Interactive fiction

Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, describes software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives and as computer games. In common usage, the word refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game with text-based input and output. The term is sometimes used to encompass the entirety of the medium, but is also sometimes used to distinguish games produced by the interactive fiction community from those created by games companies. It can also be used to distinguish the more modern style of such works, focusing on narrative and not necessarily falling into the adventure game genre at all, from the more traditional focus on puzzles. More expansive definitions of interactive fiction may refer to all adventure games, including wholly graphical adventures such as Myst.

As a commercial product, interactive fiction reached its peak in popularity in the 1980s, as a dominant software product marketed for home computers. Today, interactive fiction no longer appears to be commercially viable, but a constant stream of new works is produced by an online interactive fiction community, using freely available development systems. Most of these games can be downloaded for free from the Interactive Fiction Archive (see external links).

The term "interactive fiction" is also occasionally used to refer to hypertext fiction, collaborative fiction, or even a participatory novel, according to the New York Times. It is also used to refer to literary works that are not read in a linear fashion, but rather the reader is given choices at different points in the text; the reader's choice determines the flow and outcome of the story. The most famous example of this form of interactive fiction is the Choose Your Own Adventure book series. For others, see gamebooks.

The medium of interactive fiction

Text adventures are one of the oldest types of computer games and form a subset of the adventure genre. The player uses text input to control the game, and the game state is relayed to the player via text output.

Input is usually provided by the player in the form of simple sentences such as "get key" or "go east", which are interpreted by a parser. Parsers may vary in sophistication; the first text adventure parsers could only handle two-word sentences in the form of verb-noun pairs. Later parsers could handle increasing levels of complexity from sentences such as "open the red box with the green key then go north". This level of complexity is the standard for works of interactive fiction today.

Works of interactive fiction function like single-player Multi-User Dungeons or 'MUDs', and the original MUD was actually a multi-player generalization of Zork (one version of which was called Dungeon). MUDs, which became popular in the mid-1980s, rely on a textual exchange and accept similar commands from players as do works of IF, but the social aspects and the communities of players who participate are often the most important features of MUDs.

Interactive fiction usually relies on reading from a screen and on typing input, although speech synthesis allows blind and visually impaired users to play interactive fiction.

Writing style

Interactive fiction features two distinct modes of writing: the player input and the game output.

As described above, player input is expected to be in simple command form (imperative sentences). A typical command may be: pull lever

The responses from the game are usually written from a second person point of view, in present tense. This is because, unlike in most works of fiction, the main character is closely associated with the player, and the events are seen to be happening as the player plays. While older text adventures often identified the protagonist with the player directly, newer games tend to have specific, well-defined protagonists with separate identities from the player. The classic essay Crimes against Mimesis discusses, among other IF issues, the nature of "You" in interacive fiction.

A typical response may be: You pull the lever. The door opens, and you are shocked to see a glittering treasure chest.

Many text adventures, particularly those designed for humour such as Zork or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy use a very conversational and informal tone between the player and the game. The game may make sarcastic remarks, or witty observations which wouldn't normally be present in conventional writing. (See the transcript from Curses, below, for an example).

History

Adventure

Around 1975, Will Crowther wrote the first text adventure game, Adventure (originally called ADVENT because a filename could only be six characters long in its operating system, and later Colossal Cave).^* It was programmed in Fortran for the PDP-10. In 1976, Don Woods discovered Adventure while working at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and obtained Crowther's permission to expand the game. Crowther's original version was a quite accurate simulation of the real Colossal Cave; Woods' changes were reminiscent of the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, and included a troll, elves, and a volcano inspired by Mount Doom.

In 1976, the game began spreading on ARPANet, and has survived on the Internet to this day. The game has since been ported to many other operating systems.

The popularity of Adventure led to the wide success of interactive fiction during the late 1970s and the 1980s, when home computers had little, if any, graphics capability.

The commercial era

Infocom

In the United States, the best-known company producing works of interactive fiction was Infocom, which created the Zork series and many other titles; among them Trinity, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and A Mind Forever Voyaging.

