This April 1 two separate mainstream websites launched a prank that mapped adventure game-type controls to their website. This got me thinking, is it time to revisit how we build and play Interactive Fiction?

Both XKCD and Woot applied game elements to their website on Thursday. Woot’s appears to be  static HTML and more ‘choose your own adventure’ than IF. However XKCD’s interface (based off WordPress theme CLI), though limited, was clearly in the spirit of IF. It required text commands, had the standard navigation, included the use of an item, and (of course) involved a grue.

From what I can tell, XKCD’s interface is implemented mostly with jQuery and involves a lot of pre-programing using the standard type of code you’d find in Javascript.

A while ago, I made my own forey into the world of IF, studying a number of games for a class and going so far as to attempt to build my own. I taught myself TADS3 which is, from what I can tell, the easiest IF programming language out there. I used it to build part of a game. The entire time, I was trying to figure out why it was so difficult. It seemed to me that the amount of code that should be required for a working IF story should be minimal. XKCD’s little IF has made me think about it again. How difficult could it be to create IF using standard XML and Javascript, as opposed to some of the more obscure tools out there?

Now, I know that IF is a field that sort of relishes its obscurity, however, I think that a properly put together IF in an interface that didn’t require the installation of strange and unusual programs, might meet with more success and would certainly appeal to a wider audience.

I’m thinking that an entire IF could be laid out within an XML database and standardized Javascript could be used to transform it into a working game. I admit, I’m no expert in either language, but does this seem possible to you?

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1. ELC Interactive Fiction Reviews [Assignment]
2. Interactive Fiction
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So for my group project which was due this week, my group decided to put together an IF. I was assigned code duty, being the only one with programming experience.

After some exploration of the options, I finally settled down on TADS3 to be nicely similar to the programming languages I (sorta) knew and it looked to be good.

Well… it was a little bit harder then expected. I couldn’t figure out how to do interactive actors (NPCs) by the deadline, though I think if I play around with it a little bit more, I might have a chance to figure it out. I couldn’t set the “You are Dead” condition, and I couldn’t figure out how to set the “You Win” condition either.

However, it was a lot of fun. A very very rudimentary IF game, with scripting by myself and writing by myself and others in my group is up on my website. Despite being simple and incomplete, I have to say, I’m rather proud of it. Especially for two weeks of work.

You can find the collaboration blog, source code and a self-executable .exe version of the game on my website.

Check it out and tell me what you think.

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In line with my recent meanderings on interactivity and narration in video games, The Escapist ran a recent article titled “The Secret of Monkey Island” which comes to some of the same conclusions that I did about the interaction of imagination and games, but by a far different route. Instead, the author Rob Hearn pointed to an increase in audio, video, and the increasing quality of Next-Gen game elements as the reason behind imagination-loss for video game players. He compares it to the issue where CGI-driven movies are leaving story behind. He extends the comparison between movies and games by pointing at the success of older movies such as Citizan Kaine and still high quality elder games like the titular Monkey Island series.

Says Hearn:

However, the word “interaction” has another shade of meaning; you’d probably characterize it as an imaginary or constructive process. This is the kind of interaction that occurs between a reader and a book, or an impressionist painting and its audience. In the case of a book, the writer provides the reader with cues in the form of words. For example, take “the man walked into the green room.” Everybody who reads this sentence supplies his own man, his own room, his own shade of green. He constructs the scene largely from the store of his imagination, so that the resulting memory is a joint production. Similarly, while appreciating Monet’s “Impression Sunrise,” the viewer is really supplying much of the scene himself. Monet provides the colors and, to an extent, the form, but the precise appearance of the three daubed-boats retreating from the foreground, the adumbrated chimneystacks and amorphous structures in the distance, belongs to the viewer. The audience of a black-and-white silent film, meanwhile, provides its own sounds and colors, engaging in a kind of sensory interaction with the filmmakers, collaborating with the creator to construct the scene.

Sound familiar eh? Check out the entire article. It is quite good, even if I don’t agree with it.

My response (posted on the article’s comment thread) was:

An interesting idea. I recently was thinking about reader response criticism and how the ideas behind the theory show that even reading a book has a measure of interactivity.

