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My name is Joey Jones, I'm currently in my last leg of a Computer Science PhD looking into the structure of authoring long-form branching narratives, and I'm an author or co-author of several games, mostly text-based interactive fiction works. I've also made a lot of twitter bots, which, now that avenue of expression is mostly defunct, I have begun migrating over to this website.

JOEY JONES

Blog

Far Far Futures

The Postmortem as Qualitative Research

The postmortem, or retrospective, is by now a well embedded tradition in the interactive fiction community...

IFComp 2022 Reviews

Puzzle Game Edition It’s time for the annual Interactive Fiction Competition. I don’t know if I’ll end up reviewing many…

Monkey Island and the Ascent of Point-and-Single-Click

There’s another Monkey Island game in the works, Return to Monkey Island and we can expect it to be a…

Nothing Is True, Everything is Permitted?

Making sense of the assassins’ creed Some years ago I met with an old friend from sixth-form college who I…

Interactive Fiction Resources

I maintain a list of interactive fiction resources for the IF facebook page. It’s a bit a big list but…

Can Red Herrings Be Elegant?

This includes minor spoilers for Monkey Island and Golf Peaks but they’re worth it. In 2018 Tom Hermans wrote up…

Collaboration & Cragne Manor

Here’s some thoughts about Cragne Manor in the context of earlier experiments. Cragne Manor is a game written by 84…

Embedded Puzzle Manifesto

Here follows some statements on puzzle design. I was prompted to write this by the ongoing manifesto jam. I recommend…

Concepts in Cybertext 4 – NPC Agency

I want to talk about ways of implementing romanceable NPCs in games like CRPGs, gamebooks, visual novels and so forth…

Concepts in Cybertext 3 – Parsimony

There’s a problem that can happen in cybertexts but also more broadly in videogames and tabletop rpgs. Where the player…

Lies Under Ice

Lies Under Ice

An interactive science-fiction novel about moving to the icy moon of Europa and trying to be a good neighbour there, published by Choice of Games.

Lies Under Ice is a huge interactive novel where you make choices and the plot takes them into account. It's about managing a base under the ice on a moon 360 million miles from Earth.

Lies Under Ice at Choice of Games (demo available)

Sub Rosa

Sub Rosa

A puzzle game about secrets in the Age of Lead. You've spent seventeen years preparing for an infiltration. Stealing the Confessor's secrets is only the beginning: it will all be for nothing if you leave a trace.

Sub Rosa is a New Weird Fantasy text adventure, co-written with Melvin Rangasamy in Inform7. It won the XYZZY Award 2015 for Best Puzzles and came sixth in that year's Interactive Fiction Competition.

Sub Rosa on the Interactive Fiction Database

Play Online

Download gblorb

Trials of the Thief-Taker

Trials of the Thief-Taker

An interactive historical adventure novel set in 1720s London, published by Choice of Games.

Trials of the Thief-Taker is a twisty tale of bounty hunting, moral choices, and footchases in a seedy underworld filled with cant talking thieves, frauds and chancers.

Trials of the Thief-Taker at Choice of Games (demo available)

Andromeda Dreaming

Andromeda Dreaming

A mind-twisting short, accessible text game about dreaming on the edge of apocalypse.

Andromeda Dreaming was written as a part of the Andromeda Series, and was Nominee, for Best NPCs and Best Individual NPC in the 2012 XYZZY Awards.

Play Online

Download .gblorb

Unlikely Powers

A generator of unusual superhero powers with unfortunate drawbacks.

Output

Friedrich Nietzsche

The complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche in Tweet-sized bites (unsorted).

Nietzsche output

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The complete works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, in small chunks (not that far off how he wrote them in his notebooks).

wittgenstein output

Voltairine de Cleyre

The complete works of Voltairine de Cleyre, somewhat scrambled.

voltairine output

Authorial Burden

Chapter in The Authoring Problem (ed. Hargood, Millard, published by Springer in 2022). In this chapter, I looked at the nature of the 'authorial burden' of content writing produced by interactive or branching narrative.

Abstract

Limits that emerge out of the interactive nature of interactive digital narrative make authoring it challenging. These limits include exponential branching, where branches in the narrative increase the amount of content needed to be written progressively throughout the work; combinatorial explosion, where increasing combinations of possible game states makes writing additional content complex, as well as programming scope problems that are seen in any digital project, wherein the range of features or game interactions that could be implemented is infinite but development time finite. These limits place on the authors of interactive digital narrative an authorial burden, increasing the amount of content needed to be written, states managed or features programmed. Multiple strategies exist for tackling the burden, from reducing or reusing content, to decontextualising and generating content.

Springer Website

Cragne Manor

Cragne Manor

Cragne Manor is game made by over 80 authors for the 20th anniversary of Mike Gentry's Anchorhead, I was one of them.

I made the penultimate room, the Observatory, as well as designing the final ritual and the meta-puzzle components that each of the games puzzle chains culminate in. It was a small but important part of a huge undertaking by many great designers, including Ryan Veeder and Jenni Poldna who heroically organised the whole project.

Cragne Manor website

Moondrop Isle

Moondrop Isle

Moondrop Isle is a huge multimedia urban exploration text adventure experience made by nine authors, including myself.

I made the Lunarcade, a sprawling entertainment complex, partially ruined. It is a mysterious highly explorable place with working arcade machines and puzzling features.

Moondrop Isle website

The Forever Labyrinth

The Forever Labyrinth

I wrote 25 of the riddles in Inkle's The Forever Labyrinth, a browser-based art exploration collaboration with Google Arts & Culture.

This is a riddle I wrote that isn't in the game but is indicative of the kind of thing that appears:

In famines, bored, it holds and stays,
But comes undone on feasting days

Play The Forever Labyrinth for free in a browser.

Google Blog on The Forever Labyrinth

Review at The Short Game "This game actually has quite a lot of nice riddles in it."

Interviews

I've been interviewed by:

The Mountain Goats Song Generator

This generates almost all The Mountain Goats songs and all the possible song titles inbetween.

mountaingoats output

Raven Riddler

"Why is a raven like a writing desk?" and all other variants, ad nauseum.

raven output