Schedule
Friday Online Workshops - June 20th
On NarraScope's Friday, IFTF's Education Committee hosts online workshops.
Stay tuned for further information on the workshop content and seat reservation.
Friday Showcase - June 20th
We'll be kicking off NarraScope 2025 this year with our first ever NarraScope Showcase!
The Showcase will be held at the Arch Street Meeting House in Philadelphia's Historic Old City district - 320 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Come by to play the shortlisted games, attend in person workshops, and witness the first ever NarraScope Showcase Award Ceremony!
| Time | Penn Suite | Owen Biddle Room | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
12:00–13:00 (US Eastern) | Showcase - Welcome Remarks | ||||
13:00–14:00 (US Eastern) | Showcase - Open Play | In Person Workshop 1 | |||
14:00–15:00 (US Eastern) | Showcase - Open Play | In Person Workshop 2 | |||
15:00–16:00 (US Eastern) | Showcase - Open Play | In Person Workshop 3 | |||
16:00–17:00 (US Eastern) | Showcase - Open Play | In Person Workshop 4 | |||
17:00–18:00 (US Eastern) | Showcase - Award Ceremony | ||||
Saturday Conference - June 21st
Sunday Conference - June 22nd
Friday Showcase - June 20th
Showcase - Welcome Remarks
Friday 12:00-13:00
(Room: PENN SUITE)
Hear a short introduction to the Showcase from Showcase Director JD Calvelli and the Showcase Committee which will include a reveal of the shortlisted games, a thank you to the showcase sponsors, and a sneak peak regarding the day's workshops.
Showcase - Open Play
Friday 13:00-14:00
(Room: PENN SUITE)
Drop by the various tables of the shortlisted games and sponsors to play exciting new narrative games and learn about exciting new narrative tools!
In Person Workshop 1
Friday 13:00-14:00
(Room: OWEN BIDDLE ROOM)
Stay tuned for the reveal of our in person workshops :).
Showcase - Open Play
Friday 14:00-15:00
(Room: PENN SUITE)
Drop by the various tables of the shortlisted games and sponsors to play exciting new narrative games and learn about exciting new narrative tools!
In Person Workshop 2
Friday 14:00-15:00
(Room: OWEN BIDDLE ROOM)
Stay tuned for the reveal of our in person workshops :).
Showcase - Open Play
Friday 15:00-16:00
(Room: PENN SUITE)
Drop by the various tables of the shortlisted games and sponsors to play exciting new narrative games and learn about exciting new narrative tools!
In Person Workshop 3
Friday 15:00-16:00
(Room: OWEN BIDDLE ROOM)
Stay tuned for the reveals of our in person workshops :).
Showcase - Open Play
Friday 16:00-17:00
(Room: PENN SUITE)
Drop by the various tables of the shortlisted games and sponsors to play exciting new narrative games and learn about exciting new narrative tools!
In Person Workshop 4
Friday 16:00-17:00
(Room: OWEN BIDDLE ROOM)
Stay tuned for the reveals of our in person workshops :).
Showcase - Award Ceremony
Friday 17:00-18:00
(Room: PENN SUITE)
Show support to all of the shortlisted games, and witness the reveal of the first ever NarraScope showcase winners!
Saturday Conference - June 21st
Sign-in and badge pickup
Saturday 08:00-10:30
(Room: PISB Atrium until 10:30—after that, come to the URBN Center to sign in!)
Vision Keynote
Saturday 09:30-10:30
(Room: PISB 120)
Our NarraScope 2025 Keynote session presented by Hidetaka “SWERY” Suehiro!
Preview for the day: Saturday
Saturday 10:30-10:45
(Room: PISB 120)
Quick map-aided overview of the rest of the day, with walking route to URBN Center and URBN Annex, the conference rooms map, and help visualizing what activities are happening when. Reminders for lunch, and meeting points to get together for the end of the day.
Intrinsink: Building an Open-Source Interactive Theatre Web App
Saturday 11:15-11:45
(Room: URBN-110)
Intrinsink is a web app we’ve been developing to power Intrapology, an ongoing live interactive queer sci-fi project. The audience uses polling and free-response suggestions to alter our presentation live as we deliver it. Intrinsink allows us to carry out interactive performances over video call, and can be used for online-only or hybrid shows. Zoyander Street and D. Squinkifer first developed this tool in a 2021 collaboration funded by New Conversations programme (British Council, Canadian Council for the Arts), and it builds on Squinky’s 2014 IndieCade-nominated MFA thesis project Coffee: A Misunderstanding. Our approach integrates narrative design patterns from IF into live theatre, using Inkle Studios’s open-source narrative scripting language Ink.
Making The Crimson Diamond: How I Put the Words In, and How I Got the Word Out
Saturday 11:15-11:45
(Room: URBN-141)
I solo developed my cozy mystery adventure game The Crimson Diamond for many years. It was my first game project. I learned how to do a lot of things along the way: how to write a story, make a game in Adventure Game Studio, adapt a retro gameplay style (text parser adventure game) for modern audiences, sustain myself during the protracted development process, collaborate with an amazing musician, connect with the adventure gaming community, and how to get the word out about my game!
World Building, World Breaking: Designing a GM-Less TTRPG Amid Capitalist Ruins
Saturday 11:15-11:45
(Room: URBN-349)
Assemblage is my card-based science-fantasy TTRPG where players build a weird ecology, then explore how that ecology responds to an environmental disaster. Inspired by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s book The Mushroom at the End of the World—an “eco-anthropology” of the matsutake mushroom—Assemblage investigates community-narration and collective survival in a shifting, compromised landscape. How can a storygame invoke themes of inter-species collaboration? Can GM-less designs truly avoid the designation of a central narrative authority? What are the structures and tools for leading players through grief, and into possibility and shared power?
Cringe to Career: How Fanfiction Creates Great Game Writers
Saturday 11:15-11:45
(Room: URBN-125)
Nowadays, it is very rare for a game writer to be tasked to work on an original IP. More often than not, writers will be working on a sequel or a video game adaptation of a pre-established (and often well-loved) universe. Contributing to these worlds can be daunting for some, but others have been doing it for years under a different name: Fanfiction. Though fanfiction is considered embarrassing and “cringe,” it creates a solid foundation for working as a video game writer.
From Interactive Fiction to Immersive Learning: The Gaming Dynamics of Patient Simulation
Saturday 11:15-11:45
(Room: URBN-120)
Patient simulation has evolved over the past 60 years into an interactive and immersive educational approach, often incorporating gaming elements to enhance learning experiences for healthcare professionals. These simulations utilize live and virtual patients and scenarios, enabling learners to practice clinical skills in a risk-free environment. Typically simulations involve a fictional challenge, for example, when a medical student examines a simulated patient “actor,” or when a medical team evaluates a computerized mannequin that has be programmed to simulate hypovolemic shock due to internal bleeding.
