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Interactive fiction, often abbreviated '''IF''', describes Software simulating environments in which players use text Commands to control Characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary Narratives and as Computer Game s. In common usage, the word refers to '''text adventures''', a type of Adventure Game with text-based input and output. The term is sometimes used to encompass the entirety of the medium, but is also sometimes used to distinguish games produced by the interactive fiction community from those created by games companies. It can also be used to distinguish the more modern style of such works, focusing on narrative and not necessarily falling into the adventure game Genre at all, from the more traditional focus on Puzzle s. More expansive definitions of interactive fiction may refer to all adventure games, including wholly graphical adventures such as '' Myst ''. As a commercial product, interactive fiction reached its peak in popularity in the 1980s, as a dominant software product marketed for Home Computer s. Today, interactive fiction no longer appears to be commercially viable, but a constant stream of new works is produced by an online interactive fiction community, using freely available development systems. Most of these games can be downloaded for free from the Interactive Fiction Archive (see External Links ). The term "interactive fiction" is also occasionally used to refer to Hypertext Fiction , Collaborative Fiction , or even a participatory novel, according to the ''New York Times''. It is also used to refer to literary works that are not read in a linear fashion, but rather the reader is given choices at different points in the text; the reader's choice determines the flow and outcome of the story. The most famous example of this form of interactive fiction is the '' Choose Your Own Adventure '' book series. For others, see Gamebooks . THE MEDIUM OF INTERACTIVE FICTION Text adventures are one of the oldest types of Computer Game s and form a subset of the Adventure genre. The player uses text input to control the game, and the game state is relayed to the player via text output. Input is usually provided by the player in the form of simple Sentence s such as "get key" or "go east", which are interpreted by a Parser . Parsers may vary in sophistication; the first text adventure parsers could only handle two-word sentences in the form of verb-noun pairs. Later parsers could handle increasing levels of complexity from sentences such as "open the red box with the green key then go north". This level of complexity is the standard for works of interactive fiction today. Works of interactive fiction function like single-player Multi-User Dungeons or 'MUDs', and the original MUD was actually a multi-player generalization of '' Zork '' (one version of which was called ''Dungeon''). MUDs, which became popular in the mid-1980s, rely on a textual exchange and accept similar commands from players as do works of IF, but the social aspects and the communities of players who participate are often the most important features of MUDs. Interactive fiction usually relies on Reading from a screen and on Typing input, although speech synthesis allows blind and visually impaired users to play interactive fiction. Writing style Interactive fiction features two distinct modes of writing: the player input and the game output. As described above, player input is expected to be in simple command form ( Imperative Sentences ). A typical command may be: pull lever discusses, among other IF issues, the nature of "You" in interactive fiction. A typical response might look something like this, the response to "look in teachest" at the start of Curses : That was the first place you tried, hours and hours ago now, and there's nothing there but that boring old book. You pick it up anyway, bored as you are. Nelson, Graham Curses , 1993. 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 '', below, for an example). HISTORY ''Adventure''
The popularity of ''Adventure'' led to the wide success of interactive fiction during the late 1970s and the 1980s, when home computers had little, if any, graphics capability. The commercial era Adventure International Adventure International was founded by Scott Adams (not to be confused with the creator of Dilbert ). In 1978, Adams wrote '' Adventureland '', which was loosely patterned after the original Advent. He took out a small ad in a computer magazine in order 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. The company went bankrupt in 1985. Infocom The largest company producing works of interactive fiction was Infocom ,8 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 of 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 . The game was programmed in a computer language called MDL , a variant of LISP . In early 1979, the game was completed. Ten members of the MIT Dynamics Modelling Group went on to join Infocom when it was incorporated later that year. In order to make its games as portable as possible, Infocom developed the Z-machine , a custom