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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."
Ahh I remember those, the only thing that ran on my old 286
Open door
You cant open this door
Close Door
The Door Isint open
Attack Door
Your Hand Hurts
Get Life
You go outside, blinded by the sun, you procede to the comic book store only to be beaten up on the way there, you then return home only to be taunted by CowboyNeal.
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.
_____
Thank you.
Lojban would be ideal for interactive fiction--it's parsable like any computer language. Homonyms are just a silly artifact prevalent in English that obscures the interesting subject of computer linguistics.
-I am an elective eunuch.
I'd love to see this a Graphical Adventure contest like this one recieve the kind of coverage and participation that the interactive games get.
It's seems so sad to me that modern games seem so devoid of creativity. I pray for the day that the immense processing power of todays gaming machines are applied toward making a truely innovative and creative game, instead of ones that simply remake the same old FPS with better graphics.
Ye see a FLASK. Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH, and DENNIS.
Ye find yeself in yon dungeon. Ye see a SCROLL. Behind ye SCROLL is a FLASK. Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH and DENNIS.
What wouldst thou deau?
>go dennis
Ye arrive at DENNIS. He wears a sporty frock coat and a long jimberjam. He paces about nervously. Obvious exits are NOT DENNIS.
>talk to dennis
You Engage Dennis in a leisurely discussion. Ye learns that his jimberjam was purchased on sale at a discount market and that he enjoys pacing about nervously. You become bored and begin thinking about parapets.
More here.
I remember my old BBS had a door game I ended up actually paying for.
L.O.R.D: Legend of the Red Dragon
What a game. Kind of like a MUD too.
Those were the days. I wish there were still some BBSes (dialup) alive and thriving... I'd go sign up, maybe even pay for it.
So I see this story has the pacman icon. Pacman, however, is not a good example of interactive fiction.
You are at the center of a maze. To your front and rear are rows of dots that recede into the distance.
> forward
As you move forward, your open mouth causes you to consume a dot.
> forward
Your bulbous body thrusts forward once more, another dot disappearing into your maw.
> back
You turn around. In the distance you can see a ghost, coming right for you!
> down
You can't go in that direction.
> up
You slip into a side passage, continuing to dine on dots. Ahead there is a turn to the right.
> right
You turn, but a ghost is waiting for you right around the corner. There is no time to react, and you run right into it.
You are dead. Your score is 14/1000.
Play again? (y/n)
Those interested in the contest might want to check out these resources for getting started with Inform. And for a short ten-minute adventure, I will engage in some self-publicity and recommend Escape from Station V.
Your game is going to RULE! Systems written with IF in mind, having been worked on for years, will tremble at your amazing parser and world model.
Yes, but Inform and TADS already have excellent text parsers written for you, making life much simpler once you know the language. So you have to ask yourself which is more convenient - learning a new language to get a free parser or writing the parser yourself in a language you already know.
You also don't have to worry about cross-compatibility with the IF languages. Both of these languages create pseudo-code that runs under a virtual machine. Sort of the way Java works. If you code in C++, even if you write it to be truly portable it will still need to be compiled on each machine people want it run on.
To each his own, but you should at least take a good look at Inform/TAGS/Hugo.
I could never enter that. Everything I tried would wind up being colored by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That game has so thoroughly embedded itself in the choose-your-own-adventure part of my brain.
With likes like these, who can blame me?
"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."
"A tree outside the window collapses. There is no causal relationship between this event and your picking up the toothbrush."
The coolest voice ever.
It really exists guys. Don't we all just love our text mode pacman! > Up The ghost looms ahead! Download it here: www.freewebs.com/dansworlddomination/PACMAN.EXE
Help Fight SPAM today!
The biggest problem with graphical adventures is that you must represent what your character is playing with graphically. You can't represent something that isn't obvous and the scenes must be uncluttered to keep your adventurer excited.
