1. No sound or music exists
2. Movement is constricted to the four cardinal directions
3. Story and its components are open-ended and entirely dependent on the player and his or her imagination
4. Gaming system-player interaction is entirely text-based
5. Gaming system only recognizes pre-programmed words and cannot learn new words if the player uses them.
Cole Terlesky and Alex Whittaker
In class on Tuesday we spent almost the whole class playing the interactive fiction game Varicella. This was the second time I’d ever played interactive fiction games, the first being the three games we played before Monday’s class. The first time playing I hated it probably due to my lack of knowledge of the commands. Once playing in class with two classmates I quickly caught onto the commands and became absorbed into the game. I really liked the blog on “Writing in IF.” I feel like the highly descriptive responses the computer gives back makes you feel like you are actually there. Varicella had really good descriptions of some rooms and a lack of description in other rooms. As stated in “Writing in IF” you can tell which rooms/elements of the game are important based on the amount of description of that element. I spent alot of time in the dining hall because so much description was given and there was a lot to explore. It took me a while to catch on to all the little details that you must pay attention to so you can obtain all the room has to offer.
The creator of the game has to decide what to include in the description and what not to include. I feel like in some cases, less description is better so the gamer can imagine his own world. But in other cases it’s important to include alot of details so the gamer will explore the entire room.
I was looking into current developments with Interactive Fiction games and ran across this. The Annual Interactive Fiction game competition has been going on since 1995, and has some “now familiar people” who have entered and won. However, it looks as though anyone who can design an original IF game is allowed to compete. If you’re interested in competing, or even just playing and voting for games, take a look!
Here is an interesting Video from the writer of shade. He has crazy hair and check out his t-shirt!
He is trying to get money to create an IF program for the Iphone which I thought was a very interesting medium for IF. No complex graphics are required and it a good game to play for a couple minutes so the iphone is a good medium. One of the features he mentioned is that he wants to make multiplayer interactive fiction and I was like Huh? Multiplayer IF? Is that fun at all?
But it really exists. Here is an article on it and here is an example of how you could make your own fairly easily.
As I was looking into other IF games to play, I came across this Lost Pig game. The text reminds me of someone trying to speak like a character from sesame street. I thought Varicella gave me a headache, but I could not get past the third person dialog. At one part I command the character, Grunk, to capture the pig and the game answers back: “Grunk not know what that mean.” If you want to chase a pig around for a reason you forget in the game, go for it!
Hey guys- Katie William’s blog isn’t working so here’s her post from me!
I would suggest turning your sound off; an annoying song is playing in the background. Also, zoom your screen in to read the type and pause the clip to read large chunks of type. This is just another interactive fiction game created by some random person. It interested me though, because it’s supposedly based on one of my favorite books, Wuthering Heights. I had never played an interactive fiction game before, so watching this person navigating through his game was pretty insightful. I feel a little more comfortable with the lingo…
In class, Eliza was mentioned to be related to the Adventure IF game. The first thing I thought of was Peter Answers. It is a site that will answer any and all of your questions! But, instead of answering questions for yourself, it is used to trick the people around you. It always knows the right answer!
It is a little confusing at first, but here is a youtube video on how to use it. The main thing is to follow the format given on the site and to put you answer in the petition area of the site. The trick to it, though, is that instead of showing the answer on the screen while you are typing it, something else shows up, like “Peter, please answer the following question:”, for example. That way, the people around you will not know that you are already giving the answer to the question you are asking. Then, when the answer is given to you, the people around you will think that it knew the answer on its own.
This only works when you have people watching around you, otherwise, it defeats its purpose. I think that it is really cool, and when I was tricked a couple of years ago with this site, I fell for it and was scared at first, until I was told what was happening. See if you can fool your friends with this site!
This is an IF game that i found, but i must warn you that it is about a subject that some people might find disgusting and vulgar. It adds to the IF genre by introducing pictures of what is going on in the game so that the player doesn’t have to imagine what is going on. It also adds achievements for doing certain things in the game. These things make the game seem closer to what people are used to from video games. The game is very short and doesn’t take a long time to complete.
