Why Tarinoi?

I first played a computer game in 1982 when my dad let me use his university account to log onto his department's Unix machine. I discovered rogue and my life was never the same. I started playing tabletop Dungeons & Dragons at around the same time. I was there as gaming branched out into interactive storytelling, adaptations of tabletop and board games, and entirely new genres. Somewhere along the line, they started to make me feel more complex things than just frustration and accomplishment.

Then there was Planescape: Torment. When I first spoke with Mourns-for-Trees I realised that there was something completely new here -- someone using this still relatively new medium to let me live a story that spoke to something more than just a power fantasy. It explored its themes in ways that felt deeply personal. The choices I was making as The Nameless One felt seen, weighty and consequential, without the trappings of the Chosen One saving the world from the Big Bad. "The medium has finally come of age," I remember thinking. "Nothing will ever be the same."

It took a while for those seeds to truly take root, but slowly, they did. From small-scale artistic explorations like Kentucky Route Zero to massive AAA projects like The Witcher 3 or Assassin's Creed: Origins, stories in games became bigger, richer, stronger. And from 2017 when I first met ZA/UM, I was slowly being drawn into the turmoil of making them. I saw first hand just how much harder it is to craft a story in a game than it is in a medium like TV, film, or literature.

Historically, story has been a sidequest in the game industry. I was shocked to learn that few major studios even have staff writers. Games are still often written by people who are developers first, writers second, and it is really hard for experienced writers to even consider game writing -- not just because the shape of the story is different, but because they don't have the kinds of tools that they rely on as screenwriters or other storytellers in other media. And during my years at ZA/UM I saw just how much of a difference it makes when they have tooling that supports them rather than fights them.

I also saw how hard it is to turn that story into a game. Even a simple piece of interactive fiction must track what you've done and branch accordingly. Something like Disco Elysium or Zero Parades models successes and failures, strengths and weaknesses, inner voices, skills, abilities, and reacts to and acknowledges what you said or did to shape your personality and they way you relate to the world through the course of the story. There are thousands of variables to track and complex mechanics to link to. It all has to go through QA. It has to be exported for localisation, and imported back in. The people working on voiceover need scripts and support for recording sessions. And all that, somehow, has to be tracked, organised, and produced in a world of finite time and resources.

I do want to make a living off Tarinoi, of course, but that's not my primary motivation for embarking on this adventure. I'm doing this because I love games as a medium for telling stories. I want to make a difference to them as a form of human expression. I want to generalise what I learned at ZA/UM, and bring everyone with a story to tell the tools to not just tell it, but deliver it. I want to give writers the space to create, and studios the means to deliver. Too many great visions have withered on the vine because they are too complex to execute. Therefore, Tarinoi.