Emily Short
Interactive narrative designer and critic; author of interactive fiction including Galatea and Counterfeit Monkey, and a long-time contributor to the Inform development system.
Emily Short did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
Filter All topics · Newest first
-
Their wordsI really enjoy this and find it ingenious, but I think it can risk encouraging an instrumental approach to the NPCs: they become pawns on the player's chessboard, potentially, rather than personas who deserve consideration in their own right.
- 5 years earlier
-
Their wordsA fact is important from a game design perspective if it affects the player's ability to act in the world, and the mechanics that they're going to be able to bring to bear.
-
Their wordsIt's important from a narrative perspective if it determines stakes, motives, or consequences of a given conflict or choice point.
-
Their wordsAnd it's important from a systems legibility standpoint if it later allows the game to tell the player why something happened.
- 6 weeks earlier
-
Their wordsI want more games to be about human interaction, about the nuances of how people deal with one another, about the kinds of topics that appear in dramatic movies.
-
Their wordsBuilding procedural systems and seeing how they perform is a great way to explore whether our mental models are correct.
-
Our reading
For conversation to be effective gameplay, it must be a rewarding mechanic rather than an add-on.
Their wordsFor that to work as I'd like, the conversation needs to be rewarding as gameplay - not just bolted on around gameplay, as it so often is.
- 5 years earlier
-
Their wordsFor authors of interactive stories, presenting most of your story as backstory is often convenient because you can tell what did happen in a place without having to code any NPCs or allow for any branching in the backstory narrative: the past is a part of the story your interactive reader can't touch.
-
Their wordsBut to dismiss the navigational elements of an interactive story ignores the fact that in interactive stories the structure itself is a thing to be read, part of the communication between author and reader, requiring its own kind of literacy.
-
Their wordsEvidential storytelling presents an opportunity to tell the story of characters who have multiple sides, to invite the reader to hypothesize about who people are and then to complicate their view of those people.