choice

Opening in the center of the international refugee crisis, this playable story places the interactor in the position of the refugee. As the tale opens, an explosion sends the interactor from the comfort of a ship into the salt immortal sea. Rescued by a mysterious boat the player encounters eight other passengers, drawn from the present and the ancient past. However, one of these passengers has angered the gods, and unless the player can discover which, all will face their wrath. However, finding that secret is no easy task. Each passenger harbors secrets that pit them against each other in an allegory of contemporary global crisis. Choosing from one of nine iconic positions in the refugee crisis, the interactor can explore tales of misfortune while trying to keep the shipmates in balance by collecting and circulating secrets. In this tale, we recast figures in the contemporary refugee crisis against the mythos of the quintessential traveler, Odysseus, for the refugee likewise travels cursed, unable to return home. It is a tale of the eternal return to proxy wars and the challenge of achieving some semblance of world peace. The story of the refugee is a harrowing reality reimagined here in terms of sirens and cyclops, not to make the horrors of war fanciful but to render the tale of the contemporary global conflict in timeless, epic terms. What does it take to survive this existential journey with humanity in tact? How can one negotiate the turbulent waters and the whims of unseen gods and foreign powers in the human tragedy of a proxy war? The Salt Immortal Sea will be set up as an installation that invites a primary interactor to make choices while a larger group can watch the story’s progression play out.

The primary interface will be an iPad. LED lights spread in the room will represent the characters aboard the ship, lighting up when the player interacts with them. The reading experience can take 5-30 minutes, depending on depth of exploration. Platform: Ink + Unity Displays on IPad, (also PC or Mac).

(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)

This satirical game poem creates a small deterministic universe— a system into which a player is faced with choices, real and illusory, as they shape their “life.” Conceptually patterned after the Hasbro “Game of Life,” this hypertext version presents similar choices to its players but using an interface that lays out the general structure yet retains the element of surprise. Coverley uses this to drive home a critique of gender roles, career choices laying bare how they determine and limit one’s choices in a supposedly free and open American society. Her tongue-in-cheek tone, hokey music, prosy lines of verse, and a humorously generous ending soften the biting commentary enacted in this game, inviting readers to play, explore, and reflect.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

Rush is a hyper-narrative consisting of text, image and animation. The text moves across the screen slowly. At certain intervals the reader has to make a choice that has consequences for the story that follows. The hypertext and the reader's choices are also visualised for the read in a map. The hypertextual narrative demonstrates the seriousness in the reader's choices. And as the reader will understand, there is never a "second chance".

(Author's description:) Almost Goodbye is an experiment in minimalist procedural content generation for interactive narratives. It does not try to generate a whole story or plot points from scratch, but instead asks what is the minimum amount of procedural generation that can be added to a hand-authored story to produce something both computationally interesting but still narratively sound. The resulting narrative, about a scientist leaving Earth forever and saying her final goodbyes, generates “satellite” sentences that color the narrator’s description and perception of her conversations based on the choices made by the player in prior conversations and other player-influenced contextual cues.

(From website): There are always at least two ways to tell a story...

For his first fiction since the Booker Prize-shortlisted The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid has taken his inspiration from the Tales from the Thousand and One Nights. In this story, Hamid writes about the melancholic meanderings of a former general's life. Choose a path round his palace, and shape the story as he considers his role and listens to the tales of his loyal aide.

Author description: Blue Lacuna is a long-form work of parser-based interactive fiction containing nearly 400,000 words of prose and natural language source code, an explorable novel telling a serious story about the nature of choice and happiness. Lacuna simplifies standard IF syntax with a unique interface: to advance the story, readers type highlighted keywords indicating objects of interest, directions to explore, or topics to pursue during conversation.

Blue Lacuna’s story revolves around a complex reactive character, the castaway Progue, who evolves over the course of the story based on the reader’s interactions with him. The climax of the story and resolution of Progue’s character arc—whether he becomes a friend, a mentor, a lover, a sycophant, or one of eight other archetypes—is dependent on how the reader treats him in up to 70 distinct scenes and conversations over the work’s ten chapters. The structure of Blue Lacuna is thus best represented not by a branching tree but a braided rope, with countless ways each reader may braid the threads of story into a personal and meaningful narrative.