Magic Words - Interactive Fiction in the 21st Century

An anonymous reader writes "1UP has just published a nine-part article on Interactive Fiction, the politically correct name for what used to be called text adventure games (e.g. Zork, Stationfall, etc.). The feature includes an overview of the genre and its history, lengthy interviews with the genre's leading current creators, and resources for aspiring IF writers. Anyone who has fond memories of typing their way through dank caverns or outsmarting leather goddesses and ravenous bugblatter beasts with nothing but a keyboard should read this -- not just for the nostalgia, but to see what's become of the format."

Archive of IF games

[smr2x]

http://www.ifarchive.org/ [ifarchive.org] seems like the right place for all you nostalgic types... or the curious ;-)

play Zork here

[$$$$$exyGal]

Here is just one of many places: Play Zork [thcnet.net].

Re:Would really like to remember...

[Eharley]

Planetfall by Infocom?

Hitchhiker's Guide!

[Faust7]

The feature includes an overview of the genre and its history,

Man, and only one brief mention of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Seriously, that game takes the prize for descriptive prose. Forget "eerie dungeons" and "lush fields" and whatnot--the opening takes the cake:

"You wake up. The room is spinning very gently round your head. Or at least it would be if you could see it which you can't."

Re:Would really like to remember...

[smr2x]

Sounds like it.

From http://www.infocom-if.org/games/planetfall/planetf all.html: [infocom-if.org]

Released: 1983

About 20 years. Good luck and hope it's the right one.

Dunnet

[Aardpig]

Ah, the joy of typing M-x dunnet into emacs:

Dead end
You are at a dead end of a dirt road. The road goes to the east.
In the distance you can see that it will eventually fork off. The
trees here are very tall royal palms, and they are spaced equidistant
from each other.
There is a shovel here.
>

The only text editor to have a built-in advdenture game?

Re:stupid flask

[mekkab]

oh, have you played the new one? [videlectrix.com]
yeah verily, indeed.

The IF community is still alive

[Rope_a_Dope]

There's the newsgroups:

rec.arts.int-fiction
rec.games.int-fiction

And there is also the yearly interactive fiction competition. [ifcomp.org] The competition is a fairly big deal in the Interactive Fiction community, as fans submit games, play them, and rate them. 30 games were submitted this year. There are also a number of games, and interpreters that run on everything from Windows, Mac, Linux, Palm, and almost anything else you can think of.

Re:XYZZY

[Aardpig]

I miss Infocom... not only did they have the best games (at the time, and I daresay the games still are more fun than a lot of the flashy color thingys those kids play nowadays), Infocom had the best packaging, bar none.

I'm not sure whether its still in the shops, but a few years ago I bought the Lost Treasures of Infocom, which brings together many of their best games. Unfortunately, you don't get the actual memorabilia -- just a large book with pictures of all the items which accompany each game.

Infocom were indeed great -- their games had such a wonderful depth. However, many of the modern post-Infocom IF games, such as Curses, Jigsaw, Christminster, A Change in the Weather, really are fantastic -- even bigger and more sophisticated than the original Infocom stuff. All of these games are free (as in beer), and can easily be found on the internet.

Remember: it's dark and you are likely to be eaten by a Grue.

Re:Interactive Books

[boobox]

Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch [complete-review.com] is a good example of what I guess you'd call an interactive book (pre-internet hypertext? Written in 1966). There were, if memory serves, a couple of ways to read the book; one was to "hop" to certain chapters in a prescribed order.

trade wars info

[Alien54]

Anyhow, anyone else here remember TradeWars 2002? ;-)

You can sometimes still play it online, often via telnet:

The Home Sector [thestardock.com]: Lots of Tradewars news.

Tradewars: Dark Millenium [tradewars.com]: Large-scale multiplayer game in development. Seems to be based on Tradewars 2002 under an agreement with EIS Online.

tradewars.org [tradewars.org]: Tradewars news, links, and more.

EIS Online [eisonline.com]: The current owners of Tradewars 2002, the best known Tradewars clone. They also market Tradewars Gold and and the Tradewars Game Server for online play. TradeWars 2002 is up to version 3

Hekate's TW Links [twlinks.com]: News, links, and everything else.

TWAR Homepage [idirect.com]: Home of the TWAR helper.

Heh...The Count

[big_groo]

The Count [if-legends.org] - Vic 20.

Great game.

Re:Interactive Books

[Anonymous Coward]

Correction: written in 1963, translated to English in 1966.

Re:Interactive Fiction???

[Aardpig]

Interactive Fiction describes any type of game on the market. Every game is interactive, and every game is make-believe (fiction). How does it describe text adventure games?

