I tried to favor cloud-based software (stuff you don’t have to download), but where I found online solutions lacking I listed free downloadable software.

Last updated: 5/27/2010

Interactive Fiction tools

• Choice Script: scripting for multiple choice games
• TADS: the Text Adventure Development System
• Inform 7: extremely popular IF authoring software
• Twine: work using a graphical mapping system and output your story to a web page file for easy sharing
• Inform: “a design system for interactive fiction, created in 1993″ (inform-fiction.org)
• Curveship (Coming soon): a soon-to-be-released IF system (More info on the creator’s blog)

Visual novel construction kits

• Blade Engine
• Renpy
• Visual Novelty

Visual digital storytelling resources

• Story Bird: collaborative visual storytelling
• Prezi: an interactive approach to slideshows
• Zooburst: create 3D pop-up books from your photos
• OurStory: create multimedia timeline-based stories
• PikiWiki: easily build multimedia web pages

Video game tools

• Adventure Game Studio: adventure game maker
• Ogmo Editor: 2D Level Editor
• RPG Maker XP: create your own RPGs without all the fuss
• RPG Toolkit: An alternative to RPG Maker XP suggested by Shaun Knighton.

Comics tools

You don’t even have to draw to make a web comic anymore. And I’m not just talking about XKCD.

• Comic Lab
• Pixton
• Strip Generator
• ToonDoo

Video tools

• Xtranormal: text-to-video software
• Blabberize: Turn static photos into creepy, Gilliam-esque talking images
• Screenr: create quick and easy screencasts

Image editing tools

• Aviary Tools: Surprisingly robust features for an online application suite. Think PhotoShop Lite.
• Picnik: popular online photo editing application that lives up to the hype
• Sumo Paint
• Pixlr Editor
• Fotoflexr

Audio Editing

• Myna: another impressive online tool from Aviary
• Audacity: Another recommendation from Shaun Knighton. As he pointed out, if you’re dealing with big file sizes, having software that runs on your own system might be the way to go.

Misc.

• Processing: “an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions” (processing.org)

If you’re interested in this junk, you might want to follow me on Twitter or check out my public feed bundles via Google Reader:

• Interactive Fiction feeds
• New Media Storytelling feeds

Further Reading

• Fifty web tools for your web story: a far more thorough list of resources than the above
• Digital storytelling resources
• Brass Lantern’s resources for adventure game writers
• 100 Digital Storytelling Tools for Your Digital Selves + Natives
• Authoring Software and Platforms for Electronic Literature and New Media: This site isn’t tailored to the non-programmer and the site’s design is hideous, but there are still some resources worth checking out
• The Electronic Literature Organization

The First Alternative: The Never-Ending Story

I posit the two pitfalls of ending IF I (addressed in my previous post) arise from a failing to make a critical distinction between player-as-writer games and player-as-reader fiction.

A story that truly incorporates a significant amount of freedom, perhaps, is one that involves the player on the level of a writer rather than a reader. After all, if I’m really going to feel like I’m writing my own story, the last thing I want is to be forced into someone else’s ending.

Of course, it may be impossible to ever give a player total freedom. But video games like Oblivion, Fallout, and Mass Effect seem to allow enough freedom for us to feel that we’re not just playing out someone else’s story, but really writing your own, unique experience. In these cases, the best thing to do is obviously to create a full, immersive world enough world in which players can actively participate instead of merely observing.

Whether they choose to do so or not, I think a good rule of thumb is that players should be able to act in these games as they would in real life. This allows a player to closely identify with their character, emotionally placing them inside the story instead of casting them as some sort of external, godlike force. In other words, the relationship is player-avatar rather than reader-character. And since the experience is nevertheless fictitious and therefore safe from negative consequences, players can enjoy behaving in ways they never could in real life. I think this is where such a degree of freedom becomes truly satisfying. In these cases, perhaps the best ending is no ending at all.

