Schedule

NarraScope 2022 took place online on Saturday, July 30 to Sunday, July 31.

See the schedule in grid form.

All times are shown in US Eastern time.

Asynchronous (July 15-28)

• • Inform Bookcamp – Judith Pintar, Alexis Kim
    (two weeks, async)
    Interested in using Inform in the classroom? Always wanted to learn? We can’t think of a better way to spend the two weeks before Narrascope than hanging out together writing interactive fiction! This Slack-based bootcamp is meant for beginners or people wanting to brush up their skills. You can be as social as you want to be. New content, quizzes, and assignments drop every two days.

Friday (July 29)

• • Twine in the Classroom – VerBon Cheung, Michelle Jolley, Damon Wakes, and Friends
    (8:00–8:50 (US Eastern))
    Twine is best known as a tool for producing interactive stories — something simple enough to pick up that anyone can get started on their first game without wading through documentation. But as well as being accessible, Twine is also very versatile. This workshop will explore some of the options that it opens up for use in the classroom, with specific examples from the University of Winchester. No previous experience necessary.
• • Introduction to articy:draft 3 – Karsten Feyerabend, Raluca Percec
    (9:00–9:50 (US Eastern))
    Are you an aspiring game writer or planning to get into narrative design? This introductory workshop will show you how to use articy:draft 3 to write interactive stories and manage narrative content in a visual way.
• • Inform as a Tool to Teach Narrative Design and Game Writing – Clara Fernandez-Vara
    (10:00–10:50 (US Eastern))
    The affordances of Inform as a tool allow us to teach basic principles of writing for games and narrative design, in ways that are accessible for students coming from a variety of backgrounds. This workshop will demonstrate actual classroom examples of different concepts that apply beyond parser-based interactive fiction, from environmental storytelling, dialogue systems.
• • Unlocking Hidden Rules of Office Hours: A Twine Game Jam on First-Generation College Students’ Experiences – Matthew Farber, William Merchant, Tori Beaty
    (11:00–11:50 (US Eastern))
    We engaged participants to design interactive game systems on how first-generation students perceive and experience office hours. What themes emerge from the student-created game jam artifacts? What were students’ experiences and perceptions in participating in the game jam? How do students perceive the final game jam product? How do students perceive a game jam as an approach for harnessing student voice? Findings suggest that game jams can be used to teach coding and design skills but also as an approach to surface how undergraduate students make meaning of the systems they must navigate in college. When constructed as student-authored games, these systems appear to have hidden rules, particularly for first-generation students.
• • Introduction to Tracery: Make a Twitter Bot! – Joey Jones
    (12:00–12:50 (US Eastern))
    Tracery is a tool for writing generative grammars. It’s an easy way to get started procedurally generating text and images. A way to get started with Tracery is to make a Twitter bot with it: anything from generated poetry, jokes, writing prompts, or micro scenes. Whatever you want to create with Tracery, this workshop will get you started on the basics.
• • Inform Bootcamp Debrief – Alexis Kim, Judith Pintar
    (13:00–13:50 (US Eastern))
    Review, reflect, reimagine! Come join us to have a conversation about your experience as part of the Inform Bootcamp, revisit your struggles and triumphs and share your best code!
• • Crash Course on ink – Dan Cox, Kenton Taylor Howard
    (14:00–14:50 (US Eastern))
    Ready for a crash course on narrative scripting? Want to get started with creating interactive stories using ink? Participants in this workshop will start with creating simple procedurally-generated stories using alternatives in ink. Using knots, different sections of a story, and diverts, ink functionality to move between them, we will review ways to present different engaging experiences to players as we divide up longer stories into smaller, more modular parts. (Those interested in participating in this workshop are highly encouraged to download the latest version of Inky, an editor used with ink, before the workshop takes place.)
    (Online lesson)
• • Teaching for Transfer with Interactive Fiction – Brendan Desilets
    (15:00–15:50 (US Eastern))
    According to many educators and educationists, students (and other humans) are terrible at transferring their learning from one context to another, and teachers are equally bad at teaching for transfer. Is this a bad rap? And what really counts as transfer, anyway? In this session, we’ll explore teaching for transfer, and we’ll see how interactive fiction can facilitate such teaching.
• • Intro to Chapbook – Chris Klimas, Stuart Moulthrop
    (16:00–16:50 (US Eastern))
    This workshop will demonstrate some intermediate-level features of the Chapbook story format for Twine: mixing JavaScript in with regular Chapbook code, working with Chapbook’s debugging tools, and incorporating multimedia. We won’t get too technical, however. If you’ve used other Twine story formats like Harlowe and SugarCube but are curious what Chapbook is about, this workshop will be a great way to learn.
• • Educator’s Town Hall and Social – Anastasia Salter, Judith Pintar
    (17:00–19:00 (US Eastern))
    Teaching with Twine, Inform 7, Ink, Ren’Py, or another platform for creating narrative games? Interested in finding community to discuss the challenges, opportunities, and resources available for building educational opportunities around interactive fiction and narrative play? In the first hour of the educator’s town hall, we will discuss and share solutions to our shared challenges, and discuss opportunities for collaboration, working towards building a stronger community among educators across disciplines and settings. During the second hour, the Zoom room will stay open for people who would like to network and connect with people who have common interests, or who would like to collaborate towards an initiative that emerged during the session.

