Magic Words - Interactive Fiction in the 21st Century

An anonymous reader writes "1UP has just published a nine-part article on Interactive Fiction, the politically correct name for what used to be called text adventure games (e.g. Zork, Stationfall, etc.). The feature includes an overview of the genre and its history, lengthy interviews with the genre's leading current creators, and resources for aspiring IF writers. Anyone who has fond memories of typing their way through dank caverns or outsmarting leather goddesses and ravenous bugblatter beasts with nothing but a keyboard should read this -- not just for the nostalgia, but to see what's become of the format."

Comments

Modern Inter-Fic

[mekkab]

Videlectrix hasn't forgotten the "magic" that is interactive fiction!

P.S.- how do you get past the sous-chef?!

Re:Modern Inter-Fic

[CmdrSam]

Hint -- you got an item from the doctor...

--Sam L-L

Re:Modern Inter-Fic

[sahonen]

Ugh, this reminds me of why I hate text adventures. open drawer with key, that does not computeth, use key in drawer, that does not computeth, unlock drawer with key, that does not computeth. Can someone tell me how to unlock a freaking drawer that would have taken two clicks in a graphical adventure game?

Re:Modern Inter-Fic

[stefanlasiewski]

Bah... after I get the map, can I deal with Ripberger? I just get to a screen that says "This is serious!" after everything I type...

Re:Modern Inter-Fic

[stefanlasiewski]

two clicks in a graphical adventure game?'

Well, this is a text adventure game, and often the answers are two words, so maybe you should try to unlock drawer or something.

Re:Modern Inter-Fic

[Tyir]

just do "talk ripberger"

Re:Modern Inter-Fic

[gilrain]

Strong Bad, over at homestarrunner.com, shares your frustration.

Re:Modern Inter-Fic

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone tell me how to unlock a freaking drawer that would have taken two clicks in a graphical adventure game?

Whereas in graphic adventures you generally have so few options that there's hadly a game there at all. You don't have to have a clue why clicking on X and then Y will work, so long as you try it at some point. You wanted to shoot the guy but it decided you wanted to just wave the gun at him a bit and hey, it worked, well done, ready for the next puzzle you won't have to solve?

Or alternatively it'll let you pick from a list of keywords and isn't that "menace" option when you click gun a bit of a give away? Maybe you should try that...

Text adventures at least leave a little more room for creativity and imagination.

Re:Modern Inter-Fic

[Bambi Dee]

Just to state the blatantly obvious, it understandeth not because it's a Flash thingie parodying Scott-Adams-style 16KB adventures, though probably not in 16KB. Modern-day IF (such as the interviewed authors') typically uses the Inform or TADS parser/world model libraries which will, of course, handle "unlock drawer with key" just fine, as well as "take all keys except the pink one out of the bottom drawer, then put them on the keyring" (well, something similarly pedantic anyway).

Re:Modern Inter-Fic

[mekkab]

I think "get key" while in the office works. yeah, its wierd. All conversation consists of "speak to xxxx", except AFTER you're already speaking to xxx, then you can just say "yyyy" hunh?

Which is what makes it perfect!

Re:Modern Inter-Fic

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me like you just have an issue with graphical adventures.
I always prefered games like Half Life, Dues Ex and GTA3 which, to my mind at least, allowed for lots of creativity in the way in which you solved problems. Sure you had specific tasks that had to be completed to move on to the next level, etc. but so do text based games. All games, text or graphical, are going to have some kind of linearity. Otherwise whats the point?

Re:Modern Inter-Fic

[sahonen]

Click-on-it-with-everything-in-your-inventory is sooo much different than hunt-the-verb and all its variations. =D

The trick that a good graphical adventure will do is try to hide the puzzle/solution in the scenery, or make it just sort of blend in, something it would be difficult for a text to do without having a lot of very verbose scene descriptions. What ends up happening, is you don't do the clicking spree on it because it doesn't occur to you to, it's just part of the scenery, until you come across a puzzle where it suddenly occurs to you that that piece of scenery will come in handy. In Sierra adventures, objects you're supposed to interact with tend to stand out a LOT from the scenery, so it's kind of a giveaway, but in SCUMM adventures they blend in really nicely.

XYZZY

[So Called Expert]

Graphics are great, but the resolution on my imagination is awesome, and the refresh rate is much better than what you can get today.

I miss Infocom... not only did they have the best games (at the time, and I daresay the games still are more fun than a lot of the flashy color thingys those kids play nowadays), Infocom had the best packaging, bar none.

They knew that people would copy the disks, but they also knew if you threw in some 3d glasses, a small piece of pocket fuzz, and a plastic mask, people would gladly pay them anyway.

Re:XYZZY

[Aardpig]

I miss Infocom... not only did they have the best games (at the time, and I daresay the games still are more fun than a lot of the flashy color thingys those kids play nowadays), Infocom had the best packaging, bar none.

I'm not sure whether its still in the shops, but a few years ago I bought the Lost Treasures of Infocom, which brings together many of their best games. Unfortunately, you don't get the actual memorabilia -- just a large book with pictures of all the items which accompany each game.

Infocom were indeed great -- their games had such a wonderful depth. However, many of the modern post-Infocom IF games, such as Curses, Jigsaw, Christminster, A Change in the Weather, really are fantastic -- even bigger and more sophisticated than the original Infocom stuff. All of these games are free (as in beer), and can easily be found on the internet.

Remember: it's dark and you are likely to be eaten by a Grue.

Re:XYZZY

[Dukael_Mikakis]

Yeah, unfortunately, gamers these days are from an entirely different generation than those of 10 - 20 years ago.

With MTV and flashy graphics and an emphasis on getting a quick hit, it seems like entertainment requiring "investment" is falling from our culture. Sports games are designed to have mere 5 minute quarters, there are FPS that allow you to jump in get 10 kills and bail, and many good television shows containing a consistent storyline (rather than the flavor-of-the-week variety) don't end up being so successful (running jokes/themes aside).

It's likewise no surprise that the old computer game staples (adventure games, text games, those ASCII RPGs) are becoming increasingly less popular.

But perhaps there is hope. Books (something I deem to be a yardstick for people's interest in imaginative entertainment and attention-span -- as true or not as it may be) have been selling increasingly more.

People say that books are a dying medium, but perhaps some life remains with the success of Harry Potter and perhaps the frequent coupling of Hollywood blockbusters with current novels.

But I guess we'll have to see if games start taking a new route, themselves.

Re:XYZZY

[eostrom]

And a while after that, there was Masterpieces of Infocom, which didn't even come with a book, just a CD with I think all but one of the text games, and a whole lot of PDF.

Re:XYZZY

[irhtfp]

There's a huge collection that was put out by Activision (Infocom) called Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom . They don't publish it any more AFAIK but you can pick it up on ebay for $60 to $80 bucks. It includes:

Arthur: the Quest for Excalibur
Ballyhoo
Beyond Zork
Border Zone
Bureaucracy
Cutthroats
Deadline
Enchanter
Hollywood Hijinx
Infidel
Journey
Leather Goddesses of Phobos
The Lurking Horror
A Mind Forever Voyaging
MoonMist
Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It
Planetfall
Plundered Hearts
Seastalker
Sherlock in the Riddle of the Crown Jewels
Sorcerer
Spellbreaker
Starcross
Stationfall
Suspect
Suspended
Trinity
Wishbringer
The Witness
Zork I
Zork II
Zork III
Zork Zero

Zork I, II and III are available for free here:

http://www.infocom-if.org/download s/downloads.html

Re:XYZZY

[dilby]

Plus, I seem to remember* owning a book that gave you complete(?) instructions on how to programm your own in BASIC on a C64.

Of course my brains mostlt mush now due to beer.

Re:XYZZY

[spirality]

Everquest, IMHO, beats the hell out of any text adventure I ever played, ever!

It also is extremely popular and requires a good deal time, i.e. investment, to play and play well.

Of course, no game is a substitute for reading or writing something. I do not ever begin to believe the written word is dying. Even if 90% of what is published is garbage, there is a ton of very good stuff that is decades, nay even centuries old. Pick up some of those...

-Craig.

Re:XYZZY

[Anonymous Coward]

Note: it does not include Shogun due to licensing problems. (No big loss, in my opinion. It is about my least favorite of their games.)

Re:XYZZY

[Futaba-chan]

Graphics are great, but the resolution on my imagination is awesome, and the refresh rate is much better than what you can get today.

From the author's perspective, my entry in this year's IF competition is going to be a Western that spends a lot of time as a character study of its main NPC, and whose overall theme centers on making difficult moral choices in an uncertain and multipolar world. In any other genre, it would be difficult or impossible to round up the large team that I'd need to implement such a thing, and who would play it? In IF, if I can execute it properly, I can really make the concept work.

Re:XYZZY

[stwrtpj]

I'm not sure whether its still in the shops, but a few years ago I bought the Lost Treasures of Infocom, which brings together many of their best games.

What's really cool about these games is that the data files for the games are platform-agnostic. I originally bought a Lost Treasures before I became a 100% Linux convert, and to my delight discovered that the Linux port of the Inform parser ran these games perfectly from the data files. Same thing when I got a hold of some old Scott Adams game files and the parser for it.

Re:XYZZY

[Goldfinger7400]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That disc is worth eighty bucks?

>search desk drawer

You find a good deal of papers, magazines, empty soda cans etc., but alas, nothing valuable.

>open closet

As you tug open the door of the dusty closet, you can feel something tumbling behind it. You realize a bit too late that it's your collection of antique farming implements.

**** You have died. ****

YOUR SCORE WAS 0 OUT OF A POSSIBLE 80.

QUIT, RESTART, RESTORE?

Re:XYZZY

[fleacircus]

it seems like entertainment requiring "investment" is falling from our culture This is a common complaint but you are forgetting The Sims and Everquest which are hardly fire-it-up-and-gee-whiz sorts of games. Nor are they particularly unpopular.

Re:XYZZY

[fenix down]

Goddamn, U think you just accidentally deciphered a "what the fuck is she talking about?" conversation I had like 6 exes back. I was trying to get her to play Mario Kart or something, and she started complaining about how video games were hard. I said something stupid about having to play a little and then you'll get good, and then she said "no, no, I mean, why do they make it so you loose if you're not any good?" Then I probably said "bitch, you be trippin'" and then she probably kicked me in the nuts and went home, but now I think I get it!

You have a few text games (usually recent ones that aren't commercial, I can't think of a name, but I know I remember playing one with a mansion and some french guys that I never finished) that aren't puzzles or anything. You don't pick the wrong road and get eaten by a monkey plant or anything, you just participate in a story. You can die, but it's not like you have to keep replaying over and over to find the one way out that doesn't have a dragon hiding in it. More role playing, less game.

Now, I hate RPGs, in general, but I liked Knights of the Old Republic. I played through once, being evil as possible, and then I went back and played through as good as possible. Then I wanted to go back and do a few things differently, but I actually didn't want to do all the shooting and light-sabreing. I just wanted to go around being a Jedi and meddling in galactic intrigue. And just now I realized I probably would've bought the game (in retrospect anyway) if it had just been the talking and the picking where to go next with the battle money spent on more depth.

It's like one of the movies only you can make your Jedi force-choke the bajesus out of the annoying computer-generated locals whenever you want! That's where you need to go. I bet there are a lot of people who just hate having to do the "storming the building over and over until you don't die" thing that makes finally beating it more fun for me. No puzzles, no gratuitous item-hunting, just a branching storyline you get to move around in.

Of course, I'll start making fun of this genre the moment it appears, just like with RPGs, but I bet it'd make some money.

Re:XYZZY

[Tonith]

Meh, I wouldn't say that. I'm only seventeen, and I revel more in a game of Zork (or more frequently, MUDs) than my long-standing addictions to Asheron's Call. While I do enjoy some modern games, I find myself more frequently looking for the excellent storylines and intricacies of older games (older to me means mid-nineties, seeing as I'm not that old myself) such as the Super Famicom Final Fantasies, the old Dragon Warriors on Famicom, and the text worlds of my first video game addictions; MUDs and MOOs. The realm of interactive fiction extends itself not only through a single-player world, but even moreso in multiple user dimensions where roleplaying is enforced. The people become the storylines; their illustrious descriptions create the 32-bit graphics, rather than waiting for the stale, polygon graphics of Everquest or AC. As far as a lack of investment... I "invested" about two months of real time over six years to one of my favorite MUDs, a good month of real time to Asheron's Call, and the average console game I play lasts a good 30-50 hours. There's a lot of us mature younger gamers who don't mind that kind of investment.

Maybe I'm just speaking for a small demographic of younger gamers who'd rather sit down and create a world of their own with graphics of the mind, but I can't see a blanket statement that gamers are completely different than those of twenty years ago being true. Us young folks still have imaginations too. ;)

Re:XYZZY

[ultranova]

Everquest, IMHO, beats the hell out of any text adventure I ever played, ever!

Of course, no game is a substitute for reading or writing something.

Now I'm curious. How did you play those text advedntures without reading ? On the other hand, it would explain why you didn't like them >:)...

Anyway, the best scifi experience I've ever had was with the game Star Control 2 (with Knights of the Old Republic at the second place). Which, as it happens, has been translated for modern machines and can be played for free. Ur-Quan worm, here I come !

Re:XYZZY

[pandrijeczko]

It's not strictly legal but you can always go get yourself a copy of Frotz and then go trawl some of the ROM and emulation sites for Infocom games - because they released a lot of the games for the Commodore Amiga, Apple II, Commodore 64, etc., you can download the ROMs and then strip the data files out to run the games in Frotz. (There are utilities that will do this.)

Alternatively, if you have Usenet access, go take a look in the alt.binaries.emulation.misc or alt.binaries.emulation.tosec groups which have a lot of ROMs regularly posted in there.

