Advice on email-reading design?

Authoring Twine
1

Hello, I’m writing a Twine story where you are looking at a list of emails where you select which one to read. Most of the emails you can read are for story immersion, but you can choose to just read a few to progress the narrative and move on. I’m trying to decide how to design it.

I looked back at another game where you read other people’s emails: You Are SpamZapper 3.1. It gives you a list of emails, then goes to a new screen when you click an email, where you decide whether to delete the email or not. This makes sense for the main gameplay loop where you have to decide whether or not each email is spam. In my game, your daughter sends you a bunch of emails and asks you to find which one is related to the information you want. And of course, they’re all related (but some are more than others).

Another option I’ve thought of is to have the list of emails in one block of text, with the email you click on appearing in another block of text to the right of it. This wouldn’t work well on mobile, but I think it would feel more immersive on desktop.

Looking at how Outlook works on my phone, if you select an email, it fills the whole screen with the email’s text, and lets you scroll to read the whole thing. If you go back, you can see the inbox list again.

Have you seen other games that use the “reading someone else’s emails” conceit with good design? I would love to learn from them.

(Twine Version: 2.12.0)

2

Grab a text-based email client such as Elm or Pine, and use it to read your mail for a week. That should give you a good sense of how to make email work in a text environment.

3

The first idea that comes to mind is hypnospace outlaw. It appears to have the list of emails on top and the email text on bottom, both independently scrollable. I imagine that would work on both mobile and desktop.

hypnospace-outlaw-email-inbox
hypnospace-outlaw-email-inbox1280×720 188 KB

4

Following this one, got the same itch just with different furniture than an inbox.

What gfaregan’s pointing at with the independently scrollable panes is the real lever, more than list-vs-reading as a layout question. Your player’s doing one thing over and over: picking which email actually matters. Anything that makes “go back and check” expensive is going to kill that loop faster than a bad font size will. A full-screen swap per email means every second glance costs a tap and a wait, and if the daughter’s emails cross-reference each other, that adds up.

Test it the opposite way from Susan’s Elm suggestion maybe: read through a mock version on your own phone with your thumb resting where the back action sits. If reaching it feels like a chore by email six, your reader’s feeling it by email three.

No tidy answer, just: nail the loop first, the screen count follows from that.