Punches That Land: Approaching Games Narrative Through Panels
Saturday 12:00-12:30
(Room: URBN-110)
In the medium of comics, nothing is secondary or invisible. Each mark is a succinct commitment to the images and words on the page. This means that one person can accomplish a whole lot. Herein lies bountiful opportunity for deep, personal stories with a lively, improvisational energy. With the availability of developer resources, it is not uncommon or unwise for a cartoonist to bring their skillset and unique perspective to the world of games. But when it comes down to narrative, what can a game designer, staring down a years-long development timeline with thousands of moving parts, learn from comics? I seek to distinguish these forms more clearly, identify the places they intersect, and explore the possibilities in games that the medium of comics has the power to illuminate.
Walking with Death: Learning Holistic Game Design through Adventure Games
Saturday 12:00-12:30
(Room: URBN-141)
If adventure games died, then they’re enjoying a fantastic afterlife. Their spirit lives on, not just in the adventure genre but in games as a whole. How does Ben Throttle get past a locked door in Full Throttle? What do Lee’s choices mean in The Walking Dead versus Chloe in Life is Strange? How do these design choices impact the story and act in conversation with other game elements? Like visuals, direction, writing, and performance? If we take these tools, we can apply them to other game genres. Why does Mario Odyssey involve the glamour of 50s travel? And Zagreus keep trying to escape the underworld? If we want to grow as developers, we need to make sure that we interrogate our choices as thoroughly as any adventure game hero. Our goal? Learning to approach our projects holistically.
This Game Is Garbage: How Form Can Inspire Play in Diceless TTRPGs
Saturday 12:00-12:30
(Room: URBN-349)
Psychic Trash Detectives is a diceless, collaborative TTRPG played with actual garbage. The world is electric with psychic energy, an interconnected web of memory and emotional echoes that only animals are able to perceive. The characters are trash animals—critters like pigeons, possums, and raccoons—who experience powerful visions when they touch garbage, using those visions to solve a mystery that no one else cares about. From the game’s opening activity, which invites players to take a real memory of being discarded and transform it into an actual piece of trash, to mini games like erasure poetry, psychic sketching, and exquisite corpse storytelling, players mine the pile of garbage they’ve brought to their gaming table for the clues to solving a mystery abandoned by the rest of the world.
Writing Absorbing Stories for Short Attention Spans
Saturday 12:00-12:30
(Room: URBN-125)
In mobile F2P games, you might get seven seconds and four taps before a player decides whether to keep playing. In short-form web videos, viewers’ attention spans are even shorter—you might get half a second before the viewer decides to scroll away. So, in this modern age of shortened attention spans and heightened content options, how do you hook people with your story and keep them on the line? From their work together on Double Loop’s “Ashe Cove” mobile game—where they created a compelling paranormal mystery plot for a super-casual audience—Rose and Shelby discovered some key elements to concise writing for mobile games. Shelby will also delve into her experience transferring these skills into short form web video.
The Middle Ground: Writing for the Masses While Keeping Your Soul
Saturday 12:00-12:30
(Room: URBN-120)
We’ll explore the balance between having a career in commercial video game writing and maintaining a personal, artistic practice. Does writing for a living diminish one’s creative spirit? Is it possible to balance writing for commercial products with honing one’s craft? Can we find the drive for both work and personal projects? And finally, does turning writing into a saleable craft destroy its artistic value?
Indie Marketing Then and Now
Saturday 13:30-14:00
(Room: URBN-110)
Wadjet Eye has been in business for almost twenty years, and has seen many many changes in how indie games are sold and marketed. But just how different is it? In this talk, Wadjet Eye founder Dave Gilbert will talk about how he marketed his games back in the dark ages of 2006 and how the lessons learned can apply to selling games today.
Immersing the Mind’s Eye: Is there a place for IF in VR?
Saturday 13:30-14:00
(Room: URBN-141)
Among the most memorable clips in the documentary Get Lamp is the interview with a blind fan of IF who talks about his experience as being particularly wonderful because it is equal to the experience of sighted players—everyone must use their imaginations to create the world that is being described. People who are unfamiliar with IF as a game genre may view the lack of visual illustration as a deficit; for blind players and readers who value the immersive capacities of their own mind’s eye, it is a feature. Virtual reality applications, with some exceptions, like 3-D video games, are inaccessible to the blind. Might IF provide enhanced experiences not only for the vision-impaired—but for the sighted as well? Using speech and soundscapes to evoke the 360 spatiality of VR, players “walk through” an immersive world with the visuals provided in the traditional IF way—through the imagination of the reader.
Puzzle Process: Making Games At The New York Times
Saturday 13:30-14:00
(Room: URBN-349)
Heidi Erwin, a senior game designer at The New York Times, walks through a behind-the-scenes of the early development process of NYT puzzle games, including Connections, Strands, and other recent releases. They’ll share game design lessons, puzzle easter eggs, and other miscellaneous notes on the making of these daily games. What makes a compelling daily puzzle game? What are the challenges around making games in this format? What considerations might someone need to take into account when working with word games specifically?
Inferring Intent or Agency Without Traffic Lights
Saturday 13:30-14:00
(Room: URBN-125)
How to infer player’s narrative intent organically, without breaking dynamical flow? We strive to let player choices guide the experience. However, our usual methods are to ask for the choices directly, in the moment. What are the alternatives? Taking Clint Hocking’s “Self-Exploration Systems” and building off his and Kent Hudson’s works I will show a practical emergent narrative system, that can agnostically use input actions to change dynamical landscape of the story, by inferring story decisions from gameplay dynamics. This talk will introduce Aggregate Meaning—an Emergent Narrative Technique to discern player intent from low-level inputs and organically modify narrative. We will use it as a foundation to explain Unified Player Agency, a framework of organizing gameplay around player agency. Collectively, these practical techniques will present a model that can act as a “missing link” between second-to-second input actions and larger story themes, without breaking players’ sense of ownership over their experience.
Analysis of Le Morte d’Arthur Storyworld
Saturday 14:15-15:15
(Room: URBN-110)
Le Morte d’Arthur uses a radically different approach to interactive storytelling. The fundamental architecture of the design is linear, not branching—yet every decision the player makes helps determine the outcome of the story. The theme of the storyworld is death and the meaning of life, and it does not merely expostulate this theme—it prompts the player to discover its message through Socratic dialogue. Explore it here: https://www.erasmatazz.com/LeMorteDArthur.html
Your Dating Sim Doesn’t Need to Subvert the Genre
Saturday 14:15-15:15
(Room: URBN-141)
By nature, otome games—a subgenre of story-based romance games which feature female protagonists as the player character—break the mold of classic romance tropes and narratives that we are socialized in North America to accept. Starting with the foundational first English translations of Hakuouki in 2008 and Amnesia in 2011, these otome games popularized the concept of reverse harem, allowing the female protagonists to have agency and an abundance of choice. Whether the player character is entangled in a mafia turf war in Piofore or caught between the police and a terrorist organization in Collar x Malice, these games insert female protagonists as integral key players into narratives that historically and fictionally have excluded women. They allow the female player characters to directly affect and shift the narrative, all while searching for their happily ever after.
