 10 percent of my words and code actually in use on any single play-through […] So, if I want to write a 50,000 word interactive novella, I'm potentially looking at 500,000 words of story and code. Then there's the time to bug test, to beta test and make sure the game play works, and that the coding hasn't created any typography errors. Then the copy editor gets to look at a huge amount of pages broken into pieces, not a nice, normal, chronological piece of fiction, so that takes time and intense concentration too. (R40Q4)
Evidently there is a large amount of work that goes into not only writing an interactive story, but coding and testing as well. Therefore, a major concern for the interactive author is
The Architect of Forking Paths 61 Ben Carey
maintaining a realistic and manageable project scope. One interactive author observes that the
challenge with writing interactively is “allowing the player the opportunity to make
significant choices that affect the flow of the story, while also sufficiently reining in the story
so as to make it a realistically achievable length” (R41Q4). Similarly, Dullemond argues that it is important to find a balance between “wanting the reader to have a good experience and
you as a writer wanting to get the damn project out” (Personal interview, November 19,
2015).
2. Balance between reader agency and authorial control
Reader agency is one of the biggest obstacles for the interactive author. The reader’s ability
to make decisions that determine the progression of the narrative greatly affects the writing
process. Dullemond argues that “[a]gency is a key part of all of this because, I mean, well it's
interactive fiction but without the reader feeling like they've done stuff, there's no point”
(Personal interview, November 19, 2015). Dullemond is referring to meaningful choices, as
opposed to interaction for its own sake, and he argues that creating these meaningful
decisions is “one of the great challenges” of writing an interactive story (ibid).
For the interactive author, incorporating reader decisions, indeed giving the reader
control, is difficult because it is unnatural in most forms of writing. One participant argues
that “[g]iving the player agency, or the ability to control what happens next, is of course
something that a traditional story writer would not have to think about” (R20Q2). Likewise,
Dullemond notes that the role of the interactive author is more of a “facilitator and a guide
than purely a storyteller” and that the author has to give up some of the control they are used
to in traditional storytelling mediums (Personal interview, November 19, 2015).
The interactive element is often a stumbling block for aspiring authors (discussed briefly in Chapter 1), which, to some degree, boils down to a struggle for power between the author and the reader. One author argues that “the challenge [in writing an interactive story]
The Architect of Forking Paths 62 Ben Carey is in allowing the reader the freedom to direct the story while keeping them within the confines of the story that is in the author's mind” (R61Q2). This perspective is shared by many interactive authors. Paul La Farge says:
The reason I make stories is because I want them to go a certain way, or ways. I’m happy for the reader to have a lot of freedom in choosing how to experience my stories, but in the end I think the more generous thing on my part is actually to provide a story for the reader to experience (or hurl across the room in disgust). (Personal interview, email, February 9, 2016)
It seems that there is a delicate interplay between the vision of the author and the control that they allow the reader to have when experiencing that vision. Each author undoubtedly has different views on how the balance of power should fall. La Farge is more concerned with creating a high quality experience than the actual input the reader has on the story, whereas an author like Dullemond is more concerned with the reader’s input and maximising their agency, believing that the reader should be able to have multiple experiences. Dullemond argues:
[A] successful interactive narrative is one where you feel that your choices are rewarded […] you don't feel that you’re cheated by the author, you feel that you have actual agency, which is often difficult to push through if you’re an author who writes primarily short fiction and tries to create an [interactive] narrative structure. You have to supress your own desire to tell the story; you have to let the reader tell the story. So again coming back to the guiding, the author as a guide, it’s sort of the author as the storyteller, you are creating a path through which someone can experience a story based on their own personal choices and you must feel that they were successful or victorious or whatever, even if they fail in one of the adventures they must feel that their failure was earned through their own poor choices as opposed to just a cheat. (Personal interview, November 19, 2015)
The Architect of Forking Paths 63 Ben Carey
For some writers the interplay between authorial control and reader agency might seem like
an obstacle, but for others this increased agency is liberating. One survey respondent
observes:
With a traditional story, you take the reader from point A to point B. You have complete control of the story you're telling–and that means you have a different kind of control of how you project your world-view, which characters should end up with which fates, and so forth. The core of interactive fiction is that player agency is increased. No longer do I decide whether the 'hero' saves the day or blows everyone up and sits, cackling, on a broken throne over a ruined earth. One of the things I really like about writing interactive fiction is it lets me explore all of the ‘what-ifs’ that I wished I could follow in my traditional writing. What if the secondary character had been saved in time? What if the hero decided not to go save the world, but instead took up potholing? And then readers can explore the options that appeal to their individual tastes. (R40Q2)
It seems that true reader agency stems from the ability to choose and modify a number of
different reading experiences. However, providing this to the reader is one of the largest
obstacles that face interactive writers. As Dullemond argues, “the meaningfulness of a choice
is very specific to the individual who is on the journey, and so trying to anticipate all those
possibilities is one of the great challenges when you are trying to create a story where a person feels that they are making progress” (Personal interview, November 19, 2015). I
certainly experienced the tension between authorial control and reader interaction in my
creative practice (discussed in more depth in Chapter 6), and it is a tension that must be
continuously navigated throughout the development of a narrative.
3. The technical side of IDN is an obstacle for many writers
Interactive narratives take on many different forms and naturally there are various types of
software and programming languages that cover these different types of narrative. As a result,
The Architect of Forking Paths 64 Ben Carey
a variety of technical difficulties can arise in the writing and development process. Some
interactive authors admit that they are simply “bad at writing code” (R22Q4), which is not
uncommon among writers from traditional forms of storytelling where coding is non-existent.
I experienced many technical difficulties while writing Ouroboros (discussed in depth in
Chapter 6), partly because the different software I used was poorly designed or the
documentation was inadequate and partly because I, like many other authors, had very little
experience with programming or using complicated software to write a story.
Even those who are proficient at coding face technical difficulties. Short says that a
big challenge in interactive writing is detecting errors, claiming that “this comes up more for
highly procedural work, but it’s easy to build a system in which there are unintended block states in the code or where the routes through a story are not very well balanced for some
reason” (Personal interview, email, October 23, 2015). One survey participant echoes Short’s
statement, but also provides a tangible example of how these errors can affect the story. This
author notes that the problem is:
Making sure I haven't crossed wires in my coding somewhere which has, as a random example, it starts as Tuesday, and then the next day it's Thursday, because a choice you didn't make takes you through Wednesday. It gets difficult to keep track of all the variables after a while, and slip-ups happen. (R45Q4)
Evidently, missing an entire day in a narrative due to a coding error is a big problem at a
story level. Not only might the reader be disoriented or pulled out of the story, but they could
also miss key events or character development.
For authors such as La Farge, the technical concerns focus on the tensions between
story and technology. La Farge observes that a large obstacle in writing interactively is the
act of “devising the form and the content at the same time” (Personal interview, email,
February 9, 2016). For La Farge, he not only has to write the story, but he also has to build
The Architect of Forking Paths 65 Ben Carey
and develop the digital system that allows the reader to experience that story, whereas in a traditional format La Farge could just write the story and present it as a printed book or an eBook, for instance. Another, related concern for La Farge is “figuring out how to guide the reader through the hypertext, and to minimize her frustration at having to make choices about
which passages to read” (ibid). La Farge acknowledges the disruptive and perhaps unnatural
way that interactive narratives are presented. One of his main aims is to minimise that disruption, in order to be more accommodating to the reader.
Craven, who approaches interactive storytelling from a locative literature 8 perspective, has an entirely different set of technical difficulties. Setting up and working with
‘geo-fences’ (GPS defined boundaries) is a major difficulty for Craven, and indeed all authors who work with locative literature. Craven argues that the problem boils down to:
Setting things up in the backend, the location specifically. So you have the locations…and then realising that two locations, like a location where you are and a choice where you are, are too close together. Or they may be far enough apart, but it turns out that to cross that intersection you actually have to go closer to another choice and you will accidentally trigger it on your way to the choice where you actually want to go. Those are the massive problems that I’ve been coming across, because you’re like, shit, you’ve either got to direct them to take a route that is indirect and hope that they follow it, or you’re going to have to play around with the geo-fences, and move locations so that it will work properly. (Personal interview, November 3, 2015)
For Craven there is also a problem with the devices that run her storytelling program. Each device, whether it be an iPad, or Android phone, has a different GPS sensitivity, therefore
Craven has to design her stories with the lowest common denominator in mind. Craven observes that “it reliably works with a 50 metre geo-fence, anything smaller than that you’re
8 Locative literature is a form of storytelling that uses mobile devices to tell stories in physical locations, which are commonly the setting for the narrative.
The Architect of Forking Paths 66 Ben Carey
kind of playing with fire” (ibid). Furthermore, for Craven this is not just a technical problem,
it also changes the way that interactive stories are developed within her platform. Craven notes that “now I have to build that into the process so that the narrative fits the technology, because if it doesn’t then you almost remove the choice by accidentally triggering another location” (ibid). Craven and La Farge provide an interesting contrast in relation to the tension between story and technology. While La Farge’s concern relates to making the technology serve the story, Craven’s concern revolves around constructing the story so that it fits the technology.
4. IDN can suffer from issues of engagement, especially in relation to closure
Maintaining engagement in an interactive narrative is just as important as with any other type of storytelling. As Short argues, “[o]ccasionally you can keep an unengaged audience around—if you’re paying them, if they’re in a classroom, or if you’ve cunningly locked all the doors—but almost everyone who lives in the modern world and has contact with interactive narratives in the first place has countless other contenders for their attention all the time” (Personal interview, email, October 23, 2015).
Dullemond presents a compelling counter-argument that creating and maintaining engagement might actually be more important in interactive storytelling because of the specific narrative each reader experiences:
[Y]ou could consider it more important in interactive fiction if you look at it from the perspective of the person […] if the person feels a part of the story and that they’re making decisions, their engagement is more important to that story effectively. Kind of, stories aren’t living things but if you stop reading a piece of non-interactive fiction it’s a story that’s still there, it doesn’t go anywhere, give it to someone else and read it but if you stop your piece of interactive fiction, you stop reading halfway through that story is never told. So your experience is in that regard more important, you know,
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engagement is more important to complete that journey. (Personal interview, November 19, 2015)
Interactive storytelling certainly faces a lot of obstacles in terms of creating and maintaining
engagement. La Farge observes that a large problem in IDN is “maintaining interest in a story
that doesn’t promise closure” (Personal interview, email, February 9, 2016). Of course, not
every traditional work promises closure, and indeed in many contemporary works this is
desired by the author. However, in these works there is also a final page, which the author has
crafted and presented to the reader. Often, readers of many interactive stories are not afforded
the same luxury.
Additionally, in traditional forms the narrative is generally presented as linear
(physically) text that the reader can become easily immersed in, whereas in IDN there are
many complications that might prohibit or delay narrative engagement. For example:
navigating hyperlinks with a mouse, browser errors, or the program freezing due to bad
coding.
One of the great freedoms of interactive storytelling is the ability to present story
content in a range of different, creative ways. However, there is a learning curve, for both the
reader and the author. For instance, one survey participant argues that “[j]umping from sub-
storyline to sub-storyline can be very disorienting and immersion breaking, which slows the writing process down by a lot compared to traditional fiction” (R31Q4).
From the perspective of locative literature, readers must be engaged with not only the story, but their surroundings as well. As Craven argues:
You test for engagement if they get to the end. So if they don’t make it to the end they obviously weren’t engaged enough. And at what point they stop is where the engagement has stopped. So if the majority of people stopped on level two, why? In the first year of Street Reads, a lot of the people stopped on level three. Like it halved between level three and level four. And we were like ‘what the?’ Turned out the
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locations were too far away. People didn’t want to walk half a kilometre to get to the final location. They weren’t engaged enough with the story. They weren’t necessarily engaged enough with the previous location, that they were special enough that they thought that the final story they went to would be special enough that it would be worthwhile walking. (Personal interview, November 3, 2015)
The obvious issue with this lack of engagement is that readers do not complete the story—in
Dullemond’s words, the “story is never told”—that the writer, and in Craven’s case,
production team (artists, musicians, voiceover artists), has developed. For Craven, and on a
larger scale, game studios, there has to be proof that readers (or players) are engaged with the
material and using it to its full potential, otherwise projects can be financially difficult to
justify.
5. Tension between inclusive potential of IDN and authorial aesthetic choices
An important issue in relation to IDN is making the reader, whoever that may be, feel included in the story. Inclusivity is an issue that is commonly overlooked: there were no references to inclusivity in the survey responses, but it was flagged as an issue by two interview participants. As Dullemond argues, “[y]ou are most often the character in interactive fiction”, so making the reader feel included should be of huge concern to interactive authors (Personal interview, November 19, 2015).
Craven argues that “when you are looking at video games and stuff, you are playing that protagonist, and usually it is a white protagonist, and a white male protagonist” (Personal interview, November 3, 2015). Craven argues that the predominance of this white male protagonist inherently alienates those who are neither male nor white. Of course, Craven is discussing video games specifically, but the white male protagonist is certainly commonplace in many forms of storytelling. Craven argues that “interactive fiction should be inclusive,
The Architect of Forking Paths 69 Ben Carey rather than excluding people, because there is enough fiction and games out there that excludes people because they have always been the minority within storytelling” (ibid).
Dullemond agrees with Craven’s stance on inclusivity, reflecting on his writing process: “I personally take into consideration a broader perspective, I have to be more diverse in my approach, I have to make sure that the language is more inclusive […] because it's going to be harder for them to, for them to place themselves in the story if I'm excluding the reader from the story” (Personal interview, November 19, 2015). To some degree then, inclusive language relates to reader engagement. Dullemond’s argument is that the more inclusive the language in the story the more chance readers have of slotting themselves into the role of the protagonist and engaging in the story; alternatively, if the language is not inclusive it may alienate readers: “if I'm writing a particularly male voice, that alienates female readers” (ibid). Craven elaborates on the concern of alienating or excluding groups of readers based not only on gender but a range of other identifiers as well:
[W]ho I am could be very vastly different from who [the reader] is, and not just in race, but in terms of how they view the world, what age they are, and to some extent, even their vocabulary. So when I write interactive narrative I try as hard as possible not to put the words in the mouth of the person. (Personal interview, November 3, 2015)
But of course, this concern about inclusivity has an impact on the writing process, which I encountered while writing Ouroboros (discussed in depth in Chapter 6). Regardless of the benefits of inclusive narratives, writing without identifiers—such as gender, race, and age—is a considerable obstacle for authors. According to Craven:
[I]t’s very specific word choices as well. I remember in the first year that I ran Street Reads we asked people for feedback, and one of the general punters said, ‘I felt like in this story I was meant to be a man, because I would never rugby tackle someone…as a woman.’ Which was interesting, because, to me, my sister had played a lot of rugby and
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like touch footy in high school…and so it’s another, you can’t cover every cultural thing. But the one thing that I haven’t been able to deal with is actually mobility disability. Because what you can do is set the paths up so that everything is accessible by wheelchair or whatever, but you cannot…if it is an adventure you are saying ‘walking over here’ or ‘you run’ or ‘you hurry’ or whatever, and that immediately [pulls them out of the story]. (ibid)
Craven admits that she has been unable to produce a narrative that is completely inclusive, due in large part to the difficulty of writing for mobility disability; however, she is determined to produce stories that are as inclusive as possible, because, for Craven, inclusivity is one of the greatest strengths of interactive storytelling.
6. Structural issues arise in IDN that are different from traditional narrative
Many interactive authors, especially aspiring authors, face problems relating to structure.
These problems are inevitably due to the vast differences between traditional and interactive storytelling with respect to structure. In traditional narratives, such as short stories or novels, the story is presented as physically linear, whereas in interactive stories the reader determines their progression through the narrative. Therefore, the author of an interactive story can be aware of all of the nodes in the narrative structure, but they cannot always anticipate in what sequence the reader will navigate these nodes, or, as in my case with Ouroboros, if the reader will neglect entire portions of the story altogether.
One participant points out that structure can be an issue in IDN because of its sporadic nature: “jumping from sub-storyline to sub-storyline can be very disorienting and immersion breaking, which slows the writing process down by a lot compared to traditional fiction”
(R31Q4). This respondent’s argument relates to the fractured nature of writing interactively.
There is not always a consistent flow from one chapter to the next; instead the interactive author is often jumping back and forth between multiple storylines and trying to keep in mind everything that has happened in that specific version of the narrative. Another, related
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problem is that in order to accommodate the reader’s freedom to travel down any path they
like, the author must ensure that any one segment of text links up with any other segment of
text. As one respondent observes, “unlike with traditional writing, interactive fiction often
requires the segments that you write to be ‘modular’, almost. They have to match in tone and
transition as seamlessly as possible, so that the reader doesn’t notice the difference between a
fixed piece and a variety of variable pieces following it” (R25Q4).
Another interactive author notes that “interactive writing suffers from halting probems
[sic]: you can’t do the writing until you know what kind of mechanical structure it’s going to
fit into, but it can be hard to design mechanical structure without writing to feed into it”
(R3Q4). This statement, critiquing the potentially vicious cycle of the interactive writing process, echoes the earlier discussion (technical issues with IDN), about the tension between story and technology.
In terms of structure, generally, the more agency assigned to the reader, the more content the author must develop. Nowhere is the effect of reader agency felt as strongly as in the endings of interactive narratives. As Craven argues:
The problem is when you have to think up eight different endings. And that is a bastard. Like I can probably come up with four endings pretty easily, but then those other four are just like…depending on how…on the locations you’ve sent them to and how much scope you have given for themes within your narrative, and what’s the task that you have set people, what is the main driving force on why they are moving from place to place. Depending on how complex that is that is going to restrict how creative you are in your endings. (Personal interview, November 3, 2015)
Clearly there are structural difficulties that arise within this emerging form of storytelling.
Many of these are simply problems for writers transitioning from traditional writing to interactive writing, but some issues may be more deeply engrained. There are many different types of interactive narrative so it is unlikely that we will ever have universal structural
The Architect of Forking Paths 72 Ben Carey guidelines. For instance, while one strategy might apply to hypertext, it may not apply to
Interactive Fiction or branching narratives. However, there are many techniques and strategies that can be applied across the board. Imagine someone visiting a snow resort for the first time: whether they choose to go skiing or snowboarding they will receive vastly different instruction on where to put their feet, how to effectively pick up speed, or how to stop, however, there will be universal guidelines, such as what clothes to wear, how to brace for a fall, or how to signal for help, that will hold up across both winter sports.
The Architect of Forking Paths 73 Ben Carey
The Architect of Forking Paths 74 Ben Carey
Chapter 5: Potential writing strategies
This chapter details a number of interactive writing strategies that I have developed, based on research data collected from the interviews and surveys, and supported by suggestions from the literature review and the theory in Chapter 2. Like all guidelines or strategies, these suggestions will not apply to everyone. As one respondent observes, “most writers need randomly [sic] freedom and [to] let that freedom bleed into random creativity. Others are more scatterbrained and need structure and strategies in order to not bounce around. It all depends on the person” (R55Q7). With this diversity of authorial process in mind, the following list contains a set of ‘potential’ strategies, which are further evaluated in my creative and reflective practice.
1. Planning should be of paramount concern for interactive writers
There appears to be two schools of thought in relation to planning: the first is to plan thoroughly ahead of the project in order to minimise production risks or setbacks. The second is to draw up a basic plan before starting the project, but predominantly work through problems as they occur. George Martin has classified writers in a similar way:
I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners […] The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if [they] planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows. (Martin quoted in Flood 2011, para. 7)
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Many interactive authors choose to plan thoroughly before starting a project (the architects), in order to create a roadmap that they can follow when the development process gets difficult.
As Koenitz, Miller, and Spierling have argued, planning ahead of a project is essential (see
Chapter 2). Interactive projects have a habit of bifurcating and sometimes expanding unpredictably; it can be useful to have a plan in order to minimise setbacks in the writing and development process. Project planning can come in many different forms: plot outlines, creative mind maps, and maps of decision points. Of course, planning can also include more administrative tasks, such as developing notetaking systems or devising ways to keep track of the different versions of the story.
For many writers, interactive and otherwise, planning ahead of time is a way of protecting themselves when the writing process gets complicated. One survey participant argues that “a decent outline of the main story and branching paths goes a long way in writing complicated IF. Going in blindly leads you to fall into a rut when things get to [sic] complex” (R60Q6). In other words, in order to ease the writing process, a portion of time should be spent in the pre-writing phase of the project. One interactive author reflects on this planning stage: “I spend a large amount of time on research, character creation, plot diagramming before I even write the first word” (R66Q6). Depending on the writer and the scope of the project, the planning phase can take up a significant portion of the whole project.
Another participant reflects on their pre-writing process: “I start with an idea and a character.
I then spend several weeks creating a mind map to capture scene ideas, characters in the story, story branches, and snippets of writing. For a historical story I do some targeted research, without letting mere facts get in the way of a ripping yarn” (R49Q6).
Although most of these forms of planning could apply equally to any type of writing,
such as a novel or a screenplay, the reader’s interaction with the story and the indeterminate
narrative structure mean that planning for IDN is perhaps more crucial than in traditional
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forms of writing. One form of planning that is exclusive to interactive writing is creating
maps of decision points and where they lead: a visual depiction of how the reader affects the narrative. Dullemond reflects on the power of visual mapping within his IDN writing process:
I try to approach it a little bit from a gaming perspective so that I map out the outcomes based on choices, then I try to balance that out so that if I, if I write two or three story choices I can write the three opposite story choices and that gives me a little bit of a framework to guide me towards a complete ending. Doesn't always work but it's a good way to start. I find that having a, having a target, having the endings in mind gives me a target to write towards and so I'm sort of, like you know mapping out a little graph, that kind of thing, thought-maps, or mind maps rather. (Personal interview, November 19, 2015)
Craven agrees that planning, in the form of drawing up visual maps, pays off in the
production process. The priority for both writers, during the planning phase, relates to
mapping out the potential reader interaction, and using that map to make sure there is an
equal amount of ‘good’, ‘bad’, and ‘neutral’ endings in their stories. While this type of
balancing might be irrelevant to a literary hypertext (or another type of IDN), it is important
to the types of stories Craven and Dullemond produce. Craven elaborates on her process:
I will pre-plan out a story, like draw my little boxes and do branching bits and pieces […] so I can sort of take a look at it and go, ‘okay, have I made sure that I’ve got an equal mix of wins, losses, partial wins, etcetera.’ And if I have that equal balance, I know that it’s going to filter up. I kind of like start at the end and know that it will filter up to be more reasonable at the start. (Personal interview, November 3, 2015)
In contrast to this method of planning, some interactive authors prefer to only devise a basic plan before starting the project (the gardeners) and work through problems as they occur. One respondent said that their process involves “a bit of planning, a bit of just jumping right in. I start with a basic outline, but only decide on the chapter to chapter details as I get to it”
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(R31Q6). While some authors still favour an approach that includes some planning before the
project begins, other writers prefer to start writing straight away and plan when problems
arise: “I tend to plunge headlong, see how it goes, then plan from there” (R20Q6).
In terms of large scale interactive projects, such as video games, where there is huge
financial pressure, it would be reckless not to not have a thorough project plan. However, for
individual projects or indie games, there is an argument to be made for creative exploration
for its own sake. One author argues that improvised writing allows them to discover the best
parts of the story: “I usually have an overall idea of how I want the story to go, but as with
traditional writing, I often discover the best parts of what it will be while I’m writing it – or
while it’s writing itself” (R35Q6). La Farge also speaks to this exploratory process, reflecting
that many of the obstacles he faced were overcome using “a process of trial and error, guided
by my own sense of what was exciting in the writing” (Personal interview, email, February 9,
2016).
The first method gives writers a roadmap to lead them through the project, but the
planning stage can be uninteresting compared to the actual writing, which may limit
creativity. The second method provides more creative freedom, however writers risk finding
themselves directionless or facing problems that could have been avoided through planning.
I propose a third option that combines these methods into one: a hybrid of extensive planning and creative exploration. An interactive author using this method would create a plan before starting the project but then utilise an exploratory creative process until the next phase of planning is required. One respondent identified closely with this hybrid method, reflecting on their writing process:
I just start writing and figure it out as I go, but I have a plan for certain things I want to happen in the story, and although I ‘wing it’ while writing, I know which direction(s) I want the story to go. Sometimes things surprise me and I need to improvise, but I could express the structure I have as: Improvise to planned part,
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planned ahead part, improvise to next planned part, planned ahead part, ect [sic]. (R45Q6)
This method appears to be a good combination of planning and creative freedom. I have used this method in my own creative practice, which I discuss in further detail in Chapter 6. For me, this third method was a good fit for my style of writing, but each writer is different, so it is important to experiment with all three to determine which methods works best.
2. Strategies and tools can be used to deal with sizing and scope of a project and cut down on extra work
Authors can use coding and variables to keep the scope of a project manageable and to cut down on writing time. A variable is an author defined value that changes based on the reader’s situation. A variable called ‘life’, might track whether or not the reader is alive. At the start of the narrative the ‘life’ is set to true, however, if the reader dies ‘life’ switches to false. Many different elements of a story can be altered or re-written based on variables.
