Interactive Fiction Reflection

I’m not a good writer. I knew this before starting this project, but still I was excited for it. This project for me was about the interactivity much more than it is about the fiction/story. From the moment I started, the first thing I had in mind is what I wanted to teach and how interactive it was going to be. Little did I know that I was getting myself into (arguably) a bigger issue than my horrible writing.

Where did my last 3 weeks go?

So here’s the deal, I have a 65% finished game here. This simple, probably less than 5 minutes playtime game took me countless hours to finish it. This might seem like an exaggeration, but I can explain. You might be able to see part of the complexity that this game required by going through the different choices and seeing the branching nature of this game. One thing that I hated was the illusion of branching in a lot of games, so I wanted to create as realistic as possible branching. And I did, but in doing so, I spread the story too thin that I started exponentially branching at different points.

However, most of my time was not spent writing. It was spent starring at my screen trying to understand my character(s) in all of the different paths. I wanted to bring the experience as close to the player as possible, so I had to imagine my 2 main characters with their full emotions and reactions. Add to that having to jump from one branch to another; having to jump from a branch that leads to a break-up to another that has them living together fighting depression. It was exhausting. Top that with the topic I’m writing about: depression.

I didn’t think the topic would affect me that much, but the more time I spent on this piece, the more I started feeling for my main character. Some of the choices for what to say in the story are based on experiences from my own life. The story that I really wanted to write became a story that I hated to be honest. I didn’t want to be in a world too similar to my own - too similar to some bad parts of my own. As a result, I started distancing myself from it a bit. The distancing however meant that my quality went down, but I had to make it through this project somehow.

I failed at writing a good interactive fiction, but I am proud of what I have learnt.

What did I learn?

My writing didn’t get better. My programming skills didn’t get any better either. I didn’t do any designs, no audios. No hard skills that I can just bring up in an interview to impress an interviewer with my ability to learn such skills in a short time. What I learnt, in my opinion, is more important than that. I came in to this class with the mentality of not doing anything is better than doing something crappy. This attitude meant that whenever I’m passionate about a topic, I go all out for the perfect product. I take too much pride in what I make that if it’s not good enough, I hide it from the world. This definitely is aa behavior that persisted while working on this project, and it affected the amount of feedback I got. I know now to be more brave, to accept my weaknesses and to make up for them with users and repetition no matter what I have.

Regarding writing interactive fiction, I learnt that sometimes I may take decisions as the designer that will make my process easier. I look back at what I was trying to create vs. my favorite game, and it feels like I was missing the mark a bit. I was creating this very realistic game that tried to model as many choices and feelings as possible. This just led to exponentially increasing amount of work and exponential chaos. On the other hand, my current favorite game is called Florence. How complex is Florence? It’s a 100% linear story with minimal puzzles. But the game focuses on visual and auditory elements which are its strengths. I know now to focus on small things and grow them slowly rather than spreading myself and my story too thin.

Moving On

Whether I visit back the same story or start a new one in the future, I know that I will use interactive fiction at some point later on. Next time, I will do my best to focus on my strengths rather than what I think I should do. I will start small, and slowly expand my story to include what I think would be effective to the experience. The experience that does not necessarily depend on complexity, but rather intentionality.