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Wikipedia

Interactive fiction

January 13, 2023

Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, 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,[1] 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",[2] however, graphical text adventures 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 (not known for gaming or strong graphics capabilities). 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 analogue versions of 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 "addventure" format has also been described as a form of interactive fiction.[3] The term "interactive fiction" is sometimes used also to refer to visual novels, a type of interactive narrative software popular in Japan.

Medium

 
Zork I is one of the first interactive fiction games, as well as being one of the first commercially sold. It is one of the most famous interactive fiction games. Here it is portrayed running on Gargoyle, a modern interpreter.

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.[2]

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 (Zork Implementation Language), could understand complete sentences.[4] 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.[2] 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,[2] 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'). 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 (imperative sentences).[5] 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"[6] 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:

That was the first place you tried, hours and hours ago now, and there's nothing there but that boring old book. You pick it up anyway, bored as you are.[7]

Many text adventures, particularly those designed for humour (such as Zork, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Leather Goddesses of Phobos), address the player with an informal tone, sometimes including sarcastic remarks (see the transcript from Curses, above, for an example). 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 ('I') 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 entirely, 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 (1964–1966) and SHRDLU (1968–1970) 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.[8]

Adventure

Around 1975, Will Crowther, a programmer and an amateur caver, wrote the first text adventure game, Adventure (originally called ADVENT because a filename could only be six characters long in the operating system he was using, and later named Colossal Cave Adventure).[9] 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 talked 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 Colossal Cave, but also included fantasy elements (such as axe-wielding dwarves and a magic bridge).

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 (with Crowther's permission). Woods's changes were reminiscent of the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, and included a troll, elves, and a volcano some claim is based on Mount Doom, but Woods says was not.[10][11]

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 (later Sierra Entertainment); Ken and Roberta Williams played the game and decided to design one of their own,[9] but with graphics.

Commercial era

Adventure International was founded by Scott Adams (not to be confused with the creator of Dilbert). In 1978, Adams wrote Adventureland, which was loosely patterned after (the original) 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,[12] 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 (also known as Dungeon), at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, directly inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure. 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'.

Infocom and other companies offered optional commercial feelies (physical props associated with a game). The tradition of 'feelies' (and the term itself) is believed to have originated with Deadline (1982), the third Infocom title after Zork I and II.[13][14] When writing this game, it was not possible to include all of the information in the limited (80KB) 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.[15][16] 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.

1980s

 
Mystery House for the Apple II was the first adventure game to use graphics in the early home computer era.

United States

Interactive fiction became a standard product for many software companies. By 1982 Softline wrote that "the demands of the market are weighted heavily toward hi-res graphics" in games like Sierra's The Wizard and the Princess and its imitators. Such graphic adventures became the dominant form of the genre on computers with graphics, like the Apple II.[17] By 1982 Adventure International began releasing versions of its games with graphics.[17] The company went bankrupt in 1985. Synapse Software and Acornsoft were also closed in 1985. Leaving Infocom as the leading company producing text-only adventure games on the Apple II with sophisticated parsers and writing, and still advertising its lack of graphics as a virtue.[17] The company was bought by Activision in 1986 after the failure of Cornerstone, Infocom's database software program, and stopped producing text adventures a few years later. Soon after Telaium/Trillium also closed.

Outside the United States

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

In the early 1980s Edu-Ware also produced interactive fiction for the Apple II as designated by the "if" graphic that was displayed on startup. Their titles included the Prisoner and Empire series (Empire I: World Builders, Empire II: Interstellar Sharks, Empire III: Armageddon).

In 1981, CE Software published SwordThrust as a commercial successor to the Eamon gaming system for the Apple II. SwordThrust and Eamon were simple two-word parser games with many role-playing elements not available in other interactive fiction.[18] While SwordThrust published seven different titles, it was vastly overshadowed by the non-commercial Eamon system which allowed private authors to publish their own titles in the series. By March 1984, there were 48 titles published for the Eamon system (and over 270 titles in total as of March 2013).

In Italy, interactive fiction games were mainly published and distributed through various magazines in included tapes. The largest number of games were published in the two magazines Viking and Explorer,[19] with versions for the main 8-bit home computers (ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and MSX). The software house producing those games was Brainstorm Enterprise, and the most prolific IF author was Bonaventura Di Bello,[20] who produced 70 games in the Italian language. The wave of interactive fiction in Italy lasted for a couple of years thanks to the various magazines promoting the genre, then faded and remains still today a topic of interest for a small group of fans and less known developers, celebrated on Web sites and in related newsgroups.

In Spain, interactive fiction was considered a minority genre, and was not very successful. The first Spanish interactive fiction commercially released was Yenght in 1983, by Dinamic Software, for the ZX Spectrum. Later on, in 1987, the same company produced an interactive fiction about Don Quijote. After several other attempts, the company Aventuras AD, emerged from Dinamic, became the main interactive fiction publisher in Spain, including titles like a Spanish adaptation of Colossal Cave Adventure, an adaptation of the Spanish comic El Jabato, and mainly the Ci-U-Than trilogy, composed by La diosa de Cozumel (1990), Los templos sagrados (1991) and Chichen Itzá (1992). During this period, the Club de Aventuras AD (CAAD), the main Spanish speaking community around interactive fiction in the world, was founded, and after the end of Aventuras AD in 1992, the CAAD continued on its own, first with their own magazine, and then with the advent of Internet, with the launch of an active internet community that still produces interactive non-commercial fiction nowadays.[21]

During the 1990s

Legend Entertainment was founded by Bob Bates and Mike Verdu in 1989. It started out from the ashes of Infocom. The text adventures produced by Legend Entertainment used (high-resolution) graphics as well as sound. Some of their titles include Eric the Unready, the Spellcasting series and Gateway (based on Frederik Pohl's novels).

