This year, we’d like to support the IFComp and encourage our writers to create and submit Varytale works for the competition.

To help this, we’ve got a few things to announce.

Firstly, we’ll be making some IFComp tools available. Though not an absolute requirement, it is considered good form to have a copy of your book that doesn’t change during the judging period. Some judges like to make their assessment based on what the book was like on the day the competition closed, others are happy for updates. In Varytale we’ve got the ability to both lock bookmarks to a particular version of a book, or to see the latest version as you go. We’ll set up your book so both are available to judges, at their choice.

Secondly, we’ll be awarding a special prize to the Varytale book that places the highest in the main competition. We won’t decide who wins it: the normal voting process will. We’ll be announcing the prize shortly on the IFComp site (ifcomp.org).

Thirdly, we will publicise the winning book prominently on our site and in our winter marketing. The book will have a custom cover flash forever indicating its winning status. We’ll also work with the author to have it professionally edited and published, if they choose to.

This is a great opportunity to have your writing seen and critiqued by the most knowledgeable readers of interactive fiction. It is an opportunity to win a prize, and to have your work prominently publicised. It is a great opportunity for us to show our love to the interactive fiction community, and to see great new works emerge. Exciting for everyone.

If you’d like to work with Varytale, and don’t currently have writer’s credentials, email me at ian@varytale.com

A read is a visit of one reader to one bookmark. We use it as our standard measure of how people use our site, and we’ve been astounded by how fast it has reached this point. By the time I finish this post, it will be 53,000.

So a huge thank you to everyone who’s read the books, rated them, or commented on them. The 3,000 ratings and comments you’ve left have helped our authors to find mistakes and problems, to find what you like, and to tune their books to be even better. Authors can see ratings and comments as they appear, and can alter their work just as quickly. That quick feedback loop has never been possible in any publishing before. One of our authors commented today that she was able to fix small mistakes within seconds of them being found. Another said being able to see what bits of the story were being rated the best and worst was absolutely fantastic. I know I’ve been addicted to watching the ratings and comments come in for the book I helped write (How to Read).

If you’re enjoying the books, please let your friends family and colleagues know. We’d love to break 100,000 reads during this beta period.

As for me – as chief technical dogsbody I have a list of things to do as long as your arm. We still have some niggly bugs, and some brilliant suggestions that have come from you. We have a queue of people wanting to write content, who are been added a few at a time. So lots of hard work in the beta still to go. But the support and good feedback from our community of readers makes it a pleasure. Thanks again.

We’re calling this a ‘Reader’s Beta’ – which is a way of saying that we appreciate you reading the books and telling us when and if you hit bugs or errors.

There are some treats available. Bee is a new work by Emily Short, telling the story of growing up a spelling prodigy in a conservative household. Fighting by K. Carol Douglas describes the lives and struggles of the first female boxers in 1970s Brooklyn. Hymn and Shanty is an experimental work of song, drawing parallels between the two forms.

In addition we’ve got some self-published work already on the site. All of which are not only excellent, but scoring very high marks from readers.

In the next few weeks I’ll talk about some of the literary and interactive features of some of these works. The range is staggering, and the degree to which each author molds the interactivity to their literary goals is personally very pleasing: it was a major goal in the design of the software.

Over the next month we’ll be moving to a new phase of the beta which we’re calling “Early access”. So lots of you who’ve patiently waited since we first put the sign-up sheet on the site will get your chance to write.

Still, we can’t cope with everyone (there were a metric ton of people who signed up) and I suspect some folks will end up being disappointed. But hopefully we’ll be a little less coy now.

With this post, I want to give more information about how we’re going to manage this process over the next month. It will also act as a reference we can point folks to.

Each Monday we’ll invite a bunch of folks to come join in the beta.

We’ll send an email out to you (you did fill in your email, didn’t you?) with a contract attached. The agreement isn’t onerous: you don’t sign over ownership of your content nor give us rights to us it, except inasmuch as we’re using it to test our system. If you could sign the document, scan it and return it to us asap, that would be great. We don’t do fax, but worst case, you can snail mail it.

The beta tutorial videos under production.

Then we’ll give you a user name and password and access to the site. And we’ll send you links to a series of videos that walk you through building your first story and some of the functionality of Varytale. Those videos have been my week so far (as you can see my desk has rather transformed into a recording studio). In due course, I expect we’ll make these videos available on Vimeo or YouTube.

My Desk, in its current guise as Recording Studio. The keyboard is a red herring, incidentally, I'm not going to inflict my piano playing skills on you.

