I did try to learn early versions of Blender. It was hopeless. v3.0 is SO much better, and it only took them (checks Wikipedia) 28 years to get it right.
Meanwhile…(glancing sideways at GIMP, Inkscape, etc…)
Using Unicode symbols as building blocks to create graphical elements would be essentially similar to ASCII roguelikes or ASCII art in general, and would, IMO, not be the same kind of textual presentation and gameplay that IF has.
In principle, you could build an entire graphical point-and-click adventure out of carefully chosen & assembled symbols, but that wouldn’t make it IF.
Roguelikes and similar games use those symbols to directly build and depict the environment and the goings-on (in lieu of graphics), whereas IF games use the symbols (letters) to build words and sentences which describe the environment and the goings-on. In my view, that’s an important difference.
(But if the pictures are just a non-essential embellishment to a game that’s told in prose and receives commands in textual form (typing words to be parsed, or clicking on words to make a choice), it could/would be IF. I agree with what Adrian said above on the overall question.)
Edited to add:
Regarding Bitsy games, in my impression, they’re more akin to minimalist graphical adventures (or maybe form a subgenre of their own), as there’s usually a graphic representation of the environment, and you move a sprite around that environment, and the interaction also centrally involves that sprite (it’s not just that a sprite is overlaid upon a background as in VNs, but rather so that one of the core interactions is walking into objects and people, somewhat similar to JRPGs). They’re a different kind of experience from what I regard as IF.
A possible narrative focus, if it exists, is IMHO a bit of a red herring, to a certain extent. Graphical point-and-click adventures, immersive 3D “walking sims” (I’m not using the term derogatorily) with voice-over or text pop-ups, RPGs and others can all have a lot of text and a heavy focus on story and characters, but they aren’t IF, in my view.
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Yes, I have seen some IF games that use full ASCII grid maps, and others that just use symbols in place of the text.
I actually had two games in mind but I can’t remember the title of either. I think the one with symbols-for-words is a little better known. I think the premise was that it was from the perspective of a child, and therefore used that picture book convention?
Does anyone know the one I am talking about?
I’m also thinking now that the Twine game do not forget is relevant to the discussion since it is sort of the opposite of a Bitsy game.
In “Do not forget,” you are primarily interacting with the text. However the graphical map is not totally irrelevant since it is necessary or at least useful for navigation.
In Bitsy games you are primarily interacting with the map; however, the text is not totally irrelevant since that text can tell you where to go.
In either one you can probably brute force your way to the end by randomly clicking (Do not forget) or by hitting the arrow keys (Bitsy).
I will be partial to the conversation as, as part of a team of gamedev, we’re planning to make a bitsy-like game with a forked clone of bitsy we affectionnally name Binksi that is essentially a 2D renderer for a script that exists primarily as an ink script (the narrative language of inkle for those not familiar with it).
We asked ourselves that very same question in relation to submitting to SpringThing and whether our game fit the above mentionned definition. In my own personnal opinion, it does, because the game will be entirely playable from top to bottom in the default ink player. Playing in the bitsy player certainly eases movement and allow more interactions that would otherwise clutter and make the number of choices unbearable in pure text format, but I’d say that this is only an affordance to get around the intrinsic limitations of the choice-based interactive fiction.
All member of the team are primarily writers and/or narrative designers usually doing twines, ink text games or linear kinetic novels so maybe it’s just that we see everything under that prism of Interactive Fiction : « we usually do IF, so if we do something different, it must also be IF » (which may very well be flagged as a fallacy).
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I actually designed an adventure game like what you said, except instead of sprites, mine is circles, rectangles, and squares. Maybe someday I’ll implement it. It was an exercise in geometric collision detection. It has an extra dimensionality to it due to the nature of forms and space. I imagine bitsy is nothing more than choice IF in 2 dimensional form, assuming that is the goal.
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It’s a good question!
I recently authored a paper on the Bitsy game engine, particularly as it relates to “vignette games,” and concluded with the following: a) the minimalist features and constraints of the Bitsy game engine, coupled with a shift to more casual game development pursuits, gave rise to short vignette games; and b) Bitsy vignette games often share elements of interactive fiction, walking simulators, and autobiographical games.
