A Brief Introduction to Interactive Fiction

"Interactive fiction" can mean almost any kind of story where the reader takes a more active role than just turning pages. The term has been used for all sorts of storytelling that doesn't fit the traditional mold of "static" fiction. Interactive fiction can be anything from "choose your own adventure" books to hypertext novels, from movies with multiple endings to text adventures - but these days, it's that last format that most people mean when they talk about IF.

In case don't know what a text adventure is, it's a kind of computer game that relies entirely on text. The computer describes an imaginary location and situation, the player types English-like commands saying what he or she wants to do, and the computer describes the results. Think of those pen-and-paper role playing games with the twenty-sided dice: text adventures are sort of like those, with the computer taking the part of the Game Master. Most computer adventure games dispense with the elaborate dice-rolling combat systems of the paper games, though; the emphasis is usually on puzzles, story, and characters, instead of on combat and magic.

>go south Mr. Teeterwaller comes with you. Road A light fog hangs over the road in the still night air. The road continues into the darkness to the north. To the south, distant lights glow weakly through the fog. >go south Mr. Teeterwaller comes with you. Outside Complex The road ends at the gated entrance to a huge industrial complex sprawling over the foggy landscape to the south. A tall chain-link fence surrounds the complex; the fence is interrupted only by a sliding section of fence that serves as a gate (currently closed) across the road. Narrow paths run along the outside of the fence east and west of the road. The road continues into the darkness to the north. "That's curious," Teeterwaller mumbles. "Why would they set up a detour that just comes to a dead end?"

Text adventures were among the very first computer games ever created. They were big sellers in the early days of personal computers; several companies made a nice living selling them commercially. By the late 1980s, though, PCs were becoming powerful enough to support sophisticated sound and animated graphics in games. Graphical games quickly drew a much larger audience than text games could hope to, and by the 90s, text adventures were dead commercially.

The text adventure disappeared as a commercial game category so long ago now that many people are surprised to learn that a small but dedicated community of enthusiasts are still playing these games - and even more surprised to hear that people are still writing them. To the modern gamer, playing DVD-based, texture-mapped, hardware-shaded gazillion polygon per second, 3D-accelerated, 5.1-channel digital surround sound-enabled, fourteen-degrees-of-freedom force-feedback joystick-equipped PC games (let alone those on the latest Super PlayBox thousand-bit consoles), text adventures are no more than historical curiosities, just badly outdated games displayed one resolution step below CGA on the graphics quality scale.

To be sure, for some modern enthusiasts the main attraction is nostalgia. But for many of us, that's not it at all; there's a lot more to IF than fond memories of classic games on antique computers. Many of us see text-based interactive fiction as a uniquely expressive story-telling medium. To us, text is not the same as really lame graphics - it's an altogether different medium with altogether different capabilities, and it didn't become obsolete when graphical games came along any more than books became obsolete when television was invented.

What is it about interactive fiction that keeps us enthusiasts interested after all these years?

For starters, IF is probably the only computer game medium in which an individual author can hope to create an entire work on his or her own. Part of the reason today's cutting-edge computer games are so technically accomplished is that they're created by huge teams of specialists. Without millions of dollars of financial backing, someone with an idea for a game has little hope of realizing it as a full graphical production. In contrast, a lone writer can readily create an entire text game single-handedly.

Probably the most interesting thing about IF, though, is its inherent emphasis on story.

Story-telling is a huge part of what people want from any computer game (barring, perhaps, things like solitaire). Even in the earliest video games, where you drove a little colored block around the screen shooting slightly smaller blocks at the other player's block, the game cartridge always came with a manual that told the epic science fiction saga leading up to the climactic battle of the colored blocks. Now that PCs can easily handle full-motion video, virtually every modern computer game is structured into levels punctuated by cinematic interludes: the game is wrapped in a story, and the reward for successfully blasting the aliens is that you get to see more of the story unfold.

An adventure game is in a way the logical extreme of this ubiquitous story-wrapped game structure: it's the story parts with all the boring alien-blasting parts (or car racing parts, or peasant micro-management parts, or whatever) removed. The story part of most games is designed to spark your imagination and get you interested in the rule-based part; in interactive fiction, the story is the entire game.