The last text adventure created by Legend Entertainment was Gateway II (1992), while the last game ever created by Legend was Unreal II: The Awakening (2003) – a well-known first-person shooter action game using the Unreal Engine for both impressive graphics and realistic physics. In 2004, Legend Entertainment was acquired by Atari, who published Unreal II and released for both Microsoft Windows and Microsoft's Xbox.

Many other companies such as Level 9 Computing, Magnetic Scrolls and Delta 4 had closed by 1992.

In 1991 and 1992, Activision released The Lost Treasures of Infocom in two volumes, a collection containing most of Infocom's games, followed in 1996 by Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom.

Modern era

After the decline 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, and was soon followed by rec.games.int-fiction. By custom, the topic of rec.arts.int-fiction is interactive fiction authorship and programming, while rec.games.int-fiction encompasses topics related to playing interactive fiction games, such as hint requests and game reviews. As of late 2011, discussions between writers have mostly moved from rec.arts.int-fiction to the Interactive Fiction Community Forum.[22]

One of the most important early developments was the reverse-engineering of Infocom's Z-Code format and Z-Machine virtual machine in 1987 by a group of enthusiasts called the InfoTaskForce 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 with the IF community produced 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.

Despite the lack of commercial support, the availability of high quality tools allowed enthusiasts of the genre to develop new high quality games. Competitions such as the annual Interactive Fiction Competition for short works, the Spring Thing for longer works, and the XYZZY Awards, further helped to improve the quality and complexity of the games. Modern games go much further than the original "Adventure" style, improving upon Infocom games, which relied extensively on puzzle solving, and to a lesser extent on communication with non-player characters, to include experimentation with writing and story-telling techniques.

While the majority of modern interactive fiction that is developed is distributed for free, there are some commercial endeavors. In 1998, Michael Berlyn, a former Implementor at Infocom, started a new game company, Cascade Mountain Publishing, whose goals were to publish interactive fiction. Despite the Interactive Fiction community providing social and financial backing Cascade Mountain Publishing went out of business in 2000.

Other commercial endeavours include Peter Nepstad's 1893: A World's Fair Mystery, several games by Howard Sherman published as Malinche Entertainment, The General Coffee Company's Future Boy!, Cypher, a graphically enhanced cyberpunk game and various titles by Textfyre.[23] Emily Short was commissioned to develop the game City of Secrets but the project fell through and she ended up releasing it herself.[24]

Artificial Intelligence

The increased effectiveness of natural-language-generation in artificial intelligence (AI) has led to instances of interactive fiction which use AI to dynamically generate new, open-ended content, instead of being constrained to pre-written material. The most notable example of this is AI Dungeon, released in 2019, which generates content using the GPT-3 (previously GPT-2) natural-language-generating neural network, created by OpenAI.[25]

Notable works

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

  • 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. Adam Cadre called Galatea "the best NPC ever".[37]
  • 9:05 by Adam Cadre. It is commonly seen as an easy gateway for people to get involved with interactive fiction.[38]
  • 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 four XYZZY Awards.[39]
  • The Dreamhold, by Andrew Plotkin (2004). Designed as a tutorial game for those new to IF, it provides an extensive help section.[40]
  • Façade by Michael Mateas, Andrew Stern and John Grieve (2005). An interactive drama using natural language processing.
  • Fallen London, also known as Echo Bazaar, an open-world work of interactive fiction, by Failbetter Games
  • Lost Pig by Admiral Jota (2007). A comedic interactive fiction about an orc finding a pig that escaped from his farm. It won best game, best writing, best individual non-player character, and best individual player character in the 2007 XYZZY Awards.

2010s

  • Howling Dogs by Porpentine (2012), hypertext fiction that explores escapism. It is considered one of the most prominent Twine games and was in the 2017 Whitney Biennial.[41][42]
  • A Dark Room by Michael Townsend (2013), text-based mystery story and idle game. The story is only told through environmental cues, rather than dialogue or exposition.[43]
  • 80 Days by inkle (2014). An interactive adventure based on the novel by Jules Verne, it was nominated by TIME as their Game of the Year for 2014.[44]
  • Depression Quest by Zoë Quinn (2014). Text-based game in which players take the place of a character who is clinically depressed. The release of the game is considered to be the catalyst of the Gamergate controversy.[41]
  • AI Dungeon by Nick Walton (2019). It is notable for using artificial intelligence to dynamically generate an essentially unlimited amount of content.[45]

Software

Development systems

The original interactive fiction Colossal Cave Adventure was programmed in Fortran, originally developed by IBM. Adventure's parsers could only handle two-word sentences in the form of verb-noun pairs.

Infocom's games of 1979–88, such as Zork, were written using a LISP-like programming language called ZIL (Zork Implementation Language or Zork Interactive Language, it was referred to as both) that compiled into a byte code able to run on a standardized virtual machine called the Z-machine. As the games were text based and used variants of the same Z-machine interpreter, the interpreter only had to be ported to a computer once, rather than once each game. Each game file included a sophisticated parser which allowed the user to type complex instructions to the game. Unlike earlier works of interactive fiction which only understood commands of the form 'verb noun', Infocom's parser could understand a wider variety of sentences. For instance one might type "open the large door, then go west", or "go to the hall". With the Z-machine, Infocom was able to release most of their games for most popular home computers of the time simultaneously, including Apple II, Atari 8-bit family, IBM PC compatibles, Amstrad CPC/PCW (one disc worked on both machines), Commodore 64, Commodore Plus/4, Commodore 128, Kaypro CP/M, TI-99/4A, Macintosh, Atari ST, the Amiga and the Radio Shack TRS-80. Infocom was also known for shipping creative props, or "feelies" (and even "smellies"), with its games.