Let's take an example the standard cliche, taking stuff outta the trash. In IF, you can alude to stuf being in the trash, you can mention the trash can and hope the adventurer looks, you can relate a story about trashcans or you can hint to look directy. With graphical adventures, the trashcan looks like the recyclebin in Windows. Heaped full of papers one minute, take one sheet out and it's empty. It's pretty blunt when you think about it.
IMHO, most of the creativity was used to dress up a rather repeditive game genre.
~~~
Click here, you know you wanna!
Interactive Reality may require a larger investment in order to get a satisfieing level of game play, but the rewards are better, not to mention the graphics are like none other, and the tactile interface is truely ground breaking.
Unfortunatly, i am a broke student and can't afford to play. My stack of quarters will only go so far, so I am stuck in the "pinball" level.
Adam Cadre's stuff is pretty cool. IF isn't dead, not by a long shot.
Cue 150 comments of
"yeah but nobody wants to buy a text-based game"
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
You find yourself inside a dark room. There is a locked door in front of you. You have a key in your hand.
Input: open door
The door is locked.
Input: use key
What for?
Input: use key with door
You can't use the key with that.
Input: look door
The door is plain brown. There is a lock keeping it close.
Input: use key on lock
You get shocked.
Diego
diegoT
I loved Infocom from the very beginning, not only because they made great interactive fiction / text adventures, but because they had really funny ads.
One of the best was a picture of a brain with the caption: WE STICK OUR GRAPHICS WHERE THE SUN DON'T SHINE.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
If you already know C, you're MUCH better off just spending a couple of hours picking up the idiosyncracies of Inform. 99% of your work will be wasted if you try to write IF from scratch in C.
The Kingdom of Loathing
I've been judging the Comp for a few years now, and I have yet to see a scratch-written game that didn't suck. Not to say it couldn't be done, but in the timeframe of the competition, the specialized languages are a huge advantage.
Besides, games written in Inform have (by default, at least) the same look-and-feel as the classic Infocom games. How cool is that?
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.
Lots of BBSes still around that you can access via telnet:
http://www.3dham.com/telnet/
...by the esteemed David Wong. Warning: some of these stories will be quite possibly the stupidest thing you'll ever read.
I'm probably at the karma cap. Mod up a funny troll instead, it lightens the mood
Well, about every serious interactive fiction author (especially Inform and TADS).
The language websites for Hugo, Inform etc explain that they have been designed specifically for text based adventure games.... Talk about specialization !!!!
What's wrong with specialization? There are so many things that are the same in every int-fic game, that reprogramming it everytime would be a waste of effort (parser, feedback from user).
Any way I have registered and am going to do plain old C ( okay, okay C++)
You are not serious, are you? C/C++ is about the least suitable language for any kind of string manipulation. You maybe could write something in Ruby, scheme, or Perl... But even commercial (graphical) adventure games start by writing an engine for their product. If you know C/C++, it will be not so much effort to learn any of this languages (much less than starting from scratch).
While I agree that interactive fiction doesn't need graphics, there's plenty of interactive fiction which does have graphics and which, in my opinion, greatly benefits from having graphics.
For example, Neverwinter Nights and its Aurora toolkit provide excellent tools for creating interactive fiction with the ability to do all the sorts of things you can do in a text-based IF environment. But it renders these fictions in an attractive real time near 3D environment. The game engine does have some flaws - in my opinion it is based too ridigly on Dungeons and Dragons, and some aspects of gameplay are a bit mechanistic in consequence - but it is a worthy successor of such game engines as the Infocom ones.
It would be possible to argue that Neverwinter is to Infocom as film is to printed books, but I think this would be a mistake. It is no harder or more complex to create IF in Neverwinter than in Infocom (indeed, I personally find it easier). It seems to me that Neverwinter and Infocom (and my own LISP based text game engines of twenty years ago) fall into the same category: frameworks for the creation of interactive fiction.
As an aside, does anyone know of other modern interactive fiction toolkits which compare to Neverwinter Aurora? Much as I like it, I'd like to try anything else that's good and around.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.