Imagine a story about teenage bullying in high school where the reader is given three choices: run away, fight the bully, or report the bully to a teacher. For the sake of this argument we will say that this decision point will have lasting impact on the rest of the narrative.
Therefore, it is possible for the author to set a variable to each choice that can be referred back to later on in the story. For instance, the child grows up but is forever haunted by choosing to run away.
Craven deals with scoping issues in a number of ways. First, she ensures that her projects utilise the most straightforward structure possible, making it “a really straight, non- twisty little narrative” (Personal interview, November 3, 2015). This simplistic structure is always confined to a set amount of segments, thus limiting the time spent writing new content. For Craven the ideal narrative has 15 segments, made up of “four levels with two potential choices at each level” (ibid). Craven works with short narratives, therefore 15
The Architect of Forking Paths 79 Ben Carey segments is a reasonable number; however, for a larger narrative that number of segments would be woefully small. Though, with locative literature the physical act of walking and exploring compensates for the brevity of the actual text.
Another option for interactive writers to consider is crossing paths at strategic points within a narrative. Imagine a story where there is a meteor plummeting for Earth and the reader has to choose between trying to escape or enjoying their last days drinking, gambling, and partaking in other acts of debauchery. The reader may choose to try and escape but due to poor decisions, they may realise that it is hopeless and can choose to now drink and gamble their days away. Or alternatively, the reader may grow terrified of sitting around waiting for the end and choose to try and escape with their life. This example illustrates the way a writer can design a story so that a reader might jump between branches. Craven argues that jumping from one branch to another is fine as long as each experience is essentially different and the writer provides the reader with multiple endings so as to allow for a variety of story combinations (ibid).
Although the size and scope of a project can be difficult to negotiate, authors can use a number of strategies to make this process easier. First, interactive writers should try to determine the most straightforward structure available, especially if it is the first or second interactive story they have produced. Even if an author has had experience writing IDN, it is still a good idea to start with a simple structure and then build upon that afterwards. Second, when authors are determining the best structure, it may be helpful to restrict the amount of passages (for instance, a short narrative might have between 10 and 20 segments). Again, this might just apply to the initial stages of the project, until the author wishes to expand upon the foundation of the story. Third, interactive writers should evaluate whether techniques, such as crossing between narrative branches, will help simplify or consolidate the structure of the narrative. Finally, authors should assess whether they can employ variables in a narrative.
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Variables can reduce the amount of content an author has to produce and can make it easier
to trace and alter decisions with lasting consequences.
3. Reader agency should be a major concern for authors of IDN
Agency is the reader’s ability to make decisions and affect the outcome of a narrative. And
since this influence is the greatest strength of IDN and the most apparent distinction from
traditional forms of storytelling, it follows that agency should be of concern for interactive
authors. Before proceeding further, it is important to unpack the term ‘agency’, because it is a
term with a long history outside of interactive and digital storytelling. Murray defines agency
as “the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and
choices” (Murray 1997, 126). However, Short argues that “this definition of agency is too
murky” and “often causes more confusion than clarity” (Personal interview, email, October
23, 2015). Although ‘agency’ describes the overall concept of the reader’s ability to influence
the story, for Short the term is not robust enough to describe how the reader influences the
story. Short attempts to clarify agency by breaking it down into two categories: ‘intention’
and ‘perceivable consequence’. Intention refers to “whether the player is able to formulate
some idea about her actions in a game and pursue a course of action with a particular goal in
mind”, whereas perceivable consequence relates to the results of the reader’s decisions and
whether there are “things that happen either immediately or later on in the story that reflect
what we just did?” (ibid).
For Short, the element of intention is crucial because it allows the reader to make an
informed decision, based on the information provided and their own wits, rather than relying
on pure chance (ibid). Imagine a horror story where the protagonist’s loved ones have been
kidnapped and the reader is given a choice between two doors. Behind the blue door is their mother and behind the red door is their wife, but the reader can only save one of them. This is a decision based on intention. Who has the reader developed a stronger connection with
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throughout the narrative, whom do they want to save? In contrast to this are decisions that are
made according to pure chance, which are surprisingly common in IDN. To use the previous
example, the reader is aware that their wife and mother have been kidnapped, but they don’t
know who is behind which door, therefore who they save is purely determined by chance.
Short argues that intention and perceivable consequence are essential in IDN, and she
proposes a framework that interactive writers can use to increase agency within an interactive
narrative. According to Short, interactive authors should strive to integrate affect and diegetic
agency9 wherever possible. The author should establish how the reader will interact with the
story at the beginning and provide the reader with constant, and escalating, feedback
(immediate and long-term) in relation to their choices. This feedback will allow players to see
that their choices have a direct, and lasting, impact on the story (ibid).
Craven agrees with Short that readers should make decisions based upon a desired
outcome, but she refers to this technique as motivation:
It is less, ‘you can go to this place or you can go to this place’, it’s why you would go to this place or why you would go this place. Because you could send them to thirty different fucking locations and end up in thirty different spots, but if they are not given a reason for doing it, or if they are not provided with choices that mean something, then it isn’t indeed a choice. (Personal interview, November 3, 2015)
For Craven the problems she faces with IDN are often related to creating the right motivation
between story paths. Craven reflects that “a lot of the time I will actually run the story by
other people and be like, ‘which one would you choose and why?’ And if the majority go
down one path, I will attempt to make it so that it splits people evenly” (ibid). Craven also
tries to ensure that the endings in her stories are balanced, guaranteeing that there is “an equal
mix of wins, losses, partial wins” (ibid).
9 Diegetic agency relates to decisions that advance the narrative, as opposed to choices that merely allow the player to interact but not advance the story.
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Craven provides some suggestions for authors on how to increase agency. First,
allowing for potential flaws in other characters to help make space for player agency. Craven elaborates: “basically making the characters you are dealing with as split personalities. Where you imagine what a character would be like if they had these different motivations and then that will naturally provide them room in the narrative for you to do things. (ibid). Second, providing the reader with a purpose that they can relate to (or in her own term, providing them with adequate motivation). Craven reflects on one of her past projects:
So in the pirates story we have, rather than it being, ‘you are collecting pirate supplies and crew for your ship’, which is a superficial reason, it is ‘you have this nemesis who is a really nasty guy, who is basically going to steal all your money and then…turn everybody into slaves’ or whatever. So you know, it’s a deeper problem of what do you do when you see something…when you see an evil being done. So by couching your interactive stories around a much more universal theme you are giving yourself the room for people to make agency decisions based off the emotions and motivations. (ibid)
Finally, providing the reader with ambiguous decisions can help increase agency. Craven that prefers to make the decisions in her stories “like life, where it is a potentially ambiguous choice, and you don’t know which is going to end up bad or good” (ibid). It is important here not confuse ambiguity with chance. Although on the surface they may appear similar, a
chance decision is based on no contextual information, whereas an ambiguous decision is based on potentially misleading information. Life is strange (2015) provides a good example
of ambiguous choice. The protagonist, Max, is spending time with her friend, Chloe, who she
hasn’t seen in five years, when she receives a phone call from Kate, a girl at her school who
has been having issues with bullies. The player must decide between rebuilding a valuable
friendship or helping out someone in need. Neither decision announces itself as the correct choice. Craven argues that “true agency entertains the idea that you can fail. Where a lot of
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games are about winning, and if you fail you just get brought back to life. And you’re taught
that failing is bad. Whereas true agency means that you could fail, you could win, you could partially fail” (Personal interview, November 3, 2015).
The type of motivation that the reader is provided with and whether or not it is properly balanced depends upon a number of factors: the type of interactive narrative
(hypertext, IF, etc.), the writer’s experience level, and if the story is being produced through a publisher it can depend on the publisher’s preference. One survey respondent (R41Q5) notes that one publisher they write for, Choice of Games, “has a very specific strategy as to how they like to present choices (very balanced, no ‘wrong’ answer)”, however the type of decisions the reader can make might change if they are writing for another publisher or working on an individual project.
Dullemond offers three useful suggestions on how to create and increase agency: first, create and maintain conflict between motivations and choices; second, if there are points where agency (“valuable choices” in Dullemond’s words) clearly drops off, analyse the story on a macro level, identify the weak point, and then rewrite it; third, reduce the amount of characters in a story to allow for less ambient dialogue and more direct action on the part of the reader (Personal interview, November 19, 2015). La Farge offers another technique: creating “an irresolvable internal contradiction” or presenting the reader with “puzzle pieces that don’t fit together” so the reader “has to make a choice not just about how to assemble the puzzle but about whether it was really intended to be assembled” (Personal interview, email,
February 9, 2016; italics in original).
The goal of La Farge’s technique is to more closely relate the reader’s decisions with the form of the narrative. While not an interactive work, the narrative structure of the film
Memento (2000) provides a good parallel. The story is told in reverse chronological order in an attempt to better portray the protagonist’s short-term memory condition. The film would
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be a lot less captivating had it been presented chronologically. In the same way, a story about
an escape from a labyrinth or of an exploration of memory is perhaps best presented in a non-
linear manner with internal contradictions that speak to the imperfections of life and indeed
the narrative.
Throughout this segment I have compiled a number of different techniques that
authors can employ to increase agency. For the sake of brevity I have distilled these into four
key strategies. First, integrate affect and diegetic agency by establishing how the reader will
interact with the story at the beginning and provide the reader with constant, and escalating,
feedback (immediate and long-term) in relation to their choices. This will allow players to see
that their choices have a direct, and lasting, impact on the story. Second, keep the amount of
additional characters to a minimum and allow for potential flaws in order to make room for
player agency. Third, provide the reader with potentially ambiguous choices, preferably
choices that conflict with one another. This makes the decision making process more lifelike
and relatable. Finally, try employing a puzzle at the heart of the narrative where certain elements of the story are intentionally confusing or puzzling. This may help the reader feel that their actions are more closely connected to the actual narrative progression.
4. Interactive authors should keep story segments concise and interactive where possible in order to maintain reader engagement
Maintaining engagement in IDN is just as important as in any other form of storytelling, however, I argue that there are more potential immersion breakers in IDN than in traditional media. For example, on a digital platform, such as a PC, there are more distractions for attention: websites, Facebook, games etc. Also, a simple flaw in the programming or software
can result in huge narrative inconsistency, for instance, skipping an important day in the story
or suddenly a character that has been killed comes back to life.
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A common feature of interactive stories is that they often contain long stretches of
text, dialogue or imagery without any form of interaction. This is problematic because
interaction is the main feature that distinguishes IDN from traditional storytelling. Ryan
(2008, 8) argues that “interactive narratives should make interactive moments the rule and
passive moments the exception, rather than limiting agency to a few decision points separated
by long stretches of passive watching” (see Chapter 2 above). Short believes that Ryan’s
view “is the majority view among people who work on the games side of things, and also
among some people invested in the book side of things” (Personal interview, email, October
23, 2015). She argues that Ryan’s principle “is a good rule of thumb that can occasionally be
broken” (ibid). Short states, “I can think of a lot of pieces whose failure mode was that they
went without choices for so long that I found myself sitting back and forgetting that a choice
was even possible”. (ibid) But Short argues that there are cases where the adverse can be
effective, where a story has minimal diegetic interaction, but the content and pace of the story
have maintained her interest. While this may be the case in certain instances, I maintain that
the majority of interactive stories that sustain reader engagement follow Ryan’s rule.
Short proposes a number of techniques for maintaining reader engagement, including
“a tight interaction loop, juice, humor, suspense. Sometimes other things, depending on
circumstance” (ibid). Humour and suspense are valid techniques, but could easily apply to
any other form of storytelling. A tight interaction loop and ‘juice’ are specific to IDN. An interaction loop refers to the story world responding to the reader’s actions, thus a tight loop would reflect the reader’s actions efficiently and noticeably. Meanwhile, the term ‘juice’ is a borrowed term to describe “constant and bountiful user feedback. A juicy game element will bounce and wiggle and squirt and make a little noise when you touch it. A juicy game feels alive and responds to everything you do” (Gray et al. 2005, 3). Games are naturally more
‘juicy’ than many other forms of interactive storytelling; but it is not always possible or
The Architect of Forking Paths 86 Ben Carey desirable to achieve such constant levels of interaction. The concept of ‘juice’ takes Ryan’s rule of frequent interaction to the extreme. However, Gray et al. are referring to non-diegetic interaction (interaction that does not impact story), whereas Ryan focuses on diegetic interaction.
Craven has an interesting perspective on the two types of interaction based on different types of locative stories she has developed:
We have done these puzzle trails this year to go to a park. And I’ll be very interested to see […] how the removal of choice agency, but the increase of solving a puzzle drives people. Because it’s a different type of interactivity. Because in that interactivity you are proving that you can do something, rather than making a choice based on a motivation, so it’s a different type of interactivity. (Personal interview, November 3, 2015)
Regardless of what type of interaction is present in which form of storytelling, it appears that frequent interaction plays an important part in maintaining engagement. One survey respondent reflects that “my issues are often less with the writing itself and more the writing of something that is concise and focused, and which fits the particular scene. When I encounter issues, the solution is often a slight restructuring of a scene” (R34Q5). As discussed in the previous section, a lack of agency, or engagement in this case can often be solved by rewriting with a particular goal in mind.
Craven faces the same engagement issues, but has additional problems that are specific to her form of interactive storytelling. When Craven began telling stories based in physical locations she found that approximately 67% of the people who started the stories would actually finish them, thus showing a lack of interest in finishing the story (Personal interview, November 3, 2015). The following year, Craven made sure that each story path was under a kilometre long and saw an astronomical rise in the amount of people completing the story, from 67% up to 97% (ibid).
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Establishing and maintaining engagement is an important skill in any form of
storytelling, but particularly in IDN. Although there are several techniques for increasing
engagement, there is one major theme: authors should try to keep story segments concise,
with a decent level of interaction throughout the story. As a general rule, authors should try to avoid including long stretches of passive watching, or in the case of locative literature, walking.
5. Programming techniques, such as variables, should be used to add complexity to interactive stories and to make the writing process easier
Working with interactive narratives can get complicated, due to the increased word count and the many different permutation of the story. Programming techniques, such as using variables, can ease some of these difficulties. According to Dullemond:
You could have a piece of text, halfway through this story which talks about the people you have met, and as you make choices earlier in the story, a website or a piece of technology can keep track of the people you've met and insert those names into that bit, so you can actually reuse a lot more than you normally would if it's just written out in a Choose Your Own Adventure story. (Personal interview, November 19, 2015)
Authors can use programming techniques, such as variables, in a number of different ways, all of which have the ability to make the writing process easier. However, programming can be difficult to learn and can make a simple story extremely complicated, so it can be a double edged sword, but it is almost a necessity in the current IDN environment.
Short, who has been working with IDN for a long time, has a more advanced method of overcoming technical difficulties. Short develops additional tools specifically for the problem she is facing, for instance, “pre-processors to convert human-readable scripts into code” and “visualizers to let me see the state of play more clearly” (Personal interview, email, October 23, 2015). In Short’s first example she has developed a tool that converts
The Architect of Forking Paths 88 Ben Carey plain text that one might produce in a word processor into code that can be used in the game engine; in the second example Short has created a tool that is able to visually depict what is happening in the game engine, providing her with the insight to make adjustments where necessary. Imagine a simple, visual representation of the inside of your car that displays what is working well and what needs to be fixed.
Although the idea of developing tools to ease or overcome specific problems in the writing process is very appealing, it is perhaps out of the reach of many interactive authors, especially aspiring writers who are new to the intricacies of IDN. Still, basic programming techniques, such as variables, can be of great benefit to interactive writing. Authors should experiment with basic programming in their stories, preferably on a small scale until it is clear how these techniques operate. Interactive writing software Twine allows for a range of options in this regard: authors can create stories without any programming or narratives using basic variables, or more complex coding if necessary. Of course, not all stories need complex programming, but most writing processes can be drastically improved with the introduction of basic programming.
6. Interactive writers should be aware of the inclusive potential of IDN and exploit it where necessary
Interactive authors have the opportunity to include people who are excluded from many other forms of storytelling. Of course, not all narratives have to be inclusive: I acknowledge that many stories need to be told from a specific perspective (gender, race, social status), however, authors should be aware of the inclusive possibilities of IDN. Craven reflects on the process of making her stories inclusive: “when I am writing interactively I am incorporating a
‘you’ into things, rather than a character that’s in my head. So rather than it being an ‘I’ or a
‘we’ or a ‘she’ or a ‘he’, it is a ‘you’. And as a result of that I do not want to project who I am
The Architect of Forking Paths 89 Ben Carey onto the person who is doing the game or taking part in the narrative” (Personal interview,
November 3, 2015).
In a highly inclusive narrative the author has to be very specific about their word choice. Inclusivity is almost like an additional layer in the editing process where the author removes words that may exclude any specific categorisation. Although it may seem like an annoying addition to the writing process, the rewards are worthwhile. Instead of a story that appeals to one gender, race, or social status, the story can appeal to all categories at once.
Writing in this manner undoubtedly challenges the traditional writing notion of a ‘target audience’. But writing inclusively has the possibility of actually increasing an author’s readership, simply because they are now appealing to a wider range of people. As mentioned previously, not all IDN should be inclusive, but it is a powerful technique that authors should be aware of and able to incorporate into their stories if they desire.
7. Authors should try to make use of the interactive writing community for testing and feedback on stories
Because of the reader’s active role in IDN, interactive authors should try to make their writing process as collaborative as possible or at the very least involve the interactive community in some fashion.
Dullemond reflects on the collaborative process and how it helped him to measure the level of engagement in one of his stories: “for Street Reads I tested it by handing the starting point to a bunch, like I just printed it out, handed it to a bunch of friends and said, walk this adventure, go, give me some feedback […] that helped a lot but functionally it's not that different from handing someone a story and saying give me some feedback” (Personal interview, November 19, 2015).
Another strong argument for involving the interactive community in the writing process is that there are many sets of eyes that can help point out programming or engine
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errors well before the story is published. One respondent notes that “having the story open on
the forums for people to play, and report any bugs they run into, is vastly helpful” (R45Q5).
Feedback can be helpful to simply locate bugs within the narrative but it can also be a place where readers can actively contribute to the narrative. One interactive writer observes that in order to overcome writing obstacles they often “ask for input from online forums” (R30Q5).
The type of input that authors can receive from the interactive community is vast, for instance: feedback on decision motivations and balancing, feedback on engagement, suggestions about content or style, comments on the interface, or advice in relation to the characters. I argue that authors should become a part of an online forum for interactive writing and seek out feedback from other writers and readers in relation to their stories.
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The Architect of Forking Paths 92 Ben Carey
Chapter 6: Reflective practice
For the past five years I have been interested in experimental or avant-garde work in the field
of interactive storytelling. My Honours project focused on the seemingly forgotten reader-
assembled narrative where the story is presented in a number of segments that the reader is
asked to shuffle before reading. As a part of that project I produced a disassembled novella
titled Velcro church. Exploring interaction in print narratives was rewarding, however, it
seemed necessary to investigate the larger field of interactive digital narratives in order to
further develop my knowledge of interactive storytelling.
I embarked on my creative journey by locating an interactive writing program called
Twine and experimenting with different interactive stories. This was an enjoyable process but none of my initial experiments maintained my interest. The greatest challenge was creating a
vivid and engaging idea (or world) that could sustain extensive exploration, from myself as the writer, and from any potential readers. I tried adapting old stories into an interactive form
believing that the characters and themes might lend themselves to IDN. This method proved
unsuccessful. I learned quickly that writing an interactive narrative is a very different process to writing a conventional story and that the strongest way of developing an interactive story is not to adapt something already written, but to start from scratch and build the interaction in
from the beginning of the writing process, thus more fully integrating interaction and story. I
experimented with several different types of IDN (branching narratives, hypertext fiction,
reader-assembled narratives), however, I often faced the same problems. The narratives were
often too expansive—there were too many choices and thus too much work for me to
realistically complete—and overly dependent on choice and not enough on the world or characters.
After two years of experimentation and a profound number of dead ends, I started developing the creative work for this project, Ouroboros. My initial inspiration came from a
The Architect of Forking Paths 93 Ben Carey short story by Michael Thomét called A figure met in a shaded wood (2015), about a traveller who encounters a fortune teller in the woods. The decisions the reader makes throughout the story determines the fortune telling they receive at the end of the story. In the tradition of the
Choose Your Own Adventure books, there are many outcomes that result in the reader’s death and presumably only one that results in the reader staying alive. At the end of the story if the reader arrives at an unfavourable ending they are invited to try again and informed that if they make different decisions along the way there might be a different outcome. In a sense, the reader is trying to escape from a cyclical labyrinth where there is only one path to freedom.
The writing in Shaded wood is unexceptional, but the underlying concept and narrative framework was invigorating and full of potential. I was fond of the cyclical nature of the story: after one cycle is complete the story can loop back and begin again. I was reminded of the cyclical narrative structure of one of my favourite films, Groundhog day
(1994). I thought about how interesting it would be if Groundhog day were interactive, and thus Ouroboros was born. Although the film was purely a conceptual inspiration for my creative work and did not inform my stylistic or thematic choices, I have definitely tried to utilise what Suzanne Daughton (1996) refers to as the “spiritual power of repetitive form”.
Daughton argues that Groundhog day gives viewers “a practical guide toward achieving wholeness and transcendence” (Daughton ibid, 138). While I did not expect my work to provide readers with wholeness or transcendence, I did attempt to create this for my protagonist. The protagonist, who is depressed and feels stagnant, trapped in monotony and routine, is now literally trapped in a never-ending cycle, an eternal monotonous routine. By using the repetitive form I tried to draw attention to the tensions between choice and fate, between freedom and routine, the horrors of depression, and the power of self-discovery and personal growth. Daughton notes that:
The Architect of Forking Paths 94 Ben Carey
Groundhog Day presents one man’s metaphorical journey away from the stereotypically masculine pursuit of Power and agency, the drive to control his life and the people and events in it. Paradoxically, his “journey” is only possible by staying in one physical place, which subverts the traditional masculine theme of the romantic quest, where the hero must travel far away to meet his challenges, and replaces it with a feminine initiation ritual (ibid, 143).
Daughton’s commentary certainly presents a fascinating view of this film and also helps explain my own creative work. In Ouroboros my protagonist, like Phil, undergoes the seven stages outlined in Daughton’s (1996) work: cynicism; alarm; hedonism; depression and anger; denial and avoidance; resignation; and finally, acceptance and growth. The main difference is that Groundhog day presents these stages in order, whereas in Ouroboros the reader may encounter these stages in slightly different configurations.
The first step in my creative process was to re-watch Groundhog day and analyse the narrative structure and the plot devices that were employed to advance the narrative, despite the extreme repetition. I will outline a few of these devices as they play a part in my own work. The first is the use of an anchor, my term for an event that grounds the audience in a specific time. In Groundhog day, the main anchor is the alarm clock that plays ‘I Got You
Babe’ each morning. This event is so memorable and specific that each time it occurs the
audience immediately knows that it is the start of that day again. The second device is what I
call selection, which simply refers to what is shown and what is left out. If Groundhog day
were to repeat the exact same events every time, the story would grow stale very quickly.
However, once it is established, through the use of anchors, that it is in fact the same day
repeating, the story can focus on the differences between iterations. The final device I wish to
highlight is the use of boundaries, which refers to the limits imposed on the narrative
framework. For instance, after the first iteration of Groundhog Day it is established that there
The Architect of Forking Paths 95 Ben Carey is a strong blizzard preventing them from leaving the town. Everything outside those boundaries has no consequence on the story.
In the first stage of planning for Ouroboros I drew up a basic flowchart of the iterative day in Groundhog day (Fig. 3), determining what I thought were the key events throughout the day and designating them as an anchor, symbol, or a boundary. I use the term symbol to specify an event that it is important to the plot, but more in a symbolic way, rather than functional.
Figure 3 – The iterative day in Groundhog day
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I then drew up a second flowchart for Ouroboros (Fig. 4). This chart contained an anchor at the beginning, three symbolic events, and three decisions. The idea was that because the day kept repeating, the reader would be able to try out different choices to see where each one led. I decided not to include a tangible boundary, such as a blizzard, because I feared that it would appear comical or gimmicky. The functional boundary in the story is time: the 24 hours until the next loop begins. Initially I had fun exploring all of the possibilities in the
Brisbane area, but eventually I included some passages set in Sydney and Melbourne in an attempt to increase the geographical diversity and to exaggerate the exuberance of the protagonist’s actions.
Figure 4 – The iterative day in Ouroboros
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Conceptually, I wanted to create a cyclical labyrinth (see Fig. 5), similar to Shaded wood and
Groundhog day. In both of these stories the protagonist is trapped within a repeating cycle,
with only one way out. In Groundhog day, Phil escapes the labyrinth by realising that he is
not the centre of the universe, and by dedicating himself to help other people, and thus
undergoing serious personal growth. As Daughton (1996, 150) puts it, “[Phil] has found his
purpose serving others, and has achieved a complete transformation of the self he despised”.
