Thank you to Singapore’s Creative Arts Program (CAP) and the Ministry of Education for inviting me to run a workshop on Interactive Fiction with some of the most gifted and creative secondary school students in Singapore.
The workshop was held at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts last 30 May 2023. I had the pleasure of working with 16 students whose ages ranged from 13 to 17.
The objectives were:
- Learn what is Interactive Fiction, it’s forms and history
- Understand the principles of interactive storytelling
- Learn how to structure interactive fiction
- Be able to build a branching narrative
Along the way we talked about electronic literature, hypertext, adventure-based and puzzle-based text games, choice-based interactive fiction, visual novels, conversational agents as well as Web 3.0 interactive fiction such as Art Roleplay Games. We also discussed everything from Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” (which inspired the concept of hypertext), to early interactive fiction narratives like Will Crowther’s Colossal Cave Adventure, Trubshaw and Bartle’s Multi-User Dungeon, and Douglas Adams’ Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to visual novels like Steins:Gate, Doki Doki Literature Club and Disco Elysium. We even managed to talk about local Singaporean projects such as Catherine Lim’s very early internet novella The Leap of Love (Lycos Asia, 2000) and Benjamin Chee and Wayne Rée’s Internal Damnation, an interactive fiction companion piece to their seminal Work-Life Balance graphic novel (Difference Engine, 2022)
I was pleasantly surprised that one of the kids had actually read and liked my blockchain ride and die story on Fish Eats Lion Redux. Happy that my work isn’t as obscure as I think it is.
Looking forward to seeing one of these kids develop a crazy good Interactive Fiction narrative in the future!
The Infinite Library and Other Stories 