It's 2019 and we've got Molly (Lead Narrative Designer at Bad Robot Games, and previously Lead Gameplay Designer at Telltale on Guardians fo the Galaxy, Minecraft: Story Mode, Walking Dead: Season 3, Tales from the Borderlands) and Eric (Writer on Fortnite, interactive consultant for Eko, and previously a staff writer for Netflix's Trash Truck, and a writer at Telltale on Walking Dead: Season 2, Tales from the Borderlands, Minecraft: Story Mode seasons 1 & 2, and Batman: The Telltale Series) here to talk about how choose your own adventure is the dominant influence on interactive narrative at the moment, choice timers, the marriage of writing and narrative design, working relationships, players forgiving bad writing more than bad narrative design, what made Telltale work, finishing a project and feeling like you just spent a lot of time making an asset for somebody else, Bandersnatch (SPOILERS), the problem of having “good” and “bad” endings in branching narratives, fail states, making people feel like their choices matter, obfuscating branches from players, and what makes a good choice.

Our Guests on the Internet

Molly's Twitter.

Eric's Twitter.

Stuff We Talked About

Writing and Narrative Design: A Relationship by Eric Stirpe and Molly Maloney

Still The Smartest Guy On The Hill 30 Years After Sex, Lies & Videotape: Steven Soderbergh Unravels Hollywood Chaos by Mike Fleming Jr.

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch

Stretch Armstrong and the Flex Fighters

Until Dawn

Our theme music was composed by 2Mello, and our logo was created by Lily Nishita.