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Interactive Fiction Then and Now
Flipkin writes "Interactive Fiction was immensely popular in the 80s and believe it or not has a strong, albeit small, following today. MobyGames takes a look at the origins and history of Interactive Fiction and where it is heading." These games really were some of the best I've ever played.
Were my first interractive fiction, I used to love those. Especially the ones where you could die really easily.
-Eric (former alum of the Kobra MUD)
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
> L
You are on slashdot.
You can see the headlines.
> Read headlines
There are 12 old articles.
> N
You are in the mysterious future.
There is 1 article here.
> RTFA
I'm sorry, you cannot do that.
> open article
You open the article in the mysterious future.
> L
It is empty in the comments section, You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
liqbase
Go to page 177.
Page 177. You are in the future. [Describes grim future]. You are affecting events around you which causes a collapse in time space. No longer will you be able to get back to your friends or save the planet from [insert name of evil man]. Game over.
Oh boy, those were the days!
Seriously though, they had some really cool sci-fi/fantasy in those books, pretty much as good as any conan book or similar.
Will code a sig generator for food
I can tell you that. Currently it is in a maze of twisty passages, all alike...
Cheers,
Ian
I don't know how to "witty reply."
>clever reply
I don't know how to "clever reply."
>lame reply
You make a lame, cliche-ridden Slashdot post, probably having something to do with Netcraft or "Star Wars."
There is an angry moderator here.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
no tea
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Try Metamorphoses and Photopia. The former is known for its diverse ways of solving the puzzles; the latter is known for its nonlinear plot, touching story, and controversial lack of influence over ultimate outcomes. (Slight spoilers in the Wikipedia entry.)
Playing Adventure on a PDP-11 at the local library was the primary reason I got into computers. Now, as a Software Architect with 20 years experience, I can safely say that computer games did me good.
I just saw a great sig on another thread:
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
For The Escapist issue 7, I wrote " > Read Game," a similar article about the history of text adventures and current trends in interactive fiction.
They never maintained a coherent reality. Do one thing and you come across organization x, do something else, organization x doesn't exist.
I'll always remember the line
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
It always excited me, as back then it was the only sort of sex I could get.
Come to think of it, that still is.
sigh
Summation 2
The article is about interactive fiction computer games, e.g. "text adventures" like Zork, not about Choose Your Own Adventure books.
Ahab: LFM [White Whale] need rezzers pst
Myself, I reccomend Return to Ditch Day and The Plant (as well as Adam Cadre's works.)
Anyone else played these?
I haven't played most of the games mentioned in the article, but there's one specific type on interactive fiction I love: Sierra ones.
/done
I didn't have an Internet connection until I was 16 or so, so I spent a lot of time playing these damn games. Police Quest 1/2, Leisure Suit Larry 1/2/3, Space Quest 1/2. In my opinion these are some of the best games ever made. I recall at the age of 5 spending half an hour guessing the answers to the 'age verification' questions in LSL1. That game rocked, despite me not understanding any of the jokes.
I recently read "Twisty Little Passages" ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262134365/ ) by Nick Montfort which despite its horribly self-consciously academic approach (it's all about developing a "theory" of IF for lit. crit. purposes) still has some interesting sections about the history of IF and comparing the various approaches to the field against each other.
It also introduced me to my favourite work of IF, "For a change" by Dan Schmidt, which is really proof that the genre has more to offer than you might have expected. He's a genius, and it's beautiful.
Give it a go online here: http://paperstack.com/for_a_change/ (requires Java) or download the ZCode files from Dan's site: http://www.dfan.org/IF/
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
Thats one thing I didnt like, i usually ended up on the "you died" page or was given another page with more possible options, and its hard to keep track of all the backpages you came from, unless u right them down or try to put a finger in each slot in the tiny paperback. Other than that those books were great, I've always wondered why they died down, I'm sure kids today would enjoy them.
>examine moderator
This moderator looks like a pasty white Linux geek who hasn't left his parents' basement in at least a month. He is unsubtle, and quick to anger.
>attack moderator
The moderator is unphased by your ad hominem attack
(Score:-1, Troll)
(Your karma has just gone down by one point)
>tell moderator about linux
The moderator already knows about linux.
(Score:-1, Redundant)
(Your karma has just gone down by one point)
>tell moderator about linux superiority
You tell the moderator stuff he already knows about how much better Linux is than Windows. Even though he already knows it, he likes hearing about it.
(Score:+5, Insightful)
(Your karma has just gone up by five points)
Wow, I'm really surprised that this article could completely miss online IF (otherwise known as MUDs). Not only are there commercial entities successfully running online IF (such as Iron Realms it allows for a much larger story to be told.
The big problem with IF is that you can't do whatever you want. You're limited to what the creator was able to forsee and program. Not so with MUDs, which are able to have long and rich stories. The reason MUDs are able to overcome this limitation is that they have staff running it all the time, who are constantly adding new code updates and story updates.
