You already make the work. What you want is the studio around it.
Five classes, 41 capabilities and
29 workbenches you keep. Say the unflattering part first:
this is not a video course. There are 22.4 recorded hours on this path
and every minute of them belongs to one class. What the other four give you instead
is a bench you work at — companions, catalogues, guided apps — and a live room on the day.
41capabilities, over 5 classes — 8.2 each,
the second-densest of the nine paths
29apps, workbooks and decks — 3 fully guided,
the kind that walks you through
91exercises to do with your hands, not watch
12the complexity it tops out at — Systematic,
where you are designing the system rather than working inside one
What is actually on the shelf
One class was filmed. Four were built.
The recordings are real and they are worth having, and they are all in one place.
Everywhere else the material went into the bench instead of the camera: the exercises
you do, and the apps that hold your hand while you do them. Here is every class,
measured, with nothing rounded up.
Critical Thinking and Creativity with AI
17 capabilities · reaches order 12 ·
how far you get alone: companion
The one with a camera on it. Ten sessions, 22.4 hours, and the widest
capability spread of anything on the path.
12 capabilities · reaches order 10 ·
how far you get alone: companion
No recordings. Instead: seven separate pieces of apparatus — a companion for the day,
a workbook, a structure atlas, a shape catalogue, an authoring toolkit and a
reflection journal — plus a live studio day.
5 capabilities · reaches order 12 ·
how far you get alone: guided app
No recordings. Instead: a fully guided app that takes you from an audience to a
campaign, and the deepest deck library in the school — 16 of them,
8 written in Spanish.
7 capabilities · reaches order 11 ·
how far you get alone: guided app
No recordings, and no date on the calendar yet. Instead: two guided apps and
34 exercises — the most of any class here — because pricing is
arithmetic you do rather than a talk you sit through.
2 capabilities · reaches order 9 ·
how far you get alone: no app yet
No recordings, no exercises, no app. A live room and the people in it. This is the
thinnest thing on the path and the page is not going to pretend otherwise.
Recorded
no recordings
Exercises
no exercises
The idea the intensive is built on
Stories are made of five shapes.
Branch, gate, loop, braid, hub. Every interactive story you have played is those five
composed in some order, and the whole craft is knowing what each one costs you.
Assemble a structure below and watch the arithmetic: passages you have to write against
playthroughs you get back, and the moment where you stop tracking paths and start
tracking state.
The story-shape composer
Click a shape to add it to the end of the structure. Click a piece in the strip to remove it.
Eight shapes is the ceiling here, which is about four more than most first stories want.
Start, then a two-way branch that reconverges, a gate on a decision you recorded earlier
and a loop you may re-enter up to three times, then the end.
11passages you have to write
16distinct playthroughs it yields
2state variables you have to track
1.5playthroughs per passage written
Every shape here is on the syllabus of The Interactive Fiction Intensive, along with
the two capabilities this toy is really about — transform a linear story into chained diamonds
and operate state so a branching story neither explodes nor rails. The catalogue of shapes is
/x/ink-shape-catalog; how they compose is
/x/shape-composition-guide; the day itself runs off
/x/if-companion and /x/if-intensive-workbook.
The thing nobody puts in the description
The Interactive Fiction Intensive is a programming class in a costume.
It is advertised as a day of writing, and it is one. It is also, capability for capability,
an introduction to the ideas a first programming course spends a term on — except that
nothing is abstract, because every one of them is a thing your story needs in order to work.
Six of its 12 capabilities are straightforwardly software.
Functionsproduce a function whose result depends on program state
State machinesoperate named states instead of magic numbers
Concurrencyoperate concurrent strands that surface at the right time
Persistenceoperate a recorded decision so a later branch depends on it
Abstractiongeneralise a worked example into something you reuse
Edge casescharacterise how your program behaves on paths you did not plan for
The order, and why it is that order
Five classes. Each stands on the one before it.
You learn to work a model before you build anything with one; you build a structure before
you try to move anybody with it; and you price the work before you decide what the work is.
That last inversion is deliberate and it is the one people argue with.
01
Critical Thinking and Creativity with AI
Next: 11 Sep
Where the path starts, because everything after it assumes you can get a model to do
what you meant. Also the class that teaches you to read a passage for the devices it
is using on you — which is the same skill, pointed the other way.
Runs under the cohort name “Creative Automation”.
produce a reusable system prompt [9]
generalise a reasoning prompt pattern [10]
elicit output from a model [9]
segment text into tokens and cost it [9]
parameterise an agent persona [10]
+ 12 more capabilities in this class
02
The Interactive Fiction Intensive
Next: 29 Aug
A studio day. You leave with a playable branching story on a public shelf, and with the
structural vocabulary the composer above is built out of.
produce a playable story from a running skeleton [9]
operate state so a branching story neither explodes nor rails [9]
transform a linear story into chained diamonds [9]
classify where ai can fill a shape and where it must not choose one [10]
publish a story to a public shelf and get it played [9]
+ 7 more capabilities in this class
03
Practical Propaganda
Not yet scheduled
Five capabilities and not one of them is soft. Naming an audience, surviving a hostile
reading, watching a claim degrade as it is retold, and measuring whether the thing you
made changed what anyone did.
name an audience and its success criterion [8]
design a channel that reaches people who are not looking for you [12]
characterise how a claim degrades as it is retold [10]
produce an explanation that survives a hostile reading [9]
measure whether an explanation changed what people did [11]
04
Founding Federation: Price and Ideate (Week 0)
Not yet scheduled
Week 0 comes before the idea. You work out what your life costs, what your hours are
actually worth, and what the floor under your price is — and then you go and have ideas
that clear it.
produce the three numbers your life costs [9]
transform naive hours into billable capacity [9]
operate a boundary on unpaid work [9]
parameterise an offering backwards from its floor [10]
classify which of your offerings can reach thrive not just survive [10]
+ 2 more capabilities in this class
05
Founding Federation: Build With Your Heart First
Not yet scheduled
Artists go straight into Cohort 2. There is no service line to build first, because for
you the creative work is the business.
produce a budget for work whose timeline you have observed [9]
execute a first touch outbound sequence on schedule [8]
The business end
Artists skip the service line.
Founding Federation normally has people build a service business first and get to the thing
they actually want later. Artists do not need that detour: the creative work is the business.
So this path enters at Cohort 2. What it does not let you skip is Week 0.
The order is the argument: price first, ideate second. An idea you had before you knew your
floor is an idea you cannot tell the good version of from the flattering one.
Then, directly
Founding Federation: Build With Your Heart First
A cohort: a room, the people in it, and an outbound sequence you actually run on a schedule.
2 capabilities, no recordings, no app. It is
the thinnest entry on this page, and it is the only one that is a standing commitment rather
than a day in the diary.
Neither Founding Federation block has a date on the calendar at the moment. The three taught
classes do.
And if you want the recordings above all else, take this seriously: there are
10 clips on this whole path. Buy it for the benches and the live rooms, or do not buy it.
Come and make something on a Saturday.
The next studio day is The Interactive Fiction Intensive on 29 August.
The room that carries the rest of it is Make & Do, Mon-Thu at 9:00 Pacific.
You leave with work, not notes: a playable story on a public shelf, a campaign you can defend
under hostile reading, and a price you can say out loud.