Interactive Fiction

[Namekuseijin]

Here I recommend works of interactive fiction.

By interactive fiction, I don't mean books with multimedia content, CYOA, RPG gamebooks or multibranching hypertext. I mean what used to called text-adventures back in the 70's/80's.

Neither literature nor game proper but something in between: a story in which the reader actively participates by typing commands the protagonist (you) shall carry out, like "look", "examine painting", "go north", "take inventory", "get lamp", "put it on the table" etc. You may type "about" in a work to learn more about it.


I open up with a pretty good 2006's interactive short story by renowned author Emily Short:

Damnatio Memoriae

14 AD. Agrippa Postumus, grandson of the recently-deceased Augustus, tries to avoid death at the hands of the next emperor, Tiberius. At his disposal: a couple of old manuscripts, a lamp, and a recalcitrant slave. And a powerful knowledge of the Art of Venus Genetrix, of course -- the magic eventually known as the Lavori d'Aracne.

Try it. It's formidable and quite short. Many actions are possible and most lead to an outcome which is not the ideal, but still pretty satisfying. The piece is not straight history and fantasy elements come into play. Possible courses of action are hinted from the descriptions...


and no, I don't care for nostalgia or old silly Scott Adams text-adventures, thanks.

[crich70]

Thanks for the link. IF doesn't get quite the respect that it really does deserve I don't think. Prior to the faster CPU's that led to our modern PC's they were quite the thing. Then faster computers and graphics came along and the IF game went into decline, though not quite forgotten of course.

[Namekuseijin]

Indeed. It's usually only remembered by people fond of their childhood or hipster gamers making parodies of current 3D games as lame ADVENTURELAND spoofs to congratulate themselves like "look how far we got from our humble beginnings: back then all you'd do is type stupid commands, now I can press a button and shoot everything. har har".

Well, I didn't play text-adventures back in the 80's so have no fondness for the terrible Scott Adams-level crude games and only discovered the genre in the late 90's as part of web community efforts. Since then, I've got to know and play Infocom IF and they are indeed something quite apart from the rest of the era -- they had the right to coin the "interactive fiction" moniker.

However, I mostly only play the large body of work that has been produced over the last 20 years for IFcomp by amateur authors. There's some incredible stuff in there, notable either for the prose, story, role-playing experience or indeed for a bit of puzzle-solving, and I fear gamers are not the ideal audience for it.

Thus, I resort to this forum, where people who enjoy reading on electronic screens is to be found.


Damnatio Memoriae is from 2006 and only yesterday I managed to play it. Prose is excellent as is the setting and range of possible actions and outcomes. Given it's quite short I found it an excellent way to tease people here.

I'll advise more such gems here... as you say, they really need more respect.

BTW, it's possible to play them on smartphones or indeed even the Kindle. But the parser really asks for a keyboard -- though I myself have been playing them on my smartphone a lot.

[bobstro]

I had the same impatience with the old Zork-type games back in the day. Harking back even further are good ol' pen & paper RPGs. I only played D&D once in my life (for about half and hour), but some 35+ years later, I decided to give the Mythic Game Master Emulator a try. It's essentially a free-form adventure prompter. Your story can be whatever you want it to be, but it provides mechanisms to add surprises. Sitting in a coach seat on a 5 hour flight, I found myself chuckling as I went on a little time travel romp. I inadvertently triggered the Battle for the Little Big Horn before landing.

I'm also intrigued by some of the new indie "interactive storytelling" games such as Fiasco. These are more story focused than adventure. Unfortunately, there's nobody nearby that I'm likely to play with.

[Namekuseijin]

an RPG gamebook! Though interactive fiction certainly shares a lot with RPG's, the Role Playing part mostly, they're not really the same thing.

and I feel your pain for old Zorkiness: luckily, there's no damned mazes in modern IF works.



and while we're at it, here's another fine piece of short interactive fiction fully playable online, no fees included:

As the sun sets on the plains, Sheriff Cheney angrily snaps on the cuffs. You are shoved into the coach and land on top of Muddy Charlie and a pile of silver dollars, which until recently had been the property of the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Line.

Muddy whispers, "Don't fret none, Rick! You done good blowing up that tunnel -- I just didn't plan on the sheriff getting word ahead of time, is all. That were powerful bad luck."

The sheriff climbs onto his horse, spits, and you begin to rumble forward. "You boys really got it coming this time," he yells back cheerfully.

