Magic Words - Interactive Fiction in the 21st Century 288
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."
XYZZY (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
They knew that people would copy the disks, but they also knew if you threw in some 3d glasses, a small piece of pocket fuzz, and a plastic mask, people would gladly pay them anyway.
Interactive Books (Score:4, Interesting)
text adventure (Score:3, Interesting)
What ever happened to "choose your own adventure" books?? That's what I think of when I hear the phrase. Am I THAT old??? Anyhow, anyone else here remember TradeWars 2002?
Z Machine (Score:5, Interesting)
Almost all of the classic Infocom games, except some of the later Zork series, were written in a bytecode-like language which ran on a virtual machine known as a Z machine. This is why the old Infocom games can be played on any platform which has had a Z machine ported to it.
Inform, which is mentioned in the article, is actually a compiler which converts a high-level language into Z-machine bytecode. It was devised and written by Graham Nelson, the author of the breathtakingly-fantastic Curses and Jigsaw . Both of these games, plus the Inform compiler, plus a Z machine for just about every type of machine, can be downloaded from the Inform homepage [inform-fiction.org]
I loved and miss the old Infocom games... (Score:2, Interesting)
Kids today are only interested in cool graphics. Ever since DOOM, they've been basically buying the same game, but with nicer graphics than the previous version. Seen one FPS, seen 'em all. They're too lazy to use their imaginations.
Graphics are nice, but I haven't seen (not counting networked multiplayer) a modern PC game yet that can truly match the replayability of some of the Atari, Colecovision, NES and Genesis games.
Re:Dunnet (Score:5, Interesting)
Dunnet is actually quite fun, and I'd recommend people who like IF to give it a shot.
-Erwos
Re:Interactive Books (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone remember interactive books?
Remember them? I still have them...
Interactive books might be the ultimate geek test.
If you were willing to try and figure out the world-view of the game designer by hit-and-miss selection, congratulations: you're a geek. If you read it once or twice, and chucked it because too much of it was the same as the last time you read it... well, I guess you'd be a 'trusted user' or somesuch.
Same goes with text adventures (or whatever the kids call them thesedays. BTW, how do you get by the bulldozer?)
Re:Z Machine (Score:4, Interesting)
Besides, it was just too cool to have Zork come up in an application I wrote.
Interactive Fiction??? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Can someone explain to me why this name change was adopted?? It seems to me that the developers were just embarassed that their games didn't involve any new technologies so they renamed their genre to sound more interesting.
Remember 'The Lost Sword' on the VZ300 (Score:2, Interesting)
The VZ300 sold by Dick Smith was the first micro under $200 (and that's the reason I got one)
Blatant plug and other info (Score:2, Interesting)
its a pc (dos/windows) text adventure. yes yes I do want to port it to linux, but the code is soooo freaking messy (turbo pascal v7 - dos) with custom calls it might be fun trying.
and then there's trek7 over at sourceforge, check that out. oh god, please help. hehehe
and does anyone remember Beaurocracy ? I think this was douglas adams game for Infocom. I love this game!
"I'm sorry, but there's a radio connected to my brain". Now how many people remember the response to that query?!
I still love these kinds of games, which is why I spend endless years trying to port them to this day...
Re:Archive of IF games (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXstarte r s.html
It's got two of the most popular interpreters and about 50 games. It's a great place to start if you want to get back into the IF scene.
I recommend "Curses" as a first start. It's big, has good puzzles and a great dry wit.
Re:Interactive Fiction??? (Score:2, Interesting)
new name, used by all in the community. It's not.
Sure, I say "IF" sometimes. Mostly because it's two keystrokes and
two syllables... I say "text adventures" and "text games" just as
often.
I think most of us are relatively non-uptight about the terminology.
Some of us are aiming towards works with fewer game-like elements, and
some more so -- but even that's a question of the work itself. Not
what people call it.
-- Andrew Plotkin
Re:Z Machine (Score:5, Interesting)
Re-implementing the Z-machine is nothing to be ashamed of. Someone's done it in Perl [paunix.org], and someone else did it as an Emacs major mode [ifarchive.org]... and heck, I'm working on a pure Javascript Z-machine for Mozilla [gnusto.org] </plug>. There's so much good new Z-machine material [ifcomp.org] coming out each year now that building new Z-machines for modern environments isn't just some sort of digital archaeology to relive the Infocom glory days, though of course there's that side to it as well. It's a living tradition, not a reconstructed dead culture.
