Zarf’s Interactive Fiction (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Zarf’s Interactive Fiction (2017)

eblong.com

171 pointsTomte50 comments

I haven't played a lot of IF since I was a kid, but I recently tried Counterfeit Monkey (https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl) and was blown away by the cleverness and depth of the system.

It's many hours worth of adventure, and has a brilliant mechanic where you are in a world where real objects can be transformed by modifying their spelling (and, later, other linguistic tricks).

So you might have a Can, but you need to drive far away, so you turn your Can into a Car with your Letter-changing Device. Or maybe you use your Homonym Machine to turn the wooden Bat in your hand to a Bat that flies around. The possibilities are endless, and the game has considered an amazing number of them.

It's all set in a deep and realistic European island, with laws regarding linguistic manipulation, etc.

Emily Short has a collection of world class IF games and is my favorite writer. I haven't played Counterfeit Monkey yet, but have played some of her other work like City of Secrets, Bronze, and Alabaster to name a few.

Another good IF game is "Blue Lacuna" by Aaron Reed which has its own website. I'm about 1/3 the way through. I practically wept in the first 15 minutes of play. The technology and writing of modern IF far surpasses the INFOCOM games of the 80s.

I don't know this game but I would be willing to bet huge amounts of money that it was written by Emily Short.

It was

<3 Emily Short <3 I should replay Savoir Faire.

Hi! Thanks for the thread. :)

I'll accumulate a bunch of replies here, if that's okay...

First, I apologize for having a web page that implies that I haven't done any IF since 2017. Cragne Manor actually came out in late 2018, and I added it to my IF page, but I forgot to update the "last updated" date. (Fixed now.)

I'm still messing around with IF ideas. I'm working on a prototype for a non-parser-based IF system. It's a work in progress and I don't have anything to show off yet; we'll see how far it gets over the summer.

I suspect that dozens, nay, scores of people are trying to make IF work on Alexa. It's not an area that I'm working on myself, but I know some of the folks at Earplay (mentioned above). My understanding is that getting Alexa to respond to commands is pretty easy; the hard part is designing a game that plays well in narrated form.

Yes, I can sometimes be spotted wandering around the Somerville/Cambridge area. We have a monthly IF meetup at MIT: http://pr-if.org/ Anyone is welcome to drop in.

And also! If I may spend a moment promoting a current project... we are organizing an IF conference called NarraScope this summer. It will be held at MIT, June 14-16.

http://narrascope.org/

It will be cool. People should come.

Even as a long-time IF fan, Hadean Lands blew my mind. It remembers exactly how you solved every puzzle, so if for instance you find a door locked again after you figured out how to unlock it, all you have to do is say you want to open the door and the game replays the whole process of unlocking it (to make up an example so as to avoid spoiling anything). Some of the puzzles get quite involved, so the depth of the system's memory is quite impressive.

Also the symbolic way it handles alchemy, such that objects are understood to be aligned with various planets or aromas, allowing you to get creative with alchemical recipes, is probably the closest I've seen to "real" alchemy.

I bought this for iOS just before I switched to Android so never got a chance to play it.

Just checked again and still no android port, guess I should buy it again for desktop as everything I've heard about it does sound amazing.

Zarf is also responsible for reskinning the social game Mafia as Werewolves. I find it fascinating that we know who invented both Mafia and Werewolves. It's like knowing who invented Red Rover.

See Other Works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Plotkin

It's always nice to see IF featured on HN frontpage. Especially of such quality as Zarf's. It's been a while since I last played "Spider and Web," and there's a lot of new stuff for me to discover, too.

Even if you don't play, do yourself a favour and read "Lighan ses Lion". Brilliant idea.

If you like _Lighan ses Lion_, you should consider playing _The Gostak_: https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=w5s3sv43s3p98v45 (not by Zarf, but excellent even so).

It's not on this page, but Zarf's System's Twilight is a fantastic puzzle game, one of my favorites. It was the first shareware game I paid for, way way back in the day (early 90s). (https://www.eblong.com/zarf/twilight/index.html)

If you're never played System's Twilight before you can get a taste for it via in-browser emulation on the Internet Archive[1]. Note that the emulator doesn't support color or sound and the animations don't run at full speed, so if you enjoy what you see there you should install a better-featured emulator like Basilisk II to experience the game as it was intended.

If you have previously played System's Twilight and want a new game along the same lines, check out System Syzygy[2] which is directly inspired by System's Twilight (and similar games from the same era like 3 in Three and The Fool's Errand). It's also written in Rust(!) and fully open source(!!)[3] in case you want to get a peak under the hood (or cheat a bit).