During the 1990s Interactive fiction was mainly written with C-like languages, such as TADS 2 and Inform 6. A number of systems for writing interactive fiction now exist. The most popular remain Inform, TADS, or ADRIFT, but they diverged in their approach to IF-writing during the 2000s, giving today's IF writers an objective choice. By 2006 IFComp, most games were written for Inform, with a strong minority of games for TADS and ADRIFT, followed by a small number of games for other systems.[46]

While familiarity with a programming language leads many new authors to attempt to produce their own complete IF application, most established IF authors recommend use of a specialised IF language, arguing that such systems allow authors to avoid the technicalities of producing a full featured parser, while allowing broad community support. The choice of authoring system usually depends on the author's desired balance of ease of use versus power, and the portability of the final product.[47]

Other development systems include:

Interpreters and virtual machines

Interpreters are the software used to play the works of interactive fiction created with a development system. Since they need to interact with the player, the "story files" created by development systems are programs in their own right. Rather than running directly on any one computer, they are programs run by Interpreters, or virtual machines, which are designed specially for IF. They may be part of the development system, or can be compiled together with the work of fiction as a standalone executable file.

The Z-machine was designed by the founders of Infocom, in 1979. They were influenced by the then-new idea of a virtual Pascal computer, but replaced P with Z for Zork, the celebrated adventure game of 1977–79. The Z-machine evolved during the 1980s but over 30 years later, it remains in use essentially unchanged. Glulx was designed by Andrew Plotkin in the late 1990s as a new-generation IF virtual machine. It overcomes the technical constraint on the Z-machine by being a 32-bit rather than 16-bit processor. Frotz is a modern Z-machine interpreter originally written in C (programming language) by Stefan Jokisch in 1995 for DOS. Over time it was ported to other platforms, such as Unix, RISC OS, Mac OS and most recently iOS. Modern Glulx interpreters are based on "Glulxe", by Andrew Plotkin, and "Git", by Iain Merrick. Other interpreters include Zoom for Mac OS X, or for Unix or Linux, maintained by Andrew Hunter, and Spatterlight for Mac OS X, maintained by Tor Andersson.

Distribution

In addition to commercial distribution venues and individual websites, many works of free interactive fiction are distributed through community websites. These include the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDb), The Interactive Fiction Reviews Organization (IFRO), a game catalog and recommendation engine, and the Interactive Fiction Archive.

Works may be distributed for playing with in a separate interpreter. In which case they are often made available in the Blorb package format that many interpreters support. A filename ending .zblorb is a story file intended for a Z-machine in a Blorb wrapper, while a filename ending .gblorb is a story file intended for a Glulx in a Blorb wrapper. It is not common but IF files are sometimes also seen without a Blorb wrapping, though this usually means cover art, help files, and so forth are missing, like a book with the covers torn off. Z-machine story files usually have names ending .z5 or .z8, the number being a version number, and Glulx story files usually end .ulx.

Alternatively, works may be distributed for playing in a web browser. For example, the 'Parchment' project is for web browser-based IF Interpreter, for both Z-machine and Glulx files.

Some software such as Twine publishes directly to HTML, the standard language used to create web pages, reducing the requirement for an Interpreter or virtual machine.

See also

References

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  2. ^ a b c d Rollings, Andrew; Ernest Adams (2006). Fundamentals of Game Design. Prentice Hall. from the original on 17 February 2009.
  3. ^ Soultanis, Greg. Mullin, Eileen, ed. XYZZY News – The Magazine for Interactive Fiction Enthusiasts. Issue No. 4. July/August 1995. 28 September 2004 at the Wayback Machine
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  36. ^ Montfort, Nick; Stuart Moulthrop (July 2003). "Face It, Tiger, You Just Hit the Jackpot: Reading and Playing Cadre's Varicella" (PDF). fineArt Forum Vol. 17 No. 8. (PDF) from the original on 19 June 2008. Retrieved 17 December 2006.
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  38. ^ Bibby, Jay (11 June 2008). "9:05". Jay Is Games. from the original on 7 January 2017. Retrieved 12 June 2018.
  39. ^ "Results of the 9th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition". from the original on 24 October 2008.
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  41. ^ a b Hudson, Laura (19 November 2014). "Twine, the Video-Game Technology for All". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 3 January 2022. Retrieved 15 August 2020.
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  45. ^ Vincent, James (6 December 2019). "This AI text adventure game has pretty much infinite possibilities". The Verge. Retrieved 11 December 2019.
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  47. ^ Granade, Stephen. "Choosing a Text Adventure Language". from the original on 5 December 2006. Retrieved 17 December 2006.

Further reading

  • Montfort, Nick (2005). Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-63318-5.
  • Keller, Daniel. "Reading and playing: what makes interactive fiction unique" p. 276-298. in Williams, J. P., & Smith, J. H. (2007). The players' realm: studies on the culture of video games and gaming. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co. ISBN 978-0-7864-2832-8
  • Reed, Aaron (2010). Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7. Delmar Cengage Learning. ISBN 978-1435455061.
  • Seegert, Alf. (2009), "'Doing there' vs. 'being there': performing presence in interactive fiction", Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds 1: 1, pp. 23–37, doi:10.1386/jgvw.1.1.23/1
  • Robinson Wheeler, J, & Kevin, Jackson-Mead (2014), "IF Theory Reader", JRW Digital Media.

