Interactive Fiction Scholarship I've compiled an annotated bibliography of interactive fiction scholarship and amateur theory and criticism. It's specifically focused on text-adventure games, and it's due for an update (some URLs have changed).
Erasmataron The Erasmatron comes up periodically on rec.arts.int-fiction and related groups. For those who're interested, here's how Crawford's claims and accomplishments were received the last time they came up on that particular newsgroup.
In that discussion, Neil K. posted thus:
Last time this came up here I believe the firm consensus was that the
Erasmatron is not particularly interesting and the demonstration games are
terribly embarrassing. Crawford is about 15 years too late, for a start.
For more interesting and worthwhile work related to IF and personality
I'd look at Emily Short's Galatea or Adam Cadre's Varicella.
The idea of the skyscraper, and the twin towers of the World Trade Center in particular, have symbolized, for many modern writers, either prideful arrogance, or a new kind of technological beauty.
Check out the audio files on the XYZZY News article. You'll hear him. He was very engaging and entertaining.
Regarding the display mechanism:
In the last year, digital phone companies have licensed back cagalogues of IF games, hoping to sell a gaming service. Somebody computed how much it would cost to finish a game of Zork, and the result was astronomical, so I doubt much will come of this. Still, it's another way to get over the display mechanism problem.
I can play all the Infocom games, all of Scott Adams' games and hundreds of other more recent ones (not all at the same time, of course), using a free interpreter on my PalmIII. In fact, that's typically how I play IF games now -- while watiting in line, or while my preschooler is momentarily occupied. I slogged through "Trinity" that way. I felt kind of sad when I removed "Galatea" to make room for something else -- like I had lost a friend that I'd been carrying around in my pocket.
A little more about the content:
When I finished Cadre's "Photopia," I stared at the final screen for about a minute, then immediately restarted it, looking for a way that I could drive the story to another conclusion. Didn't want to put it down. Felt the same way about the endgame of Grahm Nelson's "Jigsaw" -- I didn't want to leave it just yet.
Scenes and moments and characters from many other IF games have stayed with me, too. My point is to encourage people to sample this particular style of storytelling.
If you're not already there (perhaps under a different identity), you might want to try checking out the archves of rec.arts.int-fiction (the interactive fiction newsgroup), where threads like this pop up frequently. Some good discussions in the last week or so have involved AI for simulation vs. "good enough" NPCs for storytelling. Parser issues, how to do exposition, and the form of the prologue have also been covered.
I'd also recommend recent interactive fiction by Emily Short and Adam Cadre. They've both coded complex stories involving NPCs that "remember" and have emotional states. This is different from the Oz Project or similar character-based efforts where there's no story (just bits of scripted behavior) and no PC per se (just a bunch of NPCs).
If you'd like to try out an Emily Short character study, try Galatea, which is light-years ahead of Eliza (though not quite up to the standards of HAL). For sheer gameplay, with a heavier emphasis on puzzles, try Graham Nelson's works.
As for recent commercial computer games with story elements... already people are saying that hundreds of hours worth of computer-based stories are boring. Perhaps authors simply haven't found the right combination of skills and subject matter that unlocks the power of the media.
When the average person finally gets access to tools that can create lifelike graphics of people, the stories that people will build with those tools will be richer and more engaging, thanks to the experimental work of amateur interactive fiction authors, beta-testers, reviewers, archivists, etc. We'll know what to do with the Holodeck once it goes mainstream (which is something commercial computer games haven't done).
Of course, like most people, I don't always want a story when I play a game.
We invited Scott to join a panel that was part of an English Department festival, for cryin' out loud. And any panel has to have a focus; so we focused on one aspect of games: the storytelling.
Nobody's trying to smack the control pads out of anybody's hands.
I think that quite a few posts on this topic are missing what I percieve to be the point, and significance, of Game Studies. It's a corss-disciplinary journal on what many people percieve to be a technical topic -- computer games. But it's a humanities journal. (Some folks may be disappointed by that fact, but I think that's the context in which editor Espen Aarseth was writing the passage that was posted to Slashdot.)
kaszeta wrote:
You're right, and studies of many game-driven (or at least game-related) computer science topics already are fairly common at academic conferences and meetings.
