I Came to Read a Story. I Lived One Instead.

What happens when interactive fiction stops feeling like a game and starts feeling like a memory.

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I wasn't looking for a writing tool. I want to be clear about that, because most of what you read about AI and fiction is aimed at writers — people who want help producing manuscripts, or bloggers who want to generate content faster, or authors looking for a brainstorming partner.

I'm none of those things. I'm a person who reads a lot of fiction and plays a lot of video games and was curious what would happen if you put the two together.

What I found was something I wasn't prepared for.

The First Fifteen Minutes

I picked a genre — noir, because I'd just finished bingeing a detective series and was in the mood — and gave Skeinscribe a loose setup: a private investigator in a rain-soaked city, hired to find someone who might not want to be found. Standard stuff. The kind of premise you've seen a hundred times.

What I wasn't expecting was how quickly it stopped feeling standard.

Within the first few turns, I had a name, an office, a client sitting across from me who wouldn't make eye contact. The prose wasn't giving me options to select from a menu. It was painting a scene and then waiting — waiting for me to decide what to do, what to say, where to look. Not "Choose A, B, or C." Just an open prompt and a blinking cursor.

I typed: "I lean back in my chair and let the silence do the work. People always tell you more when you stop asking."

And the client started talking. Not in a way that felt scripted. In a way that felt like I'd actually applied pressure and something cracked. The details that came out were specific, contradictory, human. The kind of details that make you lean forward because you're not sure if this person is lying to you or just scared.

I was fifteen minutes in and I'd already forgotten I was interacting with an AI.

The Feeling of Agency

I've played choice-based narrative games. I've done interactive fiction. I've even done text adventures with AI chatbots. The difference here was something I'm still trying to articulate, but I think it comes down to this: in most interactive fiction, your choices are selections. In Skeinscribe, your choices are actions.

There's no dialogue wheel. No branching path that someone pre-wrote. When my PI decided to follow the client instead of going to the address she'd given me, that wasn't a choice the system had anticipated and prepared two branches for. It was a genuine decision I made based on a gut feeling that something was off about her story, and the narrative responded to it the way reality responds to decisions — consequentially, not cinematically.