Clara Sherley-Appel (CSA): This is Story Behind the Story. I’m your host, Clara Sherley-Appel, and my guest today is physicist, game creator, and writer Stephen Granade. Stephen lives in Huntsville, Alabama, which he describes as “the town whose skyline includes a Saturn V rocket.” He has built hardware that's flown in space, appeared on NASA's Unexplained Files, and once wrote a game that one reviewer described as, “another Twine game that will make you sad,” which Stephen says is the best review ever. He says he’s only set himself on fire with a laser once, but whether or not you believe him is up to you.


Stephen Granade, welcome to Story Behind the Story!


Stephen Granade (SG): Thanks so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here. 


(CSA): Since this is the first time I'm having anyone to do anything with games on this show, but especially someone who works in interactive fiction (which, as we know, is a little bit of a niche interest), I think we should start by defining some terms.


(SG): Oh, Absolutely!


(CSA):  Your game writing does primarily fall into the category interactive fiction, or text adventures, but that's a very large category. What is interactive fiction to you? How would you describe it? 
 
(SG): It is a story, for me, primarily presented in text that allows the reader to interact with it in various ways; I have a fairly broad definition of what I will call “interactive.” They kind of divide into a couple of different categories. I got my start writing text adventures, which is: you’re typing commands in at a command line, and trying to solve puzzles, and moving around a simulated space. I've also written what are often called “choice-based games,” where it's sort of like the old Choose Your Own Adventure books—


(CSA): Right.
 
(SG): You get presented with choices, and you click on them; So there's somewhere between Choose Your Own Adventure books, and the hypertext works that people were writing, especially in the '90s and 2000s. 


(CSA): I have been interested in and loving interactive fiction since about the '90s — though actually, I think the first game I played was Bureaucracy by Douglas Adams. I must have been six or seven, cuz my aunt had it on her old Apple computer with Shufflepuck Cafe when that came out —
 
(SG): Oh wow!


(CSA): 1989, so yeah, six or seven. 


(SG): Excellent!


(CSA): But what struck me in general about interactive fiction (especially in that early era of the '80s and '90s) was just the sheer number of options that were available, cuz I don't know if people who grew up on open world video games today can really understand how limited so much of the World building was in graphical games in that early period. Really, the first open world game that I can think of that was graphical and that really had the richness that interactive fiction had was, like, Mist in 1993. And it kept me with interactive fiction long after we started having games like Mist, and now World of Warcraft and all of these really big MMORPGs that are incredibly open world. I'm curious what attracts you to IF as a writer? What attracted you to it at that time, and what keeps you with it now well after its heyday?


(SG): Right, (he chuckles) after it died a commercial death long, long ago. (Clara chuckles) I think there are really interesting things that you can do in interactive narrative, and graphics are hard to create and expensive — both in terms of time and effort, and then tools required. Text is a lot cheaper. The scope of what I can do and describe in text is way wider than what I can do, personally, in terms of graphics. But, at its core, it's the same reason why I still read novels, and still read short stories. There are pleasures to those kinds of text-based medium, and there are experiences that I can give people; I can communicate artistically certain visions through interaction that I can't do in the same way through a more traditional text, like a short story or a novel.


(CSA): Yeah, and I find myself frequently trying to come up with terms when I'm looking on IGN that will help me get to something like what a lot of those early text adventures made me feel —


(SG): Right.


(CSA): Even now there's so few games that really feel the same, where the storytelling is so central the way that it is in interactive fiction; The FICTION part of interactive fiction feels so important. I think of Fire Watch was one of those games that felt to me… gave me that same feeling like some of that old interactive fiction did. So I'm curious to hear you talk a little bit about what you think makes that difference. Why, even now when we have all these graphical capabilities, it's still so hard to centralize the story?
 
(SG): I think there are a couple of things that pull games away from story. In the early interactive fiction community, as folks were conglomerating on the early internet and talking about these games and creating them, we spent a long time trying to figure out, “What does it mean to be a game? What does it mean to be a story?” There was a statement in the community that was like, “Well these text adventures are like a story at war with a crossword puzzle. (Clara laughs) You're trying to solve these puzzles, but you're also trying to tell this story, and is that like a slider that you slide? Like, “more game” or “more story”? And, if you're talking about commercial video games, I think there's a real pleasure in the more actioning loops — gameplay loops — that a lot of those games provide, and I do think that the ones that I really enjoy do have a fairly tightly coupled story, and use the gameplay as a way to express what's going on in that story. 
I think about a fairly recent game called Control, which is all about psychic powers and you wandering through this secret bureaucracy in Washington DC in this thousand story tall building that nobody can see. It's a marriage of style and story and gameplay, but it's not like I'm going to rush and tell you, ‘Then this happened, and then this happened,’ cuz there's not that much there there, even as good as that is. Whereas a lot of the text-based stories, you've got more space to explore. The fact that a lot of them now are not commercially viable means you can do some really weird experiments. The review that I raved about about my twine game that will make you sad, puts you in the position of an older gentleman with dementia. That is not a commercially viable — it is an anti-commercial video game! That's not something that is just going to fly off the shelves. And yet, it let me explore this in a way that puts you into that experience very centrally, and makes you viscerally feel some of those aspects of that story, and that really vibes with me. 


(CSA): How much of that do you think is due to the structure of the games industry and the incentives that are created by the studio system? 
 
