COVER INTERVIEW: Emily Short deserves her flowers
Written for NME [14/06/23]
We pull focus on the Fallen London narrative legend’s storied career and her new game Mask Of The Rose
If you ask Emily Short, the award-winning interactive fiction writer, narrative designer and creative director, what her proudest achievements are, your question will be met with a self-deprecating laugh. “It’s often difficult to answer that question because you can always imagine future improvements still to be achieved.”
Short should be proud though. The LA and Seattle-raised author of interactive fiction (meaning text and narrative-driven games) and creative director of British indie studio Failbetter Games has worked on a number of celebrated titles.
Her first was the award-winning parser game Galatea (2000), which has been exhibited at the Library of Congress, while other games include the text adventures Savoir-Faire (2002) and Floatpoint (2006). Short is perhaps best known for her writing, world-building and narrative design work for the Fallen London universe games (Fallen London, 2011; Sunless Sea, 2016; Sunless Skies, 2019), which are famed for their literary flourish and eldritch idiosyncrasy. In June, Failbetter released visual novel-dating sim and Fallen London prequel Mask Of The Rose, on which Short has served as lead writer and game director.
All images: Rachel Billings for NME
On top of that, Short pioneered the innovative and AI-powered Versu platform for interactive stories, prior to joining Failbetter full time in early 2020. Elsewhere, she’s worked in academia and games journalism, and runs a well-respected blog in which she shares reams of advice spanning a 20+ year career.
But for Short it’s the community she’s fostered around her work that she’s most proud of. The writer has lived in Oxford for the past decade with her husband, the British IF design pioneer and Oxford University maths lecturer Graham A. Nelson, and founded the Oxford and London Interactive Fiction Group in 2014.
“Somebody asked me about my proudest achievements a few years ago and the answer I gave at the time was the community meet-up I’d been running here. It’d been useful in helping a bunch of people find work, but it really slowed down during the pandemic. I also just became completely overwhelmed… I hit a wall in terms of my ability to do it,” Short says. She takes a sip of her coffee inside the dimly lit, opulent confines of the Randolph Hotel’s snug Victorian tea room.
““Already in the early late ’90s and early ‘00s, text adventures were very much a retro thing””
“Zoom calls are now managed by other organisers besides me,” she continues, “so I guess there’s this sort of weird answer which is that I’m proud of some community support and organisational work although I am not currently doing that.”
Short may wince at the suggestion but she’s a bonafide star in IF. But she’s the linchpin in her field, armed with encyclopaedic knowledge and the drive to bring people from marginalised backgrounds or different sub-disciplines into the fold.
Her reputation as a legend in the industry is put to her. “Yeah,” she concedes, finally. “That’s a weird thing to be though.”
Short’s support work is emblematic of the general IF creator community ethos. It’s a nurturing, largely hobbyist environment where feedback is encouraged and provided freely. Much of this attitude can be attributed to the knotty nooks of text adventure design, which gathered pace in the ‘80s. Learning how to program text-based prompt games is a niche pastime. Prop that against the explosion of consumerist consoles and their more visually engaging media in the late ‘90s, and you can appreciate how the genre has become sidelined.
“Already in the early late ’90s and early ‘00s, text adventures were very much a retro thing,” Short explains. “It had a small group of really committed people in their own little weird corner of Usenet, as it was back in the day, and that was the context in which I taught myself enough code to build these things – using the tool sets that were available then.”
Short gained knowledge and confidence in game design and interactive storytelling during that period in part thanks to “that very lovely, generous, critical community”.
“You’d put a game out there and it might only be played by a few hundred people but maybe ten of those people would review it in some depth,” she says. “Then you’d get back a huge amount of really detailed craft feedback, even though the community was so small. I was a complete hobbyist; I wasn’t in the games industry. And I wasn’t expecting to be. I was, I thought, an academic.” She laughs: “I was just one who was spending a lot of time doing something that wasn’t my PhD, which wouldn’t have been approved by my advisor.”
““I was a complete hobbyist; I wasn’t in the games industry. And I wasn’t expecting to be””
That close-knit, supportive body gave rise to a strong sense of foundational community principles, Short adds. It led her peers to ask fundamental questions. “What kinds of stories should we even be telling with games? How does this work? Can we use games to look at character? There was lots of theoretical exploration; can we use games to look at morality?”
