interactive fiction – Terence Eden’s Blog

The Great British Shake Off

@edent — Sun, 01 May 2016 10:13:49 +0000

This weekend, I spotted that a person I know was running a Shakespeare themed GameJam - a sort of informal collection/competition arranged around a theme.

The Shakespeare #BardJam ends midnight BST tonight, & works-in-progress are welcome. https://itch.io/jam/bard-jam #interactivefiction #textgame

— Ash (@ggnewed) April 30, 2016

Given my previous experience developing Interactive Fiction, I figured I'd spend my Saturday building a simple game.

So, here - literally hours in the making - I present to you "The Great British Shake Off!"

Here's how we made it. Step one, hit the books!

My wife and I quickly came up with an idea. A demented game show with impossible questions - where every move is a wrong answer and is met with a Shakespearean insult.

So, as an example, are there two separate characters in two separate plays which say the same line?

It turns out that the Bard of Avon was not fond of a cliché! Trying to find duplicate lines throughout the plays was a bit of a challenge! A few years ago I released an Open Source Shakespeare MySQL dump but that didn't help much.

In the end, I just grepped through the works looking for common - and uncommon - phrases. It was pretty successful and we ended up with half a dozen interesting(ish) repeated phrases we could use.

As a host for this terrible torture, we thought the avuncular Stephen Fry would be perfect. A few years ago, my friend Documentally had taken this photo of Fry posing with a demon. With a little bit of shoddy photo editing we had some cover art!

With Liz looking through famous insults and gruesome death scenes, and me franticly trying to piece them into a semi-coherent story, it didn't take us long to complete our game. Teamwork!

So if you want to test your knowledge of Ol' Billy S - play "The Great British Shake Off!"

Writing A "Choose Your Own Adventure" Story On Twitter

@edent — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 08:58:36 +0000

I've spent the last few days writing a Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) game on Twitter. This blog post briefly discusses how I did it - and what pitfalls I discovered when creating it.

But, first, if you want to play....

Background

I'm by no means the first person to attempt running a CYOA on Twitter. Two notable examples are:

What's interesting is that they both use URLs to direct the user to the next step of the game. That's certainly a time-saver for the creator (as we shall see) but has a few disadvantages.

URLs eat into your character count. Each URL counts for 23 characters. So two choices really reduces the amount of space you have for story telling.
URLs also don't work well if users are not on the Twitter website. If you're using an app, you're likely to be redirected to your web browser.
It's easy to see the whole game just by scrolling through the Twitter feed.
You have to write the game in a linear fashion. That is, you need to write a Tweet before you can point a URL at it.

Inspiration

Last Hallowe'en Mel Seckington started live-Tweeting the horror that was unfolding in London.

While it was great fun watching the tweets roll by, I thought it would be more fun to allow people to direct the action themselves.

I had also just finished reading The Wanderer by Timothy J Jarvis - an eldritch horror novel. It's creepy tones inspired me to see if I could write that well. (Spoiler alert - not really!)

I thought I'd try my hand at creating a viral "teaser trailer" for Timothy's book. With his blessing, I got cracking.

Crafting The Story

Drawing out the paths for a CYOA is surprisingly hard. You can start with a large sheet of paper, or post-it notes and string, or trying to write an interlinking HTML document - but that's effort!

Instead, I used the marvellous InkleWriter. It's a web tool specifically for writing Interactive Fiction.

You start by writing in a fairly linear fashion:

Then, as your paths get more tangled and interlinked, you can switch to a "map" view:

InkleWriter really is a fabulous piece of software. It's intuitive to use, and gives you several options for how people can play the game - including publishing it as an ebook.

After writing the story, it was time to publish it on Twitter. This is where things get tricky!

Twitter

The CYOA I have written is modest - there are only 23 "points" in my story. So that's 23 Twitter accounts needed. I thought it would be a bit of a laborious process to sign up and configure them...

After I had created the first two accounts, I hit a snag. Twitter won't allow you to sign up to multiple accounts from the same IP address. I found I could create two accounts at most. I tried different browsers, proxies, clearing cookies - all to no avail. I used my phones' data connection - but even that only netted me half a dozen more.

That's a fair enough policy from Twitter. They don't want bulk accounts created and used for spamming their users. So, how did I get all the other Twitter accounts?

It turns out that there are a lot of dodgy websites which will sell you Twitter accounts. Frankly, I didn't much fancy my chances with them.

So, I went back through my email history and found every single Twitter account I'd signed up for. All the joke ones, the business ideas where I registered the Twitter account before realising it was a waste of time, and the accounts which I had simply forgotten about.

That had the advantage of making the idea look like it had been brewing for years!

@dansinker @wnd_go the eeriest part is that some of the accounts tweeted 5 years ago... Others only a day ago... — Margarita Noriega (@margarita) January 13, 2015 Archived Source

(In fact, I deleted the tweets from those accounts - so the "Account Created" date is old, but the Tweets are new.)

Even all my dormant accounts weren't enough - I was only half way there.

I put the call out on Twitter - and was most grateful to Ed Jefferson for saving the day by supplying me with ten old accounts.

Finally! The 23 accounts I needed. On to the next stage. Configuring them.

It's possible to use the Twitter API to configure the accounts' appearance. But as I was going in to each account to set contact preferences and write the tweets, I decided to do it manually.

