The joy of text – the fall and rise of interactive fiction | Hacker News Reader

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

theguardian.com

122 pointsbenbreen33 comments

Andrew Plotkin has released a few IF games for iPhone http://zarfhome.com/ He has a new one coming out soon, Hadean Lands. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zarf/hadean-lands-inter... He wrote his own interface for playing IF games on phones. It's called IosFismo and it's open-source, if you want to make your own text-based game for iOS. https://github.com/erkyrath/iosfizmo/

Edit: Some of those games are also playable online. The browser-based IF interpreter is called Parchment, and it's open-source too. https://code.google.com/p/parchment/

Back in 2000, I was working at a startup, and one of our rabbit trails was an IF interpreter for z-machine games on mobile phones. At that time, you could count on about 4 to 6 lines of text to be visible on a phone at any one time, and text input was horrendously tedious. Our founder approached Andrew Plotkin about licensing his games, and he was reportedly "kind of a dick" about it. Considering the source, that might have been projection.

I shudder to think of what might have happened if that company actually turned a profit from something, and this thing in particular.

Hey. This is me. I hope I was not that much of a dick, but at that point I wasn't interested in making money off old IF. I don't remember the specific incident, though.

(I'm still not very interested in making money off old IF, although I've tried a bit of that. The Hadean Lands plan is to charge money for a new game which has never been released before.)

Other notes: we also have a Boston IF meetup group (http://pr-if.org/).

The term "interactive fiction" dates from the early 80s, actually. Infocom used it in their ads with the general theme of "We're more serious and important than mere videogames." The term has been tussled back and forth over the years; these days it's more of an umbrella term than a niche.

I think you probably weren't a dick. You just said no to someone who was very accustomed to getting what he wanted.

IFComp organizer here. Pleased to see some interest in IF and the competition on HN!

I'll take this opportunity to say that the comp's judging period lasts through November 15, and is open to the public; anyone who rates at least five games via the website (at http://ifcomp.org) will have their votes counted.

This is the IFComp's 20th year, and we have 42 new text games for you to play. All of y'all are welcome to come join us!

...and most of the games in the competition are playable online in browser, see:

http://ifcomp.org/ballot#browse

By the way, it's highly noteworthy, for hackers/devs especially, that the newest Inform programming language (Inform 7, a.k.a. Natural Inform), for writing Interactive Fiction, is based on natural language -- i.e. "code that reads like English." Thus, the mandatory Hello World looks like below (copied from Wikipedia):

    "Hello World" by "I.F. Author"

    The world is a room.

    When play begins, say "Hello, world."

Really, I'm not joking! For more info, see:

http://inform7.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform#Example_game_2

What's even more surprising (at least to me), is that it actually seems to work, and quite nice! And the feeling of writing in it is really awesome and like nothing else. That said, it's not completely without quirks, obviously (what hit me most, personally, were problems with backwards compatibility between far away versions).

I've been playing around with this in recent months and while it does work, it's a pretty deep language with lots of quirks (kind of like English, actually...)

I recommend anyone who is interested in language design having a look at it, as it is a unique and interesting variation on domain-specific languages that sacrifices scalability and performance in favour of a certain kind of accessibility and power.

I've been using Aaron Reed's "Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform7" as a guide, which is as much about the nature of IF storytelling as the language (which is well-documented in the standard IDE): http://www.amazon.com/Creating-Interactive-Fiction-Inform-7/...

Anyone who is still interested in Interactive Fiction in the Bay Area, there is a once-a-month meetup for enthusiasts: http://www.meetup.com/sf-bay-area-interactive-fiction/events...

It's free, there's often pizza, and the group usually plays a few games together on the projector, or hear artists discuss their work in-person. Come down and play some games!

ooh, playing games together on a projector is a lovely idea for a meetup! i have fond memories of doing that in college, with friends crowded around a monitor and playing through some of the ifcomp games. interactive fiction lends itself nicely to that sort of group effort.

