Funny, I did more or less just this for a laugh in a work of (non-interactive) fiction I wrote when I was in middle school. The poor dear never got to finish writing the word “kill”.
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To clarify my previous post: Repeat the Ending is 150,000 words of text and code, and I believe that perhaps 47,000 (including the pdf transcript) of that number is dedicated to displaying diegetic text: footnotes, essays, reviews, and online conversations. So while it is not primarily diegetic, the critical edition of Repeat the Ending is substantially so. I am glad that some people have enjoyed it, whatever they might have made of it.
After getting into contemporary IF back in… 2021(?), I said some things I have come to regret. Most of them participated in a category, that of the “preemptive review.” Sometimes, I would loudly declare that I wasn’t interested in this or that thing, without knowing anything about it. I regret that because, while I still have taste like everyone else, I want to remain open to the possibility of being amazed by anyone, at any time. In any format. So when I say this:
I am really speaking of my desire to be open, and to meet authors where they are when I can.
But so far as diegetic texts go, perhaps there are some signs that I enjoy them from time to time.
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For me, it depends if it makes sense in context.
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I find the number of diaries and similar texts present in games that attempt to tell stories that way to be fairly unrealistic. How many people keep journals these days, and how many write the sorts of entries that such games need to establish what’s going on?
You run into H.P. Lovecraft’s problem, where his stories were accounts being written by tormented individuals whose last written words details their fates simply aren’t what any actual person would bother writing in those circumstances.
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I was pleasantly surprised to see this kind of storytelling employed a lot in the AAA MMO “New World: Aeternum.” It’s definitely not the best implementation I’ve ever seen, but it’s one of the most extensive I’ve found in modern graphical games. There are notes (letters, diary entries, supply lists, songs) scattered around the world for players to find. One thing it does well is catalog them once found for easy reading afterwards.
The MUD Lusternia uses this method for its lore history and I think it’s a good, engaging example of using a variety of historical “sources.”
https://www.lusternia.com/histories/
(The later entries are the most interesting, where the text is things like transcripts of radio transmissions)
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Two famous works that were epistolary in their original forms that many may not realize:
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Stephen King’s Carrie
This reminds me of Scream Queens when Ariana Grande’s character is murdered basically via text message.
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I haven’t played much IF that told its story in this way, but regarding this trope in general I’m very much turned off by it. I’ve wasted so many hours standing around in games waiting for some audio log to finish playing or thumbing through journal after journal that at some point (earlier and earlier these days) I stop caring*. I click or wait just long enough to get the code or clue I need to keep playing and promptly ignore the rest. (*Investigative mystery games excepted since the whole intent is to separate the clues from the noise.)
It’s not just that it takes a significant amount of time away from me actually playing the game, it’s also that my suspension of disbelief for the trope has been completely shot. No one writes detailed information in journals and scatters the pages across a setting in plot-convenient locations.
If it’s a question of narrative lore dump vs in-world journals/letters, I think both are terrible. I get much more immersed in a world via environmental storytelling, or with quick reveals in direct response to actions I take or witness myself.
If knowing or following the story is purely optional when playing, then having it there is fine. I can actually get a bit excited about it if there is a collectable aspect to it. But if it’s required reading, I’m out.
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Babel .
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I used to be a fan of it, but it went awry in a piece of mine. I considered the diegetic stories (diaries etc) to be extra story so it was fair game to hide it, whereas many players felt like the collection of everything I wrote would be “the story”, and were frustrated that I was withholding story from them. I know in games I’ve played that I’ve felt the same if I’ve missed something, even if it wasn’t too hard to find.
I’m not a fan of NPCs willing to bust into long form storytelling, because that’s just scattered diaries in a different form. Somehow I feel that a random diary page is less egregious, even though that seems nuts on reflection.
For games that are roughly archaeology - you turn up to a mostly static space and learn about its history - you’re roughly restricted to these diegetic forms, or environmental storytelling, the latter of which has a limit to detail, in my opinion.
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A: I’m feelin’ all Babel about these works that wanna deliver their stories primarily through diegetic text.
B: What the hell are you talking about?!
-Wade
My issue is less with the epistolary format and more with how it often wrecks an IF’s pacing. If I’m reading Dracula as a book, it’s paced to keep me engaged the whole way through. But if I was playing an IF adaptation of Dracula where there’s interactivity only in between the verbatim letters from the book, I’d keep getting jarred out of my groove as I try to switch back and forth between “playing IF” and “reading long-form text” every time.
Giving lore and story through letters or documents is a cool technique, but the work’s pacing needs to be designed to account for that, so that the story fits into the gameplay instead of jarring me out of it. (This is also the classic problem with “lore dumps”.)
EDIT: Oops, I see I said basically this earlier in the thread. Ah, memory issues my beloathed.
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I love games where the player explores a place and archaeologically pieces together the story of the world and its people through such ephemera. Of course, some do it better than others. Was trying to think of narrative-heavy games that put a twist on it, and the game Tacoma came to mind. You activate what would normally be audio logs, but instead silhouettes of the characters are shown moving around the area. You can listen to conversations and follow the characters around in an immersive theatre-like recording.
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I fully agree, but in the other direction I appreciate when parser/world-model IF puts lore/history and additional bonus content in the form of physical books or letters that you interact with and get the choice whether to read them or not. This opposed to wall-of-text lore dumping 1000 years of history the author believes you need to know onscreen as a prologue or mid-game forced cutscene.
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What about works where the narrative/interactive element takes the form of diegetic media, not just finding letters in an otherwise conventional narrative. For example, The Beetmonger’s Journal (for parser, although it’s only partial) or First Draft of the Revolution (for choice).
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