Virtual Machine which could be implemented on a large number of platforms, and which took standardized "story files" as input. The company was bought by Activision in 1986 after the failure of '' Cornerstone '', its database software program, and stopped producing text adventures a few years later. In 1991 and 1992, Activision released volumes one and two of '' The Lost Treasures Of Infocom '', a collection containing most of Infocom's games, followed in 1996 by '' Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces Of Infocom ''. Legend Entertainment Legend Entertainment was founded by Bob Bates and Mike Verdu in 1989. It started out from the ashes of Infocom. The text adventures produced by Legend used (high-resolution) graphics as well as sound. Some of their titles include '' Eric The Unready '', the '' Spellcasting '' series and '' Gateway '' (based on Frederik Pohl 's novels). The last text adventure created by Legend was '' Gateway II '', while the last game ever was '' Unreal 2 '' (the well-known First Person Shooter action game). Legend was acquired in 2004 by Atari . Other companies Probably the first commercial work of interactive fiction produced outside the U.S. was the Dungeon Crawl game of '' Acheton '', produced in Cambridge, England, and first commercially released by Acornsoft (later expanded and reissued by Topologika ). Other leading companies in the U.K. were Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9 Computing . Also worthy of mention are Delta 4 , Melbourne House , and the homebrew company Zenobi . In Japan, companies such as Data West developed limited interactive fiction games, such as the seven-volume murder mystery series ''Misty''.9 Later, interactive fiction became more popular in Japan in the form of Visual Novel s. The modern era After the demise of the commercial interactive fiction market in the 1990s, an online community eventually formed around the medium. In 1987, the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction was created (focusing on ''creating'' interactive fiction), and was soon followed by rec.games.int-fiction (which focuses on ''playing'' interactive fiction games). One of the most important early developments was the reverse-engineering of Infocom's Z-Code format and Z-Machine Virtual Machine by the InfoTaskForce , a group of enthusiasts, in 1987, and the subsequent development of an Interpreter for Z-Code story files. As a result, it became possible to play Infocom's work on modern computers. For years amateurs formed a small community producing interactive fiction works of relatively limited scope using the Adventure Game Toolkit and similar tools. The breakthrough that allowed the interactive fiction community to truly prosper, however, was the creation and distribution of two sophisticated development systems. In 1987, Michael J. Roberts released TADS , a programming language designed to produce works of interactive fiction. In 1993, Graham Nelson released Inform , a Programming Language and set of libraries which Compiled to a Z-Code story file. 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. Despite the lack of commercial support, the availability of high quality tools allowed enthusiasts of the genre to develop new high quality games. Competitions such as the annual Interactive Fiction Competition for short works, the newer Spring Thing for longer works, and the XYZZY Awards , further helped to improve the quality and complexity of the games. Modern games go much further than the original "Adventure" style, improving upon Infocom games - which relied extensively on puzzle solving, and to a lesser extent on communication with non player characters - to include experimentation with writing and story-telling techniques. While the majority of modern interactive fiction developed is distributed for free, there are some commercial endeavors, including '', several games by Howard Sherman published as Malinche Entertainment , and The General Coffee Company 's '' Future Boy! ''. Emily Short was commissioned to develop the game ''City of Secrets'' but the project fell through and she ended up releasing it herself.10 Some authors offer optional commercial "feelies" (physical props associated with a game) through feelies.org or similar services. NOTABLE WORKS OF INTERACTIVE FICTION
SAMPLE TRANSCRIPT This is a brief transcript from one of many possible ways to not win the game '' Curses '', by Graham Nelson . The player has entered instructions on the lines beginning with '>' (shown here in italic); the rest of the text is printed by the computer. The computer begins with a printed introduction giving a little context to the game (much more would become apparent as the game progressed):
In that game you scored 0 out of a possible 550, in 3 turns, giving you the rank of hapless Tourist. Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, give the FULL score for that game or QUIT? > INTERACTIVE FICTION DEVELOPMENT SYSTEMS Older development Systems
SEE ALSO Related Concepts
Specific Related Fiction NOTES FURTHER READING EXTERNAL LINKS
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