An example of a player run storyline is in ArmageddonMUD, which is based on Dark Sun. In it a player playing a dwarf decided to free his fellow dwarves who were slaves in the obsidian mines, and lay seige to the city-state that had kept them enslaved. This was entirely thought up by players, and with the staff's help, done by the players.
MMOs sometimes attempt to be roleplaying games, to enable an interactive story to be told. But they're even further limited by the fact that, you can't do what you want. You can only do what animations have been coded. Again, MUDs don't have this limitation, with any action being able to be provided by emoting. MUDs have the advantage over IFs in that they are multiuser. Whereas in an IF there's no-one but yourself.
So I'm very surprised that something discussing interactive fiction, including it's future (which IMO are MUDs, with more and more being created every day while others continue to be run for over 10 years), didn't feel the need to mention MUDs.
You have:
no tea
tea
I am convinced that this started life as a bug. The 'no tea' joke was great, but the 'no tea' item led to weirdness. Then they added the 'common sense' line to cover for the workaround to stop people doing things like dropping the no tea. Then someone did some really bad acid and decided to incorporate it into the plot as a puzzle...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Not many people may realize this but the State of NY uses the same type of approach for management promotion exams. They were implemented about 10 years ago and they usually comprise at least half of your score on civil service promotion exams (the other half being job-specific scoring). The idea is that these interactive management tests are standardized ways of evaluating people's "management skills."
So far these tests are not very consistent and are not truly standardized or normalized. I personally have done very well and poorly just taking the same test twice. They seem to be more of random-number generators than anything.
Having said that, they're probably more benign than the usual promotion mechanisms in civil service or elsewhere. At least you get some good qualified people promoted as frequently as the poorly qualified incompetents.
I, like many people, started playing Zork at college instead of studying in my CS classes. Later, the Infocom games were lots of fun on my old Atari 800, and even today I still have all of the Infocom games on my PDA, there are a number of PD ZMachine interperters, I use ZipARM on my PocketPC. One thing I didn't see mentioned was the horribly abortive attempt for Infocom to break out of the game business into the database arena with Cornerstone, which eventually brought the company down. Just think, if they had made a go of it Office and maybe even M$ might be afterthoughts.
Brain hurts from too much reading. Must click graphics...
Good. I even see you've managed to incorporate slashdot math, where -1+5 = +5. Not to mention I always love this one:
> tell moderator things copy-pasted from TFA
(Score:+5, Informative)
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I am certain that the need for focus and persistence to complete the game of Adventure (and later a number of Infocom titles) served me well in my computing career. I started programming in 1972 and later specialized in Software Testing and Software Quality Assurance.
I found that software testing is like playing a game of Adventure:
There are lots of little treasures (low-priority bugs), but once in a while I'd discover just the right "incantation" and locate one of the *really valuable* treasures: System Crash, Infinite Loop, Data Corruption, and Major Security Hole!
There is one significant difference, though... testing has much better pay! :)
FWIW: I first played Adventure in 1978 on an IBM Mainframe (3033) running MTS (Michigan Terminal System) at RPI. Someone in my dorm had found it on our system and we spent the next several months competing to be the first to complete it. I can't recall if I was first, but I *did* make it to Adventure Grandmaster with a perfect score of 350. I was later able to get a copy of it on magtape and a printed listing... I think I may still have them in a box in storage, too.
I play these games on my Palm with Frotz, a Z-code interpreter. Frotz exists for a variety of platforms, including Unix, Windows CE, GameBoy Advanced, Windows, KDE etc. Many of the interactive fiction games are in Z-code format.
I was an active collector of Infocom games until recently, but I had to give up because (1) I eventually acquired all 35 games and (2) the special edition versions of the game still sell for incredible prices. Check out this copy of Starcross that just sold on ebay for $500. People still have fond memories for these great games.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
> Set browse threshold to -1
It is dark, you are likely to be eaten by a Troll.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Then let me add Spider and Web. Some of the puzzles are a little tough, but for many of them the game setting works as a built-in walkthrough without making you feel like you've failed or breaking you out of the story's atmosphere.
> inventory
You have:
a towel
a babel fish
a thing your aunt gave you which you don't know what it is
an anonymous post on Slashdot
no tea.
I played many MUDS back in their day but everytime i have felt nostalgic over the past few years and started into one all I ran into were scripted bots. I have a friend that MUDS 24/7 at majormud, he is mudding right now while he is at work at burger king. Never understood the appeal of having a script play a game for you but I would suspect that 95% of the MUD users out there are scripted while the other 5% are newbies or nostalgia seekers pondering why the other characters wont talk to them.
You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
> _
When I was a kid it was fun to type in curse words just to see what repsonse it would get.
Don't forget too that there are various interactive fiction contests held annually. I know of at least two that have been running for more than a few years:
Hands down, STILL my favorite game ever. I love CStrike, Oblivion, and Unreal, but no other game affected me so much after I finished it. Its led to my healthy dose of skepticism and paranoia that I have today!
Definitely go check it out if you are into these at all. I believe there is still a telnet server out there where you could play these games online...
I sig, therefore I am.
There was also Joe Dever's Lone Wolf series, which had the fun of a CYOA and an RPG mixed all into one.
