Adult Interactive Fiction

Writing Journal: Feeling gloomy these past few days (probably a Turkey overload!), so of course everything I write feels bleh. Actually, everything I do feels bleh. Writing's just a small part of it. Which means that I'm finding it hard to get into the Serena sex scene I'm writing now for The Adjusters #27. Ah well. That's why we have rewriting. And because some of you like that sort of thing, here's a little preview, a teaser of sorts, fresh off the presses, part of what I wrote this morning. Warning: This is entirely unedited prose.

“Fuck, look at that,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m begging like a heroine addict craving her next hit.” She turned back to look at Radhu contemplatively. “You like that? Hearing me beg like that? Beg to be used and abused, offering my body in exchange? Does that get you all hot? You little perv,” and again she said that with a smile on her face. “You want to see me beg now? Is that what you fantasize about? ‘Please, Rad, please stuff your big cock in my tight cunt and fuck me hard, you Indian stud?’ Is that what you want?”

She straddled his lap, holding on to his shoulders for balance, and without hesitation she sank down upon his shaft, which slipped inside her drenched pussy in one go, without any difficulty. Serena gasped and her eyes rolled up before she closed her eyes. Radhu’s breath caught, the feelings unlike anything he had ever experienced before, completely different than what he had been expecting, than what he had dreamed of those long nights where his fist was his only sexual companion. He had imagined intercourse to feel just like that, like masturbation, like a fist jacking up and down, fingers clasped tight, but no, it was entirely different. It was as if his penis had sunk into a thick gooey liquid, perfectly warm, and alive, with waves coming and going and caressing and pressing and squeezing in all sorts of different places over his length. He abandoned himself to the experience, submerged by his senses.

“Fuck you feel good,” Serena groaned, unmoving on his lap, his shaft fully inside her, her mouth against his neck, her hair tickling the side of his face. Radhu did not know what to do. His hands wanted to run up her back and pull her close to him. His hips wanted to thrust upwards and seek more warmth and more tightness. His mouth wanted to kiss and nibble and bite on the fragrant skin all around him. He settled for pressing his hands against her sides, teasingly near the bottom of her breasts, savoring the feel of her skin.

Serena moaned into his neck. “Your hands feel good, Rad. Not as good as your cock in my pussy, but good nonetheless.” With another moan she pushed herself up, then sank back down, making him jump under the renewed strength of the sensations, and then she started fucking him with long regular strides, pushing with her legs and letting herself fall back onto his shaft harder and harder.

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In my last post I talked about some of the story ideas that went through my head earlier this week, some of which I do intend to pursue in the medium term. But there was another bunch of ideas that came calling back from the depth where I thought I had buried them. And that's the old dreams I had of creating a piece of Adult Interactive Fiction (AIF).

A couple of years ago, I posted something about AIF. Here's what I said then:

I promised I would say something about AIF. Let's start with IF, or Interactive Fiction. Some of you might know those as text adventure games, in which you are basically thrown into a virtual world, where the description of the world is given as text descriptions. Your role is to supply instructions to the player character using short verb/noun sentences, and your actions can impact the world. The result of your actions, once again is given as text descriptions. A good starting point for discovering the world of interactive fiction is probably Brass Lantern, especially its Beginners section. Now, modern pieces of interactive fiction focus maybe a bit less on the "adventuring" part, and more on stories and interactions, with an attempt at narrative. Because this narrative is interactive, in the sense that the player can affect it, the result can be dubbed interactive fiction. There is a lot that has been said about the notion of narrative that arises in such a context, and if you're curious (and have a head for theoretical analyses of new media), go and check out the work of Nick Montfort.

Adult interactive fiction is basically the smut side of interactive fiction. It should not be surprising that this came about. The original pieces of AIF were, strangely enough, very Star-Trek-centric. (Don't ask. Please don't ask. Imagine a ten-year-old creating porn. Then make it worse.) Not so much anymore. Basically, AIF has the player interact with computer-controlled characters in sexual ways. Depending on the skill of the designer, and the extent to which the sex can be connected to a narrative that has some independent interest, the result can lead to a highly arousing experience. I suspect very much that there is some underlying theory of arousal and sexual release that could be brought to bear to the study of AIF and its effectiveness as, well, smut.

