Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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...
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?
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
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
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
...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.
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
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
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.
my blog
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)
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
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...
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.
I've made up my mind and now I've got to lie in it.
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.)
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.
I have found a truly wonderful proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, but unfortunately this sig is too small to contain it.
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?
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.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
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
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.
Literacy Weblog http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog
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.
May we never see th
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).
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.