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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."
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.
... 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
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Yes, you are correct.
...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):
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.)...
'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)."
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.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
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).
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.