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

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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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.

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? ;-)

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: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

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: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.

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.)

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

[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.

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?

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: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.