Post-Apocalyptic Interactive Fiction and Scarcity

Post-apocalyptic interactive fiction is not really about the collapse. It is about what a small number of things are worth afterward: a can, a battery, a name somebody still answers to. The ones worth an evening make your world smaller as you move through it, and charge you something you can name for every choice.

• The real subject of post-apocalyptic interactive fiction is scarcity and memory, not combat.
• Inform’s Recipe Book advises authors to “simulate the least amount of realism possible, but no less” when modeling something like water.
• Inform’s Thirst example holds a drinking vessel in three states — full, half-empty, empty — instead of counting out quantities.
• In ink, every choice is once-only by default, so the set of things you can still do shrinks as the story runs.
• A ruin only works as a setting when you can still read what the building was for.

What is post-apocalyptic interactive fiction actually about?

It has two subjects, and combat is neither. The first is scarcity: how little there is, who else wants it, and what you will give up to keep it. The second is memory, meaning the world before, still legible in the wreckage, and your slow work of reconstructing it. A story that spends its pages on firefights has usually abandoned both.

The difference shows up in how each ordinary element gets handled.

Element	Treated as a system	Treated as fiction
Food	a hunger meter that empties on a timer	one can, and who else knows you have it
Water	litres tracked to the decimal place	a bottle that is full, half-empty or empty
Ruins	a loot table with respawn rules	a building whose purpose you can still read
Survivors	hostiles with a threat rating	people who want one specific thing from you

Nothing in the right-hand column needs more machinery than the left. It needs particularity. A can of peaches with a price sticker from before the collapse carries more information than a food value of twelve, and it costs the writer one clause.

Why scarcity reads better than combat

Because a fight ends and a shortage does not. A gunfight resolves inside one scene, and when it is over the story needs a fresh reason to continue. Half a tank of fuel is a question that returns at every fork in the road, and what you decided last time changes what this decision costs.

Scarcity also turns into character without anyone announcing it. The reader who rations water and the reader who drinks it are different people by the third hour, and neither needed a trait list to get there. Choices about supplies are choices about what kind of person is making them, which is the thing a stat block can only gesture at.

The empty gun is the useful one

A loaded weapon shortens scenes. An unloaded one, carried anyway, is a bluff you have to keep up, and every conversation runs through it. The same logic applies to a radio with a dying battery or a map with a corner torn off. Objects that almost work generate more pages than objects that work.

How do authored systems track supplies?

With the smallest model that still produces consequences. Inform, the long-standing system for parser interactive fiction, is blunt about this. Its Recipe Book says liquids “are notoriously difficult to simulate well”, that “a fully thorough approach consumes endless storage and can be very finicky to write”, and concludes: “Good advice for handling liquids is to simulate the least amount of realism possible, but no less.”

The manual’s own quantitative example is almost comically small. In its Thirst recipe, “we could have a drinking vessel from which we draw in sips, so that it can be full, half-empty or empty”. Three states, no arithmetic. For food, the Recipe Book describes an example in which “hunger causes the player problems unless they regularly find and eat food” — a consequence rather than a number on the screen. Both chapters are in the Inform Recipe Book.

Choice-based tools produce a kind of scarcity whether the author asks for it or not. The guide to ink, inkle’s narrative scripting language, states that “by default, every choice in the game can only be chosen once”, and that keeping an option available requires marking it as sticky. Read a branching story for an hour and the page genuinely has fewer things on it than when you started. The behavior is documented in Writing with ink.

A live narrator has none of this bookkeeping unless somebody builds it. In Fabledrift, an interactive fiction app for Android, every scene is written by a narrator that is handed the story’s structured memory — facts, characters, places, promises — on each turn, so a canteen emptied in the fourth scene is still empty in the twentieth. The alternative is the failure every reader of generated fiction knows: supplies that quietly restock. We have written about holding inventory in AI stories without an item screen at more length.

The ruins are a memory problem, not a map problem

A ruin earns its place in the story when you can still tell what it was for. Legible wreckage beats spectacular wreckage every time, because legibility is what lets you do the arithmetic the subgenre runs on: this was a pharmacy, pharmacies had a back room, back rooms had a safe, somebody has already been here.

One dated detail does more than a paragraph of devastation. A price list, a school timetable, a child’s height marked up a doorframe in pencil: each one fixes when the world stopped and how ordinary the morning was. The failure mode is a landscape of generic rubble, which tells you that something terrible happened and nothing else. Surfaces are the trap of every furnished genre, which is why cyberpunk interactive fiction needs no neon to be cyberpunk.

Memory matters on your side of the page too. The detail you noticed in the first hour is the one that should pay off in the fourth, and it will only pay off if the story has kept it. In Fabledrift a reader can write a note the narrator has to treat as true, which is the simplest version of the same bargain: you remember something, and the story agrees to remember it with you.

Who else survived, and what do they want?

At least one other person has to want what you are carrying, or scarcity is only weather. The subgenre’s best scenes are trades: a stranger with antibiotics and no water, a settlement that will let you in for something you would rather keep. Threat ratings cannot produce those scenes, because a threat only has one verb.

Give every survivor a want you could write on a card, and the wasteland starts behaving like a society rather than a hazard. That is a general rule of the form — side characters in interactive fiction want things — but it bites hardest here, where wanting and having are the whole plot.

Your first hour after the collapse

Post-apocalyptic interactive fiction rewards a reader who behaves like a scavenger instead of a soldier, and the first hour is where that habit sets.

• Count something. Pick one resource and track it yourself. A number you are keeping is felt; a number the story displays is read and forgotten.
• Read the labels. Signage, packaging and paperwork are the cheapest facts about what this place was and who else has been through it.
• Spend early, once. Burn one scarce thing in the first hour deliberately. It tells you whether the story charges you honestly or is only decorating.
• Ask what the building was. Before you search a room, decide what it was for. The search goes better and the setting stops being rubble.
• Keep one useless thing. A photograph, a key to a door that no longer exists. Stories about scarcity need one object that is only worth something to you.

A collapse is a setting that hands the writer scarcity, memory and a reason nobody is coming, all three for free. Read for what the story does with them, and the ruins turn out to be the least interesting thing in the book.