Throughout the past month my English class at Eastern Connecticut State University has been reading, playing and understanding interactive fiction, or otherwise known as IF. We began with basic games such as Ingold’s “All Roads.” From there we moved onto more in depth pieces. We also read articles about interactive fiction from Dennis G. Jerz and Mary Ann Buckles. Interactive fiction tests the patience and keen ability of a reader to understand a story and play though it. The first piece that we read about interactive was “What is Interactive Fiction” by Dennis G. Jerz. Although this article was written a decade ago, it still has information that applies today. Jerz starts off the article by summarizing interactive fiction in two sentences; “Interactive fiction (IF) is computer-mediated narrative, resembling a fine-grained "Choose Your Own Adventure" story, in which the reader helps to determine the outcome of the story. The classic IF interface is a command-based textual feedback loop: the computer displays a few lines or paragraphs of text; the interactor types a command; the computer describes what happens next, and then waits for additional input.” The analogy of “Choose Your Own Adventure” to IF’s is strikingly well put. Throughout the rest of the article he continues to compare interactive fiction to hypertext narratives. The same week we read an article by Ramsberg, “A Beginner's Guide to Playing Interactive Fiction.” Ramsberg’s first paragraph on “What is interavtive fiction” says similar things of Jerz. He goes on to say that interactive fiction “is both a computer game and a book, or rather something in between. You usually take on the role of the main character in a story. The game tells you what happens to the character, and you tell the game how the character should act. This is not always simple, but can make for a very rewarding experience. The game's output is always mainly text based, but there are some games that will also show images and play sounds. You communicate with the game using text as well, but there are indeed a small number of games that complement this with mouse support.” This explanation is a little more in depth and it covers the aspect of how rewarding it is to win with a cool ending.
When I first started reading/playing IF I was unsure how to judge it. The idea was foreign and inherently confusing. I found myself not understanding how to move, talk and basically interact with the interactive fiction. After the first game that I played, All Roads, I noticed that there was a steep learning curve. Each game moves and understands the same language that you type. North, south, east and west were always the universal movements and “look” is always a way to examine a room. After understanding this I was able to move and talk more freely in the games. Interactive fiction also uses new vocabulary words and terms for specific events that happen while playing a game. For example, when you save a game, which is called an “extradiegetic.” Currently I am using Microsoft Word 08’ and my computer does not even recognize this word. It wasn’t just words that my computer doesn’t recognize, it is also words with a new twist to them such as “directive.” We all understand this word to literally be defined as a command, but when using this word with interactive fiction it is defined as “Addressing some entity that is not part of the IF world, for instance to ask for hints.” When I ran into words like these, it gave interactive fiction a more professional feel to it.
Just like books, interactive fiction is able to have different genres. Mary Ann Buckles explains this clearly in her article “Interactive Fiction as Literature.” She provides explanations of how interactive fiction uses different genres such as adventure, mystery, and science fiction. For example “Mystery novels like those of Agatha Christie and Dashiell Hammett are more like jigsaw puzzles, while James Bond novels and spy stories can be compared to games of chess. Mysteries challenge the reader's powers of deduction; they are games in the form of stories, in which the reader competes with the author, matching wits in the game of “who done it” and how” (Buckles). While playing mysteries, the reader clashes with the author, trying to solve the puzzle that they have created, giving the reader the feeling of being Sherlock Holmes. Ramsberg gives categories for these types of games. “The first category of games is sometimes called traditional IF or puzzle-based IF or just text adventures, while the latter is called puzzle-less IF. There are of course games that are a mix of these two, as well as experiments with the genre that don't fit in anywhere yet” (Ramsberg).
Interactive fiction resembles a book with its dynamic characters and a game with its puzzles. In the story Galatea, which is also my favorite piece of interactive fiction, you go into depth with the character and talk on different levels such as religion, education, art, and morals. Although there is only one room, the puzzle lies within your words. As you talk and listen with Galatea, you try to get a rewarding ending without leaving the room. Although the game is easy to finish, the sense of winning is not always there. There are many different endings and some are more challenging to get than others. Although I have only been able to get bland endings such as walking away, other students in my class have been able to get some bazaar endings, ranging from sitting with her to a man coming out from behind a curtain apparently controlling her. The ending is what you make of it and how you connect with the character Galatea.
Only within the past couple weeks have I toyed with writing interactive fiction. The program that I was using was Inform7. The language that you use to write with has to be exact in order to have the game do what you want it to. Every period must be accounted for and nothing can be spelled wrong. Fortunately, once you get this language understood you are able to make the player character do anything you want. You can have them talk to people and give different responses each time, grab a lantern and turn it on to light a room and even make secret passageways for those mystery and adventure games. The possibilities are endless and the stories can always be added to whenever the writer chooses. However, I found the software to be extremely difficult to use. Often times I found myself changing the story in order to match my abilities with the program. When I first started using Inform7 the whole plot of my IF had to be changed because it was too difficult to create an environment that would suit the story. Even the simplest task such as talking to another character in the story became a burden that took hours to write. The most enjoyable part of interactive fiction that I found is writing descriptively. Being able to describe a skeleton that a player was going to “examine” let my creative mind free. This part of interactive fiction was ultimately my favorite for this reason. I would intentionally place objects throughout the IF map that the player character could examine just for this reason. Although it does not change the plot of the game, it adds a sense of realism to it. Knowing now how difficult and time consuming it is to write an IF, I understand that it takes a special class of person to not only write, but be understand how to use Inform7 to the fullest of its capabilities.
I believe the future of interactive fiction may take a while to get started but once it does it could open the door to an extremely entertaining piece of media. It would be a new form of entertainment that would be more fulfilling to a person than watching television and to some, more entertaining than reading a book. “The first interactive texts were written by programmers who thought of them mostly as games, and the literature they created is unsophisticated. The computer itself, however, does not limit interactive fiction to frivolous works. Consider the development of film. Early film was an unsophisticated medium, “so crude in its initial stages that it was considered to be beneath contempt” (see reference 9). Only with D. W. Griffith's “Birth of a Nation” and, later, Charlie Chaplin's films, did audiences become aware that film could transmit and aesthetically mature experiences.” (Mary Ann Buckles)
If I had a to make a decision to type a story or create one on Inform7, I would always choose to write one out. I felt like my abilities as a writer were limited to my computer skills (which I have none). After using Inform7 for several weeks, I learned to appreciate well-written If’s such as Galatea. The map that the writer has made for conversations must have taken countless hours. This new bread of writers is a pioneer to what the future holds for literature. Writing cannot be held to a piece of paper and now it is expanding to something new.