Favorite Line from Leather Goddesses of Phobos (Score:3, Interesting)
house (struggling with plumbing as Trent/Tiffany struggled with the tubing and the photo of Jean Harlow: "We'll lick those Leather Goddesses of Phobos!"
I also love how in the end game, when Trent/Tiffany needs a part for the machine which you don't have, he/she says "Well, I'll try and work around the X..." but of course the incomplete machine ends in failure (with a different description depending on what part is missing.)
No thread on IF would be complete without mentioning Willie Crowther's Adventure game. I can vouch personally that the Colossal Cave section parts of Mammoth Cave (yes, there is a Bedquilt entrance to Mammoth) resemble the game.
Occasionally a caver familiar with the game will be introduced to the actual area of the cave, and it is traditional to allow him or her the chance to ramble around and have fun trying to figure out what's where. (Will Crowther was a Mammoth Caver as well as an MIT student...along with wife Patricia Crowther (later Wilcox) was among the first people to reduce cave survey data to line plots using a computer (an early step in the cave cartography cycle.)
Re:Interactive Books (Score:2, Interesting)
It was an excercise in literary techniques. The "out-of-sequence" process you mention was just another postmodernist toy, and not the most radical in its school by any means (although more readable, therefore successful).
It could be seen as a natural progression from previous experiments in sequence, back to Borges (whom I think Cortazar admired specially).
Re:Interactive Books (Score:5, Interesting)
Dear god. I remember how I used to read them. I'd go through them once or twice, but while flipping pages I'd see some situation or ending that I liked. So I'd try to find out how to get to that point by finding what pages led to it. And what pages led to them, etc. That's right, I reverse-engineered Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books.
AI and adventure games (Score:5, Interesting)
Currently my research involves text adventures. My advisor [uiuc.edu] and I believe that text adventure games could serve as an excellent testbed for research in intelligent agent behaviour cause they model a number of real-world challenges, like partially observable world states, incompletely specified goals, and the need for common-sense reasoning and belief revision. Here [uiuc.edu] is his paper on the subject.
I'm currently working on doing Logical Filtering [uiuc.edu] in an adventure game, which is a way to maintain a sort of belief about the current state of your world depending on your prior knowledge and observations. Somewhat like filtering in a Hidden Markov model [wikipedia.org].
Some people at Saarland University, Germany, are also doing great work [uni-sb.de] on description logics [unibz.it] in adventure games. A description logic is like a language where you express concepts and the relations between them so that inferring properties is very easy.
It would be great to get some feedback and suggestions from the IF community about what they think about this. Is there any really cool idea you've had about what more could be done with adventure games? I mean many games have some standard stuff like inventories, containers etc. Is there something fundamentally different you've ever thought of doing. Something which involves creative and complex relationships between entities in an adventure games is what we're looking for. Thanks.
Re:I loved and miss the old Infocom games... (Score:2, Interesting)
I grew up playing Sierra's adventure games. It usually took me at least a couple of weeks to get through one of them. I'd get stuck and try everything I could think of, and then come back the next day and try again. Kids today don't have that kind of attention span for games; they'd rather just find a walkthrough, and text adventure games aren't very interesting without the puzzles.
Voice Interactive Fiction (Score:5, Interesting)
So on your next long drive to nowhere in particular, you could play an IF game on your car's computer instead of listening to a non-interactive audio book or some tunes on the CD player/radio.
Obviously, this kind of thing might also be fun for the visually-impaired gamer.
Any idea if anyone has ever done this?
Re:XYZZY (Score:4, Interesting)
From the author's perspective, my entry in this year's IF competition is going to be a Western that spends a lot of time as a character study of its main NPC, and whose overall theme centers on making difficult moral choices in an uncertain and multipolar world. In any other genre, it would be difficult or impossible to round up the large team that I'd need to implement such a thing, and who would play it? In IF, if I can execute it properly, I can really make the concept work.
Re:i remeber something about.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember when I purchased this game new for my C64 while I was still a teen living with my parents. I went so far as to paste a fake label on the floppy disk to disguise the game so I didn't have to answer awkward questions from my parents if they saw it lying around. I thought I was being so "naughty" by getting this game (young AND foolish you see ...).
