Toronto writer Christine Love never expected to find success making video games—particularly text-heavy visual novels about women, queerness, and technology. But she surprised everyone, including herself, when her games—Digital: A Love Story; don’t take it personally, babe, it just ain’t your story; Analogue: A Hate Story, and its expansion, Hate Plus—found an audience eager for storytelling experiences radically different from those in the latest editions of Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, or Grand Theft Auto.
Love will share some of her insights into writing and game creation at WordPlay, a free one-day festival celebrating games and interactive experiences that put text and narrative front and centre, held in partnership with The Hand Eye Society. There, she’ll lead a workshop for beginners on the art of creating interactive fiction with Twine, which lets authors weave interactive stories using a simple user interface, and then render their creations as websites that anyone can browse and play.
Text-oriented and text-centred games like The Yawhg, Kentucky Route Zero, Device 6, and the writerly works of Anna Anthropy have recently been rising in prominence, especially since the tools and skills needed to make text-based games are within reach of anyone who can type, point, and click. Twine is proving especially useful for creators who want to bring unique, unconventional, and at times, deeply personal content into the realm of games and interactive fiction.
In Conversations With My Mother, for example, trans game creator Merritt Kopas depicts a number of poignant telephone conversations she has had with her mother. For an entirely different experience, there’s Travis Megill’s Memorial, a moving interactive tribute to Megill’s late brother.
“There is no question that this is a movement,” Love said. “We are seeing a serious influx of game creators using tools like Twine to tell their stories and create their worlds. They’re learning that a game does not have to be over-produced or require elaborate programming. They’re changing the perception of games. Now, a great game can be made by anyone. And, as these creators learn and grow, they’ll move onto other bigger things and bring their perspectives with them.”
Love has created two Twine games, Even Cowgirls Bleed and Magical Maiden Madison, but she mostly works with the free, open-source visual-novel engine Ren’Py. A fan of Asian pop culture, Love became became inspired to move from prose writing to game creation after her dissatisfaction with mainstream Asian visual novels led her to the self-published works found at dōjin (independent publishing) conventions. “Unlike the flashy big-budget commercial titles, the visual novels available at festivals and zine fairs tend to be more interesting, weird, and experimental,” Love said.
Intrigued by the possibilities offered by the immersion and interactivity of text-based games, she began exploring the medium and ultimately created Digital: A Love Story in 2010. Assuming it would have an audience of a dozen people at most, she was surprised—and emboldened—when it received raves from places as diverse as Rock, Paper, Shotgun, The A.V. Club, and The Economist. The game was downloaded by thousands of players, and it earned spots on a number of top-indie-games lists. Analogue and Hate Plus have continued the trend, and have established Love as a distinctive voice in the independent game community.
“I won’t say I’m not flattered by how much I’ve reached people,” Love says. “I never expected it, and I’ve been pleasantly shocked by it. My goal is always to make the games that I would like to play, and that aren’t being made. If anyone else enjoys that, I hope that they will pick up the tools, and make their own weird stuff that I can play.”