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Entry tags:
Interactive Fiction & Short Fiction
Vague thoughts that occurred to me the other day while thinking about two interactive fiction (IF) games I've played lately: Depression Quest and Kim's Story.
Both of them, ostensibly, have "choices" driving the gameplay, though not really the way we're used to in IF. In Kim's Story your choices do nothing to change the narrative; it just changes, slightly, the tone that the narrator takes when conveying the story. Here the path-selection mechanic seems to be more of an engagement mechanism than anything—rather than just reading Kim's story, you're "conversing" with her, and it feels surprisingly intimate.
in Depression Quest your choices matter more, but the effect of those choices feels subtler, more delicate, than that of a true branching narrative. You don't ever "beat" depression; you just cope with it more or less effectively based on the choices you make (and/or the choices you're capable of making, depending on how intense your condition is). By the end of the game you can be handling it pretty well, or you can be a fucking mess, but either way all roads lead to pretty much the same spot. (In this respect it does a hell of a lot better than Spent, which I whined a bit about before.)
But both of them could've been done as short stories. Kim's Story especially. So why aren't they?
And I think the answer is, if you actually want to be heard as a writer nowadays, you aren't writing short stories. No, seriously. Who reads stuff in like, the Kenyon Review, McSweeny's, Ploughshares, etc, except the weirdly incestuous little circle of creative writing MFAs and MFA wannabees? Science fiction is slightly different, in that SFdom in general has a small-but-weirdly-energetic community attached to it that does, in fact, give short-form scifi writers their due at energetic little fan conventions and whatnot, but that's something you don't even see in other genres of genre fiction. It is Novel or Nothing in most cases.
…the obvious next question, of course, is how many people really play Depression Quest and Kim's Story outside of the similarly weirdly incestuous little circle of Video Games as Art Critics and the like? Not many, probably—but also probably more than people outside the MFA Circles are reading MFA stories. Sharing a story from the Kenyon Review requires that I buy a physical copy and hand that physical copy to some friend (I guess in theory you could scan/pirate it but ahaha good fucking luck pirating literary fiction, believe me I've tried), and that friend has to be enough of a Serious Literary Sort that the idea of reading the Kenyon Review for an evening doesn't sound eye-rollingly pretentious—whereas sharing a URL requires like 0.4 seconds on Facebook/GMail/AIM/whatever and carries basically zero upfront pretentiousness.
That matters—especially if you're Depression Quest, whose very explicit, stated purpose is raising awareness.
I'm sort of pumped at the potential. Because I honestly love short-form fiction, in all forms; I love short fanfics and short orgific and short IF and so on, but most contemporary short fiction seems to bore me, whereas the shorter IF stuff I've been messing around with, if often rough and unpolished, at least seem to be trying some pretty wacky new stuff. Maybe short IF can help breathe some new life into the short-form-fiction domain as a whole; maybe randos will start caring about short-form stuff again.
(It also raises the side question of—how much of "popular" versus "literary" fiction survives and makes it into canon? Like, obviously there's a set of contemporary authors who are regarded as Objectively Good TM, but will future literary critics dig that, or stuff that had more mainstream appeal in its time? And that's a historical question, with some real empirical answers. I'm underinformed on the topic (like, I vaguely know that Mark Twain was pretty popular in his time, fuckin' nobody read Zamyatin until later, etc) but I'd be curious to do reading about it.)
Both of them, ostensibly, have "choices" driving the gameplay, though not really the way we're used to in IF. In Kim's Story your choices do nothing to change the narrative; it just changes, slightly, the tone that the narrator takes when conveying the story. Here the path-selection mechanic seems to be more of an engagement mechanism than anything—rather than just reading Kim's story, you're "conversing" with her, and it feels surprisingly intimate.
in Depression Quest your choices matter more, but the effect of those choices feels subtler, more delicate, than that of a true branching narrative. You don't ever "beat" depression; you just cope with it more or less effectively based on the choices you make (and/or the choices you're capable of making, depending on how intense your condition is). By the end of the game you can be handling it pretty well, or you can be a fucking mess, but either way all roads lead to pretty much the same spot. (In this respect it does a hell of a lot better than Spent, which I whined a bit about before.)
But both of them could've been done as short stories. Kim's Story especially. So why aren't they?
And I think the answer is, if you actually want to be heard as a writer nowadays, you aren't writing short stories. No, seriously. Who reads stuff in like, the Kenyon Review, McSweeny's, Ploughshares, etc, except the weirdly incestuous little circle of creative writing MFAs and MFA wannabees? Science fiction is slightly different, in that SFdom in general has a small-but-weirdly-energetic community attached to it that does, in fact, give short-form scifi writers their due at energetic little fan conventions and whatnot, but that's something you don't even see in other genres of genre fiction. It is Novel or Nothing in most cases.
…the obvious next question, of course, is how many people really play Depression Quest and Kim's Story outside of the similarly weirdly incestuous little circle of Video Games as Art Critics and the like? Not many, probably—but also probably more than people outside the MFA Circles are reading MFA stories. Sharing a story from the Kenyon Review requires that I buy a physical copy and hand that physical copy to some friend (I guess in theory you could scan/pirate it but ahaha good fucking luck pirating literary fiction, believe me I've tried), and that friend has to be enough of a Serious Literary Sort that the idea of reading the Kenyon Review for an evening doesn't sound eye-rollingly pretentious—whereas sharing a URL requires like 0.4 seconds on Facebook/GMail/AIM/whatever and carries basically zero upfront pretentiousness.
That matters—especially if you're Depression Quest, whose very explicit, stated purpose is raising awareness.
I'm sort of pumped at the potential. Because I honestly love short-form fiction, in all forms; I love short fanfics and short orgific and short IF and so on, but most contemporary short fiction seems to bore me, whereas the shorter IF stuff I've been messing around with, if often rough and unpolished, at least seem to be trying some pretty wacky new stuff. Maybe short IF can help breathe some new life into the short-form-fiction domain as a whole; maybe randos will start caring about short-form stuff again.
(It also raises the side question of—how much of "popular" versus "literary" fiction survives and makes it into canon? Like, obviously there's a set of contemporary authors who are regarded as Objectively Good TM, but will future literary critics dig that, or stuff that had more mainstream appeal in its time? And that's a historical question, with some real empirical answers. I'm underinformed on the topic (like, I vaguely know that Mark Twain was pretty popular in his time, fuckin' nobody read Zamyatin until later, etc) but I'd be curious to do reading about it.)