External links

  • Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB), a community site where one can find personalized recommendations for IF games to play.
  • intfiction.org, a forum dedicated to discussing IF
  • The Interactive Fiction Archive, a large archive of free-to-download and play interactive fiction.
  • , a more user-friendly interface for the IF archive.
  • A Brief History of Interactive Fiction, a timeline of events in interactive fiction history at the Brass Lantern website.
  • The Interactive Fiction Reviews Organization (IFRO), huge repository for text adventure game reviews written and rated by Interactive Fiction community players and members since 2004.
  • Interactive Fiction: More Than Retro Fun, a beginner's introduction and setup guide to Interactive Fiction games and interpreters
  • The Interactive Fiction Wiki, a MediaWiki wiki specific to Interactive Fiction.
  • Something about Interactive Fiction – MobyGames examines the history (and future) of this gaming genre.
  • Text Adventures at Curlie

January 13, 2023
interactive, fiction, often, abbreviated, software, simulating, environments, which, players, text, commands, control, characters, influence, environment, works, this, form, understood, literary, narratives, either, form, interactive, narratives, interactive, . Interactive fiction often abbreviated IF 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 1 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 2 however graphical text adventures 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 Colossal Cave AdventureDue 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 not known for gaming or strong graphics capabilities 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 analogue versions of 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 addventure format has also been described as a form of interactive fiction 3 The term interactive fiction is sometimes used also to refer to visual novels a type of interactive narrative software popular in Japan Contents 1 Medium 1 1 Writing style 2 History 2 1 1960s and 70s 2 1 1 Natural language processing 2 1 2 Adventure 2 1 3 Commercial era 2 2 1980s 2 2 1 United States 2 2 2 Outside the United States 2 3 During the 1990s 2 4 Modern era 2 4 1 Artificial Intelligence 3 Notable works 3 1 1970s 3 2 1980s 3 3 1990s 3 4 2000s 3 5 2010s 4 Software 4 1 Development systems 4 2 Interpreters and virtual machines 4 3 Distribution 5 See also 6 References 7 Further reading 8 External linksMedium Edit Zork I is one of the first interactive fiction games as well as being one of the first commercially sold It is one of the most famous interactive fiction games Here it is portrayed running on Gargoyle a modern interpreter 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 2 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 Zork Implementation Language could understand complete sentences 4 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 2 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 2 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 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 EditInteractive 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 5 A typical command may be gt 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 6 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 That was the first place you tried hours and hours ago now and there s nothing there but that boring old book You pick it up anyway bored as you are 7 Many text adventures particularly those designed for humour such as Zork The Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy and Leather Goddesses of Phobos address the player with an informal tone sometimes including sarcastic remarks see the transcript from Curses above for an example 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 I 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 entirely 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 Edit1960s and 70s Edit Natural language processing Edit Though neither program was developed as a narrative work the software programs ELIZA 1964 1966 and SHRDLU 1968 1970 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 8 Adventure Edit Around 1975 Will Crowther a programmer and an amateur caver wrote the first text adventure game Adventure originally called ADVENT because a filename could only be six characters long in the operating system he was using and later named Colossal Cave Adventure 9 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 talked 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 Colossal Cave but also included fantasy elements such as axe wielding dwarves and a magic bridge 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 with Crowther s permission Woods s changes were reminiscent of the writings of J R R Tolkien and included a troll elves and a volcano some claim is based on Mount Doom but Woods says was not 10 11 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 later Sierra Entertainment Ken and Roberta Williams played the game and decided to design one of their own 9 but with graphics Commercial era Edit Adventure International was founded by Scott Adams not to be confused with the creator of Dilbert In 1978 Adams wrote Adventureland which was loosely patterned after the original 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 12 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 also known as Dungeon at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science directly inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure 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 Infocom and other companies offered optional commercial feelies physical props associated with a game The tradition of feelies and the term itself is believed to have originated with Deadline 1982 the third Infocom title after Zork I and II 13 14 When writing this game it was not possible to include all of the information in the limited 80KB 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 15 16 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 1980s Edit Mystery House for the Apple II was the first adventure game to use graphics in the early home computer era United States Edit Interactive fiction became a standard product for many software companies By 1982 Softline wrote that the demands of the market are weighted heavily toward hi res graphics in games like Sierra s The Wizard and the Princess and its imitators Such graphic adventures became the dominant form of the genre on computers with graphics like the Apple II 17 By 1982 Adventure International began releasing versions of its games with