The Second Alternative: Interactive Reading

On the other end of the IF spectrum, the freedom to reach more than one ending may be completely unnecessary. If your goal is to tell a compelling interactive story, not just to create a sort of narrative playground, then interactivity and player freedom should be at the level of the reading experience and not the level of the narrative itself. This type of story would follow a predetermined path with a predetermined ending, but the process by which the reader may explore this path is open. Here the participant’s role in the story is primarily that of reader, not writer.

A useful non-IF comparison might be that of a painting. While a painter may utilize his or her skills in such a way as to gently guide the eye along a particular path, (s)he hasn’t the means to limit the observer to that path. In fact, doing so would likely diminish the experience. The painter creates his work in two spatial dimensions and allows the observer to move freely in the dimension of time.

For IF in particular, this may mean there are multiple interwoven plot threads that one may read in a non-predetermined order, or perhaps a reader may select one of many vantage points from which to observe some shared event. I imagine, for example, a 3-dimensional rendering of some story with the reader given control over the camera. The experience would be akin to a play performed upon a stage through which the reader to wander without disturbing the actors.

Conclusion

A good novel makes a bad game and vice-versa. The act of trying to turn one form into the other without exercising creative license considerably is like alchemy; no one has ever proven it can produce gold.

Wait, let me try another one.

Making a novel digital and interactive may involve splicing in some video game DNA, but trying to breed the two naturally probably won’t produce viable offspring. They’re too far apart on the Storytelling Tree of Life.

While I do enjoy playing the type of games I listed under the former alternative, and I have played out some fantastic stories, I’m most interested in writing the latter alternative. I can’t predict what literary revolutions we’ll see in the future, but my instincts tell me this new type of story is the true heir of the novel. I believe so-called “visual novels” (currently more popular in Japan than the United States) comprise the beginning stages of this form’s development. I consider myself one of many writers interested in carrying this young form forward into the next stages of its evolution.

There Can Be Only One

My first creative writing professor drilled into my head that endings should be surprising yet inevitable, that they should somehow flow from the beginning. Whatever that means. If you’ve written fiction, you probably know how it feels to write an ending that just didn’t feel right. If you didn’t give up, you either had to revise the ending, the beginning, or—the likeliest scenario—both.

To me, this implies that a story’s beginning somehow contained or predetermined the true ending. If it’s true that a story needs a particular ending to be satisfying, then how could users’ choices leading to one of many endings ever feel as satisfying as a traditional novel?

Thus the two major pitfalls of IF endings. IF writers take heed.

Pitfall 1: Every Ending Sucks Except One

Perhaps the “stories only have one ending” hypothesis is too fatalistic or narrow-minded. Maybe there really can be multiple, equally satisfying endings. But when has this ever been the case? Have you ever played through an IF without finding one ending that stands out from the others, one that seems more natural and satisfying than all the rest? I haven’t. Sure, personal taste factors in, but there’s usually general agreement between players as to which ending is the best or “real” ending.

The worst examples of the favored ending are Choose Your Own Adventure books, where there’s usually only one good ending, a couple of pretty crappy endings, and a ton of endings where you die, lose everything important to you, and/or inadvertently aid the villain and feel like a total loser. The only way to reach the good ending is by memorizing your every move and using the process of elimination.

It’s just like playing a video game from the late 1980s.

Pitfall 2: Every Ending Sucks

If you’re playing an IF written by a remarkably creative author, you might encounter several equally “real” endings that are determined by your choices. Though some paths end better for different characters, none of them feel like the canonical ending. None are obviously the properly intended ending.

How happy are you with any of these endings? Knowing it just as easily could’ve ended some other way, how legitimate or conclusive do they feel? There usually seems to be something trivial or unsatisfying about all of them from a storytelling perspective. After all, how many surprising yet inevitable endings could there be to a story?

Part 2 of “Endings in Interactive Fiction” will be available Wednesday morning. Please let me know what you think so far. Do you agree? Disagree? Why? I’ve already written most of part 2, but I would love to incorporate any interesting ideas or questions that come up before I post it.