Because interactive fiction is closer to the high-quality fiction one might buy in a bookstore, than it is to the video games one might buy in a gaming store. Consider this: on the one hand we have Curses, a masterpiece of language and storytelling; and on the other we have 'All your base are belong to us'. Quite different. The term 'interactive fiction' is meant to highlight the literary nature of the genre -- while at the same time indicating that it is interactive.

Nethack

[TheOtherKiwi]

Anyone here complete nethack or have used the latest version? I remember playing a variant on a VAX11/780 at the same time as on a PC/XT (circa '83) - whoa flashback!

Plenty of links out there: http://hakosoftware.com/nethack/

Nethack 3.4.3 here: http://www.nethack.org/common/index.html

Easily my favourite game of all time.

Re:XYZZY

[irhtfp]

There's a huge collection that was put out by Activision (Infocom) called Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom . They don't publish it any more AFAIK but you can pick it up on ebay for $60 to $80 bucks. It includes:

Arthur: the Quest for Excalibur
Ballyhoo
Beyond Zork
Border Zone
Bureaucracy
Cutthroats
Deadline
Enchanter
Hollywood Hijinx
Infidel
Journey
Leather Goddesses of Phobos
The Lurking Horror
A Mind Forever Voyaging
MoonMist
Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It
Planetfall
Plundered Hearts
Seastalker
Sherlock in the Riddle of the Crown Jewels
Sorcerer
Spellbreaker
Starcross
Stationfall
Suspect
Suspended
Trinity
Wishbringer
The Witness
Zork I
Zork II
Zork III
Zork Zero

Zork I, II and III are available for free here:

http://www.infocom-if.org/download s/downloads.html

Re:Hitchhiker's Guide!

[PressReturn]

grrr, will now attempt to hit the proper button
infocom HHGTG game [douglasadams.com]

Re:Bring them back!!!

[Futaba-chan]

I really think the companies that produced adventure games back in the day should re-release them on an archive CD of sorts. I'd pay fifty bucks for that! Activision did precisely that, for $20, with its Lost Treasures of Infocom, back in the Nineties.

Re:Why so many puzzles.

[Futaba-chan]

I've always been puzzled at how games in the so called "adventure" genre were all about puzzles.

That's not the case, necessarily, any more -- look at Photopia or Galatea, for example. Contrived puzzles were always a pet peeve of mine, too, which is why A Mind Forever Voyaging was my favorite game of the classic Infocom era. But at their best, good IF games can combine a deep sense of immersion with a powerful story in which the author can be somewhat literary, for an experience that depressingly few big-budget modern games match.

Best text adventure game ever!

[tommut]

Don't forget the classic Videlectrix game: Thy Dungeonman II!!
http://www.videlectrix.com/thydungeonman2.html [videlectrix.com]

Strong Bad owns.

New book

[illuminatedwax]

The Onion AV club has a review of Twisty Little Passages [theonionavclub.com], a new book about interactive fiction by Nick Montfort.

--Stephen

Re:Modern Inter-Fic

[stefanlasiewski]

two clicks in a graphical adventure game?'

Well, this is a text adventure game, and often the answers are two words, so maybe you should try to unlock drawer or something.

Photopia

[Flamesplash]

I highly recommend Photopia [slashdot.org]. It's a really cool interactive fiction that can be played in less than 2 hours.

Re:MajorMUD

[Eric Smith]

A MUD is not a text adventure game. A MUD generally has a theme, but not any sort of consistent plot.

And having 35,000 rooms seems like a serious drawback, not a useful feature. I can't imagine that many of those rooms are well-developed. Good text adventure games typically have under 200 rooms or locations, but put a great deal of effort into designing them well.

Re:Modern Inter-Fic

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone tell me how to unlock a freaking drawer that would have taken two clicks in a graphical adventure game?

Whereas in graphic adventures you generally have so few options that there's hadly a game there at all. You don't have to have a clue why clicking on X and then Y will work, so long as you try it at some point. You wanted to shoot the guy but it decided you wanted to just wave the gun at him a bit and hey, it worked, well done, ready for the next puzzle you won't have to solve?

Or alternatively it'll let you pick from a list of keywords and isn't that "menace" option when you click gun a bit of a give away? Maybe you should try that...

Text adventures at least leave a little more room for creativity and imagination.

Linux compatibility with IF is excellent

[0x0d0a]

Except for games that use audio or graphics, Linux has pretty much spot-on compatibility with any IF game, as do most operating systems. IF games are extremely portable, written to one of a number of portable VMs (and all this years before Java...and with better compatibility than Java).

TADS (IMHO the most advanced engine, though Inform is very close) just plain runs on Linux. You want this to play .gam files.
There is Frotz to run Inform (.z5 files...I believe a couple other .zX formats, but I've only played .z5).
There is an ADRIFT implementation called SCARE [geocities.com] for Linux. It has a less-than-perfect parser. To be honest, ADRIFT is a much simpler engine, and I generally fine TADS or Inform games to be much more fun and impressive.