(SG): It's certainly — as we've seen in Hollywood as movies have gotten bigger and more expensive — that it's harder to take a flier on something maybe odd and quirky that might not succeed. You've got to have the biggest movies that are going to make the most money, and then you have micro movies that you're like, ‘Well, we didn't spend much on that.’ I think you've seen that. Also in the video game industry, where you have the so-called “AAA games industry,” where it's like: ‘We're pumping so much money in. We've got to get that money back,’ and then you've got smaller studios or indie studios that are doing weird, more interesting experimental things. You talk about video games where you have that kind of experience of the early text adventures, where there's a lot of openness and possibility and you don't know what it's going to be like, other than: I'm going to type some commands and see what happens…


(CSA): …and hopefully the commands work.
 
(SG): —and hopefully they work! But the range of what I can express as the player is, in theory, just bounded by what English I type in. I see that in some of the smaller indie studios working on things. I think about: there's a studio — Inkle Studios, which was co-founded by Jon Ingold, who got his start in the same interactive fiction community where they've done things like: they've got a recent game, Heaven's Vault, where you are a space archaeologist trying to investigate these old alien ruins and piece together the aliens language. The game doesn't… You don't just put time in, and then answers pop out. You actually have to type in, after you have studied, what you think these words mean, and you can be wrong but it can still be kind of consistent. So it has that openness and possibility that I have really enjoy with text adventures. 


(CSA): We talked a little bit about the fact that you actually enter text in a text adventure, at least in some of these, in the parser based games. So I feel like we do need to talk about parsers — the natural language processing technology that many of these text-based games ran on; Because in the '80s and '90s, let's just say that technology wasn't where it is today…


(SG): Right!


(CSA): —so a big part of playing interactive fiction from that time, and especially these very open world interactive fiction games, was figuring out what you could type in that actually would work, and different games handled parser errors with varying degrees of elegance. In fact, I think some of the most fun you can have in a game is one where, like, if you find a game where it leans into the parser failures by providing these really fun and elegant and weird errors. I'm curious, for you, how parsers informed the way that you approached writing interactive fiction at the time, and how it's different writing parser games from the choice based games — cuz you've done both. 
 
(SG): Yeah, the parser is such an interesting beast in terms of how you're going to interact with the program. Because in the text adventures you typically get a room description,and there are objects in there. And then there is this blank line and you're going to type words in, and the theory is: ‘Type in anything and I will respond to it.’ But in reality, there's a limit to what can be understood. So part of it was learning the common vocabulary that text adventures used, so you would like, ‘Well, I know if I type in “inventory,” or “i,” or I can see what I'm holding.’ I can type cardinal directions like north/south/east/west to move around. I can ‘get object.’ I can ‘put object in a backpack.’ So if you deviated from that, it became a question of discoverability, and how do I help players learn that there are new verbs and new actions that they can take outside the standard ones? Or, vice versa: How much can I express with that common pattern of verb-object syntax, and how much expressiveness can I get away with? Because in theory, you could boil all this down to, ‘I'm going to type, “use object,” and the game will just magically figure out what I am doing.’ But that doesn't always work, and it gets to be a little more boring, and it's less expressive than being able to say, “turn crank,” for example. 


(CSA): Yeah, yeah. I think one of the games that I fell in love with, which I guess is actually a little more modern at this point, is Emily Shorts’ Galatea. 


(SG): Yes!


(CSA): It uses, in some ways, the simplest version of a parser because it only really care — I mean, there are a couple other commands you can use, but it only really cares… like, the functionality of the game is entirely built on speaking. It takes place in one room between an art critic and a living statue, Galatea. Much of that game is not about figuring out what COMMANDS will work, but like, what is Galatea interested in, and willing to talk about.


(SG): Right. At its best, once you have gotten more familiar with the vocabulary, it's ideal if you can reach this flow state where you feel like you are in conversation with the game, and it is hearing you and responding and answering back.


(CSA): Yeah, and I think that’s what I mean about: here is a game that does something really elegant with parsers, because it shrinks down the kinds of things that you want to do and that are going to be interesting in the game; It also allows error handling in ways that are more about how people talk to each other and how people build trust and mess up trust, and all of those sorts of things. It becomes less about… It takes the parser error here and converts it into a social error, like a faux pas.
(SG): Right. There have been some really interesting experiments done over the last handful of years with what folks called a “restricted parser,” where instead of a blank line that says, “type anything,” instead the game says, ‘here are the small set of commands I understand. This is all you'll need to do to interact with me.’ And so you lose some of that surprise and excitement of ‘I tried a thing, I didn't think it would work, and it TOTALLY worked!’ But on the flip side, you decrease the frustration of, ‘Why won't this stupid game understand what I have typed at it???’


(CSA): — which is, like, every time I've tried to get somebody into interactive fiction, that's always the blocker. It's ‘I can't figure out what I'm supposed to be typing.’ 
 
(SG): Yeah, it's like when I was playing them in the '80s and '90s, I was a kid and really stubborn, and so I was willing to bang my head against it. If you introduced those to me now that I'm in my 40s and said: ‘here's what you're going to do with your free time.’ I think I would say… Uh, no?


(CSA): Now the games are so used to teaching us —


(SG): Right.


