Written Worlds: Exploring Frontiers of Fiction Through Interactive Stories
I’ve shared much about journeys in VR over the last few weeks. This time we’re taking a little detour, going to an earlier period of my life that firmly believe is still relevant today. We’re talking about interactive fiction!
As spirited young child who didn’t yet understand why she felt disconnected from herself and the world around her, I constantly hungered for escape outlets. It never felt like a matter of playing pretend. It was a way to put myself into stories with a connection that felt so much more real than just reading a typical book.
As much as my burgeoning imagination loved the stories that I encountered, I hungered to experience these journeys for myself. When I stumbled upon the world of interactive fiction at that age, it felt like lightning in a bottle. Sure there were videogames, but there was something about interactive stories that felt so much more real.
Core to the experience is the matter of agency. The second person perspective can be an incredibly powerful way to invite a reader to feel like a participant as events unfold. A story can define who the reader is or who they become, but in some of the best cases the story can leave the perspective up to the reader. This is especially helpful in cases when your own perspective isn’t commonly represented. When you can just be yourself in a story, it creates a very similar foundational experience to interacting with Virtual Reality. The space is largely imagined, but it serves the same purpose.
Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! was one of the first interactive stories that I ever experienced. It might seem primitive by today’s standards, but the experience of playing it is so very similar to a lot of modern adventure games. You delve into a role, there are choices and consequences laden throughout, and different skills or resources can turn the tables in a multitude of ways. Victory and defeat always feel a page away, as long as you can resist the urge to cheat!
As opposed to popular tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons, classic gamebooks are a more solitaire-like experience, with systems running in place to determine success or failure rather than having one of the players guiding the experience as a Dungeon Master. This makes them a lot closer many modern games, where rules are put in place to guide the player as they go on an adventure.
We might assume that interactive fiction of this sort is a thing of the past but these types of games have so much potential when it comes to being brought into a modern, digital front. When you can track variables in real time then the amount of variety and potential that can be communicated to a reader is limited only by the depth of the writing.
While digital conversions of classic games are one thing, they’re mostly a launching point for the potential of what we can do with interactive stories. In a way, most modern videogames are interactive stories in one way or another, at least videogames that still contain narratives.
This might be an unpopular opinion but I feel that sometimes a focus on graphics can take away from a narrative experience, over-explaining or realizing a vision with too much detail. It takes away that sense of connection by doing too much of the lifting, by not allowing one’s imagination to flourish in the same way.
When the focus is on the narrative instead, so many more resources can be put into expanding the narrative itself.
One of the best examples of modern interactive fiction is the Fallen London series by Failbetter games. The original Fallen London has expanded to over 1.5 million words, expanding out to numerous potential situations and circumstances and tracking minute details. It has graphical systems in the form of maps and interfaces, but all of the action is expressed purely through text.
It’s interactive fiction in its purest form.
Even without any form of graphical interface, however, there is really nothing quite so powerful as an adequately encouraged imagination. Setting the scene and allowing the reader to become a participant. To me it feels like it transcends being just a game, weaving a whole word for the reader to participate in.
It’s truly magical.
At any rate, thank you for reading and I appreciate any claps or feedback! I hope to bring more content in the future, and in the meanwhile I hope you have an excellent summer!