This is a summation of the 10 games in 2019 that provided me with the most enjoyment, where “enjoyment” is interpreted broadly. As such, it’s inherently weighted by my own preferences (innovative narrative, adventure games, single-player). There’s a “top 10 games of 2019” list out there that makes a case for Remnant: From the Ashes and Apex Legends, but it’s not this one. I’ll also be publishing a collection of narrative games that came out in 2019 that I think are worth a look; there’s some overlap between the lists, but I didn’t want to limit that one artificially by number. Finally: I’ve gone in alphabetical order, except that I’ve saved my game of the year for last. Continue reading “Top 10 Games of 2019” →

Not all player choices have to have mechanical effects. It’s less interesting to establish this point (and constantly re-defend it) than it is to say: given that reflective choice is a legitimate technique, it can be used well or badly. Some reflective choice is astonishingly effective, and some is worse than useless. The tools we use to interrogate mechanical choices won’t necessarily be very helpful in distinguishing between the two. What goes into a strong reflective choice?

Continue reading “Successful Reflective Choices in Interactive Narrative” →

(or, “should have been two dogs”)

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is a bleak American folk tale of a narrative game about wandering the country and trading stories. If you’ve heard about the project, you know that one of the features that sets it apart is the sheer number of writers who lent their diverse talents and voices to compose a game about America that speaks of and to many threads and cultures and backgrounds. There were 24 writers in all, and I was lucky enough to be one of them. Several people have already written excellent pieces on what writing for this game was like; Laura’s excellent postmortem especially covers the overall process of making the game. I didn’t write any of the major 16 characters you speak to, and I only wrote a proportionately small handful of stories, so this is only about my process in my own small corner. And no, I can’t tell you how we got Sting.

Continue reading “Postmortem: Where the Water Tastes Like Wine” →

I wasn’t sure initially if I would submit to Manifesto Jam: I liked the idea, but I am not much of a manifesto writer. My work tends to be crowded with hedges and footnotes, reflective choices and spaces that aren’t always resolved. But that, in the end, is why I wrote what I did: I wanted to imagine a manifesto that was not didactic, that did not draw hard lines (between what is and isn’t a ‘lacunic interactive’; what is and isn’t an ‘interactive’ at all) and most of all could speak to much of my work without having to confine all of my work–both current and present. Hence, On Lacuna came to be. I want to elaborate here on some of my reasoning behind the points I chose to include, and how they’re reflected in interactives I make or enjoy.

Continue reading “On Lacuna: in elaboration of a (sort-of)manifesto” →

This Sunday, during a Twitter conversation, Emily Short idly mentioned she’d wanted to host a Tiny Utopias IF jam. This kicked off a host of whimsical impromptu works, including a couple I made.

There’s something about the prompt which I think is inherently fertile. It asks you sketch out an entire world, one which your readers will understand as better, in a confined space. There’s a balance between the ideal of ultimate freedom and the constraints of implementation there.

Porpentine kicked things off and made FROLIC RPG, a pink delight of emojis, dancing, friend-making and frolicking. It’s an experiential piece, one that for me resists description deliberately.

Brendan Patrick Hennessy created an emoji narrative found here; I’m counting it because it’s an iteration of an imagined future where all communication is done in emoji, part of what could well be a larger piece. But also, emoji’s semiotic instability requires parsing on behalf of the reader such that the piece created cannot exist without active reading. (Also because I can.)

Bruno Dias’s game is Miniature Utopian Parser Ritual #1, which I found genuinely moving and have played several times through at this point. There’s something about using parser input conventions to suggest a linear path; this, to me, is where the ritual of the title comes in. Deviation isn’t possible because deviation isn’t the point: this is a meditation. You can’t get it wrong. You can’t lose. It feels very much like a gift.

Emily Short herself created TinyHillside, a lovely little gem of a piece, shards of a life like a kaleidoscope which you can turn over. The work features a very clear protagonist, all the pieces of their life jangling together, picked over and made whole (perhaps, just perhaps) by context and memory. There’s no obligation or duty or binding of the PC; just experience, rest, quiet.