How to Make a Game Poem: Game Design as Short-Form Personal Expression
Saturday 14:15-15:15
(Room: URBN-349)
I’ll give a brief talk introducing the concept of a “game poem” and discuss how to make game poems in practice (regardless of technical skills). Game poems can help us to challenge and push out traditional videogame expectations and tendencies. (Games that prioritize reflection and slowing down over action and hours of play; games that explore subjective experiences and the inner life rather than focusing primarily on external objects and physics; games that embrace metaphor, ambiguity, and hyperbole instead of pursuing hyperrealism and literalism....)
Representing Physical Disabilities in Interactive Fiction
Saturday 14:15-15:15
(Room: URBN-349)
Interactive fiction offers a unique space to represent diverse characters, yet too often, disabled characters are included as an afterthought—mere symbols of inclusivity rather than fully developed individuals. I will explore how to integrate characters with physical disabilities into interactive narratives in a meaningful, authentic way. Drawing from my own experience as a wheelchair user and my work in interactive fiction, I will discuss how to write disabled characters as complex, fully realized people. I will also explore how choice-driven storytelling can challenge perceptions, such as a recent project where the player faces the moral dilemma of whether to use a supernatural method to heal a paraplegic character. Additionally, I will discuss an often-overlooked topic—depicting physical intimacy with disabled characters in a way that is realistic and respectful, avoiding harmful tropes. Authentic representation can ensure that disabled characters are woven into narratives with purpose, respect, and complexity.
Big IF: No More Jockeys and the Legacy of the Car Game
Saturday 14:15-15:15
(Room: URBN-349)
A pandemic-era Zoom call gameshow hosted by three fortysomething English comedians: I’m here to tell you that this is not, in fact, a recipe for utter misery. Well, actually I’m here to mine it for ideas for narrative-and-word focused games: category elimination, cumulative callbacks and recycled responses, improvised minigames (Kitchen Conversions etc.), legalistic pedantry as defense, spectator-as-narrator (BTL), internet sleuthing, creating your own difficulty, and raising the car game to the level of art, or at least Wimbledon.
Finding the Pixel: Information Seeking Behaviors Towards Holistic Narrative Design
Saturday 14:15-15:15
(Room: URBN-125)
Information is at the heart of any narrative game. From puzzle solutions to game-spanning plot threads, narrative games are full of information for the character—and, in turn, the player—to seek out, and this pursuit of information plays a significant role in defining the game’s world and the characters within it. The field of information science has produced a rich array of theories about information seeking behavior, and looking at narrative game design through an information sciences lens yields useful perspectives and surprising insights. I will introduce several theories of information seeking behaviors (including berrypicking, sensemaking, and encountering) and apply them to examples from adventure games I’ve worked on (NORCO and Perfect Tides: Station to Station) to illustrate how considering the different ways we think about information in the real world can make for a more cohesive, consistent, and compelling experience in the worlds we create and the stories we tell within narrative games.
Bedquilt: Bringing IF to Rust and Rust to Glulx
Saturday 14:15-15:15
(Room: URBN-120)
Bedquilt, currently in development, is a Rust-based design system for parser-oriented interactive fiction. I’ll introduce Wasm2Glulx (already released), which enables targeting the Glulx ecosystem from any high-level language that can compile to WebAssembly. Next will be a quick tour of the Rust programming language, and then of Bedquilt’s system library (basically a Rust API to Glk). Then I’ll cover Bedquilt’s graph-based data model, its parser, and its world model, comparing and contrasting with established development systems such Inform, TADS, and Dialog. While some degree of prior programming experience will be assumed, the talk should be accessible to anyone who has developed parser-oriented IF in other languages.
Tabletops and Twine: Adventures in Adventure Game Proto- and Telotyping
Francisco González, Jess Haskins
Saturday 15:30-16:00
(Room: URBN-110)
“We really need to balance our relationship variables.” Is this the start of a difficult conversation at the breakfast table, or a call to dig into some gnarly narrative systems design? In this process talk, Francisco and Jess will explain why they decided to build both a tabletop RPG campaign and a fully playable Twine model alongside their expansive Western adventure game Rosewater, and they’ll show how they used them as tools for brainstorming, prototyping, playtesting, and balancing work that would have been difficult or simply impracticable to do in the game itself. You’ll see what really powers the largely invisible, possibly overwrought machinery of Rosewater’s companion relationship mechanics, why making a “telotype” (as opposed to an early-stage prototype) after most of the rest of the game is finished might not be the worst idea, and how you might incorporate these methods throughout the development process when designing your next complex, open-ended, highly responsive, or possibly overwrought narrative game.
Lessons in Adapting Graphic Adventures to Nintendo Switch While Maintaining Design and Narrative Intents
Saturday 15:30-16:00
(Room: URBN-141)
The graphic adventure is one of the strongest game genres tailored for storytelling and immersive narrative experiences. From Colossal Cave to The Crimson Diamond, the genre has focused on balancing puzzling situations solved through human intelligence to solve puzzling situations with rich world-building, character development, and emotional beats experienced through the human heart. However, many games today have converged on a mouse-controlled cursor to provide access to the world, story, and gameplay. I’ll discuss the experience of adapting point-and-click adventures to the Nintendo Switch and the lessons learned through playtesting and collaborating with the games’ authors. I’ll discuss how the genre can be adapted beyond the traditional mouse-driven controls while maintaining narrative, design, and emotional goals. Finally, I will provide tips on how to think about designing graphic adventures with controls that are more accessible to any type of input device.
Playful Worldbuilding: Using Play and Game Mechanics for Better Collaborative Imagination
Saturday 15:30-16:00
(Room: URBN-349)
When we think of worldbuilding—the conceptual process of developing a fictional setting—we often think of meticulous, bureaucratic work: doing research, writing long reference documents, finding and eliminating contradictions, and answering nitty-gritty questions about imagined societies and cultures. But framing worldbuilding as a bureaucratic process can discourage team members from contributing, emphasize “consistency” over the development of unique ideas, and sap the collaborative creative energy from which game development teams often benefit. What other methods might we use to envision and document the worlds in which our games take place? “Playful worldbuilding”—integrating play and game mechanics into worldbuilding processes—is one alternative method. Playful worldbuilding encourages creators to approach their worlds with curiosity, to embrace uncertainty and weirdness, and to confidently contribute ideas to shared worlds.
