Interactive Fiction
This is meant as an overview talk. There'll be little snippets of a lot of
things. The point is to pique your interest. I'm in no way an expert,
I just like these games :) Feel free to ask questions, but don't be surprised
if I can't answer some (or all) of them.
What is IF?
In truth, the term is very broad. I'll be talking mostly about
games that use text as their primary medium, with little to no graphics.
This still leaves a lot on the floor, and we'll get to that
at the end of the talk.
A Brief History
Before the first person shooter there was the second person thinker
Very brief, we don't have time for everything.Somewhat biased towards the games I've personally played :)
Quote is from the documentary .
The Setting
The mid-70s
Computers are big
No graphics (mostly)
The history of text games, as demonstrated by Aaron A. Reed, stretches
even further back. But, we'll start here because it's a turning point.
Full name: Colossal Cave Adventure .
Technically , not the first parser adventure, but it's first enough.
AFAIK the first known one is this .
Well, we're exploring a cave system. Obviously.
The cave itself does not appear until somewhat later in the game...
This is a port to Inform 6, so some of the quirks of the original are lost.
The parser is more advanced, for instance.
This is also the expanded version, so there's a score.
Based on a real cave!
The Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky
Specifically, Colossal Cave
Magic, treasure, and whatnot...
Thus, Colossal Cave Adventure.
Will and his wife, both MIT undergraduates, were part of a team that mapped this system.
Developed by Will Crowther
Expanded by Don Woods
DEC PDP-10
Fortran
Rudimentary parser
Will wrote this game for his daughters to play.
Eventually, lost interest, posted the game to ARPANET, and forgot about it.
A year later, Don Woods (Stanford grad student) contacted him to get the source,
and proceeded to expand the game.
Added more content, a scoring system, an objective (returning the treasures aboveground).
It was a hit
People would spend hours mapping the game, solving the puzzles.
They were hooked.
Fun fact: there's now a VR version , by Ken and Roberta Williams (Sierra).
Then Adventure hit MIT and everything changed
The Inform Designer's Manual, Graham Nelson
See here .
Basically, some MIT dudes decided that they can do Adventure better. And they did.
Their first game was Zork.
Originally for the PDP-10, like Adventure.
First released in 1977.
By 1979 is was huge , scratching the limits of the MDL language.
After founding the company, Zork was split into a trilogy to fit on floppies.
Shipped in 1980 .
Became a cultural phenomenon: "Playboy covered it; so did Time, and American astronaut Sally Ride was reportedly obsessed with it."
The largest and most widely-known company producing IF
Zork, A Mind Forever Voyaging, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
As in, several of their games would be in the top-10 charts.
Sophisticated parser
Cross-platform adventures
Feelies
For instance, parser now allows for chaining commands ("take lamp and drop keys", etc.)
The Z-Machine will also be mentioned a little later in the talk. It's still alive.
Deadline
A Mind Forever Voyaging
And another one from AMFV .
Bought by Activision in 1986
Shut down in 1989
Trademark abandoned in 2002
1989: Legend Entertainment
Gateway
Eric the Unready
Spellcasting
And others!
Company founded by Infocom veterans.
1986: Uncle Roger
It should be noted that parser games were not the only form of text games.
Author is Judy Malloy, an artist and an engineer.
A story about a woman in the early 80s Silicon Valley.
This is a database story, or "narrabase" (author's term).
Originally posted daily onto a BBS, then compiled into an interactive version.
The demo is a 2012 reconstruction.
Fire up the demo, ask the audience for a keyword.
Commercial IF slowly died
But the spirit lived on!
The companies died-off, but there were still people who wanted to play the games!
InfoTaskForce - a bunch of Australian guys that reverse-engineered the Z-Machine.
In 2020 there were 103 entries to IFComp!
Changing the rules of the genre.
There are other competitions:
Nominee, Best Game; Nominee, Best NPCs; Winner, Best Individual NPC - 2000 XYZZY Awards
Link .
Winner, Best Game; Nominee, Best Writing; Winner, Best Story; Winner, Best Setting; Nominee, Best NPCs; Winner, Best Individual NPC; Nominee, Best Individual PC; Nominee, Best Use of Medium - 2003 XYZZY Awards
Link .
Windows kernel
Z-Machine running in the Windows kernel, because why not.
Here's how this works.
And then... something magical happened
Authoring
There were, and still are, a lot of different authoring systems.
Legend had their own thing, Infocom. Adventure was custom-built...
I'll talk about some of the interesting ones.
Zork Implementation Language
A derivative of MDL
Which is a derivative of Lisp
Created by Infocom
Manual by Steve Meretzky! Of AMFV fame.
More info about ZIL here .
Created by Graham Nelson in 1993
Inform 6 released 1996
Object-oriented, procedural
Inform 7 released 2006
Natural language programming
Declarative, procedural
Compiles for Z-Machine and Glulx
We'll be talking about Inform 7, but there's a really interesting
story about the creation of the original Inform.
Here .
The first version was released on May 9, 1993.
I think it's very fitting that it happened on Victory Day.
In a sense, this was also a victory.
Glulx is a (relatively) new IF VM.
Open-sourced in April 2022. Last release was in August 2022.
Fun fact: currently Inform 7 compiles to Inform 6, which is compiled to Z-Code or Glulx.
A demo is a kind of thing
Commands to try:
i / inventoryexamine / x mejump
Show the full source, how short it is.
Show the table code.
Text Adventure Development System
Similar to C, C++ and the like
Last release was in 2013.
System for CYOA games
Created by Chris Klimas in 2009
Now maintained by the community
Author-friendly
(if:$examined != true)[Demo!]
Developed by inkle
A narrative scripting language for games Integration with Unity
The idea is that ink manages the narrative script,
but the game engine is responsible for driving it.
Welcome to the house of horrors!
-> intro
=== intro ===
In front of you, you can see a table.
+ {not table_first_time} [Examine the table] -> table_first_time
+ {table_first_time} [Examine the table] -> table_second_time
IFComp 2020
Z-Machine
Glulx
TADS
Twine
ink
Submissions
5
23
3
44
4
103
Corrected from the previous talk. Sorry for the confusion.
There were other parser games, from more esoteric platforms.
Stats gathered from here and here .
I counted by hand. You're welcome.
IFComp 2022
Z-Machine
Glulx
TADS
Parser-based
Submissions
4
10
2
21
70
Interestingly, parser games remain at ~30% of all submissions
Stats gathered from here and here .
What is IF?
The truth is fluid. The truth is subjective.
It's a parser game, but by default it behaves like Twine...
All images are from the game's website .
How like Uncle Roger :) Though I can't claim there is a direct link.
The format of "found footage" or "found media" is not very niche, too.
Gone Home
Tacoma
Her Story
Telling Lies
Immortality
Images are from the game's website .
Images are from the game's website .
Images are from the game's website .
Images are from the official website .
Commercial IF slowly died...
And was reborn!
The InfoTaskForce and Inform paved the way for modern IF.
People used these tools to explore what text games could be.
Some of them went to work on commercial projects.
For instance:
Emily Short
Creative director at Failbetter Games and lead writer for
Mask of the Rose .
Wrote a lot of IF .
Jon Ingold
Something Old
Everything Infocom
Legend Entertainment
A project that tells about one text game from every year between 1971 and 2020, per week.
By Aaron A. Reed. It's been an enormous source of help for this talk.
Please read Silverwolf. Please.And, now there's a book !
An excerpt from the Get Lamp documentary.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
