Programmable Fiction - An experiment in developing an alternative authoring tool for interactive fiction

Successful traditional narrative is often described as a balance between those aspects that are familiar and those that are new; between the degree to which those aspects are resonant with reader dispositions towards form or content -- and the degree to which they indispose readers, unsettling them in various ways with engaging novelty. Perhaps the development of similarly engaging, novel works of interactive fiction could benefit from more expressive authoring /developing tools. This paper describes some work we have done to explore this in terms of a system for developing works of interactive fiction that give readers/players of such works the ability to write programs as part of their interaction with the stories/games