Muddy shakes his head. "No offense, Sheriff, but I reckon you got the wrong men. We was just on our way to the theater."

The sheriff disagrees. "The only place you boys are heading is straight to the...

Hoosegow - A Wild West Wreck by Ben Collins-Sussman and Jack Welch

like Damnation Memorie, it's basically a escape-the-room game. Prose is excellently witty and although you're in jail, there's plenty to do, examine, search and characters to interact with by asking them about things. Can you escape facing the scaffold in the morning?

shouldn't take much more than 2 hours... BTW, typing about is priceless

[Namekuseijin]

Odd, how the light just makes your apartment gloomier. Pre-dawn darkness pools in the corners and around the tops of walls. Your desk lamp glares yellow, but the shadows only draw your eyes and deepen.

Not much of an apartment, no. One desk, paper-piled, with a dusty computer shoved to the side. Your futon. Second-hand stereo sitting on a cardboard crate. A kitchen nook one way and a bathroom nook the other, with a closet to the side. A broad mirror tries to make the place seem twice its size; it halfway works. One window, whose shade is down, and the front door firmly shut.

Your luggage is piled untidily by the door. A potted hyacinth sits beneath the window.

You are sprawled on the futon, staring up into that gloom. Your eyes feel gritty. But it's too late -- early -- no time left for sleep, anyway. In a few hours your ride will arrive.

On the desk are your to-do list and a travel book.

so begins Shade a deceitfully simple and evocative work of IF by Andrew Plotkin. Prepare for voyage while waiting for your ride.

Plotkin is a renowned master in puzzlecrafting but this IF seems to feature no puzzles. Or does it? either way, the mind truly boggles

it's not long and you can't quite get stuck. Examine everything.

[Namekuseijin]

I've been pleasantly reading (and playing) Jigsaw, by Graham Nelson, a classic 1995 work of interactive fiction lingering in poetic prose and fair and logic, but still demanding, well-crafted puzzles.

Waiting for new years eve in 1999, you find yourself attracted to a tantalizing stranger in black. Soon enough you realize Black is a time traveller supposedly trying to get key events in the XX century right. While Black seems to see you as an ally, it's up to you to get sure history as you know it - right or wrong - gets through unchanged, unless you want to live in an alternate history world.


A favorite, short vignette-like passage to give an idea:

> search dishes
Glancing through the piles of dishes, you come across one with a (rather revolting) circular pattern of mould.

> examine mould
It seems to have been contaminated by a spore of mould, because a circular colony of mould has grown across the surface of the agar. Interestingly, near the edge of the mould, the bacteria seem to have gone, leaving only a faint ghost image.

Alexander Fleming, a tall Scotsman in his late forties, strides confidently in and puts down a suitcase. As you hastily hide behind a cupboard, he looks around for something, fails to find it and leaves again.

> examine case
A solid slab of a trunk, it bears chalk-marks suggesting that its owner has just returned from the Continent.

> get it
It's far too heavy to actually pick up, except for athletic Scotsmen.

> wait
Time passes.

Fleming comes in again, and you hide once more. Something catches his eye on the pile of Petri dishes, and he begins looking through them, in the process burying the only interesting one again. Disheartened, he wanders out.

it's a good thing that while Black seems honestly bent on changing history, most efforts backfire without you even doing much: in the example above, Black "contaminates" Fleming's samples with mould taken from a jar of penicillium. Your only trouble is to get Fleming to look at it.


It is long and hard, you've been warned. It's also delightful and extremely rewarding once you get through the historical events. I'm about 40% through it. I started a week ago.

There's a fair ammount of trial-and-error: it's actually integral to the concept, otherwise you'd not know what happens in case you fail. Some scenes are rather large, some are small, vignette-like. The large ones usually require more trial-and-error as you need more than one run until you get used to your role in the sequence of events - including the timed Prologue in the Park! It's like it requires to approach the events from many angles rather than just be an inactive witness...

The puzzles are fair in that you never go great lengths to get a key item to unlock some puzzle nearby - they either are lying around close enough or you already have them. Some are even hinted at in the text. It certainly doesn't require Rube Goldberg-like machinations. (aside from the finale I'm told, from which a crucial item right from the beginning is needed. be sure not to miss it)

have fun

[BenG]

Several of the old "Choose Your Own Adventure" books are available on the Kindle.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=...rnid=618072011

[Namekuseijin]

most cyoa are truly lame puerile adventure romps not unlike old Zork and Scott Adams

not in the same league at all with the IF I review here