In June of 1977, Marc Blank, Bruce K. Daniels, Tim Anderson, and Dave Lebling began writing the mainframe version of Zork (also known as Dungeon), at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. The game was programmed in a computer language called MDL, a variant of LISP. In early 1979, the game was completed. Ten members of the MIT Dynamics Modelling Group went on to join Infocom when it was incorporated later that year.

In order to make its games as portable as possible, Infocom developed the Z-Machine, a custom virtual machine which could be implemented on a large number of platforms, and which took standardized "story files" as input.

Infocom's games were popular for many years, but the company was bought by Activision in 1986 after the failure of Cornerstone, its database software program, and stopped producing text adventures a few years later.

Infocom's games are now considered the classics of the genre, and the period in which it was active is thought of as the first golden age of interactive fiction. In 1991 and 1992, Activision released volumes one and two of The Lost Treasures of Infocom, a collection containing most of Infocom's games.

Adventure International

Adventure International was founded by Scott Adams (not the creator of Dilbert).

In 1978, Adams wrote Adventureland, which was loosely patterned after the original Advent. He took out a small ad in a computer magazine in order to promote and sell Adventureland, thus creating the first commercial adventure game. In 1979 he founded Adventure International, the first commercial publisher of interactive fiction. The company went bankrupt in 1985.

Legend Entertainment

Legend Entertainment was founded by Bob Bates and Mike Verdu in 1989. It started out from the ashes of Infocom.

Their text adventures used (high-resolution) graphics as well as sound, but were still "true" text adventures. In many areas, the parser was better than the one used by Infocom. Among their better-known titles are Eric the Unready, the Spellcasting series and Gateway (based on Frederik Pohl's novels).

The last text adventure created by Legend was Gateway II, while the last game ever was Unreal 2 (the well-known first person shooter action game). Legend was acquired in 2004 by Atari.

Other companies

Probably the first commercial work of interactive fiction produced outside the U.S. was the dungeon crawl game of Acheton, produced in Cambridge, England, by Topologika. Other leading companies in the U.K. were Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9 Computing. Also worthy of mention are Delta 4, Acornsoft, Melbourne House, and the homebrew company Zenobi.

In Japan, companies such as Data West developed limited interactive fiction games, such as the seven-volume murder mystery series Misty.^* Later, interactive fiction became more popular in Japan in the form of visual novels.

The modern era

After the demise of the commercial interactive fiction market in the 1990s, an online community eventually formed around the medium. In 1987, the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction was created (focusing on creating interactive fiction), and was soon followed by rec.games.int-fiction (which focuses on playing interactive fiction games).

One of the most important early developments was the reverse-engineering of Infocom's Z-Code format and Z-Machine virtual machine by the InfoTaskForce, a group of enthusiasts, in 1987, and the subsequent development of an interpreter for Z-Code story files. As a result, it became possible to play Infocom's work on modern computers.

For years amateurs formed a small community producing interactive fiction works of relatively limited scope using the Adventure Game Toolkit and similar tools. The breakthrough that allowed the interactive fiction community to truly prosper, however, was the creation and distribution of two sophisticated development systems. In 1987, Michael J. Roberts released TADS, a programming language designed to produce works of interactive fiction. In 1993, Graham Nelson released Inform, a programming language and set of libraries which compiled to a Z-Code story file. Each of these systems allowed anyone with sufficient time and dedication to create a game, and caused a growth boom in the online interactive fiction community.

Today, the games created by enthusiasts of the genre regularly surpass the quality of the original Infocom games, and a number of yearly competitions and awards are given out to the best games in the field, among them the annual Interactive Fiction Competition for short works, the newer Spring Thing for longer works, and the XYZZY Awards. Newer games, such as Photopia and So Far, have further increased the vitality of the interactive fiction genre.

While the majority of modern interactive fiction developed is distributed for free, there are some commercial endeavors, including Peter Nepstad's A World's Fair Mystery, several games by Howard Sherman published as Malinche Entertainment, and The General Coffee Company's Future Boy!. Emily Short was commissioned to develop the game "City of Secrets" but the project fell through and she ended up releasing it herselfSome authors offer optional commercial "feelies" (physical props associated with a game) through [http://feelies.org/ feelies.org or similar services.

