Interactive fiction , often abbreviated IF , is a software simulation environment in which players use text commands to control characters and affect the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, whether in the form of Interactive narratives or Interactive narratives. These works can also be understood as a form of video games, whether in the form of adventure games or role playing. In common usage, the term refers to a text adventure , a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text only," however, a Graphic text adventure game, where text is accompanied by graphics (still images, animations or video) is still included in the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some term users distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", narrative-focused, and puzzle-focused "adventure" text.
Due to its text-only nature, they put aside writing problems for very different graphic architectures. This feature means that interactive fiction games are easily ported on all popular platforms at the time, including CP/M (not known for gaming or powerful graphics capabilities). The number of interactive fiction works continues to increase as newly produced by online communities, using freely available development systems.
The term can also be used to refer to digital versions of literary works that are not linearly read, known as gamebook, where the reader is instead given a choice at different points in the text; this decision determines the flow and results of the story. The most famous example of this form of print fiction is the book series Choose Your Own Adventures , and the collaborative "collaborative" format has also been described as an interactive fictional form. The term Interactive fiction is sometimes used incorrectly as a synonym for an interactive movie or visual novel (popular style of entertainment software in Japan) which is an alternative form of interactive narration.
Video Interactive fiction
Sedang
Text adventure is one of the oldest types of computer games and forms part of the adventure genre. Players use text input to control the game, and game status is transferred to players via text output.
Inputs are usually provided by players in the form of simple sentences like "get key" or "go east", which is interpreted by the text parser. Parsers can vary in sophistication; the first text adventure parser can only handle a two-word sentence in the form of a noun-noun pairs. Then the parser, as built in Infocom's ZIL (Zork Implementation Language), can understand the full sentence. Then the parser can handle a higher level of complexity in deciphering sentences like "open the red box with the green key, then north". This level of complexity is the standard for today's interactive fictional works.
Despite the lack of graphics, text adventure includes the physical dimensions in which players move between rooms. Many text adventure games boast of their number of rooms to show how many games they offer. This game is unique because they can create an illogical space , where going north from area A takes you to area B, but going south from area B does not take you back to area A. This can make a maze that does not behave as the players expect, and thus players have to maintain their own maps. These illogical spaces are much rarer in the current era of 3D games, and the Interactive Fiction community generally condemns the full use of the maze, claiming that the labyrinth has become a 'random puzzle for the sake of puzzles' and that they can, in the hands of designers who are inexperienced, become very frustrating for players to navigate.
Interactive fiction has similarities with Multi-User Dungeons ('MUDs'). MUD, which became popular in the mid-1980s, relied on textual exchanges and received similar commands from players as did IF works; However, since interactive fiction is a single player, and MUD, by definition, has many players, they are very different in the style of the game. MUDs often focus games on activities involving player communities, simulated political systems, in-game trading, and other game mechanisms that are impossible in a single-player environment.
Interactive fiction usually relies on readings from the screen and typing inputs, although the text-to-speech synthesizer enables blind and vision users to play an interactive fiction title as an audio game.
Writing style
Interactive fiction has two different modes of writing: player input and game output.
As explained above, player input is expected in the form of a simple command (imperative sentence). Typical commands may be:
& gt; PULL Lever
The response of the game is usually written from the second person's point of view, in the present form. This is because, unlike most works of fiction, the main character is closely related to the player, and the events are seen to occur when the player plays. While older text adventures often identify protagonists with players directly, newer games tend to have a clearly defined protagonist with a separate identity of 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 like this, a response to "look in the tea chest" at the beginning of Curse :
"That was the first place you tried, hours and hours ago now, and nothing there besides that dull old book. You took it too, bored as you are."
Many text adventures, especially those designed for humor (such as Zork , Hitchhiker Guide for Galaxy , and Skin Goddesses of Phobos ), address players with tones unofficial, sometimes including sarcastic remarks (see transcript of Curse , above, for example). The late Douglas Adams, in designing the IF version of 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', creates a unique solution to the final puzzle of the game: this game requires a single item that players do not I chose early in the game.
Some IFs work to throw out the second person's narrative completely, choose the first person perspective ('I') or even put the player in the observer's position, rather than the live participant. In some 'experimental' IFs, the concept of self-identification is eliminated entirely, and players instead take on the role of inanimate objects, natural forces, or abstract concepts; IF experimentalism usually pushes the boundaries of concepts and challenges many assumptions about the medium.