(CSA): I think that so much of this is about the fact that those games came of age right at the same time as the game's industry, to a certain extent. It's like you were saying, you were figuring out what a game was as you were writing interactive fiction; That was some of the discussion in the community. I think now that a lot of those things have been resolved, the patience that people have for parser errors is a lot lower. 


(SG): I think there was a lot more... I would call it, almost, hostile game design (sort of like hostile architecture); You were at war with the game, and you were going to beat the game and show it that you could win!


(CSA): There is a little bit of that, yah.


(SG): In the 80s and 90s, one of the selling points was, ‘It will take you 60 hours! 80 hours! to solve this game,’ and my life is much shorter than it was back then; I've got things to do. (Clara chuckles) And there were real debates about, ‘How much do we want to coddle the player?’ And these days I'm like, a lot! I want people to be able to have the experience that I want them to have and it's not: this game keeps punching me in the face. 


(CSA): You want them to stay in the world, and not move out of the world that you've constructed into the world where there are limitations of a parser.


(SG): Right. To loop way back to the question that kicked all of this off — How did that influence what I wrote? — I would think a whole lot about how do I communicate the kind of actions that are needed. There was a, for example, a point in one of my games wher: you've come back home, you've been in your car, you've gotten groceries,and now you're trying to do that thing where you get out of the car and you've got your groceries in your hand, and you've got the key and you want to close the door, and there's a lot of frustration there. I spent a whole lot of time working out, well, the game needs to guess what you want to interact with in a logical way so that you can be frustrated at the usual frustrations: I dropped my keys. I'm having trouble juggling these sacks of groceries. And not, ‘No, that wasn't what I meant.’ So that the frustration was aimed at the frustrating event, rather than ‘I am having real trouble interacting with this game.’


(CSA): Yeah, I think that's really interesting. There is a really… I see a theme in a lot of interactive fiction at that time period of dealing with frustration, like, frustrations that are built into the game. I think exactly what you're talking about people trying to find ways to progressively disclose where you're going to go; to tip the hat just enough so that you feel like you can get to the next step in the mystery, but not so much that it unravels all all too quickly.


(SG): I think that influenced me at the time to do a lot more… I guess, information hiding and mystery style games, where it's like, ‘You're not going to know what's going on, but you're interested in text adventures, so you're going to be willing to play it!’ And like, if I tried that now, people’d be like, ‘I got lots of other entertainment options. Let me have an idea of what kind of experience I'm going to have, so that then I know whether I'm in for it or not.’


(CSA): Well one thing I find interesting as a thread that goes through a lot of your games, including some of your more current games, is the exploration of the unreliable nature of memory. So in Losing Your Grip, which is the first of your games that I played, you as the player — I think named Terry — wake up in a muddy field with no memory of who you are or how you got there. And then in the game that you mentioned earlier, the one that makes people sad, Will Not Let Me Go, you are playing a man who has Alzheimer's. And even in some of your games like binary and fragile shells where memory isn't really what the story is about, it kind of permeates the background; Like, differences in memory between the characters, or I think in one of them you you wake up with a head wound and so there's a little bit there to discover. I was curious, what about that nature of memory that makes it so compelling to you, and does it interest you in traditional fiction as well as in interactive fiction where you have this more mystery unfolding structure? 


(SG): I definitely have told on myself that I keep returning to this theme, explicitly and implicitly in a lot of my work, and I think it comes down to a couple of things. I've always been interested in how we construct ourselves, and how that memory is often unreliable and changes as we go through, and how you can kind of rediscover who you used to be; Like if you go back and read something that you… if you've ever kept a diary or a journal, and you go back and you read something from 5-10 years ago, all of a sudden you're like, ‘Oh my gosh, I was like THAT?’


(CSA): So embarrassing.


(SG):) I am both embarrassed and protective of that past self. I was like, aw I couldn't be me without that. I think watching a family member deal with dementia at a fairly early age had a big impression on me; That is one of my fears. I'm someone who makes a living and makes art through a lot of mental effort, and what if that went away?
In terms of the form, I keep getting drawn back to it because it reduces the distance between ‘you: the player,’ and ‘you: the protagonist that you are inhabiting,’ because ‘you: the player’ are potentially coming to this game without a whole lot of knowledge of the backstory and what's going on, and that lets me play with that duality of protagonist versus person playing, and shrink that distance in ways I find really interesting. 


(CSA): I found it really interesting in Losing Your Grip; I played it in 2001/2002, so a few years after it came out. I don't remember how I found it, but I remember that I found it absent the feelies, which for our audience members: feelies are the things that come along with it. They're the supplemental materials that come along with the game, or that came along with an interactive fiction game, cuz I don't think it's as common now. In this case it was some pamphlets that described what the character was going through, and sometimes they have keys to puzzles which can be frustrating if you don't have the feelies. (They both laugh) In some ways I'm really glad that I didn't have the feelies going in because I didn't really know where things were going. It did exactly what you talked about — It reduced the distance between me as a player and me as the character in a way that I don't know it would have if I had seen all these hints about what the player was doing here, or what Terry was doing here and how he arrived. 


(SG): Right.


(CSA): I'm interested to hear you talk about the relationship of that. Did you create feelies because that is a thing that you had to do at the time, or was it part of your storytelling approach? Where do those fit in?


