Hi! I’m considering making an interactive fiction/physical fiction hybrid piece—it would be a story printed on paper, but over the course of the story, the player would need to access short interactive fiction segments.
I’m wondering if there are examples of similar pieces out there—thank you!
The Ice-bound Concordance was a physical book released by Aaron Reed together with a QR-code scanning game that let you interact with it more.
I always wanted to try it but I remember it wasn’t possible to obtain last time I checked, but you can get an idea of what it’s like online.
This probably isn’t what you’re thinking of, but Dragon Wars was an RPG that put most of its text (16,603 words) in a book of numbered “paragraphs” which the game would periodically refer the player to. Without playing the game, it isn’t possible to know what order to read them in, or whether a paragraph describes something that actually occurs in the game. I always assumed there were other '80s RPGs that used this technique, but I don’t know RPGs well enough to name one.
This isn’t strictly related to your idea, but many IF works from ye olden days used “feelies” (physical texts, objects, etc.) for immersion, puzzles, and authentication. So the idea of switching between real life and the IF world is not a new one. With the rise of a more digital world, most people who create feelies make them downloadable, though, since it’s a lot cheaper and more convenient. But I haven’t heard of a physical text being supplemented with IF instead of the other way around (I haven’t heard of what that Brian and Paul are referring to).
Also not exactly what you’re thinking of, but the “PAX USB Drive” was a physical puzzle—or an alternate reality game?—that included several pieces of interactive fiction.
There are a bunch of games marketed as play-at-home escape rooms that are made up of printed materials with online elements—generally they’re more puzzly than fictiony, but people are doing interesting things with the structure. Scarlet Envelope has probably the most reading-heavy ones I’ve played, and the online sections felt the most like interactive fiction. (Here’s a review I wrote of one.)
This sounds like a cool project! I really like experimental formats like this.