I was unsure of what my way out of the labyrinth would be, or if there would be more
than one, considering the large scale of the story. But I knew I wanted to explore the delicate
interplay between choice and chance, which is reflected in the passage below:
‘Chance, I think, is both beautiful and absolutely terrifying...somehow it complicates and simplifies things at the same time.’ I pause and watch a bus pass us by. ‘If we had chosen the bus we got on and picked the amount of stops it would still have been an adventure, but so much of the excitement and wonder would have been missing.’
This particular branch of the story explores the conflict between the random chaos of the
universe and our own individual agency within that chaos. This theme speaks meta-
fictionally to the form of interactive narratives and the interplay between the universe created
by the author and the agency of the reader.
At this point I had done a lot of planning and I wanted to start writing, to see how the
idea developed. This was an opportunity for me to see which themes were strong and could
support extensive exploration and which ones would only sustain brief investigation. I
planned to write a small 1,000 word prototype as a proof of concept; however, I became
engrossed in the writing and spent a week playing around with the story. The first milestone
for Ouroboros was a 9,000 word prototype, which I felt was a success.
Finally, over two years into the project, I had my story. I felt that it was an innovative
idea and one that was interesting enough to sustain 50,000 words of exploration. I really
The Architect of Forking Paths 98 Ben Carey enjoyed establishing and developing the storyworld and the characters were much more dynamic than in any of the other stories I had produced in the previous two years.
Figure 5 – Conceptual map of cyclical labyrinth
In Ouroboros I have employed an atonal, distal style of writing, similar to that used in ‘blank fiction’. Blank fiction describes a style of writing used by some contemporary American writers, such as Chuck Palahniuk, Dennis Cooper, and Bret Easton Ellis. James Annesley
(1998, 2) observes that blank fiction prefers “blank, atonal perspectives and fragile, glassy visions”. This type of work often focuses on youth (twenty and thirty somethings) and deals with contemporary urban life, violence, sex, drugs, and consumerism (ibid, 2-3). While I did not set out to write a work of blank fiction, I appreciate the tonal similarities between my work and this style of writing. Ouroboros features a protagonist in their late twenties, a
The Architect of Forking Paths 99 Ben Carey predominantly urban environment, and deals with all of the themes above in one way or another.
I chose this ‘blank’ style of writing because I feel that it accurately portrays the emotional state of the protagonist. Using this voice I tried to highlight the protagonist’s disillusionment with the world around them and create a distance between the protagonist and certain elements of their life, for example their office job and their relationship with Melissa.
Additionally, the atonal prose is juxtaposed with the moments of beauty in the narrative and scenes that are intended to be emotionally resonant. The following passage from Ouroboros demonstrates these concerns:
The rainclouds are starting to clear and there’s a few rays of sunshine creeping through and striking the tops of the skyscrapers. Such a big city with so many people and so many stories. I’ve done a lot of things over the last couple of days but I’ve barely even touched the surface. I’m just a speck of dust in the scheme of things. I think about Melissa and the baby. Our baby. Three little specks of dust floating through the abyss together. I run my hand through Willow's fur and she begins to purr.
Although my style is similar to blank fiction, there is a significant difference: my use of inclusive language. In Ouroboros I have tried to employ an inclusive voice that can apply to any gender or race. From the start of the project I used ambiguous language in relation to gender because I wanted to be as inclusive as I could. In the interviews, both Craven and
Dullemond praise inclusive writing, and after my own positive experience with inclusive writing, I wanted to apply it to Ouroboros. For me the most appealing aspect of writing inclusively is that it gives the reader what Craven refers to as a “blank canvas” which the reader can “slot themselves into” (Craven, personal interview, November 3, 2015). Writing in this way means that you give the reader enough characterisation to make the story engaging, but leave room for the reader to insert important parts of themselves, for instance gender and
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race. Theoretically, it is a wonderful concept, but in practice it can be difficult to implement
and maintain.
Initially, readers believed the protagonist in Ouroboros was a male, not because of
any specific pronouns, but because of sections of gendered language that I had unwittingly
included in the story. For example, there was a scene in the first segment where the
protagonist puts on clothes for work: “I open my wardrobe and grab a white dress shirt and
some black slacks.” While this sentence does not explicitly state the gender of the
protagonist, it does imply gender. I have since changed this sentence to read: “I open my
wardrobe and button myself into my uniform.” This is a simple example, but there were
many such incongruities scattered throughout the narrative, which I had to comb through and
amend. Perhaps the worst offender was the sex scene that I wrote between Quinn and the
protagonist. When I wrote it I did not even think about it and wrote the protagonist as a male.
If someone had been reading the story up until that point believing the protagonist to be a
female it would have severely broken the story for them. So I rewrote the scene so that it could equally apply to a male or a female (see Appendix 7). This inclusivity in relation to gender also extends to race. I have intentionally never mentioned the protagonist’s skin colour or anything else that may denote race.
There are several difficulties in writing inclusively. As discussed above, gendered language is one issue; thankfully this can be removed in the editing phase. However, some
aspects cannot be so easily removed. I accept that my attempts at writing inclusively are
undermined by the male gaze and elements of desire that are present in my description of
female characters, particularly Melissa. With Melissa I tried to create a strong, independent
woman, however, in hindsight her representation is somewhat limited. She is portrayed as
traditionally beautiful and at times as an object of desire, additionally she primarily functions
as a means for conflict or resolution in relation to the protagonist. Given more time I would
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have liked to have developed her character further. In writing Quinn I tried to challenge
traditional notions of femininity and aesthetic beauty. I have written her as a strong and
independent person who does not conform to the idea of ‘acting like a lady’. She is
represented as an equal to her male counterparts, she is never submissive, and has her own
thoughts, feelings, and desires separate from the male characters. Furthermore, she does not
conform to the traditional ideals of feminine beauty; she has short hair, tattoos, a nose piercing, and smokes cigarettes. Steph is never treated as an object of desire. I wanted to
present a meaningful relationship between a man and a woman that does not revolve around
sexual desire.
Gender and racial cues are often ambient, embedded in the fabric of the narrative. For
instance, living in a wealthy suburb in Brisbane and working in finance may imply a
privileged Caucasian perspective. Unfortunately it is difficult to remove these types of
implications without removing valuable characterisation and character motivation. I also
acknowledge that it is difficult, if not impossible, to see past your own enculturated
perspective. This is perhaps the ultimate obstacle of writing a truly inclusive story. Although
I wanted to produce a completely inclusive narrative, I soon realised that this would not be
possible given the time constraints, my perspective, and my lack of experience writing in this
specific way. This reflects one of the tensions between writing strategies and the conventions
of IDN that can make complexity and characterisation a potential barrier to reader
engagement. There is a strong relation here to the second problem outlined in Chapter 4, the
balance between reader agency and authorial control. We might conceive of this concept as a
spectrum, with authorial control on the one end and reader interaction on the other; in order
to increase one we must reduce the other10. In relation to this, Ouroboros represents a
10 This is only a preliminary observation, but it might provide a good starting point for future research.
The Architect of Forking Paths 102 Ben Carey compromise between full authorial characterisation and the “blank canvas” where readers superimpose themselves onto the protagonist.
I think it is important to challenge categorisation where possible. I have challenged gender categorisation in a number of ways in Ouroboros, most notably in the protagonist’s relationship with Melissa. Heterosexual couples are the standard within storytelling, but in removing references to gender I have attempted to create a relationship that works with two reader orientations: homosexual female and heterosexual male. Due to the amount of effort required I decided not to include the option of a homosexual male or heterosexual female relationship.
The most difficult part of writing this genderless relationship was Melissa’s pregnancy, which naturally suggests a male protagonist. I was able to work around this issue by using IVF as the method of conception, but even still, other issues remained. I have found it much more difficult to challenge racial categorisation, perhaps due to the nature of my writing process. When I started writing Ouroboros I knew that I wanted the protagonist’s gender to be ambiguous, but the realisation that the protagonist’s race could also be ambiguous came later on once the core of the story had already been developed. I believe that if I had both gender and race in mind at the start of the project it would have been easier to challenge categorisation.
Point of view was particularly important to the writing style of Ouroboros. At the start of the project I weighed up the three major points of view, writing test paragraphs in each style. Combined with my blank, atonal voice, third person seemed too detached from the protagonist. So the choice was really between second and first person narration. Although second person is rarely used in fiction it seemed like the obvious choice for a narrative where
I was actively inviting the reader to take on a role. As Garry Disher (2003, 82) observes,
“[second person] seems to invite readers to imagine that they are someone else, or
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somewhere else, or what it would be like in a particular situation”. Second person was used
extensively during the early days of interactive storytelling, most notably with the Choose
Your Own Adventure series. But many of these narratives where plot driven, with very little
focus on the interiority of the protagonist. I felt that it would be difficult to portray the many
nuances of my story using this perspective. Eventually I settled on a first person perspective
because it allowed me to more accurately depict my protagonist’s interior state. According to
Disher, “[first person] allows readers intimate access to the doubts, hopes, fears and
machinations of the narrator, and is particularly immediate if combined with the present
tense” (Disher 2003, 87). Importantly, using first person and present tense allowed me to
amplify moments of conflict and decision in the narrative, which may have felt removed
using another point of view. I believe these moments of conflict and decision are crucial to
the reader’s agency within Ouroboros.
I learned during other projects that the best way to promote reader agency is by giving the reader decisions that are ambiguous and balanced, in terms of reader motivation. An
ambiguous decision occurs when the outcome of the choice is not clear. For instance, while
swimming at the beach in Byron the protagonist sees a gigantic wave approaching and the
reader is given the choice between catching the wave or swimming underneath it. The
outcome of each decision is not entirely clear, which means that the reader does not feel that
there is a ‘correct’ option. Balanced motivation relates to building the stakes equally for each
decision presented, so that the reader does not naturally feel more inclined to make one
decision over another. For example, if the reader decides that the protagonist should quit their job they are faced with the decision of how to spend the rest of their day: “It's still the morning, if I started driving now, and the traffic was okay, I'd be in Byron by lunch.
However, Byron's quite far and I haven't seen my best friend Steph in a while. I did say we
could hang out the next time I got a day off”. In this passage, and the majority of the others in
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the story, I have attempted to make both options equally appealing to the reader. I believe this is very important so that they do not feel that you are guiding them through a preferred version of the story. However, there are times when it is acceptable to play around with ambiguity and balancing for effect. When the protagonist arrives late to work on the first loop their boss asks if they like working there, which the reader can respond to in three ways:
‘Yes, sir’, ‘Sure’, and ‘No, it stinks’. There is clearly a ‘right’ answer and a ‘wrong’ answer, but given the context of the story, the reader is encouraged to explore a range of interesting possibilities.
Even at the relatively small size of 9,000 words, the narrative structure for Ouroboros
(Fig. 6) was already complex. In the figure below each square node represents a separate segment of text and each line represents an action that the reader can take to move between the segments. If there is only one line between nodes, then the reader simply clicks a hyperlink to advance to the next segment. The nodes that have two or more lines connecting to other nodes represent decisions that the reader can make. The bold node on the far left represents the start point of the narrative; however the placement of nodes towards the right does not necessarily indicate advancement in plot.
Figure 6 – Structural map of Ouroboros (9,000 word prototype)
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Although the length of each segment varies, I wanted the upper limit to be around 500 words.
I imposed this limit predominantly to help ensure frequent interaction throughout the story.
The concern around the brevity of segments and the need for frequent interaction was raised
by several authors in Chapter 4, and by Marie-Laure Ryan (2008), a key scholar in the field.
There is no specific reason why I chose 500 words as the limit, except that it is roughly as
long as a page in a novel, which I believed would be a decent amount of space to develop a
scene.
After the first prototype, I observed that I had three core themes running throughout
the story: ‘self’, ‘girlfriend’, and ‘others’. Each of these themes was set up early in the story
and then referred to throughout in order to not only strengthen the theme itself, but to provide
a stabilising through-line for the reader.
The theme of self (or identity) explores the protagonist: their strengths, insecurities,
aspirations, and motivations. The following is an excerpt from the opening segment that demonstrates this thematic focus:
When I was younger I was really passionate about art. I used to paint all the time. Portraits, landscapes, whatever came into my head. I was really creative. And then I graduated high school and suddenly there was this pressure on me to find a job. Dad never missed an opportunity to tell me that there was no money in painting, unless it was painting a house.
This excerpt functions in two ways: first, the passage establishes an unfollowed passion, painting, which is a what-if that can be explored later in the story; second, the segment creates tension between protagonist and father, which is a motif that is scattered throughout the story.
The girlfriend theme focuses on the protagonist’s long-term relationship with Melissa.
I decided that the narrative should begin sometime after a fight between the couple, thus
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allowing the reader to explore the relationship and to try and mend things between them. The
following excerpt comes from a flashback in the second section, directly after an argument
between the two:
She didn’t cry or get angry. She did something much worse: she just switched off. It didn’t matter what I said or did, she just blocked me out. So I decided to give her some space. I probably should have tried harder, but I didn’t want to break it even more.
The argument gives the reader some context for the relationship so that on a following
iteration they are informed when they decide whether or not to answer Melissa’s call at breakfast.
The third theme focuses on others, or the notion of being selfless. This theme was
influenced by Groundhog day, but I did not necessarily intend for it to be the way out of my
labyrinth. I liked the idea of the protagonist having the potential to step outside themselves
for a while and focus on the wellbeing of other people. The excerpt below is from the second
segment when the protagonist witnesses a car accident for the first time: “When I reach the
top of the hill I see the mangled corpse of a blue Suzuki Swift and a dinged up bus. I look
around to see if the car driver is okay, but I have to keep moving” This passage sets up a later
path that allows the reader to explore this accident from a number of different angles, in an
attempt to prevent the accident.
Upon reflection, another strong theme is ‘communication and miscommunication’,
but unlike the other themes this was not intentionally created or used as a guiding principal,
rather it was a theme that emerged during the writing process. I am deeply intrigued by this
theme, and it becomes even more interesting when reader agency is involved. An example of
this theme is the initial argument between the protagonist and Melissa, which causes a rift
between the two. Instead of communicating their thoughts, feelings, and needs to each other
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they withdraw into themselves. If the reader chooses, they can ignore Melissa’s calls and they
will drift further apart or the reader can meet with Melissa and try to make things right. But
even attempts to make things right can be fraught with miscommunication. This theme is
further complicated by Melissa’s pregnancy and the potential relationship with Quinn. If the
reader cheats on Melissa, the rest of the narrative is peppered with decisions between telling
the truth and potentially risking everything or lying and risking inner turmoil. These concerns are exemplified in the following passage:
I feel like a soldier who’s just stepped forward through some tall grass and heard the click of a landmine. I’m paralysed with the fear of moving forward or backward. If I tell her about Quinn I could ruin everything...I could lose my baby and Melissa at the same time. But if I lie to her, I might have to bury this horrible secret forever. I’ve cocked my revolver and put it in my mouth, all that’s left to do is pull the trigger.
The next major milestone for Ouroboros was a 20,000 word prototype. At this point I had no
concrete idea of how Ouroboros would end, but I felt that three distinct paths would develop
from these central themes and that might result in at least three different endings. I was also
testing the idea of Melissa being pregnant to provide a strong driving force for the protagonist
to escape the labyrinth. It is evident from the structural map of the story (Fig. 7) that the story had grown many times more complex. At this point I was concerned about the advancement of the overall plot, and that having too many possibilities might distract from developing the narrative further.
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Figure 7 – Structural map of Ouroboros (20,000 word prototype)
My solution to this rather large problem was to start overlapping the central themes, so as to allow the reader more opportunities to jump from the ‘self’ branch over to the ‘girlfriend’ branch, for instance. I was hesitant to follow one particular plot progression for the story, because I felt that would directly undermine the reader’s influence in the story. My compromise was to make the girlfriend theme more prominent, so that although the reader can explore other themes and tangents, there is one that carries more weight in terms of narrative progression.
Up until this point with Ouroboros I had experienced very few technical problems, mostly because I knew Twine well and although the concept for the story was rather complex, the implementation was relatively straightforward. However, once I reached the
20,000 word mark, and the narrative structure had grown increasingly complex, several problems began to emerge.
I experienced a large problem with the number of disconnected plot strands in the narrative. The strands themselves were not an issue; it was the fact that it was difficult to link
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the similar ones back together. For example, at one point in writing the story I had 13
‘tomorrow’ segments, which I used to distinguish a clean repetition of the start of the day11.
Initially, these segments were very helpful because they separated the iterations where different choices were made. Without these different segments it would not have mattered if the reader chose to go ice skating or on a killing spree with a machete, the next day would have just been a generic passage that did not refer to the choice that the reader had made.
Using these different segments I was then able to separate these strands and develop them independently. But as the narrative increased in size, so too did the amount of different strands, so I needed a way to consolidate them all without losing reader agency.
My solution to this problem was to use variables to distinguish between plot events and choices and to refer back to them in a single following passage, thus linking all of the elements together. For example, at one point in the narrative I had three different strands that
I wanted to link back together: one where the protagonist had cheated on Melissa with a girl called Quinn, one where the protagonist had met Quinn but just talked with her, and another where the protagonist had not met Quinn at all, but climbed to the Byron Lighthouse instead
(see Fig. 8).
11 There were more than 13 repetitions but some of them employed the principle of selection, discussed earlier, and started later in the day.
The Architect of Forking Paths 110 Ben Carey
Figure 8 – Pre-variable tomorrow segments
I created two variables: one for the lighthouse, and one for Quinn that was either true
(meaning the protagonist had cheated on Melissa) or false (meaning they had just talked),
which I referred back to in the following segment to give specific feedback on each choice
(Fig. 9). The beauty of using these variables was that not only could I consolidate these strands in the short term, but I could continue referring back to each decision later on in the story. For example, if the protagonist cheats on Melissa there are opportunities later in the narrative that allow them to confess to that infidelity and to try and make amends; alternatively, if they do not confess the protagonist may find their betrayal eating away at them.
The Architect of Forking Paths 111 Ben Carey
Figure 9 – Post-variable tomorrow segments
Another large problem I encountered was continuity editing. This problem related to passages
that used very specific phrases like “this is the third time I have relived this day” even though
it was actually the fourth or fifth time. There were also problems with the continuity of
linking. As I have discussed above, there are some sections where I linked similar plot strands back together, but occasionally these links would bypass vital information. Early on
The Architect of Forking Paths 112 Ben Carey
there were two different ways that the protagonist could reach Byron: after quitting their job and by rejecting Melissa’s call in one of the loops. Because the Byron section was written
directly after the protagonist quits their job there was a natural flow and consistency between
the segments. However, the latter segment bypassed the decision-making process and the
protagonist just magically found themselves in Byron after rejecting Melissa’s call. These
problems increased radically after the introduction of variables into the project.
Continuity issues such as these have the potential to break a story, or at the very least
pull the reader out of the narrative world and disrupt their immersion. If the reader is
forgiving and engaged in the story they will persist, but it is better not to take the chance. My
solution to this problem involved employing three simple techniques. First, I began to record
each new variable and tracked exactly which passages it affected, so if I made changes to any
affected passages I would know to keep the related variable in mind. Second, I made sure to
do more research on each passage when linking them together. This research consisted of
playing through a couple of segments before and after the link to make sure continuity was
upheld. Finally, I began to use more ambiguous language or avoided referring to specific
events altogether. Instead of saying “this is the third time I’ve relived this day” I would say
something like “yet again I find myself reliving this day”.
In addition to the large problems of managing numerous divergent plot strands and
overcoming continuity issues, two smaller issues also impacted the writing process. First, the
default text layout in Twine is bland and uninteresting (Fig. 10). Although it does not affect
the content of the story, I wanted to format my text as closely as I could to traditionally
published books, as I find the layout more aesthetically pleasing and easier to read.
Unfortunately, there is no functionality in Twine for automatically formatted text, but
the engine does support CSS formatting. Although it was easy to learn the basic CSS code I
needed, it demanded a lot of extra work because I had to format each segment individually.
The Architect of Forking Paths 113 Ben Carey
However, I was pleased with the result of this extra work, which was a well formatted story
(Fig. 11).
Figure 10 – Twine default text layout
Figure 11 – Twine text layout after CSS formatting
The Architect of Forking Paths 114 Ben Carey
Second, Twine has no inbuilt spellchecking functionality. Obviously this has an impact on larger stories such as mine. Twine does have the ability to export a proofing copy of the story; however, this copy falls short for a number of reasons. The proofing copy includes paragraph formatting and any other coding (such as variables), and, perhaps even more detrimental to the editing process, there is no discernible order to the way segments are arranged. Essentially, the proofing copy is a long, messy chunk of text, which severely decreases its usefulness. While my supervisor and I were editing the story I provided him with a proofing copy as well as a structural map of the narrative so that he would not get lost during the editing process. After this editing phase I then manually replaced the edited text in each of the 152 passages, which was tedious and counter-intuitive. Upon reflection, if I were to write another interactive novel I would make sure that the program I was using had an internal spellchecker and proofing system.
The next major milestone for Ouroboros was a 40,000 word prototype, and by this stage I had worked out a solution or temporary fix for most of the technical problems I faced.
At this stage in the project, I was close to finishing the first draft, so my primary focus was to iron out the big kinks in the narrative, such as how it was going to end, and to tie up as many loose ends as possible. For the sake of the first draft I decided that there would only be one ending, which stems from the protagonist’s relationship with their girlfriend. In subsequent drafts I developed several more endings (currently there are seven), which I feel gives the narrative variation, especially in terms of closure.
However, one issue I encountered was that the majority of my test readers reached the same ending. After some analysis I realised that this was because the majority of the endings depended on whether the reader had met Quinn or not, which was a conceptual and design flaw on my behalf. My solution to this problem was to increase the chance of the reader meeting Quinn by creating more possibility of travelling to Byron.
The Architect of Forking Paths 115 Ben Carey
In Chapter 5, I discussed what seem to be the two predominant styles of planning within interactive writing: planning before writing or working things out along the way. I also discussed a third method, which is a combination of the two, where the author makes a short term plan, writes until that point, and then revises that plan and continues on iteratively. My creative process with Ouroboros is a case study of this method. By no means did I invent this type of iterative workflow; it is quite similar to the ideas behind action research, however, within the context of creative writing (specifically interactive writing), I refer to this method as the Plan, Experiment, Revise plan, Experiment Method (see Fig. 12).
Figure 12 – Conceptual map of PEREM
Initially, I had a thorough plan of the story and I implemented that plan as best I could.
Whenever I came up against problems along the way I experimented with different creative solutions or temporary fixes. Of course, this is an important step in any creative process, but experimentation was especially vital to my writing process because of the many intricacies of the interactive medium. I wrote and experimented with my initial plan until I reached my first
The Architect of Forking Paths 116 Ben Carey milestone, at which point I analysed what was working and what was not, revised my plan and experimented until the next milestone. I repeated this process until I had finished the novel. Although other writers may approach the writing process in a number of different ways, this method was a good fit for my writing style. Also, either by coincidence or necessity (I am not sure which) the iterative and experimental nature of the writing process mirrors the iterative and experimental structure of Ouroboros.
The final version of Ouroboros is 50,000 words long (Fig. 13), however, due to the nature of interactive storytelling the size of each reading will be vastly different. The shortest path through the story is roughly 11,000 words, but because of the looping mechanic and the structural complexity, the longest path could potentially be over 50,000 words. For this reason, Ouroboros is designed to be read multiple times. Re-reading a traditional novel the reader often discovers additional details and creates new meaning based off an understanding of the whole story. This is also true for interactive narratives, such as Ouroboros, however, this story also allows readers to make different decisions, giving them the opportunity to fully explore the nuances of the narrative.
The process of writing and developing Ouroboros has been difficult but it has also been rewarding. I have faced many conceptual and technical problems along the way, and although frustrating at times, it was ultimately my ability to find solutions to these issues that proved the most valuable for my research and my creative practice as a whole. The strategies
I used to solve these problems were drawn from three sources: pre-existing theory, the author interviews I conducted, and some I developed myself during the creative process.
The Architect of Forking Paths 117 Ben Carey
Figure 13 – Structural map of Ouroboros (final version)
As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, one of the major challenges for me was
creating a world—characters, themes, setting, and events—that was engaging enough to
sustain extensive exploration from myself as a writer, but also my potential readers. I believe
that this relates to the perceived literary merit of my work, and indeed interactive stories in
general. There is certainly a tension between interactive and traditional forms of storytelling
in terms of literary significance. Interactive forms struggle to gain the same sort of critical
attention that many traditional forms enjoy, for instance novels and short stories. Traditional
works are often regarded as ‘important works’ whereas interactive narratives are frequently associated with children’s stories, such as Choose Your Own Adventure novels and mindless videogames.
With Ouroboros I have tried to create two things: a work of thematic complexity as
well as an artefact, an exemplar of the interactive narrative form. I have tried to write in a
The Architect of Forking Paths 118 Ben Carey style that is both poetic and that responds in a meta-fictional manner to the potential for thematic complexity and reader agency in IDN. The following passage demonstrates this: “I stare up at the lighthouse and feel a strange sense of satisfaction course through me. The lighthouse above me has essentially remained unchanged since 1901. It’s an anchor of stability in a sea of change.”