Designing Dictatorships: Two Research-Based Approaches to Highlighting the Techniques of Authoritarian Institutions Through Games
Saturday 15:30-16:00
(Room: URBN-125)
We’ll discuss the process of designing QUANTUM TIES, a roleplaying game set within an authoritarian system, and Silencer, a news censorship game, by integrating historical and sociological research into the games’ world building and narratives. A fictionalized authority can be built through narrativized rules that not only exist as game mechanics, but also as diagetic codes of conduct within the game world. Both games aim to highlight real-world techniques used by authoritarian governments and cults as they make their players complicit in the enforcement of these rules. How do we encourage obedience and conformity on the part of the player, while providing the space to break these rules?
Journaling Games: A History and Design Framework for Unlocking Player Creativity
Saturday 15:30-16:00
(Room: URBN-120)
Games are often portrayed as windows into the worlds crafted by game developers, but in an era where literacy rates are down, and media consumption is king, wouldn’t it be great to have games that liberates the creative writing potential of their players? We’ll propose a design framework, history, and tips for designing your own journaling game. With popular games like Kind Words and The Quiet Year, and journaling games of my own design like Reflections at Sunset, Confessions of an NPC, and Memoir Games, I’ll discuss various techniques used to make players feel comfortable and confident in writing in an attention starved world.
Sometimes Love is the Wrong Dialogue Choice: Designing Interactive Romance for Games
Saturday 16:15-17:15
(Room: URBN-110)
An analysis of designing interactive relationships, from the Baldur’s Gate 3 companion romance design lead. We’ll start with a brief history of interactive and player-driven “romance” features in video games. What does this feature in games mean to players? Provides suggestions for improvements overall for anyone designing these features themselves.
Dead Static Drive’s “Novella” Narrative Engine for Unreal
Leena van Deventer, Mike Blackney
Saturday 16:15-17:15
(Room: URBN-141)
A deep dive into the narrative of Dead Static Drive, with particular focus on the Novella narrative engine Reuben Games made for Unreal for the game. Novella is a hierarchical narrative engine with two distinct levels. The storyline layer sequences stories, and provides the logic of which scenes can play out before the player and when and how they can progress. The scene layer rules the gameplay logic: it outlines which characters appear and how they act, dictating character behavior and conversation flow.
The Superhero Test: Designing Dynamic Characters
Saturday 16:15-17:15
(Room: URBN-349)
All superheroes share five basic characteristics: a costume, a superpower, a weakness, a backstory and a mission. Using comics as a starting point, we’ll take a look at story-rich games like Disco Elysium and Night in the Woods and see how the “Superhero Test” can be used to design compelling characters in interactive fiction. We’ll test our own games while also discussing: How can text communicate personality? When’s the best time to reveal a character’s history? What’s driving their narrative arc? And most important: how do we make sure players care enough about our characters to finish the game?
How to Make Art When the World is Ending
Saturday 16:15-17:15
(Room: URBN-349)
Let’s be real; things right now look bad. What are a bunch of creatives to do? Capturing the subjective sentiment of our time lays important foundation for future stories, and it provides us perspective for the politics of both fantasy and sci-fi. Narrative—our art—is resistance.
Berlin Passages: Exploring History Through Interactive Storytelling in Twine
Saturday 16:15-17:15
(Room: URBN-349)
What if history wasn’t just studied but played? This talk explores Berlin Passages, a historical interactive autofiction in Twine that blends my personal experiences with the city’s alternative recent history—shaped by the Berlin Wall, techno culture, and squats. Through nonlinear storytelling, multimedia, and gamelike elements, Berlin Passages reinterprets the past as a dynamic, participatory and even playful experience, challenging traditional historical narratives.
ICIDS Papers
Saturday 16:15-17:15
(Room: URBN-125)
Featuring two great academic papers from our European conference ally, the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS).
Lost and Found in Translation: Converting TTRPG Experiences into Video Games
Tristan J Tarwater, Camerin Wild
Saturday 16:15-17:15
(Room: URBN-120)
While Baldur’s Gate has the monopoly on D&D mechanics, game makers can employ other mechanics to better emulate the TTRPG experience without the Table top. We will discuss what is meant, implied and misidentified as the TTRPG experience and cover a suite of mechanics which truly get at the heart of why people love these kinds of games. We’ll break down what people actually mean when they say the TTRPG experience and how they can be handled both mechanically and narratively.
IFComp 101: A Newcomer’s Guide
Saturday 17:30-18:00
(Room: URBN-110)
Have you been thinking about entering the Interactive Fiction Competition but you aren’t sure where to start? In this session, IFComp organizer Jacqueline Ashwell will answer the most common questions from new authors and share best practices to help you avoid headaches and make your entry shine. We’ll cover essential topics such as setting realistic development goals, balancing the game you want to make with how judges often vote, ensuring thorough playtesting, and understanding what to expect as a participant. We’ll also explore why you might choose to enter IFComp over other competitions. Perhaps most importantly, this session will highlight common pitfalls—including mistakes that have led to disqualification—so you can avoid them from the start. Whether you’re a first-time author or just curious about IFComp, bring your questions and leave with the knowledge and confidence to take the next step!
Re-Learning Narrative Design Lessons from Children’s Books
Saturday 17:30-18:00
(Room: URBN-141)
I read a lot to my kids when putting them to bed. Lately, I’ve noticed a familiar pattern in “I CAN READ” books we’ve borrowed from the library. The pattern wasn’t obvious to me at first, but it became clear as my youngest child skipped every other page to get to their favorite parts. I found that even if my over-eager son glossed over “details,” he could still decipher the underlying “plot” (such as it is). His enthusiasm/impatience reminded me of video game players button-mashing through dialog to “get to the action.” However, narrative designers (and authors of children’s books apparently) have anticipated this brute-force storytelling by implementing the Layer Cake method. The topmost layer is all the pertinent information; each subsequent layer contains more details, more world-building, and possibly hidden information about upcoming obstacles. I will share examples of this technique in the books I’ve been reading to my kids and compare them to narrative design in games like 1000xResist, Citizen Sleeper, and Norco.
Teaching Writing and Critical Inquiry through TTRPGs
Saturday 17:30-18:00
(Room: URBN-349)
I teach an undergraduate writing course at the University at Albany. It’s the required freshman Composition course, and I created a semester-long roleplaying game to teach it. The game takes place about 50 years into the future. Capitalism has driven us toward extinction, extinguishing cultures and causing biospheric changes that make most of earth unlivable. My students play corporate employees who secretly gather evidence and information of the corporation’s dirty work during the day, and work toward resistance at night, with a round in between that promotes joy and human connection. The game moves forward as a series of open-ended mysteries for students to create, with two mini-games for each mystery that provide them with inspirational clues. The underlying theme of the course, and the game, is about using narrative as a tool to combat systemic injustice.
The Platform is the Message: Storytelling with System-Specific Affordances
Saturday 17:30-18:00
(Room: URBN-125)
Technological elements specific to a platform can be used as a storytelling medium. I will focus on an analysis of two games. Lifeline (2015) turned push notifications on mobile into the main vehicle for its story. They were styled as messages from the main character to the player and used to create immersion, control pacing, and convey passage of time. Thousand Lives (coming out Q1 2025), my own game played wholly through email, follows the life of a woman born in Communist Poland and her choices about family, politics, and legacy. I will talk about designing a story for email and what choosing this kind of medium means for the narrative: what are the opportunities, limitations, and risks. Finally I’ll extrapolate from these examples to the broader lessons and suggestions for using unusual storytelling platforms.