Notable works of interactive fiction

Colossal Cave Adventure by Will Crowther and Don Woods was the first text adventure ever made.
The Zork series by Infocom (1979- ) was the first text adventure to see widespread commercial release.
The Hobbit by Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler of Beam Software (1982) was an early reinterpretation of an existing story (that existed in novel and radio-play forms) into interactive fiction.
Planetfall, by Steve Meretzky of Infocom (1983), featured one of the most famous characters in the first decade of games, Floyd the robot. Floyd is often referred to as the first game character who evoked a strong emotional commitment from players.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky of Infocom (1984), was an early reinterpretation of an existing story (that existed in novel and radio-play forms) into interactive fiction. It is also notable is that the author of the original work was involved in the reinterpretation.
A Mind Forever Voyaging, by Steve Meretzky of Infocom (1985), first story-heavy, puzzle-light game.
Amnesia, by Hugo Award and Nebula Award winning science fiction and fantasy author Thomas M. Disch (1987), the only text adventure ever published by Electronic Arts.
Curses, by Graham Nelson (1993), the first game ever written in the Inform programming language, and a classic in its own right. Considered one of the first "modern" games to meet the high standards set by Infocom's best titles.
So Far, by Andrew Plotkin (1996) is considered by many to be a modern benchmark for its integration of story and puzzle design.
Anchorhead, by Michael S. Gentry (1998) is a highly rated horror story inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. It is generally considered the best horror interactive fiction yet made. Of the 1210 games rated at "Interactive Fiction Ratings", Anchorhead was the highest rated game as of June 9, 2006 ^*.
Photopia, by Adam Cadre (1998), the first almost entirely puzzle-free game. Its lack of puzzles made it initially highly controversial.
Galatea, by Emily Short (2000). Galatea is focused entirely on interaction with the animated statue of the same name. Galatea has one of the most complex interaction systems for a non-player character in an interactive fiction game. The game has earned notable praise for the vivid depiction of its title character and compelling open-ended storytelling.
Slouching Towards Bedlam, by Star C. Foster and Daniel Ravipinto (2003). Set in a steampunk setting, the game integrates meta-game functionality (saving, restoring, restarting) into the game world itself. The game won two XYZZY Awards and received the highest average score of any game in the Interactive Fiction Competition as of 2006.

Sample transcript

This is a brief transcript from one of many possible ways to not win the game Curses, by Graham Nelson. The player has entered instructions on the lines beginning with '>' (shown here in italic); the rest of the text is printed by the computer. The computer begins with a printed introduction giving a little context to the game (much more would become apparent as the game progressed):

It's become a matter of pride now not to give up. That tourist map of Paris must be up here somewhere in all this clutter, even if it has been five years since your last trip. And it's your own fault. It looks as if your great-grandfather was the last person to tidy up these lofts...

CURSES
An Interactive Diversion
Copyright (c) 1993 by Graham Nelson. New players should type "help".
Release 8 / Serial number 930603 (Compiled by Inform v634)

Attic

The attics, full of low beams and awkward angles, begin here in a relatively tidy area which extends north, south and east. The wooden floorboards seem fairly sound, just as well considering how heavy all these teachests are. But the old wiring went years ago, and there's no electric light.

A hinged trapdoor in the floor stands open, and light streams in from below.

>inventory
You are carrying:

a chocolate biscuit
an electric torch (providing light and closed)
a crumpled piece of paper

>read paper
Things to do:

1. Find map
2. Phone airport to check parking
3. Health forms...
and so on. Let's face it, 1. is more enticing than the rest put together.

>enter trapdoor
Yes, probably just as well to give up looking, and heaven knows there's enough packing to do, what with the rest of the family in uproar. Oh well.

*** You have missed the point entirely **

In that game you scored 0 out of a possible 550, in 3 turns, giving you the rank of hapless Tourist.

Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, give the FULL score for that game or QUIT?
>