Online Interactive Fiction & Collaborative Storytelling Games

Digital technology has been used as a tool for collaborative storytelling and interactive fiction since the late 70s with MUDs and games like Zork. The web has both expanded the audience and tools available, allowing people to create and play stories of their own devising online with little to no programming experience. Join this panel of educators and developers as we discuss how these tools can support a variety of unique storytelling experiences online — entertaining adventures, informative journeys, and deeply emotional personal tales.

• Colin Fahrion (he/him) [site, twitter] an artist, designer, web developer, and shenaniganizer, interested in the overlap of interactive performance and games both online and off. He is the marketing & web front-end manager for Big Bad Con and the moderator for this panel.


• Doug Valenta (he/him) [site, twitter] a computer programmer and creator interested in games, narrative, language, and the web. He and his husband, John Zajac, are creating Mote, a narrative chat online storytelling tool.


• Judith Pintar (she/her) [site, twitter] a storyteller, musician, and sociologist who teaches with a focus on game design and the programming of interactive fiction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Judith is also on the board of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation


• Randy Lubin (he/him) [site, twitter] founder of Leveraged Play, a consulting firm that designs and runs games. Also, and important for this panel, the creator of the online card based tool for game designers StorySynth.