(SG): It started as a purely commercial decision because I wrote the game and released it in the late '90s, when you could still sell shareware software. You would get, typically, a limited demo, and then you'd pay to unlock the full thing. I was trying to figure out what will make somebody interested, because I didn't want to gate part of the game, like: ‘I played the first two chapters, and now to keep going, pay for the whole thing.’ I was like, I don't really want to do that. But then, what can I do that would make people be willing to part with their hard-earned money? Well those feelies — those physical artifacts that came with early text adventures — were a big part of it. Infocom, one of the biggest companies doing those types of games, had kind of an arms race going on with ever more elaborate things that would come.


(CSA): “Special Editions.”


(SG): Right. And my partner, Misty, is a mixed media artist and a graphic designer. At the time, she was working at Kinkos so I had access to all this technology that, in 1997, I would not have had otherwise. I could do things like a booklet with spot color! Very advanced! Because we didn't have a whole lot of color printing possibilities. And then I got really interested in, artistically, what can I give that's really neat to have? For example, one of the pieces of feelies was a piece ripped out of a newspaper, and we figured out how to print onto newspaper so that I could rip it up in there, and it felt like a piece of newspaper. That was the kind of artifact that was hard to create. and so you didn't see much of that, and it really made people interested in paying for that. But also said, ‘Oh, here's an artifact of this fictive world,’ and helped make it more real.


(CSA): Yeah, I think that’s really interesting.


***AD BREAK***


(CSA): If you’re just joining me, my guest today is writer and game designer Stephen Granade, whose interactive fiction explores the relationship between memory, physicality, and reality.


Also about that game, about Losing Your Grip: It's one of those games that I've returned to. I think I've played it three or four times over the years, and I keep coming back to it even now. It's okay, I know I know how the parsers work. I don't get frustrated anymore but I think what's so compelling to me about it is the way that it does guard its mysteries; Most of the action takes place in a single building, which I always kind of imagined as a manor house even though I don't know that the outside description fits that, but a lot of the inside description, a lot of the furniture, the fact that there's a foyer —


(SG): Right.


(CSA): — right when you enter lends itself to this. But it is really richly constructed and very open. So, this is a game that you can play for hours that if you have some parsers, it could get a little bit frustrating, but for the most part there's not a lot of stress to it, which I really appreciated, right? 


(SG): Right!


(CSA): You don't know who you are, but it's kind of like: ‘Okay, cool, I don't know who I am. I'll figure it out along the way.’ There's just this glory of being in and discovering this world, so I'm very curious where this game started for you. What is the seed of this story that then you built outward from?


(SG): The seed of the story really came from my interest in, how do I have puzzles? Because at the time it was like, ‘You're going to write a text adventure, and there will be puzzles.’ But how do I make those serve the story, and make the story serve the puzzles? In the same way that making the characters start out with gaps in memory not only closes the distance between player and protagonist, but also is kind of a cheat that you will learn along with the protagonist. Because all of this takes place in the protagonist's mind, it let me go hog wild with symbolism. Everything could be a symbol, but that meant that interacting with these objects and solving these puzzles, the symbology gave it an extra dimension—


(CSA): Right.


(SG): — that it wasn't just like, I'm telling the story, and now I'm going to go fiddle with this machine and fix it, and then my reward is now I can go do more story. Instead, the story was encapsulated in those interactions with these symbolic objects and symbolic points where the protagonist is stuck in their life, or are dealing with unresolved anger and guilt and all these other kinds of emotions. That's really what drove the focus and the design of it is. I wanted to see, could I have puzzles that mattered from a story standpoint?


(CSA): For a game like this, where the world is so expansive and the characters… Well I guess this is really a broad question about interactive fiction, too: How much of the plot do you have in mind ahead of time? Like, is it even possible when you're writing games like these to go in with only a half formed idea of where it's going? 


(SG): It's possible. I wouldn't recommend it, just because there is so much work to structure and put these things together. I'm fundamentally fairly lazy, so I don't want to have done a lot of work that I have to throw away, especially if it's hard to redo. I have also started writing more traditional fiction, and that I feel a lot freer to throw away or mix or cut up. But when you're talking about a choice-based game, that's harder to do, especially if you talk about any game with underlying mechanics like these text adventures with a simulated world. If you put all this effort into simulating a piece of it and then later go…nah, I'm going to throw that away… UGH. I'm too lazy to do that. 


(CSA): It’s these cascading effects; you can’t just throw away one thing easily. 
I thought of this game again last year, of Losing Your Grip again last year when I was reading Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. It felt to me very similar. I think this is one of the first times that I read a work of traditional fiction that felt to me like some of that interactive fiction had felt. There's a wonderful review of Piranesi in Tor, which gets at a lot of what feels similar to me about these two works; One of the pieces of that is that in both of them, there is a horrifying twist which takes you from this serene but unknown world with a character who doesn't really know who they are, or forces them to realize why that's a problem, and forces them to contend with their reality at some point in ways that can make it a little horror-like.


(SG): Right.


(CSA): Both Piranesi the character and Terry (who’s the player character in Losing Your Grip), they seem very at peace with the worlds they've been dropped into. In both of those cases, kind of like that review says, the twist doesn't really feel like the point. They are both works that unfold their mysteries slowly and there is this calmness to it, but there's no point in either where you don't really feel compelled to move forward. I can't ask you to speak for Susanna Clarke of course, but I am very curious to know how much of that was intentional for you, and how you approach player motivation when you're crafting a story. 


