Emily Short is a narrative design consultant with a special interest in interactive dialogue.

Emily is the primary author of over two dozen works of interactive fiction, including Galatea and Alabaster, which focus on conversation as the main form of interaction; Mystery House Possessed, which creates a mystery with a randomly chosen, AI-driven murderer on each playthrough; and First Draft of the Revolution, an interactive epistolary novella. Her more puzzle-focused work includes the critically acclaimed wordplay game Counterfeit Monkey.

She has provided a variety of content creation, world-building, and narrative systems design services for large and small clients including ngmoco:), ArenaNet, and Failbetter Games, as well as finished white-label games for advertising and publishing clients. She is also part of the team behind Inform 7, a natural-language programming language for creating interactive fiction, where she assisted in feature design and wrote over 300 code examples included in the standard manual.

Emily’s work has been exhibited at the Library of Congress and distributed as part of the collection of the Electronic Literature Organization. She has spoken about interactive storytelling at GDC, PAX East, Indiecade, Practice, Inventing the Future of Games, MIT, UC Santa Cruz, the University of Pennsylvania, NYU, Oxford Brookes University, and the University of Passo Fundo, Brazil. She will next appear as a keynote speaker at the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling in Singapore.