You are standing in a small, plain, white room. Fluorescent lights buzz overhead. A small rack sits against one wall, filled with software, and a counter stands in the middle of the room, under a sign which reads, "Welcome to the world of interactive fiction." The only exit is east through a short corridor.
Lying neatly on the counter is a booklet titled "Introduction to Interactive Fiction"
>READ BOOKLET
(First taking it.)
The above is a short example of a possible piece of interactive fiction. The concept is this: The player types commands for his character to carry out, and the computer responds with descriptions of what his character can see, hear, taste, smell, feel, as well as his thoughts and other similar things. Interactive fiction (IF) is generally oriented around "rooms" (including outdoor and even abstract locations), objects and actions, which the player manipulates to perform certain tasks (or just to do silly things).
For those who like puzzles, like to read and aren't just attracted to action games, IF can be very rewarding. For the reading aspect, IF is somewhat like reading books (hopefully good ones) except that you get to affect the outcome of the story. Most IF is based on a group of puzzles (although some are more story-oriented) which generally can be solved in various (though not all) orders.
Some of the best IF ever produced, IMO, came from Infocom. In fact, they almost invented the genre. Actually the original was Willie Crowther and Don Woods' Adventure, a simulation of part of Mammoth Cave. When it arrived on one of the mainframes at M.I.T., a group of hackers at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory there played it, and decided they could write a program with a better parser (Adventure could understand only two-word commands, such as "Take sword," "Kill troll," etc.) and better puzzles. Thus, Zork was born. ("Zork" was a nonsense word used around M.I.T., among other things for the filenames of programs on the mainframe which hadn't yet been given real names; due to Zork's subsequent popularity, the name stuck.)
Do you remember Zork or any of Infocom's other works? Would you like to play them again or just revisit those memories? Here is a site dedicated to Infocom and their works. More good news: the Zork trilogy is now available free, and you can download it there.
If this sounds interesting to you, you may be wanting to try out some interactive fiction. For this purpose I have included a Java applet (Zplet, by Matthew Russotto) running Graham Nelson's Curses, a game which is now relatively classic.
Note: It will take a minute for the story file to load. But if the applet takes too long to appear, try reloading. Also, the applet seems to work only after the mouse is passed over it. (Some browsers (e.g. Gecko-based like Mozilla, Firefox, NS6.x+) require the mouse to stay inside the applet area!) If you need instructions on how to play, just type 'help' (once you see the '>' prompt); everything you need to know to get started is included in the game. (Some games do this; some don't.)
Note 2: If the backspace key (or whatever key is located at the upper-right of the main section part of your keyboard) doesn't seem to be working properly, try CTRL-H instead.
The Z-machine is a platform independent virtual machine, not unlike Java
in concept! The main difference is that the Z-machine handles only
text. But that is exactly what IF requires. Just like Java,
in order to play IF written for the Z-machine, you need an
interpreter. If you want to get one, go to
http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/interpreters. From there, you can
select which interpreter you want. I suggest you get
Frotz. Once you select the directory for the one you want, you must find your
platform. To aid you in finding it, the file Index in each directory
gives a description of each file in that directory.
Some interpreters will install themselves, while others will just sit on the system. If you're running an OS such as Windows 95/98/NT/2000/ME/XP, just double-click on the icon of the file you want to run. Then when the dialog comes up asking what program to use, click 'Browse', find the interpreter and select it. Finally, make sure that 'Always use this program to open this type of file' is checked. After then, you can play the game just by double-clicking its icon.
An interesting thing to note: Windows uses its own type of file with the '.dat' extension, so once you do this, all of the '.dat' files on your system will have the Z-machine interpreter's icon. This won't do any harm. Windows will still treat them the same way. But they will also be associated with the interpreter. Just don't get confused. I suggest keeping all of your Z-machine games in one place.
A very helpful skill in playing interactive fiction is map making. All you need is a sufficiently large sheet of paper (or maybe several) and a pencil or pen. (I prefer a pencil, as I am erasing quite a bit.) Every time you enter a new room, you should add it to your map. I have developed my own map symbology. Below is a sample map with legend:
Note that the direction in which a line leads from a room on the map corresponds to the direction in which the exit leads. The line between "Starting room" and "Second room" is straight: it leads north from "Starting room" and south from "Second room." On the other hand, the line between "Starting room" and "Third room" is slightly different: it leads northwest from "Starting room" and west from "Third room." But it's really the same concept. The arrows work the same way, except that the connection is only in one direction - the direction the arrow points. The little triangles indicate vertical connections - one can think of it as pointing in the down direction, or the way I like to think of it, like a ladder seen from above - the top appears broader than the bottom.
Be warned that mapping some games can turn out to be messy. For this reason, there is another type of symbol, a circled letter, that I often find necessary:
The "A" indicates that "Some room" is connected to another room that is drawn at another part of the map (the other room has an identical symbol with the same letter attached to it for the appropriate exit). The other room is not necessarily at a different location, but it is sometimes necessary to break the map into sections.
Of course, feel free to develop your own conventions, but if you publish any maps, be sure to include legends with them.
See 'Site for Infocom fans...'.
If you enjoyed Curses (or even it you didn't - there are other genres that might be more to your liking), there are many more available at www.ifarchive.org. Don't forget: you also need an interpreter to play. (Those, of course, are also available there.)
Once you've become familiar with the IF genre, if you really like it and you have the imagination, you may begin to wish you could write some works yourself. With modern computer game genres, you have to learn a programming language such as C, and probably get a college education and join some software development company. (Not that I am against any of that.) Developing IF, on the other hand, is much easier. You still might need to learn a language, but it's much simpler, as you only need to worry about text. (Actually, multimedia support is being (slowly) developed in the community, but text is more important in IF, and many of us don't want multimedia.)
There are several authoring systems available, among them Inform, TADS, and Hugo. Of the three, Inform is my choice. The others can be found in the archive.
There are two major newsgroups devoted to discussion of interactive fiction: rec.arts.int-fiction (RAIF), for IF authors; and rec.games.int-fiction (RGIF), for IF players. There are also the FAQs for RAIF and RGIF, respecively.
There is also a MUD designed for readers of RAIF, called ifMUD. Note: ifMUD is not a regular MUD. It was developed around an IF theme, and as such has few roleplaying characteristics; we on ifMUD mostly just sit in one room and chat.
Last updated: Wed Apr 18, 2007
|
|
|
Preprocessed with 
