For me, the most fascinating aspect of the Interactive Fiction games that we played for this class was the extreme diversity in what the games could accomplish simply through the use of text.  Lost Pig and Aisle are two dramatically different games.  The former is more typical of what we consider a ‘video game’ – it has a clear objective, a scoring system, and set dimensions and directions.  You direct a character (the simple-minded Grunk) on a quest to retrieve his lost pig.   Unlike in a visual video game where you could take the perspective of the character through literally seeing his/her viewpoint, in Interactive Fiction you receive a narration of the character’s thoughts. I really enjoyed this approach to the game, and I think it offered an opportunity for a unique sense of humor, especially in Lost Pig where we get to laugh at Grunk’s innocent and underdeveloped thought processes (he even refers to himself in the third person – “Grunk fall down deep hole!” and “Grunk see Pig”). However, even after this first impression of Interactive Fiction games, I was even more delighted with the game Aisle. I thought that Aisle really demonstrated how IF games push our definition of video games to the limit.  While there is no concrete objective or direction in the game (no way to ‘win’ or ‘lose’), you still get to control a character and determine the course of action.  The action that happens in Aisle works beautifully as an Interactive Fiction game, but I doubt whether it would work as a Playstation or Xbox game, or in any visual representation.  I thought this was the most important aspect of IF games in general — how the genre expands our notion of what video games are, and presents new opportunities for what video games can do.

Like some of my other classmates, I found the interactive fiction video games quite intriguing.  This is basically the first game I have played that makes the player visualize the game play.  I found it quite interesting that players all visualize a different game before them.

This kind of game was both fun, entertaining and frustrating for me.  Some of the actions I could take in the games were quite unexpected and difficult to discover. The unexpected violent actions, such as the ability to attack the woman with the Gnocchi, or the sauce cans, were especially eye-opening for me. Like other classmates, I was also somewhat perturbed by the lack of finality to the game.  I usually feel a sense of productivity and accomplishment when I finish a level of a game, win a certain amount of points, unlock hidden game aspects, or win the game entirely.

These senses of accomplishment are almost always the main focus and reason I play games.  The diegetic aspect of games was often the most intriging part of a game for me; the lack of a concrete ‘story’ in these games bothered me, as a multitude of endings were possible.

I found this set of readings/videos/games to be extremely interesting. I thought the games were fun, and I had an especially enjoyable time playing Aisle. I found that this might be the kind of game Montfort talks about when he says that one should pause and think before labeling interactive fiction as a game. Aisle seemed to fit better into the ‘work’ category Montfort describes it rather than a game. What I assumed to be the point of the interface was to gain an understanding of the back-stories of each of the different characters you become in Aisle. I do not think the author had a particular end in mind. Montfort even says, “It would be bizarre for an interactor to claim to have won [Aisle]. Aisle reminded be a little bit of Storyteller, a game we played earlier in the semester. The point of storyteller was just to move things around in order to see different endings to the story. I think that is exactly what Aisle was trying to do.

I felt the same way after working with both ‘Storyteller’ and ‘Aisle’ – both amused but unfulfilled at the end of my session. I suppose I did feel productive, uncovering more and more endings, but in the end that was meaningless, because there was no way to tell if I had found them all (In Storyteller, the possibilities were so few this was possible, but not so in Aisle). It is impossible to even manifest my own ‘end’ or my own idea of ‘winning’ to the game. This was incredible frustrating, so much so that I could not rest until I had searched the Internet to find alternate endings that I might not have thought of. Even worse, I could not find an official walkthrough or list of possible endings. All I found was an ongoing list of endings with an invitation to add your own if one was missed.

So, I suppose I will reevaluate my claim that the point of Aisle was to uncover the different possible back-stories for your character. Perhaps this is the point of the game, although it seems debatable, because there is no way to tell whether you have discovered all the available pieces of information from the IF. If it is not the point, than I am at a loss.

On a side note, I love the idea of Interactive Fiction. A person’s game experience can be completely different from interactor to interactor – depending on how they visualize their atmosphere. Although the author seems to paint a picture of one’s surrounding, much is still left to the imagination, making a lighthearted and goofy game to one person a dark and gloomy game to another. It’s genius how these game developer’s can utilize aspects from outside the game to affect the game experience. This also makes me wonder where that type of action would be categorized in Galloway’s four different types of gameplay….

When Professor Sample first mentioned “textual adventure games” I immediately thought of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series that I loved back in middle school. In the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books you are given the perspective of the main character and every page presents you with a decision; based on your choice you flip to another page in the book and follow this progression until your character either dies or completes the story-line. Within each thin novel there are countless ways to arrive at a variety of conclusions.

After playing a couple of computer-based interactive fiction games (“Aisle” and “Lost Pig”), it seems like these are Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books taken to the next level. Instead of being restricted to a couple of options per page, the player is free to look around, ask questions, or interact with objects within the game world. This brings a whole new dimension of interactivity with the narrative of the game.

Both book-based and computer-based textual adventure games force the player to use their imagination to form the game world. From black text on a white background, the player can (with some help from the game designer) explore a cave, stand in a grocery store aisle, or help a troll find a lost pig. It seems plausible that modern graphic-game designers rely too heavily on flashy graphics with weak story-lines and thus remove the player’s ability to form a mental game-world of his or her own creation. I find this very sad as the creation of a mental game-world was always one of my favorite parts of reading the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series.

So I was thinking back on whether I had played any mostly test based games, because I have not played Adventure or any of the others Montford mentions.  I remembered playing Dope Wars on my older brother’s calculator back in the day.  I am assuming most people have played this game or a re-make of it on Facebook but I was intrigued to see if it could fit into Montfort’s IF definitions.  Montfort says, “text can also be considered semiotically to be any set of signifiers; thus IF works (and perhaps other works as well) that contain graphics, sound, or video can be accommodated in this way.”  In Drug Wars you don’t type in commands but click on what you want via promts that come from situations or ‘narratives’ that are generated from the game.  I am not sure that typing in commands is a requirement to be considered a work in IF, but in Drug Wars you have to click on your responses and navigate throughout the simuated world.  The above quote, leads me to beleive that yes Drug Wars can be included in the IF category.  I could not find any videos from the old calculator version of Drug Wars but I found one played on Wii that can be found here. It does have alot of graphics etc but ink the principle behind it can land this game in the category of IF.  What do you all think?