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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.
The Interactive Fiction Competition is one of several annual competitions for works of interactive fiction. It has been held since 1995. It is intended for fairly short games, as judges are only allowed to spend two hours playing a game before deciding how many points to award it. The competition has been described as the "Super Bowl" of interactive fiction.
Inform is a programming language and design system for interactive fiction originally created in 1993 by Graham Nelson. Inform can generate programs designed for the Z-code or Glulx virtual machines. Versions 1 through 5 were released between 1993 and 1996. Around 1996, Nelson rewrote Inform from first principles to create version 6. Over the following decade, version 6 became reasonably stable and a popular language for writing interactive fiction. In 2006, Nelson released Inform 7, a completely new language based on principles of natural language and a new set of tools based around a book-publishing metaphor.
Adam Cadre is an American writer active in a number of forms—novels, screenplays, webcomics, essays—but best known for his work in interactive fiction.
Photopia is a piece of literature by Adam Cadre rendered in the form of interactive fiction, and written in Inform. It has received both praise and criticism for its heavy focus on fiction rather than on interactivity. It won first place in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition. Photopia has few puzzles and a linear structure, allowing the player no way to alter the eventual conclusion but maintaining the illusion of non-linearity.
Galatea is an interactive fiction video game by Emily Short featuring a modern rendition of the Greek myth of Galatea, the sculpture of a woman that gained life. It took "Best of Show" in the 2000 IF Art Show and won a XYZZY Award for Best Non-Player Character. The game displays an unusually rich approach to non-player character dialogue and diverts from the typical puzzle-solving in interactive fiction: gameplay consists entirely of interacting with a single character in a single room.
Andrew Plotkin, also known as Zarf, is a central figure in the modern interactive fiction (IF) community. Having both written a number of award-winning games and developed a range of new file formats, interpreters, and other utilities for the design, production, and running of IF games, Plotkin is widely recognised for both his creative and his technical contributions to the homebrew IF scene.
Slouching Towards Bedlam is an interactive fiction game that won the first place in the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition. It is a collaboration between American authors Daniel Ravipinto and Star Foster. Slouching Towards Bedlam was finalist for eight 2003 XYZZY Awards, winning four: Best Game, Setting, Story, and Individual NPC. The game takes place in a steampunk Victorian era setting. Its title is inspired by a line from "The Second Coming", a poem by W. B. Yeats.
Emily Short is an interactive fiction (IF) writer and creative director of Failbetter Games, the studio behind Fallen London and its spinoffs.
Jon Ingold is a British author of interactive fiction and co-founder of inkle, where he co-directed and co-wrote 80 Days, and wrote Heaven's Vault and Overboard!. 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.
Shade is a psychological horror interactive fiction game written and published by Andrew Plotkin in 2000.
Savoir-Faire is a piece of interactive fiction written by Emily Short, about a magician in 18th-century France searching his aristocratic adoptive father's house. It won the Best Game, Best Story, Best Individual Player Character and Best Puzzles awards at the 2002 Xyzzy Awards, and was a finalist for four other categories. Puzzles in the game require the player to make "leap[s] of inference" between objects with similar functions. The game was generally praised for its unique use of magical powers and its high-quality implementation. A mini-game follow-up, Damnatio Memoriae, was released in 2006.
Earth and Sky is an interactive fiction trilogy written and produced by American author Paul O'Brian about the adventures of a brother and sister who gain superpowers while searching for their lost parents. Games in the series have won awards in the annual Interactive Fiction Competition and received an XYZZY Award.
Lost Pig is a comedic work of interactive fiction about an orc retrieving an escaped pig. It was created by Admiral Jota and released as freeware. It took first place in the 2007 Interactive Fiction Competition with an average score of 8.27. Lost Pig won best game, best writing, best individual non-player character, and best individual player character in the 2007 XYZZY Awards. Lost Pig finished with 18.7% of the votes for the Audience Award in the interactive fiction category in the 2008 Jay Is Games Best of Casual Gameplay awards, placing it second after Violet.