However, I think that your nostalgia blinds you to a point, especially for IFs and old (or even some current) adventure games. The media in the game (audio, graphics, etc…) does not necessarily blind the imagination, it is the style of the gameplay. In IFs or some of the hard-core older adventure games (I’ve never played Monkey Island, so I can’t speak on that count) require a certain style of puzzle solving and path finding. The truth of the matter is, you are required to think in a certain way and look at the game in a certain way in order to solve these puzzles.

For instance, in an interactive fiction: you may be able to visualize the room described and paint it in all the mental colors of the rainbow, but if you fail to visualize the correct sized box, in the correct position, under the correct pipe, you fail to be able to solve the puzzle. The same in some classic adventure games. No matter how new or old the graphics are, if the gameplay is like Myst, you are required to think in a certain analytical way identical to everyone else who plays the game. This sort of game structure forces the player to suppress their imagination, far worse then simply not requiring it. It means that for some of these games, despite the physical interactivity, there is less mental activity then when you read a book.

On the other hand, more free-form games give the player much more room for imagination and interactivity with the game world. As a kid I’d let my own imagination run free when playing Asteroids. It’s the same reason why there’s plenty of WoW fan-fiction out there. The very openness of the environment invites the imagination to work. In this respect, it is a representation of the tendency of the human mind to pluck connections from chaos, even when they don’t exist. The same does not always follow for order.

To blame the lack of imagination prompts in games on graphics is to do them a vast disservice. It is function, not form, that leaves imagination behind.

To use his metaphor, the failure of CGI movies to capture the viewer’s imagination lies not with the CGI, but with the movie’s screenplay and its writers.

Related posts:

1. Reader Response
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Anne Toole of Writers Cabal left an interesting comment on Monday’s post talking about Reader Response criticism. She noted that “in other words, even linear narrative is inherently interactive.”

Anne is absolutely right (and brings up a point I hadn’t thought of); the way we read can greatly change how we understand or interpret a narrative. What we get from a book with, say, a close reading technique (as described in books like Reading Like a Writer, an excellent book which I have had for a while but only just had the opportunity to start) is far different from a casual reader might understand. The same applies to education levels. What you know changes what you read. In John Mullan’s How Novels Work he identifies components of modern novels and their origins in past classics. His interpretation of a particular novel is based in his comprehensive knowledge of older novels and is completely different from how I would see it. Of course, I know that I can point to a few of my own works that would be interpreted differently depending on the reader’s knowledge of other novels.

In a way, two people can see entirely different stories from a single work. If you need any empirical proof, all you have to do is take a look at the many interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays. Even when trying to stay as close to the bard’s original intentions as possible, groups can perform in radically different ways, based on how the director has interacted with the text, and in what way they have interpreted it.

This is absolutely true when it comes to “classic” written literature. But Anne’s comment got me thinking (enough to turn this into a post), how does this apply to game theory–particularly narrative game theory?

When it comes to game narrative, there are two extremes. On one side is the absolute linier narrative, as displayed in many (especially early) Interactive Fiction games. The other side is the free-form sandbox-type game, where narrative elements may come in different orders and may end or react in a number of different ways. (Of course, there are those games without narrative at all, say some arcade games.)

However, one could argue that in the most linier of IF games, of which many are, the ability for the reader (or player) to interact with the text through interpretation (as reader response criticism posits) is distinctly and purposefully limited. With little more then a few lines of text for each area and very specific commands, an incorrect interpretation will result in an incorrect response and an eventual (if not immediate) loss. The usual interactivity between the reader’s mind and the text is negated, because in order for the text to work, the reader has to think in a very precise and exact way.

In effect, this means that linier IF and adventure games, most of which work on similar principles, rely on a set group of players who think exactly the same way. In a sense, some of these games may be less interactive then sitting down and reading a book because the usual collaboration between mind and medium is curtailed. On the other hand, they do require an active imagination, otherwise you are just looking at text. Considering the spatial elements of many of the puzzles you need to be able to visualize a great deal from what is normally very little. Though anyone who enjoys reading does the same with a book.

