Introduction to You Are Email

I don't have any sort of game design background, but I love video games and have always been interested in writing a video game (I'm a writer!). I recently attended MDEV, the midwest's biggest conference for video game developers, and I sat in on a very interesting talk on narrative design where the guy talked about the different ways you can interact with a game in order to tell a story. His examples were from triple-A-type games, with music and cutscenes and all of the cool stuff games can do these days, but someone from the audience raised their hand and asked about visual novels -- which have fewer methods of interaction than, say, a first-person shooter.

He talked about telling a story through clicking on something or not clicking on something, which I thought was really fascinating as a stripped-down angle on video game design. So I thought about what kind of game could tell a story simply by what you do or do not click, which led me to text adventures, but I didn't like the idea of the clicking being abstracted in such a way that it was no different from hitting a button. I wanted to think of something where the medium  is part of the story, where you are interacting  with a narrative specifically by clicking or by not clicking.

And that brings us to You Are Email. The idea of the game is that you are interacting with a computer program, and the game subverts your expectations by reacting to your choices in potentially unexpected ways. I hope it's funny, but that's not necessarily The Point. I just wanted to see if I could wrap my head around a structured, interactive narrative like this from a writing perspective.

So, yeah. This is You Are Email. I hope you have some fun with it.