graphics 17 The company went bankrupt in 1985 Synapse Software and Acornsoft were also closed in 1985 Leaving Infocom as the leading company producing text only adventure games on the Apple II with sophisticated parsers and writing and still advertising its lack of graphics as a virtue 17 The company was bought by Activision in 1986 after the failure of Cornerstone Infocom s database software program and stopped producing text adventures a few years later Soon after Telaium Trillium also closed Outside the United States Edit Probably the first commercial work of interactive fiction produced outside the U S was the dungeon crawl game of Acheton produced in Cambridge England and first commercially released by Acornsoft later expanded and reissued by Topologika Other leading companies in the UK were Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9 Computing Also worthy of mention are Delta 4 Melbourne House and the homebrew company Zenobi In the early 1980s Edu Ware also produced interactive fiction for the Apple II as designated by the if graphic that was displayed on startup Their titles included the Prisoner and Empire series Empire I World Builders Empire II Interstellar Sharks Empire III Armageddon In 1981 CE Software published SwordThrust as a commercial successor to the Eamon gaming system for the Apple II SwordThrust and Eamon were simple two word parser games with many role playing elements not available in other interactive fiction 18 While SwordThrust published seven different titles it was vastly overshadowed by the non commercial Eamon system which allowed private authors to publish their own titles in the series By March 1984 there were 48 titles published for the Eamon system and over 270 titles in total as of March 2013 In Italy interactive fiction games were mainly published and distributed through various magazines in included tapes The largest number of games were published in the two magazines Viking and Explorer 19 with versions for the main 8 bit home computers ZX Spectrum Commodore 64 and MSX The software house producing those games was Brainstorm Enterprise and the most prolific IF author was Bonaventura Di Bello 20 who produced 70 games in the Italian language The wave of interactive fiction in Italy lasted for a couple of years thanks to the various magazines promoting the genre then faded and remains still today a topic of interest for a small group of fans and less known developers celebrated on Web sites and in related newsgroups In Spain interactive fiction was considered a minority genre and was not very successful The first Spanish interactive fiction commercially released was Yenght in 1983 by Dinamic Software for the ZX Spectrum Later on in 1987 the same company produced an interactive fiction about Don Quijote After several other attempts the company Aventuras AD emerged from Dinamic became the main interactive fiction publisher in Spain including titles like a Spanish adaptation of Colossal Cave Adventure an adaptation of the Spanish comic El Jabato and mainly the Ci U Than trilogy composed by La diosa de Cozumel 1990 Los templos sagrados 1991 and Chichen Itza 1992 During this period the Club de Aventuras AD CAAD the main Spanish speaking community around interactive fiction in the world was founded and after the end of Aventuras AD in 1992 the CAAD continued on its own first with their own magazine and then with the advent of Internet with the launch of an active internet community that still produces interactive non commercial fiction nowadays 21 During the 1990s Edit Legend Entertainment was founded by Bob Bates and Mike Verdu in 1989 It started out from the ashes of Infocom The text adventures produced by Legend Entertainment used high resolution graphics as well as sound Some of their titles include Eric the Unready the Spellcasting series and Gateway based on Frederik Pohl s novels The last text adventure created by Legend Entertainment was Gateway II 1992 while the last game ever created by Legend was Unreal II The Awakening 2003 a well known first person shooter action game using the Unreal Engine for both impressive graphics and realistic physics In 2004 Legend Entertainment was acquired by Atari who published Unreal II and released for both Microsoft Windows and Microsoft s Xbox Many other companies such as Level 9 Computing Magnetic Scrolls and Delta 4 had closed by 1992 In 1991 and 1992 Activision released The Lost Treasures of Infocom in two volumes a collection containing most of Infocom s games followed in 1996 by Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom Modern era Edit After the decline 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 and was soon followed by rec games int fiction By custom the topic of rec arts int fiction is interactive fiction authorship and programming while rec games int fiction encompasses topics related to playing interactive fiction games such as hint requests and game reviews As of late 2011 discussions between writers have mostly moved from rec arts int fiction to the Interactive Fiction Community Forum 22 One of the most important early developments was the reverse engineering of Infocom s Z Code format and Z Machine virtual machine in 1987 by a group of enthusiasts called the InfoTaskForce 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 with the IF community produced 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 Despite the lack of commercial support the availability of high quality tools allowed enthusiasts of the genre to develop new high quality games Competitions such as the annual Interactive Fiction Competition for short works the Spring Thing for longer works and the XYZZY Awards further helped to improve the quality and complexity of the games Modern games go much further than the original Adventure style improving upon Infocom games which relied extensively on puzzle solving and to a lesser extent on communication with non player characters to include experimentation with writing and story telling techniques While the majority of modern interactive fiction that is developed is distributed for free there are some commercial endeavors In 1998 Michael Berlyn a former Implementor at Infocom started a new game company Cascade Mountain Publishing whose goals were to publish interactive fiction Despite the Interactive Fiction community providing social and financial backing Cascade Mountain Publishing went out of business in 2000 Other commercial endeavours include Peter Nepstad s 1893 A World s Fair Mystery several games by Howard Sherman published as Malinche Entertainment The General Coffee Company s Future Boy Cypher a graphically