“Choose Your Own”/Interactive Narrative

1. “Choose Your Own”/Interactive Narrative Sophia Vayansky

2. Goals • Create a narrative project that: • Will be useful to me when creating programing this summer • Is useful to the park • Can be expanded upon/ serves as a foundation for further work • Introduces me to new, useful skills/interpretive formats

3. Request from Saratoga NHP • Create a project based on Mount Vernon’s http://play.bewashington.org/ • “delv[e] into the loyalty issues concerning Neilson, Bemus, and Freeman before/during/after the battles.”

13. Narrative/Interp Techniques from “Be Washington” • Keep background information short, pithy, relevant • Historical actors presenting nuances, information • Introducing a source of stress • Interruptions, timers, have to remember multiple viewpoints • Place decision within historical context (what you chose vs. what GW chose)

14. The Plan • Create a “Choose Your Own Adventure” where your character chooses to become a Patriot, stay loyal, or tries to remain neutral • Character will interact with various actors (Bemis, Freeman, Neilson) and with primary sources (eg. Broadsides, newspapers) in order to provide context, give information, inform choices • Unclear if you need a timer; instead, investment and source of urgency will hopefully come from a cypher character with whom it is easy to emphathize

15. What do you choose? A Do the thing B. Do part of the thing C. Don’t do the thing

16. https://storyboard.viget.com/ https://www.typeform.com/templates/t/interactive-fiction/