Update

Part 2 is up now.

Further Reading

1. Choose Your Own Adventure – Most Likely You’ll Die at Flowing Data

Thankfully, smart content filtering and recommendation technology is always improving. But the problem really lies at the source: too little signal drowned out by too much noise.

“Signal” is anything that has value to you. “Noise” is everything that doesn’t. Please note, I use the word “value” loosely here. Anything useful, anything that makes you laugh or brings you enjoyment, has value for you.

Signal, noise, and value are all relative terms of course. But disdain for navel-gazing is nigh universal. Those fifteen updates about your cat in the last hour are wasting 99% of your readers’ time, and that’s a conservative estimate.

Microblogging is a new technology, meaning microblogging etiquette is still in its infancy. We’re all still figuring out the best ways to do it. But the bigger problem isn’t that rules are too underdeveloped, it’s that too many users aren’t aware of what’s already become standard.

There’s no Ms. Manners of Twitter (yet), but some basic twetiquette guidelines are accepted by pretty much everyone who’s paying attention. Things like “don’t retweet without crediting the original source,” “listen more than you speak” and “don’t tweet in all caps” are little more than practical extensions of common courtesy.

In the vein of meatspace manners made web 2.0, I propose this Golden Rule of Microblogging: Tweet unto others what you would have them tweet unto you. In other words, before you click the share or send button, simply ask yourself “Would this have value to my readers?” If it only has value to one other person (@replies excluded), send a private message or wall post instead. If you doubt your post has value to anyone but yourself, you should probably just skip it; publicly posting your update would be like interrupting a conversation with a pointless non-sequitur.

“Well, I think Mary makes a good point. Pants should be considered optional in your own home.”

“Thanks, Paul. I personally prefer hideous sweatpants, but I think everyone has the right to sit around in just their tighty-whities if they wish. What do you think, Steve?”

“I served enchiladas on my last birthday!”

In other words, you’d be a douche.

As microblogging becomes ubiquitous, fixing the signal-noise ratio will become increasingly important. We’re all broadcasters now, and we have broadcasters’ responsibilities. If you broadcast via radio, you don’t jam the airwaves with noise. If you broadcast via the Internet, you don’t jam friends’ news feeds with noise. Like any etiquette of communication, the real point is to establish rules that best facilitate communication for everyone involved—that means best for sender and receiver.

To aid passive-aggressive signal-soldiers everywhere, I’ve prepared two web pages for immediate distribution. Show someone your appreciation by linking them to bit.ly/wowasignal, or voice your scorn with bit.ly/toomuchnoise.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Is this a lost cause? Will the signal-noise ratio improve as society and technology evolve?

-Jeremiah

Further reading

• http://www.i-boy.com/weblog/2008/11/signal-to-noise-and-zuckerbergs-law.html
• http://www.markevanstech.com/2008/11/08/help-were-being-digitally-bombarded/

So, there are these egg creams. Egg creams are supposed to be some kind of big deal in New York. It seems they possess neither egg nor cream. Instead, they are composed of seltzer water and some type of chocolate syrup. I had my first egg cream during my late night stop at the 24-hour Court Square Diner. It was good and it was different from any fountain beverage I’ve had, but I’m not yet convinced that it lives up to the hype.

Let’s talk about French fries. I love French fries. I love them so much. When May told me about Pommes Frites, I thought it was too good to be true.

I was wrong.

These French fries are relentlessly delicious, inexpensive, and bountiful. A regular-sized conic serving of french fries is more than enough to fill even the most abundant tummy space. I went there at around 2:00 with an empty belly, having missed breakfast and lunch. I could not finish my fries, and had to coax poor Asha into munching on my leftovers.

Truth be told, I don’t think she minded very much.

I can’t comment on every one of the 25 sauces offered at Pommes Frites, but I can promise you that the pomegranate teriyaki mayo and the rosemary garlic mayo will blow you away. And for dessert, how about cupcakes?