The Architect of Forking Paths 119 Ben Carey
The Architect of Forking Paths 120 Ben Carey
Conclusion
As mentioned in the literature review, authors began to experiment with interactive storytelling in print during the 1960s with narratives such as Saporta’s Composition no. 1
(1962) and Johnson’s The unfortunates (1969). In the 1970s and 1980s the Choose Your Own
Adventure series popularised interactive reading among young readers and became the starting point of many other branching narratives that followed. At the same time, digital technology began to transform the idea of interactive storytelling: new forms such as hypertext fiction emerged, and IDN was born. In comparison to the history of other forms of storytelling, such as film, or the novel, IDN is still very much in its infancy. Leading game designer, Chris Crawford, argues that:
In this century we have seen an explosion of interest in [interactive storytelling], with hundreds of people coming into the field, hundreds of academic papers, a mountain of very clever ideas, conferences every year. It has really been an active field of research. And yet despite all of this effort, there is only one piece of software that we can all agree comprises genuine interactive storytelling, and that is Façade by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern. And the disappointing thing is that Façade was a dead end. It was a carefully handcrafted piece of software that couldn’t really, it didn’t lend itself to a sequel or further developments along those lines. So I think the first thing we must do is admit to ourselves the magnitude of this problem. Interactive storytelling is a really, really hard puzzle. And it’s going to take a lot of effort to solve it. (Crawford 2015)
Crawford’s argument that Façade (2005) is the only truly interactive work is perhaps a little exaggerated. Many scholars in the field dispute this claim, possibly because there is no universal checklist of what is required for a story to be classified as ‘truly interactive’.
Regardless of this, Crawford makes a compelling argument that after almost half a century of research and practice, the field of IDN is still in the early stages of development.
The Architect of Forking Paths 121 Ben Carey
Koenitz (2015, 50) suggests that while other artistic forms, such as literature and film, have established conventions for structuring and presenting narrative material, the evolving field of IDN has no such design conventions. Koenitz argues that the lack of these conventions constitutes an “important obstacle” that aspiring interactive writers and authors from traditional narrative backgrounds must overcome (ibid).
In order to solve the “puzzle” of interactive storytelling I believe it is necessary to examine every factor that contributes to interactive stories, including the reader, the technology, and the writer. The aim of this project was to investigate the writing and conceptualisation process involved in producing interactive narratives, and to develop a number of potential strategies that practitioners could use to help create richer interactive works. At the beginning of the exegesis I outlined the research question for this project: what are key writing strategies or methods of conceptualisation that authors can use to create richer interactive narratives? In response to this question, my research explores the interactive writing process and proposes a set of seven potential writing strategies for interactive authors. These strategies are at the heart of this project and have been developed using a variety of research from different sources: key theory, interviews with interactive authors, and my own creative and reflective practice. In their refined form, these strategies can be represented as the following:
1. Use an iterative writing process of planning and creative experimentation. 2. Apply tools and techniques to manage the size and scope of a project. 3. Incorporate reader agency early in the design process. 4. Keep story segments concise and interactive to maintain engagement. 5. Learn basic programming to add complexity and make writing process easier. 6. Make language inclusive, where appropriate, to give stories a broader appeal. 7. Use the interactive writing community for ideas, feedback, and play testing.
The Architect of Forking Paths 122 Ben Carey
It is useful now to respond to these strategies, discussed in-depth in Chapter 5, and provide an evaluation in the context of my experience with these techniques in my own creative practice.
1. I outlined two methods of planning: the first focuses on planning thoroughly beforehand and then implementing that plan, the second method revolved around diving straight into the writing and figuring things out along the way. I experimented with both of these methods at one stage throughout the project and found that neither was particularly effective. It was not until I combined both of these methods into an iterative planning and experimentation workflow (PEREM) that I found a method that worked for me.
2. In relation to managing the size and scope of an interactive story, I suggested four techniques: determining a simple structure, restricting the amount of segments, crossing narrative branches, and using variables. I used most of these techniques to some degree in the process of writing Ouroboros. Starting with a basic structure and building upon that was invaluable and allowed me to slowly expand on different themes in a systematic way. I discovered at the 20,000 word mark that crossing narrative paths would be essential to keeping the narrative at a manageable size (as discussed in Chapter 6).
3. I recommended four techniques to help establish or increase agency: integrating affect and diegetic agency, using minimal secondary characters with flaws, developing ambiguous and balanced decisions, and employing a puzzle at the heart of the narrative. In
Ouroboros I established that the reader’s actions would have a direct and lasting impact on the protagonist and their life. By doing this I aimed to make the reader feel as included in the narrative and the decision-making process as possible. I always kept secondary characters to a minimum, but I did not capitalise on the flaws of other characters to accentuate the reader’s role. I think that this is a valuable technique and I wish I had used it from the start of the story. Crafting decisions that were both ambiguous and that had balanced motivations was an important technique that I used throughout the story. Writing balanced and ambiguous
The Architect of Forking Paths 123 Ben Carey
decisions means that the reader has equal reason to explore all of the paths in the narrative,
not just the author’s preferred version. Writing in this way helps eliminate the notion that
there is a ‘right’ answer and a ‘wrong’ answer, which might be acceptable in basic IDN, but
should not exist in interactive stories aimed at adult audiences. In relation to creating an
internal puzzle within the story, I believe that the overall concept of the narrative, the
repeating day and the cyclical labyrinth, fulfils this to a degree. I was careful to never provide
an explanation for why the day was repeating, therefore allowing the reader to come to their own conclusion of what it means.
4. In terms of reader engagement, I suggested that authors should keep individual segments short and maintain a consistent level of interaction throughout a story, and to avoid
long stretches of passive watching. I followed this strategy closely with Ouroboros, implementing an upper limit of 500 words for each segment and making an effort to provide many interactive opportunities. The story contains section where the reader is required to merely click a hyperlink to advance to the next passage, but I tried to keep these to a minimum, and as a rule I aimed to never have more than four passive segments in a row.
5. In relation to variables, I found them incredibly useful. I wish I had used them from the very start of the story and not started retrofitting a 30,000 word narrative. Variables are very powerful tools, and if used correctly they can help add complexity to a story and also reduce the amount of work that a writer has to do.
6. I discussed the power of inclusive writing and suggested that authors experiment with it to see if it is right for their story. By using deliberately ambiguous language I have tried to make my writing as inclusive as possible in Ouroboros so that the protagonist is not portrayed to be of a certain gender or race. I found that writing in this way is often frustrating and counter-intuitive. Nevertheless, I do think it is a valuable antidote to the plethora of white male protagonists that currently dominate mediums such as video games.
The Architect of Forking Paths 124 Ben Carey
7. I highlighted how useful the interactive community can be in relation to providing
feedback on elements such as style, engagement, and interface. I would have liked to have
utilised the interactive community in the development process of Ouroboros. I would
definitely plan to use the community next time because they provide a wealth of valuable
knowledge and experience.
Initially, this project intended to highlight the differences between traditional and
interactive forms of writing. This was a complex topic that threatened to become merely a
comparison of two vastly different methods of writing. This was a broad focus and the
research would have only contributed to the field in a minor way. Instead, my research
moved beyond comparison to look at a more specific topic, one with a much greater practical
application. This revised focus invigorated my research and allowed me to produce an
innovative creative work. Ouroboros allowed me to explore the limits of my creative practice
and to investigate the nuances of interactive storytelling. The creative work was also an
important space for testing my own theoretical assumptions and those of other scholars, and
also the potential writing strategies at the core of this project.
My research explores the interactive writing process and makes at least four
significant contributions to the fields of interactive storytelling and creative writing. First, this
project proposes a set of potential interactive writing strategies. Second, my research produces an original interactive novel, Ouroboros. Third, my research produces original research data from interviews with interactive authors. And finally, this project investigates a gap in scholarly research around the practitioner and the writing process in interactive narratives and adds to this discussion using the under-represented perspective of the creative writer.
The interactive writing process is a fascinating research topic, but one that has not received a lot of scholarly attention, which means that there is a wealth of potential for future
The Architect of Forking Paths 125 Ben Carey research. First, the most important step from here is to test the potential writing strategies I have proposed with interactive authors. During this process of testing, these potential strategies could be refined further and perhaps even more strategies could be developed.
Second, future research could take a similar focus to this study but conduct a different set of interviews and surveys. For instance, the research might focus on completely different authors to the ones I interviewed or ask different questions. This kind of study would be a useful contrast to the findings of my research and it would be interesting to see the similarities and differences between the studies. Ultimately, it is crucial that there is continued scholarship on the interactive writing process, preferably from the perspective of the authors themselves.
Interactive storytelling is still a relatively new art form, and as such the field is constantly shifting, with old narrative forms being updated and new forms emerging. Emily
Craven’s ‘Story City’ presents readers with Choose Your Own Adventure stories that they can play in physical locations. Currently there are stories in Brisbane, the Gold Coast, and
Adelaide, but Craven has plans to make this a global interactive storytelling platform. There are many other recent examples of locative literature, such as The silent history (2012), a fragmented, global location-based story about a generation of strange children, born without the ability to create or comprehend language, and My story (2013), an interactive, user- generated tour of Melbourne. This is just one example within the large, constantly evolving field of interactive storytelling, but it aptly illustrates the wealth of exciting possibilities in which IDN allows writers to produce and readers to participate.
If we look at interactive storytelling from a broader perspective we can certainly see that there is an “explosion of interest” (as Crawford puts it) in interactive formats, many of which are still evolving, and in some cases still emerging. It is also apparent that there is an exciting range of applications for this type of storytelling. Certain museums around the world
The Architect of Forking Paths 126 Ben Carey have embraced the principles of interactive storytelling to engage with visitors in new ways: for instance, in 2011, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London ran an interactive performance of Composition no. 1. A recent historical project, which focussed on preserving the testimony from a victim of the Holocaust, demonstrates an even wider application of interactive storytelling. There has been a renewed interest in interactive cinema, particularly in the form of short interactive YouTube videos, which have achieved widespread success.
Finally, interactive storytelling is increasingly being used in learning and teaching environments, a trend which is likely to continue. Finally, there is strong interest in virtual reality that is likely to continue. There are many players in the market, notably Oculus Rift,
Samsung, and Sony, and with this much corporate interest, as well as demand from the people, there will most certainly be big developments in virtual reality in the coming years.
And as virtual reality is primarily being driven by the games industry it will be very closely tied to interactive storytelling. Although we cannot know what the future of interactive storytelling will look like, examining the creative and scholarly trends in the field provides us with clues about continuing and emerging areas of interest.
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The Architect of Forking Paths 128 Ben Carey
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Appendices
Appendix 1: Anonymous online questionnaire
For all questions below please tick the box that most closely resembles your experience with interactive narratives. Space has been allocated for you to leave additional feedback if you desire.
For the purpose of this research an interactive story/narrative might be a Choose Your Own Adventure story, a piece of hypertext fiction, or a web or game-based narrative where the reader or player is able to choose a path through the story.
1. How much experience have you had in relation to writing interactive narratives? A little – I have written or experimented with one or two interactive stories A moderate amount – I have written several interactive stories and shared at least one with online communities A lot – I have written interactive stories regularly and have shared most of these stories with online communities
Additional comments:
______
______
______
2. In your experience, how different is writing an interactive story compared to a traditional story (such as a short story)? Not different at all Slightly different Radically different
Additional comments:
______
______
______
3. What is the main reason you have chosen to write interactively? To experiment with writing style
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For more exposure in the modern world To engage more with readers Other (please specify below)
Additional comments:
______
______
______
4. In your experience, what are the largest or most frequent obstacles you face when writing interactively? Planning (planning and structuring the story before writing) Technology (operating the computer or using the writing application) Writing (composing and arranging segments pieces of writing) Other (please specify below)
Additional comments:
______
______
______
5. How have you navigated these obstacles in the past? I give up or start a new story if I encounter too many writing obstacles I keep trying different solutions until I find one that solves the writing obstacles I face I have a few strategies for managing writing obstacles I have many strategies and methods for managing writing obstacles
Additional comments: ______
______
______
6. How do you go about writing an interactive story? I just start writing and figure it out as I go I plan ahead and implement that plan as I go
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I research other interactive stories and try to replicate what they have done I read about what other interactive writers have done and try to do that
Additional comments:
______
______
______
7. How useful would you find a set of strategies for aspiring writers such as yourself? Not very useful Useful Extremely useful
Additional comments:
______
______
______
Thank you for completing this Questionnaire.
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Appendix 2: Survey graphics and responses
Question 1: How much experience have you had in relation to writing interactive narratives?
A little – I have written or experimented with one or two interactive stories
A moderate amount – I have written several interactive stories and shared at least one with online communities A lot – I have written interactive stories regularly and have shared most of these stories with online communities
Responses
0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40% 45%
Percentage Responses A little – I have written or experimented 41.18% 28 with one or two interactive stories A moderate amount – I have written several 41.18% 28 interactive stories and shared at least one with online communities A lot – I have written interactive stories 17.65% 12 regularly and have shared most of these stories with online communities Total 100% 68
Respondent Comment Respondent #05 I have about six stories on IFDB but haven't done it my entire writing life. Respondent #11 I've written as part of a team for an indie game studio and only recently started writing/producing on my own. Respondent #16 Ifcomp winner. Respondent #21 Other than reading "Choose Your Own Adventure" books as a child, this year has been a huge year of discovery (and writing, and sharing). Respondent #24 I have written about 4 interactive stories, but I have yet to share any of them with online communities. Respondent #26 Most of my interactive stories are short stories that range from 50k words
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to 75k words. That will also include the coding process for the game. Respondent #30 2 finished pieces. Respondent #31 I have never actually finished one to date. Respondent #35 I have started a number of interactive stories, but only a couple got to any stage beyond the beginnings. I have shared two games with the online community. Respondent #39 I have tons of games with a chapter 1. I have one or two that are further along. Respondent #40 I have written two interactive stories, one of which I shared in a shortened but complete form with an on-line community. I have also gained experience with interactive fiction by professionally editing two published interactive games, and beta testing several more. Respondent #41 While I've only written a moderate amount of interactive stories (eight?), most of these have been published. A gamebook and a smartphone/tablet application have been published to date. Another app will be published in the near future. I am currently working on another gamebook and an application, both of which have been successfully crowdfunded. Respondent #46 Although, I've recently come to write I've been writing fictions for 10+ years, though ultimately growing bored with the 'fixed' nature of story and the unanswered 'what ifs' therein. Respondent #47 I am still in midst of writing my first one. Respondent #49 I have written one interactive story so it can be played to completion on the main story line, and that won second prize in a competition for new games. I have not finished building out the seven or eight other story lines. I am writin three other games, one of which is in beta for a private client. Respondent #55 I'm a newbie to this medium of fiction, but I'm an experienced writer when it comes to regular novels and stories. Respondent #67 I have played before, but have only experimented write one.
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Question 2: In your experience, how different is writing an interactive story compared to a traditional story (such as a short story)?
Not different at all Slightly different Radically different
Responses
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%
Percentage Responses Not different at all 0% 28 Slightly different 29.41% 28 Radically different 70.59% 12 Total 100% 68
Respondent Comment Respondent #02 Interactive story is closer to a play than a traditional story. You want to make it short and on point, or the player becomes bored. Respondent #04 Being interactive means that you need to account for different orders people might experience the story in. Respondent #05 One still must fundamentally be concerned with characters and plot, but while there are tropes, creating a new shape for a narrative is often completely possible and welcomed. Respondent #10 A lot of the story, for me, is influenced by the interactivity. I have to make characters, items and places interesting, so the story has to to work around that. Respondent #11 There's a few big differences. The first is that you have to re-consider the type of stories you want to tell if you want a branching narrative. choice- based stories not only need to be internally consistent, but they have to (potentially) have multiple satisfying conclusions. That's harder than you'd think because we're very much conditioned to think of stories in a Heroes Journey type way where there is a "best" or even inevitable ending. Small stories get a LOT bigger when you make them interactive,
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at least if there's a lot of meaningful choice. And there's a lot more balancing and strategy involved, especially if you incorporate any game- play mechanics. Respondent #14 I write both traditional and interactive fiction. They feel more similar than different to me: good writing is good writing. Interactive fiction feels about as different from traditional as would writing a script. Respondent #20 The biggest thing, I think, that separates writing traditionally and writing IF is that you have to think about how the reader will interact with what you write - what you think readers will pick up from your prose could be drastically different from how people really read it. To give a very simple example, in a parser-based IF, you might set up a room with a box, a wobbly table and something you need to reach. In your head, you imagine the obvious thing to do would be to put the box under the table, then stand on it to reach whatever it is. But depending on how you write it, that could be not obvious at all. You've got to think from the point of view of the player. Also, because IF allows the player to interact with the game world, you have to think about how much choice you're giving the player. You can choose to limit the player's choices, but that's not very fun (because then the player lacks agency). Alternatively, you can let the player make choices which determine the outcome of the story. Giving the player agency, or the ability to control what happens next, is of course something that a traditional story writer would not have to think about. Respondent #21 Because I write using ChoiceScript, the setting of each chapter is the same (although some chapters won't be seen each episode) and there is a consistency of timeline. That helps my brain to cope. I needed to learn ChoiceScript, and to outline more carefully - but it's ultimately the plot, world and characters that matter. Respondent #24 I think this depends on the type of interactive story. Some stories only have choices that change the appearance of the narrative (ie how you say something, or maybe looks) and it has only 2 or 3 endings, while other stories have lasting consequences based on the action of 4 choices ago. In both cases you always have to keep in mind the choices and how the player might to each choice and how those will affect the narrative down the line. I feel as though writing an interactive story is writing many stories jammed into one. Respondent #26 Slightly different because for traditional stories I basically only have one plot to write while an interactive story needs more than one plot. An example of that is if I’m writing a certain scene then the character will do something. For a traditional story there is only one outcome while in an interactive story it must have at least three or more outcome before the story can progress. Respondent #30 I'd say moderately different (more than slightly but certaintly not radically). It depends on how they're written, but most of the better ones still need to engage the reader and have a strong story line. Since the stories branch though, they are more complicated to keep straight, especially when there are many stats involved which can influence the story line. Respondent #34 I would equate interactive writing much closer to something like prepwork for tabletop RPGs, or collaborative storytelling games. Yes, the narrative structures and literary rules of traditional writing are present,
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but the approach to interactive stories should be with focus on the branching opportunities and not a heavily focused story. If interactive stories were to have highly focused stories, it would feel railroaded no matter how many choices you give the reader. Respondent #35 The hard part with interactive stories is allowing the reader/player to have agency without having it be too "computer-ish" or losing overall cohesion. Respondent #38 The biggest difference I've noticed is trying to write a story where the PC can be anybody with any sort of relationship to the other characters and the rest of the story. I think it also means you have to write smarter because players are going to want to do clever things, which means you can't rely on narrative convenience to move the plot along without annoying your readers. Respondent #39 The biggest thing is learning the code. I started multiple games solely for the purpose of learning the program. Beyond that, you just fill in with text, just like writing a book. Respondent #40 With a traditional story, you take the reader from point A to point B. You have complete control of the story you're telling - and that means you have a different kind of control of how you project your world-view, which characters should end up with which fates, and so forth. The core of interactive fiction is that player agency is increased. No longer do I decide whether the 'hero' saves the day or blows everyone up and sits, cackling, on a broken throne over a ruined earth. One of the things I really like about writing interactive fiction is it lets me explore all of the 'what-ifs' that I wished I could follow in my traditional writing. What if the secondary character had been saved in time? What if the hero decided not to go save the world, but instead took up potholing? And then readers can explore the options that appeal to their individual tastes. Respondent #41 I've had a couple of short stories published, in a magazine and an anthology of short stories. These were both in the literary fiction genre. Respondent #45 If there were an option, I would say 'moderately different'. Some of the differences are that with interactive story writing, you are writing in multiple layers at the same time. Essentially, one chronological sequence containing many versions of the same story. Additionally, the coding and variables increases the amount of writing being done by an astronomical amount. The story I am presently working with contains over one- hundred sixty thousand words for chapter one alone. Respondent #46 Traditionally you write in one direction, thinking with an 'on the rails' mentality. You may see this residual habit form from experienced writers even withing the 'interactive' realm. A storyline holding loosely to a singular direction, the old 'throw a pebble in a river' adage. These stories are often the most successful but in the short term. While others not used to structured or planned stories wander and drift on a whim. These are usually the most creative sorts, though general story and direction tends to be weak and distracted. A price to pay with freedom. That being said the largest difference is the writer having to think in more directions than one, the 'what ifs' and balancing that with a cohesive story. Not all people can do this but it doesn't stop them from trying. The issue is the daunting possibility of infinite directions which is the most disheartening aspect of writing, ego boosts and helpful people go along way toward motivation.
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Lastly a 'clear' goal and organized notes are a great help. Respondent #47 I am currently writing my story based on a story I wrote as a teenager, so the difference is easy to spot. When writing a story you imagine all the decisions that the characters make and put it on a paper. When you make an interactive story, these choices are mostly for the reader to make, so the story evolves not in a linear matter, but creates parallel lines with every choice, and at time intersects with the original story, but rarely will it be the same. I hope this makes sense. Respondent #49 The more you accommodate the player by providing significant choices, the more you increase the labour of writing the story lines and scenes to support those choices. I also find that when I write the scenes I tend to write in a more staccato fashion than I do when writing a play (my preferred medium) or a short story. Respondent #52 You are in essence trying to write multiple different narratives at once, all relating clearly to the central narrative, yet still different enough to create the illusion of choice. Respondent #55 It's only really different in how it's formatted and the concept of choices. It's sort of like what happens when one blends a visual novel with an actual novel. Straightforward in plot with the occasional diverging path. Respondent #57 Need to consider multiple paths and how each of these affect the story- path, this can be logically quite complex at times... Respondent #58 As someone who wrote novels before IF I think the main difference is how you deal with the readers. Not only you have to be much more aware of the reader's viewpoint in an IF but you also have to pander to his whims, you have to be aware of his wishes and of the decisions he might make. Respondent #60 Interactive stories take more into account the accessibility to the reader, so your writing style does change to be a bit more simple. Writting branching narratives also changes the process quite a lot. Respondent #61 One still needs an outline, a hook at the beginning, engaging characters, all the requirements of a regular story. However, the challenge is in allowing the reader the freedom to direct the story while keeping them within the confines of the story that is in the author's mind. Respondent #62 I was a pantster until I started writing interactive fiction which requires a lot of planning. Respondent #66 Since they branch, interactive stories need to be looks at differently. All the permutations need to be kept in your mind, or else one branch might get more attention, more subconscious "canon" treatment than the other. It's like thinking of traditional stories as 1-dimensional lines, and interactive stories as 2-dimensional shapes. Respondent #67 Obviously the interaction is different. When forced to participate it changes from a passive experience to an active one.
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Question 3: What is the main reason you have chosen to write interactively?
To experiment with writing style For more exposure in the modern world To engage more with readers Other (please specify below)
Percentage
0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40% 45%
Percentage Responses To experiment with writing style 41.18% 28 For more exposure in the modern world 5.88% 4 To engage more with readers 16.18% 11 Other (please specify below) 36.76% 25 Total 100% 68
Respondent Comment Respondent #03 Because interactive writing affords techniques and effects which are not possible in static forms. Respondent #05 The "pond" is smaller, so feedback is more visceral. One can literally know their audience. It is difficult to get a standard screenplay or novel noticed or read. Respondent #06 It's a way of writing and reading fiction that opens up for new ways of storytelling. Respondent #07 There's more feedback and critical engagement than in traditional writing communities. Respondent #09 The medium is more suitable for the stories I'm writing. Respondent #10 Because I loved playing IF, and wanted to see. If I could write it. Respondent #11 I honestly just think that IF is a better fit for my strengths and interests as a writer, and I find it a fascinating medium. Respondent #12 I'm a professional game developer. I write interactive fiction because it's at the crossroads of games and literature. Respondent #16 Love for the medium since when i was 13. Respondent #17 Games are fun. Also I like programming more than writing.
