Interactive fiction (IF) is a category of games that communicate with the player through text. These are the type of video game storytelling, and they continue to be developed to this day.
Parser games are Interactive Fiction games played by typing in a set of limited commands through a natural language interpreter console. These are the earliest types of Interactive Fiction. They typically rely heavily on puzzles to complicate the unfolding of the story.
Widely considered the first Interactive Fiction game, created by William Crowther in 1976. It is a simulation of the Mammoth and Flint Ridge cave systems in Kentucky with magical elements.
Crowther said this about the game’s origin:
“I had been involved in a non-computer role-playing game called Dungeons and Dragons at the time, and also I had been actively exploring in caves — Mammoth Cave in Kentucky in particular. “Suddenly, I got involved in a divorce, and that left me a bit pulled apart in various ways. In particular I was missing my kids.
Also the caving had stopped, because that had become awkward, so I decided I would fool around and write a program that was a re-creation in fantasy of my caving, and also would be a game for the kids, and perhaps some aspects of the Dungeons and Dragons that I had been playing.
My idea was that it would be a computer game that would not be intimidating to non-computer people, and that was one of the reasons why I made it so that the player directs the game with natural language input, instead of more standardized commands. My kids thought it was a lot of fun.”
Colossal Cave Adventure directly inspired the creation of numerous early commercial computer games such Infocom’s Zork (1977), Adventureland (1978), Rogue (1980), and Atari’s Adventure (1980) which collectively formed the foundation of interactive fiction, adventure, rogue-like genres of computer games.
Three mainstream contemporary games which push the early forms of IF:
Infocom was a successful software company from the 1980s which produced numerous classic works of interactive fiction. The company started as a collaborative project between MIT staff and students, many who had previously worked on a version of their flagship adventure title, Zork. Infocom was a highly successful company, dominating the early computer software marketplace (In 1983, the computer software distribution company, Softsel, listed all of the top 10 selling pieces of software in December as Infocom games). They remained independent software produces until 1986 when their business was acquired by Activision.
Infocom games were interactive text adventures in which players used short series of words to give commands such as “go north” or “turn on the microphone” the software. These fall under the category of Parser Interactive Fiction.
These games were programmed using a language called ZIL (Zork Implementation Language) and run using a virtual machine called the Z-machine interpreter. This machine has been ported to various computer platforms and has resulted in the games still being playable today on modern computers. The use of a virtual machine also allowed their games to be run on computers that weren’t intended for such use.
Infocom games were notable not only for their quality or popularity, but also for their clever marketing and use of included props and extras called “feelies”. Feelies extended the fiction of the games into physical, tangible objects and also sometimes served a secondary purpose: anti-piracy protection.
CYOA was one of the most popular series of children’s books in the 1980s in the US, originally created by Edward Packard. The concept was created in 1975, but Packard was rejected by publishers for years leading to Packard shelving the idea for a period.
These books (called “gamebooks”) allowed readers to participate in the stories by making choices. These choices would lead to multiple endings, thus allowing the reader to “choose their own adventure” on each read through.
This form of interactive fiction is reminiscent of the types of web-based games which became popular in the 2000s created using Twine.
This is not an exhaustive list, but these are popular tools for creating Interactive Fiction today.
Inform is a powerful programming language that uses natural language syntax for creating parser Interactive Fiction.
Twine is a popular open-source tool for creating interactive, nonlinear stories created by Chris Klimas. It is an excellent tool which is used primarily for creating online IF in the vein of Choose Your Own Adventure books from the 1980s.
This markup language was developed by Inkle Studios as an in-house tool and released as an open source project. It has gained popularity in recent years due to its lightweight syntax, advanced feature set, and ability to be integrated into game engines.
Today we’re going to focus on the basics of using Ink and Inky.
Ink is a narrative scripting language for games. It is a markup language, not a programming language, so it has a gentle learning curve and can be implemented really quickly. Unlike other excellent narrative tools such as Twine, it was designed by Inkle Studios’ to integrate into a game engine. It is also able to easily create web-based interactive fiction.
Inky is an interactive editor for Ink files that allows you to easily play through your game as you write it. The editor is very simple but does feature some nice quality of life things like the ability to offer suggestions and highlight errors. In addition to autoring .ink files, it can export to web (for online interactive fiction) or to JSON (for integration into things like dialogue systems).
Here is a cheatsheet which will be updated to include all things Ink that we cover in this class. The Ink Manual is also great and I would highly recommend getting comfortable with it to find examples of advanced Ink usage.
Today, we’ll be focusing on the basics:
Read this informative blog post by Emily Short on the challenges and importance of good plotting in your narrative games.
Create a short (no longer than 5 minutes to play) Interactive Fiction game using Ink with the following simple premise:
You are in a room that you want to leave.