ai-interactive-fiction

Experiments in AI x Interactive Fiction Games

Can a story be co-authored by the player?

We came into Figment with a big question: what new forms of media would AI unlock? The one that gripped us first was the infinite story world, a story that could adapt and respond to anything the player does.

The challenge underneath every experiment turned out to be the same: how do you make a story crystallized enough to feel intentional, yet remixable enough that the player can do anything and the world still responds? Across these builds we learned how premise, objective, and gamification each offer a different answer.

Kim Kardashian Reality TV Game Reality TV doesn't run on a tight plot, it runs on interesting people and situations, so it felt like a forgiving place to start. We took Keeping Up with the Kardashians as a premise and tried to make two AI characters talk to each other in a way that stayed interesting. It was entertaining at first, but dialogue alone couldn't hold attention for long.

Feral Pooh A D&D-style horror game set in a dark Hundred Acre Wood, where Pooh has gone feral and your goal is to calm him down or let him be lost to the darkness. We added clearer stats, dice rolls, and a feral meter to test whether traditional gamification would deepen the experience. It was more fun and more visual, but the single objective was too narrow, so most playthroughs collapsed into the same two paths: soothe him, or push him over the edge.

Life Simulator If a tight objective flattened the story, what about one that is wide open? Life is the ultimate choose-your-own-adventure, so we let you simulate one: play as yourself or anyone else, set your own goal, and watch how that single choice sends the story somewhere completely different. This is where it clicked. Some people played eight or more hours a day.

Pocket People We pushed Life Simulator into a living dollhouse. Built on the open-source Beanheads library, I developed a full animation system on top of it so the characters could speak and emote, all driven by AI reading the transcript and deciding how each character should move and feel. You could talk to anyone in the house and learn about their lives, a choose-your-own-adventure that doubled as edutainment.

These games were genuinely fun, but they had a ceiling. The deeper issue was control: players couldn't author their own voice into the world. That sent us toward tools.