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Respondent #20 Because it's fun. I started out playing IF, and I had hoped, through writing, to replicate the experience and/or create an experience I could call my own. Respondent #21 Choice of Games offers larger advances than novelists receive, which is what drew me in - then I found the fast plotting and sparse description really suited me. Respondent #22 Interactivity delivers a unique experience. You can tell stories differently. It's not so much about "experimenting" as it is approaching material from another angle. Respondent #24 I love interactive story and would love to see more of them. Respondent #26 To prove to myself and other people who are like me that despite being blind we can still create games and play some games. Respondent #27 Choice of Games offers publishing, distribution, and a potential for sakes I could never hope to find for a short story. Respondent #30 Apart from enjoying writing them, there seems to be a strong reader base which makes it easier to get people interested in reading them compared to traditional fiction. There also seems to be less people writing good medium to long story based interactive fiction compared to tradtional books also. Combined with ease of access, (depending on the format, "traditional" choice books can be easily downloaded in PDF format, and computer based ones are accessable to anyone with a smart phone or computer) and usually lower cost, they are a good writing style to get started in. Respondent #31 Because there's not enough of it (accessible via the Internet anyway). Respondent #33 It helps me create more a more complete world and characters since in interactive fiction both the world and the characters have to respond differently according to the player/reader choices. Respondent #34 Experimentation, gathering of experience for longer prose, but most importantly the open, friendly, and largely untapped marketplace on modern devices. Respondent #35 To combine two of my passions, writing and computer programming. I was hoping interactive fiction could be made more immersive and engaging. Respondent #40 I actually started out editing interactive fiction before I wrote any myself. I had taught myself a relevant programming language, choicescript, just out of curiosity, and then once I had edited a complete volume written that way, it occurred to me that I could also write an interactive story. I also wanted to try something different to what has been popular lately with big-name publishers, but I know independently published traditional fiction doesn't have a tendency to make it to shelves. So I thought interactive fiction would be a good compromise. Respondent #41 Mostly because of circumstance. I've been a fan of interactive fiction for most of my life, but the first interactive story I actually wrote came about because a publisher phoned up and offered me a job. Respondent #44 To explore possibilities and "what-ifs." Respondent #45 To be clear, I began writing interactively because I have had ideas I wanted to bring to the world which, prior, I had no means by which to do so. I wanted to put my ideas out where they could be seen and experiences, which were stuck rattling around in my head. This does not mean experimenting with writing style and engaging more with readers
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are not important. In fact, I have found that engaging with my readers has become a very great source of inspiration for me, and is presently the greatest joy I find in writing interactively. Respondent #46 I've hundreds of ideas, worlds, characters and theories I want to share... and if I can make a living doing something I love, life will be all the better for it. Long story short, attention, acceptance, and the urge to show off my imagination. Respondent #47 Utter boredom in between projects at work. Respondent #49 I am not sure whether I will write games for profit, but I am very much enjoying experimenting with the medium. My private client is delighted with the progress of that game, and has made many suggestions which I have been able to incorporate into the story line. Respondent #50 It's conceptual. I want to play with the format/medium. Interactive fiction promises endless possibilities, but of course, the author can't write endless possibilities. So, how does I deliver on some of that promise, and make a decent plot with decent pacing, etc.? How can I make interesting decisions and game-like elements with just text choices? Respondent #55 I did it. Respondent #57 Provides a venue to possibly obtain some revenues (CoG has hosted games, while these might not make much money, they might be a nice little source of "beer-money"). Probably easier than to publish a traditional book, where the market is over-saturated... and, I loved interactive stories when I was a kid!! Respondent #61 To create a game and story that I would enjoy and hopefully others would enjoy too. Respondent #62 I have always loved which way books from childhood and this just the next stage. Respondent #66 Because I want to make games with a high emphasis on stories, and I am not great at programming or making graphical art.
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Question 4: In your experience, what are the largest or most frequent obstacles you face when writing interactively?
Planning (planning and structuring the story before writing) Technology (operating the computer or using the writing application) Writing (composing and arranging segments pieces of writing) Other (please specify below) Additional comments:
Percentage
0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40% 45%
Percentage Responses Planning (planning and structuring the story 38.24% 26 before writing) Technology (operating the computer or 11.76% 8 using the writing application) Writing (composing and arranging segments 20.59% 14 pieces of writing) Other (please specify below) 2.94% 2 Additional comments: 26.47% 18 Total 100% 68
Respondent Comment Respondent #03 Interactive writing suffers from halting probems: you can't do the writing until you know what kind of mechanical structure it's going to fit into, but it can be hard to design mechanical structure without writing to feed into it. Respondent #05 Planning takes the most time, technology is not a problem so long as the author doesn't scope a project outside their ability, and the writing comes easy if the planning and technology are sound. Respondent #12 Scope, as with any game. It's very easy to commit yourself to doing more work than you possibly have time to do. Respondent #20 Oddly enough, coming up with a story with sufficient scope to allow me to give the player choice. Respondent #22 I'm bad at writing code.
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Respondent #25 Unlike with traditional writing, interactive fiction often requires the segments that you write to be "modular", almost. they have to match in tone and transition as seamlessly as possible, so that the reader doesn't notice the difference between a fixed piece and a variety of variable pieces following it. Respondent #31 Jumping from sub-storyline to sub-storyline can be very disorienting and immersion breaking, which slows the writing process down by a lot compared to traditional fiction. Respondent #35 Mapping out all the possible inputs from the user (in a non-CYOA sort of game) and covering all the bases with reasonable responses is a mind- altering endeavor. Respondent #38 It's the same as any other sort of writing, it's really easy to procrastinate. Respondent #40 Time. For a traditional hundred-thousand word book, you write a hundred thousand words, edit, and you're done. For interactive fiction, I tend to have about 10 percent of my words and code actually in use on any single play-through (and 10 seems to be extreme; many people vary between 10 and 50 percent of words visible when using choicescript). So, if I want to write a 50,000 word interactive novella, I'm potentially looking at 500,000 words of story and code. Then there's the time to bug test, to beta test and make sure the game play works, and that the coding hasn't created any typography errors. Then the copy editor gets to look at a huge amount of pages broken into pieces, not a nice, normal, chronological piece of fiction, so that takes time and intense concentration too. Respondent #41 'Other' - allowing the player the opportunity to make significant choices that affect the flow of the story, while also sufficiently reining in the story so as to make it a realistically achievable length. Respondent #43 Finding time to write complete segments. It takes a lot longer to write than traditional stories. Respondent #45 Personally, consistency editing. Making sure I haven't crossed wires in my coding somewhere which has, as a random example, it start as Tuesday, and then the next day it's Thursday, because a choice you didn't make takes you through Wednesday. It gets difficult to keep track of all the variables after a while, and slip-ups happen. Respondent #47 If you let it, the story will easily grow exponentially, and the hardest thing is to figure out, what to cut off. Respondent #49 [NOTE: I wanted to select "writing" but when I started this comment the selection jumped to "additional comments". A problem with the survey layout, I think.] The problem I meet most often is having to work up the energy to write multiple branches of essentially the same scene in order to accommodate player choices. However, I feel like the actual writing is increasing my ability to write the same situation from many points of view. Respondent #57 Structuring can be difficult in an interactive game, also, motivation to finish stories can be difficult (starting tends to be easy...) Respondent #62 Finding time to write as I am on the road four weeks at a time. Respondent #66 (Other) Quality Assurance: testing and verifying programming, writing, and flow.
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Question 5: How have you navigated these obstacles in the past?
I give up or start a new story if I encounter too many writing obstacles I keep trying different solutions until I find one that solves the writing obstacles I face I have a few strategies for managing writing obstacles I have many strategies and methods for managing writing obstacles
Percentage
0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40% 45%
Percentage Responses I give up or start a new story if I encounter 22.06% 15 too many writing obstacles I keep trying different solutions until I find 39.71% 27 one that solves the writing obstacles I face I have a few strategies for managing writing 30.88% 21 obstacles I have many strategies and methods for 7.35% 5 managing writing obstacles Total 100% 68
Respondent Comment Respondent #05 I have 6-10 projects in mind at all times, and I think of it as a multi- burner stove where the boiling hot projects are toward the front and other projects in different phases are "simmering" in the back. I may work on some or many of these simultaneously depending on my enthusiasm and other factors. Respondent #07 The most usual kind of obstacle is you have an effect in mind but it's difficult to program so you either find a solution or you try doing something that is similar enough to your original vision. Respondent #12 Figuring out how to manage project scope against available time and resources is a key game development discipline, referred to as production within the industry. Respondent #19 When I don't finish a story, it's usually moreo of a conventional writing problem like not knowing what the hell happens next.
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Respondent #24 Usually I keep a notebook and I plan very vaguely such as a very short description of the scene. I have also tried looking for programs. Respondent #30 I either keep reworking the story, ask for input from online forums, or worst case, leave the book alone for a while and look at it with fresh eyes even months later if needed. Respondent #31 I mainly just muscle through it and go back later to rewrite it if the result is unsatisfying. Respondent #34 My issues are often less with the writing itself and more the writing of something that is concise and focused, and which fits the particular scene. When I encounter issues, the solution is often a slight restructuring of a scene. Respondent #38 I pretty much use the same strategies I learned in school for academic and legal writing. Respondent #40 Since time is my biggest challenge, I've worked to find a time of day when I'm least likely to be interrupted, and I try to plot or jot down notes about characters and mechanics whenever I have to sit around and wait for something, or stand in a queue, or that sort of thing. I'm a widow with two elementary children whom I teach at home, so time management has been one of my biggest factors. I also find having a handful of people willing to listen to me babble about my story encourages me to keep going at a good pace, and also helps me if I get stuck on a part of the story or on a character. Respondent #41 In practice, as I tend to be writing for the requirements of a publisher, a lot of it comes down to the publisher's style. Choice of Games has a very specific strategy as to how they like to present choices (very balanced, no 'wrong' answer). The gamebook I'm currently working on has a much more practical approach - obstacles need to be overcome, quests need to be achieved. If interactive fiction is a sub-genre, I adapt to the specific sub-sub-genre. Respondent #45 Having the story open on the forums for people to play, and report any bugs they run into, is vastly helpful. Choicescript also has a built-in quicktest and randomtest functions, which can detect coding that would crash the story, reporting in brief what is wrong and on which line. I also play through the game myself before updates to check for anything amiss, though because of the number of parallels, I do miss things. It helps considerably, though. Respondent #46 I'm an autodidact, I figure things out as I go and let my curiosity and needs direction my attention. Add a severe case of ADHD you can be guaranteed my focus is not an easy thing to keep. But when I come up to a problem, I come at it from every angle I can. PHYSICAL notes, and memory tricks are by far my favorite methods. Word association combined with music. Say I've a scene I can't get to immediately, I find a 'song' that captures that moment and listen to it while thinking the scene through and write it down in my notes. So instead of writing a page of details I have a 'Scene: Song' and boom I can recall where I was going, better than a bookmark. Respondent #47 Usually I just write a little, and the imagine where the part is going and if I'm not completely satisfied, I cut it off. Respondent #49 I have been writing for over 40 years, mainly as a playwright. I have many strategies I can put into play when I find myself reluctant to write
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the alternate paths in a scene. For instance, I identify the most unlikely/outrageous path and write that one next. I then see whether I need all the other paths between the main one and the unlikely one, and eliminate paths I don't actually need. Respondent #51 I have several works going at once and take a break from the difficult ones to work on something else. Respondent #57 Mmmm... this question might not be so well formulated, to be honest its a combination of the above and many others, you might want to be careful with conclusions you derive from this. Respondent #60 I'm managing many stories at once since I find switching to something else helps me change my perspective when I approach it again. Respondent #66 I set aside time as "work time" so I either have to be working, or I have to be cleaning, but I have to be doing something productive. Either way, I get stuff done. Respondent #67 A lot of google-ing and reading guides.
Question 6: How do you go about writing an interactive story?
I just start writing and figure it out as I go I plan ahead and implement that plan as I go I research other interactive stories and try to replicate what they have done I read about what other interactive writers have done and try to do that Additional comments:
Percentage
0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40% 45%
Percentage Responses I just start writing and figure it out as I go 30.88% 21 I plan ahead and implement that plan as I go 39.71% 27
I research other interactive stories and try to 0% 0 replicate what they have done I read about what other interactive writers 0% 0 have done and try to do that Additional comments: 29.41% 20
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Total 100% 68
Respondent Comment Respondent #02 I have a story plan, a game bible and some random ideas and I program them as they should look. Respondent #05 I do a mix, sometimes I will invent some interaction without an idea in mind, or a half-formed idea. Sometimes the novelty of tinkering with your own props and scenery can assist the story assembling in mind. I try to plan an ending so I have a goal to shoot for. Respondent #10 I sketch out and program a story wwith a barebones beginning, middle, and finish, then flesh it out. Respondent #11 I do a combination of all of these. I will usually try to research what others have done first, then do some planning on paper, but inevitably end up flying by the seat of my pants anyway. Respondent #20 A mix of all of these. Usually I start because I have an idea or I played something which I want to replicate. I tend to plunge headlong, see how it goes, then plan from there. Respondent #22 Depends on the story. Knowing what other designers have done code- wise in the past is useful in the same way that learning grammar is useful. You need to know what tools are available. But when it comes to creative content, that can develop any number of ways. Respondent #30 I usually have a bit of a plan, but due to the branching nature, often I'll start writing and just see how it goes. If it looks better, I'll change the plan around it. Respondent #31 A bit of planning, a bit of just jumping right in. I start with a basic outline, but only decide on the chapter to chapter details as I get to it. Respondent #35 I usually have an overall idea of how I want the story to go, but as with traditional writing, I often discover the best parts of what it will be while I'm writing it - or while it's writing itself. (Note: I had chosen the first option here, but when I tried to add additional comments, it lost that selection. You might want to fix this question and the one after to not have "Additional comments" be a choice, the way the first questions are.) Respondent #38 I use a very loose outline and then just figure it out as I go. One of the great things about writing a project like this is it's always easy to go back and change things. Respondent #40 I write up the plot first, but I often find myself changing details or deviating from the original plan frequently, particularly depending on the type of work I'm writing. My science fiction stayed much closer to the original plan than my fantasy-humour has. Respondent #45 I just start writing and figure it out as I go, but I have a plan for certain things I want to happen in the story, and although I 'wing it' while writing, I know which direction(s) I want the story to go. Sometimes things surprise me and I need to improvise, but I could express the structure I have as: Improvise to planned part, planned ahead part, improvise to next planned part, planned ahead part, ect. Respondent #49 [Survey layout issue, as mentioned above] I start with an idea and a character. I then spend several weeks creating a mind map to capture scene ideas, characters in the story, story branches, and snippets of writing. For a historical story I do some targeted research, without letting
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mere facts get in the way of a ripping yarn. Respondent #53 I try to plan ahead, but there are always more options than I originally think of. When I write before I code, I always end up writing more when I code, because I think like a player and wonder "why shouldn't I be able to choose something else?" Respondent #55 All of the above. I usually do trial and error when working on the interactive, technology bits, but the story itself is planned and outlined. Respondent #58 I plan ahead by making a few spreadshets, though a lot of content is made on the spot because of how more options show up as you develop the scene. Respondent #60 I chose the option to plan and implement later. A decent outline of the main story and branching paths goes a long way in writing complicated IF. Going in blindly leads you to fall into a rut when things get to complex. Respondent #62 I start a story then when it gets complex stop to plan the and track the project. Respondent #64 As with all writing, I start with a plan and very soon deviate from it. It's all in the editing! Respondent #66 "I plan ahead and implement that plan as I go" I spend a large amount of time on research, character creation, plot diagramming before I even write the first word.
Question 7: How useful would you find a set of strategies for aspiring writers such as yourself?
Not very useful Useful Extremely useful Additional comments:
Percentage
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%
Percentage Responses Not very useful 8.82% 6
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Useful 51.47% 35 Extremely useful 20.59% 14 Additional comments: 19.12% 13 Total 100% 68
Respondent Comment Respondent #03 I have been doing this for long enough that most advice is going to fall under 'yes, I know about that and already use it,' or 'yes, I know about that and it really isn't for me'. At this point most solutions are going to be so closely crafted to my own quirks that generalising them is probably not going to help much. Respondent #12 I might find them interesting, but unless they go beyond my existing training and experience (which seems unlikely - I was a producer at an AAA studio) they probably wouldn't be useful per se. Respondent #21 Not vey useful. With the exception of technological stuff (such as "How do I code in a pop-up?) I learn predominantly by reading - the same as I do for novel-writing. Respondent #22 Tips on learning how to use an authoring system are useful. Creative writing strategies... not so much. Reading lots of interactive fiction is the best lesson anyone can have. Respondent #31 Useful for people who are just beginning to write interactive fiction, because it makes it easier to get going, but for everyone else not so much. If you've spent some time writing interactive fiction you develop your own strategies based on what works for you personally. Respondent #40 Extremely useful - I don't think I would accomplish much without the strategies I use to make things work when I'm having difficulties. Respondent #46 Its hard to say, I've a Mercurial nature things change. Take in as much knowledge as you can discard what is useful discard what is not. Though the most useful thing ANYONE can do if making the attempt is to keep 'notes' something quick easy and within reach. Simplicity, not everyone can figure out how something works by watching it. Respondent #47 This depends much on a person doing the writing, I am the kind of person who goes through the most likely topics of conversations, in his head, before even the first word has been said. But a more impulsive person might not get anything out of set strategies or such. Respondent #49 I have run into the concept of looking at a project through a set of lenses, and I enjoy that. I look at the story line through the lens of the writer, of the marketer who has to sell it, of a male or a female player, of a person who "hates games", of a person who "hates reading". The lens strategy sometimes helps me identify places where the project is misshapen or displeasing. Respondent #50 Useful? It would depend on the proposed set of strategies, of course. I'm always willing to listen to advice from experienced writers. Respondent #55 It's useful, but most writers need randomly freedom and let that freedom bleed into random creativity. Others are more scatterbrained and need structure and strategies in order to not bounce around. It all depends on the person. Respondent #62 Each writer is different, I would not find them all that useful but the next writter might.
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Appendix 3: Interview with Emily Short
The role of the writer (5 Questions)
1. What do you believe is the role of the creative writer in interactive narratives?
Doubtless you’ll get a different answer from other people, but my role at least tends to be fairly inclusive: not just coming up with a plot and text but also thinking through the entire underlying systemic model that is going to support that narrative. But that’s partly because I don’t really believe that the system and the text are separable.
2. Does your writing process (in terms of the composition of sentences and paragraphs) differ when you are writing interactive stories? If so, how does it change?
This really depends strongly on what model I’m writing for. I think my composition style is pretty similar if I’m writing a largely choice-based narrative with a minimal underlying model. If I’m writing something with generative text, though, I need to put a lot of thought into making sure that the elements that might show up together will in fact work properly when they do so, and that becomes a rather different experience.
3. What are the largest or most frequent obstacles you face when writing interactively?
Friction in content creation is a big one. A lot of the more procedural work I do requires a large amount of content, and sometimes that content needs to be heavily annotated or encoded. This is time-consuming, and once I’ve encoded something it becomes ossified, because I rarely want to revise something that has already had a lot of tags or markup applied to it. Meanwhile, I think being able to revise frequently and extensively is an important part of my process as a writer.
Another challenge is detecting errors. Again, this comes up more for highly procedural work, but it’s easy to build a system in which there are unintended block states in the code or where the routes through a story are not very well balanced for some reason. Having effective ways of visualizing the world state and the data I’m using is really important; it spares a lot of beta- testing or QA time and allows me to be much more efficient.
4. How do you overcome these obstacles?
Write (or get someone else to write) additional tools — preprocessors to convert human- readable scripts into code, visualizers to let me see the state of play more clearly.
If you’re interested in a specific case study here, the bottom article at http://versu.com/about/how-versu-works/ talks about the motivation and design consideration around one of these tools.
5. What would you classify as a successful interactive narrative?
Erm. Are you looking for a list? There are far more than I can write here, but https://emshort.wordpress.com/category/game-lists/ contains some lists of pieces in specific categories that I think work well.
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Agency (10 Questions)
1. Janet Murray defines agency as “the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices”. How would you classify ‘meaningful action’?
It’s a bit of a hazy phrase, isn’t it? I’m not sure what Murray means here without going back to look at the original text, and I myself wouldn’t use the phrase “meaningful action”, so let’s instead have a go at breaking up the agency discussion into some usable components.
First there’s a question of how the player *experiences* agency. What makes them feel that they are doing something in the story? Here I most often think about this in terms of intention and perceivable consequence (a distinction that hardly originates with me, but I find it useful). Perceivable consequence is the “see the results of our decisions and choices” part of that equation: are there things that happen either immediately or later on in the story that reflect what we just did? Intention, meanwhile, has to do with whether the player is able to formulate some idea about her actions in a game and pursue a course of action with a particular goal in mind.
Then there’s the question of what the player is supposed to be controlling via this agency. I also think Stacy Mason’s distinction of affect vs. diegetic agency is very useful here. Affect refers to the player/reader’s ability to make small decisions with predictable effects (e.g., swinging a sword to cause damage to a game-world object), while diegetic agency refers to the player’s ability to do things that will change the course of the story (swinging a sword to kill the king to advance a palace coup).
The interesting and complicating part is how those various things work together and what requirements they create for the underlying model of a story or game. But I’ve written a longish article on this, and so maybe it’s easier to point to that than to try to explain further: https://emshort.wordpress.com/2015/05/24/framed-invisible-parties-and-the-world-plot- interface/
This article also talks about something similar to Mason’s “affect”, though it calls the phenomenon “grasp”: https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2014/09/22/a-bestiary-of-player-agency/
The reason I make a point of this is that I think agency is so broadly defined and incorporates so many different issues in interactive narrative that talking about it often causes more confusion than clarity. If we can narrow down what kind of agency we’re referring to, we get a lot closer to being able to talk about the craft and artistic concerns surrounding that element.
2. Why are meaningful decisions necessary?
Regardless of whether we mean “decisions with perceivable consequence” or “decisions with diegetic effect”: they’re not.
I know, I know, iconoclastic. But it is entirely possible to write interesting interactive stories in which the player never gets to make a decision that affects the outcome of the story —
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indeed, where the inability to affect the outcome of the story, and the fact that there’s really not even a prospect of doing so, is part of the point.
“The Writer Will Do Something” is about how in fact the writer cannot do anything. Michael Lutz’s hugely popular horror Twine, “My Father’s Long Long Legs,” does not allow the player to make a choice that alters the story and very often gives no option other than to click forward. My own “First Draft of the Revolution” lets the player change what is written in letters between the characters, but doing so doesn’t alter the outcome of the story; instead it alters the player’s understanding of the characters, and lets the player explore their inner life. Some of Porpentine’s Twine work invites the player to make an aesthetic selection from cycling text macros and then never again uses or refers to the outcome of that selection — but the act of choosing is part of the experience of playing the game, and also familiarizes the player with the range of possibilities in her world space.
I would say that it’s important for the decisions in your story to be doing *something* — whether that’s fostering a sense of futility or focusing the player’s attention on something we want them to pay attention to or functioning as a pacing device or creating complicity with the protagonist or something else beyond that.
But that’s an essentially vacuous observation, like “if you have illustrations they should contribute to the experience” or “the words in your book should be there for a reason”.
In the IF community there’s a bit of a trend towards referring to games without significant branching or player diegetic agency as “dynamic fiction”; of course the reason this has acquired a name is that there are enough such pieces to need one.
3. How important is feedback on these choices?
…I’m not even sure how to answer questions like this. “7”? “Very”? I don’t mean to sound flippant or critical, but this is a simple quantitative question about a large, complicated, and generally qualitative issue.
If you want the player to feel as though they have power or responsibility in the story (not necessarily the same thing), then typically you want to foster that by providing perceivable consequences. If you want the player to act with *intention*, then you need to show them early on, and consistently throughout the story, what systems underlie their choices, by giving them both immediate and longterm feedback.
If you’re asking the player to make a decision simply in order to make sure that the player has given it some thought — what’s known in interactive fiction circles as a reflective choice — then you might not want to give feedback; indeed feedback might seem to invalidate the decision the player has reached on their own.
It’s a very long and not particularly easy game, so you might not want to get into this, but Aaron Reed’s Blue Lacuna is (among other things) about the tension between love and personal life on the one hand, and commitment to work and art on the other. Towards the end of the game in a talk with a major NPC, we’re allowed to take one of several stances about this topic — but Aaron acknowledges that the player might have their own more nuanced view that cannot be slotted into any of the prewritten categories, by allowing the player to
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type something else entirely. The game is not, and cannot be, equipped to respond to any and every philosophical answer typed at this point; but the presence of the invitation matters.
4. Mathematically, the more choices you give a reader, the more work you have to do as a writer.
Again, that’s kind of a simplification of the problem. It’s broadly true, but there are enough exceptions to be worth digging into.
If I write a system that gives the reader affect — a story based on a world model — there is a fixed cost for building that model, but after a while there is a low or minimal marginal cost for additional choices that are supported by said model.
For example: in my linguistic puzzle game Counterfeit Monkey, the player has a device that can change objects into one another by removing letters from the name of the first object. So e.g. if you use your P-removing device on a PEARL, it becomes an EARL. Writing the code for this device took much more time than writing a few choices in a choice-based novel. On the other hand, once I’d done that, adding new behavior to the system required only that I specify new objects in the game world, and the system would then entirely take care of deciding when those objects could be available. Thus I can add a PEAR and an EAR to the game, and the option to create those objects now exists for the player whenever they have the PEARL to start from.
If you mean “the more diegetic choices you give a reader, the more work you have to do”, that’s maybe a bit more true, in the sense that usually each plot branch needs to be hand- tooled. But even here, there are some ways of being clever about how you handle it.