For my comment this week I wanted to pull some quotes from shade. While doing so I became curious as to what text I missed in the game from the play though. I found Reform which is a nifty program that will decompile a .z5 file, and among other things, tell you all text in the game.
This is an interactive narrative featuring riddles and clues that the interactor has to solve in order to advance the story. It isn’t strictly an IF game or a regular video game because it uses images as clues, but a text answer is needed to get to the next clue. What I find interesting is that this site was made by a novelist, not a game designer. Also, there was a huge interest response to solve the clues, resulting in many forums and message boards.
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Montfort’s notion that works of IF are not games because they can not be beaten is especially true for Aisle. Certainly the end of the frame in which you view the story of the man’s life is not the end of the life of the man. Even so, I thought I could assemble a greater picture of the man which would allow me to “beat” the game. I had realized certain patterns about the story and believed I was seeing different facets of the same life, only to stumble upon some final replies which made no sense. Only then did I realize that the game had said up front that not all of the stories presented were about the same man. My favorite of these incongruous tales is the reply the game gives the player for the command “inventory.” Thus Aisle creates a sense of depth by deliberately making it ambiguous as to which stories are about the same man, if any at all.
This nature of IF to present a world which needs to be explored, which unravels as your fingers pound out the phrases on the keyboard, is very well developed in Bronze. By allowing the player to control the pacing at which new information is presented, Bronze creates the illusion that the story in unfolding as the player traverses the castle. Perhaps it is for this reason that Montfort says that works of IF are not narratives. Still, a programmer would have had to decide at one point which events trigger certain dialogue or allow access to certain areas. As such, the sequence of events, at least the key ones, is set before the player sits down to play the game. If the player wanders around the game world for a while, is this not analogous to flipping back in a novel and re-reading the past few paragraphs?
Montfort states in his video that there is a nice symmetry between the text being presented on screen and the text inputed to the game. However, it is key to the experience that this interface is as close to natural English as possible. For games like Bronze, where the text parsing system is well defined, this works fine. However, Shade was much less flexible with its syntax. Rather than allow the more natural “go to kitchen,” which was fine by the standards of Bronze, Shade only accepted the rather curt and awkward “go kitchen.”
I played all three games and had the strongest reaction to the game Bronze. Having read the spoiler section about shade I now realize I didn’t finish it. I had gotten stuck in shade and I wasn’t pulled in by the narrative so it felt over to me. I think I figured out most of aisle, and stopped after I realized how ridiculous my commands were becoming ridiculous (spoiler: I was really surprised to learn that punching the brunette and stalking her were possible options).
By the time I started playing Bronze I had forgotten what Professor Sample had said about it in class: mainly that I was Bella and that this was beauty and the beast. I got halfway through a set of memories in the dining hall when I finally realized that my character was not a boy, the ‘lord’ was a beast, and that I could stop looking for weapons. This means that I am normally accustomed to games where the character I control is defined by me, gameplay is driven by combat, and I am normally finding beasts in order to kill them.
I was making a map originally, but after being unable to find the next area I visited the website to view the entire game map. I was stuck for maybe 20 minutes prior to using the map, and my main reason for cheating is that I wanted to know what happened next. I manage to progress a little further in the game, but I again hit a roadblock. The game seems to have realized my trouble and started offering me hints. I still didn’t get it. I sought out the guide/walkthrough and realized I had somehow made a mistake that made it impossible to progress. I gave up on the game and went searching for the simple story version, but couldn’t find a version in any readable format.
What I realized after going through the period of frustration is that I was attached the narrative and unlike in shade where I simply gave up after losing interest I wanted to press on to find out what happened. I was completely uninterested in the game mechanics though. In the early days of gaming I can see how text would offer a lot of freedom, but with today’s options I felt limited. The experience felt more similar to reading a good novel then playing a video game.
Immersion into another realm, rather then just being a passive viewer, only comes to me through a combination of visual, audio, and mental cues. The text based interface wasn’t enough to give me the sense of control I get in most video games.
What do you get when you mix the classic arcade game, Pacman, with the interactive fiction style of gaming? Pac-Txt!
After a little bit of searching around, I found this text-based version of Pacman. I have played it for a little while now, using my memory of the arcade interface to navigate. It is quite interesting and fun to play. You can do so here. Enjoy!