Morality comes into question throughout Short’s latest game, Mask Of The Rose. It’s set in 1862, months after London was stolen by bats and plunged into a vast cavern under the earth. New Masters run society with a curious interest in others’ love stories. Players can choose to make personal connections with characters old and new in the Fallen London universe – be it romantic, friendly or otherwise – and wind their way through a murder mystery. Whom shall they choose to accuse of murder? What are the implications of pinning blame on a different character during another playthrough? It’s a fun whodunnit paired with simple, beautiful animation that makes for an engaging afternoon or two sleuthing from the sofa.
“There are different ways that you can interact with the outcome of the murder that go beyond just, ‘I found out the culprit!’” Short says. “And that all becomes a context in which to look at some of those bigger questions of how our existing system of justice doesn’t really work normally anymore. What happens in that new context? What do we think should happen? How are we gonna deal with that? The different endings of the game suggest different answers to that question.”
Short began working on the project as COVID dug in its heels. Try as she might to avoid it, the pandemic seeped into the game narrative. “At that point I was like, ‘Thematically, whatever’s going on in my actual life is going to somehow, to some degree, percolate into the thing that I’m working on,’” she says, munching on afternoon tea treats.
“So I was thinking, ‘How do we collectively live through an apocalyptic experience where some aspect of what we are used to as the normal world is just completely not normal anymore and it affects everybody?’
“It’s not just my personal disaster; it’s a shared disaster. What does that do? How do we support each other through that? What happens to relationships when that’s going on? What happens to institutions, governments, faith? It’s a broad sounding question, but it gave us [at Failbetter] an opportunity then to say, ‘Well, what kinds of characters would have different takes on this… or contribute in different ways in which they’d be vulnerable in that situation?’ We built out the characterisation and the plot beats from there.”
Failbetter knew that its player base would like the opportunity to romance certain canonical characters, but also enjoy the chance to do so with those they hadn’t yet come across. “In any sort of visual novel or dating sim you have multiple paths and storylines and so we needed to facilitate that,” Short says. “We needed it to be able to accommodate these differences, like, is it a romance or a friendship and so on? That meant the content was going to be very wide and it could wind up quite shapeless.”
From the off, Short knew that she’d need to craft an organising plot to control all of the story’s potential outcomes, which is why a murder mystery was deployed.
“But then you have to think, ‘Well, murder is different [in the Fallen London universe] than it is on the surface because people come back from the dead, so that means the story’s going to play out differently. We can tweak the player about that in interesting ways; you might become attached to the victim before he dies and then be really bummed that he dies and comes back.”
Besides the structure of the plot, what does Short think is most important in storytelling? “Telling the truth.”
“One of the things that drew me to classics was a sense of awe and appreciation for the fact that I could read a play by Aristophanes and find a line in it that spoke to the bad experience I just had on the internet in the ’00s, and it would make me laugh and it would make me feel like somebody else understood.
“That’s over a distance of more than 2,000 years. So that sense of connection across great distances is possible through these media. But what makes that actually useful is some level of truthfulness about, ‘What is your experience, and what does it mean?’ Even if some of the formal craft aspects [of a story] are a little messy or they’re from a different time period and therefore I find it a bit less accessible, as long as it’s carrying some of that element, it still has value.”
To get inspiration for her stories, Short delves into appropriate subject research across books, podcasts and beyond. For Rachel in Mask Of The Rose, Short read novels about Jewish women from the 19th century to create a “mental background” of where this character is coming from. Failbetter also invited in a couple of subject matter consultants. “I think the consultants enjoy it because often they’re coming from a more academic or non-fictional [line of work]. We have a list of questions like, ‘OK, if somebody of this cultural background suddenly lives underground, how does that intersect with their dietary rules?’”
Short moved away from academia herself in the years following the 2008 financial crash, when job opportunities within it became scarce. A six month period trying to make waves in the games industry off the back of her early IF games proved fruitful. “I found I was more able to get work than I’d expected because there were enough people who were already aware of what I was doing and who were interested in working with me,” Short says.
What had once been a hobby, albeit a very committed one, became Short’s main line of work. She built her portfolio as a freelancer, and in 2011 co-founded LittleTextPeople, which was later acquired by Linden Lab. In 2016 she joined Spirit AI, examining artificial intelligence within academia and games.
