ly intersects with implementation considerations (code design – what are the pieces of my code). Authoring tools, such as Inform or StorySpace, tend to freeze this relationship by offering a language/tool that makes a specific kind of story piece (e.g. a physical object, a text node) have a clean, one-to-one relationship with code structures (e.g. the object-oriented representation of a physical object in Inform). This is powerful in that the authoring tool itself embodies the design wisdom of a technical genre, but limiting in that the tool inhibits radical movement into other parts of the design space. Different points in the design space require novel architectural elaborations; the process of conceiving of novel story segmentations requires a simultaneous concern with authorial and implementation considerations.
When thinking about the entire space of things that might be called interactive narrative, what approaches have other people found useful?