Big fan here—of your IF pieces and also of the way you’ve spread interactive fiction outside the IF community. I’m emailing to ask if you have any advice on IF education and bringing it to new platforms/media.

[Some personally identifying information about the writer’s educational background redacted.]

As I move forward with securing workshop/speaking/consulting gigs, I’m feeling a slight panic that my base skills and knowledge of IF are somewhat lackluster. When it comes to a mastery of interactive thinking, I know that I have a lot of room to grow.

Would you have any thoughts on how to flex those core IF muscles, and also improve the adaptive skills needed for bringing IF to newer formats and into audio?

Okay, so. This is a two-part question. I’m going to break it across two posts. This post will focus on “how do you flex core IF muscles.” I’ll come back next month to the question of skills for adaptation specifically.

The questioner asks about “a mastery of interactive thinking,” not about writing skills, so I’m going to assume the author feels comfortable on topics like prose and character development, and is more interested in understanding and practicing narrative design across multiple media. It also seems to be a design-focused question rather than a tools- or coding-focused question.

So I’ll try to tackle this from two angles: what are the things you might want to learn, and how might you learn them?

Finally, I should say: even with all the scoping-down I just did, this is a topic that I think would take a book to cover, not a single blog post. So the list of things you might want to know is at once very incomplete and unreasonably scary. No one will master all of it in a couple of months.

What I’d recommend doing, therefore, both to the OP and anyone else who is looking to use this as a guide:

Pick one or two areas that seem interesting to you and focus on those for a while; let your interest and enthusiasm be your guide

Use a mix of strategies to learn from other people (I list a bunch of approaches below)

Alternate between working with other people’s input/insights, and building your own thing. When something you’re reading makes an assertion you think is nonsense, build an experiment to prove the opposite. When something you play inspires you, give that a try. When you read a taxonomy of some kind, question whether it covers all the possibilities, and whether you can imagine categories the article-author didn’t consider (and would the results be any fun to play?)

Core IF Skills. What are these?

I’ve divided these, a little artificially, between “grammar” — basic skills that let you put together something that functions from moment to moment; “dialectic” — structural-level skills about creating meaning; and “rhetoric”, the skills you would need to make IF that persuades, moves, or influences the player.

I’ve also put some resource links in for some of these, but not all of them are addressable with single articles, and this is an unreasonably long post already anyway, so the resource coverage is patchy. (Sorry about that.) One could delve deep into most of the particular segments.

Grammar: how do you construct an interactive experience that makes sense?

Dialectic: how do you make the aspects of your interactive experience cohere into something with an overall thematic thrust or purpose?

Rhetoric: what moves players, what persuades them, what teaches them or makes them think?

Learning Strategies.

Not everyone learns in the same way, of course. For me, writing about something is an effective way to make myself summarize, consider, and remember… which is why this blog contains so many words. It’s a record of the past decade or two of trying to educate myself in this very field.

There’s one strategy I think you can’t really avoid here, and that’s actually building some creative work in the field you’re studying: if you want to become a good IF author, you need to write IF. (And the author of this letter has done so, for the record.)

To stretch yourself in the design area, you’re going to want to try different projects with different constraints. Build pieces using tools you haven’t tried before. If you’re a Twine Sugarcube expert, try some other Twine versions, then branch out to Texture, ink, or Inform. Experiment with different genres. Pick out competitions or game jams that are going to give you new challenges. Having a constraint and a time limit is both motivating and a good preview of the realities of commercial work, so it’s worth getting used to those.

After you’ve done that, take some time to reflect about the work you made. Read reviews, if any, but also maybe write your own post-mortem, or go back through and comment your source code (if you’ve built the kind of project for which that’s relevant). Refine your sense of what your takeaways were.

Learning from others:

Reading. I’ve listed some resources for particular topics above. Other general resources include my own list of articles, SPAG and Sub-Q, the XYZZY Awards blog with its critique of entrants,

Playing. Try lots of examples of what’s out there, especially if you’re considering working in a new area. For a broader sense of context, also read some of the reviews written about the work you’re trying out. There are lots of ways to identify suggested canon. This list represents a rather old-school IF community perspective on what’s good and what matters, but searching IFDB, checking out tags, or starting a fresh poll can help identify works with a particular quality that you’re interested in. You might also look at winners of the IGF Narrative Awards.

Here is a post I wrote about the history of IF, divided into periods, and here’s a talk I gave at AdventureX, the Past Futures of IF, that looks at what the IF community aspired to at different times — both of those might also suggest some interesting places to look.

Critiquing, workshopping, testing; reviewing. Giving feedback on other people’s work is often a very informative process, because it forces you to articulate why you think something doesn’t work, and because you often learn from hearing from the other person what they’re doing and why they’re trying to do it that way. In the parser IF community of old, that was often about beta-testing — good beta-testers were highly valued people and would sometimes write articles about their methods.

There are lots of ways into this. You could offer your services as a tester. You could write reviews for IFDB, or on a blog or for Sub-Q; or join critical discussions on the intfiction forum.

You could attend live in-person meetups with other IF authors and talk about whatever work is under discussion there. You could start your own meetup, if you live in a reasonably populous English-speaking area that doesn’t have one yet. (Or maybe some non-English-speaking ones, but I have the sense that IF is more sparsely played in some countries. However, there are or have been meetups I know of in Seattle, the SF Bay area, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Boston/Cambridge, and the Baltimore area, as well as something in Vancouver and occasional events in Toronto; also London (which I run), and sometimes in other parts of the UK and in Dublin. Not all of those cities are currently active, but I list everything I know is happening in my link roundups here, and I’m always happy to help publicize new meetups.