Fictional games are games which were specifically created for works of fiction, or which otherwise originated in fiction.
In his foundational academic work on this topic, Stefano Gualeni defines Fictional Games as "playful activities and ludic artefacts conceptualized as part of fictional worlds", [3] [4] and emphasizes that - as elements of a work of fiction - their purpose is to trigger the imagination of the audience and cannot actually be (or at least were not originally meant to be) played. [3] [4]
Many fictional games have, however, been adapted into real games by fans or ludophiles by creating pieces and rules to fit the descriptions given in the source work. For example, unofficial versions of Fizzbin can be found in reality, and Mornington Crescent is widely played in online forums.
Fictional Games tend not to be presented in a detailed and formally complete manner by their authors. Within the respective works of fiction, they are typically defined just clearly enough to achieve their intended narrative functions. [3] [4]
A rogue is a person or entity that flouts accepted norms of behavior or strikes out on an independent and possibly destructive path.
Zork is a text adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and split the game into three titles—Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz, and Zork III: The Dungeon Master—which were released commercially for a range of personal computers beginning in 1980. In Zork, the player explores the abandoned Great Underground Empire in search of treasure. The player moves between the game's hundreds of locations and interacts with objects by typing commands in natural language that the game interprets. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's commands. It has been described as the most famous piece of interactive fiction.
A story within a story, also referred to as an embedded narrative, is a literary device in which a character within a story becomes the narrator of a second story. Multiple layers of stories within stories are sometimes called nested stories. A play may have a brief play within it, such as in Shakespeare's play Hamlet; a film may show the characters watching a short film; or a novel may contain a short story within the novel. A story within a story can be used in all types of narration including poems, and songs.
Three-dimensional chess is any chess variant that replaces the two-dimensional board with a three-dimensional array of cells between which the pieces can move. In practice, this is usually achieved by boards representing different layers being laid out next to each other. Three-dimensional chess has often appeared in science fiction—the Star Trek franchise in particular—contributing to the game's familiarity.
A parallel universe, also known as an alternate universe, parallel world, parallel dimension, alternate reality, or alternative dimension, is a hypothetical self-contained layer or plane of existence, co-existing with one's own. While the six terms are generally synonymous and can be used interchangeably in most cases, there is sometimes an additional connotation implied with the term "alternate universe/reality" that implies that the reality is a variant of our own, with some overlap with the similarly named alternate history.
Malcolm McDowell is an English actor. He first became known for portraying Mick Travis in Lindsay Anderson's if.... (1968), a role he later reprised in O Lucky Man! (1973) and Britannia Hospital (1982). His performance in if.... prompted Stanley Kubrick to cast him as Alex in A Clockwork Orange (1971), the role for which McDowell became best known.
Walter Marvin Koenig is an American actor and screenwriter. He began acting professionally in the mid-1960s and quickly rose to prominence for his supporting role as Ensign Pavel Chekov in Star Trek: The Original Series (1967–1969). He went on to reprise this role in all six original-cast Star Trek films, and later voiced President Anton Chekov in Star Trek: Picard (2023). He has also acted in several other series and films including Goodbye, Raggedy Ann (1971), The Questor Tapes (1974), and Babylon 5 (1993). In addition to his acting career, Koenig has made a career in writing as well and is known for working on Land of the Lost (1974), Family (1976), What Really Happened to the Class of '65? (1977) and The Powers of Matthew Star (1982).
The Gorn are a fictional extraterrestrial humanoid reptilian species in the American science fiction franchise Star Trek. They first appeared in a 1967 episode of the original series, "Arena", in which Captain Kirk fights an unnamed Gorn on a rocky planet. The fight scene has become one of the best-remembered scenes of the original series, in part due to the slow and lumbering movement of the Gorn, which some viewers have considered unintentionally comical.
The Star Trek franchise has produced a large number of novels, comic books, video games, and other materials, which are generally considered non-canon.
Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz is an interactive fiction computer game, written by Steve Meretzky over nearly 18 months and published by Infocom in 1988. Although it is the ninth and last Zork game released by Infocom before the company's closure, Zork Zero takes place before the previous eight games. Unlike its predecessors, Zork Zero is a vast game, featuring a graphical interface with scene-based colors and borders, an interactive map, menus, an in-game hints system, an interactive Encyclopedia Frobozzica, and playable graphical mini-games. The graphics were created by computer artist James Shook. It is Infocom's thirty-second game.
The science fiction multimedia franchise of Star Trek since its original debut in 1966 has been one of the most successful television series in science fiction television history and has been considered by many to have had a large influence in popular culture as a result.
The Final Reflection is a 1984 science fiction novel by American writer John M. Ford, part of the Star Trek franchise. The novel provided the foundation for the FASA Star Trek role-playing game sourcebooks dealing with the Klingon elements of the game. Although not considered canon because of later developments in the Star Trek movies and TV series, the presentation of Klingon culture in this novel and Ford's 1987 follow-on, How Much for Just the Planet? is highly popular in fanon alternate depictions of Klingon society and culture. In particular, the fictional Klingon language klingonaase is introduced here, in advance of the creation of the canon version of the Klingon language, tlhIngan Hol.
Mackenzie Calhoun is a fictional character from the Star Trek universe. Created by Peter David, Calhoun is an extraterrestrial from the planet Xenex, and is captain of the Federation starship USS Excalibur.
Chess became a source of inspiration in the arts in literature soon after the spread of the game to the Arab World and Europe in the Middle Ages. The earliest works of art centered on the game are miniatures in medieval manuscripts, as well as poems, which were often created with the purpose of describing the rules. After chess gained popularity in the 15th and 16th centuries, many works of art related to the game were created. One of the best-known, Marco Girolamo Vida's poem Scacchia ludus, written in 1527, made such an impression on the readers that it singlehandedly inspired other authors to create poems about chess.
Discworld is a comic fantasy book series written by the English author Terry Pratchett, set on the Discworld, a flat planet balanced on the backs of four elephants which in turn stand on the back of a giant turtle. The series began in 1983 with The Colour of Magic and continued until the final novel The Shepherd's Crown, which was published in 2015, following Pratchett's death. The books frequently parody or take inspiration from classic works, usually fantasy or science fiction, as well as mythology, folklore and fairy tales, and often use them for satirical parallels with cultural, political and scientific issues.
The fictional universe of the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett features a number of invented games, some of which have gone on to spawn real-world variants.
A chess variant is a game related to, derived from, or inspired by chess. Such variants can differ from chess in many different ways.