Emily Short

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Emily Short
Emily Short.jpg
Emily Short in 2010.
Known for Galatea
Counterfeit Monkey
Spouse Graham Nelson [1] [2]
Website emshort.blog

Emily Short is an interactive fiction (IF) writer and creative director of Failbetter Games, the studio behind Fallen London and its spinoffs.

Contents

She is known for her debut game Galatea (2000) [3] and her use of psychologically complex non-player characters (NPCs). [4]

Short has been called "a visionary in the world of text-based games for years," [5] and is the author of over forty works of IF. [6] She wrote the chapters "Challenges of a Broad Geography" and "NPC Conversation Systems" for the 2011 The IF Theory Reader. [7]

She wrote a regular column on IF for Rock Paper Shotgun . [8]

Career

In June 2011, Emily Short, with Richard Evans, co-founded Little TextPeople, which explored the emotional possibilities of interactive fiction. It was acquired in early 2012 by Linden Lab. [9] In 2014, Short was let go by Linden Lab, ending the project she was working on, Versu. [10] Around that time, she started the Oxford and London Interactive Fiction Group. [2]

In September 2016, Short was hired by Spirit AI, a roughly 15 person company working on machine learning and natural language processing. She joined its board of directors in 2018, [11] and was later named Chief Product Officer. [12]

In January 2020, Short joined the 12 person Failbetter Games as creative director. [12]

Short is one of the members of the advisory board for Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF).

Interactive fiction

Works

A number of Short's works have won acclaim at the XYZZY Awards, an annual popular-choice award for interactive fiction. [13] [14] Her work has been described by reviewers in terms that range from "mesmerizing" to "frustrating". Her 2003 work City of Secrets was originally commissioned by a San Francisco synth-pop band, but after they left the project, she completed it on her own. [15]

Of over 11,000 games in the Interactive Fiction Database in July 2021, Short's game Counterfeit Monkey held the top spot in the IFDB Top 100. In addition to this, another five of Short's games, Savoir-Faire , City of Secrets, Bronze, Metamorphoses and Bee qualified into the top 100. [16]

Tools

While many of Short's early games were written in Inform, she later experimented with a variety of formats. One such format was Versu, an engine for plot-heavy and story-rich interactive fiction that Short helped develop, and which was later scrapped by Linden Lab, the company owning the engine. [17] Other formats include Varytale, for which she developed the game Bee, [18] and a custom engine by Liza Daly (with help from the company inkle) for the game First Draft of the Revolution. [19] Both formats use an interactive fiction engine based on hyperlinks.

Short wrote most of the 300+ programming examples in the documentation and created two full-length demo games for release with Graham Nelson's interactive fiction development system, Inform 7. [20] [1]

Selected IF works

Selected IF works
AssociationYearCategoryWorkResultRef
XYZZY Awards 2000 Best individual NPC Galatea Won [21] [22]
Best Writing Metamorphoses 2nd Place [21]
2002 Best Game, Best Puzzles, Best Story, Best Individual PC Savoir-Faire Won [13]
2003 Best NPCs City of Secrets Won [23]
2006 Best Settings, Best NPCs Floatpoint Won [14]
2012Best Game, Best Setting, Best Puzzles, Best Individual PC, Best Implementation Counterfeit Monkey Won [24]
IF Artshow2000Best of ShowGalateaWon [25]
Interactive Fiction Competition 2000N/AMetamorphoses2nd Place [26]
2006N/AFloatpointWon [27]
Games Magazine 2004Best RPG/AdventureCity of Secrets2nd Place [28]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Interactive fiction</span> Nonlinear narratives set by audience decisions

Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of interactive narratives or interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text-only", however, graphic text adventures still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles.

The Interactive Fiction Competition is one of several annual competitions for works of interactive fiction. It has been held since 1995. It is intended for fairly short games, as judges are only allowed to spend two hours playing a game before deciding how many points to award it. The competition has been described as the "Super Bowl" of interactive fiction.

Inform is a programming language and design system for interactive fiction originally created in 1993 by Graham Nelson. Inform can generate programs designed for the Z-code or Glulx virtual machines. Versions 1 through 5 were released between 1993 and 1996. Around 1996, Nelson rewrote Inform from first principles to create version 6. Over the following decade, version 6 became reasonably stable and a popular language for writing interactive fiction. In 2006, Nelson released Inform 7, a completely new language based on principles of natural language and a new set of tools based around a book-publishing metaphor.

Text Adventure Development System (TADS) is a prototype-based domain-specific programming language and set of standard libraries for creating interactive fiction (IF) games.

