There’s been some buzz around interactive stories in the last week, with the launch of the reading-beta of Varytale, the early buzz for Failbetter’s StoryNexus platform, and our own inklewriter all hitting the internet within the space of about 48 hours. (And Choice of Games have been accepting new stories for a while now.) It looks a bit like new authors will soon be spoiled for choice. So which way should they go?
The answer is, of course, it depends. Each system has its own system, and each system affords a certain kind of design and a certain kind of storytelling. On the Failbetter blog, Alexis Kennedy has suggested that “StoryNexus is more game-y; Varytale is more book-y”, but both are built around the basic idea of “storylets” – little chunks of narrative that are dealt out under certain conditions, like cards in a deck or the flip-flopping chapters of a book like Game of Thrones.
