Alexis and the Plague

When I had my first taste of Interactive Fiction, I became consumed with the idea of creating an autonomous story that a reader could approach and explore entirely on their own terms. I had grown up with the stunted inevitability of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, and craved the potential of a text-adventure’s completely open-ended prompt, in the context of a larger epic.

I attempted writing a couple of “adventures” on my own, but due to either lack of honest interest, or the technical learning curve for the software I tried, I never got much beyond the first three or four rooms (for the discerning IF writers, I tried both Inform 7, and QUEST, and had greater luck with Inform’s “Natural Language” programming) – and while great things can be accomplished in a confined or microscopic space, I wanted to produce a sprawling labyrinth of explorable locations, a varied cast of complex characters, and an automated world system that would give the impression of life, ticking along beneath the surface of some three act magnum opus.

(A tangential notice: if you would be interested in trying out some IFs, or one of the partial games I attempted, give ol’ Gargoyle a d/l and have a try!)

Finally, I hit upon an idea that really interested me: sort of a fantastic Renaissance, inhabited by strange animals and humanoids, centered around a virulent plague, and a single girl.

A girl named Alexis.

I started writing pages of copy, describing glittering cities, and dark wharf-master's huts. Owlish crime-lords, and leech-toting doctors. Kidnapper flamingos, and Da Vincian machines bearing entire sky-scrapers aloft. In an ideal world, the story would be delivered in tutto finito as a genuine Interactive Fiction, but at every turn, I became obsessed with extrapolating the quantum minutia within the fabric of the story, which was rapidly becoming more complex than my imagination could manage, and even further beyond my technical ability to execute. I started pacing, racking my brain, trying to understand how a person could write a text adventure without knowing what the player wanted to do.

And I got stuck.

Now, whenever I’ve played or orchestrated a role-playing game, the player and the creator have an open exchange - permitting the player ultimate (or at least thoroughly perceived) freedom, and the creator receiving instant feedback on what's going on. It is a dialog, not just a unidirectional torrent of information – and without the element of response, I just didn't know how to proceed.

Because of this, it became evident that a participant should tread these paths at least once, live, to see what they could see, and force me to render a suitably complete plot.

I enlisted the help of one of my college colleagues, (non other than the esteemed Ms. Hilary Dixon), and in a round-robin sort of way, we began to delve into Alexis' world.

I presented Hilary with a prompt - (on the wiki, all sections printed in a Serif font are from me, Sans Serif vice versa) - and Hilary would reply in kind, navigating her character (the eponymous Alexis) through various locations and scenarios as the drama unfolded.

What I did not expect, was how her responses ended up informing the story we experienced!

Rather than give terse statements re: her actions (like “Go north.” etc.), Hilary wrote whole monologues, informing me of her character’s mental state, desires, and observations - and from these concrete remarks, her actions as a player willed brand-new content into the story, things that I could never have imagined on my own.

We proceeded in this fashion quite regularly for several months - though in recent days it’s been trickier and trickier to find the time to continue. However, when the story had all of our undivided attention, I could not even hope to describe the euphoric pleasure of co-writing in this way.

Hilary made a particularly cunning remark in our out-of-game discussions on the subject, comparing the enterprise to the use of a dollhouse,

“I imagine two consciousnesses coming to a mansion only when the other isn't there, poofing things into existence, moving dolls around, leaving signs saying what they did, and waiting for the other to move.”

And it is precisely that give-and-take that made the entire experience so worthwhile.

I’ll let that be enough of an introduction to the project - and present for your leisurely reading pleasure,

(link)