enhanced cyberpunk game and various titles by Textfyre 23 Emily Short was commissioned to develop the game City of Secrets but the project fell through and she ended up releasing it herself 24 Artificial Intelligence EditThe increased effectiveness of natural language generation in artificial intelligence AI has led to instances of interactive fiction which use AI to dynamically generate new open ended content instead of being constrained to pre written material The most notable example of this is AI Dungeon released in 2019 which generates content using the GPT 3 previously GPT 2 natural language generating neural network created by OpenAI 25 This section needs expansion You can help by adding to it May 2019 Notable works Edit1970s Edit Colossal Cave Adventure by Will Crowther and Don Woods was the first text adventure ever made 9 Adventureland by Scott Adams is considered one of the defining works of interactive fiction The Zork series by Infocom 1979 onwards was the first text adventure to see widespread commercial release 26 1980s Edit Softporn Adventure by Chuck Benton a popular adult game that inspired the Leisure Suit Larry video game series The Hobbit by Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler of Beam Software 1982 was an early reinterpretation of an existing novel into interactive fiction with several independent non player characters Planetfall by Steve Meretzky of Infocom 1983 featured Floyd the robot which Allen Varney claimed to be the first game character who evoked a strong emotional commitment from players 27 Suspended by Michael Berlyn was an Infocom game with a large vocabulary and unique character personalities The Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky of Infocom 1984 involved the author of the original work in the reinterpretation A Mind Forever Voyaging by Steve Meretzky of Infocom 1985 a story heavy puzzle light game often touted as Infocom s first serious work of science fiction 28 The Pawn by Magnetic Scrolls was known for understanding complex instructions like PLANT THE POT PLANT IN THE PLANT POT WITH THE TROWEL Silicon Dreams by Level 9 Computing 1986 a trilogy of interactive science fiction games Leather Goddesses of Phobos by Steve Meretzky a risque sci fi parody from Infocom Amnesia 1987 by Hugo Award and Nebula Award winning science fiction and fantasy author Thomas M Disch a text only adventure published by Electronic Arts 29 1990s Edit Curses by Graham Nelson 1993 the first game written in the Inform programming language Considered one of the first modern games to meet the high standards set by Infocom s best titles 30 DUNNET by Ron Schnell 1992 eLisp port from the 1983 MacLisp original surreal text adventure that has shipped with GNU Emacs since 1994 and thus comes with Mac OS X and most Linux distributions often mistaken for an easter egg Anchorhead by Michael S Gentry 1998 is a highly rated horror story inspired by H P Lovecraft s Cthulhu Mythos 31 Photopia by Adam Cadre 1998 one of the first almost entirely puzzle free games 32 It won the annual Interactive Fiction Competition in 1998 33 Spider and Web by Andrew Plotkin 1998 an award winning 34 espionage story with many twists and turns 35 Varicella by Adam Cadre 1999 It won four XYZZY Awards in 1999 including the XYZZY Award for Best Game and had a scholarly essay written about it 36 2000s Edit 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 Adam Cadre called Galatea the best NPC ever 37 9 05 by Adam Cadre It is commonly seen as an easy gateway for people to get involved with interactive fiction 38 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 four XYZZY Awards 39 The Dreamhold by Andrew Plotkin 2004 Designed as a tutorial game for those new to IF it provides an extensive help section 40 Facade by Michael Mateas Andrew Stern and John Grieve 2005 An interactive drama using natural language processing Fallen London also known as Echo Bazaar an open world work of interactive fiction by Failbetter Games Lost Pig by Admiral Jota 2007 A comedic interactive fiction about an orc finding a pig that escaped from his farm It won best game best writing best individual non player character and best individual player character in the 2007 XYZZY Awards 2010s Edit Howling Dogs by Porpentine 2012 hypertext fiction that explores escapism It is considered one of the most prominent Twine games and was in the 2017 Whitney Biennial 41 42 A Dark Room by Michael Townsend 2013 text based mystery story and idle game The story is only told through environmental cues rather than dialogue or exposition 43 80 Days by inkle 2014 An interactive adventure based on the novel by Jules Verne it was nominated by TIME as their Game of the Year for 2014 44 Depression Quest by Zoe Quinn 2014 Text based game in which players take the place of a character who is clinically depressed The release of the game is considered to be the catalyst of the Gamergate controversy 41 AI Dungeon by Nick Walton 2019 It is notable for using artificial intelligence to dynamically generate an essentially unlimited amount of content 45 Software EditDevelopment systems Edit The original interactive fiction Colossal Cave Adventure was programmed in Fortran originally developed by IBM Adventure s parsers could only handle two word sentences in the form of verb noun pairs Infocom s games of 1979 88 such as Zork were written using a LISP like programming language called ZIL Zork Implementation Language or Zork Interactive Language it was referred to as both that compiled into a byte code able to run on a standardized virtual machine called the Z machine As the games were text based and used variants of the same Z machine interpreter the interpreter only had to be ported to a computer once rather than once each game Each game file included a sophisticated parser which allowed the user to type complex instructions to the game Unlike earlier works of interactive fiction which only understood commands of the form verb noun Infocom s parser could understand a wider variety of sentences For instance one might type open the large door then go west or go to the hall With the Z machine Infocom was able to release most of their games for most popular home computers of the time simultaneously including Apple II Atari 8 bit family IBM PC compatibles Amstrad CPC PCW one disc worked on both machines Commodore 64 Commodore Plus 4 Commodore 128 Kaypro CP M TI 99 4A Macintosh Atari ST the Amiga and the Radio Shack TRS 80 Infocom was also known for shipping creative props or feelies and even smellies with its games During the 1990s Interactive fiction was mainly written with C like languages