Emily Short
Interactive fiction writer known for psychologically complex NPCs.
Emily Short, a creator of interactive fiction, first gained attention with her 2000 debut Galatea, noted for its psychologically layered non-player characters. She served as creative director at Failbetter Games, the studio known for Fallen London and its related titles, from 2020 through 2023. Described as a longtime visionary in text-based games, Short has produced more than forty works of interactive fiction. Her contributions to the 2011 The IF Theory Reader include the chapters on broad geography challenges and NPC conversation systems, and she also penned a regular interactive fiction column for Rock Paper Shotgun.
Quick Facts
- Spouse
- Graham Nelson
- Known for
- Galatea, Counterfeit Monkey
Facts from the source article.
Career
In 2011, Emily Short and Richard Evans founded Little TextPeople to investigate how interactive fiction could convey emotion. Linden Lab bought the company in early 2012, but let Short go in 2014, which also ended her work on the Versu engine. She then established the Oxford and London Interactive Fiction Group. By September 2016, Short was working at Spirit AI, a small firm focused on machine learning and language processing; she joined its board in 2018 and later became Chief Product Officer. She became creative director at Failbetter Games in January 2020, leaving that role in January 2024. Short also serves on the advisory board of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation.
Interactive fiction
A number of Short's works have won acclaim at the XYZZY Awards, an annual popular-choice award for interactive fiction. Her work has been described by reviewers in terms that range from "mesmerizing" to "frustrating." Her 2003 work City of Secrets was originally commissioned by a San Francisco synth-pop band, but after they left the project, she completed it on her own. Of over 11,000 games in the Interactive Fiction Database in July 2021, Short's game Counterfeit Monkey held the top spot in the IFDB Top 100. In addition to this, another five of Short's games—Savoir-Faire, City of Secrets, Bronze, Metamorphoses, and Bee—qualified into the top 100. While many of Short's early games were written in Inform, she later experimented with a variety of formats, including Versu (an engine for plot-heavy interactive fiction later scrapped by Linden Lab), Varytale (for which she developed Bee), and a custom engine by Liza Daly with help from inkle for First Draft of the Revolution. Short wrote most of the 300+ programming examples in the documentation and created two full-length demo games for release with Graham Nelson's Inform 7.
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