I Read Zines: Voidspace

Voidspace

An online magazine of interactive fiction. You can’t just sit there and read, you have to do more. Boo to that, lazy writers, insisting that we, the constant reader, do some of the work.

But! In Issue 1 there are some pieces worth the time and effort and also a choose your own adventure by me. Here’s some highlights:

Archive From Another World by Leo Doulton. An extensive and complex work purporting to be issues of a review by Barfi and Juman, two historians. I have not got to the end of this yet, it’s huge.

Water Level by @lynchpoet/rudy is a point and click/ text game about a flooding house, family secrets and going to heaven, maybe? It’s weird. Which is cool.

Navigating by Arden Hunter, a labyrinthine poem.

Choose Your Own Psychosis by Jeremy Scott in which you can choose how to react to your psychotic episode, and how little that changes the outcome.

A Thousand Eyes by Austin Slominski where things happen on the screen when you move your mouse and click the buttons.

Also I made The Reading Of The Will Of J Arthur Worthington III, which is a choose your own adventure in which most of your choices were in the past. In theory you go to the reading to try and finish up your business with Worthington, people try to make you get back into things with him and you decide how you refuse them. This defines your relationship with Worthington, and therefore what’s in the will. In practice you talk to a couple of weirdos, tell them to clear off and then an odd will is read and it tells you Worthington was your boss, or your enemy, or your father, or your lover. Anyway, I intend to write a better twine piece, eventually.

There’s a lot more, some playing games, more forcing you to think.

Read This: Because you want to piece together an understanding of what’s going on in these strange creations
Don’t Read This: Non-linearity is illusory, a trap for the unwary