Maps Interactive fiction
History
1960s and 70s
Natural language processing
Although no program was developed as a work of narrative, the ELIZA software program (1964-1966) and SHRDLU (1968-1970) can be formally regarded as early examples of interactive fiction, since both programs use natural language processing to take input from their users and responding virtually and in conversation. ELIZA simulates a psychotherapist who seems to provide a human-like response to user input, while SHRDLU uses artificial intelligence that can move virtual objects around the environment and respond to questions raised about the shape of the environment. The development of effective natural language processing will be an important part of the development of interactive fiction.
Adventure
Around 1975, Will Crowther, an amateur programmer and caver, wrote the first text adventure game, Adventure (originally called ADVENT because the file name could only be six characters in the operating system that he use, and then called Colossal Cave Adventure ). After going through the divorce, she looks for ways to connect with her two young children. Over the course of several weekends, he wrote a text-based cave exploration game featuring a kind of guide/narrator who speaks in complete sentences and who understands simple two-word commands approaching natural English. The adventure is programmed at Fortran for the PDP-10. The original version of Crowther is an accurate simulation of the actual Colossal Cave section, but also includes fantasy elements (such as dwarves holding axes and magic bridges).
Stanford University graduate student Don Woods invented Adventure while working at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and in 1977 acquired and expanded Crowther's source code (with Crowther permission). Woods changes reminiscent of J.R.R. Tolkien, and including trolls, elves, and volcanoes, some claims are based on Mount Doom, but Woods says no.
In early 1977, the Adventure spread across ARPAnet, and survived on the Internet to this day. The game has been ported to many other operating systems, and is included with the disk-floppy distribution of Microsoft's MS-DOS 1.0 OS. Adventure is the cornerstone of the online IF community; there are currently dozens of independently programmed versions, with additional elements, such as new rooms or puzzles, and various assessment systems.
The popularity of Adventure led to widespread interactive fictional success during the late 1970s, when home computers had few, if any, graphics capabilities. Many elements of the original game that survive today, such as the 'xyzzy' command, are now included as Easter Eggs in modern games, such as Microsoft Minesweeper.
Adventure is also directly responsible for establishing Sierra Online (later Sierra Entertainment); Ken and Roberta Williams played the game and decided to design it themselves, 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 , whose motive was loose after (the original) Colossal Cave Adventure . He issued a small ad on computer magazine 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. In the same year, the Dog Star Adventure was published in source code at SoftSide, raising the legion of similar games in BASIC.
The largest company producing interactive fiction works is Infocom, which created the series
In June 1977, Marc Blank, Bruce K. Daniels, Tim Anderson, and Dave Lebling began writing mainframe versions of Zork (also known as Dungeon ), at the MIT Laboratory for Science Computer. The game is programmed in a computer language called MDL, a variant of LISP.
The Implementation Terms is a name given itself from the creator of the Zork text adventure series. It is for this reason that game designers and programmers can be called Executives (video games), often shortened to Imp, not authors.
In early 1979, the game was over. Ten members of the MIT Dynamics Modeling Group continued to join Infocom when it was established later that year.
To make the game as portable as possible, Infocom developed Z-machine, a special virtual machine that can be implemented on a large number of platforms, and retrieves standard "story files" as inputs.
In a non-technical sense, Infocom is responsible for developing an interactive style that will be followed by many later interpreters. Parser Infocom is widely regarded as the best of his era. It receives complex and complete sentence commands like "putting a blue book on the desk" when most of its competitors parser is limited by a simple two-word verb combination like "put book". The parser is actively upgraded with new features like undo and error correction, and then the game will 'understand' some sentence input: 'grab the gems and put them in my bag. took a newspaper clipping from my bag and then burned it with a matchbook '.
Some companies offer an optional commercial flavor (physical props related to the game). The 'feelies' tradition (and the term itself) is believed to originate from Deadline (1982), the third Infocom title after Zork I and II . While writing this game, it is not possible to include all information in unlimited disk space (80KB), so Infocom creates the first feelies for this game; additional items that provide more information than can be included in the digital game itself. These include police interviews, coroner findings, letters, proof of crime scene and photographs of murders.