Saturday (July 30)

• • Welcome back
    (10:00–10:15 (US Eastern), Articy Hall)
• • Keynote: 5 Lessons From 50 Years of Text Games – Aaron A. Reed
    (10:15–11:15 (US Eastern), Articy Hall)
    Last year Aaron Reed blogged through a half-century of games-in-text, one per year, from Oregon Trail to A. I. Dungeon and beyond. What have we learned? What trail are we on?
    (Video)
• • Social time
    (11:15–11:30 (US Eastern))
• • Choosing Your Happily Ever After: Choice and Agency in Romance IF – Rebecca Slitt
    (11:30–12:00 (US Eastern), Articy Hall)
    Heart’s Choice games promise real player choices with real stakes in the outcome. They also promise a “happily ever after” for all. How can we have both?
    (Video)
  • Once A Pawn A Time: Using Chess As A Metaphor in Narrative – Nessa Cannon
    (11:30–12:00 (US Eastern), Molasses Hall)
    Chess and the chessboard can convey themes of deception, internal struggle, power plays, and fate itself. I’ll discuss the symbolism of chess pieces and examples of how they have been used in games.
    (Video)
• • What I’ve Learned From (Attempting) to Play Every Adventure Game Ever Made – Jason Dyer
    (12:00–13:00 (US Eastern), Articy Hall)
    Jason Dyer has taken the opposite tack from Aaron Reed, looking at every single playable adventure game up through 1981. Are old games only remarkable as history, or do they have interesting things to say about the modern design of games and narrative?
    (Video)
  • Building an Interactive Documentary – Jeff Crocker
    (12:00–12:30 (US Eastern), Molasses Hall)
    How do we approach interactive storytelling when we want to tell a true story, a documentary, or a history? We’ll consider our approach to the story of a ’90s pirate radio station in Los Angeles.
    (Video)
  • Narrative in a Box: Interactive Fiction in the Physical World – Manda Whitney
    (12:30–13:00 (US Eastern), Molasses Hall)
    What happens when you bring interactive fiction into the physical world? Since the pandemic, take-home narrative puzzle games have taken off. We’ll look at examples, techniques, and the future.
    (Video, slides)
• • Lunch
    (13:00–13:30 (US Eastern))
    If it is not lunch in your time zone, snack and social time!
• • Narrative Instruments in Practice – Doug Valenta, John Zajac
    (13:30–14:30 (US Eastern), Articy Hall)
    Noah Wardrip-Fruin first proposed “textual instruments” in 2003. What does such an instrument mean, how do you play it, and when does play become art? We’ll share our experience creating Mote, a platform for collaborative storytelling.
    (Video)
  • A Hollow-Horned Rumination: Affective Storytelling and Ethical Artmaking – Kathryn Li
    (13:30–14:00 (US Eastern), Molasses Hall)
    Goat Game: A Hollow-Horned Rumination is a Twine game which explores the psychological toll of navigating ethical questions. I will share my creative process and its background in research on depictions of trauma.
    (Video, transcript and slides)
  • Designing a Pattern for Dialogue Choices in Discriminatory Situations – Hélène Sellier
    (14:00–14:15 (US Eastern), Molasses Hall)
    The game RecovR aims to increase awareness and develop constructive dialogue regarding cultural diversity. How does it use dialogue choices to talk about sexism, racism, ableism, and other such discriminations?
    (Video)
  • Building a Desirable Future is Not an Individual Heroic Effort – Valentin SERRI
    (14:15–14:30 (US Eastern), Molasses Hall)
    The future craves new imaginations, as it always has. More than ever we need to nourish it with positive vision. We’ll consider the heroic aspect of game protagonists, and how it must be replaced with the collective mind.
    (Video)
• • Bringing Full Accessibility to Mainstream Narrative Games – Matt Campbell
    (14:30–15:00 (US Eastern), Articy Hall)
    Parser and HTML-based IF has always had a degree of accessibility, particularly for blind users. But many newer narrative games use mainstream game engines like Unity, which have no such support. How can we fix this?
    (Video, AccessKit project, AccessKit example)
  • Adaptative and Generative Text for Unity – Jonathan Lessard
    (14:30–14:45 (US Eastern), Molasses Hall)
    Blabbeur is a free Unity plugin for creating adaptative and generative text. We’ll highlight Blabbeur’s goals, features, and syntax.
    (Video)
  • Morale Is Very Low – Gabriel Murray
    (14:45–15:00 (US Eastern), Molasses Hall)
    Resource management in narrative games is harrowing. What makes it so fun? We’ll compare resource mechanics in several suspenseful Choice of Games titles.
    (Video)
• • Social and demo time
    (15:00–15:30 (US Eastern))
• • The Futures of Inform – Graham Nelson
    (15:30–16:30 (US Eastern), Articy Hall)
    Inform 7 was published as an open-source literate program on 28 April 2022. I want to sketch new paths of development from here, some under way, some only glimpsed. How might Inform fit into today’s vibrant world of choice-based technology?
    (Video, text and slides)
  • How We Made a Story-Driven Puzzle Game for a Massive Multinational – Adam Clare
    (15:30–16:00 (US Eastern), Molasses Hall)
    We’ll look at an online puzzle hunt game created as a training tool for the staff of a large tech company. What was the design process? How did we deliver the content in a way which made sense to players?
    (Video)
  • Narrative Tools of Boyfriend Dungeon – Tanya X. Short
    (16:00–16:15 (US Eastern), Molasses Hall)
    How did we make the “dates” of Boyfriend Dungeon? (Spoiler: spreadsheets were involved.) What did these tools do well and not-so-well? How do they compare to the tools behind Moon Hunters?
    (Video)

Sunday (July 31)

• • Curiosity Multiplied The Cat: Five AI Writing Experiments To Try At Home – Charlene Putney, Martin Pichlmair
    (10:00–11:00 (US Eastern), Articy Hall)
    AI is becoming more mainstream — meaning there’s a whole new world of easy-to-use tools that writers can experiment with. We’ll introduce you to experimentation with AI and showcase five specific explorations you can try.
    (Video, notes)
  • “Musicologists’ Creed”: Digital Interactive Fiction, Historical Role-Play, and the Pedagogy of Narrative Play – Christopher J Smith
    (10:00–10:30 (US Eastern), Molasses Hall)
    Teaching history doesn’t have to mean “great battles,” “great works,” or “great ‘Men’”. #MCreed is the umbrella term for an ongoing project at Texas Tech University School of Music which explores the intersections of digital technology, narrative contingency, and immersive imaginative contexts.
    (Video)
  • My (Mostly) Frustrated Efforts to Collect Narrative Games in an Academic Library – Colin Post
    (10:30–11:00 (US Eastern), Molasses Hall)
    A look at the history and present challenges of developing collections of narrative games. I’ll reflect on my ongoing project to jumpstart a narrative games collection at the University of North Carolina – Greensboro.
    (Video, slides – download)
• • Social and demo time
    (11:00–11:30 (US Eastern))
• • Plant Patterns, People Patterns: Design Prompts for Agriculture-Driven Narratives – Josh Grams
    (11:30–12:00 (US Eastern), Articy Hall)
    Farming appears in a wide variety of games, but almost always as variations on a tried-and-true formula. Let’s look at farming in the real world and what ideas it can spark.
    (Video, slides)
  • Hawk and Puma: Bringing the “New Chronicle and Good Government” to the Present – Nico Valdivia Hennig
    (11:30–12:00 (US Eastern), Molasses Hall)
    Wamán Poma (Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala), an indigenous chronicler from the Andes, is one of the greatest exponents of indigenous literary-visual creation in America. I decided to develop a small game based on the life and work of Guamán, using the minimalist engine Bitsy.
    (Video)
• • Now You’re Thinking with Parts: Using Internal Family Systems in Narrative Design – Anna C. Webster
    (12:00–13:00 (US Eastern), Articy Hall)
    Learn how you can use the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model of psychology to create realistic, dynamic characters and narratives.
    (Video, slides)
  • Fantasy Filing Systems: Interactive Narratives of the OS – Lee Tusman
    (12:00–12:30 (US Eastern), Molasses Hall)
    Let’s put aside traditional IF development tools. Instead we’ll explore ways of creating interactive game worlds in file systems, operating systems, and shells.
    (Video, slides, notes and links)
  • Inbox Adventure: Email as IF Game Platform – Geoffrey Golden
    (12:30–13:00 (US Eastern), Molasses Hall)
    For the past three years, narrative designer Geoffrey Golden has run an interactive fiction experiment called Adventure Snack: a series of micro text games played and distributed via email newsletter. He’ll reveal what he’s learned over the course of publishing 65 email games.
    (Video, slides)
• • Lunch
    (13:00–13:30 (US Eastern))
    If it is not lunch in your time zone, snack and social time!
• • Meet IFTF – IFTF directors and program leads
    (13:30–14:30 (US Eastern), Articy Hall)
    An introduction to the board members, old and new, as well as IFTF’s ongoing programs. (We have more than we did at the last NarraScope!) This is your chance for feedback and questions to the folks behind the curtain.
    (Video)
• • To the beat y’all: Telling a Hip Hop Story Through Games – Jarory de Jesus
    (14:30–15:00 (US Eastern), Articy Hall)
    How can video games and hip hop intersect? I’ll discuss a brief history of hip hop, look at how it’s been used in games, and see where its potential lies.
    (Video)
  • “If And Only If”: Exploring Variables and Conditional Logic in Interactive Fiction – G.C. “Grim” Baccaris
    (14:30–15:00 (US Eastern), Molasses Hall)
    Not all games require complex — or any — conditional logic in order to be impactful, fun, or challenging. However, all kinds of games can benefit from the effective application of conditional logic — or even from its mere implication or intentional absence.
    (Video, slides)
• • Social and demo time
    (15:00–15:30 (US Eastern))
• • New Stories, Old Interfaces: Playing, Writing, and Designing Immersive Diegetic Narrative Games – Ian Michael Waddell, Katherine Morayati
    (15:30–16:30 (US Eastern), Articy Hall)
    The idea of computer games which simulate computer interaction has a rich and varied history, from Cosmoserve to Hypnospace Outlaw. We’ll look at what makes these games so compelling, what they accomplish, and how they can succeed or fail.
    (Video)
  • Engaging with Under the Surface at Surface Level or What Happens When Nobody Knows It’s a Game? – Elian E. Jentoft (eveghost)
    (15:30–16:00 (US Eastern), Molasses Hall)
    Under the Surface is an immersive and interactive mental health storytelling experience that conveys its story through a musician’s website. How does one create “unfiction”, which relies upon realism and immersion, while also attending to the ethical dilemmas that arise in difficult stories?
    (Video, gameplay guide)
  • Rapid Research – Josh Unsworth
    (16:00–16:15 (US Eastern), Molasses Hall)
    What does the soft skill of research mean for a writer? We’ll look at the planning, process, and pitfalls of research.
    (Video, transcript)
  • Putting Words In My Mouth: The Unsilent Protagonist in VR – Kathryn Yu
    (16:15–16:30 (US Eastern), Molasses Hall)
    What makes VR games different from other forms of interactive media? How does a game communicate the player’s role? How do they perceive themself? And who speaks for them?
    (Video)