(SG): First of all, that comparison is going to make me very happy for the next several months. Piranesi was one of my favorite stories from last year. 


(CSA): It's pretty fantastic. 


(SG): It's so good. I think, for me, it was a happy accident. Especially at that point I don't think I had enough understanding and control of my artistic process to have that good. A level of thought behind it. I think it's just that these text adventures are turn-based. Nothing happens until you type the next command. I was not trying to write a work of horror, I was trying to write a work of psychological self-examination, and those two things together — along with me not wanting to put in any of the kind of time limits that I had seen in other games (because those make me very stressed out!) —


(CSA): So stressful.


(SG): — that my own personal desires ended up putting me into this direction where it is kind of a relaxing stroll through one person's traumas, in a way. 


(CSA): (laughing) That’s a good description.
Well this is where I normally ask an author to read from their work, and I believe you've brought a piece of your short fiction, of your traditional short fiction, to share with us. 


(SG): Yes


(CSA): Why don't you tell us a little bit about it before we jump in since we've mostly been talking about your other work. What are you going to hear? 


(SG): Yeah! You're going to hear a short story that was published in the podcast magazine Escape Pod, which is a science fiction podcast. A science fiction FICTION Podcast. (Boy that’s a lot of fiction!) It is the story of a physics graduate student in the near future in which all of the federal funding agencies that fund these kinds of research programs at universities have turned all of the judgments over to algorithms, to machine learning algorithms. And in fact, then, the universities, in response, have also started using machine learning algorithms to decide what grad students stay and what grad students go. So it's like, well now the machines are going to watch you and render a verdict on whether you get to keep doing this thing that you love and want to pursue a career in. 


(CSA): Great! So, yeah. Let's hear it.


(SG): It is “Physics by the Numbers” that appeared in Escape Pod 716.


        (He reads)
Peifan had come and gone before Nevaeh reached the lab office the next morning. Nevaeh had hoped to say goodbye, but she supposed that if an algorithm had guillotined her graduate school career like a French royalist’s head, she’d have snuck away, too. Peifan had raked his class notes into a trash can that had overflowed and spilled his discarded plastic binders across the floor. He’d also left his poster of bar magnets on the wall, iron filings tracing arcs of magnetism that connected them.
She tossed her phone in her desk drawer and dug around for a Phillips screwdriver. Peifan’s computer had the best graphics card. She meant to claim it for her simulations before her labmate Mason arrived and joined in rifling through Peifan’s discards.
“Both of you are safe.” Dr. Scott gestured at Nevaeh and Mason with his food truck taco, nearly spilling fish onto the sidewalk. “My revised funding still supports two graduate students.”
The US federal science agencies had updated their algorithm that decided how productive universities were. For the second year in a row, they’d cut funding to Nevaeh’s school based on the result.
“It’ll slow down finishing our paper,” Mason said around a mouth full of quesadilla. Cheese dribbled down his chin.
“Peifan was the best at tuning the laser,” Nevaeh added. She dug her own taco out of an overfull box. Dr. Scott had bought dinner, so she hadn’t scrimped on her order.
Dr. Scott nodded. “We’ll make do. But we need results. Don’t forget, we think the funding agencies rank us based on submissions, not just publications.”
As if Nevaeh could ever let herself forget.
“Gin,” Mason said, laying his cards face up on the wobbly table between him and Nevaeh.
She swore under her breath. She hadn’t seen it coming. She’d misread him. “Knew I should’ve knocked earlier.”
“Teach you not to be so careful, Vay.” As Nevaeh gathered the cards, Mason continued, “I heard Whittaker’s high energy lab lost three. That’s eight this year, including Peifan.”
Nevaeh ran the numbers as she shuffled. Twenty percent of the graduate students dismissed in two years, all thanks to the physics department’s own algorithm that racked and stacked them. “I didn’t expect him to get cut. He crushed it in classes.”
“And in the lab,” Mason said. “But he has a girlfriend. The algorithm thought she distracted him, maybe.”
That matched Nevaeh’s guess, although it was only a guess. The department wouldn’t say what data they fed into the algorithm. That left Nevaeh and her fellow students to search for the algorithm’s signal hidden in the noise.
Nevaeh dealt cards. “Dr. Scott told me our scores weren’t anywhere near the cutoff.”
“He would tell you that. You’re not in trouble. You get a bonus for being a black woman in physics.”
Nevaeh paused. “What’d you say?”
“Nothing,” Mason muttered.
Nevaeh threw up her hands. “What the hell, Mason?”
Mason’s eyes widened. “Shh! Someone might hear.”
They fell silent, listening for footsteps outside the cramped janitor’s closet. They’d moved their lunch-time card games into it a few months after the department’s algorithms went live and Dr. Scott made an off-hand mention that playing cards might lower her and Mason’s rankings.
Nevaeh had considered giving up playing, but Mason spoke more freely during their games. She needed to know what he was thinking.
Like his assumption that she had an unfair advantage because of who she was. That went beyond his usual lack of home training. Nevaeh hadn’t known he felt that way.
No, that wasn’t true. She hadn’t let herself know.
She hid her anger and finished the deal. “Draw,” she said, as polite as she could manage. She wondered why she bothered.
(CSA): Thank you for reading that. This is, as you mentioned, a story about algorithms and the incentive structures that they create, and it touches on many of the ways that algorithms replicate and twist and strengthen the biases of the humans who create them. Can you talk about that? 


