Interactive fiction
Interactive fiction is 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, either in the form of Interactive narratives or Interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text-only", however, graphical text adventure games, where the text is accompanied by graphics still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles.
Due to their text-only nature, they sidestepped the problem of writing for widely divergent graphics architectures. This feature meant that interactive fiction games were easily ported across all the popular platforms at the time, including CP/M. The number of interactive fiction works is increasing steadily as new ones are produced by an online community, using freely available development systems.
The term can also be used to refer to literary works that are not read in a linear fashion, known as gamebooks, where the reader is instead given choices at different points in the text; these decisions determine the flow and outcome of the story. The most famous example of this form of printed fiction is the Choose Your Own Adventure book series, and the collaborative "" format has also been described as a form of interactive fiction. The term "interactive fiction" is sometimes used also to refer to visual novels, a type of interactive narrative software popular in Japan.
Medium
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. Interactive fiction usually relies on reading from a screen and on typing input, although text-to-speech synthesizers allow blind and visually impaired users to play interactive fiction titles as audio games.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 text 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, such as those built on ZIL, could understand complete sentences. Later parsers could handle increasing levels of complexity parsing 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.
Despite their lack of graphics, text adventures include a physical dimension where players move between rooms. Many text adventure games boasted their total number of rooms to indicate how much gameplay they offered. These games are unique in that they may create an illogical space, where going north from area A takes you to area B, but going south from area B did not take you back to area A. This can create mazes that do not behave as players expect, and thus players must maintain their own map. These illogical spaces are much more rare in today's era of 3D gaming, and the Interactive Fiction community in general decries the use of mazes entirely, claiming that mazes have become arbitrary 'puzzles for the sake of puzzles' and that they can, in the hands of inexperienced designers, become immensely frustrating for players to navigate.
Interactive fiction shares much in common with Multi-User Dungeons. MUDs, which became popular in the mid-1980s, rely on a textual exchange and accept similar commands from players as do works of IF; however, since interactive fiction is single player, and MUDs, by definition, have multiple players, they differ enormously in gameplay styles. MUDs often focus gameplay on activities that involve communities of players, simulated political systems, in-game trading, and other gameplay mechanics that are not possible in a single player environment.
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. A typical command may be: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 interactive fiction. A typical response might look something like this, the response to "look in tea chest" at the start of Curses:
Many text adventures, particularly those designed for humour, address the player with an informal tone, sometimes including sarcastic remarks. The late Douglas Adams, in designing the IF version of his 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', created a unique solution to the final puzzle of the game: the game requires the one solitary item that the player didn't choose at the outset of play.
Some IF works dispense with second-person narrative entirely, opting for a first-person perspective or even placing the player in the position of an observer, rather than a direct participant. In some 'experimental' IF, the concept of self-identification is eliminated, and the player instead takes the role of an inanimate object, a force of nature, or an abstract concept; experimental IF usually pushes the limits of the concept and challenges many assumptions about the medium.
History
1960s and 70s
Natural language processing
Though neither program was developed as a narrative work, the software programs ELIZA and SHRDLU can formally be considered early examples of interactive fiction, as both programs used natural language processing to take input from their user and respond in a virtual and conversational manner. ELIZA simulated a psychotherapist that appeared to provide human-like responses to the user's input, while SHRDLU employed an artificial intelligence that could move virtual objects around an environment and respond to questions asked about the environment's shape. The development of effective natural language processing would become an essential part of interactive fiction development.''Adventure''
Around 1975, Will Crowther, a programmer and an amateur caver, wrote the first text adventure game, Adventure. Having just gone through a divorce, he was looking for a way to connect with his two young children. Over the course of a few weekends, he wrote a text based cave exploration game that featured a sort of guide/narrator who spoke in full sentences and who understood simple two word commands that came close to natural English. Adventure was programmed in Fortran for the PDP-10. Crowther's original version was an accurate simulation of part of the real life Mammoth Cave, but also included fantasy elements.Stanford University graduate student Don Woods discovered Adventure while working at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and in 1977 obtained and expanded Crowther's source code. Woods's changes were reminiscent of the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, and included a troll, elves, and a volcano, which some claim is based on Mount Doom, but Woods says was not.
In early 1977, Adventure spread across ARPAnet, and has survived on the Internet to this day. The game has since been ported to many other operating systems, and was included with the floppy-disk distribution of Microsoft's MS-DOS 1.0 OS. Adventure is a cornerstone of the online IF community; there currently exist dozens of different independently programmed versions, with additional elements, such as new rooms or puzzles, and various scoring systems.
The popularity of Adventure led to the wide success of interactive fiction during the late 1970s, when home computers had little, if any, graphics capability. Many elements of the original game have survived into the present, such as the command 'xyzzy', which is now included as an Easter Egg in modern games, such as Microsoft Minesweeper.
Adventure was also directly responsible for the founding of Sierra Online ; Ken and Roberta Williams played the game and decided to design one of their own, but with graphics.
Commercial era
was founded by Scott Adams. In 1978, Adams wrote Adventureland, which was loosely patterned after the Colossal Cave Adventure. 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. That same year, Dog Star Adventure was published in source code form in SoftSide, spawning legions of similar games in BASIC.The largest 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 1977, Marc Blank, Bruce K. Daniels, Tim Anderson, and Dave Lebling began writing the mainframe version of Zork, at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. The game was programmed in a computer language called MDL, a variant of LISP.
The term Implementer was the self-given name of the creators of the text adventure series Zork. It is for this reason that game designers and programmers can be referred to as an implementer, often shortened to "Imp", rather than a writer.
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 that could be implemented on a large number of platforms, and took standardized "story files" as input.
In a non-technical sense, Infocom was responsible for developing the interactive style that would be emulated by many later interpreters. The Infocom parser was widely regarded as the best of its era. It accepted complex, complete sentence commands like "put the blue book on the writing desk" at a time when most of its competitors parsers were restricted to simple two word verb-noun combinations such as "put book". The parser was actively upgraded with new features like undo and error correction, and later games would 'understand' multiple sentence input: 'pick up the gem and put it in my bag. take the newspaper clipping out of my bag then burn it with the book of matches'.
Several companies offered optional commercial feelies. The tradition of 'feelies' is believed to have originated with Deadline, the third Infocom title after Zork I and II. When writing this game, it was not possible to include all of the information in the limited disk space, so Infocom created the first feelies for this game; extra items that gave more information than could be included within the digital game itself. These included police interviews, the coroner's findings, letters, crime scene evidence and photos of the murder scene.
These materials were very difficult for others to copy or otherwise reproduce, and many included information that was essential to completing the game. Seeing the potential benefits of both aiding game-play immersion and providing a measure of creative copy-protection, in addition to acting as a deterrent to software piracy, Infocom and later other companies began creating feelies for numerous titles. In 1987, Infocom released a special version of the first three Zork titles together with plot-specific coins and other trinkets. This concept would be expanded as time went on, such that later game feelies would contain passwords, coded instructions, page numbers, or other information that would be required to successfully complete the game.