I made two things; the first, POSTMODERN UTOPIA, is a tiny text piece that’s more about deciding what possible personal self-contentment can exist within the context of this current world in we actually live. What would it take to find peace?  Perhaps a bit more earnest and on-the-nose than I usually am, but I found it a productive exercise to seriously consider what would be the best possibilities, given my own and others’ current constraints.

For xChange, I wanted to do something different: I wanted to create a world that felt strange and teeming and filled with every possible encounter with what you aren’t, but which ended in a deeper understanding. To that end, depth and richness in 300 words or less seemed like a good place to play with Tracery grammars.

Obviously there’s a limit to the feeling of “infinite encounters”; passages do get reused. I wanted this to a degree, actually: the intention was that the more you encounter semiotically impossible creatures, the more you get inured to the strangeness around you, like, “oh yeah there’s that being made of infinite fractal light again, sigh”. In a different, more detailed project I would have pruned away previously-used sentence structures, but the idea of xChange is that you are able to continue indefinitely, if you like. That would be very difficult with 300 words; I would have needed to build a structured grammatical model in which was capable of putting together sentence strings, and I wasn’t up for doing that for a game jam.

There are still occasionally weird moments that the grammar throws: I pruned some of the less interesting ones, but deliberately kept some of the jarring ones. A degree of semantic nonsense there to mimic the disorientation of the protagonist, essentially.

One of the things that struck me about all of the Tiny Utopias games, my own included, is that they feel meditative. My initial thought was that it’s a quality inherent to a tiny game, but Chandler Groover’s creak, creak for TwinyJam, for example, isn’t something I would categorize that way. All of these games either create or illustrate a ritual: the protagonist, as well as the player sometimes, is asked to surrender to a kind of act which takes on a significance larger than themselves. And maybe that’s utopia: the something outside of ourselves that is, despite all probability, kind, and peaceful, and well-intentioned, which we can grasp.

I’ve mostly been doing contract and day job work since I came back from GDC with my head full of new project ideas. It’s been admittedly frustrating to spend much of my day on work which sometimes has little to do with games, narrative, or creative writing, especially when I want to be working on these new ideas. I’m laying foundations for work down the road: but sometimes it’s hard to feel that way.

Taking a couple hours out of my day to make a couple of tiny worlds, to reach for something outside of my usual avenues, felt genuinely restorative. I might need to do this more regularly.

EDIT:

Tiny Utopias keep pouring in! Most of them seem to hold to my earlier thoughts about ritual. If there are any I’ve missed–or if you’re inspired to make your own–please let me know and I’ll add them. And there’s now a jam page on IFDB!

“Powers of Two” by b minus seven is spare but evocative, assonant words cascading on down. I found myself playing with Rorschach-adjacent ideas (“road” or “seer” felt like a tarotic choice).

Chandler Groover made the strangely soothing “Skull-Scraper“, a dark, strange, but comforting story of plenty and ritual, about who cleans up after us when we’re gone.

Astrid Dalmady offers “TinyUtopia“, an enchanting slice of life that soothes in its depiction of a tiny glittering moment.

VerityVirtue has “morning after“, which read to me as a comforting reading of the pleasure in duty and work at something crucial. Plus tea. This is–strangely–a world in which I might want to live.

And another from Bruno, adding credence to the claim that skulls and utopias aren’t mutually exclusive.

Hannah Powell-Smith has created “Enough“, a warm, comforting reassurance, quietly encouraging that things are okay.

Mathbrush made “Fridgetopia“, where you can create and assemble words to your will.

Caelyn Sandel offers “Tiny Beach“, an immersive experience set on a seaside (and which is still open in the background as I write this, because I find the created utopia incredibly soothing). EDIT: since making this post, Sandel has created a whole host of tiny, shimmering gems, hosted on a page she’s made especially for the jam. They’re all multimedia, immersive experiences; I especially recommend Palm River.

