Interactive Fiction

What is interactive fiction and how is it different from writing for video games?

I would say interactive fiction is a kind of text-based role-playing game that involves a player reading descriptive passages, then inputting choices that represent the actions of one or more characters in that fictional world.

The medium of interaction could be – and today it usually is – a computer or phone screen, but the genre originated in physical books, like the Choose Your Own Adventure or Fighting Fantasy series, where the reader inputs a choice by turning to a particular passage or page in the book. So the books are like labyrinths that you feel your way through, and because of the limitations of the book as a physical form, there tend to be a lot of dead ends.

With digital media you can fit a lot more text into a smaller space, so that's allowed the genre to expand massively. There’s obviously a strong relationship with video games, but most people think of video games as being primarily graphics-based, often with only the skeleton of a story holding them together to give the player some kind of impetus, something to accomplish.

How has interactive fiction changed since gaming became more widespread as a medium?

In the very early days of video games there were a lot of text adventures – it used to be the standard format for a narrative-driven game – but in the intervening years games became associated with ever higher levels of graphical fidelity. Now there’s a lot more overlap between the visuals and the narrative – lots of modern video games, for instance, use cinematic techniques to tell a story, and can fold players/readers into those cinematic shots, making them feel they are a part of it, which means they work as a different kind of interactive fiction.

But you do also get lot of games today that combine graphics with large amounts of text – Baldur's Gate 3, for example, has about ten novels' worth of written content, supplied by a huge team of writers co-ordinating around different parts of the story or managing different characters. The kind of choices that the player makes in a game like that, outside of the combat mechanics, are very similar to those they would make in an entirely text-based interactive fiction.

I think one of the most important distinctions at the moment is that interactive fiction is much more accessible from the point of view of the writer. In recent years lots of free and easy-to-use software packages have emerged that let you produce short or long interactive fictions without any programming knowledge. The output is playable on a normal internet browser. It makes for a really exciting scene because many different people from varied backgrounds, who don’t have the time or resources to learn their way round computers, can experiment with interactive stories alongside those who might be using the same tools as a springboard to a career in video games.

Some fiction writers, of course, do go on to write for video games, so if that’s your aspiration, interactive fiction is a really good place to start.

You were shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize for a poem, while the other shortlistees all wrote fiction. How can a poem be interactive in the way that a story can?

Writing interactive poetry is slightly trickier for a variety of reasons. One is that we expect a poem to be aesthetically complete, something totally stable and compact, almost like a picturesque cottage. If you want something to feel interactive, to feel playable, on the other hand, then it should come across as incomplete, open. It should give the player something to do.

So there's a friction there, and I think that's why something like the New Media Writing Prize shortlist is likely to be dominated by fiction rather than poetry. We're more used to the ways in which narrative and games overlap than thinking about how poetry can be interactive.

But by making poetry interactive – or more interactive than it usually is, I should say – you can offer readers a way to get intimately involved with the mechanics of of the poem itself. They can investigate how language fits together in different ways to produce different effects. I would argue you also give them the chance to be immersed in someone else's subjective experience of reality, to dip a toe in worlds and fictional conceits that are more figurative than literal.

The piece I had shortlisted, L and the Empress of Sand, is what I would call a 'ludokinetic poem', a poem in which the reader acts as pilot. That is, to read and play it is to drive it forward to its conclusion. You become implicated in its events. In this case, there is a story. The reader inhabits a character, just like in a piece of interactive fiction. In the role of that character, they choose strings of words to utter in an attempt to win over the titular Empress of Sand. But the story isn't intended as a realistic or plausible fiction. It's a way of representing a certain kind of power dynamic – one which will be familiar to different people in different ways.

So it's a typical poetic metaphor, but one that the reader is feeling out and interacting with. They understand it by playing it out, rather than just being shown what it looks like.

Poetry often ends with a flourish, while at the same time leaving the reader work to do in in terms of figuring out what it means. Empress does the same thing. But because you've been making choices as you've gone through the poem, there's more of a sense that the ending – even though it's the same one every other reader is getting – has different implications because of the road you took to reach it.

What scope is there on our own creative writing courses for students who want to learn to write interactive fiction and submit it as part of their assignment?

If you're taking the BA (Hons) Creative Writing or MA Creative Writing at ARU, you will have the opportunity to learn how to use Twine, an open source program specifically designed for writing browser-based interactive texts.

It's extremely minimal in terms of any kind of programming. We can usually cover the basics in an hour and get you to the point where you're writing branching narratives. You can then go much more deeply into it, and we've got a bunch of worksheets, as well as a lot of knowledge on the team in terms of what else you can do with it.

We also look at a few other tools that writers of interactive fiction use, like Ink and Ren’Py – which is specifically for creating visual novels. We look at those a little more briefly, because not everyone wants to go too deep into it. 

But the exciting thing about Twine, as well as something like Bitsy, is that the interactive texts and games you produce can be uploaded via our online admissions portal, alongside your essays and Word documents. Your tutor can play through your interactive fiction and mark it just like any other piece of creative writing, then give you feedback via the same system.