Until there are comprehensive help resources and a large cadre of folks who’ve been there and done that, you’ll need our support. So we’ll be at the end of the email. Don’t be shy. I would also appreciate, for any of you who are willing, the opportunity to hook up with a phone chat in the first couple of weeks of you using Varytale. So I can wheedle out of you what sucks that you’re too polite to venture.

We set up a private Google group for authors a few months back, but haven’t needed it yet. We’ll send you an invite with your beta-invite, and I hope that you’ll sign up for that too, and it can become a shared resource for how-tos, project updates, encouragement, and bug reports. That will take time I think, because initially most support is likely to come direct to us, but hopefully it will grow to be useful.

So there you, open the floodgates, and let’s change the world. If you haven’t already signed up for the beta, what are you waiting for?

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PS: Apologies to those of you who we’d estimated would have access a few weeks ago now. Not totally surprisingly, things have been moving slower than we’d like.

One of our goals for Varytale is to engage writers and readers in ways that are more focussed and powerful than has previously been possible. A major way to do that is to bring lots of good quality feedback from readers back to writers.

There are three ways we do that. Firstly we give readers the ability to explicitly comment and share parts of the story, so that writers can see what is generating discussion. Secondly we ask readers to rate parts of the story, so that writers can see where their work is good and where it needs more work. And thirdly we gather anonymous usage statistics to allow writers to see how readers behave with their content: we call this “analytics”. It is this third type of feedback that I want to show you here.

Data for how readers are engaging with a whole book.

In the image above you can see a book’s analytics tab in the writer’s interface. The top graph shows the number of each level of rating given. The bottom graph shows the number of reads each day.

At the top of the page there is a selection box to choose to drill down into the data for one particular storylet¹.

Data for one storylet in a book.

This image shows some extra data that is only visible for storylets (the rating profile and the number of reads is also given for a storylet).

The first graph shows where readers go after reading this storylet. It helps you understand how the flow of your book works as a whole. The remaining two bits of data give you information about the individual nodes or chunks of a storylet². The first table shows how readers move from one chunk to another. This allows you to see what choices are being made at each stage of the narrative. The bottom graph shows the amount of time readers spend reading each node in your story.

One final note, the graphs are live, so you can hover over any bit of data and see the underlying information.

As with all the tools we give to authors, there is no need to use these graphs. If you just want to write, just write. But for those authors who want to be more embedded in the desires of their readers, we hope these data can be a radically new way to engage.

¹If you’re wondering what on earth a storylet is, check out the last post.

²In this demonstration, the node names are given as @node1, @node2, these names are given by the author, so can be more sensible: e.g. @saying-hello, @running, @chatting, @success, and so on.

In this edition of developer notes, I’d like to show you what we’ve come up with.

First I’d like to say that, whatever I could possibly write here, I expect that I’ll be made into a liar by the great authors writing their content on Varytale. Whenever you let loose absurdly creative people with a set of tools, they build something you’d never have anticipated. So take these ideas as a starting point, not as a set of constraints.

Interactivity is all about choices: giving readers choices as they read. The obvious choices concern what happens: what do characters do, what is the results of their actions, what happen next. But another important choice is what to see, what to know about, and what to focus on.

Hyperlinks in a story. This is just an illustration, we're not suggesting you put quite this many in!

The first mode of interactivity is ideally suited to this. It is the humble hyperlink. The image above shows hyperlinks in Varytale. Although it could be used for anything, we think it is particularly well suited to allowing readers to get more detail, to focus on part of a scene, or to view something from another perspective. Hyperlinks used in this way aren’t choices between different options, they are binary: you either chose it or you don’t.

A block of explicit choices that will move the story on.

The second interactivity is a more explicit choice between options, shown above. The options have been explicitly chosen by the author. In Varytale it is possible to have some choices only appear in certain cases, or otherwise make this list more dynamic. Still, the basic idea is that the choice is explicitly offered. These choices are ideally suited to join together parts of the story that have some natural continuity. They might be part of one conversation, one scene, or one event, but their structure is fixed.

A choice of storylets to read next. This list is automatically compiled from the storylets available to the reader.

The third type of choice is more dynamic. It is a choice of what we call ‘storylets‘ — chunks of the story that can be experienced in different orders¹, or in some cases omitted completely. In the image above, the choice is which character’s storyline to progress. The writer never writes an explicit list of these choices. It is rather the opposite. The author writes each storylet separately, and for each one they define when it can appear to the reader. The “Melody Gillian – Saying Goodbye” storylet, for example, could be available when enough of the Melody Gillian storyline has been seen. So each reader will see a different combination on offer, depending on what they’ve already read.

