Interactive Fiction Quotes

Years and years ago, I did a game based on 'Hitchhiker's Guide' with a company called Infocom, which was a great company. They were doing witty, intelligent, literate games based on text.

You turn the computer into the storyteller and the player into the audience, like in the old days when the storyteller would actually respond to the audience, rather than just having the audience respond to the storyteller. I had an enormous amount of fun, actually, working on that.

As a storyteller, I've always been fascinated with the idea of recreating this notion of choices in fiction. My dream was to put the audience in the shoes of the main protagonists, let them make their own decisions, and by doing so, let them tell their own stories.

I'm definitely more of a 'think game' kind of girl. I'll read every single dialogue and codex entry and lore entry. I really do love projecting myself and creating my character.

As new technology emerges as the greatest challenge to novels since the advent of film, it may be that the fragmentation of storytelling into installments key to Dickens's era will be recreated in some way.

Ghost stories and Sherlock Holmes mysteries were great. And I had a major soft spot for those 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books.

I'm terrible at reading fiction. I don't have the attention span - it's awful.

'Skeleton Creek' is like nothing you've ever read before because it's a book and a movie at the same time.

The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700.

I do think that in the near future, if it hasn't happened already, people will be able to use technology to design their own novels, perhaps with individuals themselves as the main character. In other words, everything is being individualized and narrowed.

The heart of the gameplay is still about choice and consequence, which is what I've been doing since the '80s.

My first book, 'To Be or Not To Be,' took 'Hamlet' and converted it to the choose-your-own-path format. It was a great fit for a book where you control what happens - a book as game - because the plot of 'Hamlet' is very game-like: get a mission from a ghost to kill the final boss, kill the final boss, and game over. You win.

'Heavy Rain' is a cousin of the 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books.

I was a good boy in high school, and I read for English class, and I vaguely remember reading, as a kid, 'Choose Your Own Adventure' stuff, but I didn't really read for pleasure.

Part of the transaction between writer and reader is the pleasure of building a community and encouraging people to play along.

I don't want to work on any games that don't have some kind of story component because that is the draw for me.

In Endless Quest books, you start the plot, and the character has to make choices. Then you have to write one choice over here, one choice over there. The author might get one or two choices out.

If I have my way, I want to go start making really interactive television. Stuff where you can sit and watch real actors do a real series and they can get into some kind of gun battle and all of a sudden your television prompts you to pick up your controller and all of a sudden, you're playing a first-person shooter.

I could put a sudoku at the end of every chapter and you'd have to solve it to progress through the story, but that doesn't address what would make people want to interact.

I write in expectation that readers want to participate in a kind of two-sided game: They are trying to guess what I am up to - what the story's up to - and I'm giving them clues and matter to keep them interested without giving everything away at the start. Even the rules, if any, of the game are for the reader to discover.

My definition of an adventure game is an interactive story set with puzzles and obstacles to solve and worlds to explore.

Who knows what form storytelling will take in the future?

I would say I'm a storyteller first, but game making is very wrapped up in how I think of story. If I were to have a story idea, and I decided to write a novel with it instead, I'd have to very consciously de-couple it from gamedom - for example, deliberately add in things that could not be represented in a game scene.

An adventure game is nothing more than a good story set with engaging puzzles that fit seamlessly in with the story and the characters, and looks and sounds beautiful.

Most games follow a real railroad plot, no matter what you want, you're following their storyline to its unavoidable conclusion. I'd like to write a game where your character can follow any number of possible story arcs and sub-plots.