2025 Speakers
Emily Short, Freelancer, Independent
Emily Short works in interactive fiction, narrative design, and conversation modeling, and was a creative director for three years at Failbetter Games, a British studio focused on narrative. She also has a PhD in Classical Studies, focusing on the role of the god Hermes in Athenian drama, and writes occasionally on classical reception in video games. She has created over two dozen works of interactive fiction, including the award-winning Galatea, a reworking of the Pygmalion myth; the interactive epistolary story First Draft of the Revolution; and Counterfeit Monkey, a wordplay puzzle game that addresses issues of language and democracy. She is part of the design team behind the interactive fiction creation languages Inform 7 and Versu. Her work has been collected by the Electronic Literature Organization and displayed at the Library of Congress, among other venues. Her practice explores how systems of play can support rewarding forms of highly personal and human storytelling, how conversation actions and social gestures can be made into meaningful game mechanics in place of the mechanics of violence, and how authoring tools can be designed around the requirements of these new forms of art.