Sugar Sweet Sunshine is a great little Manhattan cupcake bakery. A cupcakery, if you will. Tasty, affordable, adorable, and comfortable: all properties I require in a dessert shop, all of which Sugar Sweet Sunshine delivers. At just $1.50 a pop, I figured I would be coming back for seconds, thirds, fourths, etc. after I gobbled down my Ooey Gooey.

Alas, it was not to be. These cupcakes aren’t wimps. The cupcakes are soft, spongy, and perfectly baked, but the exquisite and mindbogglingly rich sweet buttercream frosting will eff you up. After consuming my Ooey Gooey, I was seized by what can only be described as an intense flavorgasm followed by a happy sugar-coma. I cannot recommend ingesting more than two cupcakes in one sitting. Maybe three if you’re feeling bold and have nothing better to do with your day than sink into your chair and wait for your body to digest enough delicious sugar and fat to kill a moose. Even still, I can’t say you’d regret it.

The most exciting project we’re working to promote right now is the Cathy’s Book application for iPod Touch and iPhone. I’m intensely interested in developing storytelling technology, so I flipped my top when I found out I would be helping to promote something this cutting edge. For those of you not immersed in the world of alternate reality gaming, the Cathy franchise comes from the brains of Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman of I Love Bees fame. In short, these men are Olympic deities of the alternate reality gaming world. Fans of Bungie‘s Halo series, take note.

You all know I’m a new tech evangelist, not a corporate, um, lady of the evening. I don’t plug products just because I’m affiliated with them. I dare you to scan my blog archives and find a single instance of me proclaiming the virtues of something I don’t love and use myself. So I hope you can believe me when I say that this is a sweet app. At only $0.99, I’d say it’s definitely worth purchasing. We’re talking about a full length novel and alternate reality game (albeit one targeted a teen girls) presented in a groundbreaking way.

Now for the personal commentary, which is general and by no means specific criticism of Perseus or Cathy’s Book. So nyeah.

I’m a believer in cross-media ownership for customers. In other words, I think if you buy a CD, you should be able to rip it to your computer’s hard drive and play the MP3s in your car or whatever. If I had to add my two cents, I would say purchasing a physical version of a book should entitle you to download the an app version for free. Granted, these are essentially two different products with different features, and each requires its own creative team. But I firmly believe that offering an app for free to existing and new customers who purchased a similar product in pulp form would be the best way to spread the word. Existing fans of the a franchise are potentially the best evangelists for a new app version. Imagine the already established readership telling their friends that they can get their favorite book in an exciting new form for only a dollar.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: everything is huge; everything is open late, so it’s really accommodating for night owls like me; the subways are confusing, but I think I’m starting to get the hang of them.

For my first day in the city, I ate breakfast at a little joint around the corner. Then I did the tourist thing and explored Times Square, Rockefeller Plaza, Grand Central Station. Today my mission was to find a comfortable, quiet, quirky, writing-friendly coffee shop like the ones I frequented back in Bellingham. I’m happy to say I found one. I’m writing this post in the Flying Saucer Cafe, where the baristas are friendly and the atmosphere is peaceful and inviting. I’m a huge fan of the cut-out comics pasted on the supports. Plus Ziggy Stardust is playing right now, so I’m pretty sure I found my new home away from home.

Now to find a bite to eat and then off to Central Park.

All this means I’ll be on a temporary blogging hiatus, probably until I’m settled in to my new home in New York City. City of Tides will be back in early January, and it will be so good. We’ve got fresh content cooking, a new focus I’m extremely excited about, and a couple surprises. Until then, everyone have a great holiday season and a happy winter solstice!

If only there were a minimalistic text editor for Windows that could keep me focused, but retained the features that are actually important to my productivity.

I’d like to introduce you to WriteMonkey. It’s a scaled-down text editor that runs in full screen mode so you can concentrate on your writing. It’s like a little home office for your operating system.

