Interactive fiction
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."[7]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).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.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.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).Adventure is a cornerstone of the online IF community;[citation needed] there currently exist dozens of different independently programmed versions, with additional elements, such as new rooms or puzzles, and various scoring systems.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,[12] 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.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.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.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.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.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.[17] 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.The largest number of games were published in the two magazines Viking and Explorer,[19] with versions for the main 8-bit home computers (ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and MSX).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.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.For years, amateurs with the IF community produced interactive fiction works of relatively limited scope using the Adventure Game Toolkit and similar tools.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.[24] 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).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.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.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.
Interactive narrativeInteractive narrationText-based gamesoftwarecommandscharactersliterarynarrativesInteractive narrativesInteractive narrationsvideo gameadventure gamerole-playing gametext-onlypuzzlesgamebooksChoose Your Own Adventureaddventurevisual novelsZork Iinterpretercomputer gamesadventurereadingtypingaudio gamessentencestext parserZork Implementation LanguageMulti-User Dungeonssecond-personpoint of viewpresent tenseCursesThe Hitchhiker's Guide to the GalaxyLeather Goddesses of PhobosSHRDLUnatural language processingWill Crowtheroperating systemFortranPDP-10simulationMammoth CaveDon WoodsStanford Artificial Intelligence LaboratoryJ. R. R. TolkienMount DoomARPAnetInternetoperating systemsMS-DOSEaster EggMicrosoft MinesweeperSierra EntertainmentRoberta WilliamsAdventure InternationalScott AdamsDilbertAdventurelandDog Star Adventuresource codeSoftSideInfocomTrinityA Mind Forever VoyagingMarc BlankTim AndersonDave LeblingMIT Laboratory for Computer ScienceimplementerZ-machinevirtual machineparserfeeliesDeadlineSoftlineThe Wizard and the Princessgraphic adventuresSynapse SoftwareAcornsoftActivisionCornerstonedungeon crawlAchetonTopologikaMagnetic ScrollsLevel 9 ComputingDelta 4Melbourne HousehomebrewZenobiEdu-WareApple IIPrisonerCE SoftwareSwordThrustrole-playing270 titlesZX SpectrumCommodore 64Dinamic SoftwareAventuras ADLegend EntertainmentBob BatesMike VerduEric the UnreadySpellcastingGatewayFrederik PohlGateway IIfirst-person shooterUnreal EngineThe Lost Treasures of InfocomClassic Text Adventure Masterpieces of InfocomUsenetZ-CodeInfoTaskForceAdventure Game ToolkitGraham NelsonInformprogramming languagecompiledInteractive Fiction CompetitionSpring ThingXYZZY Awards