(How) Can I Help? : An Interactive Fiction
Over the last 3 weeks, I have attempted working on one of the most challenging projects of my undergraduate years at Stanford. The project was building a dystopian interactive fiction game. What at first looked like a task that could be fulfilled in no more than a week spiraled out of control into this huge mess of a problem that I needed to continuously adapt to. This post talks about my process starting with an idea that I thought was brilliant, my struggle with it to completely pivoting my project into yet another idea just few days ago. To say here that I now know how to write an interactive fiction game would be lying. I have learned a lot. I know how much work is needed to produce such a game, and most importantly, I’m a little more comfortable with putting my crappy work out there to take hard punches.
The hunt for an idea
Just like writing any story, the first step with writing this IF was finding the right idea to write about. I started this process by looking at different dystopian fiction that I know. I immediately came to realize that dystopia is not my favorite type of novels. On the contrary, I love magical fiction. So, I decided to start with magical fiction and turn it into dystopia somehow. My first attempt at this was this idea that there is a group of “outsiders” who look exactly like humans. However, because of something wrong with them, once they turn 18, they start having dreams, which they later realize are not dreams, but rather a second reality. I managed to change this idea into a dystopia by making the “outsiders” a government project. I previewed my idea in a bit more detail to a friend, and she asked “What am I supposed to learn by the end of this?” I didn’t have an answer. See, my fear of dystopia drove me to thinking too much about the story that I forgot why I’m telling it. I eventually managed to mold the story in a way that made it teach being nice to people. By that point, it started feeling too much of a cliche dystopia. My original idea started fading away, and I felt that it lost its character then.
Eventually, I threw that idea out the window, and I moved into another one. This time, I started with what I wanted to teach. I simply wanted to start a conversation around mental health stigma. A simple objective. This time, I avoided a lot of the issues with the previous draft. I started with a dystopia that takes a place mainly in a hospital-prison hybrid that you get taken to if you say anything that is not happy. After writing a decent amount of my story, I previewed it to my friend. She looked at me and said “This does not feel original at all. Is it just that the government is censoring the media to portray a happy image?” And damn was she right. At that point, I realized that dystopia is a lost cause for me, so I decided to switch gears.
V1: Fighting Depression in a Magical World
Sparking a conversation about mental health stigma is a goal that I have decided to keep even though my early ideas failed. This time, I decided to start with a world that is similar to what I usually read/watch, which is magical fiction.
Development
For this story, I wanted to focus on 2 main idea. The first is that the person fighting depression ends up fighting it on their own. This was manifested in the story with the Augustine (the little monster) and the magical world that are only existent in the room of Phil (The main character fighting depression). Phil also cannot tel people directly about his illness because of the masks everyone is wearing around him. These masks prevented people from hearing anything that didn’t make them happy such as other people’s depression. The second idea that I wanted to deliver was that depression could in some cases never die, but you learn how to deal with it. This is shown by having Augustine never leave the room, but rather he gets much weaker as Phil finds help to stay out of the magical world.
This idea felt innovative to me. It stayed away from the repetitive ideas that I have seen out there for the most part. After writing part of it in Twine, I started playtesting with a few friends.
Playtesting
One of my friends (Chloe Wintersteen, shoutout to her for playtesting everything I have created in this class), playtested the part in Twine in addition to orally moving along the branching fiction. As a fan of Harry Potter, Chloe liked the magical side of the story and its novelty. When I asked her about the choices that she had to make in the story, she mentioned that they were thrilling, but in some cases she didn’t know what could be the difference between the different choices. “Some of the choices felt like a mystery which I liked, but then others I felt indifferent about because I didn’t know what they could even influence.” While these are important issues to fix with the story, my main concern at this point was whether she saw what I was tryin to teach in the story or not. Her reaction was that maybe. The elements of trying to keep something away from everyone then somehow letting people know seemed to be well conveyed to her, but that could have been applied to anything, not only depression.
This was the point at which I questioned my version of the story and realized that I might have a good story for the wrong topic.
The reboot
I loved my magical fantasy. I still do love it, and I think there is a lot in that idea that is special to me, but it did not fit the experience I wanted to give people. By going to a magical fiction, I was able to abstract the stigma around sharing depression experiences with people, but the abstraction stripped this stigma from depression. If I wanted this idea to work, I had to add elements that are specific to depression.
I tried doing that, but it was painful and hard. I was effectively making up what depression feels like as someone who has not fought it. I started fearing misrepresenting it. With the lack of resources that I had about the topic, I decided to change gears yet once more, and I started by talking to my instructor Christina Wodtke.
Transition to V2: Research
Christina gave me a simple advice “why don’t you bring the narrative closer to you? What if you were the person supporting others that are going through depression?” By changing points of view, I became more comfortable with what I was writing, and I started thinking about my personal experiences as well as those around me. I found 2 sources really helpful at this stage: Depression Quest and Depression Part Two blog post.
V2: (How) Can I Help?
This is the story that I ended up building and could be found here. In this story, you are the boyfriend of Emma who is starting to fight depression. The story is mainly 3 scenes. The first one is an intro to you relationship at the moment. The second one is where Emma tells you she has depression. The third is more of a collection of interactions between you two where depression affects how you interact with each other. The story is branching, and I tried to provide as much variability as I could. I committed myself to a big breadth of choices, which made the game super short to play (~ 5mins). Check premise here.
Playtesting
I playtested this version in class and with a couple of other friends. My focus was on giving people meaningful, branching story. I encouraged people to go through the different choices to see that in action. I was really glad that people found that choices were actually affecting the story, and that they felt they had agency over the story. Some of my playtesting was done when I was only halfway done with it, and people were like “Is that it? What happens next?”, which I assumed as a good sign since they really wanted to continue playing.
Of course, it was not all rose-y and good. Breadth is hard… I know that there are a couple of bugs somewhere in my game for example, but it would take a lot of time to debug. In addition, given the complexity of choices, I started increasing the text/decision that is made for people, which was too much to read in some cases.
Final Thoughts
During these few weeks I have gotten to play a lot of IF games, and I have witnessed how awesome they are. If anything, I have become much more appreciative of what the medium can do. However, I also have become much more aware of the effort it takes to create a simple IF game. I might come back to IF later on, but I will definitely start faster and smaller and grow from there using the experience I gained from this project.
Play (How) Can I Help You? here.