On the other hand, the reader response is essential to driving a narrative forward in MMORP, sandbox-, or open-type games. This type of interaction with the player and world narrative is codified into some games, allowing players to work with groups who share their point of view and goals in the game world. The actual textual content in a game like World of Warcraft (quests and the like) is pretty bland, it is the interpretation of these quests and how you move to complete them that adds any spice to the gameplay. The grind is counterbalanced by the player creating their own narrative and content within a social (and in some cases economic) structure. Part of a game-creator’s responsibility is insuring that the back-story, content and mechanics are available to shore up and encourage these player-created narratives, much in the same way a good book can make you think.

Then, to bring The Human Brain Cloud back to the discussion, any ‘player’ entering words or clicking through the bubble chart is automatically creating their own narrative and participating in the type of interpretive feedback that is native to literature (if we accept reader response as a valid form of criticism, which I do). The human mind is, in this case, imposing a structure onto something that in many ways lacks such structure.

When it comes to the works in the Electronic Literature Collection, all of the ones I looked at pass the test. Of the three I reviewed: Martha absolutely passes, it creates its own narrative as well as an interpretive narrative (in that, the interpretation of the work is its own narrative: Martha is going crazy, attacked by angels, under attack by hackers, or her husband, or whatever). As does Alice, whose mystery leaves much in the mind of the participant; it even went so far as to make one of my classmates carsick. Even Deviant has that particular interactive quality of interpretation.

If interactivity is classified as “Communicating or collaborating: involving the communication or collaboration of people or things” [Encarta Dictionary] then even the strangest of narratives can’t really fail at creating it. The reader is always, in a way, collaborating with the author to create a consensual world (or, to call back the phrase, a fictional dream).

I suppose that the next question in this line of reasoning is: does interactivity then always bestow narrative?

Related posts:

1. Are Graphics and Other Next Gen Technologies at Fault for Imagination Loss?
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So, I went to the first class for English 344 today, Digital Writing in the Genres (you’ll see posts for the class on this blog as well), it looks like it is going to be a lot of fun. We were going over a number of the course requirements and I saw that among the possible projects was listed the option to create an interactive fiction.

Now, perhaps I am biting off a bit too much, but out of all the options that jumped out at me for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because I had, only a few weeks ago, read READ GAME at The Escapist (and subsequently downloaded the winners of the 2007 IF Contest). I decided I should figure out a little bit about the genre and perhaps play the games before I do anything else. So I’ve read up on IF from a quick search on The Escapist and actually installed all the games are the virtual (or Z-) machines.

I am afraid to admit it, but I have never actually played Zork. I guess I’m too young, when I started gaming (Duke Nukem the first anyone? By the way, in the beyond side scrollers category, 3D Realms released a teaser trailer for the long long anticipated Duke Nukem Forever) we were already playing with graphics. However, it seems from these articles that the community is still growing strong and producing free and fantastic games. After reading the experience of Lara Crigger, of The Escapist, I can’t help but be intrigued. It has been a long time since IF games could have been called mainstream, even in the gaming community, but it looks like the opportunity here for storytelling is remarkable.

I’m going to take on the 2007 IF winners and see what they are like, with a mind towards creating my own.

IF is especially interesting because of the mechanics inherent in the gameplay. One might ask, what sort of mechanics can a text-based game have? However, “Textual Pleasure” makes it clear, in the parable of Photopia, that even the limited functions of IF have to wrangle with how gameplay mechanics conflict or magnify stories. As Crigger makes clear,

Some experimentation with fancier prose and philosophical themes did occur, such as Lucian P. Smith’s 1997 winner, The Edifice, a monkey-makes-good tale about human evolution. But even Smith struggled with the idea that interactive fiction was a function of its puzzles, rather than the other way around.

It is no mistake that even in the simplest and most linier and technically limited of stories, gameplay is intrinsic to how the story is laid before the player. The best example in modern games (in my opinion) is the timed decision making mechanic built into Fahrenheit. Here we see a mechanic flowing naturally from the story. The rush of making decisions and mirroring real movements with mouse movements is essential to the game and also to the sense of building panic that is part of the game’s story.

It’ll be interesting to see what the latest batch of IF winners has to offer.

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