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

[Aardpig]

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.

I'm not sure whether its still in the shops, but a few years ago I bought the Lost Treasures of Infocom, which brings together many of their best games. Unfortunately, you don't get the actual memorabilia -- just a large book with pictures of all the items which accompany each game.

Infocom were indeed great -- their games had such a wonderful depth. However, many of the modern post-Infocom IF games, such as Curses, Jigsaw, Christminster, A Change in the Weather, really are fantastic -- even bigger and more sophisticated than the original Infocom stuff. All of these games are free (as in beer), and can easily be found on the internet.

Remember: it's dark and you are likely to be eaten by a Grue.

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.

Archive of IF games

[smr2x]

http://www.ifarchive.org/ seems like the right place for all you nostalgic types... or the curious ;-)

PC?

[Rexz]

"...Interactive Fiction, the politically correct name for what used to be called text adventure games

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.

Re:PC?

[dilby]

I would have thought they'd call them graphically challenged adventure games.

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.

Oh, the memories!

[perimorph]

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!

Re:Oh, the memories!

[Hitmouse]

Eliza: Why is the endless game of seeing how many different ways you could type a sentence before the computer realized what you were talking about, your favorite part? Does your mother feel the same way?

Hitchhiker's Guide!

[Faust7]

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."

Re:Hitchhiker's Guide!

[PressReturn]

grrr, will now attempt to hit the proper button
infocom HHGTG game

Re:Would really like to remember...

[smr2x]

Sounds like it.

From http://www.infocom-if.org/games/planetfall/planetf all.html:

Released: 1983

About 20 years. Good luck and hope it's the right one.

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

The irony...

[Erwos]

... 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

Dunnet

[Aardpig]

Ah, the joy of typing M-x dunnet into emacs:

Dead end
You are at a dead end of a dirt road. The road goes to the east.
In the distance you can see that it will eventually fork off. The
trees here are very tall royal palms, and they are spaced equidistant
from each other.
There is a shovel here.
>

The only text editor to have a built-in advdenture game?

The IF community is still alive

[Rope_a_Dope]

There's the newsgroups:

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.

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.

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.

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?

Re:Interactive Books

[boobox]

Yes, you are correct.

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.)...

...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):

'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)."

New book

[illuminatedwax]

The Onion AV club has a review of Twisty Little Passages , a new book about interactive fiction by Nick Montfort.

--Stephen

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:Interactive Books

[Tonith]

If you want to kill the ogre, turn to page 452.
[turns to page 452]
The ogre laughs at your pitiful attempt to kill him and rends the flesh from your bones.
"Damnit!" [turns back to page 231]

If you want to befriend the ogre, turn to page 294.
[turns to page 294]
The ogre befriends you - with an ogre-hug of epic proportions. You are crushed to a pulp.
"Damnit!" [turns back to page 231]

If you want to run away from the ogre, turn to page 583.
[turns to page 583]
You turn to run away, and run smack into a tree. While you stumble back, the ogre picks you up and throws you off a nearby cliff. Your body plummets onto several sharp pointy rocks, and you see vultures start to circle around you. "Damnit!"

I never won at those things. Stupid ogres.

Linux compatibility with IF is excellent

[0x0d0a]

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).

TADS (IMHO the most advanced engine, though Inform is very close) just plain runs on Linux. You want this to play .gam files.
There is Frotz to run Inform (.z5 files...I believe a couple other .zX formats, but I've only played .z5).
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.

Re:IF today

[Dennis G. Jerz]

That's a good one... Scott Adams tells this story about "SCR* BEAR"... I've posted an .mp3 of him telling this story at an academic panel a couple years ago...

http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/adams/audio/bear.mp 3

Well, I got a fan letter in that just had my whole company rolling in the aisles. It said:

We got to that bear on the ledge. We tried giving it the honey and he ate it up and boy that was a treasure and that was no good. So we reloaded the saved game and we went back to that bear. We pushed that bear, we prodded that bear, we tickled that bear, we have gotten so upset with that bear we could get nowhere.

Now the following is rated PG-13 so if you don't want to hear it, please close your ears. Ok. Continuing..

So we finally said "Screw the bear!!" And the game replied, "The bear is so startled he falls off the ledge!"

They thought I was a genius programmer!

http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/adams