Even with "only" 23 accounts, it was still an evening's work to get them all set up correctly. And, despite all my efforts, I didn't quite manage to turn off all the email notifications. I woke up to a phone clogged up with these:

Play Testing

As with any "interactive" thing, it's wise to test before release. I sent the demo game to a few friends and, based on their suggestions, I fixed some typos, logical bugs, and tidied up the story.

Had I been using URLs to link between accounts, it would have been a lot harder to fix these problems. Instead, I just deleted a tweet and wrote a new one. I'm sure there are tools to help you manage multiple accounts - I just used a bunch of incognito browser windows though.

Next Steps

If this is a success (as measured by the number of people saying how much they enjoyed it) I'm going to look at automating the process.

At the moment, I have to...

Write the story.
Link each decision in the story to a Twitter account.
Log in to each individual account.
Post the Tweet (and customise the page appearance if necessary).

If this is to be a regularly updated game, I'm going to need to have a system to export my story and auto-update it on Twitter. Probably not too difficult given that InkleWriter offer a JSON API to their stories.

I'll also need a lot more Twitter accounts!

But, for now, wait until just before midnight and start your adventure...

Quick Update

Well! That went a lot better than I expected :-)

As you can see from the above tweets, the story has very quickly gone viral. I wasn't able to see everyone who mentioned or retweeted it - although I did catch a few of my favourite authors talking about it - which was immensely gratifying. I also had the somewhat recursive experience of being mentioned on Twitter by Twitter.

There were so many people Tweeting me that I couldn't reply to all of them. It was hard enough to read them. Although, this review did catch my eye

Thus far, the story has been mentioned in Quartz, Gizmodo, The Independent, IO9, FastCo Design, The Telegraph, Huffington Post, CNET, The Next Web, Slate.fr, Gamer.no, Kotaku (with too many spoilers IMO), Kill Screen Daily, The Mirror and The Mirror (again), Vice, and this epic review from the Guardian. No doubt there are a few more that I've failed to mention.

Phew!

I'll also leave these two reviews here, just for fun.

I like the use of exophoric references to force the reader to create the narrative themselves. So it's still interactive even when you aren't making choices. It's a good way of making a narrative complicated without actually explaining those complications!
(Friend of a friend on Facebook)

nods sagely

Thanks so much for all the retweets and the positive feedback.

Text Adventures Via Text Message

@edent — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 10:55:20 +0000

Remember text adventures, eh? They were pretty nifty!

"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike"
>Go East
"You have been eaten by a Grue. A dwarf starts singing about gold"

Smashing! Just like the pictures are better on the radio, so the graphics are immeasurably superior when they're in your head. Don't get me wrong, I love the 5.1 surround sound snarl of a rabid beast rendered in 1080p - but nothing is quite as good as using your imagination.

Text Adventures - or, more properly, Interactive Fiction - is enjoying a mini-renaissance at the moment. There are emulators for smart phones, computers, and consoles.

But for SMS? None that I could find. Think about it; SMS is close to the perfect medium for Interactive Fiction. Your commands are concise enough to fit into a single message, you don't have to worry about the speed of your response, everything is text based.

So, I present to you, Zork via SMS (with a little help from Twilio).

Brilliant!

HOWTO

Although superficially a simple project, there are a few gotchas along the way. This documentation is mostly for me - but may be of use to you :-)

Let's start at the end.... Using Twilio you can send an SMS to a phone number, that is then POSTed to a webserver of your choice.

Twilio will send an SMS back if it receives a response such as



  You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded
front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

Easy enough. (NB the free account prepends your messages with a trial message. Once you pay, that goes away.)

So, how do we get a text adventure like Zork running server side? There are plenty of client side emulators out there - but I only found one which was purely server side.

THCnet have a PHP interpreter for Zork. It's slightly cludgy - but it works. I'm checking to see if I can distribute it on GitHub.

The game library "dtextc.dat" must be installed in "/usr/games/lib/". The source code is available if you want to recompile it and place it somewhere more accessible.

A MySQL database needs to be created to keep track of users and sessions.

A temporary directory (which must be readable and writeable) will also be needed to store the state of play for each session. I've used "tmp/404/" but you can alter config.php to point wherever is convenient. You will also need to adjust index.php and functions.php with the new location.

Finally, the executable "zork" must be runable.

That's pretty much it.

When a user (or, in this case, Twilio) first makes a request to the URL, we check to see if they already have a session cookie. If they don't, create one, and start the game by returning the opening text.

For every subsequent connection, we check the state of the game based on their cookie, then apply the body of their SMS to the game engine. Whatever Zork spits out, we return as an SMS.

By default, Twilio kills unused sessions after 4 hours, and all cookies will be lost.

Where Next?

It strikes me that the various forms of text adventures are excellent as a sort of mini-IVR. A nice little finite-state-machine which can quite happily run for years. Services like Frontline SMS are great for information sharing, but they're really not designed for this sort of work.

Could we use interactive fiction in places where SMS is cheap but other forms of entertainment are expensive? Could IF be used to augment existing media events? SMS is lowest common denominator - even iPhones can use it.

But, for now, all I have to worry about is someone texting me "Go west'); DROP TABLE ..." ;-)