One common approach is to recognize when plot choices are orthogonal in their outcomes and write a system that will build a “what happens next” text out of several component parts, rather than handwriting all of the possible variations. A very recent game that experiments with this in the text space is Map by Ade McTavish: it has a rather extended conclusion montage that shows your relationship to a bunch of different characters, depending on the different choices you made earlier. (If you’re curious, I talk about Map a bit here: https://emshort.wordpress.com/2015/10/09/if-comp-2015-map-ade-mct/ )
Do you think about this during the writing process?
Of course. More precisely, I think about it during the design and spec process. And then if I’ve spec’d ambitiously, I think about it a lot more during the writing process, often in the form “oh god why did I get myself into this."
5. In order to keep this workload manageable, some writers give the reader ‘the illusion of agency’, where they give the reader a choice, with adequate feedback, but which does not inherently affect the narrative progression. What are your thoughts about this method? Have you ever used the illusion of agency?
Sure — as I imagine has almost everyone who has written any significant amount of interactive narrative. And I don’t view this as “cheating”.
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The thing is, the story is not happening inside the computer; the arrangement of state variables is not the story. The story is happening inside the mind of the reader, and even minor, short-term variations can persist as a part of the reader’s memory in a way that inflects the significance of what happens afterwards.
One of my favorite examples of this comes from Margaret Killjoy's CYOA novel What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower ( https://emshort.wordpress.com/2015/02/05/what-lies-beneath-the- clock-tower-margaret-killjoy/ ). There is a passage where the story branches and the player can fall in love with either of two characters. Then the story rejoins, and one of those characters dies while the other survives to console the protagonist about the death. The text of that second passage is the same either way, but its meaning is considerably altered depending on whether it is your lover who dies and your friend who consoles you, or vice versa.
6. Marie-Laure Ryan suggests that interactive narratives should make “interactive moments the rule and passive moments the exception, rather than limiting agency to a few decision points separated by long stretches of passive watching”. What are your thoughts about this?
I think this is a good rule of thumb that can occasionally be broken.
I would say that Ryan’s view is the majority view among people who work on the games side of things, and also among some people invested in the book side of things. If you watch some of Jon Ingold’s talks (linked I think from the inkle studio site?), he talks a lot about pacing in text games and the need for tight exchanges with only a little text between choice points. Choice of Games tends to go for a bit more text, but still in the range of a few paragraphs or a page. And certainly I can think of a lot of pieces whose failure mode was that they went without choices for so long that I found myself sitting back and forgetting that a choice was even possible.
But then I think of cases like the short interactive story Tailypo by Chandler Groover, which just came out a couple of days ago. It’s a horror story in which *almost* all of the action is click-to-continue stuff — so while the reader remains in physical contact with their device, they’re really not experiencing any decision points. The only exception is that the player has an opportunity to decide how to perform a particular action… actually, again, I wrote a whole essay about this, but it’s not available online yet because it’s scheduled to appear on my blog in a few weeks. I’ll attach a copy to the bottom of this email, though. (Sorry if it feels like this is massively more of an answer than you actually want, but I feel like with a lot of these questions the really interesting answers require a lot of detail; “in general, yes” isn’t going to advance our understanding much.)
7. Do you think that more choices equates to more agency?
No.
You can have a lot of choice points but little or no diegetic agency at all; this is effectively the case for a lot of parser IF, where the player has a lot of affect and can make many small decisions, perhaps for thousands of moves in a row, but where the plot progression and ultimate outcome of the story are totally fixed.
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You can also have choice points with a diegetic effect but little or no intentionality. For example, take the case from early CYOA where the player might be asked to pick the left or the right tunnel. One of these leads to success, the other to death (or perhaps to some totally different unrelated success), but there’s no evidence prior to making that choice where you’re going to wind up.
8. How much do you think about reader agency during the writing process?
The core question at the beginning of any design session is “what does the player do in this story, and how does that fit into its themes and artistic aims?” This may in fact mean that they’re not going to get much or any diegetic agency, or that the design is not going to be built to permit intentionality.
9. Are there any techniques or strategies that you use to increase agency within a story?
Build a systematic mechanic that focuses on the main way that the protagonist is going to interact with her world. Work out how the player will use that mechanic to make the major diegetic decisions in the narrative, and possibly also some challenges to overcome with it, or some exploration that can be done using this mechanic. Teach the mechanic from the beginning of the game, systematically. Provide consistent immediate consequences for the application of the mechanic so that it is as systematic as possible. Be willing to incorporate UI elements to communicate important world state if need be. Marry affect and diegetic agency as much as possible.
10. How do you measure the level of agency in a story?
I don’t have a way of constructing a quantitative metric around this. I know some people do so, but I’m much more interested in qualitative aspects: am I offering the reader the opportunity to plan and direct how things go, and is that the experience I want them to have?
Engagement (4 Questions)
1. How important is engagement in interactive writing?
I’d say it’s as important as in any medium, which is to say that you need the audience to be engaged if you don’t want them to just wander off. Occasionally you can keep an unengaged audience around — if you’re paying them, if they’re in a classroom, or if you’ve cunningly locked all the doors — but almost everyone who lives in the modern world and has contact with interactive narratives in the first place has countless other contenders for their attention all the time.
I would add two things, though. One: I think that engagement can be easier to foster in interactive writing than in static fiction writing because you’re constantly checking in with the reader, and that tends to keep them alert and focused on what you’re saying to them; I think especially younger people brought up in a multitasking internet kind of environment actually find it easier to stay tuned in to an interactive story. (Don’t worry, this is not going to turn into a moralistic rant about the attention spans of millennials or something — I think it there’s been a technological and cultural shift with neurological effects, and I actually consider it an encouraging fact that apparently our brains are so plastic that we can adapt to this kind of change almost overnight.)
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But then also two: there’s also the issue of friction. If the interaction you’re asking for is repetitive or demanding in some way, this may use up the player’s energy and send them away when they might otherwise have stuck with the story. I have certainly quit games when I otherwise would have liked to know more about the story because the short term interaction experience was so boring or laborious. Maybe a test example (though a case where I actually did stick around to the end) is Tale of Tales’ “The Path”, where various visionary and creepy things happen in vignettes in the woods, but only after you have spent extended periods of real time walking from one location to another.
2. How do you define engagement?
Is the audience paying attention? Are they interested in what’s going on? Do they feel like this is a good use of their time, or are they getting bored and considering checking their phone/having a coffee/reading a novel instead?
3. Are there any techniques or tricks that you use to increase engagement?
Barring some other reason not to do these things: a tight interaction loop, juice (https://emshort.wordpress.com/2008/05/24/make-it-juicy/), humor, suspense. Sometimes other things, depending on circumstance.
4. How do you test for engagement?
Does the player quit, or go away from the game to do something else even if they come back later? Or, if they’re a play tester: when do they get bored? Are there points when they want to stop playing? If it’s an in-person play test where I can watch their body language, are they leaning into the game or leaning back?
If you’re asking “how do you design a game that will systematically detect whether the player is engaged and do something to compensate”, that’s harder and likely to be quite specific to a given game type.
One thing I’ve done in some of my more ambitious games is to include a drama manager that notices if too long has passed without a dramatic event or without the player making progress in the story, and have it trigger a small anecdotal scene that moves the story along or gives some hints.
Another approach with parser based IF is to watch for the frequency of “floundering” commands, things like LOOK or INVENTORY that the player tends to type in order to gain more information about the situation when they are not sure what to do next. To the best of my knowledge, though, there hasn’t been any very extensive research either into identifying those points or into building a system within parser IF to respond to their presence. And of course in another kind of game, a totally different approach would be needed.
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Appendix 4: Interview with Emily Craven
Ben Carey: What do you believe is the role of the creative writer in interactive narratives?
Emily Craven: I think that in interactive narratives the writer is the driver of the narrative. For me. So they are driving the plot…In part they are driving the characterization, but not entirely. Um. And they are driving the choice mechanism. And the reason why I say they don’t entirely drive the characterisation is because a lot characterisation, particularly with the stuff that I do with Story City, is driven by the voiceover narrator and the artwork.
BC: So it’s a multimodal experience?
EC: Yeah, exactly. So while it’s very strongly plot driven, it only partially drives characterisation. And it also drives the chance. Sorry, the choices I should say.
BC: Does your writing process (in terms of the composition of sentences and paragraphs) differ when you are writing interactive stories? If so, how does it change?
EC: Definitely. So, when I am writing interactively I am incorporating a ‘you’ into things, rather than a character that is in my head. So rather than it being and ‘I’ or a ‘we’ or a ‘she’ or a ‘he’, it is a ‘you’. And as a result of that I want to be careful that I do not project who I am onto the person who is doing the game, or taking a part in that narrative. Because who I am could be very vastly different from who that person is, and not just in race, but in terms of how they view the world, what age they are, and to some extent, even their vocabulary. So when I write interactive narrative I try as hard as possible not to put the words in the mouth of the person.
BC: So you want it to apply to as many people as possible?
EC: I want it to be broad. And I think that’s the reason why, so far, I haven’t done any romance related storylines where the person who is in the story is part of the romance. Because, in that you are making assumptions that people…about what genders they like, about their sexual orientation, etcetera, etcetera. And I think that interactive fiction should be inclusive, rather than excluding people, because there is enough fiction and games out there that excludes people because they have always been the minority within storytelling.
BC: I think that is a fascinating subset of research that could happen. That inclusiveness of interactive fiction.
EC: Yeah, definitely. And I mean…even when you are looking at video games and stuff, you are playing that protagonist, and usually it is a white protagonist, and a white male protagonist. So yeah, I want it to be that no matter what gender you are, no matter what age you are, no matter what race you are. And so it was very interesting because when we were doing…so there is a story we are going to be putting out in the Gold Coast. And the guy who wrote it…the idea is, he wanted to tell stories about the Gold Coast in the 1950s. And I said, that’s great; however, you cannot assume someone is just in the 1950s at the time, because it has been too built up. And so I said what you need is you need some sort of time travel aspect of it, and I said but I want you to try really hard not to physically describe…I said what I think would work would be if you time travelled back in time and the idea was that you were
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bringing your grandparents together. You were the one that brought them together. What I would like you to do is make it as gender neutral as possible, so anybody could be like, ‘I’m going back in time to get my grandparents together.’
BC: What I find interesting is that it seems that for the reader interactive fiction can be a lot more inclusive, and yet that introduces a lot of problems for the writer to make that…because when you think about making something inclusive, you don’t think that that would inherently be problematic, but it seems like a lot of these things where you have to change or remove genders makes it a difficult process.
EC: And it’s very specific word choices as well. I remember in the first year that I ran Street Reads we asked people for feedback, and one of the general punters said, ‘I felt like in this story I was meant to be a man, because I would never rugby tackle someone…as a woman.’ Which was interesting, because, to me, my sister had played a lot of rugby and like touch footy in high school…and so it’s another, you can’t cover every cultural thing. But the one thing that I haven’t been able to deal with is actually mobility disability. Because what you can do is set the paths up so that everything is accessible by wheelchair or whatever, but you cannot…if it is an adventure you are saying ‘walking over here’ or ‘you run’ or ‘you hurry’ or whatever, and that immediately…
BC: Yeah, you lose them.
EC: Yep. So…I have yet to be able to do it so that it is completely inclusive.
BC: So this links a little bit to the last question, but what –
EC: Sorry, I just wanted to add in there. When I write a normal narrative, I have a character already fully formed in my head. Whereas when you are doing interactive narrative you can have characters fully formed in your head, but you basically want to make it general enough so that…you are being a person without being a person. So you’re almost presenting a blank canvas. Which is odd, because normally when you present a blank canvas in a story people are like, well you didn’t try hard enough to describe their different motivations and stuff like that.
BC: So it’s all about accepting and appreciating that reader contribution.
EC: Exactly.
BC: So what are the largest or most frequent obstacles you face while writing interactively?
EC: So again, one is that gender, race, age neutral, which is a very large obstacle. The other obstacle is making the choices between branching narratives motivation based, rather than location based. And it’s something that I see time and time again where people will be like ‘do you do this thing or do you do this thing?’ without providing appropriate motivations for why you would pick one thing over the other. Because people do not feel involved if they just have to pick something without being given a reason for it. And so in interactive narrative you want to involve people as much as possible and to do that you need to make the potential motivations clear. So you might give one or two potential reasons why this is a good idea and one or two potential reasons why it’s not. And you have to make those equally appealing, because you know where each of those branches is going, but you can very easily, while
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writing that, have that knowledge seep through so that your motivations are unequal. Because you know that it would be more exciting or pleasing to go down this particular path so you would just unconsciously make that path more enticing without thinking about the motivations as to why…so that’s what I’ve found really difficult with branching narratives in particular.
BC: I think that strong characterisation, and when you’re invested in a character and their wellbeing, it makes the decisions so much more important. Have you played The Walking Dead Telltale games or Life is Strange?
EC: No.
BC: Oh, you’ve got to check out Life is Strange, it’s great. It’s very character heavy and there are many decision points. It’s very branching narrative. So everything you do has consequences, so there’s a section where you get to her bedroom and you’re just looking around and it’s fun. You just construct the narrative out of things you find sometimes. And you water the plant and it goes ‘this action will have consequences’ and it’s like ‘what are you talking about?’ and you start freaking out. Anyway, it’s a really cool game to check out.
EC: And there’s two different ways that you can go about it right. So I prefer to make both motivations equally appealing. Like how do you choose? Because it’s like life, you know? In life you’re like, there are motivations to go both ways, how do I pick? I could get it wrong, but both of these seem like equally good options. The other way you could do it is you could appeal to personalities, right. So one way is a much more community-focused way for example and the other way is a much more ‘destroy the earth’ kind of way. And so you could potentially present a thing where people are attempting to be the hero or people are revelling in the fact that they can be an anti-hero.
BC: Yeah, because they are empowered through this narrative. It’s not real –
EC: Yeah, it’s not real so they can try out the bad shit, without the consequences.
EC: So you could go that way, but I prefer not to do it that way. I prefer to make it like life where it is a potentially ambiguous choice, and you don’t know which is going to end up bad or good. If there is one that is very clear like I am bad, you would go into it like full…like you know in shoot ‘em games, where you’re just going for it. And in the hero games you’re being the, you know. Whereas if you don’t know where that’s going to end up… a slight change in consequence can actually mean that you have done a bad thing. It’s a much more involving and learning and brain-changing experience for them to not get a sense of where that goes.
EC: That’s how you can make change in people. Is by getting them involved to the point where they are like ‘shit, how did I not even think that through?’
BC: So with that in mind, do you have any methods or strategies in place for overcoming obstacles? So like you identify that those are problems, do you have stuff in place that you kind of know what to do when that comes up?
EC: Ah, it’s all mainly like editing checks. So if you think about it, I kind of have a mental editing checklist where you will go through and you will look at the word choice that is being
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used and you will be like, wait, in terms of word choice have I only been using word choice as such to characterise other people in the narrative? Or is that word choice being used in the narration? Which would be problematic. Going back and checking the motivations…and a lot of the time I will actually run the story by other people and be like, ‘which one would you choose and why?’ And if the majority go down one path, I will attempt to make it so that it splits people evenly….In terms of those sorts of things. The other is that I will pre-plan out a story, like draw my little boxes and do branching bits and pieces so that I can make sure that I can mitigate the need to tell them to run between locations, or where…anything in the surroundings might indicate that you are taller than you are or shorter than you are, you know, that sort of thing. So I will pre-plan that out so I can sort of take a look at it and go, ‘okay, have I made sure that I’ve got an equal mix of wins, losses, partial wins, etcetera. And if I have that equal balance, I know that it’s going to filter up. I kind of like start at the end and know that it will filter up to be more reasonable at the start.
BC: So that visual mapping process is very important?
EC: Yes, very.
BC: Okay, just before we go on, I just have one question about the previous area. In terms of obstacles and stuff like that, do you ever find working with the actual narrative engine is a problem? So the program and finding that frustrating implementing the actual writing into the program.
EC: Into the app?
BC: Yeah.
EC: Yes. And I’ve slowly been learning…So for example, setting things up in the backend, the location specifically. So you have the locations…and then realising that two locations, like a location where you are and a choice where you are are too close together. Or they may be far enough apart, but it turns out that to cross that intersection you actually have to go closer to another choice and you will accidentally trigger it on your way to the choice where you actually want to go. Those are the massive problems that I’ve been coming across, because you’re like, shit, you’ve either got to direct them to take a route that is indirect and hope that they follow it, or you’re going to have to play around with the geo-fences, and move locations so that it will work properly.
BC: Is this a problem that you’ve faced for quite some time?
EC: No. I only just came across it since the app has been born. Because when we used to use QR codes nothing accidentally triggered, because you had to physically scan the codes when you got there. Whereas now it is a matter of, particularly when loading the old stories in, because when you loaded the old stories in it would be like…it reliably works with a 50 metre geo-fence, anything smaller than that you’re kind of playing with fire. And so when I loaded the old stories in it, that had already been written, that couldn’t be changed, and then going, ‘oh, shit.’ And so now I have to build that into the process so that the narrative fits the technology, because if it doesn’t then you almost remove the choice by accidentally triggering another location.
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BC: Do you think that advances in technology is going to bring that range down in the near future?
EC: Yeah, but it will be hardware, not software. So the reason why you set it at 50 metres is because each phone has its own GPS accuracy range. SO the iPhone 3 in comparison to the iPhone 4 in comparison to the iPhone 5 have varying qualities of GPS in them, and have not necessarily improved, you know, because it’s about casing and all sorts of shit. Same with the Android phones…Android phones can be fucking anything, you know? Sony, Samsung, whatever. So depending on how important GPS is will depend on how big or accurate they make them.
BC: And you have to accommodate for the lowest common denominator as well.
EC: Exactly. But also you have to accommodate for the fact that there might be tall building in an area. So in the city they have massively tall buildings and that blocks GPS signal, no matter how good the GPS signal in your phone is. So even considering locations, and being like what could block satellites and towers? And how narrow does that make that field of view.
BC: So there’s a lot of play testing that has to go into it before it’s anywhere near ready?
EC: Yep.
EC: Which sometimes, what that mean is that you write the story and set people to narrate it and go off and do the music and stuff like that and then basically you’ll have to go put it into the system, test it and if anything’s wrong you have to go back to the authors and be like, ‘I need you to change this, this, and this.’
BC: What would you classify as a successful interactive narrative?
EC: One in which people make it to the end. Because, particularly with something where you are making people walk around…people will follow novelty only so far before they stop. A successful narrative is one in which people, at the end, will want to share it by creating something that is a part of it. Not just like share it, as in ‘this was fun, you should go do it’, word of mouth review or whatever. I’m talking like they want to create something that goes with it so they will take a snap of themselves acting it out or they will do a fan poster or they will finish a poem that is left unfinished at the end; those sorts of things where they are compelled to interactively make their own contribution.
BC: Do you encourage your authors, and do you, yourself, try and incorporate a lot of different things like that?
EC: Yeah, encourage people to take photographs, to…at the moment it’s mainly encouraging people to solve puzzles or create photographs or something like that, which they then post on social media. What I would eventually like to build into the app, which is not built in at the moment, is people’s ability to submit things, whether it be an ending or whatever, that could be incorporated or showcased on a website. But that’s not built into the app yet, so that limits creativity to sort of…telling people to try out these, I call them bonus activities, can you do this or this or that? Sometimes, like some of the more recent stories, we will actually get them to do something, and then when they’ve done it they have to press a button to say that they’ve
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done it, to bring up the next part of the content. Almost like giving people a pause, so that they have time to do something. Because that’s what I think a lot of the problem can be is that if you’re…if don’t add it as a bonus activity at the end or at the start, if it happens somewhere in the middle of the narrative you’ve got to give people the ability to be able to pause that narrative and take part in that activity, and then continue. Because if you don’t give them that pause space and you just keep ‘blah blah blahing’ on you lose them.
EC: At the moment the app is, because it runs off a streaming type of trigger, you can’t pause it. So as soon as you press stop, it reverts back to the start. To pause it would mean that you would have to use a different mechanism to deliver the audio, which would mean that it would take longer to load, because you have to cache it, which means that people could be standing there for a couple of minutes while this thing’s loading, depending on their bloody internet data. And that makes people impatient, and think that the app is broken.
BC: And so then it goes back to the difficulties with the, I want to call it the narrative engine, the software or whatever. There seems to be a lot around that. Like you want to tell this story but there’s so many things that get in the way of doing that easily.
EC: You need to make it easier, yeah. And you might as well see that as an opportunity to make them further interact by pressing a button…so that they’re done.
BC: Janet Murray defines agency as “the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices”. How would you classify ‘meaningful action’?
EC: It is an action which irretrievably changes the result. So you have quite a lot of video games that may branch out, but you still end up in the same place at the end. That is not agency. That is giving people the option to experience many different stories, but ultimately their choices make no difference. So a narrative where someone truly has agency is one in which the ending’s changed and you cannot go back. If you wanted to go back, you would have to do the whole thing again. Like life.
EC: Not only does it change the ending but it also changes the potential happiness of the ending as well. True agency entertains the idea that you can fail. Where a lot of games are about winning, and if you fail you just get brought back to life. And you’re taught that failing is bad. Whereas true agency means that you could fail, you could win, you could partially fail. And in those different cases it may not mean what you think it means, because if you win in a particular goal, but it turns out that that goal actually ended up helping somebody who was evil...
EC: So true agency allows for those changes…for that ending to be different.
BC: How important is feedback on the choices that the reader or the player makes?
EC: What do you mean by feedback?
BC: Feedback on the actual action itself. To make the player or the reader think that what they’ve done makes a difference.
EC: Could you give me an example?
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BC: I kind of come across it when you talk about the illusion of agency, which you’ve already mentioned, where you’ll give them choices and it can still proceed along the same path no matter what choice they make. The feedback that I am referring to is like ‘you pick up the axe and swing it at the Viking’ or whatever. And then it’s like, what level of feedback are you providing them with? For me, a lack of feedback would be ‘you kill the Viking’. You know? Because then it doesn’t matter whether they picked up the axe or the bow or the sword. Whereas if you provide a level of feedback where it’s like you’re acknowledging the decision they’ve made so ‘you picked up the axe.’ Obviously this is a very basic example. But the stuff that I’ve come across is that when you provide more feedback on their actions and you acknowledge their part in the narrative in that way it will be more engaging for them. Does that explain a little bit more what I mean by feedback?
EC: Yes.
EC: I don’t necessarily acknowledge feedback in my writing. It’s not that I directly say ‘Viking was beheaded’ or ‘Viking had a blossoming rose of blood in the chest.’ It’s more…the feedback is less story-based and more location-based. So, you have moved to a completely different location. So that immediately tells you that your choice has been different. If you then follow that on by lying within the story and then not replicating the fact that the story is different, then readers can feel cheated. Whereas being in location automatically means you’re filtering in the features of that location: the atmosphere of that location, the visuals of that location. Which provides visual or audio feedback, I suppose. But that is not necessarily acknowledged within the narrative, but more within the sensory. So I’m allowing sensory things to talk for the choice change, rather than the narrative…because obviously there are different actions within the narrative. Like different plot points and different character actions and things like that. But I think that in terms of feedback it is in a much more sectional nature.
BC: Yeah. And I guess in your experience, with locative literature, when you’re trying to be inclusive you might not explicitly mention all of the actions and stuff like that. It’s not as…
EC: Not as important.
BC: Because what matters is how they get to that next point?
EC: Yep. Exactly.
BC: Okay. So maybe that doesn’t apply as much to locative literature.
BC: The more choices you give a reader, the more work you have to do as a writer–
EC: Yes! Indeed.
BC: Do you think about this during the writing process, and I guess going back to the obstacles kind of thing, how do you mitigate that?
EC: There are a lot of themes that you will find that emerge. So in a book themes will emerge and you can, in a branching narrative, separate those themes into different streams. And so it’s similar to a book where you kind of have to write the whole thing to figure out where those streams could potentially merge. And then from there you can be like ‘well
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actually, that choice over there, one of the potential responses to that could be this one that is one a different branch. Because they have very similar themes in where you are headed. So you can link those together and then eliminate the need for another ending. And then what you would have to do is that in the next one, the next one has to be able to encompass the fact that people have come from different points to get to that point. Which, depending on how specific you have been, about referencing previous locations…And it also depends as well whether something has been a deviation. So you might have the main stories where…So take for example this one on the Gold Coast where you are trying to get your grandparents together so that you are born. In one stream you can choose to follow your grandma and separate her from the man she seems to have become very attached to. Or in another stream you can follow your grandpa and try and give him the courage after a humiliating defeat to go and hit up your grandma. So there’s those two main streams in there, but then there is this other stream where you go to a hypnotist’s show and accidently get hypnotised into thinking you are a bush turkey. And so that goes off on its own random branch, but when you wake up, you know, someone clicks their fingers or you go into the water and you are doused and wake up from the hypnotist’s dream. And you realise that you’ve fucked things up through this deviation. Then you can go back into the streams of finding grandma, finding grandpa.
