What are the various approaches that nonfiction games, particularly autobiographical ones, take to depict memory and/or reality? What are their advantages and disadvantages? Which structures are best for which purposes?
I’ve played several nonfiction games, many autobiographical. One approach is to create something almost entirely linear, essentially an interactive memoir. I’m not the hugest fan of this approach because I like a degree of interactivity, but it depends on the content. I’ve read and enjoyed quite a few memoirs, so I don’t necessarily hate this format. Many autobiographical Twine games do this.
Another is to reconstruct existing locations based on research, or the dev’s own memories for an autobiographical game, and let the player wander around them and interact, essentially making your memories into setpieces. Accuracy is an issue, but all memories are unreliable to some degree anyway. But this is an enormous amount of work if you have many locations. Sting does something like this. For parser games, I think this is the option that best suits the medium, perhaps the only option.
You could do something in between, where the method of traveling between different memories is like traveling between locations, but the memories themselves are immutable and presented directly from an authorial perspective. They can’t be interacted with to change them. My Pseudo-Dementia Exhibition does this. I also liked Summer Studies in Japan, which is essentially a self-contained autobiographical blog about the author’s time studying abroad in Japan. Each blogpost is about a specific topic. You can navigate the blogposts chronologically, or by jumping from related topic to related topic.
I played a game years ago that I really liked and still remember today. It was called A House in California, by the makers of Kentucky Route Zero. It was a surreal and nostalgic point and click game where you traveled between the memories of different people by interacting with key items that featured in each memory, or related symbolically to each memory, with the correct action. I liked this style very much and think sometimes that I’d want to adopt its approach. It would work even for fiction.
I can’t link to the games mentioned above right now, but will add links later. Are there any other structures I’m missing? Which are the best for which purposes? If you had to make a game about your childhood, for example, how would you prefer to go about organizing and presenting your memories? And assuming the technical aspect was no concern, and you were a professional at all IF languages, which format would you prefer to use?
Edit: Personally, I’d go with some kind of hyperlinked diary, but perhaps it would feel too much like lecturing the player, and it’s hard for me to stomach writing that much in first person for anything that would be based on my own life. So an interactive series of vignettes à la Sting may work out better.
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