Writing Digital Interactive Fiction

Description

Convenor: Claire Carroll (CDH Methods Fellow)

Interactive Fiction (IF) stories let readers decide which paths the story should follow, featuring non-linear narrative design. The discipline combines the excitement of post-structuralist narratives with the power of creative coding, making it a perfect introduction for participants more familiar with one field than the other. In this workshop, led by Methods Fellow Claire Carroll, we’ll explore both parser-based (rooted in reader instructions and terminal response) and choice-based (hyperlink or multiple choice-driven) IF and work together to write our own interactive fiction. The workshop will also introduce participants to the passionate IF community, which offers advice and support to experienced writers and newcomers alike. 

Target audience: CDH Methods sessions are open to the University of Cambridge staff and graduate students who want to learn and apply digital methods and use digital tools in their research, these sessions may be of particular interest to:

• PhD students in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
• Early Career Researchers in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
• Other Cambridge students and staff welcome

About the convenor: Claire is interested in the aesthetics of interactive fiction (IF) and how they might connect to broader digital behaviours. More specifically, she’s exploring how the normalised usages of the second person voice and the present tense in IF create slippage for players’ immersion as they are simultaneously readers and characters, thus balancing and bouncing between extra/diegetic modes of engagement. Her research methodologies include actor-network theory, disability studies, critical code studies, and new media theory.

Last year, Claire co-hosted the Cambridge Theatre Hackathon, a fast-paced workshop and performance exploring the contours of digital interactive theatre around the theme of memory allocation. This year, she is co-convening the Cultural Politics of Code, a critical code studies reading group.

Claire is the recipient of the Judith E Wilson Studentship and is a 2023-2024 Methods Fellow affiliated with Pembroke College. Claire holds a B.A. from Yale University in English and Computer Science and has completed her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews. She is from New York (state) and likes to cook (pasta).