This was a far cry from fiddling about with text adventures on computers as a youngster.
“I have a little diary from when I’m six or seven years old that recounts my attempts to solve a Scott Adams game on my VIC-20 [8-bit home computer],” Short says of her initial attraction to the world of IF. “And that wasn’t even the first text adventure I’d been playing because my mother [a since-retired programmer] had another computer at home where I’d seen her play Adventure and Deadline, and then I was trying to play them myself.”
Short loved exploring a universe that somebody else had built. “I was experiencing their concept from the inside in a way that you can’t with a book. Also the sense of, in this game environment, everything is here for a reason. That really appealed to me. When you’re a child, the world is not very legible… there’s a kind of incomprehensibility. I think the constrained world of a text adventure where everything is part of a puzzle really hooked into my child brain.”
““I think the constrained world of a text adventure where everything is part of a puzzle really hooked into my child brain””
With coding, Short had laid the groundwork for her career early on. And, in part due to her mother, she didn’t fret over people’s impression of a woman bucking gender norms. “The idea of, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t do this because I’m a girl’, just wasn’t a feature of my world model at the time,” she says.
Those industry gender expectations are very much flipped at Failbetter. Half of the studio’s staff have gender identities that are underrepresented in games (four cis women and four people who use they/them pronouns). It’s a suitable environment for a female boss in creative charge.
“Failbetter is more balanced and has a more pleasant culture around this than I would say most studios do,” Short explains. “There’s a range of experiences one can have in the industry. Sometimes it feels fine, sometimes there’s a certain amount of…” she trails off, and sighs. “Just, you know, being overtly taken less seriously than your male colleagues or being tested on things more.
“I started a job once where part of the reason I’d been hired was that I did have some coding experience. One of the first co-workers I met just didn’t believe that I had the role that I had. He was like, ‘But obviously you’re not doing that?’ I’m like, ‘Obviously what? Because I am a woman?’”
Early in her career, Short struggled with the social norms of the games industry, in contrast to those of academia. In a studio meeting people would talk over me all the time,” she says. “Some of that was about gender and some of that was just the prevailing mood. I remember feeling very uncomfortable. I don’t really like interrupting people but I was having this realisation of, ‘Well, I need to change my conversational interaction strategy and be willing to interrupt people or I’m never gonna be heard and I’m not going to be contributing to this project. If I want to do my job I have to be more rude than I’d normally prefer.’
“I experience shockingly little of that kind of thing at Failbetter relative to industry norms,” she continues. “It’s also gotten somewhat better over time – definitely not perfect yet – but there’s a noticeable difference in how many women are present at large industry events.
“Sometimes you have to wait in the bathroom now, which used to not be the case,” she says with a chuckle.
As an independent company Failbetter has greater freedom than larger studios working on AAA games to give realistic time and space for staff to work on projects.
“We have a certain level of stability where it’s possible to build something and be confident that it’s definitely going to launch. We have enough runway, it’s going to work,” Short says. “And we have time that, you know, if we need to change the production schedule we can manage all of that stuff realistically. It’s not going to ruin anybody’s life.”
Indeed, Mask Of The Rose was postponed to June 8 from its initial April release date to help the team avoid the pitfalls of crunch culture.
“That’s meant, practically speaking, there’s been room to be inventive; to push some things that might be a little bit unusual. It’s possible for me to be spending quite a lot of my time and energy on actually writing the game and not on persuading somebody to let me keep writing it, which hasn’t always been the case with some of my other experiences,” Short says.
As we wrap our conversation and in turn wrap up any cakey leftovers, talk returns to Short’s hesitation to spotlight herself – even when her latest game has an imminent release.
“I’ve brought to the project various things of my own but other people’s contributions really have been very important in making Mask what it is,” she says. “And there have also been places where that decision to even involve somebody else feels – in itself – part of the creative process. It’s like, ‘I know the game needs this but I’m not the right person to do it.’
“Certainly, there are strands in the narrative of Mask which I’m excited to have in there but which I couldn’t have devised myself,” she adds. And of course, there are strands which nobody but Short could have come up with.
Short may laugh off her achievements, but she’s more than earned her legendary status.
Mask Of The Rose is now available on Windows, macOS, SteamOS, Linux, Nintendo Switch and will be Verified on Steam Deck. PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S are set to follow.