Never finished the game in my youth. Then I got married to someone who liked these games as much as I did but had never played this one. We fired it up under a Linux port of the Inform parser, played it together, and proceeded to laugh our asses off as we played it. We each picked up more subtle jokes in descriptions, characters, and room layouts that the other didn't.
Interactive fiction vs. text adventures (Score:5, Interesting)
In interviews I'm often asked to comment on how IF compares to various computer game genres, and I usually don't have much to say because my interest in computer games is minimal. I'm not a gamer. I'm a writer. Every time modern IF comes up on Slashdot, a hundred people dredge up how great Infocom was... but I've never cared for most of Infocom's offerings. "Text adventure games" bore me. I have little interest in and even less patience for solving puzzles, and most of my IF reflects this. So it seems to me silly to call something like Photopia or Narcolepsy a "text game," because they're not games. They have a lot more in common with works like The Sweet Hereafter and The Big Lebowski than they do with Zork. So I call them interactive fiction, not to make them sound more important, but simply because it's a more accurate name.
Adam Cadre, Holyoke, MA
http://adamcadre.ac
Re:PC? (Score:5, Interesting)
Some contemporary offerings aren't "adventures" -- they are character studies, one-room mysteries, flashbacks, or puzzle-based wordplay. To call them all "adventures" is limiting. Calling it "text-parser-based interactive fiction" is probalby more accurate, but unwieldy. A good deal of classic commercial games included both a text parser and graphics, so "text" isn't always the defining factor.
Some academics use the term "interactive fiction" to describe literary hypertext. And some "interactive fiction" is actually very linear, giving only the illusion of player agency. So even the "preferred" term is imperfect.
I'm not aware of any fan or designer of IF who would be upset if someone said, "Hey, is that an adventure game you're playing?" Take "politcally correct" in the Slashdot article as a lighthearted poke, nothing serious.
Re:XYZZY (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:XYZZY (Score:5, Interesting)
You have a few text games (usually recent ones that aren't commercial, I can't think of a name, but I know I remember playing one with a mansion and some french guys that I never finished) that aren't puzzles or anything. You don't pick the wrong road and get eaten by a monkey plant or anything, you just participate in a story. You can die, but it's not like you have to keep replaying over and over to find the one way out that doesn't have a dragon hiding in it. More role playing, less game.
Now, I hate RPGs, in general, but I liked Knights of the Old Republic. I played through once, being evil as possible, and then I went back and played through as good as possible. Then I wanted to go back and do a few things differently, but I actually didn't want to do all the shooting and light-sabreing. I just wanted to go around being a Jedi and meddling in galactic intrigue. And just now I realized I probably would've bought the game (in retrospect anyway) if it had just been the talking and the picking where to go next with the battle money spent on more depth.
It's like one of the movies only you can make your Jedi force-choke the bajesus out of the annoying computer-generated locals whenever you want! That's where you need to go. I bet there are a lot of people who just hate having to do the "storming the building over and over until you don't die" thing that makes finally beating it more fun for me. No puzzles, no gratuitous item-hunting, just a branching storyline you get to move around in.
Of course, I'll start making fun of this genre the moment it appears, just like with RPGs, but I bet it'd make some money.
Re:Voice Interactive Fiction (Score:2, Interesting)
If you're serious about looking into games for the visually impaired, try http://www.audysseymagazine.org/
Re:AI and adventure games (Score:3, Interesting)
The question is how to do it? I am not a programmer or an expert on AI, so I do not know what is possible or not, but I have often wondered what might happen if you created an agent for the game, and let it learn there. For example just have it go around and interact with its environment. Give it every command possible, and have commands return codes to it. The codes could be used to weight a Neural Network that is controlling what actions it will take. Gibberish commands return a code the weighs the network against repeating that combination. Good commands return codes that let it know these are proper commands. After a while it should learn all the proper commands, and perhaps we can use that as a model and train it differently. Now we return codes based on the outcome of the proper commands. Commands that have a positive outcome (ie kill ant > you attack the ant and destroy it) can return a positive weight and commands that have a negative outcome (ie kill dragon > The dragon destroys you utterly. You find yourself floating in a dark place) can be weighed accordingly.
Basically I am just talking out my ass, but I have not the expertise to try these things. If any of these ideas seem worth doing and you try them, I would be very interested in learning the results.
