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illuminesce
@illuminesce

A week ago, I made a post about interface dramas and what they are. They're (usually software) interfaces that tell a story. Previously called UI games or desktop simulators, @mabbees and I are proposing a new name: interface dramas.

I made an Interface Drama Master List here. I hope to help boost visibility for this niche genre.

It's searchable by tags! So convenient!

We have:

I'm still in the process of contacting devs to make sure the tagging/entries look right, so if you are one of the devs of this game, please look forward to a message from me. :eggbug-smile-hearts:

Don't see a game that you think should be on the list?

Submit a new interface drama here. I love new submissions! Please take a look at the FAQ before submitting. Info here will be regularly updated.

Thank you to the person who submitted Zachtronics' TIS-100.

It's been added to the list. :eggbug-wink:

I think the interface drama genre is cool. What can I do to help?

Steam takes user-generated tags.

If you want interface drama to catch on as a genre, go to the Steam page of each game in this list and click the "+" button to add your own tags. If enough folks add tags, they'll appear on the Steam page of the game.

How to access tags on Steam: click the + tag in the tag cloud section, then at the bottom add your own custom tags.


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in reply to @illuminesce's post:

Thank you for sharing these. Part of the reason @mabbees and I wanted to define something about this genre is because we made a game too, and felt it was difficult to describe with pre-existing words.

It's really nice to know other folks are thinking about this and presenting on this too. I'm going to take a look and add these to the list.

Do you mind if I include y'all's presentation on the FAQ? I can use your itch.io handles to credit you if that works for you.

Oh this is awesome! I was actually wondering if anyone coined a term for games like this. I see Her Story and Telling Lies there, does Immortality count too? I think in the framing story it’s presented as an interactive archive program, but it doesn’t have the entire desktops like Her Story or Telling Lies do.

We had included IMMORTALITY in the list when we first did the talk—like you mentioned, it’s presented as a film clip archive, but ultimately as I was thinking more about it, the user interface is presented more as “game UI” as opposed to “experiential interface” that thematically tie interface dramas together.

https://chostett.com/blog/posts/2023-08-15-Interface-Drama-Master-List

It’s a hard call though; as @morayati says in her presentation, there’s quite a few interface dramas that are on the cusp of interface dramas, where they describe interfaces or feature interfaces but they are not as front and center, and I think IMMORTALITY falls into the “cusp” category.

What to do with this kind of category…

I was just thinking about that, but ultimately I feel like Immortality makes zero effort to actually sell the player on the conceit that they’re interfacing with a diegetic piece of software. Once you’re out of the tutorial it’s pretty easy to just forget about the framing device entirely.

hi! yeah, as katherine mentioned above we've done a bit of work on this as well — really appreciate more folks paying attention to the form!

not to quibble over terminology, but I find "drama" to be a bit prescriptive? for instance, such as hypnospace outlaw or pony island or there is no game, are largely comedic — feels a bit dissonant to call them dramas, lol

(this is why katherine and I opted for "interface fiction", which is perhaps undescriptive but at the very least inclusive)

Quibble away! Thank you to both of you for your work and your talk; I read through the slides and I like your take on the nostalgia aspect. It's something @mabbees and I touched on but didn't dive in too deep.

As far as the word "drama" is being used I wanted to share two points of view. One is that we're using "drama" as in a play, or more specifically, “a composition intended to portray life or character or to tell a story involving emotions through action and dialogue.”

I can't speak to Pony Island as I haven't played it yet, but the ending of Hypnospace Outlaw has a lot of emotion in it.

(spoilers for Hypnospace Outlaw incoming...)
The player finds out that Hypnospace interferes with people’s brain waves and a person dies (or persons, depending on whether the player does their job as an Enforcer) due an event called the Mindcrash.
(/spoilers)

Granted, even if the gameplay was comedic, I'd still say if it uses action or dialogue to convey a story that has emotion or portray life or a character it counts as a drama.

The other is specifically in regards to interface fiction versus interface drama. I can see where fiction comes from, as this genre uses text to convey messages and developers who have done interactive fiction have done interface dramas and vice versa.

It's a name that is descriptive of the genre, but from a distinct naming perspective, and perhaps this is a personal discomfort, but I think interface fiction shares too many letters with interactive fiction for newcomers to distinguish it via text.

In addition, interactive fiction has used the abbreviation "IF" a lot—see ifcomp.org for the interactive fiction competition and IFDB for the interactive fiction database. Were the genre to go with interface fiction, it would also use "IF" as an abbreviation.

I can see the indistinct abbreviations in the future causing problems for people looking for interactive fiction but finding interface fiction and vice versa.

In summary, interface drama is:

  1. descriptive
  2. distinct enough from interactive fiction
  3. has a separate acronym

You, Katherine and Lee Tusman so far are the folks I know of who have been talking about this genre. I'm sure there's others I haven't found yet, too. I think it'd be neat for us to talk about this more.

i think your point about interface fiction being too similar to interactive fiction is a fair one, and one that katherine and I considered (and jsyk katherine and I both have backgrounds in interactive fiction; we've both competed in IFComp several times, so you can probably tell where I'm coming from here a little bit)

ultimately though i think my reservation still remains; i feel like interface drama, as a term, foregrounds the content rather than the form. (this is the same reason why we say "interactive fiction" nowadays instead of "text adventure.") in my opinion, the term should be expanded to be as inclusive as possible of the sorts of games people can create rather than prescribing those games to be of a certain genre. interactive fiction, visual novel, hypertext, etc — all of these terms are necessarily broad because it's the form that's being described. whether or not the game elicits emotion A or emotion B is of less importance, imo (or that's a different type of categorisation going on.)

but! it's just a name. at the end of the day it's nice to see more folks talking about games like these bc they have such a rich history!

Heya!

This is a super interesting frame! I really love thinking about games/VNs/interactive fiction in this space too though maybe coming from a different place as well.

I wanted to comment initially but realised it was just far far too looong and veering off in 10 directions ahaha………
If you're interested I shared other ways to think about such games here! https://cohost.org/lrwerther/post/2597097-this-is-so-interesti
(Also this is really not to distract from interface drama, which seems pretty effective; I just really like sharing different ways to share about these things since I rarely find people going off the deep end with them!)

From one person who likes going off the deep end to another… I appreciate you springboarding off this!

The more I talk about it the more I realize all of us are scratching the surface of this giant body of work that is related to each other. I have a lot more resources to study and a lot more to consider with all this new information and it makes me happy to know folks are sharing their own perspectives.

Whoa I thought this was a recent post at first and thought "welp time to be the 7th person to suggest Uplink" but it's genuinely been a bit and I suppose no one else has suggested it! It's a real classic of this genre, it was the oldest I knew of, but Cosmoserve from the slideshow in the comments does beat it by a few years.