nickm.com > classes > interactive narrative, fall 2025

21W.765 / 21L.489 / CMS.618 / CMS.845
Interactive Narrative
MIT · Fall 2025

This course is a CI-M for 21W majors and CMS majors.

This draft syllabus was posted/updated September 4, 2025. Updates during the semester will be noted here.

Instructor: Nick Montfort, in@mkcinckm.com, office: 14E-316 (the MIT Trope Tank)
Class meets in 2-135 Wednesdays, 2pm–5pm
Office hours: Thursdays 9:30am-10am by Zoom, extended until 10:30am if students join during the first half hour. In-person office hours in 14E-316 will be arranged at different times during the semester via a sign up sheet in class.

☛ Attending all of the first class is required!

Generally, attendance and participation is required. This is not a lecture-based class. Our class meetings are filled with discussion, activities, exercises, and the sharing of student work. There is no straightforward way to individually “make up” what we do as a community when we gather. Students must attend all of the first class to enroll or remain enrolled. The only exception would be for a legitimate medical reason or a religious observance — and in those cases a student still needs to at least find out what topics we covered by discussing a missed class session with a student who was there.

Resources

Books in the MIT Trope Tank. Our interactive narrative collection has software and manuals directly related to interactive narrative, along with multisequential books, sometimes called “gamebooks.” The list indicates which books are also held by the MIT Libraries. I’ll do my best to make these books available for students to read. However, I’m never able to allow my books to circulate. They have to be consulted in the MIT Trope Tank.

Evaluation (according to MIT Rules & Reg 2.62.1)

Because this is a CI-M course, I’m compelled to specify a minimum word count for all of your creative projects, 1, 2, and 3: 2400 words combined. Most will be much longer, but because you may choose to do word-image work or otherwise engage with language and computation in unusual ways, this is the lower bound.

Participation (not only attendance)

Participating in class is necessary to respect your fellow students, who, along with you, are important parts of the workshop community. Participation starts with physically being in the classroom for the whole class session (presence), but also includes engagement with what is happening (attendance/attention) and your willingness to respond and to initiate discussion (full participation).

Absences for medical reasons, or personal or family emergency, or religious observance, will of course be excused. In such cases a student must work with another student who participated to be ready for the next sessions. If you will be absent and can possibly let me know (for instance, because of a religious observance), so do and let me know as soon as you can. I will request that a student help fill you in on what we did.

An unexcused absence will decrease your grade by 10%, one letter grade. So, if you skip class or oversleep (however odd that might be for a 2pm class), you will be able to earn at best a B.

Feedback

What type of substantial feedback (aside from quantitative grading along the way and a final letter grade) should you expect from me?

I will gladly provide extensive and detailed feedback when it is explicitly requested. The ideal way of getting detailed feedback is via your communication with me in office hours. For instance, if you come to office hours I’m willing to review not only your sentence-by-sentence writing, but also the code you are writing for your digital projects and the design of your booklet. Based on your preliminary work for your print project, I can suggest ways to better print and bind that work. I can also explain in office hours how to approach writing a critical paper, how to prepare a presentation, and how to draft and revise interactive narrative work, giving you specific pointers based on what you have done so far. I can explain aspects of narrative theory in greater depth and suggest ways to strengthen your particular creative writing. My preference is to meet with small groups of 2–3 students at once so we can benefit from each other’s questions and perspectives, but I can also meet with you individually. Remember that you must initiate the request.

Please understand that without your individual requests, I cannot offer this set of detailed and extensive feedback routinely, on a weekly basis, to every student. Because of this, the main sorts of feedback I will provide to everyone, based on assignments, is intended to answer these questions: Do you understand the basics of narrative theory? Do you see how narrative theory offers you new possibilities as a writer? Can you identify interesting aspects of existing interactive narratives? Can you exploit the different dimensions of narrative to go beyond the most obvious possibilities in your own interactive narrative work? Are you making good use of material properties and formal possibilities in both your print and digital projects? Is your writing, especially your critical writing, in a good and appropriate style and framework given the projects you are undertaking? This is the feedback necessary for this particular subject’s learning objectives and for a subject fulfilling the CI-M requirement.