Re:XYZZY

[Anonymous Coward]

Play online in your web browser at

http://www.forkexec.com/html/play-zork1.html

Re:XYZZY

[jonadab]

> and to my delight discovered that the Linux port of the Inform parser ran
> these games perfectly

It wouldn't be the Inform parser (to use that, you'd need source, but the source
would be in ZIL and would not be compatible with Inform...) but the z-machine
emulator (probably Frotz). Also, if it surprised you that you could run the
games in Linux, you obviously aren't the least bit familiar with the IF
community. z-machine (version 3) binaries are probably the third most portable
format, after ASCII text and HTML3.2. There are z-machine emulators for types
of computer systems that you've never heard of, 8-bit microcomputers, university
minicomputers, mainframes, handheld devices too small and unpowerful to have
Perl or Java, systems that don't have a GUI, systems that *only* have a GUI
and no text-mode library, systems without a filesystem, most programmable
calculators, and certain brands of wristwatches. You name a data format, it's
less portable (except, as mentioned, ASCII text and HTML3.2).

Re:XYZZY

[argStyopa]

Or you *could* get all of them for free at http://www.the-underdogs.org/company.php?name=Info com

Bandwidth friendly games, Suspended is 86k zipped LOL.

Of course, that's like the last site in the universe that needs a good slashdotting.

Re:XYZZY

[jonadab]

> Everquest, IMHO, beats the hell out of any text adventure I ever played, ever!

I saw a guy playing Everquest for about an hour once. He was an experienced
player at the game, but during the whole hour (I was bored; my other choice,
besides watching him, was to listen to people yack about sports and junk),
he didn't actually *accomplish* anything in the game. He killed some bad
things and picked up a couple of items, then visited a city. Whoo. Sure
made me wonder why he pays a monthly fee for this. I think you have to be
into the whole RPG thing.

The best computer game probably that I have ever played is Curses, although
Descent and Scorched Earth were pretty good too, in their day, and are still
fun from time to time.

Re:XYZZY

[Anonymous Coward]

REBOOT (Windows)

Re:XYZZY

[Tackhead]

> People say that books are a dying medium, but perhaps some life remains with the success of Harry Potter and perhaps the frequent coupling of Hollywood blockbusters with current novels.

> INVENTORY
You have:
- Turkey sandwich
- $8.00
- The latest Harry Potter Novel

> ENTER THEATER

You pay $8.00 and enter the theater. The concession stand is to the East. The screening room is to the North.

> N

You enter the screening room.

> WAIT

It becomes dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

You are hungry.

> WAIT

The trailers for coming attractions have started. It is no longer dark. (A nearby grue flees in terror.)

You are very hungry.

> WATCH THE SCREEN

Keanu Reaves is reading a Slashdot post that reads "People say that books are a dying medium, but perhaps some life remains with the success of Harry Potter and perhaps the frequent coupling of Hollywood blockbusters with current novels."

You are starving!

> PONDER THE FREQUENT COUPLING OF HOLLYWOOD BLOCKBUSTERS WITH CURRENT NOVELS

You are disctracted by a trailer for Turkey Time for Harry! Order of the Gigli, featuring three hours of J-Lo and Ben Affleck repeatedly skullfucking the corpse of J.K. Rowling.

You are faint with hunger.

> EAT TURKEY SANDWICH

Not bloody likely.

*** You have died ***
Your score is +5, Funny. Would you like to play again, load a saved game, or quit?

Re:XYZZY

[Tackhead]

> I saw a guy playing Everquest for about an hour once. He was an experienced player at the game, but during the whole hour (I was bored; my other choice, besides watching him, was to listen to people yack about sports and junk), he didn't actually *accomplish* anything in the game. He killed some bad things and picked up a couple of items, then visited a city. Whoo. Sure made me wonder why he pays a monthly fee for this. I think you have to be into the whole RPG thing.

I think it's worse than that - you have to be into the whole MMORPG thing to put up with dreck like Evercrack.

RPGs are fun - Wizardry Gold, Ultima IV, and so on.

IF is fun - Infocom games are all about role-playing, after all, and by using words to describe mental states, can provide similarly immersive experiences.

MMORPGs are intrinsically un-fun. It's all about repeatedly pressing the same buttons to get the XP to get to the next level to... but there is no goal. Other than to keep paying your monthly subscription fee.

That fee could go into designing content to rival the best single-player RPGs, and adding it to the game every month.

But it doesn't. It's cheaper to keep the money and lengthen the treadmill -- because people like the guy you described are happy to grind mindlessly on the treadmill for days, weeks, months on end, and the MMORPG company can pocket the change. Why write a good story into a game if you can make the same amount of money by catering to a playerbase drooling fucknozzles who'll pay you not to write a story?

SOE's other masterpiece, Star Wars Galaxies, is the same formula as Evercrack with a Star Wars skin around it, and even longer grind cycle. Other MMORPGs are fundamentally the same at heart.

Players are finally waking up to this, and are demanding fun for their dollar. Which probably explains why more and more MMORPGs are failing or being cancelled before release. Thank God.

Re:XYZZY

[JDWTopGuy]

This is a repost of something I posted a while back.

Slashdot should be a text adventure game.

You are on the main page, generated for you by a beowulf cluster of soviet russians.

There is a troll's keyboard here.
> GET KEYBOARD
You are now carrying the troll's keyboard.

Suddenly, a vicious troll appears and begins throwing flamebait at you!
> THROW KEYBOARD AT TROLL
You hit the troll!
The troll vanishes in a puff of smoke!

There is a troll's keyboard here.
> GET KEYBOARD
You are now carrying the troll's keyboard.
> NORTH
You are in a maze of duplicate stories, all alike.
> HELP
Mark rooms with the EVIL bit to tell if you've been there before.
> SCORE
With a karma of 28, you are a witty wanderer. Only 60 more points to become a wizard!

Re:XYZZY

[spirality]

You should read and write independent of playing games. That's what I meant. You totally took me out of context! :)

-Craig.

Archive of IF games

[smr2x]

http://www.ifarchive.org/ seems like the right place for all you nostalgic types... or the curious ;-)

Re:Archive of IF games

[Anonymous Coward]

Obvious exits are [N]orth, [S]outh, [E]ast, and [D]ennis.

Re:Archive of IF games

[irhtfp]

Try ashes.exe (archive) at:

http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXstarte r s.html

It's got two of the most popular interpreters and about 50 games. It's a great place to start if you want to get back into the IF scene.

I recommend "Curses" as a first start. It's big, has good puzzles and a great dry wit.

Re:Archive of IF games

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool, downloading it now and getting about 1200bps. Ah, the nostalgia is already starting.

Re:Archive of IF games

[tqft]

Firefox extension to play games in z-machine format - needs testers

http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/#gnusto

Gnusto
by marnanel
Version: 0.6.0
File Size: 143 KB
Updated: 2003-09-01

Play adventure games available in the Z-machine format.

http://gnusto.mozdev.org/

excessive gaming vs excessive reading

[stonebeat.org]

last year somebody died of excessing gaming (maybe one of those Interactive Fiction games), trying to go through this NINE-part article made me wanna kill myself. ;)

Re:excessive gaming vs excessive reading

[s4m7]

yeah. reading is hard and it makes my eyes go twitchy. is there anything good on tv?

Re:excessive gaming vs excessive reading

[sinergy]

He was playing Counter-Strike.

Re:excessive gaming vs excessive reading

[Bingo Foo]

There is an article here.
> read article
I don't know how to "read".

There is an article here.
>

Re:excessive gaming vs excessive reading

[Cus]

...or even more infuriating for Scott Adams adventurers:

> read article
Sorry, I can't do that...YET!

Interactive Books

[dotwaffle]

Anyone remember interactive books? Yeah, remember those? Like, you were given a decision, turn to 461 for hit him, 421 for run away, 124 for invite him to dinner. They were good... Much better than text games, for a start I don't have to stare at a screen...

Re:Interactive Books

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone remember interactive books?

I think I've heard of those. You start on page 1 and progress through them sequentially to the end, right? Pretty cool technology...I can't wait to see where they go with it.

Re:Interactive Books

[boobox]

Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch is a good example of what I guess you'd call an interactive book (pre-internet hypertext? Written in 1966). There were, if memory serves, a couple of ways to read the book; one was to "hop" to certain chapters in a prescribed order.

Re:Interactive Books

[Kris_J]

You mean these? Yep, I currently have to walk around three piles of them to sit at my PC at home.

Re:Interactive Books

[Kris_J]

d'oh! (Actually, that mistake will probably drop the traffic to my little site to something it can cope with.)

Re:Interactive Books

[OECD]

Anyone remember interactive books?

Remember them? I still have them...

Interactive books might be the ultimate geek test.

If you were willing to try and figure out the world-view of the game designer by hit-and-miss selection, congratulations: you're a geek. If you read it once or twice, and chucked it because too much of it was the same as the last time you read it... well, I guess you'd be a 'trusted user' or somesuch.

Same goes with text adventures (or whatever the kids call them thesedays. BTW, how do you get by the bulldozer?)

Re:Interactive Books

[Anonymous Coward]

Correction: written in 1963, translated to English in 1966.

Re:Interactive Books

[Anonymous Coward]

They were funny, until I graduated elementary school.

Re:Interactive Books

[Bodrius]

As outstanding as the book is, I wouldn't call it "interactive fiction". The plot is static, if open to interpretation (like any good fiction).

It was an excercise in literary techniques. The "out-of-sequence" process you mention was just another postmodernist toy, and not the most radical in its school by any means (although more readable, therefore successful).

It could be seen as a natural progression from previous experiments in sequence, back to Borges (whom I think Cortazar admired specially).

Re:Interactive Books

[Fwonkas]

Dear god. I remember how I used to read them. I'd go through them once or twice, but while flipping pages I'd see some situation or ending that I liked. So I'd try to find out how to get to that point by finding what pages led to it. And what pages led to them, etc. That's right, I reverse-engineered Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books.

Re:Interactive Books

[froody]

Lie down in front of it, just like in the book.

Tim

Re:Interactive Books

[Drantin]

Lay(lie?) down in front of it... haven't you ever read the books? (I assume you were referring to HitchHiker's Guide?)

Re:Interactive Books

[OECD]

Lie down in front of it, just like in the book.

Yeah, that was the obvious (having read the book) thing to do. But then what? I would just be lieing there. Nobody came along to take me to a pub :-(

Re:Interactive Books

[Anonymous Coward]

BTW, how do you get by the bulldozer?

> lie in mud

Then wait a few times, Ford shows up, and he fixes things up for you.

The trick is, how do you get Arthur to get up out of the mud? :-)

Re:Interactive Books

[boobox]

Yes, you are correct.

It's been a while since I read it, so I did a little Googling and found this interesting article by Phil Goetz here.

Here's a relevant quote:

"Hypertext is text with links. Links take you from one text to another. Sometimes there is a default linear path which the reader can follow through the narrative, and the links are optional.

For instance, say you were reading the hypertext version of Hamlet on an Apple Macintosh. After reading Act II, you might be prompted, 'Should Hamlet (A) kill his uncle, (B) leave the country, or (C) mope about life and death?' You type 'A', and read a considerably shortened version of Hamlet (This exhibits one problem with interactive fiction - sometimes the action which builds up to more dramatic climax is not the action which a goal-oriented reader would take.)...

...Jorge Luis Borges described such a book (though he did not write one) in 'El jardin de senderos que se bifurca' ('The garden of forking paths') in 1941 (Fishburn, 1990):

'In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses - simultaneosly - all of them... Fang, let us say, has a secret. A stranger knocks at his door. Fang makes up his mind to kill him. Naturally there are varios possible outcomes. Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, both can be saved, both can die and so on and so on. In Ts'ui Pen's work, all the possible solutions occur, each one being the point of departrre for other bifurcations. Sometimes the pathways for this labyrinth converge. For example, you come to this house: but in some possible pasts you are my enemy: in others my friend.' (Borges, 1944)

In the same year Borges described a backwards hypertext fiction, the likes of which has never been written, in 'An examination of the work of Herbert Quain' (Borges, 1944). Herbert Quain's supposed book April March was a backwards-branching hypertext. The first chapter described the events of an evening. The next theee chapters describe three alternate prececling evenings. The next nine chapters describe nine alternate evenings before those in the second through fourth chapters with three possible preludes to each of those three chapters. There never was any such book; Borges often pretended to review an imaginary book in order to explain the principles he had in mind for a book without actually writing it.

Julio Cortazar wrote the novel Rayuela (Hopscotch) in 1963, which is a simple non-interactive type of hypertext. He provides two ways of reading it: With or without a set of optional chapters between the required chapters (Cortazar, 1966). To my lnowledge, the only interactive fiction written on paper before it had been demonstrated on a computer was 'Norman vs America', a 20-frame cartoon by Charles Platt based on an idea by John Sladek, published in an underground comic in 1971 (Platt, 1971)."

Re:Interactive Books

[Anonymous Coward]

This part might be easier for you if you had the manual -- it's got a list of some verbs you can try. The one you need is "wait". (Although actually, just about anything will work... all that you need to do is kill time until Ford gets there.)

By the way, this is a good example of a game where solving puzzles requires a certain amount of saving-and-restoring.

>s
Front of House
You can enter your home to the north. A path leads around it to the northeast and northwest, and a country lane is visible to the south. All that lies between your home and the huge yellow bulldozer bearing down on it is a few yards of mud.

Mr. Prosser, from the local council, is standing on the other side of the bulldozer. He seems to be wearing a digital watch. He looks startled to see you emerge, and yells at you to get out of the way.
The bulldozer rumbles slowly toward your home.

>lie in mud
You lie down in the path of the advancing bulldozer. Prosser yells at you to for crissake move!!!

