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Emily Short

Emily Short is a renowned American-British interactive fiction author, narrative designer, coder, and critic, best known for pioneering advancements in conversational mechanics and procedural storytelling within text-based games. With over two decades of experience, she has authored more than 24 works of interactive fiction, contributed to major game design tools like Inform 7, and led narrative development for commercial titles in the Fallen London universe. Short's career began in the early 2000s with seminal pieces that emphasized realistic (NPC) interactions and player agency, starting with her debut Galatea (2000), a single-character dialogue-driven game exhibited at the for its innovative approach to NPC realism. She followed with award-winning titles such as Savoir-Faire (2002), which earned four XYZZY Awards including Best Game, Best Puzzles, Best Story, and Best Player Character for its intricate alchemy-themed puzzles and narrative depth, and Floatpoint (2006), which took first place in the Interactive Fiction Competition. Her later works, like Counterfeit Monkey (2012)—voted the best text adventure of all time by the community for its word-manipulation mechanics—and First Draft of the Revolution (2012), a browser-based story exploring letter-writing and revolutionary intrigue, further solidified her influence on the genre. Transitioning from academia to the games industry after the , Short, raised in and , drew from her childhood fascination with text adventures and her mother's programming background to co-found the narrative AI startup LittleTextPeople (acquired by in 2011) and pioneer the Versu platform for AI-driven interactive stories on . She served as creative director at from 2020 to 2023, leading the development of Mask of the Rose (2023), a set in the Fallen London world, while contributing narrative design to projects at studios including Firaxis, , Paradox, and . Since 2024, she has worked in narrative design at . Beyond game development, Short has advanced the field through , chapters in books for scholars and students, and applications in procedural text generation, such as The Annals of the Parrigues (2019), a dynamically generated guidebook. As associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Games and an advisor for the Game Developers Conference (GDC) AI Summit, she has shaped academic and industry discourse on and modeling. In 2014, she founded the Oxford and London Group, fostering a monthly for the genre. Now based in with her husband, Graham Nelson—the creator of the language—Short continues to explore high-agency and -enhanced through her and ongoing projects.

Interactive Fiction Authorship

Major Works

Emily Short's debut interactive fiction work, (2000), is a compact, one-room experience centered on a dialogue with an animated statue of a woman in an art gallery. Drawing from the myth, the game unfolds through player-driven conversations that explore the statue's backstory, psyche, and possible futures, leading to over 70 distinct endings based on interpretive choices rather than traditional puzzles. Its innovation lies in the sophisticated for NPC interactions, allowing for deep, context-aware responses that simulate psychological nuance and branching narratives without inventory management or . In Savoir-Faire (2002), set in an alternate 17th-century , players assume the role of a young aristocrat indebted to shady associates, tasked with scavenging valuables from his adoptive father's lavish but abandoned estate amid themes of , , and familial betrayal. The game's puzzle mechanics revolve around the "Lavori d'Aracne" system, a magical technique that binds similar objects across locations for manipulation, enabling inventive solutions like combining letters or elements in environmental challenges. This approach highlights mechanical ingenuity, with interconnected rooms and alternate puzzle paths that reward experimentation in a richly detailed historical setting. City of Secrets (2003), originally commissioned by the synth-pop band Secret-Secret but completed independently by Short, presents an urban mystery where a traveler's routine train trip halts in a enigmatic city blending magic and advanced technology under perpetual daylight. Players navigate intrigue, alliances with eccentric inhabitants, and escalating surveillance as they uncover conspiracies and decide loyalties in a sprawling, lore-rich environment. The mechanics emphasize contextual dialogue via menu-based and ask/tell systems, with optional novice mode for accessibility, prioritizing exploration and narrative immersion over complex puzzles in a solo-authored tale of suspicion and revelation. Short's science fiction piece Floatpoint (2006) casts players as an diplomat evaluating the relocation of genetically modified colonists from the remote Aleheart outpost, where a deteriorating forces tough choices echoing the settlers' prior ethical compromises. The narrative delves into cultural clashes, alien flora like video-recording fruits, and interstellar politics through an interface mimicking a for emails and logs. Innovations include integrated communication tools that advance the story while presenting moral dilemmas about sacrifice and identity in a vividly realized world. Her most ambitious project, Counterfeit Monkey (2012), is a wordplay-centric adventure on the fictional island of Anglophone Atlantis, where players, as a smuggler fleeing authorities during a holiday crackdown, use a device to remove or add letters from object names, transforming items like a "stone" into a "tone" or "stun." This core mechanic drives puzzles across an expansive map, from beaches to bureaucratic offices, with dual-protagonist perspectives and tools like synthesizers enhancing linguistic creativity. The game's world-building features dense, immersive prose detailing a society obsessed with language regulation, supported by sophisticated simulation of transformations and interactions. Short's major works were primarily authored using the language and hosted on platforms like the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) and the Competition (IFComp) archives for free play via interpreters.