Required Books

Are We Only Reading Books?!

No. We will play, read, report on, interact with, and otherwise engage with many interactive digital narratives (including games and works of electronic literature). However, you will not be required to buy anything for us to do this. I am legally required to let you know what textbooks are required for this class because it is typical for students to purchase these.

Narrative Theory

Throughout this course, and particularly during the first half of it, we will learn the basics of narrative theory, a body of thought related to narrative that is quite precise. “Narrative theory” and “narratology” are very similar fields of study and approaches to narrative, although some make fine distinctions between them. Specifically, we will be learning about what some now call a pan-narrator theory, which holds that there is always a narrator (more or less overt) for any narrative. And we will stick to a two-part story/discourse or context/expression distinction, although others such as Mieke Bal argue for three levels. One may eventually settle on a different specific narratology, but it’s essential to start somewhere, and I’ve chosen what has proved to be a very useful starting point. It facilitates our conversation and collaboration in class and allows authors to understand the possibilities of narrative.

The basis for learning about narrative theory will be class discussion and A Dictionary of Narratology. During class discussions, the instructor will be ready to answer questions and clarify all the concepts, and time will be allocated for this during each of the initial class sessions. After the very first class meeting, students need to come prepared with questions, as in-class instruction in narrative theory will be offered in response to these questions. In-class exercises, which determine part of your grade, are required to determine your understanding of narrative theory and guide further discussion. These exercises may seem quiz-like. Anything we have covered in discussions or assigned readings is fair game for these.

I · Interactive Digital Narrative

We’ll focus on digital works, including electronic literature and games, that have narrative as an important component. Often, the “player,” “user,” or “reader” is the one who gets to produce the narratives by interacting. A narrative electronic literature work can be a structured document that the interactor can traverse in many ways or a more complex computer program that simulates a world, accepts English input, generates text in response, or does other interesting things. Many computer and video games, including interactive fiction works (a.k.a. text adventures) are certainly in this category, along with graphical adventure games and classic and more recent hypertext fictions — some of you may know the recent ones as “Twines.”

In addition to completing the other course requirements, graduate students in CMS.845 are required to submit an additional critical paper during this time that deals with electronic literature or another aspect of the course topic. There is no particular length requirement. This paper can (and ideally should) relate to graduate student projects being undertaken outside the class.

Students are assigned to do a short (“lightning”) presentation in class on one particular interactive digital narrative that the class as a whole is not studying. Details of the assignment will be provided two weeks beforehand.

During this unit students will each develop two creative works, a short variable narrative in Curveship and a longer game / electronic literature work in Twine, Inform, or Ren'Py. Creating such a work requires writing, design, and structuring; depending upon one’s choice of platform it may also require programming. (To create an Inform work, you need to program.) Quality of writing, suitability of the structure/program and the writing to the theme, and the quality of the interface will all be factors in the final grade. Neither of these two projects have to be fictional. They should just be interactive narratives.

II · Forking Paths in Print

We’ll study “non-linear” print work of different sorts. The books in the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series are probably the most famous of these, and we’ll look at them on the first day, but they are hardly the limit. We will also consider other juvenile fiction books of similarly unusual structure; parodies of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books; literary works along these non-linear lines by Saporta, Queneau, Mathews, Coover, Cortázar, and others — with a focus on Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars — and comics along these lines by Jason Shiga (mainly Meanwhile) and others.

Students are assigned to do a thorough study of one particular book that the class as a whole is not reading, writing a paper on this book and discussing it in class, answering questions about this from the instructor and others. This will require checking out such a book from MIT’s Hayden Library or an area public library, or requesting such a book via interlibrary borrowing, or buying such a multisequential book, new or used, from an online or brick-and-mortar bookstore. Many interesting ones can be obtained for less than $10. Students should of course become familiar with all books that we study in class, so that they can at least usefully compare their selected book to those we are studying as a class. We consider the material qualities of multisequential books, looking at how to interact with the printed and bound objects. Because of this, a PDF, e-book, or audiobook (if such a thing were to exist?) will not work for us. You need the printed and bound book.

