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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.
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.
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)
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.
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!
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
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 couldn't agree more...and for a blast from the past for all you fans of text based adventure games: There are, of course the old games from Infocom and the http://infocom.elsewhere.org/ gallery which allows you to still play some of the originals online, and look at exhibits featuring the original accessories from nearly all the Infocom lines. Truly a step down memory lane.
Requiem
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.
Lots of BBSes still around that you can access via telnet:
http://www.3dham.com/telnet/
Pic
Technoli
For example, most of the higher-ranking games don't let you mess things up (e.g. by "shattering the crystal key" or whatever) and they let you UNDO actions if you find that you don't like how things are going.