A. Johanna DeNiro made “TinyUtopia Football Manager: Super Slam Soccer Edition” which is delightful. It takes a genre I find fascinating from a distance (the sports management sim) and offers something new and lovely.

Oreolek has “Antropology“, a minimalist word-based slice of life; the soundtrack really underscores the dynamism of the structure. Everything is constantly in motion–well, nearly everything.

“Moving Day” is by helado de brownie, a piece about leaving it all behind for something better.

This isn’t technically made for the jam, but Adri called it an “un-submission” and it’s adorable, so here’s “Kii!Wii!”

Here is Teaspoon’s “sheep here“, which I don’t want to overhype but please play this game. I think I’ve discovered I really love what I think of as “parser poetry”, small parser games with a limited verb set (Chandler Groover is amazing at this). (Try eating yourself, once you’ve gone through the logical options.)

Ade has “We Are Unfinished“, a meditation on perspectives which I found wholly absorbing. (Someone read it as a companion to “Map”, and while I’m not sure that reading works for me, it’s at least an interesting idea.)

There’s A.C.Godliman’s Mushrooms Red As Meat, which requires fullscreen. I spent an absorbing half-hour exploring the last lingering memories of a decaying world; the visual aspect especially immersed me.

rocketnia offers “The Shape of Our Container“, a soft and gentle meditation on rest and mutual understanding. It posits a world where the anxieties of existence and connection are soothed away.

Then we have “Untie,” credited to Alex Ellis, a Twine meditation on freeing oneself of attachments. I’m not sure my reading is what the author intended, but I see the final choice of sleep as a way of washing over, cancelling out both obligations and the rebellion from obligation–a way of smoothing out the ravelled sleeve of care, as it were.

Brian Kwak made “Coffee and Tea“, a soothing slice of life where you make the perfect cup. It’s made in Texture, which feels like the right choice: I liked having to drag the word, to take a sustained action on the track pad, to achieve my delicious end. Have a mug of your favorite hot beverage handy.

Invasion post-mortem, because I couldn’t resist the thematic resonance, and also because I want to talk a bit here about my intent in writing the piece, and about some of the design choices.

Before I do, there’s now a version up on itch.io that has some of the CSS I initially wanted to add, and hopefully more typos removed! Keeping the default stylesheet was a conscious choice, an homage to some of the Ectocomp games I’ve loved in years past. I knew I wanted to do Grand Guignol, but I wanted it to still be Speed IF and feel like Ectocomp of yore–I personally felt strange about submitting a finely tuned piece where all the sound effects and backgrounds worked in harmony.

• you have a story idea scratching at the inside of your skull, but no time to do more than ponder mechanics
• you suddenly have a very long plane ride with nothing more pressing to attend to
• you know you can write really fucking fast.

I gave myself a limit of the flight (plus airport transit time on both ends) to see how much of this I could knock out. Not counting the editing done Sunday night (and thanks to Andrew Watt for pinch hitting on that; all remaining mistakes are my own, yes I know about the alt-text in the zip file), the whole piece took about 8 hours. I wrote Invasion on the flight to Los Angeles for Indiecade; not counting imtermittent dozing and airport milling, 8 hours seems like a pretty good estimate for how much time I spent hunched over my laptop typing. Including code bits but not borrowed stylesheets and scripts, there are about 10,000 words in Invasion. I don’t even want to do the math on words per hour. The point is: I write fast, and I know I write fast.

So I figured I could manage a mid-length game, and I suppose I was right; I don’t know how coherent it is as a mid-length game. I can see all the little pieces of truncated ideas I didn’t have time to implement, but I don’t know if it would be a better game if I had. I knew I wanted the early game to feel a bit like a bait-and-switch by subtly invoking some familiar parser tropes. (There’s a reason the field is described as being “east” despite me being terrible with the compass in both parser and reality.) I’m not sure how much of that sense remained after I rewrote the opening, though. The original intention was to make it feel like a game that would work better as a parser, to give the player a sense of wanting to explore the world more, examine and take objects that weren’t keyed by the author. I wanted a sense of puzzlement, even frustration, as you run around picking up everyday mementos from the forest floor while a slavering horror advances to devour you, until you figure out why you’re doing this. I don’t know how effective this was, admittedly, but I am curious.