(SG): Oh absolutely! In my day job, I work on sensors and algorithms in machine learning, and the field is finally starting to grapple with “bad data in, bad results out,” and that you can have a whole lot of bias in these algorithms. There's still some views in some circles that, ‘These machine learning approaches are the great way to get good answers out, and remove the humans from making those decisions. Instead it will be impartial!’ But it's not impartial. 
I thought a lot about my own experience in physics grad school, where there was a little bit of that “crabs in the bucket” kind of pressure. I did have some fellow students who played cards and got reprimanded for it because they weren't being serious enough.


(CSA): Oh, wow.


(SG): Yah!!! I was like, wouldn't it be even worse, once all of these biases are fed into one of these algorithms, and everyone says, ‘Well, we've solved it. Now we'll just do what the algorithm tells us to!’ And then what is it like to try to be yourself and be human, and to have human outside interests like cards or dating, in an environment that is judging you in this way and you don't know how the judgments are being rendered?


(CSA): Yeah! And so, that for me was a really interesting part of this, and a part that I think feeds back into your physics background; Because this can be read as a story about observer effects, right? The way that a phenomenon or a person changes behavior when they know someone is watching. 


(SG): Right.


(CSA): And in this case, the someone is a funding algorithm, but to some extent the effect on the person is the same. The observations alter their behavior because it alters those incentive structures. It incentivizes people to, as you say at one point in the story, “twist and contort themselves to fit people's expectations,” and it makes them feel like there's no way out. But you contend in the story that there is, so tell me about that.


(SG): I think there is hope in being ourselves and in recognizing ourselves, and not really trying to play that game; Opting out, in some cases, and recognizing that it may bring you to a different in-state than you expected, but that might be for the good. I think we can get bound up in these harmful systems and say, “But I've got to play the game.” And I know I have been in cases where I've been in a job where it's not been great, but I'm like well… I guess this is what I have to do. And only after I either leave it or was forced to leave it, after the fact, I'm like, “Oh actually, I should have done that a long time ago.’ In this story, the main character, Nevaeh, is trying to out-guess the algorithm and do what she thinks it wants her to do before it's forced upon her, and I think that's really confining; And I know that is behavior that I've partaken in. I have, in my job, done things like, ‘Of course I'm going to be available on the weekend and answer emails at all times of the day or night,’ instead of setting boundaries, because I'm like, “Surely they expect that.” Well, maybe not. Maybe if I draw a boundary and draw a line, and say, “No, I'm actually not going to do this,” it would actually work out okay. Or, maybe it won't and I'll be forced to do something different, but that might be healthier for me in the long run.


(CSA): One of the ways I think this is kind of most pernicious (and I feel like I'm going to sound about 20 years older than I am when I say this ) is in social media. Because the social media platforms — things like Twitter and Facebook — they are driven by algorithms, but the way that you interact with them is primarily through the people who you are observing, and who are observing you. I think one of the reasons that it feels so pernicious to me is precisely because like you said, that is the place where the algorithms are are most hidden in a lot of ways. 


(SG): Right.


(CSA):  And I think there's a little bit of social media in this story, or really some social media manipulation that is used to try to get the algorithm… used as a bit of competition between two of the characters. 


(SG): Yeah.


(CSA): I'm curious how you think of that, and how you were thinking of it in the story. 


(SG): I definitely have had the experience of, with social media, trying to say, ‘All right, what am I going to do that will make the algorithm like me and surface what I'm doing?’ (Clara laughs) I have some friends who are YouTube creators, and the things that they have to do in terms of length of what they do, and how often that they post it, and what does it look like, so that the algorithm is like, ‘Senpai, notice me!’ And the algorithm says, ‘Yes, I will surface your content to more people.’ And that you end up with these emergent behaviors that are bad, actually. Like the way that a lot of attention on Twitter is driven by anger and outrage, and so it rewards angry behavior in some ways, and disincentivizes more nuanced behavior, and that's just an emergent fact of how they work. We've seen that with Facebook, and it's kind of poisonous actually, and we don't have a good solution for that yet, and I hope we can come up with one.


***AD BREAK***


(CSA): We've talked now about both some of your interactive fiction and some of your traditional fiction. How is writing traditional fiction different for you than writing interactive fiction?


(SG): Part of it is I end up focusing a lot more on the language itself, and that's not to say that the language is unimportant in interactive fiction, but you've got other elements carrying forward the story in terms of, ‘What are the interactions that the player is having? How often are those interactions happening? How do I structure those?’ I don't have any of those tricks available if I'm writing traditional fiction. I've just got the prose, and it has forced me to become a much better prose stylist. I'm not going to claim that I am wonderful, but I have seen myself improve as I have forced myself to focus on that, and really polish that aspect of writing up. In some ways it feels easier. So, I'm working right now on a game for a company called Choice of Games, which is a choice-based story that you play on your phone or on the computer, but behind the scenes it is tracking these statistics, these stats that let you express, in terms of your character: are they brash or are they retiring? Are they centered on themselves? Are they centered on others? When I'm writing on that, like if I'm going to have an interactive dialogue, it's really nice because I'm someone who likes to pregame conversations out ahead of time, and be like, ‘Oh, if they say this, how should I respond?’ And when I'm writing a choice game like that, I get to have all of those conversations all at once; I can explore that space. But then in a traditional fiction, I've got to sit down and say, okay: What is the most true to this particular character, and rings true to me? And that's a very different exercise that is kind of related, but with different end goals. 


