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."
Videlectrix hasn't forgotten the "magic" that is interactive fiction!
P.S.- how do you get past the sous-chef?!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
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.
http://www.ifarchive.org/ seems like the right place for all you nostalgic types... or the curious ;-)
.
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. ;)
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
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 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.
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!
of a maze of twisted paragraphs, all of them alike
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Here is just one of many places: Play Zork.
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
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
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.
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."
The coolest voice ever.
Sounds like it.
f all.html:
From http://www.infocom-if.org/games/planetfall/planet
Released: 1983
About 20 years. Good luck and hope it's the right one.
.
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!
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.
... 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.
Ah, the joy of typing M-x dunnet into emacs:
The only text editor to have a built-in advdenture game?
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Leather Goddesses of Phobos by InfoCom
p.s. It seemed funny at the time
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
...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.
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.
...for fear of being eaten by a Gru!
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
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.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Great game.
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
You are in a maze of twisty little comments, all alike...
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
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.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
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...
Microsoft representatives release statements that their software is only penetrated after patches are released, and we respond on slashdot....
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.)
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.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
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 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.
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?
Don't forget the classic Videlectrix game: Thy Dungeonman II!!
http://www.videlectrix.com/thydungeonman2.html
Strong Bad owns.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
--Stephen
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
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
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...
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.
I highly recommend Photopia. It's a really cool interactive fiction that can be played in less than 2 hours.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
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.
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
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).
.gam files. .zX formats, but I've only played .z5).
TADS (IMHO the most advanced engine, though Inform is very close) just plain runs on Linux. You want this to play
There is Frotz to run Inform (.z5 files...I believe a couple other
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.
May we never see th
outsmarting .. ravenous bugblatter beasts with nothing but a keyboard
A keyboard? I used a towel.
http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/adams/audio/bear.m
http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/adams
Literacy Weblog http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog
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).
Literacy Weblog http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog
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).
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.
>
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
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.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Ah. Those were the good old days. .
-FL -Plugh
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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.
Random and weird software I've written.