That’s probably a better way to put it, yeah. CompXX is informative, but not educational.
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An ethics professor friend of mine used Twine to explore the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, which is decidedly not entertainment.
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That would be a great example. I would expect that this sort of stuff would only occasionally make it to wider dissemination. Like its wider sharing is almost accidental.
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Outside of Lists and Lists that everyone knows, the closest I can think of is my own attempt at making an interactive sourcebook for a tabletop RPG using Twine. Nobody got it. People asked, “how am I supposed to play that?”
A subsequent version using Feather Wiki fared much better, despite having the exact same text and structure, down to the links. Far as I’m concerned, that’s the way to go.
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Oh, yes. I expect most of what I’m trying to find to go over about as well as a wet diaper, so I’m not surprised to hear that.
I found this interactive art portfolio someone wrote entirely with Twine:
I’ve found some mention of attempts at interactive CVs written with Twine, but I haven’t managed to find an extant example yet.
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Also, many of the IF Art Show games would fit your description.
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I’ve got plenty of examples of IF written to teach specific concepts, such as Jim Fanning’s work in the 80s and 90s.
However, it seems like this thread is more about IF tools being used to create something that isn’t IF?
In the 1980s/90s there were some e-zines created using text engine systems, such as the PAWS.
I think the first thing any kid who picked up a text adventure system did was make a version of their school they could walk around.
(I have vague recollections of making dictionary for one of the languages I was using in a game as an introductory program using PAWS).
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At the bottom of This GitHub page is a list of “non games” made with Ink, including Air New Zealand’s chatbot and a boating safety course for Virgin.
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That’s a good point. Yeah, I don’t care in the least whether these “games" count as games, let alone IF at all. Basically, “what else have people made or done with IF software besides IF?”
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What about abuses? People have written arcade games, Sokoban, chess, RPG, simulations, all sorts of stuff.
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Honestly, that sort of gets at the spirit of it, yeah. The only reason I didn’t bring it up is because all the best known abuses use IF gaming software to make other non-IF games.
If someone made a calculator specifically for converting obsolete units of measure into modern units and used Twine to do so, say something that allowed you to convert how many Dutch Casks to fill an Olympic swimming pool, or how many poncelets are required to light the Eiffel Tower each evening, that would probably be a better example of an IF software abuse that would be outside of gaming or narration (story telling) altogether.
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At one point someone made a wizard in Twine for selecting a… game engine or something? Not sure anymore. That one was well-known for a while.
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When I was using AXMA 6, their documentation file on how to use the engine was built directly in the engine, using the menu options as an interactive chapter list, links to other topics, and live demonstrations of code.
In training for my job, we frequently have “scenario” work where the trainee reads a paragraph and then selects the best answer, which is very much like a choice-narrative. If you choose wrong, the answer is explained and more coaching is given before looping back to try again.
I have worked a job where we were instructed to follow an actual flowchart to make sure all troubleshooting steps were followed, documenting node-numbers in notes. It was occasionally a bummer when we instinctively knew what was wrong but reaching that branch over there to accomplish the fix was impossible from where the caller’s answers took us.
I think choice narratives can make very good training tools for empathy. When I played Hana Feels I thought it felt like an instructional scenario for educating therapists.
Every year we have the dreaded FWA (Fraud, Waste, and Abuse) training which is required when you work with health insurance, and for some reason this is the module my company goes all out on - it’s designed like a visual novel/adventure game with voice-acting, selecting an avatar, cutouts of people who pop up with dialogue, music, sound, achievements, clicking hotspots in a room, fog effects (in the most recent you’re a “detective” on “cases” to discover instances of insurance fraud and the transitions looked like bumpers on a detective TV show…) The bummer on that one is we were usually accessing the game through a Remote Desktop so it was almost always a choppy slideshow.
That one is actually better than the first one they were using where you were running through the woods as a side scroller and questions would hover above you with a time limit to answer. If you ran out of time or answered wrong, your avatar would fall through a hole in the path and you literally had to Mario-platform-jump your way out of a pit using actually movement and jump buttons, and it was terrible when everyone in your class was all trying to do it over limited bandwidth. Often the problem is you’d know the right answer but the game was so janky you’d still end up in the pit.
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Oh! Oh! I just remembered that someone made an interactive gamedev course with my own engine Ramus. To be fair I always advertised it as being for more than just games. And for a while my biggest fan used Ramus to make college courses, e.g. about critical thinking, but they’re gone from his site now.
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There’s the Fanworks Permission Statement Builder, which is a handy tool made in Ink that helps fanfic writers built blanket permission statements for their work. It asks which types of fanworks you are or are not OK with (art, translations, podfic, fanbinding etc), how you want to be credited, and combines the answers into a full statement that you can copy.
Also Sorting Hat Chats, an advanced personality quiz also made with Ink (used to be a more complicated version of a Hogwarts House quiz but the creators has since removed any explicit mentions of Harry Potter)
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I remembered another example that arguably fits the definition: Cornerstone.
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There’s a tool for manipulating Blorb files written in Glulx, though Glulx’s file-handling restrictions make it very fiddly.
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Yes, very good. I clearly managed to convey the idea, so yay! (And thank you)
Now, is there
?
Because, as useful and interesting as the term Interactive Nonfiction is, that’s not really it, or at least not always it.
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What group of “non-game” does not satisfy the criteria you want?
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I think there have been a lot of examples of this both old (Oregon Trail) and new, deliberate (Cheiron) or gameified education (Beauty Cold and Austere, Sugar Lawn). Create a list over at IFDB describing the types of works you’re looking for to get many more examples.
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