Awards and Recognition

Emily Short's interactive fiction works have garnered significant acclaim within the community, particularly through prestigious awards that highlight her innovations in narrative depth, character development, and puzzle design. Her debut piece, (2000), received the Best of Show award at the 2000 IF Art Show, recognizing its artistic portrayal of a single, psychologically complex . The game also won the XYZZY Award for Best Individual NPC and was a finalist in the Best NPCs and Best Game categories at the 2000 XYZZY Awards. Additionally, Short's (2000) earned the XYZZY Award for Best Writing in the same year, underscoring her early prowess in prose and thematic exploration. In 2002, Savoir-Faire secured four XYZZY Awards: Best Game, Best Puzzles, Best Story, and Best Individual PC, establishing Short as a leading figure in crafting intricate, character-driven puzzle adventures. The work was also nominated in several other categories, reflecting its broad impact. Short's contributions to the Competition (IFComp) further demonstrate her consistent excellence; Metamorphoses placed second out of 53 entries in 2000, while Floatpoint (2006) took first place with an average score of 8.41 from 113 votes. City of Secrets (2003) won the XYZZY Award for Best NPCs. Short's later masterpiece, Counterfeit Monkey (2012), dominated the 2012 XYZZY Awards with wins in Best Game, Best Puzzles, Best Setting, Best Individual PC, and Best Implementation, and a finalist nomination for Best Use of Innovation. This recognition affirmed her influence on evolving interactive fiction mechanics. On the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB), Counterfeit Monkey holds the #1 position in the Top 100 as of November 2025, with five other Short-authored works—Savoir-Faire (#16), City of Secrets (#36), Bronze (#40), Bee (#87), and Metamorphoses (#92)—also ranking in the top 100, highlighting her enduring legacy. Over her career, Short has authored 47 works, earning multiple wins and nominations across categories that emphasize narrative innovation and mechanical sophistication, solidifying her as one of the most awarded authors in the genre.

Tools and Technical Contributions

Inform 7 Involvement

Emily Short became actively involved with the programming language in the mid-2000s, transitioning from earlier versions to contribute substantially to Inform 7, a natural language-based (IF) authoring system developed by Graham Nelson. Her engagement aligned with her own IF releases during this period, beginning around the system's initial public preview in 2006. Short authored the majority of the over 300 programming examples in the Inform 7 documentation, which illustrate the system's syntax and features through practical, English-like code snippets. She also created two full-length demo games—Bronze, a puzzle-oriented adaptation of the legend, and , a timed set in the universe of her earlier work Savoir-Faire—released alongside early versions of Inform 7 to demonstrate its narrative and mechanical possibilities. These contributions extended to developing the for and offering theoretical guidance on the system's design. A key focus of Short's work was enhancing accessibility for non-programmers by emphasizing clear, prose-like that mirrors natural English, thereby lowering for aspiring IF authors. This approach helped standardize tool usage within the IF community, fostering broader adoption and influencing how subsequent developers approached narrative programming.

