Interactive Fiction

Interactive fiction is storytelling where the text itself is the game: the reader chooses, and the choice changes what follows.

The craft question is structure before prose. A branching story has to stay coherent while the player takes any path through it, which means tracking what they know, what they did and who remembers it. Writers in this area work with state - flags, variables, conditions - and with the arithmetic of how fast branches multiply, because a tree that doubles at every node is unwritable and unplayable.

Postings usually name a scripting language or authoring system, since the text is written inside one rather than in a document. Beyond that they ask for the parts that do not come from prose writing: testing every reachable path, keeping a consistent voice across variants that few players will ever compare, and cutting a branch that costs more than it returns.

Dialogue and quest text inside a larger game is tagged separately; this one is for work where the writing carries the whole experience.

Interactive Fiction experts (1)

Anka Günther

Marketing

Nürnberg, Junior
All talent for Interactive Fiction