These implicit choices make it very simple to add new content to a Varytale book. If a writer finds that some of their readers dislike a particular storylet, they can write an alternative, and have both options appear together. Or a simple storyline, if it proves popular, can be fleshed out with much more content.

Visually we’ve distinguished the three different types of choice, to make it clear that they occur at different levels of the narrative. From the word by word level of the text; through choices at the end of a chunk of story that lead the narrative on; to a table of contents metaphor that organizes the whole experience.

Structurally this approach is a superset of a vast range of prior art in interactive fiction. It makes it trivial to create hypertext fiction. You can follow the structure of Failbetter’s Echo Bazaar. You can match the feel of classic gamebooks. Or mix them all and create your own style.

Varytale also has a little thing called “Magic” which makes it able to be vastly more powerful still. But that is a peek behind the curtain which I’ll let you have on another day.

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¹ We’ve had an interesting journey figuring out if this is the right name. Including some rather heated arguments on the merits of synonyms! Because interactive fiction is still an emerging field, there isn’t any standard terminology. Our friend Justin Parsler at Brunel co-opts the term “Pericope” from Biblical studies for these. Others stretch the term Lexia from Hypertext theory to include these larger units. Depending on your story they might correspond with a “scene”, an “event” or even a “paragraph” or “chapter”. Alexis came up with “storylets” which is both cute and meaningful. So for Varytale, storylets it is. We hope you forgive the neologism.

A book can have lots of folks associated with it. Each person has a role. There’s the reader, and in the case of books that haven’t been released yet, you can specify a list of readers to test or preview the book. Then there are writers who create new content. Editors also create content, but can also change other people’s content. Administrators can do everything editors can, but can also send content live: making it available to all readers (more on that below). Finally there is one head-honcho, the owner of a book.

Permissions are related to the concept of “versions” in Varytale. Every time anybody saves their work, a new version is created, and you can easily see who made what changes when. Notice above that there is a “latest” version and a “live” version. The live version is what folks are currently reading. But the team can work on new versions, or changes, without them going live immediately.

We can see the complete list of versions at any time.

In the next image, Carol and I have worked on the content a bit more.

In the penultimate column for each version is its “state”, or workflow stage. A piece of content can pass through different stages on its way to being seen by readers. There are five workflow stages: draft, in-edit, edited, live and retired. They go in lock step with permissions. So writers can move content to the “in-edit” stage, but no farther. Editors can move it to “edited”. Administrators can go all the way to “live”.

I’m only a writer on Carol’s book, so I don’t have the ability to put my changes live. So instead I set them to be “In Edit”.

Carol can then come and check they’re okay, and make a few last minute tweaks, before putting them live. Notice the previous live version is now “Retired”.

If you’re writing your own book, you’re its owner, so these permission levels are never an issue: you just do what you want, when you want to. You edit content, then click the button to send it live. You don’t have to use workflow stages, or permissions, if you don’t want to.

But we have a lot of experience of creating content as a writing staff, and it has unique challenges. This is a preview of some of the facilities we have built to support teamwork in Varytale.

NB: As with all these ‘developer notes’ what you see is the beta version of the system. As we use this more and get more feedback from beta-testers, some elements will change.

Media in general seems to be heading towards ‘interactivity’ as fast as technology will allow – the consumption of television, newspapers, music and social media involve an increasing amount of customisation and decision-making by the consumer. It starts with the external – more options on when and where and how to watch or read or listen to content – and it moves into the content itself.

In the mainstream, we’re still mostly limited to the level of alternative endings and deleted scenes on DVDs and customising an album’s track selection, but interactive films have been around since the beginnings of laserdiscs in the early ’80s, and no doubt will get more sophisticated. This direction makes complete sense: as distribution becomes digital, as more and more content is published. and consumers create more and more individualised niches for themselves, it’s natural for producers to want to model the content itself on the choice-heavy way it gets consumed. Paradoxically, this happens at the same time as content converges, either for conservative reasons (publishers feeling the need to stick to proven formulas) and for developmental reasons (films become more dependent on computer-generated imagery, video games strive to become more realistically film-like).

The term interactive fiction has connotations. For most people, it exclusively means the text adventure games of the ’80s and their descendants, which have lived on to become a rich, sophisticated and experimental sub-culture. You think of a text-only interface that allowed you to picked up sticks, look in cupboards and explore the world by strictly following the compass, and infuriatingly refused to accept any variations in instructions. These games’ interactivity is on a literal level – you type text, the game types text back at you, and together you create a narrative. You make choices about what to do, and the game reacts to those choices. Interactive fiction in this strict sense has developed a lot since the ’80s – it can encompass branching, tree-shaped narratives or winding stories that leave and rejoin a central path. It can include stories that use hypertext links to jump around. The interactivity is internal, between reader and text.