>wait
Time passes...

The bulldozer thunders toward you. The ground is shaking beneath you as you lie in the mud.

>wait
Time passes...

The noise of the giant bulldozer is now so violently loud that you can't even hear Prosser yelling to warn you that you will be killed if you don't get the hell out of the way. You just see him gesticulating wildly.

>wait
Time passes...

With a terrible grinding of gears the bulldozer comes to an abrupt halt just in front of you. It shakes, shudders, and emits noxious substances all over your rose bed. Prosser is incoherent with rage.

Moments later, your friend Ford Prefect arrives. He hardly seems to notice your predicament, but keeps glancing nervously at the sky. He says "Hello, Arthur," takes a towel from his battered leather satchel, and offers it to you.

Re:Interactive Books

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

I think you need to wait a turn, lying in the mud. Enjoy it. Pretty soon Ford shows up and tries to give back your towel. Don't take it.

Find a full walkthrough on gamefaqs.com, and don't feel bad about cheating. HHGTTG is among the most difficult of the Infocom games I've played.

Re:Interactive Books

[Anonymous Coward]

By the way, this is a good example of a game where solving puzzles requires a certain amount of saving-and-restoring.

Oops, hit "Submit" too soon. What I mean by this is just that there are sections in which (the first few times through) you will probably get killed before you figure out how to solve the puzzle.

[Also: like most of these games, you should try to take anything that isn't nailed down.]

Re:Interactive Books

[OECD]

This part might be easier for you if you had the manual

I did have the manual. Obviously, I didn't read it . What self-respecting geek Rs the FM? (OK, me, ideally)

The peril-sensitive sunglasses worked, though!

Re:Interactive Books

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, I remember those. Does anyone remember a Choose Your Own Adventure that had in infinite loop? I remember being about 6 and finding my first "bug" that way ... in a book.

Wish I could remember anything about the book itself.

Re:Interactive Books

[Anonymous Coward]

"Interactive books might be the ultimate geek test.

If you were willing to try and figure out the world-view of the game designer by hit-and-miss selection, congratulations: you're a geek. If you read it once or twice, and chucked it because too much of it was the same as the last time you read it... well, I guess you'd be a 'trusted user' or somesuch"

how about me, I tried to figure out every possible outcome to the book... and in one book I found there were several pages with neat stuff on them... that were inaccessable, no other pages ever said to turn to them. I hacked an IF book and found an easter egg. w00t me.

Re:Interactive Books

[bomb_number_20]

2 words...

Interplanetary Spy

Re:Interactive Books

[Anonymous Coward]

[Also: like most of these games, you should try to take anything that isn't nailed down.]

And unlike most of these games, expect the computer to lie to you:

"There are exits north, south east and west."

>north

"You can't go that way, I was lying."

>uh...

Re:Interactive Books

[Tonith]

If you want to kill the ogre, turn to page 452.
[turns to page 452]
The ogre laughs at your pitiful attempt to kill him and rends the flesh from your bones.
"Damnit!" [turns back to page 231]

If you want to befriend the ogre, turn to page 294.
[turns to page 294]
The ogre befriends you - with an ogre-hug of epic proportions. You are crushed to a pulp.
"Damnit!" [turns back to page 231]

If you want to run away from the ogre, turn to page 583.
[turns to page 583]
You turn to run away, and run smack into a tree. While you stumble back, the ogre picks you up and throws you off a nearby cliff. Your body plummets onto several sharp pointy rocks, and you see vultures start to circle around you. "Damnit!"

I never won at those things. Stupid ogres.

Re:Interactive Books

[Mr. Hankey]

Ford, what about my home? :-)

Re:Interactive Books

[p_millipede]

I had one (I can't remember the name) where towards the end you fell out of a plane or something (why??). There were two ways (three if you count cheating) of surviving, one was to role two sixes and miraculusly survive the fall, the other was to have a parachute. I never had a parachute - ever! I went right through that book, ignoring the story trying to find where you could get a parachute - you couldn't!

Re:Interactive Books

[phasefx]

I had an interactive Zork book. It told me I cheated. :D There was no damn light scroll from the rock tribe.

-- Jason

Re:Interactive Books

[hoggoth]

> I reverse-engineered Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books

Back then that was legal.

Re:Interactive Books

[operagost]

I read one called UFO 54-40: just in case ...

*SPOILER*

You were abducted by aliens, and part of their mythos included a paradise planet that you could not get to by following directions or making a choice. I discovered by accident that you made it to the paradise planet on page 100. Curious, I read through every story fork looking to see how I would get there - guess what? No fork lead you to that page. Get it?

Re:Interactive Books

[Anonymous Coward]

Moments later, your friend Ford Prefect arrives. He hardly seems to notice your predicament, but keeps glancing nervously at the sky. He says "Hello, Arthur," takes a towel from his battered leather satchel, and offers it to you.

And actually, at this point, it gets a little weird too, as you have to "REFUSE TOWEL" otherwise the story does not continue. You can't just ignore Ford and expect the same result. Kind of like later in the game where you're supposed to pick up "No Tea".

Re:Interactive Books

[SlipJig]

I used to play (read?) an interactive book/game that simulated WWI air combat: Ace of Aces. Totally weird but fun! The book had pictures of the planes from various angles, firing, etc. You would declare a maneuver, and then turn to the correct page showing the outcome. Your opponent had his own book.

Re:Interactive Books

[pavon]

Oh man I remember those. I would read them once picking my own choices, and then would have to go through and do (what i would now call) a depth-first traversal of all the possibile choices. I don't know why I was so obsessed with making sure that I hadn't missed any of the possible segments, but I was. Perhaps it is the same thing that made me want to understand every aspect of how my computer worked, or the thing that abored wasting anything, and caused me to save all scrap parts, and eat everything I was given whether I liked it or not.

(BTW, What does one normally do when a bulldozer is going to knock down one's house? Still can't figure it out? Rot13 Solution: Whfg yvr qbja, va gur zhq, va sebag bs gur ohyyqbmre, naq jnvg sbe Sbeq gb pbzr svk guvatf hc.)

Re:Interactive Books

[dotwaffle]

Mine I think was about Europe being an Arctic wasteland or something, and it was quite cool. You had to keep codewords and stuff, and go hunting to find the "Heart of Volent" or something... I ought to dig it out sometime...

Re:Interactive Books

[Mage Inq.]

Especially since you have to pick ever EVERY tool in the game, otherwise in the end you can't finish it b/c you'll need the one that you don't have.

Re:Interactive Books

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to lay down in front of it.

Re:Interactive Books

[Nick Harkin]

I found one, it was a Sonic book, and whatever option you chose, it sent you to the same page.

However, the real page was in there, they had just mistyped to 'turn to this page' number.

Re:Interactive Books

[MythMoth]

BTW, how do you get by the bulldozer?

Oh man, wait 'til he tries to sort out the babel fish situation...

Re:Interactive Books

[Nick Harkin]

You lie down in front of it. ;)




No seriously.

I loved that game.

Re:Interactive Books

[Riff10111]

And actually, at this point, it gets a little weird too, as you have to "REFUSE TOWEL" otherwise the story does not continue. You can't just ignore Ford and expect the same result. Kind of like later in the game where you're supposed to pick up "No Tea".

The alternate command is "FORD, WHAT ABOUT MY HOME?" although guessing that requires a certain familiarity with the source material.

Re:Interactive Books

[Bodrius]

Thanks for the article.

I had read The Garden of the Forking Paths along with other works of Borges, but had not been aware of the Herbert Quain fictional review. Yet another reminder I should get ahold of the rest of his complete works.

In case you are interested in that sort of literature, I recommend checking out the works of Stanislaw Lem : the immensely underrated Polish science fiction writer.

He saw himself more as a follower of Borges' fantastic writings than the pulp-sci-fi that defined the genre in the west, and published some outstanding works in the same vein: fictional encyclopedias, reviews, anthologies, etc. and experimental writings.

PC?

[Rexz]

"...Interactive Fiction, the politically correct name for what used to be called text adventure games

What a silly thing to say. Did the makers of the games feel insulted by the label? Were the games themselves offended? Is "text" to "fiction" what "coloured" is to "black? Of course not.

Just because someone comes up with a brand-new, improved-formula, pro-active name doesn't mean that it's more politically correct, or even better, than the old one.

Re:PC?

[Butterwaffle Biff]

What a silly thing to say. Did the makers of the games feel insulted by the label?

Well, people that wouldn't be caught dead playing adventure games wouldn't buy a "text adventure", but a lot of them read fiction. So the companies making text adventures tried to expand their demographic by neutering their language. Of course I don't think it really did them much good in the end, did it?

Re:PC?

[dilby]

I would have thought they'd call them graphically challenged adventure games.

Re:PC?

[fenix down]

It's politically correct because not all interactive fiction games are adventues, hence not calling it a text adventure when it's a mystery story, or perhaps a bodice-ripping romance, if anybody's done one of those, which I strongly believe they should, and if they have then they probably didn't like people calling it an adventure. So, replacing the stereotype with a generally descriptive name is politically correct.

Re:PC?

[marko123]

If a bodice-ripping romance is not an adventure then you, good sir, are jaded....

>L

You look around you and see a POINT the previous poster made.

>GET POINT

Point taken.

Re:PC?

[Dennis G. Jerz]

For an audience that is more familiar with literature than computer games, I use "interactive fiction," emphasizing that the game uses blocks of prose to describe events and things, but that it reacts to your input. For an audience familiar with computers, "text adventure" or "adventure game" is usually enough.

Some contemporary offerings aren't "adventures" -- they are character studies, one-room mysteries, flashbacks, or puzzle-based wordplay. To call them all "adventures" is limiting. Calling it "text-parser-based interactive fiction" is probalby more accurate, but unwieldy. A good deal of classic commercial games included both a text parser and graphics, so "text" isn't always the defining factor.

Some academics use the term "interactive fiction" to describe literary hypertext. And some "interactive fiction" is actually very linear, giving only the illusion of player agency. So even the "preferred" term is imperfect.

I'm not aware of any fan or designer of IF who would be upset if someone said, "Hey, is that an adventure game you're playing?" Take "politcally correct" in the Slashdot article as a lighthearted poke, nothing serious.

Re:PC?

[Anonymous Coward]

or perhaps a bodice-ripping romance, if anybody's done one of those, which I strongly believe they should, and if they have then they probably didn't like people calling it an adventure.

Plundered Hearts by Infocom. It was very very good actually.

Re:PC?

[F452]

It's a silly thing to say because it has nothing to do with "politics." Nothing to do with what is normally referred to in discussions of "political correctness." I don't think it became "interactive fiction" because of some people's squeamish concerns about propriety.

Re:PC?

[Dennis G. Jerz]

The classic bodice-ripper is "Plundered Hearts" (http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?name=Plunde red+Hearts) though Emily Short recently hosted a "SmoochieComp" (Valentine's day IF authoring competition -- http://emshort.home.mindspring.com/smoochie.htm ) and "SwashComp" (for swashbulcklers -- http://emshort.home.mindspring.com/Swash.html).

Oh, the memories!

[perimorph]

My favourite part was the endless game of seeing how many different ways you could type a sentence before the computer realized what you were talking about. Ah, nostalgia!

Re:Oh, the memories!

[Hitmouse]

Eliza: Why is the endless game of seeing how many different ways you could type a sentence before the computer realized what you were talking about, your favorite part? Does your mother feel the same way?

Re:Oh, the memories!

[westendgirl]

We were talking about you, not me.

You are in the middle

[Alien54]

of a maze of twisted paragraphs, all of them alike

Re:You are in the middle

[Anonymous Coward]

of a maze of twisted paragraphs, all of them are different

Re:You are in the middle

[Anonymous Coward]

Ooo oo! I know this one! Keep going east and you'll reach the vending machine where you can get more batteries for your lamp (but lose out on the final top score)

Its just not the same

[HappyCitizen]

Without:
http://bbspot.com/News/2003/02/ati_ascii .html

Would really like to remember...

[GAVollink]

On an ancient UNIX terminal in my Mom's cubicle (some 20 years back).. there was a text adventure game where you walked around a space ship - and nobody else was aboard. I remeber walking into a new room, and the program would unexpectedly exit. Different from the terse, "your dead" after opening the air-lock.

Yeah, I know my memory is foggy, and not very helpfull but does anybody know what that game could have been? Anybody know if there's a playable version of the same game somewhere?

Re:Would really like to remember...

[Eharley]

Planetfall by Infocom?

Re:Would really like to remember...

[smr2x]

Sounds like it.

From http://www.infocom-if.org/games/planetfall/planetf all.html:

Released: 1983

About 20 years. Good luck and hope it's the right one.

Re:Would really like to remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

in 1975, i think, i was betting babysat by something called a "cyber" (i think). i could see it though a window in the hallway.

my mom was working on her doctorate and didn't know what to do with me, what with the recent divorce and all, so she left in the computer lab at the university while she was in class. it was empty most of the day.

the desk my mom sat me in front of had a paper tape reader, a keyboard, and some type of printer.

i would go sign out the tape named "star trek" and run the commands to load the paper tape, then i would start traveling around the universe, trying to get to a starbase with fuel, trying not to run into things as i jumped quadrants, and trying to blow away klingon ships before they gave me too much damage.

every move, the printer would spit out a page showing the details of the quadrant i had moved into, and some status info.

anyway, that was my first computer game.

Re:Would really like to remember...

[OECD]

On an ancient UNIX terminal in my Mom's cubicle (some 20 years back).. there was a text adventure game where you walked around a space ship...

These kids today... When I was a whelp, we'd crash our lunar landers into the moon to see how big a crater we could make!

AND WE WERE GLAD TO DO IT!