These materials are very difficult for others to copy or reproduce, and many include information that is essential to complete the game. Seeing the potential benefits of both helping immersive games and providing creative copy protection measures, in addition to acting as a deterrent to software piracy, Infocom and then other companies began creating feelies for many titles. In 1987, Infocom released a special version of the first three titles Zork along with plot-specific coins and other knick-knacks. This concept will be expanded over time, so game play will contain passwords, coded instructions, page numbers, or other information necessary to complete the game successfully.
1980s
AS
Interactive fiction is becoming a standard product for many software companies. In 1982 Softline wrote that "market demand weighed heavily on hi-res graphics" in games such as Sierra's Outside the US
Perhaps the first commercial work of interactive fiction produced outside the US is a dungeon crawl game from Acheton , produced in Cambridge, England, and was first commercially released by Acornsoft (later expanded and reissued by Topologica). Other leading companies in the United States are Magnetic Rolls and Computation Level 9. Also worth mentioning are Delta 4, Melbourne House, and homebrew Zenobi companies.
In the early 1980s Edu-Ware also produced interactive fiction for Apple II as determined by the "if" chart that was displayed at startup. Their titles include the series Prisoner and Empire (Empire i: World Builders ), Empire II: Interstellar Sharks < > Empire III: Armageddon ).
In 1981, CE Software published SwordThrust as the commercial successor to Eamon's game system for the Apple II. SwordThrust and Eamon are simple two-word parser games with many role playing elements that are not available in other interactive fiction. While SwordThrust publishes seven different titles, it is heavily overshadowed by the non-commercial Eamon system that allows private authors to publish their own titles in the series. In March 1984, there were 48 titles published for the Eamon system [and more than 270 titles in total as of March 2013].
In Italy, interactive fiction games are mainly published and distributed through various magazines in the included cassette. The largest number of games are published in two Viking and Explorer magazines, with versions for the main 8-bit home computer (Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and MSX). The software house that produces those games is Brainstorm Enterprise, and the most prolific IF writer is Bonaventura Di Bello, which produces 70 games in Italian. The interactive fictional waves in Italy lasted for several years thanks to various magazines promoting the genre, then faded and to this day is still a topic of interest to a small group of lesser known fans and developers, celebrated on websites and associated newsgroups.
In Spain, interactive fiction is considered a minority genre, and not very successful. The first Spanish commercial fiction released commercially was Yenght in 1983, by Dinamic Software, for the ZX Spectrum. Then, in 1987, the same company generated interactive fiction about Don Quijote . After several other attempts, a company emerged from Dinamic, called Aventuras AD which is the main interactive fiction publisher in Spain, including titles such as the Spanish adaptation of the Colossal Cave Adventure, an adaptation of the Spanish comic El Jabato , and especially the Ci-U-Than trilogy, composed by La diosa de Cozumel (1990), Los templos sagrados (1991) and > Chichen ItzÃÆ'¡ (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, CAAD went on its own, first with their own magazine, and then with the advent of the Internet, with the launch of an active internet community that still produces non-commercial interactive fiction today.
During the 1990s
Legend Entertainment was founded by Bob Bates and Mike Verdu in 1989. It started from the ashes of Infocom. Legendary adventures produced by Legend Entertainment use (high resolution) graphics and sound. Some of their titles include Eric the Unready , the Spellcasting and the Gateway (based on the Frederik Pohl novel).
The latest text adventure created by Legend Entertainment is Gateway II (1992) , while the last game ever made by Legend is Unreal II: The Awakening (2003) - known action game first person shooter using Unreal Engine for both impressive graphics and realistic physics. In 2004, Legend Entertainment was acquired by Atari, which publishes Unreal II and was released for Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Xbox.
Many other companies such as Level 9 Computing, Magnetic Scrolls, Delta 4 and Zenobi also closed in 1992.
In 1991 and 1992, Activision released The Lost Treasures of Infocom in two volumes, a collection containing most Infocom games, followed in 1996 by Classic Text Adventure Masterpiece of Infocom .
Modern era
After the decline of the commercial interactive fiction market in the 1990s, the online community finally formed around the medium. In 1987, Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction was created, and soon followed by rec.games.int-fiction . According to the custom, the topic rec.arts.int-fiction is interactive fiction writing and programming, while rec.games.int-fiction covers topics related to playing interactive fiction games, such as game prompts and reviews. At the end of 2011, discussions between authors largely moved from rec.arts.int-fiction to the Interactive Fiction Community Forum.
