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I haven't published any of them, but yes -- like many people interested in creative writing, I've written a number of short stories and one novel. I've also belonged to a couple of fiction workshops. I think my nonfiction writing has had a larger effect on my prose style, though. One of my other hobbies is writing travel narrative, which is good practice when it comes time to compose dozens of location descriptions. GS: I've been playing your game in the morning, on the Gargoyle interpreter on a small part of my screen. I don't know if it's Gargoyle's nice typography, the puzzley nature of your game, or its historical nature, but the experience reminds me strongly of someone doing a crossword puzzle. Specifically, in their solarium on a folded up newspaper. Which is strange because I'm not a fan of crossword puzzles, but interactive fiction seems to fit that niche for me. You're an active interactive fiction player yourself, what niche does it fit for you? ES:That's hard to answer. I tend to regard it as its own thing, not quite like reading a book or doing a puzzle. If anything, playing IF is most like writing IF: there's a reason the community has so many members who do both. GS: Currently, I'm stuck in the game. But I find myself wandering around the grand old empty house, examining things I never thought to examine and discovering a real generosity in detail. I'm trapped but not frustrated -- which make me think that if you're going to design an oubliette, make it a beautiful one. You have other games which are more experiential, not meant to be "solved" or "beaten." What's the player reaction like for puzzley games vs. more experiential? Both styles have their fans. Puzzle games often produce more discussion, in the form of people asking one another for hints, and that can be fun for the author to watch. But, judging from the email I get, the experiential work affects players more emotionally. GS: What do you like about writing each? ES: Constructing a puzzle game is itself a kind of puzzle, and I enjoy it on that level. With Savoir-Faire, I wanted to teach the player the magic system gradually until he felt as competent as the player character. I also wanted to re-visit a lot of old puzzle chestnuts, such as dealing with a key that's on the wrong side of the door, but use a solution that had never been done before. And I had a bunch of ideas about the kinds of things the magic system in S-F would let the player do. So the challenge was to figure out how those magical abilities could be turned into novel solutions for the puzzles I had in mind, and how to structure the whole thing so that the puzzles used more complex applications of the magic (without necessarily getting a lot *harder*) as the game went on. Making the big puzzle-structure chart is one of my favorite things in IF creation: sitting down with a pencil and paper (or, these days, OmniGraffle) and moving lines and boxes around until I'm satisfied that the whole thing works. The process for Savoir-Faire was cleaner than it is for most of my games -- a lot of the time I wind up revising the puzzle design a lot, whereas with S-F what got implemented is pretty close to what I originally wrote down. Incidentally, though it doesn't refer to Savoir-Faire, this gives a pretty detailed description of how I plan a game like this, including a bunch of puzzle design diagrams. My more experiential work uses interaction to get people to engage with fiction in a new way: to tell a story where a moral choice falls to the readers rather than to the author, say, or to allow readers to forge their own relationships with a character. There the fun part is more like the fun part of writing conventional fiction. With my most recent game, Floatpoint, I did a lot of the exercises you might find suggested in a writing workshop: inventing a detailed setting with a map and history; coming up with personal histories for the characters; writing up important background scenes, even if they weren't going to appear in the game anywhere. That material was very useful when it came time to write the most demanding passages of the game, namely the correspondence the player receives from other characters and the cut scenes that occur as endings. I do a bit of world- and character-building for puzzle-centric games too, but it tends to be lighter and less important to the final product. |
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