Graduate students taking the class for credit as CMS.845 are assigned to write a paper on two thoughtful selections, both of which should be thoroughly studied and compared in detail against one another and the other works being examined in class; the graduate paper will probably need to be almost twice as long as the typical undergraduate paper to do this.

Students are also assigned to write a multisequential story, in draft/prototype format and then in revised, proofread, and final form. Both of these are to be produced as a print booklet, set of cards, or other material artifact, which can be produced using ordinary office supplies and a home printer, or using a printer at MIT, or by employing the services of Copytech. As with the electronic literature projects, neither of these have to be fiction.

Calendar

1 · September 3: Introduction & Essentials

Narrative questionnaire distributed. Students are required to complete it, right at the beginning of class, for use in class discussion. This is not a graded exercise. We will begin with discussion of this questionnaire.

Discussion of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books.

Review of the syllabus, major required readings, assignments, evaluation.

Rapid introduction to narratology and the distinction between discourse/expression and story/content.

Closely study for the next class these terms: “Narratoloy,” “Story,” “Narrative,” “Character,” “Narrator,” “Focalizer,” “Existent,” “Event.” Read the full entires several times, looking up terms in them that are mentioned.

(5%) Narrative exercise covering concepts in today's lecture and discussion. Yes, there is a graded exercise (you might even consider it a quiz!) at the end of class on the first day.

2 · September 10: More Narrative Specifics, Curveship Preview

Discussion of several very short narratives.

What makes “narrative” hard to define?

Preview of Curveship.

Closely study, for the next class, “Voice,” “Mood,” “Tense” and the terms they refer to. Note that these are defined by analogy to linguistic terms, but we will discuss them as narrative terms.

(5%) Narrative exercise, in class.

3 · September 17: Parser-Based IF

Play Varicella (by Adam Cadre) together in class. We will play it in the terminal.

Play Shade (by Andrew Plotkin) together in class. We will play it in the terminal.

Closely study, for the next class, all the terms and concepts in the Curveship documentation. That is, consult Prince’s Dictionary about those that are labeled as narr. (narratological terms).

(10%) Creative Project 1, a variable narrative in Curveship, is assigned. Create a story.js file and three (3) different narrator files, specifying no more than ten (10) events. Build the project so that it works in a browser. Place everything in a zipfile and email it to me. Due September 24 at 11am. Late work may be accepted for 50% credit at the instructor’s discretion.

(5%) Narrative exercise, in class.

4 · September 24: Project 1 Presentation

Creative project 1 presentations in class. Remember, the projects are due emailed to me at 11am today, several hours before class. I need them to assemble the projects and allow us to smoothly show them in class.

Play a Twine game (to be revealed) together in class.

(10%) Oral presentation on interactive digital narrative is assigned. Prepare a presentation on a specific interactive digital narrative. (The length will depend on the enrollment at this point.) Choose something that is clearly an interactive narrative and has extensive and interesting narrative aspects. Consult me about your selection today; email after class is fine. You are assied to show the interactive digital narrative itself, the actual game, interactive video, computer program, etc., to support your presentation. In other words, do not make slides. You can develop this sort of presentation with save points, using tabs, etc. Due (to be delivered in class, using your computer) October 1.

Closely study for the next class these terms: summary, scene, stretch, analepsis, prolepsis, syllepsis, free [indirect|direct] [speech|thought], stream of consciousness.

Read for the next class: “Going for a Beer,” Robert Coover.

5 · October 1: Extremes of Narrative, Oral Presentations on IDN

Our main discussion of core narrative theory ideas concludes today. Of course, we will be discussing narrative theory throughout as we also deal with issues of materiality, interface, expectation, riddle and solution, etc. But this will wrap up our concentrated study of Prince’s Dictionary and of the fundamentals, so bring your remaining questions.