Re:Would really like to remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

Darn, wish I remembered the name too, but I do know it wasn't Planetfall. The game in question was available for the PC at one time, I know because I played it back in the mid 90's. The thing I do remember is that I ftp'ed it from wuarchive.wustl.edu around 1994-1995. Unfortunately I don't seem able to connect to that site anymore, but I would bet money there are still quite a few sites left that had mirrored Wuarchive over the years.

Re:Would really like to remember...

[mobius_stripper]

It's possibly Battlestar. Although most of the action takes place on a tropical planet, you have to make your way out of a doomed spaceship (the Battlestar) first. The source for this and a whole bunch more 'interactive fiction' can be found at The Interactive Fiction Archive, specifically here.

Krishna

Re:Would really like to remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds right to me. The version of it that I played was a bit buggy (but quite interesting).

Depending on what you type in, there can be some of what we used to call "suggestive content". But none if it is dirty, especially by today's standards.

Re:Would really like to remember...

[mobius_stripper]

Yes, you had to kiss the goddess exactly 3 times before you could make love to her. Any less and she wouldn't let you, any more and she'd faint!
(Lord, What a geek I am!)

Krishna

play Zork here

[$$$$$exyGal]

Here is just one of many places: Play Zork.

Re:play Zork here

[jdavidb]

I'm kind of amazed noone's mentioned that you can telnet to eldorado.elsewhere.org.

Interactive Fiction--Old School

[BoldAC]

I know that I am getting old when I think of interactive fiction as those old "choose your own adventure" books.

If you would like the stab the dragon, turn to page 23.

If you would like to tickle the dragons underbelly, turn to page 56.

Plus, I had such a short attention span, I could never remember the "death pages" until I had already turned to them 3 or 4 times.

What great literature that was! The skill it took to write a death page that covered all the potential ways you could have gotten there. And we thinking coding is hard...

AC

Re:Interactive Fiction--Old School

[Anonymous Coward]

I know that I am getting old when I think of interactive fiction as those old "choose your own adventure" books.

No, you'd be getting old if you thought of interactive fiction as those new fangled "choose your own adventure" books and wonder why kids today can't be happy with ordinary books that were good enough when you were growing up.

Re:Interactive Fiction--Old School

[pne]

Ooh, Choose Your Own Adventure books!

I remember those from when I was a schoolkid. Never was much good at them, though.

...and I also remember converting about half of one into some program on the networked Z80 machines we had back then; the program allowed you to create a number of pages with (I believe) up to 10 options to leave each page. I had to quit when I was taking up too much disk space which they needed for other students.

Ah, the memories.

Re:Interactive Fiction--Old School

[ronfar]

Ah, I can remember one page from The Mystery of Chimney Rock:

Aaaah-Aaaaaaaaah-Aaaaaah---cht-thunk!

Or something like that. Anyone else remember the primarily solitare RPG, Tunnels and Trolls. Sorcerer's Solitaire, in that line, was pretty good. Oh, and Dargon's Dungeon (spoiler) Become one with the immortal sea (/spoiler)

text adventure

[chunkwhite86]

what used to be called text adventure games

What ever happened to "choose your own adventure" books?? That's what I think of when I hear the phrase. Am I THAT old??? Anyhow, anyone else here remember TradeWars 2002? ;-)

Re:text adventure

[tobes]

TradeWars was the best.

I used to skip straight to the decision pages in the Choose Your Own Adventure books. You could finish a whole book in like 2 minutes.

Hitchhiker's Guide!

[Faust7]

The feature includes an overview of the genre and its history,

Man, and only one brief mention of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Seriously, that game takes the prize for descriptive prose. Forget "eerie dungeons" and "lush fields" and whatnot--the opening takes the cake:

"You wake up. The room is spinning very gently round your head. Or at least it would be if you could see it which you can't."

Re:Hitchhiker's Guide!

[PressReturn]

Definately. If anyone wants to play it online: http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava. html

Re:Hitchhiker's Guide!

[PressReturn]

grrr, will now attempt to hit the proper button
infocom HHGTG game

Re:Hitchhiker's Guide!

[bomb_number_20]

And don't forget the buffered analgesic...

Re:Hitchhiker's Guide!

[freeze128]

I know! I found a bug in the game which got me 425 points out of a total of 400 points!

stupid flask

[prockcore]

I just wish they'd explain to me how to get ye flask.

Instead I just have to sit here wondering WHY I can't get ye flask!

Re:stupid flask

[mekkab]

oh, have you played the new one?
yeah verily, indeed.

Re:stupid flask

[ShawnDoc]

You must not have tried hard enough. Eventually you will get the flask. Alas, it turns out it is a load bearing flask.

Z Machine

[Aardpig]

Almost all of the classic Infocom games, except some of the later Zork series, were written in a bytecode-like language which ran on a virtual machine known as a Z machine. This is why the old Infocom games can be played on any platform which has had a Z machine ported to it.

Inform, which is mentioned in the article, is actually a compiler which converts a high-level language into Z-machine bytecode. It was devised and written by Graham Nelson, the author of the breathtakingly-fantastic Curses and Jigsaw . Both of these games, plus the Inform compiler, plus a Z machine for just about every type of machine, can be downloaded from the Inform homepage

Re:Z Machine

[zjbs14]

A couple of years ago on a lark, I wrote a Z machine emulator for Java (Yes, I know there are already ones out there). It was a lot of fun and I got some great insight on what they had to do to pack such cool stuff onto 160 KB floppies.

Besides, it was just too cool to have Zork come up in an application I wrote.

Re:Z Machine

[marnanel]

Re-implementing the Z-machine is nothing to be ashamed of. Someone's done it in Perl, and someone else did it as an Emacs major mode... and heck, I'm working on a pure Javascript Z-machine for Mozilla </plug>. There's so much good new Z-machine material coming out each year now that building new Z-machines for modern environments isn't just some sort of digital archaeology to relive the Infocom glory days, though of course there's that side to it as well. It's a living tradition, not a reconstructed dead culture.

Re:Z Machine

[oskillator]

A virtual machine running on a virtual machine, I love it.

You can get yet another layer of indirection by running Andrew Plotkin's Lists and Lists, which features a Scheme interpreter, in the Java Z-machine interpreter. Anyone feel like writing a JVM in scheme? :)

Re:Z Machine

[tachyonflow]

Infocom's Z Machine bytecode interpreter was a truly awesome idea! It's great being able to play the same game on just about any platform. A few years ago, I played through the entirety of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on a Palm Pilot while riding the bus back and forth between Boulder and Denver.

Anyone remember...

[smr2x]

Maniac Mansion, I think it was. A little off topic I know, but I just thought about the little code book they give you and the little red plate decoder thing...

Anyways! ;-)

Re:Anyone remember...

[DanThe1Man]

Don't forget to mircowave the hampster ;)

The irony...

[Erwos]

... is that, today, it's much easier to write a simple piece of interactive fiction than ever before, yet it's far less popular nowadays. I personally like TADS, but I'm sure there are other excellent systems.

A point I'd like to make, though:

As someone who's done a LOT of serious area writing on diverse MUDs (both RP-enforced and hack and slash) and has dabbled in IF, I must stress that writing IF and writing on a MUD are two completely different things. I know someone's going to compare the two and claim IF's still alive and well in the form of MUDs, but it's not even close to the same thing. Your skill set in creating a MUD area doesn't automatically map to IF, and vica versa.

Good IF requires FAR more attention to detail than the average MUD. On a typical MUD, you can get away with only one or two levels of details because the players are busy interacting with other people. In IF, you've got to really hammer in those details to bring out a convincing world (usually - that Arabian Nights-esque game that was in the IF Comp a year or two ago was basically choose your own adventure, yet was extremely good), because the world is all there is.

IF != MUDs. That is all I want to point out, before someone claims it's so.

-Erwos

Dunnet

[Aardpig]

Ah, the joy of typing M-x dunnet into emacs:

Dead end
You are at a dead end of a dirt road. The road goes to the east.
In the distance you can see that it will eventually fork off. The
trees here are very tall royal palms, and they are spaced equidistant
from each other.
There is a shovel here.
>

The only text editor to have a built-in advdenture game?

Re:Dunnet

[Erwos]

And the best part: you can cheat by reading the straight Lisp code. I must confess I had to do it once, just for some syntax.

Dunnet is actually quite fun, and I'd recommend people who like IF to give it a shot.

-Erwos

Re:Dunnet

[Anonymous Coward]

>And the best part: you can cheat by reading the straight Lisp code.

Or you can just look at the walkthrough here.

Re:Dunnet

[Anonymous Coward]

My first foray into this game did not go too well:

>look at the card
The CPU board has a VAX chip on it. It seems to have
2 Megabytes of RAM onboard.
>take the card
Taken.
>eat the card
You forcefully shove a computer board down your throat, and start choking.

You are dead.

Nine parts = nine pages?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess I'm just a jerk, but when did "nine page article" become synonymous with "nine part article"? I mean, sure, it looks like they tried to do a decent job putting the article together and I'm not trying to demean the content, but it sounds a lot more grand to call it a "nine part article", no? And we can add "cynical" in front of "jerk", I suppose, since I'm left wondering if "anonymous reader" is someone closely associated with 1UP who'd like to see the site get a few more hits for its "nine part article".

i remeber something about..

[Bodhammer]

a length of rubber tubing, some lubricant, and a Yak...

Leather Goddesses of Phobos by InfoCom

p.s. It seemed funny at the time

Re:i remeber something about..

[stwrtpj]

Leather Goddesses of Phobos by InfoCom

I remember when I purchased this game new for my C64 while I was still a teen living with my parents. I went so far as to paste a fake label on the floppy disk to disguise the game so I didn't have to answer awkward questions from my parents if they saw it lying around. I thought I was being so "naughty" by getting this game (young AND foolish you see ...).

Never finished the game in my youth. Then I got married to someone who liked these games as much as I did but had never played this one. We fired it up under a Linux port of the Inform parser, played it together, and proceeded to laugh our asses off as we played it. We each picked up more subtle jokes in descriptions, characters, and room layouts that the other didn't.

Re:i remeber something about..

[nudicle]

I remember this game. As a kid I played on the old school machines of the day as well, of course. Am i remembering correctly or am I fantasizing that it had separate "naughty" and "tame" modes of play?

Re:i remeber something about..

[Cus]

I believe the modes were 'tame', 'suggestive' or 'lewd'

Re:i remeber something about..

[0x0d0a]

Playing IF with a spouse that also appreciates it does sound like a blast. :-)

I remember watching a friend and his girlfriend play graphic adventures for hours, but there's less thinking involved in most graphic adventures...

Re:i remeber something about..

[SamSim]

I can't help feeling I'd have far preferred Leather-Wearing Goddesses of Phobos.

I loved and miss the old Infocom games...

[Anonymous Coward]

...but the text adventure genre is dead.

Kids today are only interested in cool graphics. Ever since DOOM, they've been basically buying the same game, but with nicer graphics than the previous version. Seen one FPS, seen 'em all. They're too lazy to use their imaginations.

Graphics are nice, but I haven't seen (not counting networked multiplayer) a modern PC game yet that can truly match the replayability of some of the Atari, Colecovision, NES and Genesis games.

Re:I loved and miss the old Infocom games...

[Hitmouse]

I'm waiting for Pong or Lemonade Stand on X-Box. I want a force-feedback jolt every time someone puts money in my hand for a lemonade

Re:I loved and miss the old Infocom games...

[Anonymous Coward]

..but the text adventure genre is dead.

Kids today are only interested in cool graphics. Ever since DOOM, they've been basically buying the same game, but with nicer graphics than the previous version. Seen one FPS, seen 'em all. They're too lazy to use their imaginations.

Yeah, but kids aren't the only ones playing games. There's a small but thriving community creating dozens of new games each year, several of which are comparable to the original Infocom games. If interactive fiction was alive when Infocom was releasing 3 or 4 good games a year, how much more alive is it now when the online IF community is releasing four or five times that number?

Beyond that, I don't need a mediocre game that millions of other people play; I need a good game that I can play.

Re:I loved and miss the old Infocom games...

[moexu]

Not only that, but all of the answers to the puzzles are available online for free.

I grew up playing Sierra's adventure games. It usually took me at least a couple of weeks to get through one of them. I'd get stuck and try everything I could think of, and then come back the next day and try again. Kids today don't have that kind of attention span for games; they'd rather just find a walkthrough, and text adventure games aren't very interesting without the puzzles.

Re:I loved and miss the old Infocom games...

[master_p]

Ever since DOOM, they've been basically buying the same game

Not true. After Doom, the next major step was Quake, which brought real 3d spaces and true up/down. And then came Half Life, with many new things and concepts to master. The tri-tentacle terror that hunts on sound is one of the most beautifully executed FPS game sequences I have seen.

Furthermore, the rise of real 3d has given birth to 3d FPS, to Deux Ex, to Everquest and many other games.

And wait till you see Half-Life 2 and Doom 3. Your jaw will drop to the floor, not only by the graphics, but also by the gameplay, which is made possible by the graphics.

Re:I loved and miss the old Infocom games...

[thrash242]

There are plenty of completely or relatively puzzle-free pieces of interactive fiction that are very intersting. Do you read novels to see how many devious puzzles the protagonist solves? I don't really even like puzzle IF.

Re:I loved and miss the old Infocom games...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not holding my breath.

The IF community is still alive

[Rope_a_Dope]

There's the newsgroups:

rec.arts.int-fiction
rec.games.int-fiction

And there is also the yearly interactive fiction competition. The competition is a fairly big deal in the Interactive Fiction community, as fans submit games, play them, and rate them. 30 games were submitted this year. There are also a number of games, and interpreters that run on everything from Windows, Mac, Linux, Palm, and almost anything else you can think of.