One of the most important initial developments was the reverse-engineering Z-Code Infocom format and the Z-Machine virtual machine in 1987 by a group of fans called InfoTaskForce and subsequent development of an interpreter for Z-Code story files. As a result, it becomes possible to play Infocom's work on modern computers.
Over the years, amateurs with the IF community have produced interactive fiction with a relatively limited scope using Adventure Game Toolkit and similar tools.
However, the breakthrough that enabled the interactive fiction community to truly succeed was the creation and distribution of two sophisticated development systems. In 1987, Michael J. Roberts released TADS, a programming language designed to produce interactive fiction works. In 1993, Graham Nelson released Inform, a programming language and collection of libraries that were compiled into Z-Code story files. Each of these systems allows anyone with enough time and dedication to create games, and cause an explosive growth in the online interactive fiction community.
Despite the lack of commercial support, the availability of high quality tools allows fans 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 XYZZY Awards, are increasingly helping to improve the quality and complexity of the game. The modern game is more advanced than the original "Adventure" style, improving the Infocom game, which relies heavily on puzzle solving, and to a lesser degree on communication with non-player characters, including experiments with writing and storytelling techniques.
While most of the modern developed interactive fiction is distributed for free, there are several commercial endeavors. In 1998, Michael Berlyn, a former executive at Infocom, started a new gaming company, Cascade Mountain Publishing, whose goal was to publish interactive fiction. Although the Interactive Fiction community provided social and financial support, Cascade Mountain Publishing came out of business in 2000.
Other commercial endeavors include Peter Nepstad's 1893: A World's Fair Mystery , some games by Howard Sherman published as Malinche Entertainment, The General Coffee Company Future Boy !,
Original Interactive Fiction The Colossal Cave Adventure is programmed at Fortran, originally developed by IBM. The parser plot can handle only two words in the form of a noun-noun pairs.
The game Infocom 1979-1988, like Zork, is written using the LISP programming language-as ZIL (Zork Language Implementation or Zork Interactive Language, it's called as both) is compiled into byte code can run on a standard virtual machine called a Z-machine. Since this game is text-based and uses variants of the same Z-machine translator, the translator should only be ported to the computer once, rather than once per game. Each game file includes an advanced parser that allows users to type complex instructions into the game. Unlike previous interactive fiction works that only understand the commands of the 'noun verb' form, Infocom parsers can understand more sentence variations. For example someone might type "open the big door, then go west," or "go to the hall". With the Z-machine Infocom was able to release most of their games to the most popular home computers of the time simultaneously, including the Apple II family, Atari 800, IBM PC compatibles, Amstrad CPC/PCW (one disk working on both machines), Commodore 64, Commodore Plus/4, Commodore 128, Kaypro CP/M, Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, Mac, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, and Radio Shack TRS-80. Infocom is also known for the delivery of creative props, or "feelies" (and even "smellies"), with the game.
During the 1990s, Interactive fiction was mainly written in C-like languages, such as TADS 2 and Inform. 6. A number of systems for writing interactive fiction exist. The most popular remain Inform, TADS, or ADRIFT, but they differed in their approach to IF-writing during the 2000s, giving the IF author today an objective choice. In 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 programming languages ​​leads many new authors to try to produce their own complete IF applications, most of the existing IF writers recommend the use of specific IF languages, arguing that the system allows authors to avoid technically producing full-featured parsers while allowing community support large. The choice of an authoring system usually depends on the balance desired by the author on ease of use versus power, and the portability of the final product.
Other development systems include:
- David Malmberg's Adventure Game Toolkit (AGT)
- Incentive Adventure Creator (GAC) Software Incentives
- Hugo
- Professional Adventure Writer
- Gilsoft's The Quill
- Twine
Translators and virtual machines
Interpreter is software used to play interactive fiction works created with the development system. Because they need to interact with players, the "story files" created by the development system are the correct programs. Instead of running directly on one computer, they are programs run by Interpreters, or virtual machines, designed specifically for IF. They may be part of the development system, or can be compiled together with fictional works as self-executable files.