Discuss “Going for a Beer” and consider whether we can understand it any better (no guarantees!) using narrative theory.

In-class oral presentations on interactive digital narrative. These will be done using student laptops/notebooks. The duration will depend on the enrollment at this point. During presentations, all students will take notes to aid their own comprehension and to help their fellow students with their presentation skills.

(10%) Creative Project 2a, in Twine, Inform, or Ren'Py, is assigned. Inform and Ren'Py projects are more challenging to complete in a short time span, so let’s talk if you wish to develop using these platforms. A functional, working draft is due next week, October 8 at 11am. The completed project is due October 29 at 11am.

6 · October 8: Project 2a Workshop

Workshop for Creative Project 2a. Everyone’s work will be the subject of class discussion.

Creative Project 2a, working draft of Twine/Inform/Ren'Ry project, is DUE before 11am this day.

NO CLASS · October 15: I’ll Be Out of the Country at a Conference

7 · October 22: Project 2b Workshop

Final workshop discussion with questions about developing creative project 2a into 2b. Students who have signed up will have priority in asking the class about outstanding issues.

For next week, read and solve Meanwhile.

(10%) Complete Project 2b for the next class.

8 · October 29: Project 2b Presentations

Discussion of students’ journey from project 2a (draft stage) to project 2b (final stage). We will have seen drafts of the project, so actual presentations of project 2b will be very brief.

Discussion of Meanwhile.

Possible visiting artist.

Creative Project 2b, in Twine or Inform, is DUE before 11am this day.

For next week, read Khazars. You will need to determine how to read it and take notes on what you did during the process.

9 · November 5: Khazars, Scattered Multisequential Books

Meet in 14E-316 (The Trope Tank) Today

Discussion of Khazars begins. What does it seem to be about? How does the form relate to its topic, theme, subject, and/or “content”?

Exploration of the Trope Tank Interactive Narrative collection.

“Sight readings” and lightning presentations about multisequential books.

Continue reading or re-reading Khazars.

(10%) The Critical & Practical Report is assigned.

(10%) Creative Project 3a is also assigned.

Both are due November 19. The Critical & Practical Report is to be sent by email as a PDF by 11am. Project 3a (a laid-out mock-up draft in booklet or similar form) is due at the beginning of class, on paper. Bring four copies so the class can look at your draft on paper. These are assigned together because what you learn from studying a print multisequential narrative should inform you as you make a print multisequential narrative, and vice versa. The final version of this creative project, 3b, is due December 10, the last day of class.

The Critical & Practical Report is a detailed report focusing on a multisequential, narrative book and its relationship to your own work as an interactive narrative author, digitally and in print. Obviously the narrative qualities and “interface” are important to discuss in detail, but so are paratexts and contexts, intertextual references, and the book’s material nature including design and production aspects. If the book has aspects of literary riddle and solution, consider those. Comparisons should be drawn to other appropriate multisequential books. You should report on how the different dimensions of your chosen multisequential book come together to create a particular effect, and how that is related to the themes and subjects of the book. Of course you need to include references in a consistent and appropriate citation format. And, again, the report should discuss, throughout, how you as an author are responding to this book: What techniques in this work are you going to appropriate, extend, elaborate? Do your goals and the author’s goals differ in certain regards? Does the work you are studying have a philosophy or principles that you agree or disagree with, and so, what are the implications of this?

Because this is a CI-M course, I’m compelled to specify a minimum word count: 1800 words. Reaching this word count in no way assures a passing grade, of course.

Creative project 3 (again) is a multisequential, narrative booklet or other print work. As this is a CI-M course, I’m compelled to specify a minimum word count for all of your creative projects, 1, 2, and 3, also mentioned at the end of this document: 2400 words combined.

10 · November 12: Khazars, Two Bizarre & Different Hypertexts

Discussion of Khazars, dictionaries, history, myth and fable, and different perspectives on the same events.

Read The Unknown (a hypertext novel) together in class.