To this day, I never turn out the lights...

[jbarr]

...for fear of being eaten by a Gru!

Re:To this day, I never turn out the lights...

[Anonymous Coward]

...for fear of being eaten by a Gru!

A Gru? I hope that's not any worse than a Grue, those are bad enough already!

Of course, I always carry some Grue Repellent with me just in case my lantern goes out :)

OK.

[big_groo]

You lost me on 'nine-part article'.

This *is* the gaming section, no?

trade wars info

[Alien54]

Anyhow, anyone else here remember TradeWars 2002? ;-)

You can sometimes still play it online, often via telnet:

The Home Sector: Lots of Tradewars news.

Tradewars: Dark Millenium: Large-scale multiplayer game in development. Seems to be based on Tradewars 2002 under an agreement with EIS Online.

tradewars.org: Tradewars news, links, and more.

EIS Online: The current owners of Tradewars 2002, the best known Tradewars clone. They also market Tradewars Gold and and the Tradewars Game Server for online play. TradeWars 2002 is up to version 3

Hekate's TW Links: News, links, and everything else.

TWAR Homepage: Home of the TWAR helper.

Heh...The Count

[big_groo]

The Count - Vic 20.

Great game.

Re:Heh...The Count

[CB-in-Tokyo]

That was my very first IF game that I played (Finished it too.) I could never remember the name of it! It came on a cartridge for the Vic 20!

Cheers man! I can hardly remember it, but I remember something about a cigaratte and a coffin! Ahhh I just had a huge blast of nostalgia sweep over me!

Interactive Fiction???

[panaceaa]

How is Interactive Fiction more politically correct than Text Adventure? What's politically incorrect about Text Adventure? Once apon a time the Adventure genre dominated the gaming industry (Sierra). So Text Adventure games are just adventure games done only with text. What's wrong with that?

Interactive Fiction describes any type of game on the market. Every game is interactive, and every game is make-believe (fiction). How does it describe text adventure games?

Can someone explain to me why this name change was adopted?? It seems to me that the developers were just embarassed that their games didn't involve any new technologies so they renamed their genre to sound more interesting.

Re:Interactive Fiction???

[Aardpig]

Interactive Fiction describes any type of game on the market. Every game is interactive, and every game is make-believe (fiction). How does it describe text adventure games?

Because interactive fiction is closer to the high-quality fiction one might buy in a bookstore, than it is to the video games one might buy in a gaming store. Consider this: on the one hand we have Curses, a masterpiece of language and storytelling; and on the other we have 'All your base are belong to us'. Quite different. The term 'interactive fiction' is meant to highlight the literary nature of the genre -- while at the same time indicating that it is interactive.

Re:Interactive Fiction???

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't get the idea that "interactive fiction" is the mandatory
new name, used by all in the community. It's not.

Sure, I say "IF" sometimes. Mostly because it's two keystrokes and
two syllables... I say "text adventures" and "text games" just as
often.

I think most of us are relatively non-uptight about the terminology.
Some of us are aiming towards works with fewer game-like elements, and
some more so -- but even that's a question of the work itself. Not
what people call it.

-- Andrew Plotkin

Re:Interactive Fiction???

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider this: on the one hand we have Curses, a masterpiece of language and storytelling; and on the other we have 'All your base are belong to us'.

Er, don't get too hoity-toity... The Incredible Erotic Adventures of Stiffy Makane (not to be confused with Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country) is also considered interactive fiction.

Re:Interactive Fiction???

[Anonymous Coward]

It was just a term the marketers at Infocom came up with to sound good. It has no real special meaning, and "text adventure" works just as well. But since Infocom is (was) the text adventure king, it's natural to follow their lead.

Re:Interactive Fiction???

[tachyonflow]

There's nothing politically incorrect about the term "text adventure". The original poster was just being silly. I use the term "text adventure" all the time, to refer to this broad genre of games.

However, the term "interactive fiction" implies a much higher standard of quality, probably because Infocom popularized the term and their games were clearly more sophisticated than most others of the time. From the opening sequence to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it looks like Infocom was using the term "interactive fiction" at least as far back as 1984:

THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
Infocom interactive fiction - a science fiction story
Copyright (c) 1984 by Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
Release 59 / Serial number 851108

I'm sure there were some good non-Infocom games from the era, but I do recall quite a few really horrible games which had awful parsers and gameplay. You would type "TAKE THE STICK", and the game would reply "Sorry, I don't know what a 'the' is." I'd say that these games probably classify as text adventures, but are not up to the standards of Infocom's "interactive fiction".

(And, as another poster pointed out, not all interactive fiction games are adventures.)

Re:Interactive Fiction???

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure there were some good non-Infocom games from the era, but I do recall quite a few really horrible games which had awful parsers and gameplay.

Magnetic Scrolls produced interactive fiction of about the same quality as Infocom.

As you say, there was quite a lot of other I.F. from the 1980s, both commercial and shareware, but very little of it was anywhere near as good as Infocom or Magnetic Scrolls. The first shareware IF that really impressed me was the first "Unkuulian Unventure", which I think came out around 1990. I believe it was made using TADS.

Re:Interactive Fiction???

[jdavidb]

The term interactive fiction isn't new. Infocom was using it in their glory days.

I'd say the main point of the term is that the games can be described as literary works of fiction, and they are interactive. I don't see anything politically correct about it at all. I'd shy away from "adventure game" because to me adventure game suggests some sort of high-paced excitement, probably involving slaying dragons and such. These games were set in so many different genres that many of them wouldn't seem "adventurous" to me. For example, the classic infocom game "Nord and Bert couldn't make head or tail or it" is mostly a game of word puzzles and could hardly be described as an "adventure" at all.

Re:Interactive Fiction???

[thrash242]

Partially because not all interactive fiction is a "game" per se. Some is more of a story than somehting you have to solve puzzles to win. For examples, try Photopia by Adam Cadre (I believe) for an excellent story told in a very intersting way. There is also The Space Under the Window and Aisle, of the top of my head, which have no real "game-like" qualities.

In other words, the genre has evolved to include non-games.

Actually approprate for all stories

[sigma]

You are in a maze of twisty little comments, all alike...

Remember 'The Lost Sword' on the VZ300

[MrRTFM]

I wrote that program in 84 - it was a cool Text adventure.
The VZ300 sold by Dick Smith was the first micro under $200 (and that's the reason I got one)

But ...

[i.r.id10t]

.. do all of the old bonus majick words work still?

plugh

Re:But ...

[Helen O'Boyle]

Blockquoth the poster:

do all of the bonus majick words work still?

plugh

A hollow voice says "fool".

Or at least it does if you said that in zork. That word (plugh) (and xyzzy, and plover, etc.) is from original Adventure (a version of which was produced by Microsoft in 1982/1983 for the original IBM PC .... I still have the disk somewhere....).

You are greeted with the above comment ("A hollow voice...") if you try the Advent words in zork. ;-)

Re:But ...

[ahunter]

Someone did a survey of how modern games responded to XYZZY and PLUGH. There's a wide range of responses, ranging from hollow voices to easter eggs. Let's see... here it is.

Blast from the past

[Neo-Rio-101]

You are in a comfortable tunnel like hall to the east the the round green door you see: the wooden chest. Gandalf. Gandalf is carrying the curious map. Thorin. Gandalf gives the curious map to you. > HIT GANDALF You attack Gandalf. But the effort is wasted. His defense is too strong. Gandalf attacks you. With one well place blow Gandalf cleaves your skull. You are dead. You have mastered 0.0% of this adventure.

Re:Blast from the past

[Cus]

Thanks for that :-)

I still have flashbacks to:
Say to Thorin "open window"
Say to Thorin "pick me up"
Say to Thorin "west"

...until I inevitably got caught by a goblin and chucked back in the dungeon. Aaaaaaaaaargh!

Nethack

[TheOtherKiwi]

Anyone here complete nethack or have used the latest version? I remember playing a variant on a VAX11/780 at the same time as on a PC/XT (circa '83) - whoa flashback!

Plenty of links out there: http://hakosoftware.com/nethack/

Nethack 3.4.3 here: http://www.nethack.org/common/index.html

Easily my favourite game of all time.

Re:Nethack

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I play it all the time.

I use the tiles though, they're well drawn and it makes it easier to see what's going on (and it's really funny to see when you hallucinate).

because

[bsDaemon]

because "text adventure" was double plus ungood as a name, the ministry of propaganda changed it. However, I have just been informed by the ministery of truth that i am a liar. "text adventure" has never been the name of anything....

Blatant plug and other info

[RouterSlayer]

well obviously no one plays new games any more, try this one - http://nexus.vrx.net/mp3/castle.zip

its a pc (dos/windows) text adventure. yes yes I do want to port it to linux, but the code is soooo freaking messy (turbo pascal v7 - dos) with custom calls it might be fun trying.

and then there's trek7 over at sourceforge, check that out. oh god, please help. hehehe

and does anyone remember Beaurocracy ? I think this was douglas adams game for Infocom. I love this game!

"I'm sorry, but there's a radio connected to my brain". Now how many people remember the response to that query?!

I still love these kinds of games, which is why I spend endless years trying to port them to this day...

Re:Blatant plug and other info

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi! I downloaded Castle and started to play it. It looks great.

My only problem is: I cant find the command to see my inventory. I have tried everything, even looked in the documentation. Can you please tell me what command I should use to see the objects I have?

Btw. My bad english is perfect for playing adventure games. 'look piano' and 'get bucket' is as advanced as my average english sentence. :)

Re:Blatant plug and other info

[thrash242]

There is plenty of new interactive fiction. People still make it.

Re:Blatant plug and other info

[RouterSlayer]

Try "invent" or "inventory", will show your list of stuff yer holding.

no, you cant "look" or "examine" your inventory, tho I suppose I could make it spew out the same info as the inventory list does, but that seems a tad redundant to me ;)

the much more fun will be porting the game. the file access and such, and the encryption scheme used (ahahaha - inside joke), use some system calls. ick.
yeah some of its badly coded, so sue me (lol).

We've moved on to a new Interactive Fiction...

[Sam Nitzberg]

Microsoft representatives release statements that their software is only penetrated after patches are released, and we respond on slashdot....

Bring them back!!!

[rice_burners_suck]

I thought this article was informative, though a bit heavy on the interviews... One or two people would have been sufficient, but I think they interviewed about five.

Other than that, this was a bit of nostalgia from the good ol' days. I really think the companies that produced adventure games back in the day should re-release them on an archive CD of sorts. I'd pay fifty bucks for that! (Of course, I say the same about the original Mission Impossible series, the original Star Trek series, and a lot of other things...)

Re:Bring them back!!!

[Futaba-chan]

I really think the companies that produced adventure games back in the day should re-release them on an archive CD of sorts. I'd pay fifty bucks for that! Activision did precisely that, for $20, with its Lost Treasures of Infocom, back in the Nineties.

Favorite Line from Leather Goddesses of Phobos

[LouisvilleDebugger]

I often say this to my wife when we're working on our
house (struggling with plumbing as Trent/Tiffany struggled with the tubing and the photo of Jean Harlow: "We'll lick those Leather Goddesses of Phobos!"

I also love how in the end game, when Trent/Tiffany needs a part for the machine which you don't have, he/she says "Well, I'll try and work around the X..." but of course the incomplete machine ends in failure (with a different description depending on what part is missing.)

No thread on IF would be complete without mentioning Willie Crowther's Adventure game. I can vouch personally that the Colossal Cave section parts of Mammoth Cave (yes, there is a Bedquilt entrance to Mammoth) resemble the game.

Occasionally a caver familiar with the game will be introduced to the actual area of the cave, and it is traditional to allow him or her the chance to ramble around and have fun trying to figure out what's where. (Will Crowther was a Mammoth Caver as well as an MIT student...along with wife Patricia Crowther (later Wilcox) was among the first people to reduce cave survey data to line plots using a computer (an early step in the cave cartography cycle.)

Re:Favorite Line from Leather Goddesses of Phobos

[Dennis G. Jerz]

Lousville Debugger, would you happen to know where I can find pictures of the original well house, slit in stream, grate, and other features described in the game? I'm giving a conference paper next week on "Adventure" and would love to hear from you...

Why so many puzzles.

[0111 1110]

I've always been puzzled at how games in the so called "adventure" genre were all about puzzles. Why not just call them Puzzle Games then. An "Adventure" game should be about exploring some kind of interesting game world, not about twisting levers in a certain way. I always hated the puzzles in Zork. Those stupid dam controls. Give me a break. I think CRPGs were what adventure games were intended to be.

IMO, all computer games should contain an element of interactive fiction. At least until virtual reality has reached near holodeck levels, we will need text descriptions. Even a holodeck uses lots of text in terms of character dialogue. It's just spoken instead of written. When you combine good modern game design with interactive fiction you end up with something like Planescape:Torment, a computer game that some believe to be the best ever made. It was the interactive fiction aspect of the game that made it stand out from the competition.

Re:Why so many puzzles.

[Futaba-chan]

I've always been puzzled at how games in the so called "adventure" genre were all about puzzles.

That's not the case, necessarily, any more -- look at Photopia or Galatea, for example. Contrived puzzles were always a pet peeve of mine, too, which is why A Mind Forever Voyaging was my favorite game of the classic Infocom era. But at their best, good IF games can combine a deep sense of immersion with a powerful story in which the author can be somewhat literary, for an experience that depressingly few big-budget modern games match.

Re:Why so many puzzles.

[Anonymous Coward]

You should try A Mind Forever Voyaging by Infocom, if it's still possible to get it. As I remember, very little if any puzzles as such. You played the part of a machine intelligence with the job of living in a simulation of the future. All you had to do was record what the future was like in several stages, e.g. 10 years hence then 20 years then 50 then 100 or something like that, if they implemented their "Plan for National Renewal" or somesuch.