such as TADS 2 and Inform 6 A number of systems for writing interactive fiction now exist The most popular remain Inform TADS or ADRIFT but they diverged in their approach to IF writing during the 2000s giving today s IF writers an objective choice By 2006 IFComp most games were written for Inform with a strong minority of games for TADS and ADRIFT followed by a small number of games for other systems 46 While familiarity with a programming language leads many new authors to attempt to produce their own complete IF application most established IF authors recommend use of a specialised IF language arguing that such systems allow authors to avoid the technicalities of producing a full featured parser while allowing broad community support The choice of authoring system usually depends on the author s desired balance of ease of use versus power and the portability of the final product 47 Other development systems include David Malmberg s Adventure Game Toolkit AGT Incentive Software s Graphic Adventure Creator GAC Inkle s inklewriter Professional Adventure Writer Gilsoft s The Quill TwineInterpreters and virtual machines Edit Interpreters are the software used to play the works of interactive fiction created with a development system Since they need to interact with the player the story files created by development systems are programs in their own right Rather than running directly on any one computer they are programs run by Interpreters or virtual machines which are designed specially for IF They may be part of the development system or can be compiled together with the work of fiction as a standalone executable file The Z machine was designed by the founders of Infocom in 1979 They were influenced by the then new idea of a virtual Pascal computer but replaced P with Z for Zork the celebrated adventure game of 1977 79 The Z machine evolved during the 1980s but over 30 years later it remains in use essentially unchanged Glulx was designed by Andrew Plotkin in the late 1990s as a new generation IF virtual machine It overcomes the technical constraint on the Z machine by being a 32 bit rather than 16 bit processor Frotz is a modern Z machine interpreter originally written in C programming language by Stefan Jokisch in 1995 for DOS Over time it was ported to other platforms such as Unix RISC OS Mac OS and most recently iOS Modern Glulx interpreters are based on Glulxe by Andrew Plotkin and Git by Iain Merrick Other interpreters include Zoom for Mac OS X or for Unix or Linux maintained by Andrew Hunter and Spatterlight for Mac OS X maintained by Tor Andersson Distribution Edit In addition to commercial distribution venues and individual websites many works of free interactive fiction are distributed through community websites These include the Interactive Fiction Database IFDb The Interactive Fiction Reviews Organization IFRO a game catalog and recommendation engine and the Interactive Fiction Archive Works may be distributed for playing with in a separate interpreter In which case they are often made available in the Blorb package format that many interpreters support A filename ending zblorb is a story file intended for a Z machine in a Blorb wrapper while a filename ending gblorb is a story file intended for a Glulx in a Blorb wrapper It is not common but IF files are sometimes also seen without a Blorb wrapping though this usually means cover art help files and so forth are missing like a book with the covers torn off Z machine story files usually have names ending z5 or z8 the number being a version number and Glulx story files usually end ulx Alternatively works may be distributed for playing in a web browser For example the Parchment project is for web browser based IF Interpreter for both Z machine and Glulx files Some software such as Twine publishes directly to HTML the standard language used to create web pages reducing the requirement for an Interpreter or virtual machine See also EditGet Lamp a documentary about interactive fiction Graphic adventures adventure games with roots in interactive fiction Hypertext fiction Interactive storytellingReferences Edit Montfort Nick amp Urbano Paulo Tr A quarta Era da Ficcao Interactiva Archived 17 May 2008 at the Wayback Machine Nada Volume 8 October 2006 a b c d Rollings Andrew Ernest Adams 2006 Fundamentals of Game Design Prentice Hall Archived from the original on 17 February 2009 Soultanis Greg Mullin Eileen ed XYZZY News The Magazine for Interactive Fiction Enthusiasts Issue No 4 July August 1995 Archived 28 September 2004 at the Wayback Machine DeMaria Rusel and Wilson Johnny L 2002 High Score The Illustrated History of Electronic Games McGraw Hill Osborne Berkeley Calif p 52 ISBN 0 07 222428 2 The Next Generation 1996 Lexicon A to Z Text Adventure Next Generation No 15 Imagine Media March 1996 p 41 Giner Sorolla Roger April 2006 Crimes Against Mimesis Archived from the original on 19 June 2005 Retrieved 17 December 2006 This is a reformatted version of a set of articles originally posted to Usenet Giner Sorolla Roger 11 April 2006 Crimes Against Mimesis Part 1 Archived from the original on 2 November 2011 Retrieved 17 December 2006 Giner Sorolla Roger 18 April 2006 Crimes Against Mimesis Part 2 Archived from the original on 2 November 2011 Retrieved 17 December 2006 Giner Sorolla Roger 25 April 2006 Crimes Against Mimesis Part 3 Archived from the original on 2 November 2011 Retrieved 17 December 2006 Giner Sorolla Roger 29 April 2006 Crimes Against Mimesis Part 4 Archived from the original on 2 November 2011 Retrieved 17 December 2006 Nelson Graham Curses 1993 Montfort Nick 2003 Twisty Little Passages An Approach To Interactive Fiction Cambridge The MIT Press pp 81 85 ISBN 0 262 13436 5 a b c Jerz Dennis G 17 February 2004 Colossal Cave Adventure c 1975 Dennis G Jerz Seton Hill University Archived from the original on 6 September 2007 Retrieved 20 October 2006 Even the description of the volcano which some writers have claimed was modelled after Mount Doom was written with no particular vision in mind Interactive Fiction I prefer Adventure L avventura e l avventura June 2001 Archived from the original on 4 February 2012 Retrieved 22 May 2007 Jerz s Introduction Storytelling and Computer Games UWEC Panel May 2001 Jerz setonhill edu Archived from the original on 30 December 2010 Retrieved 1 February 2011 Graham Nelson July 2001 A short history of interactive fiction The Inform Designer s Manual Archived from the original on 27 August 2007 Retrieved 1 November 2006 Allen Varney 9 December 2006 Feelies The Escapist Issue No 64 Archived from the original on 12 October 2007 Retrieved 10 July 2009 