[1] https://archive.org/details/SystemsTwilight

[2] https://mdsteele.games/syzygy/

[3] https://github.com/mdsteele/syzygy

> If you have previously played System's Twilight and want a new game along the same lines, check out System Syzygy[2] which is directly inspired by System's Twilight

Oh, cool—I've never even heard of that. Thanks for sharing!

Zarf has a comprehensive list of references to the IF world, except for this one book, a critical study of IF as both literature and game:

Twisty Little Passages - An Approach to Interactive Fiction By Nick Montfort

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/twisty-little-passages

Every couple of years I drop in to see if there's a simple way to publish IF games on the web yet. There isn't. It's a shame.

No one's going to pay for text-based IF games and no one wants to install software to play them. The web is the ideal delivery channel for the medium, but no one seems interested in making good publishing tools for it.

(To be clear, I’m not saying it isn't possible, just that the tools for doing so are fiddly and ugly.)

I've actually been bouncing this idea around for a bit. How many people do you know that are interested in an IF publishing platform?

There is actually a few companies doing stuff with IF right now. There is one that gives you their tools and publishes your game on their site and takes a cut of the royalties. I played a preview of one some highschool girl wrote about going to a school of magic and it was a blast.

Twine has been remarkably successful in this space. (http://twinery.org/)

Parchment seems to work well for Z machine games: http://iplayif.com/?story=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ifarchive.org%2Fi...

I wonder why speech-based IF games are essentially nonexistent, given the popularity of podcasts and existence of speech-only computers (e.g. Alexa).

Does AWS give you the option to get just a full token stream for voice? Alexa's parser always seemed vastly primatove to me compared to Inform

There's at least one company doing this. Not sure how successful they are. [0]

[0] https://www.earplay.com/

I'm the founder of Volley (YC W18). We're working on games like this as well for Alexa, check out https://www.amazon.com/Volley-Inc-Infected/dp/B07JBKRRNP and https://www.amazon.com/Volley-Inc-Angel-of-DOOM/dp/B07Q35LY8...

I paid for hadean lands and it was worth every penny

Compile your inform 7 game and ftp it onto your website?

Huh? Inform 7, the primary authoring tool for interactive fiction, can compile games to a a static webpage out-of-the-box. It's had this capability for years.

Andrew Plotkin, featured in this submission, wrote the Quixe interpreter [0] for this purpose, which is bundled into Inform 7.

The Interactive Fiction Database [1] has—again, for years—an instant "Play Online" button on the listing of any supported game, powered by Parchment [2], which is even older than Quixe.

You must not have checked very thoroughly.

[0] https://eblong.com/zarf/glulx/quixe/

[1] https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=2xyccw3pe0uovfad

[2] https://iplayif.com/

Most current IF authoring tools allow you to create web-playable versions. The SpringThing Festival of Interactive Fiction [0] is running right now, and of the 20 entries, all but 2 are playable without a download.

And Choice of Games has been successfully charging for their choice-based IF games for years (successfully enough that they're considered a professional market for writers by the SFWA).[1] Their games are playable on the web, but they also distribute apps for iOS and Android.

[0] https://www.springthing.net/2019/play.html [1] https://www.choiceofgames.com/

There are people out there doing interesting stuff with IF on the Web. One example is The Onion, whose spinoff site Clickhole has a whole series of parody "Clickventures" that are essentially little Web-based comedy IF games.

You can play them all here: https://clickventures.clickhole.com/

And Wired did a piece a few years back about how the Clickhole team originally developed the idea: https://www.wired.com/2016/03/clickhole-adventure-games/

I have been meaning to develop a twine based library in Elixir/Javascript for quite sometime, that will enable anyone to create Interactive Fictions and also something called Socratic Monographs. I understand clearly that good and easy to use publishing tool is the way forward.

Socratic Monographs are basically longform articles and goes deep into a subject but the way they do it through conversations. It may enable people to engage more with a subject deeply rather than skimming.

Happy to see there are people who want better IF tools.

Zarf also invented the game Capture the Flag With Stuff, played twice a year by hundreds of people at Carnegie Mellon University.

Current rules (2017 edition): http://www.cmukgb.org/ctfws/

Zarf's original rules (1995): https://eblong.com/zarf/capture-flag-rules.html

Harvard's spinoff: http://www.hrsfa.org/photos/lotze/ctfws/harvard-rules2.html

Shout out to my favorite recent evolution of IF: 80 days. I found this a blast to play ... and replay several times. Not shareware but at $4.99 on Android, a heck of a deal per hour played.

https://www.inklestudios.com/80days/

I see Zarf around Cambridge from time to time. Either on the red line or at PorchFest. He's a recognizable dude. I feel like I'm one of the few people to fanboy at him in the real world. He's really nice!

What does he do at Cambridge? Student? Professor?