Porpentine Charity Heartscape is a video game designer, new media artist, writer and curator based in Oakland, California. She is primarily a developer of hypertext games and interactive fiction mainly built using Twine. She has been awarded a Creative Capital grant, a Rhizome.org commission, the Prix Net Art, and a Sundance Institute's New Frontier Story Lab Fellowship. Her work was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. She was an editor for freeindiegam.es, a curated collection of free, independently produced games. She was a columnist for online PC gaming magazine Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
Cryptozookeeper is an interactive fiction game written and self-published by American developer Robb Sherwin in 2011. Cryptozookeeper was written in the cross-platform language Hugo and runs on Windows, Macintosh OS-X, and Linux computers. Cryptozookeeper was released under a Creative Commons license and contains more than 12 hours of game play.
Rat Chaos is a 2012 stream of consciousness art and browser game created by Winter Lake.
The Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) is a database of metadata and reviews of interactive fiction.
References
- ↑ Videogame, Player, Text. Manchester University Press. 2007. p. 189. ISBN 9780719074004.
- ↑ Nick Montfort (11 February 2005). Twisty Little Passages: An Approach To Interactive Fiction. MIT Press. p. 210. ISBN 9780262633185.
- ↑ Montfort, Nick; Ashwell, Sam Kabo; Cornelson, Dave; Shiovitz, Dan (2005-04-08). "Interactive Fiction FAQ". Interactive Fiction: Other Poetic and Imaginative Writing for the Computer and Writing on Digital Media Topics. Retrieved 2010-09-01.
- ↑ Carless, Simon. XYZZY Ranks Top Text Adventures For 2005 . GameSetWatch. 28 March 2006.
- ↑ Davidson, Drew. Well played 1.0: video games, value and meaning. ETC Press. 2009. ISBN 0557069750
- ↑ Compiled from:
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- "XYZZYNews 1996 finalists (at IF Archive)" . Retrieved 2007-02-16.
- "XYZZYNews 1996 winners (at IF Archive)" . Retrieved 2007-02-16.
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- "XYZZYNews 1997 winners". Archived from the original on 2010-02-28. Retrieved 2007-02-16.
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- "XYZZYNews 1998 winners". Archived from the original on 2007-02-02. Retrieved 2007-02-16.
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- "XYZZYNews 1999 winners". Archived from the original on 2000-03-03. Retrieved 2007-02-16.
- "XYZZYNews 2000 finalists". Archived from the original on 2013-02-10. Retrieved 2007-02-16.
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- "XYZZYNews 2004 finalists". Archived from the original on 2013-02-09. Retrieved 2007-02-16.
- "XYZZYNews 2004 winners". Archived from the original on 2005-03-27. Retrieved 2007-02-16.
- "XYZZYNews 2005 finalists". Archived from the original on 2013-02-09. Retrieved 2007-02-16.
- "XYZZYNews 2005 winners". Archived from the original on 2013-02-09. Retrieved 2007-02-16.
- "XYZZYNews 2006 finalists". Archived from the original on 2013-02-09. Retrieved 2007-02-16.
- "XYZZYNews 2006 winners". Archived from the original on 2007-05-15. Retrieved 2007-02-16.
- "XYZZYNews 2007 finalists". Archived from the original on 2013-02-09. Retrieved 2008-05-01.
- "XYZZYNews 2007 winners". Archived from the original on 2013-02-09. Retrieved 2008-05-01.
- "XYZZY Awards 2008 at IFWiki" . Retrieved 2009-04-30.
- "XYZZY awards winners 2009". Archived from the original on 2010-03-24. Retrieved 2010-07-28.
- "XYZZY awards finalists 2009". Archived from the original on 2011-07-20. Retrieved 2010-07-28.
- "XYZZY awards finalists 2010" . Retrieved 2011-03-23.
- "XYZZY Awards Historical Results" . Retrieved 2013-12-20.
- ↑ Porpentine (May 12, 2013). "PORPENTINE — HOWLING DOGS CONTINUES THE SWEEP". PORPENTINE. Tumblr . Retrieved April 13, 2017.
- 1 2 3 "What's new with the XYZZY Awards in 2010?". XYZZY Awards FAQ. Archived from the original on 2012-07-27. Retrieved 2013-12-20.