Note that other classic adventure game VMs -- the ones for commercial graphical adventures -- like the Sierra (King's Quest, among others) and Lucasarts (Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max, Secret of Monkey Island, among others) VMs have been ported to Linux in the form of Sarien [sf.net], FreeSCI [linuxgames.com], and ScummVM [sf.net]. I don't believe there have been any new AGI/SCI/SCUMM adventures made -- the engines are static and no improved games will be made for them, but they're still neat projects to have fun playing the originals on.

Re:Interactive?

[Dennis G. Jerz]

No medium is unconstrained, so pointing out that IF is constrained is perhaps missing the point. From a certain perspective, what you call constraints in IF can be seen as freedoms. The IF designer is *not* constrained by needing a team of 3D artists, scriptwriters, mo-cap actors, and voice actors in order to realize a particular vision. Whether the effort required (on behalf of the designer and the player) is worth the aesthetic payoff is a matter of personal taste. It's clear there isn't an audience willing to pay for text adventure games -- I've got no delusions in that area. But that doesn't nullify the cultural value of the genre.

Within the aesthetics of IF, if a puzzle really is random, it's *not* considered a good puzzle, but there are some games that people play only for the puzzles, because the puzzles are devious enough, clever enough, or maddening enough that they keep their interest. Even fans of IF hate gratuitous mazes and "guess-the-verb" problems (which are treated as bugs, not puzzles).

Have you seen some recent IF? Adam Cadre's "Photopia" is the canonical example for "Gosh, look how far IF has come," in that it's a relatively easy game (you might get stuck in a few places, but that's what walkthroughs are for) with a strong storyline; it's not just a good story divided up into chunks, it uses the IF medium to its advantage; when I finished it for the first time, I sat there, stunned, and then immeditely restarted from the beginning to see what kind of power I could wield over the outcome. The degree of power that the author granted me was an important part of the "message" of the story, and it fit perfectly with the medium. The same author's "9:05" plays with the notion of "winning" -- but the ending in which your NPC ends up the best is completely unsatisfying, and the ending in which your NPC ends up in deep trouble is deeply satisfying (in a creepy way). Emily Short's "Galatea" is an NPC portrait; the conversation interface won't win any Loebner prizes, but it's a good attempt to push the boundaries of the "ask X about Y" syntax for conversing with an NPC.

I recommend that you take a look at recent winners of the XYZZY Awards -- games are selected on the basis of puzzles, NPCs, setting, writing, and a half dozen other specific categories. The rethinking that you call for is already underway.

http://www.wurb.com/if/award/3

(The 2003 XYZZYs will be announced this Saturday.)

Given the external constraints forced upon early game designers, in the form of cruel memory restrictions, blocky graphics, atrocious sound, and 30 or so competing platforms, the text genre was actually freeing -- it was easily portable, for one thing; for another, typing into a command line interface that may or may not understand what you wanted to do was a common activity -- that was pretty much how you used a computer.

The term "interactive fiction" historically emphaiszed that an text adventure game was a form of story in which you participated; while the stories weren't always compelling, and while narrative is only one of many components of contemporary commercial games, if the story is good, an IF player won't mind giving up some freedom in order to see the narrative play itself out the way the designer intended it.

Modern game design techniques wouldn't exist -- that is, they wouldn't be modern -- if they didn't have older techniques to build off of (and, when appropriate, reject).

Politically Correct Term?

[ronfar]

Interactive Fiction, the politically correct name for what used to be called text adventure games

It seems to me that they were calling it Interactive Fiction way back in the New Zork Times [csd.uwo.ca] (anyone else remember anxiously awaiting each issue, until those bastards at the New York Times made them change the name to The Status Line). In fact, there was one issue where they thought that the term Interactive Fiction was a bit unwieldly so they had a contest to come up with a new term for Infocom Style Adventure games. [csd.uwo.ca]

Re:XYZZY

[argStyopa]

Or you *could* get all of them for free at http://www.the-underdogs.org/company.php?name=Info com

Bandwidth friendly games, Suspended is 86k zipped LOL.

Of course, that's like the last site in the universe that needs a good slashdotting.

My favourite text adventure

[Cecil]

My favourite text adventure was tabtne.vda and tabtxe.nda in Wing Commander: Privateer. They are, for the unenlightened, commonly referred to as advent.bat and adnext.bat.

Yes, the people at Origin included a pair of text adventures, written in DOS BATCH FILES, with their game. How cool (and masochistic) is that?

They were actually pretty fun little games.

MyAdventureGame

[Anonymous Coward]

MyAdventureGame.com [myadventuregame.com] is entirely devoted to user-created text adventure games. It's certainly not a popular site, but it's cool to see fans putting stuff like that together.