(CSA): Do you find yourself creating artificial constraints for yourself when you're writing traditional fiction because you are so used to working under constraints for game writing?


(SG): To a certain extent. I think really what I end up doing is trying to say, ‘What is the most true and interesting thing that can be happening in these stories?’ I'm less hard about that in my interactive stories because some of that is generated by the interaction, and I can pull people in through that interaction. But I think that's the main constraint, is really trying to get to the truth that I'm trying to express in the story, whereas these interactive fiction works, I can express a bunch of different truths and allow the player to kind of express some of their views on what that truth looks like as they progress through the story.


(CSA): How have your storytelling interests evolved over the 25-30 years that you've been writing? (both laugh)


(SG): Oh my gosh it's so long! It's so long.
That's a really interesting question. I feel like it's less that they've evolved, and more that I've refined them. I think it has been a very long exercise of, in public, working out what my interests are, what my voice is like, and where are the sweet spots, and what I want to express. And what are the themes that I'm tackling? I see a lot of commonalities between me now and that 20 some odd-year-old who was writing Losing Your Grip. I still see those themes showing up. They're just expressed in different ways, and with a different set of experiences and a deeper set of experiences to draw on. 


(CSA): What kind of changes have you observed in the interactive fiction community since the '90s? 


(SG): (He guffaws) It's broadened a lot. When I first got involved in the interactive fiction community in the '90s, we were still having discussions like, ‘Can you actually have a defined player character, defined protagonist in these games?’ Because all of the early ones really took it as read that you were going to be this self-insert; You were playing yourself in there. And I remember when I was first starting to work on Losing Your Grip, which has this defined protagonist with a defined backstory, that was still an open point of discussion. A number of the traditionalists were like, ‘No no, you've got to be yourself! That's the whole point of these games is you're playing yourself.’ And that's changed now. There was a lot of looking down the nose at people writing hypertext, or Choose Your Own Adventure style stories. It's like, ‘Those aren't sophisticated.’ And it’s like, well they are. They are different, but there was this generalized snobbery and self-importantness of, like, ‘Look at how smarty smart we are solving these puzzles by typing in text instead of just clicking links.’


(CSA): Banging our heads against the wall


(SG): Yep, yep. ‘See how frustrated we are? That's a measure of how smart we are. Look at these foolish people just clicking links! That doesn't take any skill at all!’ But there are way different experiences and stories that you can tell through that kind of medium that don't really lend themselves well to text adventures, and it's broadened out so that now, that competition that I ran, it was originally just for text adventures; That was really what everybody entered. And then slowly, more and more choice-based games started showing up, and at this point they're a good chunk of that competition and they place highly. So there's been a broadening end of acceptance in what is considered interactive fiction. 
There's more experimenting. In the '90s and early 2000s, it was still fairly new as an art form (despite Infogama having worked in the '80s), that there were this pre-cambrian explosion of experimentation. But that's still going on, it just shows up in different ways, like the limited parser experiences that people are putting together. It's now been long enough that people can go back and look at older text (unintelligible) and say, ‘Okay, what can we do that is still in conversation with that, but that is a new expression, and it takes advantage of the things that we have learned since then?’ Like there are some what would be very classic parser-based text adventures that would not have been necessarily out of place in the '90s, but that have all of this 20-30 years, 40 years of experimentation behind them so that they can provide a much smoother, more player focused, and gentler experience in ways that are really fun.


(CSA): I think hearing you talking about some of the gatekeeping mentality around text adventures being the only real interactive fiction, it makes me think about how much platforms like Twine have democratized interactive fiction. There are so many more people writing it now, even though as you said it hasn't been commercially viable really for years in the way that it was in the '80s, and to some extent the '90s. There's something really beautiful about that; about the fact that anyone can sit down and create a game — which I think is always, to some extent, the beauty of interactive fiction. It was that it's text based, and so like you said, you don't have to have graphical capabilities or the money behind them. But you don't have to learn a whole new programming platform, really. You can do it largely in a UI now. 


(SG): You know there were programs that tried to let you write text-based parser-based games using a UI. There was a tool called Adrift, for example, and I remember a bunch of people look down their nose at that, it's like, ‘Oh, you're making it too simple!’ You know, I came of age. I'm a white dude. I'm middle class. I'm a scientist, so in that early community I was like the fish that didn't know what water was. I didn't realize how gatekeeping it includes— I can't think of the word I’m trying to say. Exclusive. 


(CSA): Exclusionary, I think.


(SG): Exclusionary is the word I was looking for; This is why I write, cos I’m real good at words. (Clara chuckles) I just didn't realize that until it started broadening out. There's, I think, very good reasons why Twine was taken up by so many authors of color and queer authors who had been gate-kept and shut out of a whole bunch of other spaces. They’re like, ‘Well, we're going to make our own.’ And made games and experiences that were unlike what other people were doing, and had been shunted to the side, and that really showed me… it let me see the water. 


(CSA): Do you feel like encountering that work has changed yours?