Our examination of a curated group of Bitsy games with the “vignette” tag often revealed the developer’s tendency to categorize their work as “interactive fiction,” however my personal thoughts on this phenomenon is that Bitsy games sort of occupy an IF-adjacent space (think visual novels). The presence of a navigable avatar makes it altogether different, despite Bitsy games being story-driven and textual in nature.
If interested, our paper “Itsy-bitsy vignettes: Examining a game development phenomenon borne through the limitations of a minimalist game engine” may be found here: https://www.learntechlib.org/p/221914/
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This is a debate that I really love.
My opinion is that Bitsy is not … traditional IF? certainly, it is not a text game. I think Bitsy makes “minimalistic JRPG”, that’s how I like to define it. However, it fits perfectly within the interactive fiction community because of the spirit of the Narrascope Manifesto:
“Interactive fiction” has many meanings. It describes many kinds of games and many diverse communities of practice. It’s time to bring those communities together to hang out and chat exchange ideas!
For fans of ‧ Zork ‧ The Walking Dead ‧ The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo ‧ Syberia ‧ Sorcery! ‧ Portal ‧ Photopia ‧ Patchwork Girl ‧ Oxenfree ‧ Myst ‧ Meanwhile ‧ Loom ‧ Lifeline ‧ Howling Dogs ‧ Gone Home ‧ 80 Days ‧ Dream Daddy ‧ Device 6 ‧ Counterfeit Monkey ‧ Choice of Broadsides ‧ The Blackwell Legacy ‧ Analogue: A Hate Story ‧ Adventure ‧
So, Bitsy fits very nicely in the same place and spirit of the Twine revolution, because people are using it to share stories and personal experiences.
So… is it Interactive Fiction? I think it is time to spread again the umbrella of IF and welcome Bitsy Games and the Bitsy into the community.
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I don’t think we should ever decide whether a game is IF based on the engine it was made with. Sure, some engines can hardly make anything else than IF but even the z-machine can be used to produce a Tetris clone ( link ) and it surely isn’t IF despite being on IFDB.
So from what I have read above, Bitsy can most likely be used for IF and most likely also for things that are not really IF. I think it would be wrong to put all popular Bitsy games on IFDB without taking a look at them first and determine if they are IF.
I haven’t seen this before - does intfiction need to agree with Narrascope?. I love the Blackwell games but they are point-and-click adventures so I don’t see why they should be called IF (unless we are discussing semantics which we shouldn’t as that is rarely productive). If that is the decision by IFTF(?) I will not oppose it, just say that either we should embrace point-and-click fully or not. I can imagine that the point-and-click community would love a corner here (do they have their own site?) but we could politely tell them to post in “general” or similar if we want to distinguish between point-and-click games and IF. If we regard it as IF, we should state that clearly on intfiction too. To me, the Narrascope definition is way too general for e.g. IFComp and probably what many here agree on is IF.
EDIT: Just want to add that I think Narrascope is a great idea with inputs from areas we don’t normally associate with IF but I don’t think that should influence our definition of interactive fiction.
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No. Nor do the IFComp entry criteria or the “what belongs on IFDB” criteria need to agree.
However, “interactive fiction” as a whole includes all of those programs and services. So there is a broadest possible sense to be had there.
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I made a parody mmo simulator game in Bitsy a while ago, which I would qualify of not really IF.
At the same time, I’m very sceptical of rigid nomenclature definitions. A bitsy game is likely to have dialogue, and it’s going to be interactive. Do you have to be able to make choices that influence the story to qualify as IF?
I’ve played a lot of visual novels before that had absolutely no choices, or the common “it has choices but the choice only changes the phrasing of the line after” used a lot in JRPGs too. Yet, most people would probably consider visual novels as part of interactive fiction.
Similarly for tools, a tool that has low “typical gameplay” and lends itself more to let’s say, a game that is more about reading than “playing”, would probably end up being associated with IF.
But at the end of the day, I don’t think we should try to definitively assign anything to any specific category. The nice thing about art and all things humans make, is that they’re more complex than that.
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Technically: no, though people will argue.
There are subdivisions of IF: one is “dynamic fiction” which is mostly clicking next to continue with maybe a smidge of interaction such as entering your name or clicking optional extra description pop ups that don’t fork the story at all. There might be pictures or mini games or text-trickery. (I believe it’s considered “dynamic” with respect to a standard novel, not in comparison to standard IF.)