FYI the "Uncle Who Works For Nintendo" game that made the front page on HN last week was created with Twine.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8471580

Around 2009 somebody came up with the idea of marrying Inform7 games with multiplayer, he called it Guncho. I am not entirely sure how this differs from regular MUD playing but I can imagine it's very nice if you want to explore the same atmospheric 'realm' together. A realm that's easily build with the excellent Inform7 natural language tools and world simulation. The only obstacle is finding players to play the game. The platform is C# and open source, I like the idea so much I'm installing it now on my own machine. https://www.guncho.com/

I played a text-based MUD called Federation II for about a year before I moved over to a more popular title named Gemstone III, which was a sort of text-based precursor to World of Warcraft, where you could run around and kill rats and cast spells and such. I was obsessed with GS3 for a few years until my early teens. It was no less addictive than Warcraft later became (at massive scale), and back in the days when AOL was $3 per hour for dial-up, this was not an inexpensive activity. Fortunately my parents wanted to support my interests and for several years I received "AOL coupons" for all the usual holidays, my birthday, and chores around the house. I'm glad they found a way to make it work, because those experiences are what inspired me to learn how to code - I wanted to make a virtual world just like the ones I fell in love with playing. Most people I've talked to who never played them definitely underestimate how immerse a text environment can be.

Here's a video that shows the medium for those are who may not have seen it before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJrC1xD4DM8

I'll note that Gemstone IV (same game world, same general idea) still exists, and is one of only a handful of subscription MUDs that still exists. An account is $15 a month.

And Federation still exists, with the universe rebooted a third time: http://ibgames.net

Gemstone : World of Warcraft :: Federation : Eve Online

Their attempt to make the planet authoring tools more accessible by adding a GUI wasn't the best idea, though.

For those without an interactive fiction client you can read attack of the yetti robot zombies[1] via http. This text stuff is really versatile; no wonder it rose again.

[1] http://www.allthingsjacq.com/intfic_clubfloyd_20080703.html

For most of the games entering the competition, it's actually very easy to play them online (without any need for a special client), see:

http://ifcomp.org/ballot#browse

Thank you, I'm going to apply at http://www.alethicorp.com/

You might also take a look at inkle's 80 Days (http://www.inklestudios.com/80days/) to see how I.F. has evolved on mobile devices. Warning: There are a few illustrations, but not too many.

It seems a lot of the IF games are based around old engines, or at least old engine concepts. Don't get me wrong, I loved the old games back in the day, the sense of exploring a large and unknown world was awesome.

I wonder what would be possible these days with a cutting-edge natural language processing, and a game engine designed to run dozens of bots. Each bot would have its own attitude, goals, behaviors, quirks, etc.

Aside from the occasional IF game, the height of NPC interaction these days seems to be just picking a sentence off of a menu. Maybe you can blame the rise of the consoles for that, but even so I think we could do better.

Arguably, IF has always been on the cutting edge of natural language processing. I'd encourage you to take a look at what's possible with inform7.com.

And as far as NPCs, versu.com is pushing the edge of AI for stories (sadly not available for widespread use, though).

It's really a shame for mobile gaming that this does push hard in this direction. [0] is one of the few developers who make great interactive fiction for Android (and maybe iOS). Their "Sourcery" and "Sourcery 2" games are really really nice (although terribly short).

What I'm missing is also a "Professor Layton"-like game.

[0] http://www.inklestudios.com/blog/

The "Puzzle Agent" games by Telltale Games are serviceable Layton-alikes, and available on various PC and mobile platforms.

Text adventures were magical to me in the early 80s when I started playing them. My child mind had no idea how a computer program could do what it was doing. I was talking to a machine, and it was talking back to me and taking me on an adventure.

Then graphics came along and made them pretty much obsolete.

Then they got renamed to "Interactive Fiction", and, frankly, became a really weird niche.

Has anyone tried to marry IF with voice recognition (+synthesis or recorded content)?

I imagine it could be a wonderful experience, sitting with a headset, eyes closed, and exploring this kind of world. Not unlike "pen&paper" role playing games - even if you have to restrict your speaking to a limited vocabulary.

Does it exist? Any experiences?

I tried it with Frotz when Apple added speech recognition to iOS. It was really fun.

I just want to take a moment to re-affirm that A Mind Forever Voyaging is a great piece of Sci-Fi.

It is, and the fact that it's told in a medium like interactive fiction adds much to its greatness.

Reminds me of the new John Darnielle book [0]. Definitely makes me want to try out some IF.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0374292086?pc_redir=1413707125

I wrote my first IF this year using http://textadventures.co.uk/ although after a while I had to download the desktop client to make things work.

Lately, I'm using TextFiction[0] to play Zork on Android. It's a nice app.

[0]http://www.onyxbits.de/textfiction

Fallout series?

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