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| | IFDB | | About me...

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

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Show all Blog Games Generators Philosophy Bots Publications/Collaborations


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

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.

More...

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

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.

More...

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

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

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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

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

More...

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.

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You have the power to generate the drawbacks of ravens but it doesn't pay the
bills.
You can almost morph into a finch and now it only reaches its full power when
you're feeling euphoric.
You can almost control people but only in a four mile radius from yourself.
You can cause spontaneous confessions of indifference however only in Paris.
You are amazing at alkalising but it won't help you endure the dizzying world of
superheroing.


FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

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

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Now the first serious object was to rear men in whom self-seeking impulses were
extinguished. priests, saints. And if people doubted that perfection was
possible, they did not doubt what perfection was.
Goal and Means of Democracy.—Democracy tries to create and guarantee
independence for as many as possible in their opinions, way of life, and
occupation.
In addition, every one was striving to outdo some one else's virtue with his
own, so why should they not have made use of every artifice to show off their
virtues, especially among themselves, if only for the sake of practice!
same footnote) And it is so, perhaps! The Stoics at least believed it was so,
and they were consistent when they wished to have the least possible pleasure,
in order to have the least possible pain from life.
There is no such thing as 'Cause,' in those few cases in which it seemed to be
given, and in which we projected it out of ourselves in order to understand a
phenomenon, it has been shown to be an illusion.


LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

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

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'Only someone who is convinced can say that.'—How does the conviction help him
when he says it?—Is it somewhere at hand by the side of the spoken expression?
To this end we shall constantly be giving prominence to distinctions which our
ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook.
5.143 Contradiction is that common factor of propositions which no proposition
has in common with another.
And if anyone can do so—why should that not merely prove that such imagemongery
is of no interest to us?
I want to say: we have this vivid picture—and that use, apparently contradicting
the picture, which expresses the psychical.


VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE

The complete works of Voltairine de Cleyre, somewhat scrambled.

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So said Lord Buddha, the Light of Asia.
Yet he, too, was fair who promised me, with his tender mouth and his Christ-like
eyes; And his voice was as sweet as the summer wind that sighs through the
arbors of Paradise.
To-night I am to deliver a final address before what will probably be a small
gathering of intellectual faddists calling themselves the International
Progressive Thought League, in the parlors of the Iroquois Hotel.
Do we not know that our brothers die In the cold and the dark tonight?
Shelterless faces turned toward the sky Will not see the New Year’s light?
He simply conjures the spirit of Dare and Do in the plainest workmen—says to
them: 'It is you who know how to mine, how to dig, how to cut; you will know how
to organize your work without a dictator; we cannot tell you, but we have full
faith that you will find the way yourselves.


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.

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

More...

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


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.

More...

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:

 * Jordan Erica Webber for Ten Things Video Games Can Teach Us: (about life,
   philosophy and everything), 2017
 * Mariella Frostrup for Open Book on Radio 4, 2018
 * Matt Griffin for ChoiceBeat, iss. 10, 2024




THE MOUNTAIN GOATS SONG GENERATOR

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

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No Abandoned Crew
Going to Amman
The Demonic
So Point Of The Julian King
These Vampires


RAVEN RIDDLER

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

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Why is a chihuahua like china cabinet?
Why is an ibis like an island?
Why is an impala like an island?
Why is a ragdoll like a rack?
Why is a red wolf like a room divider?