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Interactive Fiction Competition Opens
Sargent1 writes "The 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition has opened for business. The yearly competition, now celebrating its tenth anniversary, is for short pieces of interactive fiction. At this point IF authors can sign up to take part in the competition, and everyone can learn how to judge the games when they are released in October of this year. If you're not sure what interactive fiction is, take a look at Slashdot's recent review of Twisty Little Passages, a book on interactive fiction from Adventure (and earlier antecedents) to present day."
that people are still making text based adventure games. They sure do pass the time like nothing else. That and text games can be made by anyone with a little bit of programming knowledge and too much time on their hands, thus creating a great variety of games not seen in other genres.
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Thank you.
There doesn't seem to be any reason you couldn't enter a graphical game (so long as you don't enter a non-interactive one). You'd get fewer judges, probably, than one that was text-based, and there would probably be a bunch of discussion, but that doesn't mean you couldn't enter it. Of course, it would be judged against text, which is a much easier medium to be expressive in.
I dunno, half-life certainly seemed very creative, focusing a lot more on adventure than just shooting things, and some other games have picked up on that.
I think the main reason you don't see a graphical competition is because the tools are so much more in-depth. Skill aside, it is somewhat easier to describe a vast scene because you can draw on the player's own knowledge and creativity than to have to painstakingly model every detail of it. Think of like that big tree from Rivne or something- describing would likely be a bit easier than modeling it in 3D.
Not that IF games are very easy to produce; in fact, though it is easy enough to make fun of their short comings, allowing for every possible outcome a person could possibly type in is a difficult task.
Sometimes I think we don't have all the concepts of a 'game' nailed down yet from what they started in the days of text adventure. I really enjoy books, but sometimes there are movies, such as Star Wars, that just wouldn't work like a book. I think that graphical games can show just as much creativity as an IF game, and IF games can suck just as much as the latest FPS.
"yeah but nobody wants to buy a text-based game"
Which is probably why they're free these days.
Come on, think before you post. That is one of the most ignorant things anyone's ever said about interactive fiction. No, it's not a synonym for "Text-based Adventure Game". No, it's not just Quake without graphics.
Interactive Fiction is a genre that focuses on a story - that includes plot and character development, dialogue, and creativity - and it allows the player to interact with te development of that story. You don't see much (if any) of that in Quake.
Good interactive fiction doesn't need (and doesn't have) graphics for the same reason that pictures don't make a good book any better.
That is not correct. Interactive fiction is *not* a synonym for text adventures. Text adventures are a subset of interactive fiction. There are many examples of IF that are not adventures in any sense of the word, nor are they games.
Anyway, yes, there are many people who still like IF, and there's a thriving community based around it. Once cool thing about it is that just about anyone who learns one of the many IF authoring languages can write one. This leads to many interesting works that wouldn't be commercially viable to a mass market, but are entertaining to fans. This also leads to crappy IF, of course, but there are plenty of sites that review works of IF. Much IF written by writer types rather than programmer types, althogh it requires both skills to be an excellent author.
Just as there are people who read books instead of just watching movies, there are people who write and play IF, including me. But then, I play the most modern graphical games as well.
Who in the world uses these? You obviously know nothing about IF. 99.95% of IF is written with one of the many IF languages: mainly Inform, TADS, and Adrift. These come with very complex parsers and other features that are commonly used in IF. The more powerful ones (Inform, TADS) are fully functional programming languages, as well.
The other major benefit to using one of these langauges is that they compile to bytecode, and can be used an an insanely varied number of platforms, including Palm devices, Game Boy Advance, Dreamcast and anything that can run a Java Applet. All this with no modification or recomplication.
So if you want to write IF from scratch in C, go ahead, but do it as an excercise in writing parsers, not as a entry to this competition.