There are a few alternatives (e.g. Dark Room, TextRoom, Momentum Writer, Typewriter, Q10, and Write Room), but WriteMonkey is a cut above the rest. Dark Room might be a little more user friendly, but WriteMonkey has features that I’ve come to rely on: tons of keyboard shortcuts, typewriter sounds, intuitive progress measurement, timer, and — this is the coolest part — flow mode.

Typewriter Sounds

I love hearing the clickity-clicking typewriter sounds while I’m rocking the keyboard. Seems like it would be annoying, doesn’t it? But once you try using typewriter sounds, I think you’ll agree they really add to the satisfaction of typing. Computer keyboards (especially dinky laptop keyboards) just don’t give you enough of that beautiful sensory feedback. Nothing says “I just finished another line so hell yes I’m awesome” like a little “DING!” when you punch the return key.

Progress Bar and Timer

Whether your writing goals are self-imposed or part of a school assignment, you’ll love WriteMonkey’s customizable progress bar or numeric display. You can even choose whether to measure pagecount or wordcount. It’s encouraging watching the little progress bar extend as you write, and it saves you from breaking the flow to check your progress manually.

If you’re working within an allotted writing time, or you just want to add some motivation to keep writing, WriteMonkey also has a handy timer feature. This really shines when you’re warming up with some freewriting.

Flow Mode

The greatest asset to keeping the words coming out is flow mode. It’s not easy to find, but jam CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+F and say goodbye to editing as you go. Flow mode disables backspacing, deletion, cutting, copying, and pasting, so the only way to go is forward. As a compulsive self-editor, I’ve found flow mode ridiculously helpful for first drafts and writing warm-ups.

Visual Customization

Green text on a black background is the way to go. For me, it feels less sterile and unnerving than black on white. It makes each word seem more important somehow. Plus it makes you feel like you’re in the Matrix. I don’t know how this helps you be productive. But it does. And I know it’s not as “classic” as a Courier font, but throw Dina in there… Mmm. You got yourself a recipe for awesome.

Seriously. Try WriteMonkey. OpenOffice.org Writer and Notepad++ are swell, and of course they have their place. But they are really more tailored to business needs and programmers, respectively, than the needs of novelists, poets, and bloggers.

Download .zip: WriteMoney

It struck me today that I am not interested in being a traditional novelist. I feel like I’ve been struggling with this for years, trying to be something I don’t want to be just because I decided somewhere along the way that novel writing is a more legitimate profession than writing alternative forms of fiction.

Don’t get me wrong. The novel is a storytelling technology that has been around for a long time, and it’s told a lot of amazing stories. I hope it doesn’t go away. I love books, I love stories, I love reading. But I’m not excited about the form of the novel, or even books as such. I am excited by the notion of telling stories through new technologies.

Today as I sketched out a list of projects I hope to bring to fruition in the next ten years, I noticed not one book made the list. What about those ideas I had for novels? After some pondering, I realized that the second I started thinking about these projects as novels specifically, I pushed them away because I became bored with them. I suddenly realized I only wanted them to be novels to legitimize them. What a ridiculous and hypocritical way of thinking! I was embarrassed to find myself subconsciously operating under the very archaic assumptions about literature I sought to remove from our culture.

So I said to myself, ”okay, let’s just remove that way of thinking. What do you really want this project to be? What would be most fun for you?” I realized one project is really an experimental web comic, another project is really a new kind of ARG, and this other thing is hyperlinked literature. Suddenly I became excited again about dusty old projects that I had sitting on the shelf for years.

By freeing my mind from the self-imposed bondage of a form I didn’t care for, I quickly realized what I truly want to be, what kind of storyteller I am at heart. It makes perfect sense. I’m attracted to experimenting with form, technology, multimedia, “this is not a story” stories, reader interaction, use of music and images, unconventional narrative structures, collaborative artwork… why would I be married to the idea of writing paper-bound novels of all things?

Of course, now it will be even harder to make any money.