How (and Why) to Bore Your Players
Saturday 17:30-18:00
(Room: URBN-120)
I will make a case for boredom as an intentional game design tool to provoke reflective interpretation in players. Drawing from aesthetic and philosophical theories of boredom by Lars Svedsen, Susan Sontag, and others, I will show how boredom studies can be applied to the medium of games through careful analysis of Tale of Tales’ The Graveyard (2008) and Studio Seufz’ The Longing (2020). Each game reveals distinctive approaches to creating and regulating the experience of boredom: the former as a short, minimalist vignette, and the latter as a 9,600-hour epic. I argue that both titles manage to stage the player’s confrontation with boredom in a way that encourages a productive resolution to the resulting tension through an active, player-led process of meaning-making. Finally, my talk will reflect on some of the practical design questions and challenges that emerged in the process of building boredom into the structure of my own game, Beaux-Arts.
Sunday Conference - June 22nd
Sign-in and badge pickup
Sunday 08:00-10:30
(Room: PISB Atrium until 10:30—after that, come to the URBN Center to sign in!)
Conference Day Two Welcome from the NarraScope Conference Team
Sunday 09:00-09:30
(Room: PISB 120)
The Conference Team shares highlights from Saturday and upcoming Sunday sessions. Include a message from a Special Guest!
Local Hero Keynote
Sunday 09:30-10:30
(Room: PISB 120)
Our NarraScope 2025 Keynote session presented by local legend Dain Saint.
Preview for the day: Sunday
Sunday 10:30-10:45
(Room: PISB 120)
Quick map-aided overview of the rest of the day, with walking routes to URBN Center and URBN Annex, the conference rooms map, and help visualizing what activities are happening when. Reminders for the Farewell event, lunch, and routes to head out with luggage to Amtrak, airports, and other transportation at the end of the day.
Help! I Accidentally Wrote A Sequel!
Sunday 11:15-11:45
(Room: URBN-110)
In December 2014, I released my first title for Choice of Games, Psy High. One of the things I was proud of was the huge variation in the way the story could go: the endings ranged from “you’re accused of arson” to “you win a scholarship to college” to “you give magical powers to everyone in your hometown,” with dozens of other variations along the way, including friendships, romances, hobbies, and more. I had always envisioned it as a self-contained story, so it didn’t matter that it could potentially end in so many different ways.... Then I got the idea for a sequel. In this talk, I’ll discuss the writing of Psy High 2: High Summer, and my process for turning a standalone into a series: the decisions I had to make about which storylines could continue, the opportunities to respond to player feedback about the first game, the difficulties and joys of building in callbacks, how one character got saved from a terrible fate, and what I learned from the experience.
The Magazine Model: Lessons From The HTML Review
Sunday 11:15-11:45
(Room: URBN-141)
For four years The HTML Review has run as an annual magazine for interactive literature on the web. Works we have published have won both traditional literary awards and interactive prizes, gone on to be displayed in old school art museums, and lead to fully-fledged game releases. We will discuss the benefits and drawbacks to using a literary magazine model for interactive narratives and games. What sort of work is best suited to being supported, shepherded, and released in this way? What does it take to start, fund, and run a magazine? How can publications enhance and foster a community?
Can Haunted Houses be Immersive Fiction?
Sunday 11:15-11:45
(Room: URBN-349)
Haunted houses are one of the oldest forms of immersive entertainment. Today, they are a massive seasonal business, drawing in throngs of devoted scare-junkies annually during the weeks leading up to Halloween. But haunted houses are missing something: too many rely on jump scares or chainsaw guys to fill the void left by a cohesive and compelling narrative. How can novel takes on an old favorite compete with the traditional favorites like blood buckets and endless dark hallways? What role does the audience play in driving the narrative? And what kinds of stories lend themselves well to a haunted experience, one that can satisfy the deep-diving storytelling romantic and excite the casual thrill-seeker alike? Can psychological suggestion give us the same scares that we know and love from a traditional haunted house? Or is even the idea of an “immediate scare” too limiting, omitting the slow-burn or fridge logic horror that has already rattled the film industry? Join me on a journey through the history of haunted houses, purposeful constraints, and applications of theory to reality as I attempt to orchestrate a new kind of haunted house in New York City in October 2025.
Mathematically Proving Your Stories Have No Bugs
Sunday 11:15-11:45
(Room: URBN-125)
Manage changing story requirements can be a challenge. Game narratives grow to be complex, with multiple overlapping and intertwining elements. It’s difficult to ensure that a large, complex story remains coherent no matter how the player experiences it. We’ve developed a novel method of managing this, by applying constraint solving to narrative structures. The constraint solver takes formal statements about the rules of your story, and ensures that these rules can never be broken at any point in the game. Our system allows the designer to model the relationship between facts in a story—whether an item has been collected, or a character has been met—and provide strong guarantees that the current state of the game is consistent. This allows the team to stay on top of complexity, at any stage in development, giving you the tools you need to focus your time and attention on the things that matter, instead of checking literally every branch of a story, oh my gosh!
NarraScope Papers Block 1
Sunday 11:15-11:45
(Room: URBN-120)
Featuring a highlighted academic paper from the 2025 NarraScope Papers program, made possible by Drexel University.
Absurdly Elaborate Tools and Techniques For ChoiceScript Development
Sunday 12:00-12:30
(Room: URBN-110)
The fine folks at Choice of Games have excellent rules of thumb for how to simplify your project and save yourself work. I ignored them all! Instead of smoothing out history into a small set of scalar variables, what if we obsessively collected information on everything that happened, so we could react with delicate nuance to each specific playthrough? Wouldn’t that make the project unmanageable? Well, maybe, but come see how state-capturing enumerated variables and idempotent flag-recalculating subroutines can help! Do you roll your eyes at “Save the Cat” plot beats? Well, what if you let the code guide your story—deciding the next beat by statistical analysis? Do you despair of clicking through your game to test every weird little possibility? What if you could search the space of possible playthroughs by story criteria, and spit out the text of the specific one you want to read through? Come and see my cat-vacuuming procrastination in all its Ruby-scripted glory.
Hyperprint: From Novels to Games and Back Again
Sunday 12:00-12:30
(Room: URBN-141)
How can digital storytelling change the printed book? KUU, my current work-in-progress, bridges the worlds of interactive narrative and hybrid book design, through a recursive creative process and a smuggling of technique: Twine and Ink for novel drafting and scanned print pages as a video game. I’ll explore the strange loop of developing an interactive game and a print novel simultaneously, focusing on how narrative structures, reader/player agency, and design constraints can be deployed across formats. Building on my illuminated novel Bats of the Republic (Doubleday, 2015)—which featured diagrams, maps, easter eggs, and a sealed envelope containing Möbius loop of text—I’ve discovered that working to maximise the affordances of different media can create a narrative ecosystem that thrives. I’ll reveal drafting and development insights, including how the physical constraints of book design can inform digital interactivity, and how branching narrative design can inspire innovative print layouts.
