mobile interactive fiction blog » Novel Guidelines http://www.mifiction.co.uk/blog Mon, 24 May 2010 08:47:47 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 The Basics of Mobile Interactive Fiction http://www.mifiction.co.uk/blog/novel_guidelines/the-basics-of-mobile-interactive-fiction/ http://www.mifiction.co.uk/blog/novel_guidelines/the-basics-of-mobile-interactive-fiction/#comments Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:42:20 +0000 admin http://www.mifiction.co.uk/blog/?p=8 We’ve done a bit of research into how and when people use their phones and what those phones are really capable of. Apparently, the average amount of time someone spends using an application or playing a game is around 20 minutes per section. These 20 minutes are actually more usually spent back at home rather than waiting for a bus or otherwise on the move. Display wise, the amount of text that can comfortably be read and scrolled through in a single section on the average mobile phone screen is quite small at around 200 words. Phones are also interactive of course, more so than a printed page, allowing the use of hyperlinks selected by the reader to go off to different sections and take different branches through a story. What does this mean for fiction on phones? Well, we came up with a few ground rules for the mobile interactive stories we want to publish:
1) Mobile interactive fiction stories are made up of chapters, each chapter containing a number of sections that link together to form paths through the story.
2) Each section should be on average 150 words in length – and definitely no more than 300 words.
3) In a 20 minute phone session about 10 to 15 sections can be read – so that gives us the average chapter being 10 to 15 sections long.
4) About 10 chapters seems to be about the right length for a full interactive story.
Following these basic rules results in mobile interactive fiction stories that tend to be fast paced, easy to read and give the writer a great interactive experience. There’s more guidelines and advice on writing mobile interactive fiction.

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