No ants were actually harmed during the creation of this posting.
AIs would need a complex world (Score:3, Interesting)
You know those stories about people that get stranded somewhere in a foreign country, and have to perform an amazing act to learn and understand what's going on? A human baby learns extremely quickly. Each human manages to do this, to go from zero knowledge of any language to speaking and comprehending knowledge with a few years of work. The problem is that it takes *four years* of constant interaction with new people and languages, plus visual input, to learn something like this. If you consider how much sheer *stuff* there is in four years of a human life, the task becomes staggering in scope. And we'd still be working with only a text-based interface...given the lower data bandwidth, and the fact that visual knowledge from the outside world is incredibly important to understand what is going on in a game for us, it would probably take far longer with just text to work with.
So maybe it could be done, but all the IF writers in the world have not written enough content (and some of it is surrealistic or misleading). All of it offers a much less powerful world than the one humans are in.
Re:Interactive Fiction??? (Score:3, Interesting)
However, the term "interactive fiction" implies a much higher standard of quality, probably because Infocom popularized the term and their games were clearly more sophisticated than most others of the time. From the opening sequence to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it looks like Infocom was using the term "interactive fiction" at least as far back as 1984:
THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
Infocom interactive fiction - a science fiction story
Copyright (c) 1984 by Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
Release 59 / Serial number 851108
I'm sure there were some good non-Infocom games from the era, but I do recall quite a few really horrible games which had awful parsers and gameplay. You would type "TAKE THE STICK", and the game would reply "Sorry, I don't know what a 'the' is." I'd say that these games probably classify as text adventures, but are not up to the standards of Infocom's "interactive fiction".
(And, as another poster pointed out, not all interactive fiction games are adventures.)
Re:Interactive? (Score:2, Interesting)
The game industry is in no good shape, but there is hope. Serious research has been going on the field since the 60's at least, and there is the literature to prove it. There is no excuse to ignore all this work, neither for the professional 3D-wizbang developer (who unfortunately usually does) nor for the amateur game writer.
Actually, I see Photopia as a step backwards. I agree it's a fantastic story, but there is no interactivity at all. The command prompt in Photopia could be substituted by a "press any key to continue" message and the overall experience could be about the same. Perhaps better, because the "puzzles" in Photopia serve no purpose at all and can distract you. Photopia triumphs with the fiction part while dismishing the interactive one.
I have to concede at least that the IF designer does not have nonsense marketing constraints such as the need to do big, flashy 3D graphics. Actually, the command prompt would be the best interface there is IF (and it is a big if) it understands everything. Then it is the equivalent of a Star Trek computer hearing your voice and doing just what you said. The problem with current command prompts, and the cause they are substituted by GUIs, is they don't. They only understand a tiny subset of verbs you're supposed to memorize. Interactive fiction "pretends" it understands a lot. You're supposed to try anything you want. The reality is, however, very different. There is a tiny subset of commands accepted, and you know them either because you're familiar with the genre or because guessing them is part of the puzzle. This is horrendous interface design at best. There should be another way, maybe inverse parsers, maybe some new interface abstraction not seen yet.
Finally, I'm not interested in historical retrogaming. There are other good points to bring interactive fiction to the table. Anybody could write it, for example, transforming the genre to a medium and not only a bunch of "games" (it's not true today simply because the current tools are simply not designed this way).
Re:Voice Interactive Fiction (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:But ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Interactive Books (Score:2, Interesting)
*SPOILER*
You were abducted by aliens, and part of their mythos included a paradise planet that you could not get to by following directions or making a choice. I discovered by accident that you made it to the paradise planet on page 100. Curious, I read through every story fork looking to see how I would get there - guess what? No fork lead you to that page. Get it?Re:Interactive Books (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:AI and adventure games (Score:3, Interesting)
Deep knowledge representation is well and good in research projects and perhaps single player games. Once you try to scale it up to a MUD, for even simple things like "known names" (of people and objects), you find yourself wishing for many more gigs of RAM and a few more CPU's to handle it. M objects of N knowable states by P players
Ultimately, the winning strategy is just to have a good setting, story, gm's, and roleplaying in a MUD. Knowledge representation, no matter how good the attempts have been, always ends up feeling like artificial game mechanics.