Before making an interactive fiction game, I had kind of forgotten how much I love stories.
I’ve spent the last several years as a science teacher, and while I adore biology (and science communication), I didn’t realize how much a preference for the quantitative had snuck into my mind. It’s easy to begin proselytizing about the merits of data, especially when you’re trying to convince students that recording good data is really worth it. And the physics teachers are always poking fun at us bio folks for being too soft.
As a child, I was artsy, spacey, people-oriented, and a truly ravenous consumer of books. When we began this unit, I got to re-immerse myself in a world I always thought I would end up in. The games in class (storytelling games! D&D style games!) felt so fun and refreshing. I also dove immediately into the narrative of my game — I wanted to make something personal and meaningful, like the “zinesters” reading had described. Alas, stories can be slippery. I immediately began struggling with all the things I wanted to include, and all the directions the story might go. I found myself in the same place I often end up in projects of all kinds: with around 35 beginnings and no endings. The novelty of new ideas holds so much more value to my brain than the satisfaction of completion does (and therein lies my constant downfall).
Simultaneously, I began my battle against technology, as I really have avoided all even remotely code-like interactions prior to this. I got to find out how variables might work, how to write instructions to a computer in any form (and the order they will be read in), and how to overcome my perception that I am bad at all tech. It was great that Twine is so deeply intuitive and that Chapbook let me play with nice colors, which I always like. It’s also good to notice that I’m very uncomfortable making mistakes in this kind of space. I want it to work on the first try! It turns out that’s not really how it goes.
As I watched my playtesters experiment with my prototypes, I became genuinely delighted in the moments they laughed or were curious, because so much of my own life story was wrapped up in this game. If a player thought the cat character was cute, I was proud, because the actual Cricket was cute, and I wanted that to come through. If they were frustrated by a dead end, I was excited, because it meant they wanted to keep going. And when they gave useful feedback, I was highly motivated to make the story better, because it was so important to me that I got it right.
There was a downside to this level of personal investment, though, which is that I couldn’t always see what was wrong with the game through my “history-colored glasses.” Because I knew the place and characters that I was writing, things felt obvious to me that weren’t always to my players. I had to go back many times to fix things that felt totally intuitive to me that were completely obtuse to others.
Overall, it was very fun to realize that stories are kind of like games, and that narratives should be playtested many times too. As a writer, I’ll move forward from P2 more able to put my crappy prototypes of communication in front of people. As a gamemaker, I’ll move forward knowing games can be just for you, or just for silliness, or just a love letter to a place, a person, and a cat. As a person, I have remembered that stories are a great joy of my life. And all of those are enormous gifts! So thank you, P2.