They mean the city of Cambridge, next to Boston, MA, USA.

Which is also full of Universities.

Thank you. As someone who doesn't live in that part of the US, I frequently forget about Cambridge the US city.

It's amazing that the community is still going strong. It's probably never going to be more than a small subculture, but I smile everytime I see these small but incredibly deep cultures staying strong, thanks to the internet.

Can you play any IF through phone? Siri/Alexa/Google? It would be awesome to be able to play while driving / walking / whatever, and could attract more people to voice interfaces... IF seems very well suited to voice.

There is https://textfiction.onyxbits.de/ for playing Z-machine IF on Android

not voice controlled though

Someone needs to use sound and voice.

You enter a dank, dimly lit room, water trickling off to the side, reflecting the fire from your torch. You become aware of a disturbing, low grinding sound, low growl... off to the north, and a cool breeze following you in the exit to the east.

Two things:

Displaying text, with a soundscape would be amazing and, I'll bet, immersive.

The second order might be a mix of spoken word and soundscape that has directionality. You hear most of it, details are spoken, say on move.

North.

Quickly spoken room details: exits to north, east, water trickle.

Soundscape is looping.

On next command, look, turn, move, repeat.

Voice and or text for user input.

I want to pop in earbuds and either speak or type, and let my minds eye fill in the rest.

No time right now, so I just put it here.

Go!

Exactly this!

Twenty years ago, I wrote StoryHarp in 1998 in Delphi to do this, using Microsoft Agent for speech and sound output and limited speech input (from a small set of choices appropriate to the context). I recently ported StoryHarp to JavaScript/TypeScript (using Mithril and Tachyons) to run in the browser -- but without speech input as yet.

Demo: https://storyharp.com/

Source: https://github.com/pdfernhout/storyharp-js

There's a cross-platform (win mac lin) app called Lectrote[1], by Andrew Plotkin, built on Electron. For Android I use Fabularium, TextFiction (both can do speech) and IFMapper tool. Can't say anything about iPhone.

Speech output is supported in clients Frotz[2], Git[3].

Talking back should be possible with OS methods or Sphinx or whatever. I think speech input for IF case is more about 3rd party tool for controlling terminal with voice.

I also thought about one-handed chord keyboards, so you can kick back or walk and listen while typing with one hand. Unfortunately, there're no practical solutions and prices for keyboards like "twiddler" are insane.

[1] https://github.com/erkyrath/lectrote/releases [2] https://www.davidkinder.co.uk/frotz.html [3] https://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXprogrammingXglulxXi...

I've found that when picking up a new IF game, it's harder to start getting into it than it is with most other games, but that once you get over that hump, the immersion I feel is greater than I feel with other games. The last one I played was Anchorhead and I had a great time.

I always wanted voice assistant/chat bots to feel like a work of IF. You can kind of navigate a space textually, and perform spells/commands. Only difference is that there is a connection between the text and some representation of reality.

I missed this scene by a few years but Netflix's recent interactive experiment Bandersnatch gave a good flavor of it :)

Sorry for the tangent, but what is it with these odd new names for things that have been around since forever?

Every video game is "interactive fiction." These are "text adventures" and have been known as such since more or less the beginning.

Same for "MOBA" and the like. eugh. /peeve

I have seen the term "interactive fiction" used in Infocom's documents. Although, like you, I also prefer "text adventure".

Quoting from the XZIP documentation: "ZIP is the lowest level of Infocom's multi-tier interactive fiction creation and execution system."

Interactive fiction may have been used as an explanation for muggles, like "a movie you can control", but I cannot recall seeing it as a category in any of my gaming magazines from the 1980s.

Infocom used "interactive fiction" as the marketing tag for their games. You can easily see this on their box covers. I believe they started using the label with the "grey box" packages in 1984.

I don't know how much competing IF companies, like Level 9, tried to use the term. Infocom may have treated it as a trademark; I haven't checked.

Post-golden-age, hobbyists were congregating on the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup starting in 1992 or 1993. The newsgroup wasn't actually started by Infocom fans -- it was more serious literary-hypertext people who tried to co-opt the term! But that didn't stick, and it was all parser/text games and Z-code software by 1994. So "IF" was solidly held by that community through the 2000s, when IFComp and the IF Archive started to clue in to Twine and the larger space of text-based games.

As for the words "interactive fiction" -- of course their literal meaning is wildly off from how the genre is understood. Genre labels are always silly when read literally. (Contemplate "science fiction" and "fantasy", which do not mean "stories about scientists" and "made-up stories".)

(I have a soft spot for the term "adventure game", which -- for a few years -- literally meant "a game like Adventure, aka Colossal Cave." But it's changed since then, and I mean since 1982.)

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