Top all-time · #2694
Emily Short
Personal blog · emshort.bloggameswriting
Emily Short's personal blog at emshort.blog covers games and writing. Since 2016, 28 different Hacker News readers have linked it 34 times. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Narrative in games and new media
Most-linked posts?
- /2013/01/24/making-of-counterfeit-monkey-puzzles-and-toys/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-04-25
- /2016/09/21/bowls-of-oatmeal-and-text-generation/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-10-17
What Hacker News says?
There's an updated version here - I didn't realize that page had an old release on it. https://emshort.blog/2017/12/26/counterfeit-monkey-release-7...
Comment linking /2017/12/26/counterfeit-monkey-release-7/
on “How to write a spelling corrector (2016)”Submitted AI Research on Dialogue and Story Generation (Part 3) as a story · 44 points
HN discussionHere's her blog post about which interpreters to use to play the game. (Spoilers in the comments but not in the main post.) https://emshort.blog/2012/12/31/counterfeit-monkey/ Also there's a cheat/hint guide [PDF] https://emshort.blog/2013/01/24/making-of-counterfeit-monkey... . There's a spoiler-filled post about the design of the puzzles here. https://emshort.blog/2013/01/24/making-of-counterfeit-monkey... It won…
Comment linking /2013/01/24/making-of-counterfeit-monkey-puzzles-and-toys/
on “How to write a spelling corrector (2016)”Submitted Counterfeit Monkey: release 8 as a story · 20 points
HN discussion> Creating the rules for it reminds me a little bit of writing a text adventure game from days gone by Interactive fiction has long been the playground for conversation UIs since its inception (Zork's development is even directly entwined in the early history of MIT's AI lab). It's also a useful thing to ask someone starting a bot project: what was the last IF game you played? Have you written one? There's a lot of…
Comment linking /
on “Bottery – A conversational agent prototyping platform”Submitted TextWorld: Inform 7 (interactive fiction) and machine learning as a story · 6 points
HN discussionWe have gotten a lot closer to it, much more than Rimworld. - World models with motivation-driven characters is a common subgenre of IF; you could do worse than starting with Galatea which is seminal and still very good. The author is an acquaintance of Crawford, and is aligned with his stated goals - you can read her critique of his book[0] and one of his more recent tools[1]. She has previously designed Versu, an…
Comment linking /2017/06/21/chris-crawfords-encounter-editor/
on “I Really Blew It (2020)”Submitted The End of May as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis reminds me of this year's xyzzy award-winning interactive fiction game, The Mary Jane of Tomorrow. https://emshort.blog/2016/06/05/the-mary-jane-of-tomorrow/ (It won Best Single Puzzle and Best NPC.)
Comment linking /2016/06/05/the-mary-jane-of-tomorrow/
on “How I Used Deep Learning to Train a Chatbot to Talk Like Me”Submitted So, Do We Need This Parser Thing Anyway? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe book Life's Lottery by horror author Kim Newman plays with this (and is inspired by Choose Your Own adventure books) Review (with spoilers, though not sure that concept applies here) by Interactive Fiction author Emily Short: https://emshort.blog/2015/01/05/lifes-lottery-kim-newman/
Comment linking /2015/01/05/lifes-lottery-kim-newman/
on “The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books”Submitted The Uncanny Deck: Co-Authoring with GPT-2 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI think you're saying what the average person is thinking but is worried about being impolite. You are of course correct: it is the kind of fact about a game that non-gamers might still mistake for quality or depth. The horseshoe theory of ai generation tells us that handcrafting and content generation extremism end up very close to each other: https://emshort.blog/2016/09/21/bowls-of-oatmeal-and-text-ge... The fact…
Comment linking /2016/09/21/bowls-of-oatmeal-and-text-generation/
on “A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI”Submitted 2017 in Interactive Fiction as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYep, pretty cool - it's a very popular tool in the "interactive fiction" genre of game development/writing. It's widely used for "choice-based IF" (also called "CYOA" after the Choose Your Own Adventure books), with the other main side of the genre being parser-based IF (like Colossal Cave and other PC text adventures from back in the day). Parser IF is often built with a tool called Inform, might also pique your in…
Comment linking /how-to-play/writing-if/
on “Show HN: Eigengrau's Generator – A procedural city generator for tabletop gaming”Submitted Writing for Games: Theory and Practice as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe usual approach for managing complexity is to chop it up into storylets. Emily Short has written a lot about it on her blog [1] [1] https://emshort.blog
Comment linking /
on “Writing web-based interactive fiction with Ink”Submitted Second Person (2007) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion"Counterfeit Monkey" by Emily Short expands the T-remover puzzle into a full game full of wordplay. For example, you turn a fossil into foil and then oil to fix a car. Retrospective: https://emshort.blog/2013/01/24/making-of-counterfeit-monkey...
Comment linking /2013/01/24/making-of-counterfeit-monkey-puzzles-and-toys/
on “Great Adventure-Game Puzzles”Submitted Subcutanean as a story · 1 points
HN discussionJames Ryan's Talk of the Town does this https://www.jamesryan.world/projects#/talktown/ https://github.com/james-owen-ryan/talktown . His PHD thesis on curated story worlds is here ( https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330855103_Curating_... ) with a good write up by Emily Short here ( https://emshort.blog/2019/05/21/curating-simulated-storyworl... ). The focus is on generating interesting narratives for games…
Comment linking /2019/05/21/curating-simulated-storyworlds-james-ryan/
on “Procedural content generation: creating a universe (2015)”Submitted Patchwork Girl (Shelley Jackson) and Spatial Hypertext as a story · 1 points
HN discussionEmily Short https://emshort.blog/my-work/
Comment linking /my-work/
on “New Tricks for an Old Z-Machine, Part 3: A Renaissance Is Nigh”Submitted An Incomplete List of Things I’d Need to Know To Not Be a Total Impostor as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSpeaking of Emily Short, she compiled a more recent overview/bibliography of IF history that I found useful: https://emshort.blog/2016/04/02/brief-bibliography-about-if-...
Comment linking /2016/04/02/brief-bibliography-about-if-history/
on “A History of Interactive Fiction (2006)”Submitted These Violent Delights as a story · 1 points
HN discussionExactly, there's application videogames and interactive fiction[1]. I'm rather experienced in procgen for roguelike development so those techniques and their value and pitfalls have left an impression on me, but also illuminated how narrow the application of current techniques is. Though there's some work that's been done in the area in terms of storylets[2], and story graphs[3], from a practitioner's point of view,…
Comment linking /2019/11/29/storylets-you-want-them/
on “Algebraic Semiotics (2020)”But what is it? EDIT: found the answer: > Counterfeit Monkey is a full-length wordplay puzzle game. https://emshort.blog/2012/12/31/counterfeit-monkey/
Comment linking /2012/12/31/counterfeit-monkey/
on “Counterfeit Monkey: release 8”Emily Short, a core member of the interactive fiction community, maintains an excellent, well-curated guide to help people find games that might suit their tastes. https://emshort.blog/how-to-play/reading-if/
Comment linking /how-to-play/reading-if/
on “Ask HN: Great text based games to play?”It's the Bowls of Oatmeal problem: https://emshort.blog/2016/09/21/bowls-of-oatmeal-and-text-ge...
Comment linking /2016/09/21/bowls-of-oatmeal-and-text-generation/
on “My Ten Years in No Man's Sky”
