Like many of my interests, interactive fiction is a somewhat aspirational hobby of mine. The records show I created an account in summer 2017, placing this as a college interest (which is semi-unexpected to me). If I had to put myself back in my college shoes, I would guess that I was newly off of declaring my computer science minor and trying desperately to figure out where computer science and English intersected. Had the timeline been a little different, I could have been obsessed with AI. (Maybe I will still be forced to care about AI.)
What I do remember vividly was the first interactive fiction game I played: Counterfeit Monkey. Emily Short is a titan in the interactive fiction (IF) community, and while Counterfeit Monkey wouldn’t be the game I would choose to put in front of newbies to the genre, Short’s expertise and wit and design suckered me in.
I was frustrated by the game. The whole premise of IF is that you put in prompts to tell the game what to do (if that sentence makes no sense to you, perhaps this reference card will help). As good as technology and game design had gotten by then, I wasn’t always clever enough to find the exact verb or noun to target. Plus, puzzle games aren’t really my thing; one of my favorite childhood anecdotes to tell is that I refused to learn how to play chess as a kid because I knew my brother would beat me if I played him. What sticks in my mind from the Counterfeit Monkey experience, however, is the puzzle/solution chart. I couldn’t believe that you could make something like this, something that accounts and works with the player but in the guise and confines of a story. How could a computer, a simple line parser, be so flexible?
I tried to write my own interactive fiction: I remember messing around with Twine, a different strand of IF that is link-based, acting like a choose-your-own-adventure, and bookmarking many masterposts on Tumblr. I played more games: an actual introductory game Bronze, the Twine masterclass Birdland, the infinitely frustrating Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the game that comes to mind first when I think about IF these days, Aisle. I wanted to bring IF into the classroom, but deep down I truly wanted to be able to create my own game, and this medium seems so close to my strengths.
But, as I said at the top—aspirational hobby. When I dig back through my IF history, I see a trail of ghosts: the games that I marked from MathBrush’s starter list that I will likely never follow through with, the newsletters sitting in my inbox from Aaron Reed’s fantastic and informative 50 year retrospective on IF, the text adventure documentary on YouTube that has been in my watch later list for at least six years, at least five games festering in my likes from the interact-if Tumblr blog. There are things that briefly reawaken my dormant interest, the latest being stumbling across a post about all the different uses of “Oy” in a Jewish historical fantasy IF game released in the last year. I considered buying it on Steam.
It’s clear I’ve gained something from the genre—you can see it in how seventy-five percent of the blog posts I write are covered in links. I love that writing online has this way of opening optional rabbit holes, that people reading my work can either take it simply as is or that they can explore and dig deeper. Interactive fiction games can be played straight, getting from point A to point B, but there are branching paths, multiple endings, little easter eggs when you make a clever move or when you know a genre in-joke.
Interactive fiction is one of the purer marriages of words and technology, taking the best of both worlds—stories and choice. And I want to pay real homage to it! I want to wrestle with code, create a game that creates a rich experience, make a contribution to this cool corner of the internet. But fiction, even when dressed up with choice and complex code, is still fiction—out of my wheelhouse. In that community, I may have to be content with just being a consumer and celebrating instead what other people have lovingly crafted. Maybe I should start working on my meager backlog.
Alex Johnson (‘19) is a high school English teacher in Massachusetts. She spends her days being an uncool adult who enjoys reading romance novels and explaining niche rhythm game strategies.
