Experiments in Interactive (Fan)Fiction
A collection of fic with with interactive components that thedeadparrot has written.
The Arithmetic of Memory
Pacific Rim
Newt Geiszler/Hermann Gottleib
about 2000 words in total
It had been a while since I worked on anything interactive, and I just watched a Double Fine video game documentary, and I was inspired to try it out again. The Twine ecosystem has changed a bit since 2015/2016, so I messed around with writing in Twee again and using TweeGo. Go figure that most of my interactive fic is about a loss of control, mostly because it’s easier to write/program that way.
機不可失，時不再來
Shadowrun Hong Kong
Player Character & Duncan Wu
about 1500 words in total
Written as my main Yuletide story this year. I was originally going to try to build it in the original Shadowrun UGC editor, but I ran out of time, so I mocked it out in Twine and recreated the Shadowrun interface. It came out way better than expected.
userspace
Transistor
ensemble
about 1300 words
Built in a bit of a rush in Twine 2 so I could make the Yuletide deadline, but I’m proud of it. I liked trying to capture the feel of Transistor – its unsettling not-quite-realness – and the quiet empathy it has for the people who inhabit its city.
Ghost in the Shell
X-Men movieverse
gen with a side of Charles/Erik
57 pieces of content
This was heavily inspired by Gone Home, a game that I feel really captured the feeling of exporing spaces. I wanted to build something like that, with the computer terminal equivalent of locked rooms and hidden keys. I like that it’s about a lot of different sides of Charles, the grand and the mundane, and I like the things that are hidden away.
What You Want
Glee
Kurt/Blaine
1500 words
Written as a sequel to A Far Better Thing. This was written over three days of a long weekend, partially because I wanted to try to write something short and quick, and partially because I wanted to see how else I could use the Twee engine to tell different stories. I like the way this story contrasts with A Far Better Thing, where that one is bigger and more sprawling, driven by its plot, and this one is smaller, self-contained, driven by the emotions and the particular moment. It feels like they’re opposite sides of the same coin, pushing at the platform in different ways.
A Far Better Thing
Glee
Kurt/Blaine
26,000 words in total
Written using Twee. This was a particularly exhausting bit of writing because it ended being so long and so much worldbuilding had to go into it. I have some frustrations with extending some of the underlying Javascript, but I suspect that’s what you have to deal with when you’re messing about with the DOM. Overall, I’m still proud of it and the work that I did on it. It was quite an undertaking, but I still finished it.
Sympathy for the Devil Boston Adventure Map
The Social Network
ensemble
4700 words, 11 ficlets
Co-written with merisunshine36 as part of the Sympathy for the Devil series. This was a super-fun combination of Google Maps, photographs, and short ficlets mashed together to make something I’m still really proud of. I think one of the joys of making this was the chance to revisit all these places around Boston that get mentioned in the series and put a visual on what and where they are.