Play a Twine game (to be revealed) together in class.

11 · November 19: Project 3a Workshop

1

Workshop for Creative Project 3a.

Discussion of insights in the Critical & Practical Reports.

Creative Project 3a, the booklet or related print work, is DUE today at the beginning of class.

The Critical & Practical Report is DUE, emailed to me as a PDF, before 11am this day.

NO CLASS · November 26: Thanksgiving

12 · December 3: Project 3b Presentations

Final workshop discussion with questions about developing creative project 3a into 3b. Students who have signed up will have priority in asking the class about outstanding issues.

(10%) Complete Creative Project 3b for the next class.

13 · December 10

Each of us will share our final Creative Project 3 (the “3b” version) in class by handing it around for others to read. We will also discussing what rethinking we did and what changes we made.

Discussion of how to publish work beyond the classroom.

Creative Project 3b, booklet-length print multisequential literature, is DUE at the very beginning of class (2:05pm) this day, as a completed piece of bound printed matter, brought to class. Make at least four copies: One to hand in, one to keep for yourself, and two in case you would like to offer to trade for someone else’s project or provide gifts.

Accommodations and Excused Absences

Students sometimes need special accommodations and/or are allowed to be absent from class for Institute-approved reasons. If you need an accommodation due to a disability, I need you to provide me with information about the nature of the accommodation you require via MIT’s Disability and Access Services, and to do so on or before Tuesday September 9. As the DAS site says: “It is the student’s responsibility to clearly identify who is arranging the logistics of the accommodations (i.e. the instructor, department, TA, or Disability and Access Services). If difficulties arise in obtaining accommodations or there are concerns related to this process, it is the student’s responsibility to contact DAS and the relevant faculty member/instructor immediately.” So, I need you to contact both DAS and me; with information from DAS about the nature of the accommodation needed, I will implement this accommodation as soon as possible so that you can equitably and productively engage in learning.

If you will be missing classes because of religious observances during the semester, let me know on or before Tuesday September 9. This allows me to plan the semester for you as best as I can and to ask another student to take notes for you.

If you fall ill or are injured and are unable to attend class for a health-related reason, you do not need to let me know in advance for your absence to be excused. It’s excused. Still, I appreciate knowing about the situation as soon as possible so that I may be able to ask another student to take notes for you.

“AI,” Plagiarism, and Academic Dishonesty / Inappropriate Assignment Production Policy

All of your work is to be done “manually,” by hand, by you. This means without the hindrance of LLMs or other sorts of Generative AI models. You can use conceptual writing techniques; this would be distinct from plagiarism, which is prohibited. You also are not allowed to hire someone to write your paper or develop your creative projects for you. Question? Do you wish to, for instance, use a language model to translate a Wikipedia entry from another language when there is no English entry? That could be an acceptable thing to do. “Get ideas” or “polish” text? No, for reasons I’ll be glad to explain. Check with me in any case.

In your creative projects and well as the Critical & Practical Report, you should always cite any source you relied on and any assistance you received, whether it was an email, a Web page, a book, an article, help from the WCC, or an answer on Stack Overflow.

Minimum Word Counts

The “minimums” should not be considered maximums. I’m required to state them because of rules about MIT’s CI-M requirement (communications intensive within a major). The minimum length may be generally suitable for the critical report. In the case of the longer creative projects, those absolute minimums may or may not suit your purposes and goals as a writer.

The MIT Writing and Communication Center

The Writing and Communication Center offers free one-on-one consultations and coaching with communication specialists who hold Ph.D. degrees and have publishing experience. The WCC can help you learn about different types of academic and professional writing and further develop your written and oral communication skills. To work on a presentation, you can schedule sessions with the Oral Communication Studio, where you can rehearse your talk and receive instant feedback. You can learn more about WCC consultations and studio sessions at the WCC Website and register with the online scheduler to make appointments through https://mit.mywconline.com. Please note that WCC hours are offered Monday-Friday, 9:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m. during the semester, and fill up fast.