July 7, 2026
This series of essays will attempt to explain the artistic process of creating a storyworld with the SlubberdeGullion technology. This is not about the technical process — there are other resources for that. My focus will be on the artistic issues that you must tackle with Slubber.
Determine your purpose
This is the first and most important requirement, and one that I suspect many will fail at. I expect that many people will decide that they want to build a cool storyworld, and they’ll set to work coming up with lots of interesting things to explore, lots of tricky challenges, and loads of combat. Those people will fail miserably, because that’s what games do, not stories. Games are about challenge; stories are about people.
Let’s compare two well-known movie series: The Lord of the Rings with The Hobbit. In The Hobbitt, Bilbo Baggins sets off on an adventure, and has lots of adventures with a great variety of creatures and threats. The only dramatically interesting thing he does is decide to keep the Arkenstone away from Thor the Dwarf. But even that is merely an interesting side event. The movie has no clear plot, no significant character development for Bilbo, no crisis, and no denouement. The entire trilogy can be summed up as “Bilbo Baggins leaves his home, travels across Middle Earth facing many threats, experiencing many adventures, encountering many wondrous things, and after many exciting experiences returns home.” Wowie zowie, what a plot! This is the kind of storyworld that most game designers would create.
The Lord of the Rings, on the other hand, is a rip-snorting story. Frodo Baggins, like Bilbo Baggins, leaves his home on an adventure. At Rivendale, he volunteers to take the One Ring into Mordor and drop it into the fires of Mount Doom. Inspired by his courage, others join him, forming the Fellowship of the Ring. They set off for Mount Doom. Along the way, they too experience many adventures, suffer many great dangers, and encounter many wondrous things — just like Bilbo Baggins had done sixty years earlier. But this time they have a clear purpose, and their task is of immense importance to all of Middle Earth. One by one, the members of the Fellowship of the Ring peel away until only Frodo, and his friend Samwise remain, along with Gollum, who wants to take the Ring as soon as the opportunity arises. Their situation grows ever more desperate, and in the crisis of the story, Frodo and Samwise struggle up the slope of Mount Doom, at the end of their strength, and Gollum attacks Frodo. At the moment of crisis, Frodo stands on the brink overlooking the lava of Mount Doom, preparing to drop the Ring. After a long moment, he turns to Samwise and announces “The Ring is mine!” — Frodo has succumbed to the seductive and evil power of the One Ring. Gollum attacks him, they struggle, and fall over the edge. Gollum gets the Ring and falls into the lava, taking the Ring with him. Frodo somehow holds onto the ledge and Samwise rescues him. Frodo has successfully completed his task.
This is great story, with a clean plot and a clear crisis and resolution. Tolkein had a clear purpose in creating the story. He wanted to show the true meaning of World War I, when the forces of good (Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, and America) battled to preserve decent civilization from the forces of evil as represented by Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey. He showed that victory was not won by mighty feats of arms, but by the virtue and determination of one humble citizen; that evil and power can seduce even the noblest soul, but somehow the right prevails.
You must decide what you want to say to the world. If you are not driven by the urgent need to tell your truth to the world, then you are not ready to create a decent storyworld. Sure, you could create a storyworld like the story in The Hobbit, with loads of exciting adventures and spectacular wonders. So what? Such tales are cliched bores, great fun for kids, but of little interest to adults. If you want to make entertainment for youngsters, go build games. Please do not ruin the medium of interactive storytelling by making it merely one more province the vast wasteland that is games. There are a million ways to fuck around with a computer; please do your digital fornication elsewhere.
If you have a purpose
OK, let’s proceed on the assumption that you do indeed perceive interactive storytelling to be a medium of artistic expression rather than one more flaccid channel for entertainment. You have something burning in your gut that you MUST tell the world. Now you must devise a plot that demonstrates your message.
I can’t tell you how to construct a plot. There are quite a few books that purport to do so, but I think they promise far more than they can deliver. This is art we’re talking about.
I can tell you a crucially important difference between interactive storytelling and every other form of storytelling: it is broken into discrete chunks. Think of it in this way: regular storytelling is like a movie: a continuous flow of (generally) closely related events. But this kind of interactive storytelling is a like a sequence of snapshots of a lengthy event. The causal relationships between the snapshots (or Incidents) is much looser.
Conventional stories are linear sequences of events. Many, many people have attempted to build interactive storyworlds by creating trees. I have been watching people do this for over thirty years, and it has NEVER worked. Trees suffer from geometric explosions, and nobody could build a tree big enough to be satisfying. I suppose that, if you assembled a huge team, you could build such a humongous tree — but it would cost a great deal of money and it would never sell well enough to recoup your investment.
Moreover, a tree has no plot, and can have no plot. There are too many variations, too many outcomes, for it to support any kind of plot. If you interactivize The Lord of the Rings with a tree, you end up with endings where Frodo came back home after being chased by the Nazgul, deciding that this adventure stuff was a lot of bunk. Or perhaps Frodo is killed, or Samwise is killed, or Gollum gets the One Ring, or any of a hundred other possible conclusions, none of which support any plot. Trees just don’t work for interactive storytelling.
My solution is the “Upside Down Palm Tree”, which I have explained elsewhere.
I’m still working on this essay.