You had specific tasks, like "go get something to eat" or "visit a hospital", I don't remember exactly, and were supposed to go to those places and record the experience, but there was way more to explore than that. Life got better in the first jmp into the future, then better again but with some hints of problems then all downhill...

Not like any other game I played but a lot of fun. It was just seeing how things played out.

Re:Why so many puzzles.

[Gleng]

Can I just say that I think that the character Galatea, from the game of the same name, is probably the best NPC I have ever encountered in a game.

Anybody trying to design an NPC should look to the standards set by Emily Short.

Classic Sierra games anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I always like the text adventure games with graphics. Kings Quest was the first computer game I ever saw and owned. (Hey, I always typed "look" to get the text description of the area.)

I grew up with the typing Sierra games on the Apple II. I still have the boxes and 5.25" floppys with a a picture of a mountain on the dust sleeve. I was very disappointed by the point and click games and never bothered to buy any of them. Instead I went backwards in time and got the Infocom games. The only point and click I thought was any good was Willy Beamish, which Sierra bought. I could never figure out why Sierra removed the typing interfact to their games...

Re:Classic Sierra games anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look around on the net. You can find an Apple ][ emulator and a Cranston Manor image.

AI and adventure games

[thesilverbail]

I'm a PhD student at the University of Illinois. I do research in AI and automated reasoning.

Currently my research involves text adventures. My advisor and I believe that text adventure games could serve as an excellent testbed for research in intelligent agent behaviour cause they model a number of real-world challenges, like partially observable world states, incompletely specified goals, and the need for common-sense reasoning and belief revision. Here is his paper on the subject.

I'm currently working on doing Logical Filtering in an adventure game, which is a way to maintain a sort of belief about the current state of your world depending on your prior knowledge and observations. Somewhat like filtering in a Hidden Markov model.

Some people at Saarland University, Germany, are also doing great work on description logics in adventure games. A description logic is like a language where you express concepts and the relations between them so that inferring properties is very easy.

It would be great to get some feedback and suggestions from the IF community about what they think about this. Is there any really cool idea you've had about what more could be done with adventure games? I mean many games have some standard stuff like inventories, containers etc. Is there something fundamentally different you've ever thought of doing. Something which involves creative and complex relationships between entities in an adventure games is what we're looking for. Thanks.

Re:AI and adventure games

[Dennis G. Jerz]

If you post your comment on rec.arts.int-fiction, I'm sure you'll get a good response. The number one feature where AI would be useful would be in improving the parser's recognition of typed commands. People are so used to text-messaging each other that the parser's frequent "I didn't understand that" gets in the way of their immersion in the game, to an extent that wasn't a problem back when all computer users were used to the command-line interface.

Meanwhile, Stephen Granade's brief article on why IF doesn't need AI will be a good start.

http://brasslantern.org/editorials/ai.html

Re:AI and adventure games

[CB-in-Tokyo]

With all the power that home computers have these days, I have often thought that if AI was put into interactive fiction, it could take advantage of unused computer power, and make IF viable again.

The question is how to do it? I am not a programmer or an expert on AI, so I do not know what is possible or not, but I have often wondered what might happen if you created an agent for the game, and let it learn there. For example just have it go around and interact with its environment. Give it every command possible, and have commands return codes to it. The codes could be used to weight a Neural Network that is controlling what actions it will take. Gibberish commands return a code the weighs the network against repeating that combination. Good commands return codes that let it know these are proper commands. After a while it should learn all the proper commands, and perhaps we can use that as a model and train it differently. Now we return codes based on the outcome of the proper commands. Commands that have a positive outcome (ie kill ant > you attack the ant and destroy it) can return a positive weight and commands that have a negative outcome (ie kill dragon > The dragon destroys you utterly. You find yourself floating in a dark place) can be weighed accordingly.

Basically I am just talking out my ass, but I have not the expertise to try these things. If any of these ideas seem worth doing and you try them, I would be very interested in learning the results.

No ants were actually harmed during the creation of this posting.

Re:AI and adventure games

[Allasard]

Ahh, I did something similar for my Cognitive Science senior project almost 6 years ago now. I used something I called Intention-Based Reasoning to build a goal stack to build complex patterns using simple declaritive logic trees focused on overcoming failures, interestingly. Old hat nowadays, I'm guessing.

I modified TinyMudd so I could add AI modules for NPCs.

Unfortunately, I waited to the last week of the year to start, of course. :) By the end of a week, I had a NPC that realized when it was hungry, could find food and get through unlocked doors by finding keys. It didn't have any location memory, so it took a while to get through a door when the key was in a different room, but it was pretty cool for a week's worth of work.

I did write plans for an improved engine and still come up with ideas and write them down. But I haven't implemented anything since that week. Makes me wonder what it could have done with more time. Now I'm stuck in the real world cycle as a Unix admin and don't want touch computers at night.

Damn laziness, maybe I should have went to grad school....

Good luck, working with text adventures is a great way to build intelligence models into an already existing world you don't have to waste your time programming from scratch. It's a good testbed for AIs that could be then moved to real world tasks.

I'm glad someone else is going down this path. I'd like to get back into AI someday. Maybe when I'm laid off. :)

-Mike

Re:AI and adventure games

[scrytch]

I'm currently working on doing Logical Filtering in an adventure game, which is a way to maintain a sort of belief about the current state of your world depending on your prior knowledge and observations. Somewhat like filtering in a Hidden Markov model.

Deep knowledge representation is well and good in research projects and perhaps single player games. Once you try to scale it up to a MUD, for even simple things like "known names" (of people and objects), you find yourself wishing for many more gigs of RAM and a few more CPU's to handle it. M objects of N knowable states by P players ... ouch.

Ultimately, the winning strategy is just to have a good setting, story, gm's, and roleplaying in a MUD. Knowledge representation, no matter how good the attempts have been, always ends up feeling like artificial game mechanics.

Re:AI and adventure games

[Dan Crash]

I'd love to see an open source project that integrates OpenCyc into an interactive fiction programming suite.

The primary benefit I see in doing this is that instead of requiring users to complete excruciatingly specific chains of actions to achieve a goal, programmers could set goalstates and let the creativity of their players run wild trying to achieve them. OpenCyc's inference engine should be able to determine whether the goalstate was achieved or not, based on the properties of the objects.

This would, of course, make for an entirely different interactive fiction experience. Up until now, interactive fiction programming has focused on creating intuitive but nonobvious chains of reasoning and rewarding the player for discovering these sequences. Goal-based interactive fiction would place a greater focus on designing situations based on the properties of your objects. For example:

The Guard Room is filled with weapons. There are several shotguns mounted on the wall, next to a cabinet full of ammo. There is a filing cabinet in the corner, and a map of the prison on the wall.

There is a desk here with a phone, a lamp, a letter opener, and guard who seems to have fallen asleep while doing paperwork. It's Jimmy. The nice guard. Poor kid. You feel bad that he has to die so you can be free.

In a normal IF game, there would be one preferred way to solve this problem. Perhaps two, if the author felt especially creative. But an OpenCyc enabled game would let you examine the room in increasing detail, and use any and all of the objects you find to achieve the goal of incapacitating Jimmy.

Instead of being required to, say, grab a gun from the shotgun rack and shoot Jimmy in order to move past him, you might decide electrocuting Jimmy is quieter and smarter:

> get letter opener from desk.

Taken. Jimmy snores quietly but does not budge.

> cut lamp cord with letter opener

You are electrocuted. You have died.

Oops. OpenCyc knew that the letter opener was metal and that the lamp cord was plugged in, and that a human being could be electrocuted by doing this. Next time you unplug the lamp before cutting the cord and electrocuting Jimmy. Or maybe you tie him up with the lamp cord, and don't kill him. Your choice.

What makes this style of gameplay especially intriguing is that solutions could emerge which would surprise the author. It might even be fun to create situations which have no immediate solution and see if, through clever introspection, one might not emerge. Sharing your unique solutions with others would be part of the fun of playing the game.

By building on OpenCyc, the effort one programmer takes to define objects could be used and amplified by other authors. It could perhaps even be used by the general OpenCyc community in other applications. If nothing else, the challenge of trying to create a goal-based interactive fiction language that was powered by a common-sense inference engine like OpenCyc would be a heck of a lot of fun.

Invalid Command

[nicks_all_taken]

[i]Anyone who has fond memories of typing their way through dank caverns or outsmarting leather goddesses and ravenous bugblatter beasts with nothing but a keyboard should read this[/i] You cannot type your way through a dankcavern. I see no leathergoddesses here.

Re:Invalid Command

[dilby]

You cannot type your way through a dankcavern. I see no leathergoddesses here.

Hah. My wife says the same thing to me.

"9 part article". Right

[Animats]

What they mean by "9 part article" is "9 sets of banner ads, one per page".

Re:"9 part article". Right

[0x0d0a]

No...I know that's a common trick, but some of these sections are *long*.

They have one page per person they interview.

I was actually rather impressed with this "1up" site, which I'd never been at before.

Voice Interactive Fiction

[Fermata]

I always thought an interesting application for "modern" interactive fiction would be to apply the technologies of voice recognition and speech synthesis to IF. The structure of the IF game itself would remain the same - only all of the interaction is through listening/speaking rather than reading/typing.

So on your next long drive to nowhere in particular, you could play an IF game on your car's computer instead of listening to a non-interactive audio book or some tunes on the CD player/radio.

Obviously, this kind of thing might also be fun for the visually-impaired gamer.

Any idea if anyone has ever done this?

Re:Voice Interactive Fiction

[Dennis G. Jerz]

I have used Dragan Naturally Speaking to play interactive fiction. I first fed in a transcript of a complete game session, to give the speech-recognition software an edge. It worked fairly well, though getting the software to read only the new text that appears on the screen (rather than starting from the top) would involve some changes to the game interpreter. A few years ago, Scott Adams updated his classic gaming engine with a scrolling feature that would probably lend itself well to screen readers.

If you're serious about looking into games for the visually impaired, try http://www.audysseymagazine.org/

Re:Voice Interactive Fiction

[ahunter]

I implemented speech synthesis in the Mac OS X version of Zoom, although more as a gimmick than anything else. When I get around to it, the new Cocoa version should improve on this considerably (as it will be able to take advantage of Mac OS X's existing accessibility features as well as providing its own synthesis). Speech recognition is more difficult under OS X, as you have to provide specific phrases to recognise. I thought about hacking the game and reading the grammar tables (both the Inform and Infocom formats are documented somewhere) in order to generate these, but it did seem like rather too much effort and would probably be a bit hit and miss in any case.

Best text adventure game ever!

[tommut]

Don't forget the classic Videlectrix game: Thy Dungeonman II!!
http://www.videlectrix.com/thydungeonman2.html

Strong Bad owns.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

New book

[illuminatedwax]

The Onion AV club has a review of Twisty Little Passages , a new book about interactive fiction by Nick Montfort.

--Stephen

Get Frotz'd!

[kwelndar]

I remember my excitement a few years ago when I found out about the frotz z-code engine to interpret all the old Infocom games. I had purchased the Activision collectors editions a long time ago and so had a lot of games to play with. It brought back a lot of memories. I think the first game on disk (of course I had pac-man et.al. on cartridge) I ever bought for my Atari 800 was Zork III: The Dungeonmaster. The thrill of discovery was still there as I tried some of the games I had never played. I encourage everyone to try this tremendous form of entertainment. Great for those airport waits.

Also, if I remember correctly, Interactive Fiction was the term Infocom used itself as a description of the games, not any kind of politically correct nonsense. I think they were trying to indicate that their offerings were more like literature than the run of the mill text adventure, although off hand I can't remember anyone else who marketed games of this sort.

KILL!

[cepler]

Ahh, fond memories of Zork...

> kill
You!
You are dead.

er...oops..

Be careful . . .

[CleverNickName]

If you sit there too long, you head wil A Splode.

Mod parent +5 Insightful

[OECD]

or perhaps a bodice-ripping romance, if anybody's done one of those, which I strongly believe they should,

'nuff said.

telnet?

[ShawnDoc]

Anyone know where I can play some IF via telnet? I'm stuck at the airport using my sidekick. I wanna see if I can play one of these via the telnet/ssh client.

One word....

[Fizzl]

BatMUD

Interactive fiction vs. text adventures

[adamcadre]

There's been some (mostly negative) talk here about the term "interactive fiction"... and Andrew Plotkin has pointed out that no one involved in IF really insists on the term. That said, I recently rewrote the introduction to my own IF page, and since it seems relevant to the discussion, here's an abridged version:

To most people who've heard of it, the entry for "interactive fiction" in their mental dictionaries goes something like this: " Interactive fiction, noun. A fancy name for text adventures, a type of computer game popular in the early 1980s despite having no graphics. Usually involved wandering around in caves solving complicated puzzles, and became completely obsolete around the time Reagan left office, as graphics became less crappy."

The problem with this definition is that the medium of interactive fiction is no more a relic of the 1980s than the novel is a relic of the 17th century. [...] Now, it's true, a lot of IF works (even today) are games, and you have to solve puzzles in order to "win." Even a few of mine are like that (and I've identified how gamelike each one is [on my IF page]). But they don't have to be, and most of mine aren't. They're stories [...] with the twist that you get to participate in the telling.

In interviews I'm often asked to comment on how IF compares to various computer game genres, and I usually don't have much to say because my interest in computer games is minimal. I'm not a gamer. I'm a writer. Every time modern IF comes up on Slashdot, a hundred people dredge up how great Infocom was... but I've never cared for most of Infocom's offerings. "Text adventure games" bore me. I have little interest in and even less patience for solving puzzles, and most of my IF reflects this. So it seems to me silly to call something like Photopia or Narcolepsy a "text game," because they're not games. They have a lot more in common with works like The Sweet Hereafter and The Big Lebowski than they do with Zork. So I call them interactive fiction, not to make them sound more important, but simply because it's a more accurate name.

