Wor(l)d Building

Instructor: Jason Boyd

Interactive Fiction, as its name indicates, foregrounds the activity of interaction that becomes key to the reader’s navigation and experience of the work. In Wor(l)d Building, we will use Inform 7 to construct a storyspace — a textual simulation of a space that generates a story through the reader’s purposeful engagement. Participants will furnish an imagined and/or recreated space of their own with curious and personal objects to handle, striking views to contemplate, and intriguing things to listen to, all in a world made of words.

Jason Boyd is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at TMU, and the Director of the Centre for Digital Humanities. He regularly teaches a course called “Narrative in a Digital Age,” where students learn a variety of authoring platforms, including Inform 7, for the creation of playable stories. His essay, “Poetry as Code as Interactive Fiction: Engaging Multiple Text-Based Literacies in Scarlet Portrait Parlor” (2023), explored an Inform 7 work that is simultaneously a sonnet, a program, and an interactive fiction.