While Visual Novels are often more low-agency than IF but usually do involve some choices or perhaps relationship/stat-building with multiple endings, a VN which is completely non interactive is usually referred to as a “kinetic novel” (I believe this was the name of a company that made such things and it kind of carried over as the generic term) - stories that could be read on a computer or game device but ran like visual novels with non-interactive text and occasional illustrations and possibly sound effects or music. A Visual Novel might get the tag “interactive fiction” on itch.io, but players of VNs and players of IF certainly know the difference between the two forms.
There’s also ergodic literature which is essentially the non-computer version of this where a book forces a reader to interact with it in non-standard ways, such as classic “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, or the best-known example House of Leaves or S which is an annotated library book with other documents pressed in the pages or Griffin and Sabine which is a book made up of letters in envelopes the reader must remove and unfold.
Back to Bitsy: In my experience these are little bite-sized screens the player moves around to have an experience, usually reading bits of text (I assume this is where they got the name!) I don’t believe a standard Bitsy would would usually be considered IF - just as a poem is not a novel though a poem is made up of words the same as a novel is. I could totally see Bitsy being utilized within a larger IF as interludes or dream sequences creatively.
We frequently have had the “What is IF?” discussion/argument/flamewar in the past (and it can even become a code of conduct violation here if people try to argue in exclusionary fashion) but the main factor is we in the IF community usually are talking about a standard kind of text narrative or adventure game, where a lot of indie developers interpret “interactive fiction” loosely at face value and can say “DOOM is interactive, and it’s set in a a fictional world and there’s a story, therefore DOOM = IF” 
The line is even more blurry with RPGs which are much more narrative based, and may include conversation trees which are often an element of IF but also involve stats and often random dice rolls and combat. RPG elements can be an effective part of IF, but I am not sure RPG enthusiasts would consider something like “Fallen London” a true example of an “RPG” with regard to genre classification.
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Are those really “two forms” that you can make such a clear distinction between? That is, a visual novel is a distinct form, certainly, but is “interactive fiction”? The range of gameplay styles included in the set of things we all (generally) agree are IF is immense, and some choice-based games have more gameplay overlap with VNs than with parser games. There are also many types of games that are (these days) uncontroversially included in the IF category that have graphics. So how do you define “interactive fiction” as a distinct form in a way that includes all the things we think are IF but doesn’t include VNs? I don’t think you can, unless you go with “any primarily text-based game that isn’t a VN.” And I think that is broadly how most people here think of it, but it’s a distinction more based on the separateness of the communities than the form or content of the games.
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Both forms are “interactive” and "fiction, but a visual novel usually takes this format:
And IF that we normally discuss here is more like this:
There of course are a hundred little variations. A visual novel takes a very distinct style which is usually a full screen picture, paper doll sprites overlaid that represent characters, and a small text box at the bottom.
We tend concentrate on pure-textual IF here and while we don’t exclude VNs, they are technically interactive fiction and tend to have a separate audience from textual IF.
(all grains of salt and caveats apply.)
That’s not correct, actually. What you’re describing is an “ADV style” (as in “adventure”) visual novel. There are also “NVL-style” (as in “novel”) visual novels, which look like this:
This isn’t a weird edge case or an outlier, it’s a substantial category of visual novels that includes many popular and influential entries in the genre (like Umineko no Naku Koro ni, the source of the above screenshot).
That said, I think we’re also talking past each other a little—I didn’t disagree that “visual novel” is a distinct and identifiable category (more or less), and in fact explicitly said that it was. I also agreed that the audiences for the two tend to be separate. Where I disagree is that “interactive fiction” is a distinct and identifiable category that you can define in a way that definitively excludes all visual novels while including all the things that we think of as IF. As the above screenshot shows, you can’t do it by amount of text on the screen any more than you can by gameplay or presence/absence of graphics. (VNs are also the evolutionary descendants, as it were, of parser games in Japan, so they share roots with modern IF as well.)
I stand by my contention that, although there is a distinction, the distinction is more social than based in a clear and coherent definition of what IF is.
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What is that black-and-green game?
Then I’ll defer to your knowledge.
Thanks—I legitimately really appreciate that.
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