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= Interactive_fiction =
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Introduction
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Interactive fiction (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, 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", however,
graphical text adventure games, where the text is accompanied by
graphics (still images, animations or video) 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 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 "" format has also been described
as a form of interactive fiction. The term "interactive fiction" is
sometimes used also to refer to visual novels, a type of interactive
narrative software popular in Japan.
Medium
======================================================================
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.
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. 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. 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, 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). A
typical command may be:
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" 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':
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,
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.
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.
''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').
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 spoke 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 life Mammoth 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, which some
claim is based on Mount Doom, but Woods says was not.
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, 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, 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. 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'.
Several 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'. 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. 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.
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. By 1982 Adventure International began
releasing versions of its games with graphics. 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. 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. 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, 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, 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.
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) - the 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,
Delta 4 and Zenobi 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 was created, and was soon followed by . By
custom, the topic of is interactive fiction authorship and
programming, while 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 to the
Interactive Fiction Community Forum.
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. Buster Hudson, developer of 'The Wizard
Sniffer' (201'7),' emphasized that parser-based puzzle can be used to
control the pacing or develop a character.
Other commercial endeavors 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'.
Emily Short was commissioned to develop the game 'City of Secrets' but
the project fell through and she ended up releasing it herself.
Notable works
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* 'Colossal Cave Adventure', by Will Crowther and Don Woods.
* '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.
* '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.
* '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.
* 'Silicon Dreams', by Level 9 Computing (1986), a trilogy of
interactive science fiction games.
* 'Leather Goddesses of Phobos' by Steve Meretzky, a risqué 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.
*'Stellar Agent' (1991), a text-based spy adventure game.
* '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.
* '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.
* 'Photopia', by Adam Cadre (1998), one of the first almost entirely
puzzle-free games. It won the annual Interactive Fiction Competition
in 1998.
* 'Spider and Web', by Andrew Plotkin (1998), an award-winning
espionage story with many twists and turns.
* '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.
* '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".
* '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.
* 'The Dreamhold', by Andrew Plotkin (2004). Designed for those new to
IF, it provides an extensive help section and tutorials. Although the
puzzles are not too difficult, it can be a challenge for both novice
and experienced players.
* 'Façade' by Michael Mateas, Andrew Stern and John Grieve (2005). An
interactive drama using natural language processing.
* '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.
* '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.
* '9:05' by Adam Cadre. It is commonly seen as an easy gateway for
people to get involved with interactive fiction.
* 17776 by Jon Bois. It is a "serialized speculative fiction
multimedia narrative."
* 'Black Mirror: Bandersnatch', by Charlie Brooker (2018). An
interactive film in the science fiction anthology series 'Black
Mirror'.
The games that won both the Interactive Fiction Competition and the
XYZZY Awards are 'All Roads' (2001), 'Slouching Towards Bedlam'
(2003), 'Vespers' (2005), 'Lost Pig' (2007), 'Violet' (2008),
'Aotearoa' (2010), 'Coloratura' (2013), and ' The Wizard Sniffer'
(2017).
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 computers, 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, Amiga, and TRS-80.
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.
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.
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
* Twine
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
======================================================================
* Hypertext fiction
* Electronic literature
* Visual novel, interactive fiction with graphics.
*
* Gamebook
* Graphic adventures, adventure games with roots in interactive
fiction.
* Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), which may be considered as a kind of
multiplayer or collaborative interactive fiction.
* Role-playing games, which are occasionally described as another form
of interactive fiction.
* Interactive storytelling
* Get Lamp, a documentary about interactive fiction
Further reading
======================================================================
*
* 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.
*
* Seegert, Alf. (2009), "'Doing there' vs. 'being there': performing
presence in interactive fiction",
'[
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/intellect/jgvw/2009/00000001/00000001/art00002
Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds]' 1: 1, pp. 23-37,
* Robinson Wheeler, J, & Kevin, Jackson-Mead (2014), "IF Theory
Reader", JRW Digital Media.
External links
======================================================================
* [
http://brasslantern.org/community/history/timeline-c.html A Brief
History of Interactive Fiction], a timeline of events in interactive
fiction history at the Brass Lantern website.
* [
http://ifarchive.ifreviews.org/indexes/if-archive.html The
Interactive Fiction Archive], a large archive of free-to-download and
play interactive fiction (random mirror).
* [
http://ifdb.tads.org/ Interactive Fiction Database] (IFDB), a
community site where one can find personalized recommendations for IF
games to play.
* [
http://www.andybrain.com/archive/interactive_fiction.htm
Interactive Fiction: More Than Retro Fun], a beginner's introduction
and setup guide to Interactive Fiction games and interpreters
* [
http://www.ifwiki.org/ The Interactive Fiction Wiki], a MediaWiki
wiki specific to Interactive Fiction.
* [
http://www.spagmag.org/ SPAG], the quarterly e-zine of the Society
for the Promotion of Adventure Gaming
* [
https://iftechfoundation.org/ The Interactive Fiction Technology
Foundation], ensure the ongoing maintenance, improvement, and
preservation of the tools and services crucial to the creation and
distribution of interactive fiction
License
=========
All content on Gopherpedia comes from Wikipedia, and is licensed under CC-BY-SA
License URL:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction
