If: Interactive Fiction

“IF” or

A little something we call Interactive Fiction!

“Interactive Fiction (IF)” Computer-mediated narrative, resembling a very finely-grained "Choose Your Own Adventure" story in which the “interactor” reads a short textual description and types instructions to the computer. Also called: “Text Game” or “Text Adventure” Source: http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/#Playing

Interactor  

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player, adventurer, gamer, or user. In interactive fiction it’s the live human being (you), who advances the plot by issuing instructions (generally through typing into a keyboard), to the player-character.

“…a short textual description…” West of House You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

“…types instructions to the computer.”      

"enter building“ “open mailbox” “take all” “walk north” “knock on door” “help”

Playing an IF…   

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Read a few lines or paragraphs describing a simulated world. Type a command. The computer first tries to figure out what you want to do, and then checks to see whether you can do it. The computer prints out some more text, describing whether or to what extent your action has affected the simulated world.

Love & Hate “Interactive fiction requires the text-analysis skills of a literary scholar and the relentless puzzle-solving drive of a computer hacker. People tend to love it or hate it. Those who hate it sometimes say it makes them ‘think too much.’”

http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/#Playing

Why? What’s the point? The purpose of these games, is so that the plot can change based on what the interactor types. It has the potential to be more truly interactive than hypertext and more immersive than other forms.

(imagine you are a tree)

Imagine this… 

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Our Imagination will often be better than the image we see. The book is often “better” than the movie. The “interactive” is often more engaging than the passive… or even the merely “active!”

History of IF "In the mid 1970's Will Crowther, a programmer and an amateur caver, having just gone through a divorce, was looking for a way to connect with his two young children. Over the course of a few weekends he slapped together 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 really close to natural English.... Some time later Stanford graduate student Don Woods came along, and he came across an unfinished copy of this game on a mainframe computer. He expanded it and released it on the Internet." “Colossal Cave Adventure” was born.

Writing Interactive Fiction 

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Designing interactive fiction involves both computer programming and storytelling skill. Designers with any ambition must spend considerable time fiddling with the mundane technical details of coding objects and behaviors, …while also creating characters, dialogue, and narrative elements that can be pieced together in multiple different ways.

Tools 

“A particularly exciting development in interactive fiction is the release of Inform 7, a complete package for writing, debugging, mapping, and publishing interactive fiction games playable on a wide range of platforms, including PCs, Macs, and handhelds. Inform 7 code is designed to resemble ordinary English, and is thus an excellent choice for verbal thinkers who are not trained as programmers.”

http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/#Playing

Tools MAINSTREAM  Inform 7  ADRIFT  ALAN  Hugo  Inform  Quest  TADS

MINOR  A-code  AAS  AGT  Aiee!  IAGE  JACL  PAWS  SUDS

CURIOSITIES      

AGI AIFT AWK CAT LADS Scott Adams

Let’s Play…

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FINE TUNED

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ZORK