We're keen to integrate further options for writing digital and interactive media into our modules, and we know some of our students are increasingly interested in writing for video games as a possible career route, so we’re seeking to expand what we offer, getting in guest lecturers who've written for video games and looking at other tools we can use as well. One of the main skills we want our students to develop is versatility, the ability to shape their talents to fit as many of the different opportunities for jobs and funding as possible.

So the short answer is yes – you can play around with writing interactive fiction with us. We'll show you the ropes and, if you decide its something you really want to get into, we can support your further development. But if it's just something you want to just drip into briefly and then move on from, that's fine as well.

For writing students who aren’t interested in video games and prefer more traditional media for their stories, what are the benefits of experimenting with interactive fiction?

Even if you're not remotely interested in video games or interactive fiction, experimenting with the software tools and methods can still be a really useful way of finding out more about your characters and settings.

If you're a fiction writer, for example, you might use them to explore what happens if your protagonist takes a different key decision to the one you had planned for them, or if they act contrary to their established nature. Then you can follow that particular route and find out more about who they are.

You could also create an interactive map of your setting, so potential readers or players can explore different parts of a city, say, step into the characters’ houses, root through their belongings and so on. All of that material, if you don’t make it available to a general readership, could be very useful in terms of your own understanding of the fictional world you're creating and the potential for stories within it.

In the Multi-Platform Storytelling module for our first-year BA (Hons) Creative Writing students, one of the things we emphasise is that a lot of stories these days take place across different formats. For big franchises like Star Wars or the Marvel Comics Universe, writing is taking place simultaneously across comic books, films, TV series, and video games. Some even cross over between those different formats. So it can often be really useful to think about the wider fictional universe where your stories take place when you're planning future novels or offshoots, and how you one medium might be adapted into another.

For all those reasons, I think it's worth every writing student gaining some familiarity with interactive fiction, getting to know the ropes and seeing what they can do with it.

Do you think writing is likely to veer towards more distinct roles for larger franchises, so you might have some writers working on characters, some on worldbuilding, some on narrative, similar to how computer development teams work?

There are definitely a growing number of opportunities for writers to work in teams – not just with other writers, but with other creatives too. In terms of the jobs that are available to you as a writer, more often than not they will involve collaborating with other people in some capacity.

What a lot of writers do is have the writing they do on their own as a solo writer – maybe the novels they're working on privately that they're trying to get published – while at the same time working in a team somewhere else, maybe on a TV show or for a computer game, for extra income and variety. It's fairly normal to be doing a bit of both these days.

And we obviously want to train our students toward that potential future. Rather than thinking of yourself just as a novelist, you're also supporting that work and feeding into it by finding jobs that involve collaborating with other writers or creatives, and specialising in other areas of building a story or fictional universe.

What are some of your own favourite games and interactive texts, and is it always the writing that interests you, or do other aspects draw you to them as well?

It's definitely not only writing that attracts my interests when it comes to video games! I'm interested in many of the mechanical aspects, and easily won over by atmosphere, as well as other things that involve the work of graphics designers, sound designers, and those who coordinate the overall vision for the game.

But as a writer I'm particularly interested in games that are well written, in part because growing up there was a very strong divide between those different parts of my life. There was literature and books on the one hand, which used language in all sorts of innovative and exciting ways but generally kept you on the outside of them. Then there were video games, which allowed you to be more sociable because you could have a friend round your house to play online, either adversarially or co-operatively, but you wouldn't expect those games to be any great shakes in terms of storytelling and writing. Generally, most of the games I grew up with were very threadbare in terms of characterisation, plotting, poetry or original story ideas.

So it's been really exciting to watch those two parts of my life converge. You get many more games now that are cleverly or expressively written, and some where the writing is as good as what you'd expect to find in a book.

I'm a big fan, for instance, of Disco Elysium, a retro-futurist mystery role-playing game in which you wake up one morning hungover, with no memory of who you are or what you're meant to be doing, and are presented with a murder to solve. You argue with parts of your own brain to decide what kind of person you're ultimately going to be, and how you're going to go about solving (or not solving) the case.

It's another game that likely has several novels' worth of text in it. It has a stylish, atmospheric graphical interface, but also a text sidebar where a lot of description is added, as well as an account of what's going on in your protagonist's brain and the dialogue taking place between the characters.

Another game I recently really enjoyed was Citizen Sleeper, a haunting sci-fi story set on a space station. You play a sort of android whose body belongs to a corporation, and at the start of the game you've gone into hiding. You don't want to be owned anymore, so you have to take odd jobs around the slum areas of the station, initially to survive and to make contacts so you can work out how to escape and be permanently free of your owners.

Although there's a graphical interface it plays out a lot like a visual novel aspects, with static character portraits and lots of dialogue. The world around the characters is three-dimensional, and you move across it sort of in the way you might plot a journey across Google Maps. The rest of the story, including all the actions you undertake, is told through descriptive writing.

It's really interesting that you now have video games with near-photorealistic graphics, but many developers choose other options. It's not necessarily to do with a lack of time or expertise. Both Citizen Sleeper and Disco Elysium could have included fully animated 3D characters and cinematic cut scenes, but the developers decided it would make more sense to give you less visual information – just a rough idea of what things look like at a glance – and do most of the actual world-building, most of the enriching of the fictional landscape, through text. Through writing.