The opening of the first computer adventure game, Colossal Cave Adventure, as it appeared in 1977.

But the interactivity exists outside of the text, too. A big part of the fun is in trying to anticipate what the writers anticipated you might do. It’s the pleasure of typing something silly and being rewarded by something witty, rather than ‘I don’t understand what you mean by that’. This is the second layer of interactivity, and it’s this type of metatextual cooperation that’s at the heart of modern IF. You collaborate with the creator of the fiction, second-guess them, work with them to create an experience. This is what Varytale seeks to facilitate. But why?

By the terms of the second type of interactivity described above, fiction has always been interactive to a greater or lesser extent. The act of reading has always involved a level of cooperation and collaboration with the text – interpretation, reaction, criticism. In literary critical terms, the author (the authority of the author, that is) has been dead since the 1940s; Roland Barthes wrote the definitive obituary in 1967. In fact, it’s impossible to go back to a time when it wasn’t understood that reading involved interaction. the Greeks and Romans certainly played with metanarrative and intertextuality, they understood the collaborative nature of reading.

But the crucial distinction between traditional fiction (even understood in this way) and IF is that, apart from a few significant exceptions, reading hasn’t involved decision-making that affects the specific course of the narrative itself. And it is fair to see developing interactivity as a natural progression in fiction, it’s about deepening engagement, increasing communication between storyteller and audience. The barriers up until now have been technological, (although Choose Your Own Adventure and Fabled Lands managed to do it in traditional book form) and more importantly, perceptual. For most people. IF is a type of game, not a type of fiction. It’s a game by virtue of the reader’s participation. Reading is seen as passive; playing as active. But this is no longer a useful distinction. We are getting more used to the idea of being actively involved. It’s time to allow IF a wider meaning and an independence from games. It’s time to accept that literature can also be interactive.

That said, the question at hand is, is interactive fiction the next stage in literature’s evolution? It’s a seductive idea. But no, interactive storytelling isn’t the future of storytelling. Rather, it’s an evolutionary offshoot, developing in parallel with more traditional forms, with lots of grey areas of interbreeding. Modern fiction and modern interactive fiction share common ancestors, like bears and primates. They will continue to evolve together. Interactive fiction isn’t going to kill off fiction – there are always going to be stories that are better told in traditional forms, and there are always going to be occasions where we don’t want to have to take on the burden of helping to shape the narratives we consume. And this is a good thing. Interactive storytelling is much better off if we allow it this parallel development, rather than trying to make it responsible for the future of fiction. It will be able to develop the kinds of stories that are actually better told this way, rather than having to shape them to fit. It would be a terrible shame if IF became the novel’s 3D cinema, forced on top of everything whether it suits it or not.

So we built a system that does generative design: it creates artwork based on the author’s choice of patterned design or photograph. Although there is a distinct visual style, every single cover is unique with subtle differences of sizing and positioning that makes a whole bookshelf look varied and interesting.

Using generative design also allows us to automatically generate the same book cover in different editions. We use this to signal to readers those books that have been shown to be really special, or those that are still half-finished, or in development.

The optional rating and commenting options after each part of the story. Click for a larger version.

Books in Varytale can go through a series of editions, shown in the image above. Initially they will appear in “Draft” form (the book lying down). Readers will be able to access these books (as long as the author has set them to be public), but it is obvious that the work is a work in progress.

When a work is of sufficient quality, it will move to a “Standard Edition“. The first cover standing on the left shows a short book in standard edition, the second shows a longer book.

If a book is well received, and garners good feedback, it will be issued in a “Recommended” edition. Then it may move on to be a “Highly Commended” book. Finally the very very best, the cream, will be issued in “Classic Edition” form (the final book on the right).

Authors who consistently create books that are high quality will find all their books subtly change to reflect their personal brand: their name grows bigger, heavier and appears above the title, for example.

So how do books move through this series?

One of the things we’ve been passionate about in building Varytale, is allowing readers to continually tell authors (and their friends) what they like and don’t like. At the end of every chunk of story there is an optional set of rating stars. As a book gets more top ratings, its cover will change. And our expert review team can also give great books a boost if we think they are being neglected.

Great writers are often first-class at spotting the talent of others: raw or refined. So a writer who receives lots of high ratings, will have more influence in the ratings they give.

There’s much more to say about the way this feedback empowers authors, and gives a much deeper level of interactivity to readers. But that’s for a different post.

NB: Obviously, books published on our platform by other publishers will have their own design and branding, that won’t conform to this pattern.