Stephen van Egmond 17 April 2004 FAQ 2 3 2 3 How did Infocom make those neat packages Newsgroup rec games int fiction Archived from the original on 18 September 2009 Retrieved 7 October 2009 Peter Scheyen 1987 Genuine Zorkmid coin minted for the Zork Trilogy Archived from the original on 16 June 2006 Retrieved 10 July 2009 Robin Lionheart 2009 The Zorkmid Project Archived from the original on 11 April 2009 Retrieved 10 July 2009 a b c Maher Jimmy 28 August 2012 SAGA The Digital Antiquarian Archived from the original on 11 July 2014 Retrieved 10 July 2014 Montfort Nick 2005 2004 The Independents Twisty Little Passages An Approach to Interactive Fiction Cambridge Massachusetts The MIT Press p 196 ISBN 978 0 262 13436 1 Some special purpose interactive fiction development systems were used by the ordinary home computer owner of the 1980s An important early one was Donald Brown s 1980 freeware system Eamon a system for creating text based role playing games Eamon was used to create more than 240 games Le collane avventurose in Italia Adventure game series in Italy Ready64 in Italian Roberto Nicoletti Archived from the original on 14 March 2010 Retrieved 6 March 2008 Bonaventura Di Bello IFWiki David Cornelson Archived from the original on 12 March 2008 Retrieved 6 March 2008 Club de Aventuras AD Caad es 13 November 2010 Archived from the original on 8 May 2011 Retrieved 1 February 2011 intfiction org Index page www intfiction org Archived from the original on 25 December 2011 Retrieved 17 December 2011 Home of the Best Interactive Fiction Textfyre com Archived from the original on 2 February 2011 Retrieved 1 February 2011 Emily Short 5 October 2003 City of Secrets Archived from the original on 9 January 2007 Retrieved 1 November 2006 Coldewey Devin 11 June 2020 OpenAI makes an all purpose API for its text based AI capabilities TechCrunch Retrieved 16 July 2020 Article at The Dot Eaters 2006 Archived 14 May 2013 at the Wayback Machine Allen Varney 23 August 2005 Read Game The Escapist Issue 7 Classical Studies Archived from the original on 18 August 2007 Retrieved 1 November 2006 ISSUE 5 April 19 1995 SPAG Sparkynet com 19 April 1995 Archived from the original on 25 January 2011 Retrieved 1 February 2011 ISSUE 9 June 11 1996 SPAG Sparkynet com Archived from the original on 27 January 2011 Retrieved 1 February 2011 XYZZYnews Issue No 1 Interview Graham Nelson Xyzzynews com Archived from the original on 22 June 2008 Retrieved 1 February 2011 Anchorhead Wurb com 30 June 2000 Archived from the original on 27 January 2011 Retrieved 1 February 2011 Interactive Fiction Bibliography Manifestos and Taxonomies Jerz setonhill edu Archived from the original on 3 March 2011 Retrieved 1 February 2011 History of the 14th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition Ifcomp org Archived from the original on 7 June 2011 Retrieved 1 February 2011 XYZZY Awards 1998 Winners Xyzzynews com 6 February 1999 Archived from the original on 2 February 2007 Retrieved 1 February 2011 Spider and Web Wurb com 30 June 2000 Archived from the original on 9 January 2011 Retrieved 1 February 2011 Montfort Nick Stuart Moulthrop July 2003 Face It Tiger You Just Hit the Jackpot Reading and Playing Cadre s Varicella PDF fineArt Forum Vol 17 No 8 Archived PDF from the original on 19 June 2008 Retrieved 17 December 2006 Photopia is a short story Varicella is a world January 2002 Archived from the original on 18 January 2007 Retrieved 17 December 2006 Bibby Jay 11 June 2008 9 05 Jay Is Games Archived from the original on 7 January 2017 Retrieved 12 June 2018 Results of the 9th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition Archived from the original on 24 October 2008 People s Republic of Interactive Fiction Archived from the original on 12 January 2011 Retrieved 4 September 2013 a b Hudson Laura 19 November 2014 Twine the Video Game Technology for All The New York Times Archived from the original on 3 January 2022 Retrieved 15 August 2020 Whitney Biennial 2017 whitney org Retrieved 15 August 2020 Thomsen Michael 11 June 2014 A Dark Room The Best Selling Game That No One Can Explain The New Yorker Retrieved 15 August 2020 Peckham Matt These Are the Top 10 Video Games of 2014 Time Archived from the original on 23 November 2017 Vincent James 6 December 2019 This AI text adventure game has pretty much infinite possibilities The Verge Retrieved 11 December 2019 Games of the 12th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition 2006 Archived from the original on 3 January 2007 Retrieved 17 December 2006 Granade Stephen Choosing a Text Adventure Language Archived from the original on 5 December 2006 Retrieved 17 December 2006 Further reading EditMontfort Nick 2005 Twisty Little Passages An Approach to Interactive Fiction The MIT Press ISBN 978 0 262 63318 5 Keller Daniel Reading and playing what makes interactive fiction unique p 276 298 in Williams J P amp Smith J H 2007 The players realm studies on the culture of video games and gaming Jefferson N C McFarland amp Co ISBN 978 0 7864 2832 8 Reed Aaron 2010 Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 Delmar Cengage Learning ISBN 978 1435455061 Seegert Alf 2009 Doing there vs being there performing presence in interactive fiction Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds 1 1 pp 23 37 doi 10 1386 jgvw 1 1 23 1 Robinson Wheeler J amp Kevin Jackson Mead 2014 IF Theory Reader JRW Digital Media External links EditInteractive Fiction Database IFDB a community site where one can find personalized recommendations for IF games to play intfiction org a forum dedicated to discussing IF The Interactive Fiction Archive a large archive of free to download and play interactive fiction Baf s Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive a more user friendly interface for the IF archive A Brief History of Interactive Fiction a timeline of events in interactive fiction history at the Brass Lantern website The Interactive Fiction Reviews Organization IFRO huge repository for text adventure game reviews written and rated by Interactive Fiction community players and members since 2004 Interactive Fiction More Than Retro Fun a beginner s introduction and setup guide to Interactive Fiction games and interpreters The Interactive Fiction Wiki a MediaWiki wiki specific to Interactive Fiction Something about Interactive Fiction MobyGames examines the history and future of this gaming genre Text Adventures at Curlie Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Interactive fiction amp oldid 1132509072, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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