My experience of P2 overall was that I felt very challenged but felt very fulfilled by what I learned from it. Before I started, my understanding of the Interactive Fiction genre was mainly informed by visual novels (dating simulators) and games that use embedded narratives like the Stanley Parabole and parts of Breath of the Wild. I knew that choose your own adventure word games existed too, but I perceived the genre to be a lot more visual asset driven than it needs to be. After exploring twine-made word games and parser fiction, I realized that text can be incredibly powerful. I decided to push myself in a more text heavy direction since I felt less confident with it. I wanted to focus on creating a good narrative and build characters.
My Interaction Fiction, Grandma’s Phone, offers discovery and narrative aesthetics and aims for outcomes in attitude and behavioral change. The game puts the player into the POV of a granddaughter who recently lost their grandma. In the process of digging through their grandma’s phone for funeral information, the protagonist learns more about their grandma than they ever did when she was still alive. This is where the discovery aesthetic comes in — players get to explore the phone in any order they wish and learn more about the protagonist’s dynamics with their family as they dig deeper. Though I was no longer working on visual media, I was interested in the power of embedded and enacting narrative in creating behavior change for topics that can feel too cheesy as a directly told narrative. In this case, it is to spend more time with your loved ones when you can). As the player learns more about the family and applies their learnings to how the protagonist interacts with the mother, the player enacts ways for the family relationship to change and enjoys the narrative aesthetic.
This experience taught me a lot about choosing when to encourage player agency versus taking it away. I had to reflect a lot about when to make the user enact something and have agency so they feel like the message is less forced. In other cases, I felt like I had to curate the experience more to tailor to the kind of story I wanted to tell about the family. I also learned a lot about how to write a good narrative in general. I learned about general creative writing tips—world building, character building, etc., and that is always helpful in anything that involves storytelling.
