Zeroth Edition · July of 2026 · Organized and compiled by Bruno Dias
2001
In this classic chapter from the Inform Designer's Manual, Graham Nelson separates the relationship between the player, the protagonist, and the narrator of an interactive story.
2009
Visualizing and examining the internal structure of classic Choose Your Own Adventure Books.
2026
Choice-based narratives use choices in many different ways, and they carry both a structural function and a rhetorical function.
2014
Ron Gilbert details a process for designing the puzzle structures of adventure games like Monkey Island.
2016
An introduction to alternative narrative structures to branching.
2014
A survey of the ways procedural text is used in interactive fiction.
2022
Understanding narrative systems by their purpose and affordances.
2018
"Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics" is a common theoretical framework for understanding game design; this article explores their application to narrative, and the question of what constitute "narrative mechanics".
2016
On the dynamics of using different types of "stat checks" as a narrative mechanic.
2021
A gentle introduction to the underlying math of building game systems.
2019
On mapping several individual variables in a narrative together into a possibility space.
2024
On why learning to imitate the style of other writers is a key skill that enables collaboration with others.
2018
Techniques for writing reflective choices, using examples from Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Pathologic, and others.
2016
Explaining the production process of We Know the Devil, and how to build a visual novel structure-first.
2024
The "Agile" methodology, imported for software development, is widely used in video game studios. Laura Michet makes the case that it works poorly for writers.
2024
On the editorial process for mid-sized video games.
2020
A postmortem of Battletech's event system, both in its design and production constraints; it deals with several of the failure modes that are possible when building these kinds of systems in a real production environment.
2022
A framework for managing scope when creating dynamic narrative systems, centered on increasing authorial leverage—that is, how easily content can be created for the game.