True, but conference papers aren't nearly as valuable to the professional career of the academic. Since few humanities academics work at well-funded research centers (or at any kind of research center at all), few humanities academics can afford to attend the kind of big conferences in which the proceedings are all published (thus providing all the speakers with a "publication").
I've sat through uncountable presentations on 3D-modeling, polygon reduction, texture mapping, landscape generation, networked real-time simulations, etc., in which the author(s) made it clear that computer games were one of the primary motivations for the study.
Okay... but consider the mission statement from the Game Studies home page:
"Our primary focus is aesthetic, cultural and communicative aspects of computer games.
Our mission - To explore the rich cultural genre of games; to give scholars a peer-reviewed forum for their ideas and theories; to provide an academic channel for the ongoing discussions on games and gaming."
While some people may question the value of the existence of the humanities in the first place (that's an argument for another day), I think the real value of the journal Game Studies is its intention to legitimize the study of this particular cultural activity, which hasn't yet been taken seriously by mainstream society (beyond the same old same-old about violence and obsession).
Articles on computer games do get published from time to time in mainstream humanities journals such as Computers and Composition or any of the journals that focus on postmodern cultural studies, but it's true that many of them do tend to fixate on those aspects of computer gaming that support independetly existing postmodern theories, or else they look at the gaming culture as an isolated subgroup, the way an anthropologist would. Of course there are probably scores or hundreds of exceptions to the sweeping generalization I just made, but many humanities folks still think that clicking on a hyperlink is somehow more interactive than turning to page 24 of a Choose-Your-Own Adventure novel; Aarseth's book Cybertext argues strongly for the notion that hypertext fiction is not the only kind of cybertext. This is likely not news for the Slashdot crowd, of course, but professors in departments outside of CS and AI programs need to hear it.
Perhaps some of the articles in this first issue show the literary lens through which humanities folks look at computer gaming activity... but I think it's wonderful to see a journal that intends to focus on the cultural and aesthetic aspects of computer games.
Speaking more generally, and not directly in response to kaszeta, I would say that to express disappointment with Game Studies simply because it does not look like a promising place to swap AI algorithms and Quake mods is, I think, to miss the point.
Slashdot Mirror
Scott Adams -- the first professional game designer ("Adventureland", 1978) -- released "Return to Pirate Adventure 2" a couple of years ago.
See this Slashdot article on Adams.
I've compiled an annotated bibliography of interactive fiction scholarship and amateur theory and criticism. It's specifically focused on text-adventure games, and it's due for an update (some URLs have changed).
See the recent copy
http://www.uwec.edu/jerzdg/orr/articles/IF/biblio
...or the copy published by the journal Text Technology:
http://texttechnology.mcmaster.ca/jerzbib/index.h
Erasmataron
The Erasmatron comes up periodically on rec.arts.int-fiction and related groups. For those who're interested, here's how Crawford's claims and accomplishments were received the last time they came up on that particular newsgroup.
In that discussion, Neil K. posted thus:
Erasmatron is not particularly interesting and the demonstration games are
terribly embarrassing. Crawford is about 15 years too late, for a start.
For more interesting and worthwhile work related to IF and personality
I'd look at Emily Short's Galatea or Adam Cadre's Varicella.
Dennis G. Jerz
In an effort to come to terms with what has happened, I posted the following website, which examines that theme:
World Trade Center: Reflections on the Disaster
Regarding Scott's voice:
Check out the audio files on the XYZZY News article. You'll hear him. He was very engaging and entertaining.
Regarding the display mechanism:
In the last year, digital phone companies have licensed back cagalogues of IF games, hoping to sell a gaming service. Somebody computed how much it would cost to finish a game of Zork, and the result was astronomical, so I doubt much will come of this. Still, it's another way to get over the display mechanism problem.
I can play all the Infocom games, all of Scott Adams' games and hundreds of other more recent ones (not all at the same time, of course), using a free interpreter on my PalmIII. In fact, that's typically how I play IF games now -- while watiting in line, or while my preschooler is momentarily occupied. I slogged through "Trinity" that way. I felt kind of sad when I removed "Galatea" to make room for something else -- like I had lost a friend that I'd been carrying around in my pocket.
A little more about the content:
When I finished Cadre's "Photopia," I stared at the final screen for about a minute, then immediately restarted it, looking for a way that I could drive the story to another conclusion. Didn't want to put it down. Felt the same way about the endgame of Grahm Nelson's "Jigsaw" -- I didn't want to leave it just yet.