Graham A. Nelson is a British mathematician, poet, and the creator of the Inform design system for creating interactive fiction (IF) games. He has authored several IF games, including Curses (1993) and Jigsaw (1995).

<i>Photopia</i> 1998 video game

Photopia is a piece of literature by Adam Cadre rendered in the form of interactive fiction, and written in Inform. It has received both praise and criticism for its heavy focus on fiction rather than on interactivity. It won first place in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition. Photopia has few puzzles and a linear structure, allowing the player no way to alter the eventual conclusion but maintaining the illusion of non-linearity.

<i>Galatea</i> (video game) 2000 video game

Galatea is an interactive fiction video game by Emily Short featuring a modern rendition of the Greek myth of Galatea, the sculpture of a woman that gained life. It took "Best of Show" in the 2000 IF Art Show and won a XYZZY Award for Best Non-Player Character. The game displays an unusually rich approach to non-player character dialogue and diverts from the typical puzzle-solving in interactive fiction: gameplay consists entirely of interacting with a single character in a single room.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Plotkin</span> Interactive fiction programmer and writer

Andrew Plotkin, also known as Zarf, is a central figure in the modern interactive fiction (IF) community. Having both written a number of award-winning games and developed a range of new file formats, interpreters, and other utilities for the design, production, and running of IF games, Plotkin is widely recognised for both his creative and his technical contributions to the homebrew IF scene.

The XYZZY Awards are the annual awards given to works of interactive fiction, serving a similar role to the Academy Awards for film. The awards were inaugurated in 1997 by Eileen Mullin, the editor of XYZZYnews. Any game released during the year prior to the award ceremony is eligible for nomination to receive an award. The decision process takes place in two stages: members of the interactive fiction community nominate works within specific categories and sufficiently supported nominations become finalists within those categories. Community members then vote among the finalists, and the game receiving a plurality of votes is given the award in an online ceremony.

Jon Ingold is a British author of interactive fiction and co-founder of inkle, where he co-directed and co-wrote 80 Days, and wrote Heaven's Vault and Overboard!. His interactive fiction has frequently been nominated for XYZZY Awards and has won on multiple occasions, including Best Game, Best Story and Best Setting awards for All Roads in 2001. Ingold's works are notable for their attention to the levels of knowledge that the player and player character have of the in-game situation, with the effect often depending on a player who understands more than the character or vice versa. Ingold has also written a number of plays, short stories and novels.

<i>Anchorhead</i> 1998 video game

Anchorhead is a Lovecraftian horror interactive fiction game, originally written and published by Michael S. Gentry in 1998. The game is heavily inspired by the works and writing style of H.P. Lovecraft, particularly the Cthulhu mythos.

Savoir-Faire is a piece of interactive fiction written by Emily Short, about a magician in 18th-century France searching his aristocratic adoptive father's house. It won the Best Game, Best Story, Best Individual Player Character and Best Puzzles awards at the 2002 Xyzzy Awards, and was a finalist for four other categories. Puzzles in the game require the player to make "leap[s] of inference" between objects with similar functions. The game was generally praised for its unique use of magical powers and its high-quality implementation. A mini-game follow-up, Damnatio Memoriae, was released in 2006.

Earth and Sky is an interactive fiction trilogy written and produced by American author Paul O'Brian about the adventures of a brother and sister who gain superpowers while searching for their lost parents. Games in the series have won awards in the annual Interactive Fiction Competition and received an XYZZY Award.

<i>Fallen London</i> Browser-based choose-your-own-adventure game

Fallen London, originally Echo Bazaar, is a browser-based interactive narrative game developed by Failbetter Games and set in "Fallen London", an alternative Victorian London with gothic overtones. The franchise subsequently expanded to other games, including Sunless Sea, its sequel Sunless Skies and the visual novel Mask of the Rose.

<i>Aisle</i> (video game) 1999 video game

Aisle is a 1999 interactive fiction video game whose major innovation is to allow only a single move and offer from it over a hundred possible outcomes. It is notable for introducing and popularizing the one move genre.

Snack Time! is a 2008 interactive fiction work by Renee Choba, which she co-authored with Hardy the Bulldog, who also features as the player character (PC). Snack Time! presents the interactor with the challenge of getting a snack while playing as Hardy the Bulldog. Hardy must complete a series of steps, each of the five steps worth ten points, making a score of 50 possible, in order to get the sandwich from the human owner. Taking place within just a few rooms of living space, the interactor must position themselves from a dog's perspective in order to successfully complete the game.

