Week 8

In this weeks blog I intend to add on to what I discussed in week six’s blog about interactive fiction which is a catch-all name for many forms of story-telling. I feel I didn’t discuss much background knowledge on the subject, or fully explain what interactive fiction is. So this is my task this week to my reader’s. To explain the wonder that is interactive fiction! So here goes…

Interactive fiction is also known in a shorter term as IF. It is a game where players give text commands to control the actions of their character. It could be argued that interactive fiction games are the older version of video games, but are much more restricted as they are only 1 player games.

Another term used for interactive fiction is text adventure games. This is probably because interactive fiction features two modes of writing which includes the players input, and the game/programming output.

Will Crowther was the first person to write a text adventure in 1975, and it was named ‘ADVENT’, then later ‘Adventure’. A man called Don Woods later (with Crowther’s permission) expanded on Crowther’s source code so to make it available to people’s personal computers, as it was originally an experiment on a mainframe. Interactive fiction even though still a text based game has altered from a verb and noun command such as “get toothbrush” to sentences such as “walk to the sink and get toothbrush” . I know it doesn’t sound like a big change when looking at it in this way, but trust me, it is, for example it says on the website-

http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/interactive_fiction.php

‘The limitation of interacting with a complex world by using simple commands became a problem’. It wasn’t challenging enough for the player. That was until such games as Zork were released as it says on the above link, ‘Zork was the first game to include a sophisticated full sentence parser that allowed for fairly complex input’. Many people are now getting in on the craze and creating new forms of interactive fiction, for example the game’ ‘The Breathing Wall’-

http://www.thebreathingwall.com/

This interactive fiction game breaks the norms of usual interactive fictions as the game reacts to the player’s breathing habits. The course of the character and story changes depending on your breathing. Although this game differs from the usual interactive fiction games, it also follows the traditional side as it is made up of text, images and sound, just like any other IF game.

There is a new form of interactive fiction breaking through at the moment, with such websites as ‘Flight Paths’-

http://www.flightpaths.net/

Which is a networked novel that people have contributed through text, videos and pictures to the outcome of the story.To know more about the website and how to contribute, click on the link below-

http://www.flightpaths.net/blog/

‘Storymash’ is another example of this type of website, where it enables communities of authors, amateur writers, readers, and any other person who’s interested in collaborative fiction to have the chance to participate in writing a chapter of interactive fiction. Different people can write different outcomes to the last chapter. If you’re interested in doing this, click on this link-

http://storymash.com

So why not have a go at participating this week, I certainly am going to give it a try! All this research on it has intrigued me to have a go, and see what happens.

Until my next blog, have fun giving it a go!