What if a book wasn’t a story that begins at point A and ends at point Z? What if a story changed as you read it? That is the premise of interactive fiction, a genre where storytelling is a collaborative effort between the author and reader. In interactive fiction, text is movable and mutable. By its nature there is not just a single story, but 2 or 8 or even open-ended worlds where the story never reaches a horizon. The plot, resolution, and development of characters is begun by one writer but is completed by the interactivity between the creator(s) and one or more readers. These stories change and breath, live and die, by the decisions made by their audience. Depending on the medium, the text itself may be altered by reader/player choices. Replays/rereads can deliver a totally novel experience. In this course, we will look at numerous forms that interactive storytelling can take, from page based Choose Your Own Adventure novels, to early computer adventure games, role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, immersive theater, VR game spaces, cooperative Muds/Mushes, while exploring how narrative game design differs from novel writing. We will play games. We will read fiction and theory. We will write and code. And in the end, we will design, pitch, and execute a prototype Twine-based interactive story for our final project.