Adam Cadre, Holyoke, MA
http://adamcadre.ac

Re:Interactive fiction vs. text adventures

[scrytch]

Here's a problem I find with most computer "adventures". They often degenerate into a verb or pixel hunt. Here's a relevant quote for graphical adventures from the paper I Have No Words and I Must Design:

Or let's talk about computer adventures; they often display information failure. "Oh, to get through the Gate of Thanatos, you need a hatpin to pick the lock. You can find the hatpin on the floor of the Library. It's about three pixels by two pixels, and you can see it, if your vision is good, between the twelfth and thirteenth floorboards, about three inches from the top of the screen. What, you missed it?"

Yeah, I missed it. In an adventure, it shouldn't be ridiculously difficult to find what you need, nor should victory be impossible just because you made a wrong decision three hours and thirty-eight decision points ago. Nor should the solutions to puzzles be arbitrary or absurd.

That last sentence, "arbitrary and absurd" is what characterizes all too many text adventures, that they often devolve into a hunt of "apply every verb I can think of to every noun in the scene". Gee, I had to "rotate tree" to move the secret lever. Or was it "push", "turn", "twist" ... To say nothing of whatever bizarre key it might need.

Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy had some really absurd puzzles, but that was part of the fun, and it was usually a comical trial-and-error thing that gave you a hint as to what you needed as you went. Too many adventures lacked such cues entirely. HHGTG isn't the best example either, because if you fail to take one action at the very start of the game, you could play almost ALL the way through, but not finish at the very end. Totally infuriating.

Anyone remember "Crystal Cave"?

[jamie]

I remember playing a text adventure on a DEC PDP-10 back in the early '80s, but I've never been able to find reference to it since. I'm almost sure it was called "Crystal Caves" or "Caverns" or something.

The main parts I remember are wandering around a city in a taxicab, trying to find something to do. The text used to read something like "There is a taxi stand here, and a cabbie waiting for a fare." And then there was a scene in a bar in the city where the description read something like "One of them asks for a match, and everyone laughs uproariously." (I didn't get the joke at the time, not that it's a very funny joke.)

I eventually found my way into an adventure of some sort because I remember there being a cave or dungeon or something, with a sign over a door reading "Breathes there a man with soul so dead," or some other quip about a soul.

I never got very far into the game, and I never have seen any mention of it since...

Man...

[Azureflare]

Not even thirty and I feel like an old fogy ;_;

What's the world coming to where you turn into a crotchety old guy at mid-twenties? I think exactly the same way you do about the situation of gaming, but I realize our attitudes are similar to those old fogies who go around saying "Back in my day we had to walk through 6 feet of snow etc."

I'm really hoping Video games will go through a period of revitalization, 'cause they're heading down the path of mass commercialization.

Re:Man...

[Short Circuit]

I've been having those kind of "I'm feeling old" attacks since I was 16. And I'm only 20 now.

Re:Man...

[True Grit]

Hrrmph. Youngsters. I'm working on 40, and you kids are making me depressed. Now run along with you! Scat!

Choose your own adventure

[Innova]

It's been mentioned already, but I thought I would share my own memories about "text based interactive fiction".

I read all of the choose your own adventures. And I cheated at all of them. I would have all ten of my fingers marking different parts of the book. I wanted to make sure that I didn't "die".

It was alot of work, but I always finished those books with the most points possible (and I learned a great life lession....or someting).

Anyway, I could never finish hitch hikers guide, because I couldn't put my fingers in the disk, damnit!

Re:Choose your own adventure

[Carmie]

I'm so glad to hear someone else read them this way.

I don't know why I was so insistent on reading all the storylines at the same time.

Also, I never finished Hitchiker's either...came close. But I'd end up outside the Vogon hold more often than not. :(

There's a lesson here, I'm sure.

Star C. Foster

Photopia

[Flamesplash]

I highly recommend Photopia. It's a really cool interactive fiction that can be played in less than 2 hours.

Re:Photopia

[andyclap]

Have to second this: if you haven't played it or are new to IF, go get it now.
Incidentally, the author, Adam Cadre, has also published a couple of novels. I've not tried them myself - anyone here read them?

A few years ago, I ported an inform interpreter to GEOS for the Nokia 9110 communicator; discovering Photopia made all the hard work seem worthwhile. It's the only game that has actually made me cry.

Re:Photopia

[thrash242]

I "third" this. This piece left me kind of awestruck after finishing.

Also try 9:05 for an intersting twist and Shrapnel to really mess with your mind. Both by the same author.

MajorMUD

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many types of text based games. I run a MUD (Multi User Dungeon) which has over 35,000 rooms and more as more modules are added to the game. Over 256 live users can be on all at the same time fighting monsters and each other!

Text based adventure games are not lost! Check need to know where to find them. MajorMUD is just 1 over 1,000's od MUD out there.

Re:MajorMUD

[Eric Smith]

A MUD is not a text adventure game. A MUD generally has a theme, but not any sort of consistent plot.

And having 35,000 rooms seems like a serious drawback, not a useful feature. I can't imagine that many of those rooms are well-developed. Good text adventure games typically have under 200 rooms or locations, but put a great deal of effort into designing them well.

English is limiting

[Thinkit4]

Look at something like lojban, which is parsable by a computer.

It's nice to be able to pause

[0x0d0a]

I've thought about this -- I like playing with both speech synth and IF -- but decided that you really have to think intensely about IF. I'm uncomfortable even listening to audio books, since I can't stop and reflect when I need to. IF would be much more difficult to play without being able to stop.

While I'm posting, I wanted to say that it's wonderful to see an IF story put on Slashdot. IF fell off a lot of people's radar with Infocom. The games have advanced a lot and, IMHO, gotten much better. Problems like "hunt the verb" have been largely eliminated, and many clever tricks and elements introduced.

Complete Infocom Download Torrent

[Anonymous Coward]

check it:
http://213.158.115.211/suprnova//torrents/1268/Inf ocom%20Collection-zip.torrent

about 150 mb and it's the dos/windos version.

torrent

[Anonymous Coward]

better yet, download it here

http://213.158.115.211/suprnova//torrents/1268/Inf ocom%20Collection-zip.torrent.
150mb.

AIs would need a complex world

[0x0d0a]

The main problem is that an AI capable of entertaining and interacting with a human would have to be very complex. The complexity of an IF world is very small compared to what it would take to train an AI.

You know those stories about people that get stranded somewhere in a foreign country, and have to perform an amazing act to learn and understand what's going on? A human baby learns extremely quickly. Each human manages to do this, to go from zero knowledge of any language to speaking and comprehending knowledge with a few years of work. The problem is that it takes *four years* of constant interaction with new people and languages, plus visual input, to learn something like this. If you consider how much sheer *stuff* there is in four years of a human life, the task becomes staggering in scope. And we'd still be working with only a text-based interface...given the lower data bandwidth, and the fact that visual knowledge from the outside world is incredibly important to understand what is going on in a game for us, it would probably take far longer with just text to work with.

So maybe it could be done, but all the IF writers in the world have not written enough content (and some of it is surrealistic or misleading). All of it offers a much less powerful world than the one humans are in.

Two IF adventures worth trying

[0x0d0a]

While you're there, try Babel (for the TADS engine) and Bliss also for TADS.

Babel, a sci-fi horror game, was the first IF game I beat without needing any hints (though it's still significantly more difficult than many IF games out there), and Bliss...probably the best example I've ever seen of using the IF format. Describing it would probably spoil it, so I can only recommend playing it. When you've finished it, you'll understand.

Note that both of these games are dark and potentially disturbing. If you like fluffy or fantastic or slice-of-life or something else, look elsewhere...

Linux compatibility with IF is excellent

[0x0d0a]

Except for games that use audio or graphics, Linux has pretty much spot-on compatibility with any IF game, as do most operating systems. IF games are extremely portable, written to one of a number of portable VMs (and all this years before Java...and with better compatibility than Java).

TADS (IMHO the most advanced engine, though Inform is very close) just plain runs on Linux. You want this to play .gam files.
There is Frotz to run Inform (.z5 files...I believe a couple other .zX formats, but I've only played .z5).
There is an ADRIFT implementation called SCARE for Linux. It has a less-than-perfect parser. To be honest, ADRIFT is a much simpler engine, and I generally fine TADS or Inform games to be much more fun and impressive.

Note that other classic adventure game VMs -- the ones for commercial graphical adventures -- like the Sierra (King's Quest, among others) and Lucasarts (Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, Secret of Monkey Island, among others) VMs have been ported to Linux in the form of Sarien, FreeSCI, and ScummVM. I don't believe there have been any new AGI/SCI/SCUMM adventures made -- the engines are static and no improved games will be made for them, but they're still neat projects to have fun playing the originals on.

Re:Linux compatibility with IF is excellent

[matlhDam]

While I agree that SCARE's parser is decidedly average, in fairness, it's not that much worse than ADRIFT's own mediocre parsing capabilities. I'm regularly annoyed by ADRIFT's inability to figure out things that most other engines could do easily.

I think SCARE's major problem compared with ADRIFT (at least for me) is the fact that it doesn't have a command history. At some point, I'll finish off that GTK2 interface and release it, but until then, I guess we're stuck with it (or WINE).

Re:Linux compatibility with IF is excellent

[ronfar]

I played Day of the Tentacle all the way through for the first time on my Dreamcast using ScummVM. Truly the developers on that project are kings among men...

Re:Linux compatibility with IF is excellent

[e7]

TMA *

Too Many Acronyms

Interactive?

[Cebrian]

Interactive fiction games are actually not very interactive.

The word interactive suggests some kind of system capable of adjusting and modify itself to your reactions in some manner. Such a system should do its best to watch your movements, whatever they are, trying hard to provide a reasonable response to them. Interactivity is all about giving you as most freedom as possible. Interactive software is expected to allow you to do almost anything you wish and provide reasonable and interesting responses to all your actions. Chris Crawford refers to the process as a listen/think/speak loop between two actors, and the most thinks you can "say" that your listener will understand, the more interesting is the converstaion.

However, "interactive fiction" is filled by constraints. The game limits as much as it can the things you can do: you can't move to any place, you can't take anything, you can't speak to other people, and when you're able you can't say almost anything to them. You're expected to find the "commands" the game understand, and the game world is filled with random constraints called "puzzles". While I expect the presence of conflicts and obstacles in a game, the moment there is a predefined, designed set of closed solutions you almost can't talk about interactivity anymore. You should create problems instead of puzzles, as any modern game designer would say. Problems are interactive and solutions beyond the creator's grasp are expected to exist given the broad number of actions at your disposal. Puzzles, however, are not interactive. There is a solution, find it or you're stuck and punished. But the action you need to do is hidden to you, even if logical. You should figure the exact word or sentence: if it where presented to you, the puzzle whould be so simple there would be no point to its existance. You're fighting the interface.

Interactive fiction is out of touch of modern game designing techniques. There is nothing wrong with text-only interfaces and textual descriptions, but the whole genre needs a deep rethinking if it is going to be something more than fine books so difficult to read that you need to figure puzzles before you can turn the page (and this in the better case).

Re:Interactive?

[Dennis G. Jerz]

No medium is unconstrained, so pointing out that IF is constrained is perhaps missing the point. From a certain perspective, what you call constraints in IF can be seen as freedoms. The IF designer is *not* constrained by needing a team of 3D artists, scriptwriters, mo-cap actors, and voice actors in order to realize a particular vision. Whether the effort required (on behalf of the designer and the player) is worth the aesthetic payoff is a matter of personal taste. It's clear there isn't an audience willing to pay for text adventure games -- I've got no delusions in that area. But that doesn't nullify the cultural value of the genre.

Within the aesthetics of IF, if a puzzle really is random, it's *not* considered a good puzzle, but there are some games that people play only for the puzzles, because the puzzles are devious enough, clever enough, or maddening enough that they keep their interest. Even fans of IF hate gratuitous mazes and "guess-the-verb" problems (which are treated as bugs, not puzzles).

Have you seen some recent IF? Adam Cadre's "Photopia" is the canonical example for "Gosh, look how far IF has come," in that it's a relatively easy game (you might get stuck in a few places, but that's what walkthroughs are for) with a strong storyline; it's not just a good story divided up into chunks, it uses the IF medium to its advantage; when I finished it for the first time, I sat there, stunned, and then immeditely restarted from the beginning to see what kind of power I could wield over the outcome. The degree of power that the author granted me was an important part of the "message" of the story, and it fit perfectly with the medium. The same author's "9:05" plays with the notion of "winning" -- but the ending in which your NPC ends up the best is completely unsatisfying, and the ending in which your NPC ends up in deep trouble is deeply satisfying (in a creepy way). Emily Short's "Galatea" is an NPC portrait; the conversation interface won't win any Loebner prizes, but it's a good attempt to push the boundaries of the "ask X about Y" syntax for conversing with an NPC.

I recommend that you take a look at recent winners of the XYZZY Awards -- games are selected on the basis of puzzles, NPCs, setting, writing, and a half dozen other specific categories. The rethinking that you call for is already underway.

http://www.wurb.com/if/award/3

(The 2003 XYZZYs will be announced this Saturday.)

Given the external constraints forced upon early game designers, in the form of cruel memory restrictions, blocky graphics, atrocious sound, and 30 or so competing platforms, the text genre was actually freeing -- it was easily portable, for one thing; for another, typing into a command line interface that may or may not understand what you wanted to do was a common activity -- that was pretty much how you used a computer.