Bring Your Own Workflow: Creating Better Narrative Production Processes for Indies
Sunday 12:00-12:30
(Room: URBN-349)
Because pipelines for game writers and narrative designers are rarely standardized or formalized, it often falls to these writers and designers themselves, with or without the aid of a producer, to establish best practices and processes surrounding game narrative. I’ll address that lack of clarity and provide guidance on what kinds of workflows to utilize in different professional settings, depending on the type of (indie) team you’re working with and what sorts of games you’re creating. Learn about a variety of templates for story content organization (visual story mapping using a tool like Miro, standard screenplay format, node-based branching tools) and examples of the situations in which each template tends to be the most effective, in my experience. I also dive into interdisciplinary communication (design briefs, video updates) and how to make narrative content easily readable and digestible for your collaborators.
We’re All in This Together: Using Creative Commons as a Game Design Philosophy and Foundation for Community Building
Sunday 12:00-12:30
(Room: URBN-125)
Creative Commons is an amazing resource that I greatly undervalued until a throwaway comment changed the entire design of my game. In this talk I will briefly go over the basics of what is Creative Commons and how it works (the differences between CC licenses, public domain, royalty free, etc.), before segueing into practical advice on how one might incorporate it (including tips on sources and how to blend the visions of different artists under a unified design principle). CC can be the basis for a new design philosophy that can expand the scope of your game; especially as a solo developer with a tight budget. Once I let go of expected conventions I was able to find a new unique voice which served to enhance my game’s themes, functionality, and style. In a medium like IF which inherently crosses the boundary between the real and imagined worlds, there is special power in inviting reality into the game space through archival assets. Finally, I will talk about CC as a tool for community (and audience) building. Small creators often have to make tough decisions, especially in an era where AI seems like an easy shortcut but threatens the creative ecosystem at large. Instead CC is all about artists empowering one another.
NarraScope Papers Block 2
Sunday 12:00-12:30
(Room: URBN-120)
Featuring a highlighted academic paper from the 2025 NarraScope Papers program, made possible by Drexel University.
Like the Last 20 Minutes of a Movie: Adapting the Falling Action of Cinema for Games
Sunday 13:30-14:00
(Room: URBN-110)
Stemming from research done for World Ending Game (2022), we’ll will discuss dénouement—and various ways to employ film’s falling action inside of games. What makes for a satisfying ending? How long can characters, stories, and last shots linger? When do we cut, fade to black, or roll credits? What specific cinematic shots, tropes, conventions, and structures can we use to end our stories? In an industry where games are rated in part by their play hours, where New Game+ and regular DLC releases are considered standard, and where players often “set down” games as often as they finish them—I argue instead for the power of considered endings, and the gift of proper goodbyes.
“The Life We Have Left to Live”: Death-Positive Narrative Design, and Embracing Mortality Through a Site-Specific Cemetery Roleplay
Sunday 13:30-14:00
(Room: URBN-141)
Dying is one of the most common experiences in games, but it’s rarely the selling point, a pillar of the narrative or design. In recent years, however, “death positivity” has emerged as a prominent theme in a growing number of acclaimed indie games: Spiritfarer, Death and Taxes, A Mortician’s Tale—and, less overtly, in existential titles like Outer Wilds. These games engage thoughtfully and compassionately with death, not as something to be celebrated, but as an integral part of life. When I set out to write The Life We Have Left to Live, a site-specific roleplay designed for cemeteries, my intention was to build on this death-positive movement in video games, while bringing gameplay into the real world, where players could meditate on their mortality in the company and care of local community. I took inspiration from designer Jane McGonigal, a proponent of positive psychology and pioneer in the field of gamification, whose “Tombstone Hold’em” drew crowds of players to cemeteries across America in 2011. Did my experimental approach, combining an immersive LARP with a low-key scavenger hunt, succeed at engaging different player types? What balance did it strike between “fun” and “funerary”? And does this project have a future, or is it ready to rest in peace?
“Can I Borrow Your Shoes?” The Theory and Practice of Empathy in Video Game Narratives
Sunday 13:30-14:00
(Room: URBN-349)
When promoting the wonders of video game narratives to friends, family, and colleagues, I’ve often enthusiastically put forward this argument: “Video games, thanks to their unparalleled immersion and widespread access, are an underutilized tool for building empathy and experiencing different perspectives.” But one day, going through this exact discussion, I realized I had perhaps taken the central questions of my argument for granted. So I designed a thesis project to deconstruct, investigate, and analyze if and how video games build empathy. I will synthesize theories of digital narratology with psychology and neuroscience research and my personal experiences as a narrative designer to try and answer some basic questions: What does it mean to build empathy? Can video games build empathy, and if so, how? Do video games build empathy differently, or perhaps better, than other narrative mediums? What are, if any, the best practices for building empathy with games? And, perhaps most importantly, why are we asking these questions in the first place?
Anonymously Submitting Transgressive Transsexual Trauma to IFComp
Sunday 13:30-14:00
(Room: URBN-125)
I’m the dev behind LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST, an interactive fiction piece I submitted on a whim to IFComp 2024. It’s a story made for a very select subset of transmasculine people, caring very little about how it’s received outside of its target audience. This is a talk about my thought process behind creating it as a semi-autobiographical piece, the importance of representing the unmarketable parts of queer experience, the question of promoting work in competitions that aren’t for the “general public”, the experience of reading critiques from people who don’t know you’re in the same room, and, ultimately, why I think more people should create art without caring if it pisses off the right people.
Social Democracy: A Postmortem for an Alternate History
Sunday 14:15-14:45
(Room: URBN-110)
This talk is a postmortem for Social Democracy: An Alternate History, a political simulation game set in the Weimar Republic, where one plays as the Social Democratic Party of Germany and tries to defeat the Nazis via democratic means. First submitted to Spring Thing 2024 (where it received a “Best in Show” award), it became a minor viral phenomenon. I will discuss how the game came to be, its inspirations and predecessors in the domain of political simulation games, and the research process and historical sources that went into its development. Next, I will discuss the game’s mechanics and design principles, and the balance between narrative and mechanics. On one level these include the abstract representation of politics and economics and events, and on another level the card-game-like mechanics and randomness. I will also discuss the DendryNexus narrative engine which was developed for this game, a system inspired by StoryNexus from Failbetter Games, but taken to different ends. Finally, I will discuss the historical narratives and assumptions implied by the game, the envelope of historical possibility, the community that has developed around the game, and speculate about the real-life applicability of an antifascist alternate history game.
