on interactive fiction

This summer I took a class on interactive fiction. Below is a link to one of the “stories” I made if you’d like to check it out. I’m sorry to say it plays better on computer than on phone, although on tablet it is not too bad as it allows the full picture in one screen (whereas the phone cuts the lower portion off unless you scroll down).

Anyhow, during the class, our main goals were to 1) give the reader/player an immersive experience that 2) could only be created in the I.F. form. That is to say it wouldn’t read/feel the same as a poem/short story/etc.¹ We wrote four stories during the class, and this one (the fourth and final) was the closest I got to doing both. Fair warning, it’s not a happy “story”. But my hope is that the mere act of clicking through this thing once or twice or ten times or twenty will offer some form of cathartic relief to those for whom it hits a note.

Until we MEAT again,

ADDICTION BATTLE by Maegan Heil

(please note this story link will take you to my website)

1. One great example of this (and my favorite of all the works we studied during the course) is Anna Anthropy’s Queers in Love at the End of the World: https://w.itch.io/end-of-the-world