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The joy of text ? the fall and rise of interactive fiction

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  The joy of text ? the fall and rise of interactive fiction Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2014-10-23 10:25 +0000
    Re: The joy of text ? the fall and rise of interactive fiction Oregonian Haruspex <bob_davis_retired@yahoo.com> - 2014-10-23 13:36 -0700

#5418 — The joy of text ? the fall and rise of interactive fiction

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/22/interactive-fiction-awards-games

   The annual Interactive Fiction Competition is an institution that has
   endured for almost 20 years, with the goal of discovering each year's
   best and brightest works in the world of text-based gaming. The genre is
   surprisingly broad and complex ? and this year's entries show how much
   text games have to offer modern audiences, even those who don't
   ordinarily play computer games.

   The age of free and intuitive creation tools, combined with the
   explosion of mobile platforms, e-reader devices and an audience that's
   comfortable reading screens, means a brand-new opportunity for fresh
   narrative experiences that stand to attract new types of players.

   Veteran gamers may remember the text-based adventures of history ?
   titles like Adventureland, Zork and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
   Arriving in the late 1970s and early 80s, they were taut, forbidding
   puzzles of logic and language; proceeding the age of graphics on home
   computers, they made the most of constraints, using brief, carefully
   chosen prose and a limited list of terse commands to create the
   experience.

   ...

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#5422

On 2014-10-23 10:25:41 +0000, Rich said:

> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/22/interactive-fiction-awards-games 
> 
> 
>    The annual Interactive Fiction Competition is an institution that has
>    endured for almost 20 years, with the goal of discovering each year's
>    best and brightest works in the world of text-based gaming. The genre is
>    surprisingly broad and complex ? and this year's entries show how much
>    text games have to offer modern audiences, even those who don't
>    ordinarily play computer games.
> 
>    The age of free and intuitive creation tools, combined with the
>    explosion of mobile platforms, e-reader devices and an audience that's
>    comfortable reading screens, means a brand-new opportunity for fresh
>    narrative experiences that stand to attract new types of players.
> 
>    Veteran gamers may remember the text-based adventures of history ?
>    titles like Adventureland, Zork and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
>    Arriving in the late 1970s and early 80s, they were taut, forbidding
>    puzzles of logic and language; proceeding the age of graphics on home
>    computers, they made the most of constraints, using brief, carefully
>    chosen prose and a limited list of terse commands to create the
>    experience.
> 
>    ...

I view interactive fiction through a somewhat more jaundiced eye than 
some.  The interpreters were very rigid in their requirements, the 
interactivity was usually quite low - "you can't do that" being 
probably the most common response from the interpreter - and the 
storytelling was often quite bad.

Take Zork for example.  If it was published as a novel it would have 
cost the publisher a lot of money as I seriously doubt it would have 
broken even.  But as an interactive novel, a novel form of 
entertainment in those days, it was fresh and exciting at least until 
you got it home and tried to play it.  The story was just laughably 
bad, the dialog and plot would have cause a middle-schooler to get poor 
marks as fiction, and it was designed to frustrate the player in order 
to make the game seem cleverer than it actually was.

Most Infocom games were like this.  HG2G was even worse as a game, 
because it failed to capture the humor of the novel, and it was 
frustrating as hell to boot.  I must say though, it did effectively 
communicate the helpless, frustrated feelings that Arthur Dent must 
have had and allowed me to empathize with the character in the novel 
much more than I could have had I not played the game.

Stick a fork in it, interactive text-based fiction is done.  The only 
way I could see it making a comeback is if there was a much more 
complicated and sophisticated interpreter that could actually 
understand natural language to a much higher degree, and provide a much 
more interactive environment that wasn't "on rails."

As far as video games go, I'm personally past the point where I wish to 
have my hand held while I am led down a garden path by the developer.  
This is why I play Dwarf Fortress.

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