What I really enjoyed about them is the variety of Kai powers (which later became Magnakai, then Grand Master, etc), and how those choices could affect how easily you could survive the path that you took. An example would be that you wouldn't want to travel somewhere excessively hot or cold without the Kai power of Nexus (The ability to withstand extremes in temperature).
Also, it was a nice touch to have the ability to bring over your character from previous books. Sometimes, it felt like a necessity, since some parts were easier if you were in possession of certain items that were acquired in previous books, like the Sommerswerd.
What a timely article! Videlectrix just released Thy Dungeonman III today!
-Peter
22 years ago I bought a Commodore 64 floppy drive ($179 then!) so I could play a copy of ZORK I found in a department store in upstate NY. I had never heard of such a thing before but I fell in love with the description on the package. I've played a lot of IF games since and I've always wanted to create one but I've never had time to try.
The problem I always had was similar to pixel-hunting in graphical games: phrasing a command exactly right. Many times I've given up, asked/bought a cheat book/etc, and found that I had guessed correctly already but had not been able to get the program to take it. (Other times it was a completely out of the box solution that was obvious to the author but not me. Fair game.)
It's not surprising that new converts are so rare and the market so small. Look what modern teenagers do for amusement: the last thing they want is something that requires them to slow down or think. These are the kids who think a movie is "real" while the book it came from isn't, for Pete's sake!
Last June I taught a game design class to kids 11-13. As a way of talking about branching,I introduced them to Zork I. After the initial "where are the pictures" response, the kids dived right in. They'd never seen a natural language parser before. They'd never had to map anything out. They never had the machine talk back to them or crack wise when they typed something inane. They were hooked.
While "Zork Fever" only lasted a few days, the experience opened up a whole new world of interaction for the kids. After that, they went back to the online game where among the choice of weapons they could use was a toilet, which they could use to beat their prey to a bloody pulp.
Ah well...
The best IF character ever? Floyd the Droid from Planetfall iirc. I cried when he sacrificed himself for me. Anybody want to play a game of hucka bucka beanstalk?
The trouble with IF is that not much has changed since the days of Infocom. Here are some features that would definitly be welcome in modern day IF or Z machine interpreters:
1. Auto mapping - I mean, come on, I still have to map things out on graph paper? An automapping feature would be welcome.
2. Notes section - OK, how about games that automaticly generate notes that are accessable from a tab or button. So when the wizard tells me "Bring the magic crystal to me, and I will give you the Staff of Ages", a note will appear in my notes that says "The Wizard told me that he will give me the Staff of Ages if I bring him the magic crystal". It would only make notes of game critical actions, not every action I do... so it would be a quick reference.
In the modern day and age, I shouldn't have to write things down on paper to play a computer game!
> moderate post
You have wasted your points moderating a post by an anonymous coward.
(your score has gone down 1 point.)
Anonymous Cowards suck.
"Brain hurts from too much reading. Must click graphics..."
Then you'd hate this or this game then.
Here's one I did not too long ago called
Eric the Power-Mad DM about playing D&D back in the early 80's with a megalomaniac dongeon master.
Here's a Javascipt interpreter for the Old School Scott Adams games
Adventures from LucasArts like Loom, Monkey Island, Day of The Tentacle, adn Grim Fandango will always have a special place in my heart. They are as old as text adventure games, but they were definitely innovative, from a time that LucasArts had good stories, not just the "let's-sell-everything-related-to-StarWars-that-we -can-think-of" idea that we see today.
But surely automappers would take all of the fun out of exploring a maze of twisty little passages, all alike?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I've tried to get kids interested in some of the old games I was interested in (IF, MUDs, etc.) but usually without much luck (which is a shame, some of those IF games were excellent). However, recently I was surprised how interested my cousin's kids were when I showed them one of those old games where you "program your own robot".
I currently use frobnitz, not frotz. Have you or anyone else used both? care to give a comparison?
I think my favorite series of the genre was Steve Jackson's Sorcery! . They had georgous art, and the puzzles, plot, and writing were quite good.
Dark Reflection
Most interactive fiction seems interactive in one way--you may get to choose what to do next, but that's only out of the available list of options, and the story from that point forward is predetermined.
What about a story where you can do that (like a Choose Your Own Adventure), but you can also add another choice, and write what happens? Don't like the way one path turned out? Go back and write another one that turns out better!
If you're interested in checking something like that out, try out BookLick.
Disclaimer: I am involved in the creation of that site.
I've actually got that one (dungeon) compiled on a unix account I use! To be honest, though, I've never got far... maybe I'm just too old for these things now :(. When I was a kid, I got through sabre of saltar and eye of min within a week of copying... errr, buying them.
"What's tall as a house,
:>
Round as a cup,
And all the king's horses
Can't draw it up?"
For yeeeears I was stuck on this. At one point I figured it out, but I still didn't get the parser to understand my answer. Then some years later...
> say "well"
I can't tell you how much I hate the Frobozz Magic Well Company.
Sometimes even the simple riddles stop a player cold.
--Dave Romig, Jr.