I was a Teenage Zombie

As a child of the ’80s my interests coincided with the highpoints of the decade’s nerdiness: Dungeons & Dragons, Choose Your Own Adventures and text adventure games. In text adventure games, most famously Zork, the player would interact with the game by typing out commands like ‘north’ (or just ‘n’) to go north, ‘examine’ objects, ‘look’ to view their environment, ‘give’ and sometimes ‘kill’. Occasionally this led to disagreements with the computer where rather than comply it would return with ‘I don’t know that word’ or ‘Too many noun clauses’. Many of my nights were spent typing my way through mazes or puzzles. At school in year 7, there was a room full of green monochrome-screened computers on which we’d wander around searching archaeological ruins (the exact title of the game has disappeared, along with the teachers’ names).

The games were marketed as both text adventure games and interactive fiction, though Nick Montfort argues in his excellent history and analysis of interactive fiction Twisty Little Passages that text adventure games are a subset of interactive fiction (IF), because not all IF are adventure games.

The first text adventure game was Adventure, initially written in the mid ’70s by Will Crowther and then modified by Don Woods on the Standford SAIL computer. At the high point of the commercial success of IF, Douglas Adams was adapting his The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and future US poet laureate Robert Pinsky wrote the ‘electronic novel’ Mindwheel for Synapse Software. When I started high school the golden age of commercial adventure games was coming to a close. The biggest company that produced the games, Infocom, was bought by Activision in the middle of that decade and finally shut down in 1989.

But so influential have the classic text adventure games been, particularly Zork, they are a staple of geek culture:

Though the end of the commercial phase meant the death of financially viable interactive fiction, the form is still alive and well today thanks to the work of dedicated fans, some of whom programmed out of ’80s computer magazines, books like Delton T. Horn’s Golden Flutes and Great Escapes: How to Write Your Own Adventure Games, or other construction programs.

Reading IF

In the conclusion of Twisty Little Passages, Montfort wrote something that has stuck with me: ‘Interactive fiction is hardly out to displace or replace the book in some simplistic way, and arguments assuming that it is will soon be seen as obsolete. What is more troubling is that many people who are capable computer users and who also enjoy literature have never imagined that something like interactive fiction could be part of their literary and computing life.’

There have been fantastic games made in its independent period, but IF still has the problem that if you’re new to it you can be put off by the way the work interacts. A good primer (essential if you haven’t played/read IF before) is A Beginner’s Guide to Interactive Fiction.

It is also now much easier to find and play/read IF than it used to be. Parchment, a web interactive fiction interpreter, allows some formats of IF to be played/read online. The Boston IF interest group, Peoples’ Republic of Interactive Fiction, hosts some classic independent IF (including a reconstruction of the original Adventure). There is the interesting conversational game Emily Short’s Galatea and Andrew Plotkin’s disconcerting Shade. Although IF is no longer commercially viable, Plotkin’s reputation helped him to fund an IF project on Kickstarter well above his target goal.

If you’re intrigued, you can play recent games that have won the annual interactive fiction competition, IFComp. But you’ll need an interpreter; luckily, ifwiki has a list of interpreters by platform .

Writing IF

This year Codeacademy started Code Year, which encourages people to learn to code for themselves. As a programmer, I’d recommend everyone learn to program. Knowing how to do so gives you a vocabulary that lets you think differently about what you can achieve with computers. In some ways, we live in a strange period of history where our language differs from the language we directly use to communicate with technology. However, no matter how verbose and complex programming codes might be, they are still basically more akin to the human than the machine.

In Inform 7 the syntax used to write IF is a natural language syntax. Graham Nelson created it to test with that very quality in mind, testing the hypothesis: ‘that the natural language in which to write interactive fiction is natural language’. As a programming language this is an excellent writing form for both creation and expression. An example from Aaron Reed’s Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 has a ‘complete and valid Inform 7 program [that] plays on the old text adventure cliches’:

The Hole Below is a dark room.
The description is “Cavernous gloom.”
    The lamp is in Seoul.
    Before going in Hole,
instead say “You will meet a grue soon.”

If you’d like to learn online rather than from a book, the Inform 7 website has a list of tutorials . And if you’ve a couple of hours to kill, Jason Scott, a technology historian and documentary filmmaker, has a fascinating documentary on IF, Get Lamp.

The diversity represented in broader fiction have their counterparts in IF. It’s likely that anything you’ve written for print could be expressed in IF, so perhaps it’s time to start playing/reading/interacting/writing/programming.