With Those We Love Alive Is a Twine interactive fiction video game written by Porpentine. It was released on October 1st, 2014 in both English and Hungarian. The musical score was composed by Brenda Neotenomie.

Counterfeit Monkey is a 2012 interactive fiction espionage game by Emily Short.

The Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) is a database of metadata and reviews of Interactive Fiction.

<i>The Wizard Sniffer</i> 2017 video game

The Wizard Sniffer is a 2017 interactive fiction fantasy comedy game by Buster Hudson.

References

  1. 1 2 Short, Emily (6 September 2015). "Private Games". Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling. Retrieved 13 April 2022. One of my larger on-going projects is providing support for the text adventure tool Inform 7. One of the things I do for that project is provide...example games...their first reader has always been my collaborator on the project, Graham Nelson. [...] And, full disclosure, partway through this project I married him
  2. 1 2 Krol, Charlotte (14 June 2023). "Emily Short Deserves Her Flowers". NME. Retrieved 15 June 2023.
  3. ↑ Ryan, Marie-Laure. (2006). Avatars of story. U of Minnesota Press.
  4. ↑ Stuart, Keith (5 Jun 2015). "Lonely planet: the solitude of open-world games when the story is over". The Guardian.
  5. ↑ Alderman, Naomi (22 Sep 2014). "The magic of words opens a whole new world of fun". The Guardian.
  6. ↑ "Emily Short Member Profile". Interactive Fiction Database. 2022
  7. ↑ Kevin Jackson-Mead, J. Robinson Wheeler. "IF Theory Reader", ifarchive.org, March 2011.
  8. ↑ Short, Emily (15 June 2016). "Text Adventures For People Who Hate Guessing The Verb". Rock Paper Shotgun . Retrieved 2016-09-06.
  9. ↑ "Second Life developer acquires experimental game studio LittleTextPeople". 16 February 2012.
  10. ↑ "The end of Versu: Emily Short looks back". 14 March 2014.
  11. ↑ "Interactive fiction specialist Dr Emily Short joins the Spirit AI board". 9 August 2018.
  12. 1 2 "Jobs Roundup: Emily Short takes over as creative director at Failbetter Games". 9 January 2020.
  13. 1 2 "XYZZY Awards: Winning Games of 2002". XYZZY news. 2002. Archived from the original on 12 February 2009. Retrieved 2009-01-19.
  14. 1 2 "XYZZY Awards: Winning Games of 2006". Archived from the original on May 15, 2007. Retrieved May 12, 2007.
  15. ↑ "City of Secrets".
  16. ↑ "IFDB Top 100" (archived), ifdb.org, 5 July 2021.
  17. ↑ Nutt, Christian (14 Mar 2014). "The end of Versu:Emily Short Looks Back". Gamasutra.
  18. ↑ "Bee". Dan Q. 16 July 2012.
  19. ↑ Hamilton, Kirk (24 Sep 2012). "Write (And Re-Write) Letters Of Intrigue In This Fantastic Free Game". Kotaku.
  20. ↑ Smith, Graham (9 May 2014). "Informing You: Text Adventure Tool Inform 7 Has Updated". Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
  21. 1 2 Mullin, Eileen (2000). "XYZZY Awards: Winning Games of 2000". XYZZY news. Eileen Mullin. Archived from the original on 12 February 2009. Retrieved 2009-01-19.
  22. ↑ "Emily Short: Galatea". Electronic Literature Collection Volume One. Electronic Literature Organization. Archived from the original on 27 January 2009. Retrieved 2009-01-19.
  23. ↑ "XYZZY Awards: Winning Games of 2003". XYZZY news. 2003. Archived from the original on 12 February 2009. Retrieved 2009-01-19.
  24. ↑ "XYZZY Awards Historical Results". 2013. Retrieved 2016-01-05.
  25. ↑ Parker, Marnie. "2000 IF Art Show". IF Art Show. Marnie Parker. Archived from the original on 6 June 2007. Retrieved 2009-01-19.
  26. ↑ Musante, Mark J. (2000). "6th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition Voting Results". Interactive Fiction Competition . Interactive Fiction Competition. Archived from the original on 25 July 2008. Retrieved 2009-01-19.
  27. ↑ "12th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition". 2006. Retrieved 2007-05-12.
  28. ↑ McDonald, Thomas L. and Bennett, Dan. The Electronic Games 100. Games. Issue 196 (Vol. 27, No. 10). Pg.58. December 2003.
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