Interactive Drama

My Life With Master is as seminal a work in the history of tabletop role-playing games as Frankenstein was for literature. It's a game designed around not a narrative, but a dramatic scenario that you act out, producing your own unique narrative. From a game designer's perspective, it's something that must be studied, it's something that must be played.

Some years ago, at Fastaval in Århus, Denmark, I had one of the most splendid, if brief, roleplaying experiences in my life, in a mixed company of Danes, Swedes, and Finns, who partially in my honor and partially because English was the only language they had in common, chose to play with me in a language I found comprehensible. The game we played was The Upgrade; and it's a source of some little frustration that, reading over the materials they've used to present it to the world, my main emotion is a sense of dissatisfaction that the prose itself does not impart a clear notion of the pleasure to be gained by experiencing this remarkable ouevre. In part, perhaps, this is because it is translated from the Swedish (and for those who read it, a version in the original tongue is also available via the link above); but in part, it is also because some things that can be experienced in play are impossible to express in the more mundane form of the words used to describe their rules. Not always, to be sure; in reading, say, My Life With Master, you obtain a sense of the genius that likes within; but in the case of The Upgrade, surely, you do indeed need to play the game to understand what it has to offer.

The Witch's Yarn is a graphic adventure with a difference. Rather than being an exercise in puzzle-based problem solving, it's more of an interactive drama--your choices in terms of actions and exposition affect the reactions of the other characters, and the direction of the story.

For decades, true interactive fiction--an application in which characters' responses to a player's input are determined algorithmically rather than via prescripted sequences, and in which valid stories emerge regardless of player action--has been a holy grail for AI researchers, digital artists, and game developers alike.