I’m curious if there are any audio versions of IF out there–sort of like a “Let’s Play,” but without extra commentary from the player. Just game text and commands entered or options chosen as part of playing the game. Not interactive, though.
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A couple of people have announced audio IF systems in the last few months.
A couple of Infocom classics, including Zork I, are available on Alexa.
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I’ve sometimes wished for this for classic games that I’m curious about but don’t have the skills to play myself (like any of the Phoenix ones). Sadly, it generally doesn’t exist.
Zero commentary sounds like it could be confusing! Maybe if it’s more in the style of a walkthrough and the player is fully spoiled. But I think if you listened to a transcript of me playing a game, understanding what I was trying to accomplish would be as much of a puzzle as the game itself.
I’d argue the programs released for the classic 2-XL talking Robot toy were audio choice IF, especially the more story-oriented programs.
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Yeah, to be more like an audiobook, the thing I’m imagining would probably be less like a real player’s transcript and more like an ideal transcript or walkthrough. Except with commands meant to sound a little more like natural sentences, for example, “Look at the thing” rather than “x thing.”
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I literally just donated ‘I will do a dramatic reading of an ideal transcript of your game’ as a prize for IFComp! I was testing my game, thought, “It would be fun to read this out loud” and then thought, “Heck, I can do that; why not.”
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If they got the voice of Floyd right, maybe. Or what does being eaten by a grue sound like? Since it was first a radio show we could adapt the HHGG Infocom game to speak like the guide and of course we need a brilliantly sad Marvin.
I’m working on such a feature for Storyfall, including voice input for choices with a mic, so you’d be able to play an entire game hands-free so to speak. I’m in the polishing phase at this point so only a couple of days away from release.
While working on this feature one of my kids (who can’t read yet) heard some of the narration and started asking questions, and I realized this would actually be great for kids. In our family we try to avoid putting our kids in front of the TV as much as possible, preferring audiobooks, audio story toys and the like. Basically to keep them away from the screen.
My daughter is actually old enough to play an IF game but not quite old enough to read. I could write her a story and she could play it without having to actually look at a screen or touch a keyboard!
Anyway, that got me extra excited. It’s coming out soon!
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As for a non-interactive audiobook: ChatGPT claims it can turn a transcript into an MP3, with different voices for e.g. input and output. Gonna try that later, sounds promising.
As for an interactive audiobook: Screenreaders read text out loud for you, and blind players use them to play IF. Phones have a speech-to-text function. Is there any combination of a screenreader and a speech-to-text function out there? I would really love my seat neighbours on a plane watch me with headphones and a sleep mask on, seemingly asleep, but occasionally muttering sentences like “open window” or “get bottle”.
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Not sure I’d want to play a parser game with voice commands, but replacing espeak with a human narrator and voiced acted NPCs would be nice… Of course, voice acting for a typical parser game would probably be cost prohibitive for most IF writers, and while I feel like AI voices are starting to scale the far side of the uncanny valley that dumb natural sounding speech synths tend to fall into, I’m not sure they’d hold up across a whole game, and that’s not even getting into the controversy surrounding modern AI.
Used Eleven Labs to make this short audio: https://youtube.com/shorts/sDGV4s87kfg how does this sound @Mewtamer
What kind of voice would you want in what specific game?
Me, I want Samuel L. Jackson to narrate Ensign First Class Blather in PlanteFall.
I like what I’ve heard from 11 labs, but what I’ve heard from them, that I knew was from them, has been on the short side. I haven’t heard, say, an entier short story or novel chapter read by an 11 labs voice, so no idea how they hold up for longer pieces.
Storyfall now supports narration! I posted a tutorial video here demonstrating how it works. You can record your voice, upload audio recordings, or use TTS to generate recordings, with multi-voice support (e.g. a scene can have a narrator voice and multiple other dialogue voices).
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