BC: So do you go back to the beginning of those streams or do you –
EC: No. You would join them hallway through.
BC: Oh, interesting.
EC: So the thing being that a previous attempt to convince grandma not to part of Soldier Boy failed or in the previous thing you told grandpa that you’re from the future.
BC: So it references what you had already done?
EC: Yeah. So what you can do is…those both lead to endings in which a certain thing happens. So grandma almost drowns and grandpa saves her. Or grandma almost drowns and grandpa doesn’t know what to do so you push him in to save her. So those don’t necessarily reference what has come beforehand, but you can plug in to, if you spy grandma in the distance or grandpa in the distance you can decide who it is that you want to follow. So you can sort of deviate in that way.
EC: What was the original question again?
BC: The original question was around the more choices you give a reader, the more work you have to do–
EC: And do you think about this during the writing process. Yeah. So what I will do is I will assume that I am starting off with the 15 locations. And that I’m doing a really straight, non- twisty little narrative.
BC: So how did you come to 15 locations?
EC: Four levels. With two potential choices at each level.
BC: But how did you come to that? Was that a realisation that–
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EC: Yeah. A realisation that it was the simplest structure to write. So just very linear, branching things. The problem is when you have to think up eight different endings. And that is a bastard. Like I can probably come up with four endings pretty easily, but then those other four are just like…depending on how…on the locations you’ve sent them to and how much scope you have given for themes within your narrative, and what’s the task that you have set people, what is the main driving force on why they are moving from place to place. Depending on how complex that is that is going to restrict how creative you are in your endings.
BC: So it’s a ripple down effect, and it’s almost exponential. So there more decisions that you include the more paths you have to write. But also the more endings, as you say.
EC: And so you need to make a decision about can you fold things back in. And if you can how does that change the story.
BC: Yeah. Are you cheating the reader or not.
EC: Are you cheating the reader. Exactly.
BC: I’ve actually got a couple of questions on that later. So I might just move on, unless you’ve got something more to say about that?
EC: Yeah so, what I would do is plan it for the simplest structure, write it. If I can see themes that would allow me to reduce the number of endings I will and add more middle parts in. So it’s more like a diamond structure, rather than a tree.
BC: So in order to keep this workload manageable, some writers give the reader ‘the illusion of agency’, where they give the reader a choice, with adequate feedback, but which does not inherently affect the narrative progression. What are your thoughts about this method? Have you ever used the illusion of agency?
EC: You can do it…And I think it’s fine if you have gone off in two separate branches, so if you think left hand branch, right hand branch, and something on the right hand branch leads you to jump all the way over on to the left hand branch…so that you are having a similar experience to what you would if you had gone down the left. But because you had enough changes over on the right hand side I feel like that illusion, that cutting down of locations is okay because you have given them enough of a different experience that if they did go back to the start and try to follow the left path all the way down it would be a sufficiently different story. But, I feel that it only works if, again, you have multiple endings, because it is truly an illusion if you only end up in one spot…or even two spots. But if you have at least three or four multiple endings that gives enough combinations that you can end up with, you know, a thousand combinations and it will be a different story.
BC: So it’s okay at points?
EC: In the middle. I think in the middle it is okay to cross, as long as there are very distinct endings.
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BC: Marie-Laure Ryan suggests that interactive narratives should make “interactive moments the rule and passive moments the exception, rather than limiting agency to a few decision points separated by long stretches of passive watching”. What are your thoughts about this?
EC: 110% agree.
EC: So I have contracted a well-known Australian writer to write a story for Brisbane. And she provided me with her first draft, and what I found going through it was that…the premise of the story was that there were two characters who are arguing between each other and they could never come to a consensus. So you as the next person in there was making the choices for them, otherwise they would never move, which is fine, however, in the story you didn’t actually do anything to change what was going on in the story. You didn’t interact with the thing they were pursuing. It is a superhero story…and sure, you may not have had any special powers, but maybe that endears you to the thing that they are trying to capture because they can sense that you don’t have any specific powers so they are more likely to trust you, or whatever. But either way, what would happen is that you would watch the action happening and they wouldn’t be able to come to a decision so you would make a decision for them. But if you have no active role in how the story ends, then you are just making choices for the sake of making choices, without actually having any agency.
BC: It feels tacked on. EC: Yep. It is the illusion of interaction, but you are still passively consuming a story. You are not actually included within the action.
BC: So how did you combat that?
EC: What I said to them was…I suggest various points where the reader could be incorporated in, where there were several happy accidents at the start that would allude to the fact that the preacher trusted you, or that you knew the city better, or you were more logical or, you know. So basically it was introduced earlier on that there was something that you had that these heroes didn’t.
BC: Oh okay, so they are ruled by emotion and you can think logically, or something like that?
EC: Yeah. So you can direct their powers to be used specifically.
BC: So basically you are highlighting the readers worth, their value…why they’re here, rather than just observing–
EC: So they might have just been brought on to help the heroes make a decision but they are worth much more than that. Similarly, someone who is a student who has finished their degree and has been taken on by a creative agency, they have been brought on to do a job, but if they can prove that their worth is more than that, then they get to take part in how the ending ends. So I suggested points in which they could introduce that agency, and from there suggest…well how, in what way could the superheroes then use them as…fucking bate, or like sacrifice them, or, you know? And in all of those endings you won in some way, and I was like, ‘well, what if the heroes aren’t trust worthy?’ So, you know, there are different ways where we automatically…just thinking more complex motions, what if the person her trusts is not actually someone who is trustworthy? What if the person actually has more
The Architect of Forking Paths 175 Ben Carey confidence than ability and they slip up? You know? And so those changes in personality and in potential characterisation then leaves a little bit of room where you assume something that turns out not to be true, so you have to make up the slack. And so if you put yourself in constant situations where you have to make up the slack then that naturally allows for that incorporation into the narrative for them to have a role.
BC: Have you heard of a game called Façade?
EC: No.
BC: Okay, that’s really interesting. It reminded me of what you were talking about. It’s quite short, it’s probably about a five minute experience and I think really it’s just a narrative…a dialogue experiment. So you’re basically having dinner with this couple. It starts with…you hear them having a bit of an argument and one of them opens the door and you come in, and basically just having a conversation with them the whole time. But they have these arguments about things and they keep asking your opinion on things and they keep involving you in this discussion, and depending on your responses they will either stay together, because I played through it a couple of times because I was interested in how it worked. They will either stay together or break up or a myriad of other things. But yeah, it was really interesting because it incorporates what you type, rather than actual decisions. So yeah, maybe check that out, I don’t know. It’s called Façade, and yeah it’s interesting.
EC: Cool.
BC: Do you think that more choices equate to more agency?
No. I think that motivations equate to agency: giving people enough motivations so that they feel that they are making a decision. So it is less, ‘you can go to this place or you can go to this place’, it’s why you would go to this place or why you would go this place. Because you could send them to thirty different fucking locations and end up in thirty different spots, but if they are not given a reason for doing it, or if they are not provided with choices that mean something, then it isn’t indeed a choice.
BC: Okay. So motivation and intention, as well–
EC: So something can be a very simple experience and have a lot of agency.
BC: Have you heard of Emily Short?
EC: No.
BC: She’s fairly big in the interactive community. Anyway, she said something similar, along the lines of intention. So that’s good.
BC: How much do you think about reader agency during the writing process?
EC: A lot. Because, as we said recently, I do not want people to feel they are a certain race, gender, or sex. And so as part of that then, you have to think a lot about their agency because their agency cannot rely on language or age, gender, etcetera. It has to rely on their emotions, or their motivations, or whatever. And so when you can’t categorise someone it relies on how
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they think.
BC: Thought and feeling hey?
EC: Exactly. So when you purposefully remove all ability to be able to categorise someone, then agency plays a very massive role. Because that’s the only way you can differentiate yourself is by your actions.
BC: Are there any techniques or strategies that you use to increase agency?
EC: Again, allowing for potential flaws in other characters to provide the room for that agency to happen. So that’s one technique. Basically making the characters you are dealing with as split personalities. Where you imagine what a character would be like if they had these different motivations and then that will naturally provide them room in the narrative for you to do things. EC: What other techniques can you use to create agency…
EC: Providing people with a purpose that they can relate to. So in the pirates story we have, rather than it being, ‘you are collecting pirate supplies and crew for your ship’, which is a superficial reason, it is ‘you have this nemesis who is a really nasty guy, who is basically going to steal all your money and then…turn everybody into slaves’ or whatever. So you know, it’s a deeper problem of what do you do when you see something…when you see an evil being done. So by couching your interactive stories around a much more universal theme you are giving yourself the room for people to make agency decisions based off the emotions and motivations.
BC: Do you have a way to measure agency in your stories?
EC: We can tell which direction people go through in the story. So we can tell the most followed path. So we can tell how people move through the story and we can tell what path most people followed. Now whether that speaks to trends, so hero stories are more popular, or being the anti-hero is more popular or whatever, I would say that if you know you’ve got a story that has great agency in it, it would be an even spread across all story paths. Because you are given such good options that people will equally split 50/50. But if there is a very clear pathway through the story…that either A, shows a current trend, or B, shows that you haven’t done your job properly. Oh, not necessarily haven’t done your job properly, but you haven’t somehow influence the choice of others.
BC: How common is it to come across stories that do have an even split?
EC: I haven’t had one yet.
BC: So it’s rare?
EC: Yep.
BC: So nailing that is one of the most difficult challenges perhaps? EC: And I’m absolutely refining it in my editing process with working with the other writers. You know, what is it that would potentially stop that choice from being made…is it a choice between ‘build’ or ‘destroy’ or ‘chaos’ or ‘structure’.
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EC: Yeah so I’m slowly refining my process of being able to spot what might flick someone to go one way and not another. A lot of times it’s because the choice dares people to go up a particular way. ‘Do you chose to run away or fight the bad guy?’ and you’re like, well it’s a story, in real life it has no consequences, so there has to be a good reason for them to run away. And there needs to be a reason why will fail dismally if they go into the fight. So that you can even those choices out.
BC: How important is engagement in interactive writing?
EC: What do you mean by engagement? Do you mean that people wholly immersed in what you are doing? Or do you mean that you are getting people to do things?
BC: Both.
BC: What I did mean was immersed. But the other thing that you said is also very interesting. It didn’t really occur to me as much, but that obviously applies a lot more to your area.
EC: Yeah. I feel like it is important that they are fully immersed, as in engaged, and again, the techniques for that are…making sure that they can slot themselves into that blank canvas. So by having that lack of detail about who ‘you’ is you make it more engaging, because they can imagine themselves in it. You don’t have to imagine everything for everyone. By allowing people…by trusting that people are smart enough to imagine themselves in a role, increases engagement much more than people being told, because they are bring something to the story. And even if it’s as simple as imaging themselves, whoever they may be, Asian, or African American, or whatever, in this role, creates a more engaged audience. If you’re talking engagement in terms of getting them to do things, like touch a button or move locations, it helps if the pacing of the story is moving things forward, but I do not think that it is necessary…it’s almost like bells and whistles, getting people to take a photograph and interact with posting on social media.
BC: So it’s secondary to the–
EC: Yeah, the story…to them being immersed within the story. It’s great for them to be able to add those creative things in, but ultimately the problem that we have in our society is that people see that…they know that…people do like to contribute, but they also understand that it can be used for marketing purposes. Regardless of whether they got that story for free or whatever, anything where you are encouraging people to be public about their love, they understand on some level that that is a marketing platform for something. Even people who do fan fiction, even people who do fan art, on some basic level they understand that they can never sell that, because they understand that they are proving some sort of marketing. And so it is more likely to bring people out of the story than it is to keep them immersed as if you included them in the story. At least that’s in my mind. I think that’s an opinion thing, rather than an experience thing. That’s my opinion.
BC: Are there any techniques or tricks that you use to increase engagement or that immersion?
EC: I do. And this is more specific to location fiction, rather than interactive fiction. If you reference that you are standing in a room where there is a beautiful Moroccan light hanging from the ceiling and there is an actual Moroccan light hanging from the ceiling that is going
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to increase the grounding in reality and their engagement within the story, because they know they are there, and that increases trust. So you don’t have to, like you would in a normal book or whatever, to put in huge descriptive detail because a person is standing there. You don’t have to do that whole…call your book an apple and putting an apple on the front cover double meaning shit. So you can use that location as a way to immerse them and engage them, and by pointing out features that they can see, that acts as an added layer of them believing you. So like, ‘she says that I can look right and I will see this thing…oh look it’s actually there,’ belief. Over here you’ve seen this thing and you can imagine at night time that it would light up, belief. And then when you introduce the monster that comes out of the grate…those things were there, those things were true. It almost adds an instant believability to that thing.
BC: You’re building the stakes.
EC: Yeah. So basically the engagement is being built in by referencing the things around you.
BC: So the physical location that you’re in is very beneficial in a way. It’s almost like the building blocks…so you’ve got the building blocks of the narrative world, and then you’re adding the flavour and all that other stuff like characters and plot.
EC: Yeah, exactly. You don’t need to world build, it’s just flavour and it’s, you know, stuff on top. Yeah, that’s exactly right. And having location is a very easy tool for increasing that believability and increasing that grounding so that you don’t have to build that trust over chapters and chapters and chapters. It becomes almost an instantaneous trusting of the narrative voice.
BC: Okay, so the final question. How do you test for engagement?
BC: So is that about, if you see people aren’t taking certain paths?
EC: You test for engagement if they get to the end. So if they don’t make it to the end they obviously weren’t engaged enough. And at what point they stop is where the engagement has stopped. So if the majority of people stopped on level two, why? In the first year of Street Reads, a lot of the people stopped on level three. Like it halved between level three and level four. And we were like ‘what the?’ Turned out the locations were too far away. People didn’t want to walk half a kilometre to get to the final location. They weren’t engaged enough with the story. They weren’t necessarily engaged enough with the previous location, that they were special enough that they thought that the final story they went to would be special enough that it would be worthwhile walking. So that help with…and so the next year we made sure that every path was under a kilometre. That was why we made that decision. Similarly, we have done these puzzle trails this year to go to a park. And I’ll be very interested to see that statistics of that, because they go for longer than a kilometre, but it’s a linear path… where you’re solving puzzles. So I want to know how the removal of choice agency, but the increase of solving a puzzle drives people. Because it’s a different type of interactivity. Because in that interactivity you are proving that you can do something, rather than making a choice based on a motivation, so it’s a different type of interactivity. So I’ll be interested to see how the location and the distance combat with that. And again, the other way you can tell they’re engaged is whether or not, as I said, if you encourage them at the end to post a photo of themselves acting it out, do they do it?
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BC: I think that’s quite interesting that you can measure it by levels. Stuff like that. So generally what are the statistics like, in terms of how many people actually finish the stories?
EC: In the first year we ran it, where the endings were quite far we had something like a 67% of people completed the story. When we reduced it to under a kilometre 97% of people would finish the story. We had less people in the second year, but they were more engaged. And the thing is that, that’s where the structure comes in, right? So if you have that very linear tree like structure, it’s very easy to see where that engagement drops off, because you can put all the numbers in how many people opened that page and you could add up the numbers per level, and you could say, okay 100 people started the story, 53 made it to the end.
BC: Being able to test for engagement, for you I guess is very important? And being able to test it that specifically, allowed you to make an increase of 30% over a year, so that’s pretty cool.
EC: It was interesting because, we noticed it that year in the zombie story, because it was literally consistent between every single level, except for those final two levels. Whereas the other stories kind of dropped of like 15 to 20 people per level. But yeah, the zombie story is the only one that was consistent and then all of a sudden there was that half, like a 50% drop off actually, between level three and level four. And that was where we had the ‘ahhh.’
BC: That’s the end of the questions I have written down. Would you like to add anything?
EC: Well. Particularly in terms of locative fiction…making sure that you have strong connections between…that the branches are significantly different. I had an author hand in a 30 segment Choose Your Own Adventure for the Gold Coast, which we eventually cut down to 18, because we were like ‘that is not helpful, we need to reduce the number of locations, I like this ending more, however, you have more fail endings than win endings so you need another win ending, so adjust this part. And those sorts of things. The other things is that you have to be careful with the locations you pick, because you can’t pick places near high volumes of traffic, in case someone does something stupid and steps out in front of a car. If people are going to do it at night, you need to make sure it’s well lit. You’ve got to go light on words like ‘run’, because if someone does run and they trip…you know? Just like stupid things, like litigation things. Like thinking about litigation problems and incorporating them into stories is just…
BC: You might have to incorporate into the app one of those things where you can have a camera display what’s in front of you, so you can walking at the same time.
EC: Haha. I didn’t know about that.
EC: It’s part of the reason we introduced the audio feature.
BC: Okay, well thank you very much for your time.
EC: That’s okay.
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Appendix 5: Interview with Tom Dullemond
Ben Carey: What do you believe is the role of the creative writer in interactive stories?
Tom Dullemond: Alright, if I may analogise to the role playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons where the narrator is the person running the game. I would say that the role of the, the role is a guiding role right, you're creating a, you're creating an interactive game basically or an interactive story and that means you have to cede some control to the reader whereas normally you wouldn't. It means that there's some tricks that you wouldn't be able to pull because you can't subvert expectations to the same extent because the reader is an active participant in the narrative, or I mean, you might be able to do that it's just harder. So yes, more so as a facilitator and a guide than purely a story-teller.
BC: Cool. Does your writing process change in terms of composition of sentences and paragraphs? Does it change when you're writing interactive stories and if so how does it change?
TD: It does change, again because the, in my experience which is like Choose Your Own Adventure style particularly, you can't make assumptions about the reader because the reader is more in the adventure than... I hate that. Make it go in the opposite direction. (Bashing sounds)
TD: Fantastic, Christ we've got a narrative already! So because the, because the reader is more immersed in the story as a participant than purely an observer of the characters and everything like that you do have to take into order, I personally take into consideration a broader perspective, I have to be more diverse in my approach, I have to make sure that the language is more inclusive, not purely from a, from a consideration, but like for the consideration of the reader, but because it's going to be harder for them to, for them to place themselves in the story if I'm excluding the reader from the story. So for example if I'm writing a particularly male voice that alienates female readers where in a normal narrative that's just, that's just the person, the character that you'd have it. Sorry, that's the character that you would journey with. You are most often the character in interactive fiction. Now obviously that's just me personally you can still change that you can still, if you have a look at any of the big narrative games that have come out you can be a female player embodying a male character and vice versa. But for my writing I try to make it more generic.
BC: Yes I think there's a tradition of, that inclusivity in Choose Your Own Adventure s particularly….
TD: Yes, totally.
BC: ...the you, the you is (muffled) they are, I interviewed Emily a couple of weeks ago and she talked to, to Brett like about how inclusive interactive fiction can be.
TD: But again, that you run that same risk that it's exclusive as well. Somebody can then… so a person in a wheelchair who can inhabit an able bodied character in a piece of narrative, may feel alienated if you can’t include them in this story, or exclude it rather.
BC: What is the largest or most frequent obstacles you face when writing interactively?
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TD: The, the permutations of the narrative. So the possible endings, I grew up reading a lot of Choose Your Own Adventure stories, I then moved on to the Steve Jackson, you know the Fighting Fantasy games which is basically Choose Your Own Adventure but has a little bit of pencil, a bit more of a random sort of gamey aspect. And what I disliked in that, reading the Choose Your Own Adventure stories is mostly that the short narratives where you make a wrong decision and you're done after three choices and it's kind of laziness on the part of the writer, but not pure laziness it's also much easier to limit the branching nature of the story. So if you're going to write an interactive piece of fiction like a Choose Your Own Adventure story, you may want to have eight different endings, if you want to give the reader eight full story experiences you're basically writing, it's not eight full stories but the word count multiplies quite rapidly and...
BC: I've got a question there later about that.
TD: ...yes, yes your creativity has to, you have to create eight satisfying stories as well. So it's very tempting to just go, to have eight endings but the five of them are creamed because you die or because you're happy or because you succeed and then only two or three of those branches are an actually story, and you're kind of cheating the reader if they don't pick that then they either re-read your story over and over again which is tedious, or they just get annoyed. So I hope I answered that question, I ramble a bit.
BC: No, no it's good. Can I get you to speak up just a little bit...?
TD: Yes sure.
BC: ...I'm just worried, I'm just worried it might not capture it as much. Do you have any methods and strategies in place for overcoming these obstacles?
TD: I try to approach it a little bit from a gaming perspective so that I map out the outcomes based on choices, then I try to balance that out so that if I, if I write two or three story choices I can write the three opposite story choices and that gives me a little bit of a framework to guide me towards a complete ending. Doesn't always work but it's a good way to start. I find that having a, having a target, having the endings in mind gives me a target to write towards and so I'm sort of, like you know mapping out a little graph, that kind of thing, thought maps, or mind maps rather.
BC: So that visual process of mapping is quite helpful?
TD: Yes.
BC: Okay, cool. How would you classify, what would you classify as successful interactive narrative?
TD: Okay I would say a successful interactive narrative is one where you feel that your choices are rewarded, so as coming back to my previous question you don't feel that you're cheated by the author, you feel that you have actual agency which is often difficult to push through if you're an author who writes primarily short fiction and tries to create a narrative structure. You have to supress your own desire to tell the story, you have to let the reader tell the story. So again coming back to the guiding, the author as a guide, it's sort of the author as the story-teller, you are creating a path through which someone can experience a story based
The Architect of Forking Paths 182 Ben Carey on their own personal choices and you must feel that they were successful or victorious or whatever, even if they fail in one of the adventures they must feel that their failure was earned through their own poor choices as opposed to just a cheat.
BC: Yes.
TD: So I avoid random things like oh yes, this may have felt like a good choice but oh that building fell down, you couldn't do what you wanted to do.
BC: It's like those ones like, there's a blue door and a red door which one do you choose? And it's like well, it's not really a meaningful choice but it's...
TD: Correct.
BC: Yes. Which beautifully ties us into the next section which is, I've got ten questions about Agency.
TD: Brilliant.
BC: Janet Murray defines Agency as the satisfying power to make, to make meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices. How would you classify meaningful action?
TD: I would go back to the previous point and say the meaningful action is a satisfying action. So again, even if you fail you can understand the process by which you failed, as opposed to having victory snatched away from you, you can look back at the story and say Ah! I should have overcome my greed and not lied, or something like that. Something that, that, meaningful is something that makes you learn something, it’s like a didactic process, you learn something from the story and from the steps that you took, even if the ending isn't what you wanted to you come away from that experience having grown in some capacity.
BC: Yes, even if it's just the capacity of being able to play that game better.
TD: Yes absolutely. Even if you just think hey I've, in Crossy Road I've beaten my you know, my last high score, oh my god I'm playing that a lot!
BC: Me too, me and my girlfriend play it at the train station while we're waiting for the train.
TD: Oh yes yes. So meaningful is very, so this just ties back into the difficulty of writing it, the meaningfulness of a choice is very specific to the individual who is on the journey, and so trying to anticipate all those possibilities is one of the great challenges when you are trying to create a story where a person feels that they are making progress.
BC: Yes and I guess that feeds back to being inclusive as well.
TD: Correct.
BC: You've got to be as universal as possible sometimes with the characters and the meaningful choices...
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TD: Correct.
BC: ...stuff like that.
TD: And there's a lot of cases, by definition you can't be universal for everyone.
BC: Yes, yes. I guess you've kind of answered the second question which is why are meaningful decisions necessary?
TD: I may answer it differently, why not!
BC: Okay let's do that then.
TD: I contradict myself. Why are meaningful decisions necessary? Alright so from a purely, from a commercial perspective you want the user, the user listen to me, I'm in IT brain, you want the reader - the person who is on the journey - to come back and do it again. For Street Reads you want them to come back next year or recommend it to their friends, as a writer you want them to buy your next book or you want them to recommend it to the library or anything like that. So meaningful decisions create a good outcome, make the person come back for more so that's good from a commercial perspective. From a personal perspective (art?) that makes you feel good is always better than stuff that passes you by. Not to say that things like Crossey Road don't create stories, we tell our own stories, but, but yes, meaningful decisions, well-meaning gives purpose and purpose makes people do things that's I guess... rambly, a little bit rambly.
BC: Leaving them fresh?
TD: Yes, exactly.
BC: Okay. How important is feedback on these choices?
TD: Feedback to the author or feedback to...
BC: To the reader.
TD: ...to the reader. Well tying back into them feeling like they've made a meaningful impact to the world I think that feedback is important, well feedback is important but it's important to the extent that it needs to inform, it needs to educate the user, again I'm in computer, computer mode. Educate the reader so that they can learn how to make their future choices better, so it's like a you know, the tutorial phase of a, of an adventure?
BC: Yes?