Scenes and moments and characters from many other IF games have stayed with me, too. My point is to encourage people to sample this particular style of storytelling.
If you're not already there (perhaps under a different identity), you might want to try checking out the archves of rec.arts.int-fiction (the interactive fiction newsgroup), where threads like this pop up frequently. Some good discussions in the last week or so have involved AI for simulation vs. "good enough" NPCs for storytelling. Parser issues, how to do exposition, and the form of the prologue have also been covered.
I'd also recommend recent interactive fiction by Emily Short and Adam Cadre. They've both coded complex stories involving NPCs that "remember" and have emotional states. This is different from the Oz Project or similar character-based efforts where there's no story (just bits of scripted behavior) and no PC per se (just a bunch of NPCs). If you'd like to try out an Emily Short character study, try Galatea, which is light-years ahead of Eliza (though not quite up to the standards of HAL). For sheer gameplay, with a heavier emphasis on puzzles, try Graham Nelson's works.
As for recent commercial computer games with story elements... already people are saying that hundreds of hours worth of computer-based stories are boring. Perhaps authors simply haven't found the right combination of skills and subject matter that unlocks the power of the media.
When the average person finally gets access to tools that can create lifelike graphics of people, the stories that people will build with those tools will be richer and more engaging, thanks to the experimental work of amateur interactive fiction authors, beta-testers, reviewers, archivists, etc. We'll know what to do with the Holodeck once it goes mainstream (which is something commercial computer games haven't done).
Of course, like most people, I don't always want a story when I play a game.
We invited Scott to join a panel that was part of an English Department festival, for cryin' out loud. And any panel has to have a focus; so we focused on one aspect of games: the storytelling.
Nobody's trying to smack the control pads out of anybody's hands.
As soon as I get the chance tomorrow, I'll add a note to clarify the Lord British issue.
cribeiro writes: "The first Infocom games date from the early 70's..."
Mainframe Zork was released in the late 70s, before Infocom existed as a company, and after Adams released "Adventureland".
Infocom, as an entity, did not actually release Zork until 1981.
See a recent MIT student undergaduate paper that carefully examined the history of Infocom:
Down from the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc.
You can't get to the ftp.gmd.de archive because the archive site has moved to a new URL: http://www.ifarchive.org
kaszeta wrote:
True, but conference papers aren't nearly as valuable to the professional career of the academic. Since few humanities academics work at well-funded research centers (or at any kind of research center at all), few humanities academics can afford to attend the kind of big conferences in which the proceedings are all published (thus providing all the speakers with a "publication").
Okay... but consider the mission statement from the Game Studies home page:
While some people may question the value of the existence of the humanities in the first place (that's an argument for another day), I think the real value of the journal Game Studies is its intention to legitimize the study of this particular cultural activity, which hasn't yet been taken seriously by mainstream society (beyond the same old same-old about violence and obsession).Articles on computer games do get published from time to time in mainstream humanities journals such as Computers and Composition or any of the journals that focus on postmodern cultural studies, but it's true that many of them do tend to fixate on those aspects of computer gaming that support independetly existing postmodern theories, or else they look at the gaming culture as an isolated subgroup, the way an anthropologist would. Of course there are probably scores or hundreds of exceptions to the sweeping generalization I just made, but many humanities folks still think that clicking on a hyperlink is somehow more interactive than turning to page 24 of a Choose-Your-Own Adventure novel; Aarseth's book Cybertext argues strongly for the notion that hypertext fiction is not the only kind of cybertext. This is likely not news for the Slashdot crowd, of course, but professors in departments outside of CS and AI programs need to hear it.
Perhaps some of the articles in this first issue show the literary lens through which humanities folks look at computer gaming activity... but I think it's wonderful to see a journal that intends to focus on the cultural and aesthetic aspects of computer games.
Speaking more generally, and not directly in response to kaszeta, I would say that to express disappointment with Game Studies simply because it does not look like a promising place to swap AI algorithms and Quake mods is, I think, to miss the point.
Dennis G. Jerz
Department of English
University of Wisconsin -- Eau Claire
Literacy Weblog
Interactive Fiction Call for Papers