Interactive Narrative is any story where the reader can influence the outcome or progression of that story. This can cover a wide variety of works, and really I think there are several "interfaces" for IN that are common and worth looking at. All of these can be made in a program like Twine (with varying degrees of difficulty) and in lots of other programs dedicated to one type of IN. Let me introduce you to a few types of IN...
Parser-based Interactive Narrative
The Dreamhold
The first type of Interactive Narrative was likely the book, something like the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books of the '80s (ish). In computer form, IN started as what I call 'Parser-based games.' The Parser is the engine that takes a list of words and updates the game based on what you type. I'm explaining that badly, so here's an example...
As you can see from the screenshots above, the whole interface is just text. Parser-based games can be tricky, they require a lot of commitment from the player. The player has to remember the list of command words, and there is not a map or any kind of convenience feature that many current gamers take for granted. You have to make your own map and keep track of your own details. The Dreamhold above is at least a webpage so you can scroll up to see what's happened before; most original Parser-based games moved on, dropping old text as you traveled the game world. Still, putting in the extra effort can make the game feel much more rewarding when you 'win.'
A few more screenshots, but the game is worth playing (even just for a little while) to get the feel of it if you've never played one of these before...
Hypertext Interactive Narrative
Hallowmoor
From the Parser we go to the hyper-link, that staple of the webpage (and what Twine is great at making). Hypertext INs are a little easier on the player, since the available choices are highlighted as links. This is also just like navigating a webpage, something most people are pretty comfortable with. Also, by adding the technologies of the web you can add color and images and animations to the story - a bit more visually appealing that the wall of text that most Parser-based games are.
Hypertext INs also tend to use more role-playing-like elements. In Hallowmoor you have an inventory page, that includes your special ability to change bodies and the body you are currently inhabiting...
I'm a big fan of games that have some kind of visible score or otherwise track your progress, it helps create that feeling of accomplishment, and pulls at the 'obsessive completionist' bone :)
An interesting Parser/ Hypertext Hybrid:
spondre
I both love and hate "spondre" - it kind of merges the strengths of the Parser and Hypertext by hiding the words you can click on, so you have to put in the extra effort to find everything, but not as much effort as a pure-parser game. It also makes great use of color to add an extra splash of something to the experience. At the same time, since the text is always added to the very bottom of the page, it makes the narrative kind of disjointed, and there are more words that don't do anything than words that do - so it does create that feel of "pixel-bitching" (a term from old point-and-click adventure games, where you had to click the entire screen to find the 1 pixel of a small or hidden item; and I'm dating myself by even using the term :). It's an interesting hybrid, I'm not sure if it's stronger or weaker than it's individual components - but I do give the writer props for making something pretty unique.
Visual Novel Interactive Narrative
My Cup of Coffee: The Trouble with Earl Grey
I think it's safe to say that in the general wold of all games, parsers are pretty old-school, hypertext is kind of niche, but Visual Novels are almost common. I've seen a ton of Japanese games in this style (I'm not sure if they even pioneered it), and I think of the IN types in this post the Visual Novel is the most common.
Basically, a Visual Novel has a main portion of the screen dedicated to a picture of the background and the characters involved (typically not the player character). The story tends to play out in conversation (though there can be all kinds of options and even mini-games).
Being very visual makes the format appealing (the old saw about pictures and thousands of words) and possibly more inviting for some people who are not big on reading a wall of text. But the reliance on conversation as the story interaction is a very tricky one: like with the parser, finding the right thing to say can be frustrating - add to that what the writer writes and interprets one way can be interpreted a different way by the reader. It's hard to describe in general, once you play one of this style of game you'll see it quickly: an NPC (Non-Player Character) will get mad at you for saying something that you didn't think was offensive when you read it, or something similar. Having that small uncertainty in how the game will respond to your conversation choices makes playing the game more difficult (you have to be able to accurately gauge the outcomes of your actions after all, if you can't then you might as well close your eyes and click on anything). And that difficulty is not a good kind to most people, for any game with lots of conversation you can find a comment/ forum/ thread of players venting about unexpected results.
RPG-Screen Interactive Narrative
Explore!
I'm making up this term (the others above are quite common) since it fills a unique role. RPGs are kind of a super-set of Interactive Narrative to me, notable because they typically have a person on both ends of the narrative (the GM creates the story the players interact with - though in some games the players both create the narrative and interact with it), and because they typically have stats or some kinds of numbers that need to be tracked (finally you could say they also tend to rely on some form of randomness in their resolution). Keeping track of the stats and numbers requires a specifically-construced interface....
Explore! is not a completed game, just a proof-of-concept, but it does show the "RPG-Screen" type of Interactive Narrative. The interface is pretty complicated for this style of game, but there are some conventions so a player can usually get used to it pretty quick. With the extra level of detail provided by all the RPG-like stats (attributes, skills, equipment, etc) on top of the visual interface (seeing other characters, locations and maps) there is a lot going on - and my hat's off to the writer of Explore! because I honestly didn't think Twine could handle something this complex!
Another Hybrid, Text and Graphics
Twine RPG dot HTML
Another hybrid, this time using text-as-art (ahh... I'm old enough to remember when ASCII art like this was common, and it can be surprisingly beautiful when done right). This one has a little of everything above, and it's not a very detailed (or long) game, and I'm not sure 'game' entirely applies to it; but it's another creative hybrid of mainstream styles.
So there's an overview of some common types of Interactive Narrative, and I'll try to remember to use that term from now on instead of "interactive fiction" since I think IN is a better descriptor for the genera overall. A good place to find more stories like this is itch.io, here's a link to games tagged with Interactive Fiction.
I've put this all together because of my upcoming project, The Open2 Engine. It's going to basically be me trying to make my own Twine, so I was wondering what all Twine could be used for. These stories are all examples of what Twine's capable of (though the Visual Novel and RPG styles would be a bit harder to pull off) and so these are things that I'd like to implement (someday, of course, one feature at a time :). Also, I like having a set of terminology for things, there's an old Chinese proverb that says "the root of all wisdom is learning to call things by their proper name" (at least, that's what I read somewhere). So this is for me to organize my thinking, and I believed it might be interesting for any readers who are as new to the Interactive Narrative structure as I am.
Know any good IN stories (or make your own)? Drop me a comment below, I'd love to check it out :)
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