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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."
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 ;-)
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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.
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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."
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"
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 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
--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
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.
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
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.
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. 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.