The term "interactive fiction" historically emphaiszed that an text adventure game was a form of story in which you participated; while the stories weren't always compelling, and while narrative is only one of many components of contemporary commercial games, if the story is good, an IF player won't mind giving up some freedom in order to see the narrative play itself out the way the designer intended it.

Modern game design techniques wouldn't exist -- that is, they wouldn't be modern -- if they didn't have older techniques to build off of (and, when appropriate, reject).

Re:Interactive?

[Cebrian]

Ah, but IF is constrained by design, and willing to do so. As an IF writer, I don't give the player a world filled of interesting things to do and then suggest some goal: I simply plan about an specific puzzle and then populate the world with the minimal actions and objects needed to win. Any side addition such as extra actions available and more objects to define the world and interact with, are considered simple flavor or clues for the player, when this form of interactivity should be the central point of the experience instead of yet another word puzzle or yet another story to be told. It is incredible just how so many games blame the player when s/he attempts to interact with some things not related to the plot ("this is only scenary, you idiot!").

The game industry is in no good shape, but there is hope. Serious research has been going on the field since the 60's at least, and there is the literature to prove it. There is no excuse to ignore all this work, neither for the professional 3D-wizbang developer (who unfortunately usually does) nor for the amateur game writer.

Actually, I see Photopia as a step backwards. I agree it's a fantastic story, but there is no interactivity at all. The command prompt in Photopia could be substituted by a "press any key to continue" message and the overall experience could be about the same. Perhaps better, because the "puzzles" in Photopia serve no purpose at all and can distract you. Photopia triumphs with the fiction part while dismishing the interactive one.

I have to concede at least that the IF designer does not have nonsense marketing constraints such as the need to do big, flashy 3D graphics. Actually, the command prompt would be the best interface there is IF (and it is a big if) it understands everything. Then it is the equivalent of a Star Trek computer hearing your voice and doing just what you said. The problem with current command prompts, and the cause they are substituted by GUIs, is they don't. They only understand a tiny subset of verbs you're supposed to memorize. Interactive fiction "pretends" it understands a lot. You're supposed to try anything you want. The reality is, however, very different. There is a tiny subset of commands accepted, and you know them either because you're familiar with the genre or because guessing them is part of the puzzle. This is horrendous interface design at best. There should be another way, maybe inverse parsers, maybe some new interface abstraction not seen yet.

Finally, I'm not interested in historical retrogaming. There are other good points to bring interactive fiction to the table. Anybody could write it, for example, transforming the genre to a medium and not only a bunch of "games" (it's not true today simply because the current tools are simply not designed this way).

IF today

[Qrlx]

"interactive fiction" whatever. The modern day equivalent is called Vice City. If you are parapalegic or somegthing and cant work a mouse it's called KOTOR.

But there is something to be said for that world unfolding on the amber screen over an acoustically coupled modem... Then there was the parser. Noun Verb would get you very far, like "kill orc" or "scream bear." "Scream bear" is one of my favorites. I couldn't get across the bridge without giving up the pot-o-honey treasure item to the bear guarding the walkway. Well, in my frustration, I typed "scram, bear" into the command line.

The game only read the first three letters of any word you typed in, so it interpreted "scram" as "scream" and followed up with some message about the poor bear cup being scared off and running away. So I won that game, but only through an act of frustration which I seriously doubt was intentional on the part of the programmer.

There are a few other good ones, like "the magic password to enter is needed" and you type in "needed". Come to think of it, these games are a lot more cerebral than Vice City or KOTOR and it's too bad that the blinky lights have taken over. Oh well I guess that's civilization for you. TV or smallpox, I guess we chose TV.

Bonus points for whoever actually typed in "lick dots" without cheating.

Re:IF today

[Dennis G. Jerz]

That's a good one... Scott Adams tells this story about "SCR* BEAR"... I've posted an .mp3 of him telling this story at an academic panel a couple years ago...

http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/adams/audio/bear.mp 3

Well, I got a fan letter in that just had my whole company rolling in the aisles. It said:

We got to that bear on the ledge. We tried giving it the honey and he ate it up and boy that was a treasure and that was no good. So we reloaded the saved game and we went back to that bear. We pushed that bear, we prodded that bear, we tickled that bear, we have gotten so upset with that bear we could get nowhere.

Now the following is rated PG-13 so if you don't want to hear it, please close your ears. Ok. Continuing..

So we finally said "Screw the bear!!" And the game replied, "The bear is so startled he falls off the ledge!"

They thought I was a genius programmer!

http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/adams

Re:IF today

[Qrlx]

thanks, that's great. of course i was only ten when playing that game so screwing the bear probably never occurred to me ;)

Use a towel

[Anonymous Coward]

outsmarting .. ravenous bugblatter beasts with nothing but a keyboard

A keyboard? I used a towel.

Collosal Cave Adventures

[hughk]

The main adventure started on a PDP-10 and was written in Fortran by Crowther and Woods. It was mostly data driven (special actions needed software assistance) and the data file was eminently hackable. This sounds very much like a variant of the original from the 70s.

Ack! Please, please wait!

[0x0d0a]

AAAAACCCCKKKK!

Wait!

You're the SCARE maintainer? I've got patches for you that have been sitting around, and couldn't get in contact with you via email!

One of those adds a command history! :-)

a monkey with a brass leg...

[jmlyle]

Please, someone help me on this one. I've been trying to find out what this game was for years.

A text game that we played over a 300 bps dial up to a Georgia Tech server in the late 70's or early 80's. The only thing I can remember for sure is that there was a monkey with a brass leg in one of the rooms.

Any help?

Ahh the memories..

[mrselfdestrukt]

Maybe it's just my imagination, but I always remember it being very dark in those text adventure games. Most of the time I couldn't really see what was going on...

My favourite paragraph....

[SmackCrackandPot]

From: Leather Goddesses of Phobos

]There is a machine here, with a sign saying "T-remover".

>Open door
>Place rabbit in machine
>close door
>start machine

]The machine comes to life and there is a brilliant flash of light.
]A rather suprised looking rabbi jumps out of the machine and runs away.

Re:My favourite paragraph....

[Creepy]

Ah, the T remover, which I think it was described as a TEE-remover (what's a TEE-remover?)... I really wanted to put Trent in it and get Ren, but the game wouldn't let me :) (Trent was your sidekick if you played as a male [decided by the bathroom you enter at the beginning of the game], Tiffany the female...).

Personally I loved the docks - Hickory Dickory Dock, Whazzup Dock, Donald Dock... I don't think I simultaneously laughed and groaned at the same time so much in my life.

Great for planes

[Piquan]

I have a Palm Z-interpreter, and a whole slew of IF (mostly the top three from previous IF contests). It's great for when you're on a plane, waiting room, early to a meeting, or whenever you have time to kill.

Usually, I'll play new (to me) games on planes or other times when I have at least an hour, and re-explore old games when I've got less time, like waiting for a meeting.

The Neverhood (by DreamWorks)

[KlaymenDK]

...Hi all,
just wanted to say that The Neverhood (whence I stole my nick) is a neat game, even though it has no text interface.

You (a clay figure) walk around in this zany clay landscape, and while the interface is simply point-and-click, the humour, physical set design, and soundtrack is excellently made. All in all, it is reminiscent of the old adventures (Zork, CC, Transylvania, etc). /My .02

all I can say is

[marksilverman]

Unfortunately, there's a radio connected to my brain.

Interactive FPS

[ch-chuck]

Hey, how about the best of both worlds:
>+-+-+-+-+-GO NORTH

You see two Orcs and an Enforcer

>SHOOT ORC WITH BFG

The Orc explodes in a bloody spray of meat

>SHOOT ORC WITH BFG

You are out of ammo. The Enforcer hits you, -10.

>SHOOT ENFORCER WITH RAIL GUN

You miss the Enforcer. The Orc hits you, -5.

>SHOOT ENFORCER WITH ROCKET

The Enforcer explodes in a bloody spray of meat.
The Orc hits you, -5.

>SHOOT ORC WITH ROCKET

The Orc explodes in a bloody spray of meat.

>GET MEDIKIT

+20

>GET ROCKETS

You now have 55 rockets

>GO NORTH

You see 3 Orcs and 2 Grunts.

>

Politically Correct Term?

[ronfar]

Interactive Fiction, the politically correct name for what used to be called text adventure games

It seems to me that they were calling it Interactive Fiction way back in the New Zork Times (anyone else remember anxiously awaiting each issue, until those bastards at the New York Times made them change the name to The Status Line). In fact, there was one issue where they thought that the term Interactive Fiction was a bit unwieldly so they had a contest to come up with a new term for Infocom Style Adventure games.

My Favorite Text Moment. . .

[Fantastic Lad]

>Examine lamp

The dusty silver oil Lamp is very old. There are some words engraved on the side of the Lamp.

>Read words

You cannot read them. They are covered in dust.

>Wipe lamp

As you wipe away the dust, the lamp shudders and grows warm in your hands. But then it makes a wheezing sound and a thin trail of smoke sputters from the lamp. Nothing else happens.

> Examine lamp

The shiney silver oil Lamp is very old. There are some words engraved on the side of the Lamp.

> Read words

"Do not rub."

Ah. Those were the good old days. . .

-FL -Plugh

Not a text/graphics issue...

[clary]

...I think, but rather what kind of game you like. I have never been able to stand puzzle games, because the object is to guess what connections were in the author's mind, regardless of whether they make any sense.

<flamebait> For that reason, Zork and Myst sucked equally. ;-) </flamebait>

New (sort of) AGI/SCI/SCUMM games

[lysium]

Actually, there have been some amazing fan remakes of Kings Quest I&II, and best of all, Quest for Glory II. I've heard rumors of Space Quest remakes as well.

All are well-crafted and will bring back a memory or two. In addition, I've played a few new 'point and click' adventures made with the AGI/SCI engines; check the web, there should be a graphic adventure equivalent to the IF-Archive.

===========

smarter NPCs

[_|()|\|]

I've seen some posts on this topic stressing the "F" in IF, but the "I" is so much more important. To that end, I'd like to define the story in terms of roles, which various NPCs will fill (the same character won't always be the bad guy, or the Judas, etc.). To properly implement this, I need smarter NPCs that have personal agendas, can go off script a little (sort of like a customized Eliza), and can make basic inferences. NPCs should talk behind the player's back and form opinions of each other and the player. Trust, in particular, would weigh heavily.

Two games that do part of this are Siboot and The Sims. Siboot, which I've never played, is described in Chris Crawford's On Game Design. The Sims has the rudiments of a relationship model, but I would hide the NPC stats from the player. If you insult an NPC, he may put on a happy face and exact his revenge at a later date.

Nope

[jamie]

Nope, it wasn't Colossal Cave, it was quite different in many respects. Maybe it shared some of the same code but it was a wholly different adventure.

Perry Simm

[jdavidb]

Who remembers Perry Simm? Absolutely best story in a game manual ever.

And nowadays, some people are actually trying it. (I'm really curious if that project is real or if they are putting us on. Can anyone tell?)

Re:Perry Simm

[Brian_rts]

I loved AMFV... im tempted to play it again. That was one of my favorite infocom games.

Slightly ot: Map editor for text adventures?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know a nice map editor program that I can use to create a map while playing text adventures with quite irregular maps like zork 1?
I only found the one built into Zinc so far and it's lacking important features.
Thanks.

Re:Slightly ot: Map editor for text adventures?

[dgagley]

Map editor?
I don't need no stinking map editor. From the top of my head I can still draw out some of the Zork I, II, III and underground maps. They, however, are getting forgotten with my old age.

All you need to ... OH NO MY SWORD IS GLOWING.....

Inteligence I have, my sanity is questionable.

Death of IF

[Dun Malg]

I read an editorial commentary one a web site (I can't remember where, and I can no longer find it) discussing the demise of adventure games. One reason cited was the use of irrational puzzles. The author went on to describe one such puzzle in detail (I quote from memory, so it's just an approximation):

You must get into a secret base, but you need an ID Pass. You get a soldier drunk and steal his pass. Next, you find a pen and draw a mustache on his picture on the ID. Then you go out back to the shed, put a piece of masking tape over a small hole in the back of the shed. You then chase a black cat into the shed, who then runs out the hole in the back. The masking tape catches some of the cat's hair as it brushes past it. You then take the hair from the tape, find the bottle of spirit gum in the hotel manager's desk, and use the cat hair to make a fake mustache. The problem with the puzzle is that it's illogical. Everybody knows that the first step in impersonating a man without a mustache is to not make a fake mustache. Even after making the leap to the mustache, the method of making it is totally bizarre and non-intuitive. The worst part is that getting into the base is a bottleneck in the game. Unless you can figure out the "stupid cat trick", you can't continue. Bad design like this was a nail in the coffin.

Re:Death of IF

[Anonymous Coward]

The original artist of zork box fame created the graffix at this site:

bridesofdestruction

Re:Death of IF

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that was Old Man Murray (site may be dead) talking about Gabriel Knight 3.

My favourite text adventure

[Cecil]

My favourite text adventure was tabtne.vda and tabtxe.nda in Wing Commander: Privateer. They are, for the unenlightened, commonly referred to as advent.bat and adnext.bat.

Yes, the people at Origin included a pair of text adventures, written in DOS BATCH FILES, with their game. How cool (and masochistic) is that?

They were actually pretty fun little games.

Re:My favourite text adventure

[andrewa]

Here they are....

MyAdventureGame

[Anonymous Coward]

MyAdventureGame.com is entirely devoted to user-created text adventure games. It's certainly not a popular site, but it's cool to see fans putting stuff like that together.

"Adventure House"?

[orcus]

Surely - the author of this article means "Adventure International" ???

Though Infocom was the most successful company producing IF, they were not the only one; other notables include Adventure House, founded by Scott Adams, and Sierra On-Line, cofounded by Roberta Williams