Interactive Fiction Then and Now

Flipkin writes "Interactive Fiction was immensely popular in the 80s and believe it or not has a strong, albeit small, following today. MobyGames takes a look at the origins and history of Interactive Fiction and where it is heading." These games really were some of the best I've ever played.

Choose Your Own Adventure Books!

[RockModeNick]

Were my first interractive fiction, I used to love those. Especially the ones where you could die really easily.

No mention of MUDS?!?

[elrous0]

How can you write an article about IF and not mention MUD's, which continue to be popular even today? These games not only continue the text-based adventure tradition, but they also allow for interaction with other players within the text "world."

-Eric (former alum of the Kobra MUD)

Re:Choose Your Own Adventure Books!

[voice_of_all_reason]

The best ones had the endings derived totally on luck, where even choosing the most logical and safe path would lead to your untimely demise. I liked that Packard guy who wrote the later ones (shiny covers). The earlier editions had stuff like "To run from the bear, turn to page 37. To fight him off with your fists, turn to page 129". And you always knew the endings were in the back :)

Re:"Read Game" in The Escapist

[Allen Varney]

Dang, why didn't the link go through? The URL for "Read Game": http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/7/12 [escapistmagazine.com]

Good games

[Rekolitus]

Myself, I reccomend Return to Ditch Day [wurb.com] and The Plant [wurb.com] (as well as Adam Cadre's works [adamcadre.ac].)

Anyone else played these?

Recommended book and game

[MythMoth]

I recently read "Twisty Little Passages" ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262134365/ [amazon.com] ) by Nick Montfort which despite its horribly self-consciously academic approach (it's all about developing a "theory" of IF for lit. crit. purposes) still has some interesting sections about the history of IF and comparing the various approaches to the field against each other.

It also introduced me to my favourite work of IF, "For a change" by Dan Schmidt, which is really proof that the genre has more to offer than you might have expected. He's a genius, and it's beautiful.

Give it a go online here: http://paperstack.com/for_a_change/ [paperstack.com] (requires Java) or download the ZCode files from Dan's site: http://www.dfan.org/IF/ [dfan.org]

Re:Choose Your Own Adventure Books!

[ronfar]

I have one, Knight of the Living Dead [gamebooks.org]. It's pretty well written, by some guy named Allen Varney [slashdot.org]. I loved some of the dialogue in that game.. oh, and the neat picture of the one vampire lady taking a bath...

Now, Tunnels and Trolls [flyingbuffalo.com] made this their focus for a while. I have a ton of Solitare dungeons for T&T.

Chaosium had their Alone Against series, though I think there were only two, Alone Against the Wendigo and Alone Against the Dark, I have both. Pagan Publishing published a similar solitare scenarion Alone on Halloween [trollandtoad.com] which I do not have, and looking at the current price probably never will.

Oh, and there is something called Fighting Fantasy [fightingfa...ebooks.com] which is apparently British, so I missed out on that.

Still, being an angry loner as a teenager really paid off for me, as you can see....

No mention of online IF?

[aussie_a]

Wow, I'm really surprised that this article could completely miss online IF (otherwise known as MUDs). Not only are there commercial entities successfully running online IF (such as Iron Realms [ironrealms.com] it allows for a much larger story to be told.

The big problem with IF is that you can't do whatever you want. You're limited to what the creator was able to forsee and program. Not so with MUDs, which are able to have long and rich stories. The reason MUDs are able to overcome this limitation is that they have staff running it all the time, who are constantly adding new code updates and story updates.

An example of a player run storyline is in ArmageddonMUD [armageddon.org], which is based on Dark Sun. In it a player playing a dwarf decided to free his fellow dwarves who were slaves in the obsidian mines, and lay seige to the city-state that had kept them enslaved. This was entirely thought up by players, and with the staff's help, done by the players.

MMOs sometimes attempt to be roleplaying games, to enable an interactive story to be told. But they're even further limited by the fact that, you can't do what you want. You can only do what animations have been coded. Again, MUDs don't have this limitation, with any action being able to be provided by emoting. [armageddon.org] MUDs have the advantage over IFs in that they are multiuser. Whereas in an IF there's no-one but yourself.

So I'm very surprised that something discussing interactive fiction, including it's future (which IMO are MUDs, with more and more being created every day while others continue to be run for over 10 years), didn't feel the need to mention MUDs.

Re:I grew up on this stuff

[drxenos]

Yes, but the confusion is that Interactive Fiction was called Adventure Games long before these graphical ones (which evolved from the textual ones) came about.

Play these games on PalmOS

[wrecked]

I play these games on my Palm with Frotz [csubak.edu], a Z-code interpreter. Frotz exists for a variety of platforms, including Unix, Windows CE, GameBoy Advanced, Windows, KDE etc. Many of the interactive fiction games are in Z-code format.

Re:Choose Your Own Adventure Books!

[_|()|\|]

I was a huge fan of the Lone Wolf series.

The author of the Lone Wolf series has generously allowed many of them to be published on line [projectaon.org], free of charge.

Re:Choose Your Own Adventure Books!

[Meagermanx]

I thought these [kirit.com] were interesting, but I've never gotten around to trying them out.
I have the T&T rulebook, too, and a solitaire adventure for that, but I never got around to trying to work through it.

Re:No mention of online IF?

[Wyndo]

Also, unless things have changed dramatically these past few years, the parsers in a MUD are nowhere near as what you get in most Interactive Fiction. Well a MUD understand what you mean if you try to PUT LARGE ROCK INTO THE SMALL BOX THEN PUT THE BOX ON THE TABLE AND OPEN IT. ? I mean -- unless that *exact* interaction is required, it's not going to do anything in a MUD. With IF languages, as long as your box is a container, has a capacity large enough to hold the rock, and there is a table set up as a platform, it'll work. It might not be *meaningful* to do it, but it should work. IF parsing beats any MUD parsing I've seen.

Re:Play these games on PalmOS

[Xamien]

The Inform compiler is available from inform-fiction.org [inform-fiction.org] for those who want to try their hand at actually creating old-school IF. It produces story files for the Z-machine that will run under Frotz. There is also an online copy of the Inform designer's manual [inform-fiction.org] available.

Inform isn't the only system available for creating IF -- see the rec.arts.int-fiction Authorship FAQ [plover.net].

On a related note, the Interactive Fiction Competition [ifcomp.org] is apparently still going strong after over a decade, with entries sorted by authoring system.

Re:Good games

[kavau]

My personal favorite: Anchorhead [wurb.com] (go here [ministryofpeace.com] for a review). It's very well written, has a delightfully creepy atmosphere, and is almost free of glitches.

Try Hunter, In Darkness [wurb.com] for something slightly different (but at the same time strangely familiar).