Just out if curiosity: are there any IF works told in a specific meter (like iambic pentameter)? Or using rhyming patterns, or as lipograms (without using a certain letter)?
Dance Nocturne is written entirely in iambic pentameter, and some of it employs other poetic devices. A lipogram would be impressive!
Graham Nelson’s IF staging of The Tempest is to a large extent in blank verse.
Nick Montfort recently made a palindrome contribution to the Apollo 18 + 20 collection, and his Ad Verbum makes extensive and great use of alliterations.
For what it’s worth, my WIP employs both blank verse, lipograms (though some of the compass directions are hard to manage without using E), and other more or less Oulipoan stylistic variations.
Great, thanks. Hey, if one wanted to store this sort of info somewhere, what would be the best way? Ifdb? If wiki? And what’s an appropriate tag or category?
Montfort’s Ad verbum has rooms where everything (all messages printed by the game as well as all accepted commands) consists of words starting with the same letter. Not quite a lipogram, but certainly something in the vicinity.
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Ideally both ifdb and the if wiki, I guess.
I think “constrained writing” is a term in use for everything from ancient hexameter to univocalism (i.e. using only one of the vowels).
Ad Verbum has a couple of lipograms too – in the library there are some objects that can only be taken using lipogrammatic commands (one of them is univocalic), and one of the alliterative rooms is completely lipogrammatic – no command that contains a certain letter will be understood.
Going back to games in a certain meter, there’s A Night Guest, which is in metrical rhymed verse – as you might figure, after each scene you basically have to figure out a command to unlock the next one. I don’t remember whether the feedback for unsuccessful commands is also in verse.
As for the tags, in addition to “constrained writing,” I’d use “poetry” for the verse ones (that’s how I found “A Night Guest,” whose name I’d forgotten), and “lipograms” for lipogrammatic ones – never hurts to have more than one tag!
Quite!
Oh man. N+9, I did not see that coming.
While not specifically metred, Ad Verbum follows in the wordplay footsteps of Infocom’s odd man out Nord and Bert.
I attempted using AdventureCow to write a lipgrammatic CYOA, but was stymied by its inability to direct to a new section without use of the word “page” 8) That one may still come out the other end of the pipe someday, perhaps using Twine.
The language of Nevermore was quite poetic, though it’s been a while since I’ve played it, so I can’t remember if it was iambic or not.
ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=0gp3my5d5wi0owtu
Nevermore isn’t iambic (nor does it appear to have any other kind of metre) but the passages from The Raven which it quotes are in trochaic octameter.