My Love Affair with the Lindenbaum Prize Competition: Embracing the Limitations of Physical Gamebooks
Sunday 14:15-14:45
(Room: URBN-141)
Have you ever wanted to just get weird and experimental while making narrative games, but then you remembered that games take a long time to make, and that seems like kind of a bad idea? This sounds like a job for The Lindenbaum Prize for Short Gamebook Fiction! This little-known competition has been running for the last four years, and I’ve participated in it every time. In this talk, I’ll discuss my four experimental gamebooks and what I’ve learned about creating narrative games in-general and physical gamebooks specifically. Did you know that you can arrange an unread section in a gamebook to act as a promise to the reader or to serve the function of a content warning? Were you aware that orphaned sections aren’t just for goofs any more? I’ll tell you why I most want to publish the submission that my spouse hated and how The Lindenbaum Prize is helping me get tenure. So join me for a talk about four gamebooks you’ve never played.
Immersive Collage as a Medium for Collective Storytelling Across Time
Sunday 14:15-14:45
(Room: URBN-349)
The Community Game Development Toolkit is a set of tools that make it easy and fun for students, artists, researchers and community members to create their own visually rich, interactive 3D environments and story-based games. Based in the Unity game engine, the toolkit provides intuitive tools for diverse communities to represent their own traditions, rituals and heritages through interactive, visual storytelling. The toolkit draws on creators’ own photos, collages, drawings, sound recordings and 3D scans to create objects and textures in 3D space. This makes creative experimentation rewarding and fun for creators who may have no prior experience in 3D modeling or even visual art. I will present several recent projects created using the Toolkit. In “The Middle”, community members in rural Nebraska, some of whom are affected by Substance Use Disorder, engaged in worldbuilding sessions and used the Toolkit to build game-like virtual worlds that imagine a future of healing and mutual support. “Bisexual Bedroom Imaginaries” constructs a virtual bedroom created from a collage of formative queer objects, texts and drawings, collected by the author as a youth and teenager.
From Stanley Parable to Severance: The Growing Influence of Games on Pop Culture
Sunday 14:15-14:45
(Room: URBN-125)
I examine the increasing influence video games are having on other mediums, focusing on smaller indie video games that served as key inspirations for the Emmy award winning TV show Severance. I delve into the five year history of the first person shooter inspired Backrooms creepypasta that began with the phrase, “I clipped out of bounds in real life”, and how its concepts and aesthetics influenced Severance’s creator. I examine how the concept of gameplay is used in Severance, and how the office workers play various “games”—either wrangling the enigmatic numbers on their computers, or uncovering the various mysteries of the endless hallways of their building. This connection shows a dramatic shift in how video games have been continuously permeating our pop culture landscape since the first failed video game movie adaptations in the 90s. Now individual creators are growing up on video games and drawing from their own personal inspirations in a more organic way.
IFTF Grants Program
Sunday 14:15-14:45
(Room: URBN-120)
The IFTF Grants Program shares details about awards granted to date and how you can submit.
IFWiki × ALA Librarians
Sunday 14:15-14:45
(Room: URBN-120)
The IFWiki team and some librarians share how you can get involved in preserving and documenting the legacy of narrative games and interactive fiction.
Leaving Room For Grief
Sunday 15:00-15:30
(Room: URBN-110)
Death is high stakes, ritualized, dramatic, cathartic, haunting, and universal. It’s no wonder it’s everywhere in storytelling, but why do some stories of death, and those left behind, hit us in the gut while others skirt past our soft, gooey center? How do we tell tales that reach into the very tender core of us for what is personal about grief, without alienating our audiences and participants, sometimes before they even begin? The mere possibility that a story will elicit grief can keep us off news apps, avoiding “serious” content, and making even the weather a topic of potential griefiness. And yet, we must contend with it, and better to do so together, and playfully, than by letting it eat us alive from the inside. We’ll explore the fine line and rich possibilities at the intersection of artistic self-expression, interactivity, and communal grief, including tools for incorporating personal, societal, and eco-grief in a way that is true to the creator while providing space for participants to feel their feels.
Inara’s Banquet: Serving Ancient and Interactive Drama
Sunday 15:00-15:30
(Room: URBN-141)
How do you transform a 3,000-year-old myth into an interactive, immersive experience? That is the question I tried to answer when developing Inara’s Banquet: a live performance based on the ancient Illuyanka Myth, a Hittite text from the 2nd millennium BCE. I will share insights from the development process and discuss how I applied theories of game design to immersive theatre as a powerful formula for bringing ancient rituals to life. I’ll talk about how to strike a balance between historical authenticity and a compelling interactive experience, my discoveries on how to motivate the audience in participating in unfamiliar activities, and what it takes to establish a temporary world in which actors and audience members feel like they can act freely whilst working within dramatic and practical constraints. Since Inara’s Banquet is a work in progress, it provides a unique insight into the development of immersive experiences and the ways in which game-based narrative design principles can be applied to create worldbuilding and performance frameworks for interactive productions, especially when using source material that an audience might be unfamiliar with.
Consent and Agency in Narrative Development
Sunday 15:00-15:30
(Room: URBN-349)
In the summer of 2020, early into the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the Creative Partners of Flux Theatre Ensemble made a suggestion to address a need for sharing space while socially distanced: what if we create a phone line people could call to either give something or take something? From that simple prompt came Our Options Have Changed (OOHC), an interactive audio experience released in 2022. With a sprawling web of content containing mindfulness exercises, subversive challenges, office voicemails, hidden puzzles, and introspective monologues, OOHC slowly reveals a dystopian storyworld via a telephone menu. The breadth of experiences available was a direct outcome of our process for development: we provided the structure for any Creative Partner to add whatever they wanted to the experience, trusting in our ability to synthesize the material. We describe the result as a pando-narrative, named for the organism that appears as a grove of distinct trees but is actually connected via a single root system. We will share the organizational structure mapping the interactive experience, the internal narrative that emerged, and subsequent manifestations of the OOHC heterocosm in other forms.
Crafting the Texture of a City in Project Abigail
Isabelle Smith, Antonio Andrade, Biagi Calicchia
Sunday 15:00-15:30
(Room: URBN-125)
In this talk we will speak about narrative and design techniques we applied to our game, Project Abigail, that helped us create a city that feels vibrant and multifaceted. As a team we hand crafted and photographed every building, tree, and bench. The material choices we made—felt, pipe cleaners, papier mache, collaged scraps—were chosen to echo something core about each neighborhood. We also convey locality through Azulejo, a game within our game, played by the people in this city. Azulejo is a fundamentally subjective game based on tiles, and it is played differently in each neighborhood. We use Azulejo as a narrative device to better understand the characters, the neighborhoods, and the protagonists’ place in the city.