The Z-machine was designed by the founders of Infocom, in 1979. They were influenced by the new idea of ​​a virtual Pascal computer, but replaced P with Z for Zork, the famous adventure game 1977-79. The Z-machine evolved during the 1980s but more than 30 years later, it still used essentially unchanged. Glulx was designed by Andrew Plotkin in the late 1990s as a new generation IF virtual machine. This overcomes the technical constraints on a Z-machine by being a 32-bit processor rather than a 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 ported to other platforms, such as Unix, RISC OS, Mac OS and the latest iOS. The modern Glulx interpreter is based on "Glulxe", by Andrew Plotkin, and "Git", by Iain Merrick. Other interpreters include Zoom for Mac OS X, or for Unix or Linux, managed by Andrew Hunter, and Spatterlight for Mac OS X, managed by Tor Andersson.
Distribution
In addition to the commercial distribution places and individual websites, many free interactive fiction works are distributed through community websites. These include Interactive Fiction Database (IFDb), Interactive Fiction Review Organization (IFRO), game catalog and recommendation engine, and Interactive Fiction Archive.
Jobs can be distributed to play along with separate translators. In this case they are often available in the Blorb package format supported by many interpreters. The.zblorb filename suffix is ​​a story file intended for the Z-machine in the Blorb wrapper, while the.gblorb file name suffix is ​​a story file intended for Glulx in Blorb wrapping. This is not common but IF files are sometimes also seen without Blorb wrappers, although this usually means missing cover art, help files, and so on, like a book with a torn cover. Z-machine story files usually have names ending in.z5 or.z8, numbers that are version numbers, and Glulx story files usually end in.ulx.
Alternatively, the work can be distributed to play in a web browser. For example, the Parchment project for Interpreter IF is web browser based, for Z-machine and Glulx files.
Some software like Twine publishes directly to HTML, the default language used to create web pages, reducing the requirements for Interpreter or virtual machine.
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See also
- Hypertext Fiction
- Visual novels, interactive fiction with graphs.
- Addventure
- Gamebook
- Graphical adventure, adventure game with roots in interactive fiction.
- Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), which can be considered a kind of multiplayer or collaborative interactive fiction.
- Role-playing games, sometimes portrayed as another form of interactive fiction.
- Interactive storytelling
- Get a Lamp, a documentary about interactive fiction
Note
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Further reading
- Montfort, Nick (2005). Twisty Little Passages: Approach to Interactive Fiction . The MIT Press. ISBNÃ, 978-0-262-63318-5 Ã,
- Keller, Daniel. "Reading and playing: what makes interactive fiction unique" p.Ã, 276-298. in Williams, J. P., & amp; Smith, J. H. (2007). The realm of players: the study of the culture of video games and games. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & amp; Co ISBN: 978-0-7864-2832-8
- Reed, Aaron (2010). Making Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 . Delmar Cengage Learning. ISBNÃ, 978-1435455061
- Seegert, Alf. (2009), "'Doing there vs' being there': performing presence in interactive fiction", Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds 1: 1, pp.Ã, 23-37, doi: 10 , 1386/jgvw.1.1.23/1
- Robinson Wheeler, J & amp; Kevin, Jackson-Mead (2014), "IF Theory Reader", JRW Digital Media.
External links
- The Baf Guide for Interactive Fiction Archives, an easier interface for IF archives.
- A Brief History of Interactive Fiction, a schedule of events in the history of interactive fiction on the Brass Lantern website.
- The Interactive Fiction Review Organization (IFRO), a large warehouse for text adventure game reviews written and rated by players and members of the Interactive Fiction community since 2004.
- Interactive Fiction Archive, big free download archive and interactive fiction play (random mirror).
- Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB), a community site where one can find personalized recommendations for IF games to play.
- Interactive Fiction: Over Retro Fun, introductory guide and novice preparation for Interactive Fiction games and translators
- Interactive Fiction Wiki, a special MediaWiki wiki for Interactive Fiction.
- Parchment, z-machine translator written in javascript and can be played in any browser. Links to many games that can be played.
- Something about Interactive Fiction - MobyGames checks the history (and future) of this game genre.
- SPAG, a quarterly e-zine discussing all the IF stuff
- Text Adventure in Curlie (based on DMOZ)
- Web-adventure, online z-machine translator
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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