Other Development Projects

Beyond her foundational work with Inform 7, Emily Short contributed to several experimental and proprietary tools for and procedural narrative from 2011 onward, emphasizing emergent storytelling, branching structures, and player agency in . In 2013 and 2014, Short co-developed Versu, an AI-driven engine for social simulations, alongside Evans at Little TextPeople. The platform enabled emergent narratives through simulated characters with autonomous behaviors and conversational interactions, allowing players to inhabit social worlds where outcomes arose from dynamic relationships rather than fixed scripts. Little TextPeople was acquired by in 2012, after which the project was discontinued without a full public release, though prototypes like a Versu adaptation of Short's earlier work were demonstrated. During the 2010s, Short consulted on the development of Varytale, a tool for creating branching-story using storylets—modular vignettes that respond to player choices and state changes. She demonstrated its capabilities with Bee (2012), a compact about a homeschooled girl navigating family tensions and personal pressures while preparing for a national , highlighting Varytale's support for nuanced, choice-driven emotional arcs. Short also pioneered a bespoke engine for First Draft of the Revolution (2012), a choice-based interactive epistolary work co-developed with Liza Daly, prototyped and produced with Inkle Studios. The system allowed players to revise letters between characters during the , exploring themes of historical agency, censorship, and personal revolution through iterative rewriting that altered narrative outcomes and relationships. This custom tool advanced procedural elements in by integrating player edits directly into the story's evolving text. In addition to these projects, Short has contributed to broader procedural storytelling tools focused on dialogue systems and enhanced player agency, drawing on her expertise to prototype mechanisms for dynamic, context-aware interactions in narrative design.

Professional Career

Early Collaborations and Startups

Emily Short's early professional collaborations marked a shift from her solo interactive fiction (IF) authorship in the early 2000s to team-based projects that integrated narrative design with AI technologies. This transition began in the mid-2000s, as she leveraged her expertise in crafting responsive characters and worlds—honed through independent works like Galatea (2000)—to contribute to community-driven IF initiatives and commissioned pieces. By engaging with broader networks, Short began exploring how IF techniques could scale in collaborative environments, bridging experimental storytelling with practical applications in game development. One notable early collaboration was City of Secrets (2003), a large-scale IF game commissioned by the synth-pop band Secret-Secret. The band provided an initial narrative outline and feedback on lyrics integrated into the story, while Short developed the game's intricate plot twists, , and puzzle , resulting in a conspiracy-filled urban adventure with over 100 non-player characters. This project highlighted her ability to adapt solo IF principles to group input, emphasizing dynamic NPC interactions and environmental simulation. In 2011, Short co-founded Little TextPeople with AI researcher Richard Evans, focusing on AI-driven systems for interactive narratives that emphasized emotional depth and social simulation. The studio developed prototypes for real-time, multiplayer text adventures, drawing on Evans's experience from The Sims 3 and Short's IF background to create tools for personality modeling and conversational AI. Little TextPeople was acquired by Linden Lab in February 2012, after which Short and Evans worked on the Versu platform, an extension of their narrative AI research into social simulation games. Short's involvement with Spirit AI further exemplified her move into commercial AI applications for dialogue. She joined the company in September 2016 as a developer, leading the Character Engine product team to build machine learning-based systems for enhancing NPC conversations and player interactions in . By August 2018, she had advanced to the as and later served as , guiding the development of AI tools that simulated believable character behaviors until her departure in late 2019. These ventures established Short as a pivotal figure connecting the IF community with mainstream game industry innovation, demonstrating how text-based narrative techniques could inform scalable AI solutions for emotional and social storytelling.