Democracy, Now!: Participatory and Co-Creative Design for Collective Liberation
Daniel Park, Ari Gass, Dain Saint, Sulu LeoNimm
Sunday 15:45-16:45
(Room: URBN-110)
Fascist and authoritarian practices are being spread and normalized across the globe. This blooming is neither new nor surprising, but rather was made possible by the planting and tending of cultural beliefs much earlier than our current political moment. The many overlapping systems of oppression have been designed to keep most people away from the levers of power, and we replicate these systems of hierarchy and control in our workplaces, our educations, and our homes. We have been trained, exhausted, and overwhelmed into passive spectatorship. At Obvious Agency (where we aim to make your agency obvious), we see participatory design as a remedy; An opportunity to normalize a culture of democratic power-sharing and co-creation where we all have a say in every aspect of our day-to-day lives. This belief is embedded into our art, our model as a worker-owned cooperative, and we expand it by finding ways to share power with the contract artists we hire to work on our projects. In this panel, staff from our current piece Space Opera will reflect on how the massive TTRPG’s participatory design creates a training ground for the skills needed for the actualization of a more liberated world, and the impact and meaning of working democratically with a team of more than 14 people to produce the work. Our panelists bring a wide range of experience and expertise on this topic including Sulu LeoNimm, Artistic Director of Theatre of the Oppressed NYC, experience designer Dain Saint, and scholar-practitioner Dr. Ari Gass.
Sing to Me, Oh Glitch!
Sunday 15:45-16:45
(Room: URBN-141)
No matter what kind of story you’re telling or what kind of tools you’re using to tell it, something always goes wrong. And that’s... good. Failure is a human success. Failure is what takes art from slick and soulless to relatable and pleasurable. Novelist A.E. Osworth will present a short lecture titled “On Fucking Up” and will then lead participants through a brainstorming session that takes their stubborn programming, narrative, or art-related “bugs” and turns them into “features.” We will do this applying craft concepts from non-interactive fiction such as “thematic argument,” “aesthetic argument,” and “implied reader/player/audience” to interactive work. Working backwards, what do you want your audience to feel and how can your glitch support that? How can we turn our foibles into our styles? This generative workshop is intended for artists, writers, designers and programmers and we will be working in pairs and small groups, as well as coming together to debrief as a large community. Come ready to discuss or demonstrate the glitch in your project.
Revisiting “Chaotic Fiction”: Chaotic Play in the Slenderverse Blog Community
Sunday 15:45-16:45
(Room: URBN-349)
In 2006, Sean Stacey coined the term “Chaotic Fiction”, a framework for understanding alternate reality games and the broader context of collaborative fiction that ARGs exist within. Works of chaotic fiction were defined as having an initial premise set by an author but lacking a completely predetermined outcome, with the relationship between creator(s) and audience influencing the contents and final product. This process constitutes “chaotic play”. While the framework of chaotic fiction fell out of fashion in the interactive fiction community, one group—the “Slenderverse” blog community—embraced the term circa 2009 as an alternative to defining their work strictly as alternate reality games. Through hundreds of blogs revolving around the horror character “Slender Man”, blog authors were responsible for creating a quintessential example of chaotic play in action. Authors played the role of both creator and audience member, influencing the outcome of others’ stories. I’ll explore the framework of chaotic fiction in the context of the Slenderverse blog community, and how chaotic fiction may still be a useful framework today.
Ergodic Narrative: A Brief Exploration of Multimodal Video Game Engagement
Sunday 15:45-16:45
(Room: URBN-349)
Text is a crucial aspect in practically all video games, from dialogue trees to the exposition of in-game discovered documents to the way-finding signage and equipment stats. But where does ergodic literature fit in critically to the game’s experience? Come join me in this wayward investigation of historical and personal misadventures exploring multimodal information related to cybertext for video games. Get ready for a quick romp that recalls feelies, digs into external data files, and traces the rerouting of game flow as we choose our own adventure.
Crafting Kissable Characters (Whether Your Game has Romance in It or Not!)
Sunday 15:45-16:45
(Room: URBN-349)
What makes a great character in a narrative game? Sure, they should have an appealing design, display a certain amount of depth, and provoke empathy from players, but ultimately they must be… kissable. In this lip-smacking presentation, I would like to introduce the “Smoochability Matrix” as it applies to character design, drawing from my experience designing dating sims with “unconventional” love interests, as well as my recent transition into writing a non-romance visual novel, where I found kissability to be almost equally important. Kissability reflects the ability for a character to conjure desire. Whether that desire motivates you to push the character to success, watch them fail, or simply see their story play out to its conclusion, kissability is the key to a strong connection between player and character. Notable points on the Smoochability Matrix include “peckable” (cute, sparks protective feelings) “smackable” (love-hate, sparks confrontational feelings) and “frenchable” (aspirational, sparks admiring feelings). My hope is that writers and designers can apply these playful metrics to their own characters in order to play up their inherent strengths and amplify their charm!
CRISPR for Game Storytelling: Contextual Injection and Narrative Assembly in Epic Tavern
Richard Bisso, Shawn French, Yoshitomo Moriwaki
Sunday 15:45-16:45
(Room: URBN-125)
How can we create video game narratives that feel as dynamic and responsive as a skilled Dungeon Master running a tabletop RPG? Traditional approaches in video games often struggle to reflect the full complexity of player choices and world events without becoming ham-handed or unwieldy. This panel explores a systems-based approach to this problem. Much like CRISPR edits DNA with precision, this solution dynamically injects context into traditionally written content, ensuring that dialogue, quests, and character interactions continually respect past events, choices and the myriad conditions of the evolving game world. We’ll break down the mechanics behind this system, discuss the benefits of context-aware storytelling over traditional branching structures, and examine how dynamically assembling narrative elements can lead to more immersive and engaging game worlds.
Mother of Frankenstein: Innovative Design in Game-Based Learning
Sunday 15:45-16:45
(Room: URBN-120)
This talk aims to elaborate upon the design process of educational games. This involves working backwards from an educational standard or goal to achieve a fun, interactive experience for the learner. When designing for educational games, the creator must stitch together the two disparate elements—the occasionally dry, protein-rich educational content and the fun, engaging game content—to create something wholly engaging. To exemplify this process, the talk will go over the design roadmap for one of my own works of interactive fiction: Six Nights at Diodati, an exploration of the inspiring texts and physical circumstances that lead to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Diodati is chock full of name-drops of very old books, plays, poems, and other things that are difficult to remember without supportive game mechanics framing them. The resulting game seamlessly blends Mary Shelley’s literary world with stat-raising, dating sim-esque gameplay, to an educational result.
Farewell and Postmortem
Sunday 17:00-18:00
(Room: URBN Lobby)
Come together with the rest of the NarraScope community to celebrate the conclusion of our fifth event, thank those who helped make it possible, reflect on highlights from the long weekend, and hear first teasers for NarraScope 2026! This session transitions into a community-wide postmortem of 2025, so that we bring these latest insights into the producing of the next year’s event.