I strongly urge you to have look at the kind of things that are out there. Start with the IF Wiki page for AIF, and work from there. It's a little bit difficult to get started, simply because there are few centralized places were to get games and information how to run them. On the plus side, games tend to run on all platforms, partly because the game itself is just a data file, and to run the game you need an interpreter that can run the data file. There are a few systems out there that can produce games (TADS and Inform being the two big ones), and each of those systems come with interpreters for essentially all known computer platforms. Head over to Brass Lantern and start poking around. If you're looking at good adult games to start, you may want to look up Moist, one of my all time favorites and a good starting point.

Now, I haven't kept up with the AIF community, and there doesn't seem to have an actual central meeting place. Two sites seem to maintain games and walkthrough information: AIFGames (which seems to require registration) and Matrix Mole's AIF Archival Area. A lot of the action seems to happen on the Yahoo group aifarchive, which you may want to check out.

Now, over the years, as I said, I have had this dream of creating an AIF game. I've had ideas galore:

• a scifi-ish scenario in which you play a junior technician at a company specialized in virtual reality simulations, and who is asked to perform a rather urgent repair job on a virtual reality card brought in by a wealthy customer, where the card encodes a scenario with which the customer indulges the anger produced by a failed marriage.
• a scenario in which you play a guy that discovers that some of the girls around you have been equipped with posthypnotic triggers that you can take advantage of, and end up being pursued by the people installing those triggers that want to make sure you don't talk.
• a scenario in which you play a girl being blackmailed by a ruthless gangster and have to play along as the girl while trying to get out of under the bastard's thumb.

And so on. Some ideas have been developed more than others.

The problem is that the furthest I've gone writing any of those has been programming at most one room, with maybe a sketch of the characters. The problem is not the programming, that I can do okay. No, the problem is simply process. See, I've got the process for writing the kind of smut I write more or less down pat. I'm not saying it's easy, or there aren't points where I wonder what the hell I'm doing, but overall, for standard fiction, I can more or less outline, and once a piece has been outlined, I pretty much know how to start writing it: start at the beginning, and write from that point on, and do much of the work of making it pretty at rewrite time. The initial pass is to work out the structure, the skeleton. It can be near unreadable or near the final product (I've experienced both) but the point is to remove the pressure to come up with something perfect or even good the first time around.

For AIF, it's rather clear I have no clue how to approach a project. I don't know how to construct the skeleton and then find the starting point. A piece of AIF is essentially a graph where situations are connected via actions that the player takes. If you let me go technical for a second, do I go depth-first by going down branches until I either join a new branch or hit the end of the current branch, and then backtrack up to a split that contains a branch I have not fleshed out yet? Or do I go breath-first, doing all the scenes that a branching point leads to, and then go down to each such scene and develop its own subsequent scenes, and so on? Point is: I don't know. And even if I knew how others did it, I still wouldn't know what works for me.

So one thing I've thought about this wee is to maybe ease my way into developing AIF. Rather than jumping into command-based adult interactive fiction, I may start with a more hypertext-based form of interactive fiction, much more akin to those old "choose-your-own-adventure" sort of books we used to have when I was a kid. (There I go, dating myself again...) A nice system that has come out recently is Undum, a Javascript-based framework that lets you publish a piece of hypertext-based interactive fiction on the web in a particularly aesthetic way. I've been playing with it a bit in my free time, and I think I can work with it. The process is closer to writing standard fiction, so presumably I can make some progress on an actual project there. I just need a project where the choices that the player has to make carry some emotional payoff bigger than ”which girl do I screw next?” I'm thinking that an interactive story from the perspective of a girl being blackmailed may lend itself well to this kind of setting. We'll see.