Notes about Interactive Fiction

Gene Michael Stover

created Monday, 2005 May 29
updated Thursday, 2005 June 2

Copyright © 2005 Gene Michael Stover. All rights reserved. Permission to copy, store, & view this document unmodified & in its entirety is granted.

Contents

• 1 What is this?
• 2 Definition
• 3 Links
• 4 Random Microthoughts
• A. Other File Formats
• Bibliography

1 What is this?

Herein are some notes about Interactive Fiction.

2 Definition

Here is the definition of interactive fiction according to [6]:

Interactive fiction (IF) is computer-mediated narrative, resembling a very finely-grained ``Choose Your Own Adventure'' story. The interactor reads a short textual description (``You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.''), and types instructions to the computer (``enter building''). The plot can change based on what the interactor types. It has the potential to be more truly interactive than hypertext.

As I'm writing this, I've renewed my interest in test-only interactive fiction, but I'd like to point out that interactive fiction need not be text-only. Examples of graphical interactive fiction include: Silent Hill series, Fatal Frame series, Kuon, & most games in the Resident Evil series.

I do not consider role playing games as interactive fiction because it places more emphasis on personalization than story. Also, RPGs have more emphasis on combat than does interactive fiction. Where is the dividing line between IF and RPG? It's fuzzy, & I don't know where it lies.

3 Links

• The Interactive Fiction Archive. [7]

  Lots of material. Accessible via FTP also.

• D.G. Jerz. ``Playing, Studying and Writing Interactive Fiction (Text Adventure Games)'' . [6]

• Cloak of Darkness. Compares IF authoring tools.

• Inform. Possibly the most popular authoring tool.

• TADS. The official home of the Text Adventure Development System on the web. Probably a close second in popularity to Inform.

4 Random Microthoughts

1. I suspect that horror works better in interactive fiction (possibly with graphics, as Silent Hill, Fatal Frame, Kuon, or Resident Evil) than in print, in the movies, or in other non-interactive forms. This is because to be effective, horror must be personal, more so than in other genres.

2. I'd like to catalog the types of puzzles I've seen in interactive fiction.

A. Other File Formats

• This document is available in multi-file HTML format at http://lisp-p.org/nif/.
• This document is available in Pointless Document Format (PDF) at http://lisp-p.org/nif/nif.pdf.

I write almost all of my documents in L^ATEX ([8], [4]). I compile to PDF with latex, dvips, & ps2pdf. I compile to HTML with latex2html ([3], [5]).

Bibliography

1

Cleveland M. Blakemore.
Programming your own text games.
Ahoy!, (55):13-14, July 1988.
http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/articles/ahoy88.zip.

2

Charles Carr.
IF: The end of an error?
ComputorEdge, February 1998.
http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/articles/ComputorEdge.txt.

3

Nikos Drakos.
latex2html.

4

Michel Goossens and Frank Mittelbach.
The L^ATEX Companion.
Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1993.
ISBN 0201541998.

5

Michel Goossens and Sebastian Rahtz.
The L^ATEX Web Companion: Integrating TEX, HTML, and XML.
Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1999.
ISBN 020143317.

6

D.G. Jerz.
Playing, studying and writing interactive fiction (text adventure games).
http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/.

7

David Kinder and Stephen Granade.
The interactive fiction archive.
http://www.ifarchive.org/.

8

Leslie Lamport.
L^ATEX: A Document Preparation System.
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1986.
ISBN 0-201-15790-X.