Alabaster

Official Website

A fractured fairy tale by John Cater, Rob Dubbin, Eric Eve, Elizabeth Heller, Jayzee, Kazuki Mishima, Sarah Morayati, Mark Musante, Emily Short, Adam Thornton, & Ziv Wities

Illustrated by Daniel Allington-Krzysztofiak

[i]The Queen has told you to return with her heart in a box. Snow White has made you promise to make other arrangements. Now that you're alone in the forest, it's hard to know which of the two women to trust. The Queen is certainly a witch — but her stepdaughter may be something even more horrible...

There are some eighteen possible endings to this fairy tale.

Some of them are even almost happy.[/i]

Alabaster is the result of an experiment in open authorship.

Emily Short wrote and released the introduction to the story; John Cater, Rob Dubbin, Eric Eve, Elizabeth Heller, Jayzee, Kazuki Mishima, Sarah Morayati, Mark Musante, Adam Thornton, and Ziv Wities then contributed conversation text. Every day or two, the game was recompiled and rereleased with waves of new material, allowing contributors to draw on one another's inventions. This period of writing took place around Halloween 2008.

Afterward, the game received further editing to improve continuity and conversation flow, and assorted testing and improvements to the environment. The plot that resulted is thus no single person's invention. (Those interested in the development process will find the whole thing charted in blog entries, back to the initial request for participants.)

Alabaster incorporates some 415 quips (snippets of conversation), many of which have further alternate versions depending on just when the player encounters them.