Category: interactive fiction

Making Phenomena

Dawn Sueoka

Phenomena began, like most creative things I do, with my favorite obsession/puzzle, the film Last Year at Marienbad. I was reading articles from BAMPFA’s CineFiles database, and came across this passage from an analysis by Freddy Sweet: "The key to understanding Marienbad is the realization that the very structure of the film is consciously designed… Continue reading Making Phenomena

There are robots in this rabbit hole, also interactive fiction

Dawn Sueoka

As part of a new project I'm working on, I’ve been exploring the structure of Last Year at Marienbad and The Invention of Morel in terms of a branching narrative--or perhaps more accurately, a kind of fractured narrative. I hope to write more about that later. But first, I wanted to do a little bit… Continue reading There are robots in this rabbit hole, also interactive fiction

A Clock in its walls

Dawn Sueoka

Source: https://lecinemadreams.blogspot.com/2015/12/meet-me-in-st-louis-1944.html My annual Christmas re-watching of Meet Me in St. Louis, coupled with, well, all of 2020, has gotten me thinking a lot about time, and the way that the passage of time is both communicated and experienced in choice-based interactive fiction (for a great discussion of time in parser games, see this). Specifically,… Continue reading A Clock in its walls

Cement is the flour, concrete is the bread: making So Are the Days

Dawn Sueoka

By the time the SNES came out, I had pretty much stopped playing videogames. This is why So Are the Days’s overall conceit is based on games from 30+ years ago: besides Twine games, those games (e.g., StarTropics, Bubble Bobble, Super Contra, Duke Nukem, DOOM, Wolfenstein 3D, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?) are… Continue reading Cement is the flour, concrete is the bread: making So Are the Days

A made place: Interactive fiction and “location-based poetry”

Dawn Sueoka

The “space” inhabited by a poem has been conceptualized in terms of music or sound (e.g., Tracie Morris, John Cage), in terms of painting (e.g., Gertrude Stein, John Yau, John Ashbery), in terms of ritual (e.g., Bhanu Kapil, CAConrad). But what about in terms of, well, space?  I was at the No Fair/Fair at AWP… Continue reading A made place: Interactive fiction and “location-based poetry”

Where one endless corridor follows another: thoughts on translating Robbe-Grillet into Inform 7

Dawn Sueoka

Background I’ve been learning more about parser IF lately, and what I think I like most about it (and what I liked most about lurking around LambdaMOO back in the day) is exploring space that is at the same time imaginative and rule-bound. Learning to write parser IF in Inform is especially interesting and exciting… Continue reading Where one endless corridor follows another: thoughts on translating Robbe-Grillet into Inform 7

Making ROUND / SQUARE

Dawn Sueoka

Well, I have covered myself in hundreds of index cards again! This time to make ROUND / SQUARE, a micro game I submitted to sub-Q Magazine’s #subQjam. The prompt was to tell an interactive story about love in fewer than 1,000 words--1,000 words across ALL paths. In the way it distills each choice into two… Continue reading Making ROUND / SQUARE