Recent Industry Roles

From January 2020 to early 2024, Emily Short served as Creative Director at , where she led narrative development for the studio's ongoing projects in the and universes. In this capacity, she contributed to titles such as , a 2023 dating-and-murder-mystery emphasizing expressive player dialogue and agency, and The City in Silver, a 2024 epilogue to the Railway storyline that resolved key narrative threads involving characters like Furnace Ancona. Following her departure from Failbetter, Short transitioned to independent narrative design consultancy, providing expertise in , conversation modeling, and procedural narrative systems. Her 2024 engagements included a keynote at the Foundations of Digital Games conference on using storylets for scoping and a talk at Everything Procedural on storylet-based design, highlighting techniques for dynamic, player-driven worlds. In advisory capacities, Short joined the jury for the Narrative Award at the Independent Games Festival 2025, evaluating entries for innovative storytelling and human connection in games.

Writing and Industry Influence

Blog and Critical Writing

Emily Short maintains a personal , emshort.blog, which has been active since the early and serves as a primary platform for her reflections on (IF) and narrative design. The blog features categories such as Tools, Games, Conversation, and My Work, where she explores topics including techniques, player agency in narrative choices, and the mechanics of systems. For instance, in posts like "Dialogue Expressiveness in ," Short discusses how expressive player enhances and enables high-agency gameplay by allowing players to convey nuanced intentions through conversational options. During the 2010s, Short contributed a regular column titled "" to , beginning in June 2016 as a fortnightly feature focused on IF design, criticism, and specific games. These articles covered aspects of IF evolution, such as linguistic experimentation in titles like Alcyone and the of classic works like those from Magnetic Scrolls for modern browsers, providing critical analysis of how procedural elements shape player experiences. Over the course of the column, which ran from 2016 to 2017, Short examined more than two dozen IF works and trends, emphasizing innovative structures. Beyond her blog and column, Short has authored essays in various publications on key themes in IF, including procedural narrative generation, the integration of in , and the progression of the over two decades. Representative pieces address aids through advanced modeling, as seen in her discussions of as mechanics that foster emotional depth and player immersion. Another essay explores high-agency systems, detailing how procedural tools can create dynamic, responsive narratives without sacrificing . Short's writing has established her blog and related contributions as an influential resource for IF developers and critics, offering conceptual insights into evolving practices like AI-driven stories and the balance between player freedom and narrative coherence. Her analyses, spanning over 20 years, have shaped discussions on how IF adapts to broader contexts, prioritizing expressiveness and innovation.

Advocacy and Mentorship

Emily Short has served on the advisory board of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF) since 2016, providing guidance on the preservation and advancement of (IF) tools and resources. In this role, she contributes to initiatives that support the IF community's infrastructure, including the maintenance of the IF Archive and efforts to sustain competitions like the (IFComp). Short has actively mentored newcomers in the IF community through her support for IFComp, where she has organized related events such as Bring Out Your Dead in 2016 and served as a judge for the IF Art Show in 2003 and 2004. She promotes participation in IFComp by highlighting its role in showcasing emerging works and encouraging feedback for authors. Additionally, Short has endorsed the Fund since its inception in 2015, a patron-supported program that commissions new short works of IF each month, thereby fostering creative output from early-career writers. Through industry talks and interviews, Short has addressed key challenges in narrative design, such as pacing in interactive stories. In a 2007 Gamasutra interview, she discussed strategies for balancing player agency with structured progression in IF. More recently, in a 2023 feature, she reflected on her career pride and the evolution of narrative roles in games. In 2025, she participated in a GDC talk on narrative design alongside industry peers. Short's broader influence extends to bridging and the , as evidenced by her participation in events like the 2011 UCSC "Inventing the Future of Games" symposium, where she explored interdisciplinary approaches to . She has also tackled social norms in the , noting in interviews her early struggles adapting from environments to studio dynamics, and advocating for more inclusive practices. Furthermore, Short promotes diverse voices in IF by curating lists of works by female authors and emphasizing underrepresented perspectives in her writings and recommendations. In 2025, Short continues fostering new talent through ongoing jury and consultancy roles, including serving on the Independent Games Festival (IGF) Narrative jury, where she evaluates works focused on player agency and human connection. Her consultancy emphasizes narrative systems that support emerging designers in creating high-agency experiences.

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