(SG): Absolutely. I think it has broadened my view of what can be done in interactive fiction and interactive narratives. It's let me experience stories that I otherwise would not have come across. People have used Twine to write very personal-to-them stories and explore... One of my friends, she's trans and has written games exploring that; Her experience of transness through these Twine games, and I think that's great. For years I had been interested in writing a game about dementia because that frightened me so much, and finally said, oh! This is a thing I can do. I can allow myself to explore this through interactive fiction in a way that I had gate-kept myself out of doing earlier. 


(CSA): What are some of your favorite interactive fiction games? Classic and contemporary.


(SG): As soon as you ask me, everything starts falling out of my head. There's a game by Emily Short. It’s a parser game in which you are in this world where you can change objects by changing their textual representation. It was inspired. There's a game from Infocom called, The Leather Goddesses of Phobos which had this object in it called the TEE-remover. If, for example, you shot a tray with a TEE-remover, it became this dude named Ray. Emily Short wrote a game that explores all of those kinds of permutations, like if you rearranged letters, if you turned a plural into a singular — and you play a character who is actually two people fused together, Alex and Andra, fused together into Alexandra, trying to smuggle information out of this nation that has all of these advanced linguistic capabilities. Like a de-pluralizer ray that turned a bunch of ships into a ship, so the attempted invasion of the island failed.


(CSA): I've played this game and I can't remember the name of it either...


(SG): Counterfeit?


(CSA): Counterfeit!


(SG): Counterfeit Monkey.


(CSA): There we go. 


(SG): And I love that because it is a game that could not exist in any other medium. It has to be text-based, and it has to involve you interacting with the text. In the same way that I leaned so heavily into symbolism for Losing Your Grip because I wanted the puzzles to be part of the story, here, Emily took the idea of linguistic play and turned it into an actual fictive world. Like, asked: if that was going to be the world, what would it look like? And all of these implications fall out, like the nation that has all of these linguistic contraptions is very, very careful about their language, because if the words change then the effect of these linguistic weapons changes. So they are really, really strict on what words mean. It's just… it could not have existed in any other way. 
Another one I really like is a game called Spy Intrigue by Furkle. It's a choice-based game in Twine, and it's very, very hard to describe. It's one of those artistic works that just has all of these things shoved in together to make this experience that is unlike any other one that I've ever had. Another one I really enjoyed was Harmonia by Liza Daly, which is a choice-based game about utopian communities and small New England colleges, and is one of the most beautiful textual represented choice games I've ever played. It’s really good.


(CSA): And just for listeners, if you're not familiar with interactive fiction and don't know how to get started with it, it's a lot easier now than it used to be. You can download an app on your phone or iPad or whatever, and usually you can find a whole library of games, both past and present there. So if you're interested in checking these out, that's what I'd recommend you do. 


(SG): It's way easier than it was in the past. 


(CSA): It’s so much easier. You don’t have to struggle with tabs interpreters. On your website you describe your younger self as a member of the Major of the Month Club. And, even now as you're an adult, looking at the range of your work and hobbies, you don't seem like the kind of person who could ever do just one thing.


(SG): That is correct. 


(CSA): So what drives that? What motivates you?


(SG): Uh, in part ADHD? But I think one of the things that I have always been is curious, and wanting to experience new things and see new things and learn things. And I think that drives a lot of what I do. I went to college and I was like, all right. I'm going to do science. And so I was doing physics and chemistry, and then I got cast in a one-act play. I'm like…well this is fun! And so then I did plays, and so I came out with a theater arts degree. And that I had the graduate school experience where all I focused on was physics. That was pretty much what I did, with the occasional side writing of interactive fiction, and I was like… I don't think this makes me happy. I want to have time to do a bunch of different things and explore a bunch of different approaches, and I've always been wide-ranging in my interests and what I like. I have mainly written science fiction and fantasy. My reading varies across a much wider spectrum because I think all of this stuff is interesting and I really enjoy learning about it, and reading works, and hearing new music, and seeing movies. And I find all of that inspiring, and then that drives my interest in making art that is a response to the things rattling around in my head.


(CSA): Well, and I think curiosity is such an important trait in playing interactive fiction as well. Especially that old stuff, if you're gonna survive the parser frustration — yes, stubbornness is part of it, but a lot of it is also just this genuine curiosity and going forward, and the stories really tend to capitalize on that curiosity. 


(SG): Yeah, I would agree with that. 


(CSA): So it almost seems silly to ask this after just observing how many varied interests you have and how many things you do, but what's next for you? What are you working on these days? 


(SG): I am trying to wrap up this game for Choice of Games; I'm about a year and a half into it. I remember Losing Your Grip took me about a year to write. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that took forever! I will never work on anything that long again!’ And so here I am, a year and a half into this game that will hopefully be done and out by the end of the year. So that's where a lot of my focus has been, and then I have been taking breaks by writing the occasional short story. Because again, if I focus on one thing for too long, after a while I get bored.


(CSA): Well, Stephen Granade, Thank you so much for joining me today.


(SG): Thank you for having me. This was a blast.


(CSA): You can learn more about Stephen and their games at his website, stephengranade.com, or at the interactive fiction database, ifdb.org.  


Catch Story Behind the Story the first Friday of every month from 5 to 6 p.m. on KSQD 90.7 FM, or on KSQD.org. To share your thoughts on this or other shows, drop me a line at Clara@KSQD.org. 


The Story Behind the Story is produced for KSQD 90.7 FM by me, Clara Sherley-Appel. Our sound engineer is Lanier Sammons; He also wrote our theme.