Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of Interactive narratives or Interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text-only", however, graphical text adventure games, where the text is accompanied by graphics still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles.
Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are a combination of role-playing video games and massively multiplayer online games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual world.
Text Adventure Development System (TADS) is a prototype-based domain-specific programming language and set of standard libraries for creating interactive fiction (IF) games.
Colossal Cave Adventure is a text adventure game, developed between 1975-1977, by Will Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe. The game was expanded upon in 1977, with help from Don Woods, and other programmers created variations on the game and ports to other systems in the following years.
Phoenix was an IBM mainframe computer at Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory. "Phoenix/MVS" was also the name of the computer's operating system, written in-house by Computer Laboratory members. Its DNS hostname was phx.cam.ac.uk.
The number 69,105 was used as an in-joke at the computer game manufacturer Infocom. It has occasionally appeared in later computer games as a tribute to Infocom.
The XYZZY Awards are an event to recognize extraordinary interactive fiction, serving a similar role to the Academy Awards or Grammy Awards but for a far smaller community. The XYZZY Awards have been presented yearly in the early spring since 1996 by Eileen Mullin, the editor of XYZZYnews. Any game released during the year prior to the award ceremony is eligible for nomination to receive an award. The decision process takes place in two stages: members of the interactive fiction community nominate works within specific categories in the winter, and sufficiently supported nominations become finalists within those categories. Typically there are four or five finalists in each category. Community members then vote among the finalists, and the game receiving a plurality of votes is given the award in an online ceremony at ifMUD.
An online text-based role playing game is a role-playing game played online using a solely text-based interface. Online text-based role playing games date to 1978, with the creation of MUD1, which began the MUD heritage that culminates in today's MMORPGs. Some online-text based role playing games are video games, but some are organized and played entirely by humans through text-based communication. Over the years, games have used TELNET, internet forums, IRC, email and social networking websites as their media.
The National Magazine Awards, also known as the Ellie Awards, honor print and digital publications that consistently demonstrate superior execution of editorial objectives, innovative techniques, noteworthy enterprise and imaginative design. Originally limited to print magazines, the awards now recognize magazine-quality journalism published in any medium. They are sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) in association with Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and are administered by ASME in New York City. The awards have been presented annually since 1966.
Curses is an interactive fiction computer game created by Graham Nelson in 1993. Appearing in the beginning of the non-commercial era of interactive fiction, it is considered one of the milestones of the genre.
The Adventure Game Toolkit (AGT) is a development system for text based adventure games. It was written in 1987 by David Malmberg, based on Mark J. Welch's 1985 Generic Adventure Game System (GAGS). AGT was produced until 1992, after which time it was released as freeware. AGT was originally built for DOS but has also been compiled for Microsoft Windows, Macintosh, Amiga, and others. Scorpia of Computer Gaming World called it, "essentially, a sophisticated compiler", lamenting its lack of an in-game editor while praising the meta-language which allows a user to create "remarkably complex and sophisticated games in a fairly simple way".
Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature encompassing works created exclusively on and for digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. A work of electronic literature can be defined as "a construction whose literary aesthetics emerge from computation", "work that could only exist in the space for which it was developed/written/coded—the digital space". This means that these writings cannot be easily printed, or cannot be printed at all, because elements crucial to the text are unable to be carried over onto a printed version. The digital literature world continues to innovate print's conventions all the while challenging the boundaries between digitized literature and electronic literature. Some novels are exclusive to tablets and smartphones for the simple fact that they require a touchscreen. Digital literature tends to require a user to traverse through the literature through the digital setting, making the use of the medium part of the literary exchange. Espen J. Aarseth wrote in his book Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature that "it is possible to explore, get lost, and discover secret paths in these texts, not metaphorically, but through the topological structures of the textual machinery".
Jon Ingold is a British author of interactive fiction and co-founder of inkle, where he co-directed 80 Days. His interactive fiction has frequently been nominated for XYZZY Awards and has won on multiple occasions, including Best Game, Best Story and Best Setting awards for All Roads in 2001. Ingold's works are notable for their attention to the levels of knowledge that the player and player character have of the in-game situation, with the effect often depending on a player who understands more than the character or vice versa. Ingold has also written a number of plays, short stories and novels.
Nick Montfort is a poet and professor of digital media at MIT. He has written and written about interactive fiction, collaborated on the blog Grand Text Auto, and developed many digital poems and text generators. His most recent books are The Future and The Truelist. A futures studies reviewer describes The Future as "written by an outsider to the foresight community" who "examines the works of artists, inventors, and designers and how they have imagined the future." The book was reviewed as "striking a balance between planning and poetry ... a sober, tight account of what 'the future' is and has been, as well as how to think and make it." Among Montfort's several computer-generated books is #!, in which he "chooses the programming languages Python, Ruby, and Perl to create impressions of an ideal—machines based on the rules of language." The book includes a Python version of "Taroko Gorge," which is available online in JavaScript and has been modified by many authors. Some of these "remixes" are collected in The Electronic Literature Collection: Volume 3. Montfort and Ian Bogost wrote Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Montfort also wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction and co-edited The Electronic Literature Collection: Volume 1 and The New Media Reader.
Robert W. Lafore is a computer programmer and systems analyst and entrepreneur. He coined the term "interactive fiction", and was an early software developer in this field. He is a best-selling writer in the field of computer programming.
Aisle is a 1999 interactive fiction video game whose major innovation is to allow only a single move and offer from it over a hundred possible outcomes. It is notable for introducing and popularizing the one move genre.
Judith Pintar is a sociologist and author of interactive fiction. She is also a Celtic harp player and a composer of instrumental music.