TD: And what else with that, I kind of thing feedback is very broad like, I mean feedback can be direct narrative feedback, like if you make a choice and you can see the consequences straight away, that could be extended throughout the story so if you make a choice and you don't see the consequences till later but you can foreshadow those, you can even foreshadow them to the extent that a later choice can allow you to undo your earlier choice. You wake up a giant guardians of blah, you can see the hazard you are wreaking, oh here's another, opens
The Architect of Forking Paths 184 Ben Carey up new opportunities for adventure and allows you to convey information back to the reader. And again, so with your example the red, blue door if they go through the red or blue door, you as the narrator can push them to the same next part of the story, there's no way they would know, and that's kind of a meaningless choice. So I mean again, Agency is a key part of all of this because, I mean, well it's interactive fiction but without the reader feeling like they've done stuff, there's no point. You're just making it harder to write the story.
BC: Because that's the reason they're doing this rather than reading a novel.
TD: Correct! Absolutely.
BC: Okay, so mathematically the more choices you give the reader the more work you have to do as a writer, do you think about this during the writing process?
TD: Absolutely. With Street Reads I definitely wanted eight endings, I wanted a full story for each person so that was two-thousand words per story and of course the branching, it's probably about one-and-a-half times or…you could, you could quickly work out the percentage of reused words, it's probably only about thirty percent. So it does get complicated but you can, because of we have like the Street Read the Stories City App, is it Stories City?
BC: Yes.
TD: Because of technology we can actually simplify some of those things so we can make a choice which sets a variable and that only rewrites a couple of lines of a chunk of text down the track.
BC: Got you, based on choice?
TD: Correct, so you could just say, you could have a piece of text, halfway through this story which talks about the people you have met, and as you make choices earlier in the story, a website or a piece of technology can keep track of the people you've met and insert those names into that bit, so you can actually reuse a lot more than you normally would if it's just written out in a Choose Your Own Adventure story. But yes, because of time constraints and the commercial reality of having to write twenty-thousand words instead of eight-thousand words, those choices are very important. And that's where you find your balance between you wanting the reader to have a good experience and you as a writer wanting to get the damn project out because...
BC: Yes, yes. Okay.
TD: Did that answer that question?
BC: Yes no you did! In order to keep the workload manageable some writers give the reader the illusion of Agency, where they give the reader a choice with adequate feedback, but the choice does not inherently affect the narrative progression...
TD: Yes, for sure.
BC: ...what are your thoughts about this and do you use this?
The Architect of Forking Paths 185 Ben Carey
TD: I think it is perfectly acceptable, I haven't used it in my writing because it's not, I don't think it works for, for the written word because if a person re-reads the story they will pick your trick up, like it's ideal if someone has a, if you're offering a single play through of a, of an adventure yes that's perfect, you can do it a couple of times, you can make it difficult but it's not impossible, or it's more difficult but it's not impossible, it does save you time but you will be found out the moment you do it again, and so you have to take into consideration how pissed off they will be when they retrospectively find out that you have cheated them out of a choice.
BC: You risk cheating the reader?
TD: Yes. so again it's perfect for say Street Reads where you're going to do this adventure once and then go onto another adventure but for a Choose Your Own Adventure book which I used to have fingers in every possible ending so as you go through and re-read it you'll be cheated and that's bad, bad marketing basically.
BC: Yes. Marie Laure-Ryan suggests that interactive narratives should make interactive moments the rule and passive moments the exception. Rather than limiting Agency to a few decision points separated by longs stretches of passive watching, what are your thoughts about this?
TD: I agree but you have to balance it out the reality of the amount of work that the writer has to do. Might be easier if you have a team of writers, but there is idealist and practical and there's a balance right in the middle there. Everyone gets what they want but yes, ideally everything is interactive, but Jesus, that's you know, a lot of work! But again computer games and stuff allow that much more so than...
BC: Because there are so many more people on the team?
TD: Yes, but also because you're able to fake the, much easier to fake that previous thing, the illusion of Agency in a computer game because there are trivial changes that make the reader feel, I'm getting my terminology mixed up all the time, in this instance the player feel as though they've made a choice because now everyone's wearing a certain uniform or something like that, and it does, it is a reward it is feedback but in terms of effort it is very minimal. So it's the medium is quite, has a bit of impact on the viability of that.
BC: Do you think that more choices equate to more Agency?
TD: If the choices are poor then that makes, there's no difference. But as a rule I think yes, makes sense. More choices more Agency. But there's no correlation between choice, the number of choices and the quality of choices so that's the key differentiator there.
BC: How much do you think about reader Agency during the writing process?
TD: For interactive writing or all the time basically?
BC: Interactive writing.
TD: It's priority, I mean it could be 2am and everyone is high on coffee and I'm thinking about many other things but when I'm actually constructing the choices Agency is key. That's
The Architect of Forking Paths 186 Ben Carey
what makes it fun. I mean it's also the hardest part of the writing process, but you owe it to your reader to put some effort into it.
BC: Are there any techniques or strategies that you use to increase Agency within a story. So if you've got a story and you feel the reader isn't doing enough here or they're not moving the story enough or making... that you feel like you've run through it and they don't have enough agency how would you...
TD: I guess, I guess I'd focus on trying to throw in a bit more conflict and a bit more, it really comes into, it's not really a stylistic thing it comes down to the plotting and the actual narrative progression. So if I'd really, I may just throw the whole thing out and just find a point where I feel the reader in this case is making a, feels as if they had Agency and is making valuable choices and then see where that, where that, where from my experience that goes away through something I've decided in the narrative, and at that node - because we're looking at a big tree of decisions - cut that node off put it aside and re-write it or try to often, actually I find that just reducing the number of characters in a narrative allows you to focus heavily on the interaction because a lot of the time, if you have four or five characters in a short section, a lot of the time you're just handing over between characters and the player is a bystander, while characters interact. If you take a couple of those away and make the reader, like merge them with the reader that gives them a little bit more involvement as well. So those are strategies that I’d employ just to push the narrative points and the dot points around a bit to see what comes out.
BC: Okay, so by removing those additional characters you create that space for the reader to do that involvement instead?
TD: Yes.
BC: Okay.
TD: Or I may just speed it up, it may be a pacing issue.
BC: Okay so it does come, it is about plotting and narrative direction?
TD: I think so.
BC: It can just come with editing and thinking of the bigger picture?
TD: Yes.
BC: Okay, how do you measure the level of Agency in a story?
TD: Probably by the permutations of the story. So if the reader has a lot of, if the narrative paths diverge quite viably as the story progresses then I would consider that to be, so if you graphed it and there was a really broad sort of tree that would consider the Agency of the player maximised, and if it's a very narrow branch that's reaching back on itself and has very few endings I would consider that a minimum, and then try to balance it, and get the balance against the effort right.
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BC: And would you do that through, you would be able to do that through the Story City App?
TD: Well, I don't...
BC: From an author perspective?
TD: I haven't, I haven't developed it I don't know how they structure their thing...
BC: Okay.
TD: ...I think they just take nodes and link them all up. I've used I can't remember the name of it, but you would have encountered it, it's just a little node mapping, it's a little application built for this kind of writing, Choose Your Own Adventure writing.
BC: It's not Informs...?
TD: I'll find it I've got it at home.
BC: Okay.
TD: All you really do is just drop boxes and then link them up and then you can then...
BC: Not Twine is it?
TD: Twine!
BC: I love Twine.
TD: Yes, Twine is very simple but it basically produces an html hyperlink story.
BC: Yes I actually use it often just for mind-mapping.
TD: Yes, it's good for that as well.
BC: Non-interactive stuff just because it's a good digital corkboard.
TD: So yes that's, that's what I used. That's when I used it.
BC: Cool, we're smashing through these, only got four left!
TD: Ask me them all again and I'll give you a different answer!
BC: No that's okay! No, it's been really good stuff. The last couple of questions are on engagement.
TD: Yes?
BC: So how would you define engagement? In an interactive context?
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TD: How would I measure it or how would I just generally define it?
BC: How would you generally define it?
TD: Alright, generally I'd define engagement as the, the commitment that the reader has to the story. So if for example they're, if someone is going through an adventure and they're feel like that have a lot of Agency and they're making choices that, and the world reflects their decisions I would expect them to keep reading, to not abandon…if you're were measuring it by Story City you would see that they complete the adventure, they don't dawdle between points, they jump quickly from page to page or if they sit down they would read through notice tracks from the front. Engagement is commitment to the story I think.
BC: How important is this engagement in interactive writing?
TD: I can give two answers to that. Firstly is no more important than in regular writing because you're reading and you're giving up that, if it's not engaging you're not going to finish the story. But you could consider it more important in interactive fiction if you look at it from the perspective of the person's, if the person feels a part of the story that they're making decisions engagement is more important to that story effectively. Kind of, stories aren't living things but if you stop reading a piece of non-interactive fiction it's a story that's still there, it doesn't go anywhere, give it to someone else and read it but if you stop your piece of interactive fiction, you stop reading halfway through that story is never told. So your experience is in that regard more important, you know engagement is more important to complete that journey.
BC: That's an...
TD: But I mean it's not something you can, like if you tie completion to success and Story City App and it ties back in to metric square funding then engagement becomes much more important because you can't tell, you can sort of tell, but if you have an eBook for a five page eBook you can't really tell if someone has finished it or not. Whereas you can definitely tell if someone doesn't complete Story, or if branches don't start because no one ever makes that choice.
BC: Yes. So there's definitely considerations as opposed to if you're just, if you're writing for fun or if you're writing for funding and stuff like that?
TD: Yes, exactly. Also because of, because of the choices that, okay, because of the amount of effort required to write all the possible permutations if the reader isn't sufficiently engaged to explore all those permutations you're basically wasting your time. So if ten-percent of the readers never hit fifty-percent of the choices, because of their engagement isn't enough to get past a certain point, so if they make choice to of level three, they don't finish it but if they make choice one at level three they do finish it and you've just wasted all your time.
BC: It's like when we spend thirty hours marking student assignments and then ten percent of them pick up their assignments. (Laughs)
TD: Exactly, yes exactly right! So in that, in that respect it's not really measureable because I have to do all the work up front but it's important that I engage the reader so that they
The Architect of Forking Paths 189 Ben Carey actually get value out of the work I do, I've made. But does that matter really? Does it make a difference to anyone?
BC: I think the second point you made about the importance of engagement is really interesting about the fact that if they don't finish it, it kind of doesn't exist. Well they're not, it doesn't exist but....
TD: It's kind of a cool...
BC: ...but it's untold...
TD: ...it's kind of a cool sort of way of thinking about it but not in any practical sense but just...
BC: No...
TD: ...kind of a sad artistic sort of gaff. Tiny little gaff.
BC: I like it! This is a bit of a repeat of the Agency question but...
TD: No that's alright.
BC: ...are there any techniques or tricks that you use to increase engagement?
TD: Look that's, that is a purely a writing and stylistic thing so you know, fewer passive phrases, more sort of interesting concepts, so it's really kind of up to the writer so I've been writing for a long time, I practice a lot so I think I've just, through the process of learning to become a better writer you improve engagement. It's very easily reflected if you don't sell your short stories then not everybody is trying to buy your short stories is being engaged by your stuff.
BC: How do you test for engagement, do you test for engagement?
TD: I do but it's really just, actually for this kind of stuff it's easier because you can, for example, Emily can see on her website how long people do it, how often do they read it and whether they give up. In generally you just have to go with beta readers effectively, so you're giving your work to other people to review and you get feedback. That's how I test for engagement. In this more game-ified environment you could formalise that process better, but generally it's how was it, what did you do. So for Street Reads I tested it by handing the starting point to a bunch, like I just printed it out, handed it to a bunch of friends and said, walk this adventure, go, give me some feedback. And that' quite, that helped a lot but functionally it's not that different from handing someone a story and saying give me some feedback.
BC: Okay. Do you have anything else to add?
TD: No I think it's, I find this area really really interesting, at the very start I mentioned role playing games, I do a lot of those as well. My daughter is now fourteen and really getting into that and because it ties in with improvisation and communal storytelling and the skill sets and just the community aspect of it that even this kind of interactive fiction, even Choose Your
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Own Adventure s where people can come and say, hey how did that story go we both have the same book but we both get different experiences out of it, brings people together so it increases engagement in that respect that readers engage with each other about their adventures. And then that reflects back to you as an artist. So across the board from written Choose Your Own Adventure s to more, the kind of hybrid ones where you can get an iPad adventure, which is mostly text but has computer aspects, Story City where you have groups of people wandering through communal spaces which is an excellent, amazing I really like it. And then computer games and then pen and pencil role playing games, that whole spectrum of interactive fiction is awesome, I'm involved with it a lot. Even though I don't produce a lot of it in the written form, I do sort of orbit the edges of it, it's cool. So I'd be really interested to see what comes out.
BC: Cool, well thank you very much for your participation.
TD: Yes that's cool. Hopefully it all worked.
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Appendix 6: Interview with Paul La Farge
The role of the writer (4 Questions)
1. What do you believe is the role of the creative writer in interactive narratives?
I think it’s an intensified version of the role the writer always plays in creating narrative. You’re making an experience for the reader, and, possibly, thinking about how to shape that experience in order to communicate something: an idea, a question. The fact that you’re determining not only the shape of the narrative but also the conditions under which the narrative will be read (the interface, the architecture of the interaction) means that you have to make more choices, and in a way these choices seem to be of a different order, because they’re not obviously determined by the narrative’s intrinsic qualities (who are the characters? how do the sentences follow one another? what is the plot?). But in fact I think it’s a mistake to consider choices about UI, interactivity, what Janet Murray calls ‘procedural authorship’, as being of a different order. All of these elements should be determined by the nature of the narrative itself. So, e.g., Luminous Airplanes is about introspection and memory and history and the involutions of the narrator’s thought, and a lot of my choices about the design of the interaction were determined by that fact.
2. Did your writing process (in terms of the composition of sentences and paragraphs) differ when you were writing the hypertext version of Luminous Airplanes? If so, how did it change?
The hypertext of Luminous Airplanes pulled the writing in two directions. On the one hand, the expansiveness of the form, and its quasi-imperative to digress, created a lot of freedom in the writing, and an almost hysterical energy: the narrator could say whatever was on his mind, and, by god, he would say it! On the other hand the challenge of reading on the screen, and the navigational burden which the hypertext imposes on the reader, put pressure on the writing to be concise. To my surprise, given theoretically infinite room to write sentences, I found myself editing rather stringently, trying to keep each passage of the hypertext to its minimal length. Reading parts of Luminous Airplanes over now, several years after I stopped working on it, I think that if anything I could have gone farther in that direction.
3. Did you face any obstacles during this writing process? If so, how did you overcome these writing obstacles?
First and foremost the obstacle of devising the form and the content at the same time. The obstacle of deciding what would follow from what. The obstacle of figuring out how to guide the reader through the hypertext, and to minimize her frustration at having to make choices about which passages to read. The obstacle of maintaining interest in a story that doesn’t promise closure. To the extent that I overcame these obstacles, I did so iteratively, by a process of trial and error, guided by my own sense of what was exciting in the writing. Most of my solutions to the problems I’ve mentioned above had to do with explicitly thematizing the problems: making confusion, disorientation, exploration, digression, etc., thematically important to the story. And then trying to create a lot of momentum and pleasure in the writing.
4. What would you classify as a successful interactive narrative?
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One interactive narrative that I enjoy very much is Andrew Plotkin’s interactive fiction Shade. It’s puzzle-oriented, like many interactive fictions, but the puzzles aren’t very hard to solve, which means that you can keep some momentum as a reader, and get into the kind of immersive space that fiction readers often inhabit. Also, the story is relatively small (almost all of it takes place in a single room), which allows Plotkin to give it a satisfying shape. You get the experience of the world turning inside-out, of things not being what they seem, which is something that a good short story will often do.
Agency (9 Questions)
1. Janet Murray defines agency as “the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices”. How would you classify ‘meaningful action’?
I think it should be understood broadly. A ‘meaningful action’ might be an action that decisively influences the outcome of a narrative: a choice made at a narrative fork in a multipath fiction, e.g., or a puzzle solved in an interactive fiction. But a ‘meaningful action’ could just as easily be the decision to investigate (or not to investigate) a given branch of a fiction; or really any action that the reader takes, which reveals to the reader something about the nature of the thing read. So e.g. the decision to revisit the sections in Cortázar’s Hopscotch out of order is a meaningful action in the sense that the reader is now committed to experiencing the narrative (at least for a while) in a new order. Likewise, there’s a David Foster Wallace story in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men that invites you to skip the rest of the story, if some condition X has or hasn’t been met for you. I skipped it. I’m sure I would have liked the rest of the story (strangely, I haven’t gone back to re-read it), but skipping felt meaningful in that moment, in the sense that it changed my relation to the text.
2. Why are meaningful decisions necessary?
Who says they’re necessary? And what kind of decision are you talking about? I get a lot of pleasure from Fifties science fiction novels. Some of them are quite formulaic, but they’re all pretty engrossing. The most meaningful decision I make w/r/t those books is to pick them up, which seems ‘meaningful’ only in a fairly trivial sense.
3. How important is feedback on these choices?
Depends what you mean by ‘feedback.’ Does the artifact (book, screen, whatever) have to light up and tell you that you’ve made a good/bad choice? No. In the most general sense, the fact that the narrative keeps going, and that you can keep deriving pleasure and meaning from it, might be feedback enough.
4. Mathematically, the more choices you give a reader, the more work you have to do as a writer. Do you think about this during the writing process?
No. I’m not really interested in multipath-type interaction. The reason I make stories is because I want them to go a certain way, or ways. I’m happy for the reader to have a lot of freedom in choosing how to experience my stories, but in the end I think the more generous thing on my part is actually to provide a story for the reader to experience (or hurl across the room in disgust).
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5. Marie-Laure Ryan suggests that interactive narratives should make “interactive moments the rule and passive moments the exception, rather than limiting agency to a few decision points separated by long stretches of passive watching”. What are your thoughts about this?
I think it’s a very limited definition of interaction. Reading is an interaction, and so is meaning-making. I wouldn’t characterize either activity as passive. When you read Hopscotch, to pick on that poor book again, you’re given decision points only every few pages — but you’ve got to work constantly to assemble the parts into a model of what the whole might be. Ironically, the narrative forms that do afford constant “active” interaction, mostly video games and LARPs, are quite tyrannical in their larger plots. You can interact freely within a given scene or level or area of the map, but if you don’t meet the narrative goals of the scene, you don’t get to the next cut-scene or narrative moment or whatever.
6. Do you think that more choices equates to more agency?
Caramel latte or peppermint frappuccino? No.
7. How much do you think about reader agency during the writing process?
I think about reader agency constantly, in the sense that I’m thinking about how the reader is experiencing the story, and what mental models they might be forming about my world and how it works. I think about what choices I want the reader to be able to make in reading in the same way. The affordances of an interactive fiction tell you something about what kind of world you’re in. They have resonances, overtones, connotations.
8. Are there any techniques or strategies that you use to increase agency within a story?
It seems to me that one of the most interesting techniques you could use to increase reader agency within a story is aporia: “an irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction in a text, argument, or theory.” You present the reader with puzzle pieces that don’t fit together, and the reader has to make a choice not just about how to assemble the puzzle but about whether it was really intended to be assembled. I suspect that this wasn’t the answer you were looking for, but I believe that narrative is a technology, albeit one that UI designers and futurists often undervalue.
9. How do you measure the level of agency in a story?
I don’t.
Engagement (4 Questions)
1. How do you define engagement?
Does the reader feel compelled to keep going? Do the events of the story matter to the reader? Do they resonate with other things the readers knows, or thinks about? Most deeply, I guess, does the world look different to the reader after she or he puts the story down?
2. How important do you think engagement is in interactive writing?
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As important as it is in other kinds of writing, which is to say, absolutely vital.
3. Are there any techniques or tricks that you use to increase engagement?
Yes. I try to say things precisely, and to choose words and combinations of words that haven’t appeared in so many other contexts that they’re incapable of having a meaning specific to the context in which I use them. I try to represent characters as complicated beings whose actions aren’t always immediately intelligible. I try to depict a world which is not so strange as to be unrecognizable, but not so ordinary as to be boring.
4. How do you test for engagement?
I don’t, or at least, I haven’t. But if I were to test for engagement, probably I’d want to look at some things that seem hard to quantify: did this story change the reader’s world? And did it spark anything in the reader, any new thoughts? A UX tester would probably throw up her hands in despair at this answer, and suggest that I test for page views, or try citation indexing, or even just do a focus group and test for recall/comprehension. But I’m interested in changing people’s worlds.
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Appendix 7: Before and after gender ambiguity
Before
I take a long drag and hold the smoke in my mouth until I start coughing. Everyone laughs except for Quinn. I hurriedly pass the joint to the girl next to me.
‘Lets go for a walk,’ Quinn says, getting up.
We walk past a couple of tall, thin trees and stand at the far edge of the summit. It's dark now and the sky is flooded with thousands of stars.
‘First time smoking weed?’ Quinn says.
‘What gave it away?’
She laughs and moves closer to me. Her arm presses up against me and I can feel the warmth of her skin again mine. It's intoxicating. I turn around and her green eyes pierce my flesh, cutting straight through to my soul. Before I know it she's kissing me, her big soft lips sucking on mine. She slides her tongue into my mouth and for some reason I start laughing.
‘What?’ she says, raising and eyebrow.
‘I don't know,’ I say, slurring my words somewhat. ‘Your tongue feels like a slug.’
I start laughing and she shakes her head. ‘Yep,’ she says. ‘Definitely first time.’
I forget about the slug and we kiss for a while, passionately. I slide my hand under her shirt and fondle her small, supple breasts. She unbuttons my jeans and runs her fingers up and down my rock hard cock.
She tugs the legs of my jeans and they slide down to my ankles. She looks up at me, smiles, and then wraps her warm lips around me. I close my eyes and the stars are replaced with a slowly rotating kaleidoscope. It feels like I'm drifting through space, detached from my Earthly body.
When I open my eyes again she is sliding off her underwear. For a fleeting moment I think about Melissa. But her face soon fades into oblivion and I give myself to Quinn.
The Architect of Forking Paths 196 Ben Carey
She slides down onto me and not even the cold grass against my back or the rocks
digging into my hips can dull the pleasure I feel. My nose and my fingertips are tinged with
the cold of the night, but a warmth surges through me, a warmth I haven't felt in years, maybe
ever. Time stretches out, losing all meaning. We could have been making love for five
minutes or an hour by this point and I wouldn't know.
Quinn grinds on top of me in a very quick and rhythmic fashion and brings herself to orgasm. She lets out a whimper, which turns into a high-pitched moan. I feel her tighten
around me, quivering with pleasure. Breathless, I empty myself inside her. She collapses onto me and we both lay sweaty and out of breath.
‘So how was your first time?’ she whispers into my ear. It sends a shiver down my spine.
Sometime later Quinn leaves to grab her stuff. When she returns she rolls out a small camping mattress and lays down a blanket. We cuddle up together and look up at the stars.
After
I take a long drag and hold the smoke in my mouth until I start coughing. Everyone laughs except for Quinn. I hurriedly pass the joint to the girl next to me.
‘Lets go for a walk,’ Quinn says, getting up.
We walk past a couple of tall, thin trees and stand at the far edge of the summit. It's dark now and the sky is flooded with thousands of stars.
‘First time smoking weed?’ Quinn says.
‘What gave it away?’
She laughs and moves closer to me. Her arm presses up against me and I can feel the warmth of her skin again mine. It's intoxicating. I turn around and her green eyes pierce my flesh, cutting straight through to my soul. Before I know it she's kissing me, her big soft lips sucking on mine. She slides her tongue into my mouth and for some reason I start laughing.
The Architect of Forking Paths 197 Ben Carey
‘What?’ she says, raising and eyebrow.
‘I don't know,’ I say, slurring my words somewhat. ‘Your tongue feels like a slug.’
I start laughing and she shakes her head. ‘Yep,’ she says. ‘Definitely first time.’
I forget about the slug and we kiss for a while, passionately. I slide my hand under her shirt and fondle her small, supple breasts. She unbuttons my jeans and runs her fingers over me.
She tugs the legs of my jeans and they slide down to my ankles. She looks up at me, smiles, and then laps at me with her tongue. I close my eyes and the stars are replaced with a slowly rotating kaleidoscope. It feels like I'm drifting through space, detached from my
Earthly body.
When I open my eyes again she is sliding off her underwear. For a fleeting moment I think about Melissa. But her face soon fades into oblivion and I give myself to Quinn.
She presses herself against me and not even the cold grass against my back or the rocks
digging into my hips can dull the pleasure I feel. My nose and my fingertips are tinged with
the cold of the night, but a warmth surges through me, a warmth I haven't felt in years, maybe
ever. Time stretches out, losing all meaning. We could have been making love for five
minutes or an hour by this point and I wouldn't know.
Quinn grinds against me in a very quick and rhythmic fashion and brings herself to
orgasm. She lets out a whimper, which turns into a high-pitched moan. I feel quivering with
pleasure. Breathless, I cum as well, shuddering from the intensity. She collapses onto me and
we both lay sweaty and out of breath.
‘So how was your first time?’ she whispers into my ear. It sends a shiver down my spine.
Sometime later Quinn leaves to grab her stuff. When she returns she rolls out a small
camping mattress and lays down a blanket. We cuddle up together and look up at the stars.
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