Also, the “why isn’t this a parser” reaction also felt crucial to what happens in the later game, when essentially your freedom is further stripped away and you’re left with only unpleasant, confining alternatives. Invasion is about isolation, about not being able to reach out and tell people how you’re feeling, what’s happening to you. In my mind, Twine as a format is often at its strongest when it’s telling stories about constraint and pain. Invasion is a story about both. I needed that sense of claustrophobia, that feeling of all these doors and windows of possibility and ingenuity shuttering in an instant. You can’t KISS alien. You can’t ASK alien ABOUT interstellar diplomacy. You can’t PLEAD for alien to LEAVE YOU ALONE, HASN’T IT DONE ENOUGH.* So. Twine, not Inform.

The mid-to-late game is brutally linear. I’d have wanted it to be so even if this weren’t Speed IF. You always end up with the same three choices. Your selection of who you dream of does significantly alter the glimpses of backstory you get, in that dreaming of an individual causes you to ruminate on them in all places where it’s possible to do so, which is at least once per day. If you think of Lakshmi, you get a real sense of your relationship, but you don’t have much access to your mother anymore.

That’s intentional. This isn’t a game with a high degree of replayability, and so I wanted the choice to represent a loss, and not necessarily one where the entire significance of that loss could be realized in the moment. This is a game about losing your memories and sundering connections to your loved ones, and thus to parts of yourself. Knowing at all turns what you’re giving up runs counter to the experience I wanted to build.

The idea of the agalma runs heavily through Invasion: in Greek lyric, an agalma denotes precious gift object, carefully crafted and beautiful, beyond its usual common definition of a votive statue to the gods. The agalma of Homer creates appreciation and exaltation in its viewer, and through the curation of that experience, the conjuring of those emotions of delight, builds fond relationships between strangers, between the human and the divine.** The embedding of memory in an object that can conjure an absent ghost is an idea that I keep coming back to, and wanted to explore. The agalmata in this story forge links between individuals, to preserve memories that would otherwise be lost (I have a whole structural idea of how that loss happens, but I didn’t have enough time here to do the concept justice.) But they also act as links, as threatening bonds between alien and human. What nourishes you destroys you, etc.

Emily Short has talked about games as a medium for being able to talk about truth slant, to tell stories in a way that feels safe for both reader and author. Arkady Martine once said that aliens are full of allegory. I happen to agree with them both. Thus, Invasion was born. I was glad for the opportunity to tell this story, and I might like to come back and explore the world in greater depth at some point. We’ll see.

* Maybe another time! A piece with “KISS alien” and “ASK alien ABOUT interstellar diplomacy” does seem like something I would write.

**yes, this is a very particular metaphorical and not entirely Classicist-approved reading of the function of agalmata. But I’m taking poetic liberties.

It’s a proper blog! This seems like a nice place for thoughts about writing, both my writing and other people’s which I find thought-provoking.

I’m Cat Manning. Up until now, I’ve mostly written about dead languages and historical cosmopolitanism for my day job, but I’ve gotten heavily invested in interactive fiction recently. I’m a latecomer to the scene, but I’ve been writing creatively on and off for the better part of two decades now. I like speculative fiction, digital humanities, translation and rewriting, and marginalia. I also like commas and semicolons more than is good for me. I’m working on several interactive fiction pieces across a variety of platforms (Inform7, Undum, and Choicescript), and this seems like a good place to talk about processes, both specific and theoretical.

A bit more about me: Cat, late-twenties, she/her. Perpetually peripatetic and usually split between Los Angeles, London, and the small town where I’m finishing up my Ph.D. in Renaissance literature. I love graffiti (ancient, modern, and imagined) and cityscapes (especially the ones in someone’s head).