RECOMMENDATION REQUEST: The Future of Interactive Fiction

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Parser excels at text simulation due to allowing a model world with objects and rules affecting them. The simulation is theoretically only limited to what the author can create and how much data the game can manage. Older games like Oregon Trail and Lemonade Stand are essentially small-scale world and economic simulations with random elements and could be considered choice-narratives.

What can tend to get lost in larger parser simulation is authored plot and story. Not necessarily a bad thing as a good simulation will imply plot - like how in Dwarf Fortress a random affliction making an NPC more aggressive can suggest that the character has become the town hothead/drunkard with psychological problems based on the fact his house randomly burned down a year ago…that’s all inferred by the player based on random numbers and events and can totally work. Often the trick is allowing freedom between scripted plot or world events that are brought about based on the simulation.

Building that scale of simulation is a lot of work though. One of the reasons I transitioned from writing in parser to choice-narrative specifically was because parser games are so incredibly difficult to thoroughly test due to the world model and emergent gameplay that is provided. It’s similar to the difference between a linear shooter like Half Life and an open world game like Grand Theft Auto.

That’s not to say choice-narratives need to be completely linear. They require a bit more work to give the player more options than A, B, or C, but simulationist elements can be built in to offer more agency and “game” than a simple branching narrative.

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For one person, absolutely. But a world like Grand Theft Auto certainly isn’t built by a single person. And Dwarf Fortress has been going on for decades; today’s DF complexity is the result of countless development hours. Not to mention the money it took to build those systems. The time/money are luxuries that force most of us to scope our projects way down.

But if I look at the tools available to non-IF developers, with things like Direct3D, PhysX, free 3D models, free pixel art assets, sound effects libraries, and so forth, there is quite a lot to help a small team get a leg up.

I don’t think the IF community has quite such a deep bag of tricks to support developers. For example, over on ifarchive.org I see a total of 8 extensions for Inform7. In fact, the current nature of world modeling in IF kind of runs counter to the development of such plug-in-play tools. Every experience is a bespoke work that (necessarily) constrains the player’s actions to a curated set of options, so as not to break the rest of the game. If a “physics simulator” were added generically, then a player might accidentally set fire to a ticket stub that plays a pivotal role in implicating the murder suspect. And I’m not clear if authoring work can be easily shared amongst a team of implementors, for example if you wanted a few people to go off and make “side quests” that you plug into your main story later.

Then again, if such options were available, perhaps it would birth a new breed of IF experiences. A little bit of a chicken and egg problem there. But I think we have vastly untapped compute resources at our fingers that could potentially offer up deep, data-driven games were the tools to craft them available.

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There is no doubt that I’m an ol’ curmudgeon.

There is already a plethora of interactive video games… Just about all of them are some type of shooter.

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The mental exercise I’ve been toying with lately starts with Zork.

Personally I think the IF definition breaks down somewhere around here regardless of the other points:

Next, rather than static images, replace the locations with full 3D locations where physically exiting a location equates to “go east” and such.

I think if you can only move within the rooms (ie. move the character freely) you don’t have IF, you have a graphic adventure. If you can only move between rooms it’s still IF, just illustrated IF.

The end result would probably look something like Myst or Kenji Eno’s D. I think both of those games have a fair claim to being closer to interactive fiction than they are to graphic adventures, especially if you throw out some of the audio, video, and animated elements and leave only still graphics.

This is probably a spectrum because you can give degrees of freedom of movement. You can also have the POV snap to objects (which I think is actually the case in D), rather than snapping to rooms.

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There are quite a few more extensions than that. IFArchive isn’t as good for discovery. If you go into the Public Library in the IDE there are hundreds of extensions. Inform 7 is a mature platform that hasn’t been updated for years. And that’s not a big deal. There’s only so many different ways to make a specifically Infocom-style parser game and with Inform 7, Inform 6, and TADS and Dialog it’s possible. I7 is due for an update, and if it does, that’s cool, if it doesn’t, it’s still useable.

If you want to make a game completely out of words, there are proven ways to do so, and new ones being developed as we speak. Dialog is a new parser engine. Inform 7 is due for a planned upgrade. Ink is a really good tool that plugs into everything and does conversation programming really well. Twine shows no sign of stopping. Elm Story Engine is a specific one I’m following with interest.

Many of these are incorporating media a lot more, but encouraging it into a completely unrecognizable form (specifically that minimizes the importance of the words) for “the future” means that a developer might not be making IF. Which is cool! IF is a very specific niche of gaming that informs (no pun intended) writing and plotting for other types of games. Fiction in a text form is always going to be a form of reading and always going to be a form of gaming just like there are people for whom model railroading is fun and making the trains bigger and computerized and rideable isn’t necessarily the future for them either.

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A post was split to a new topic: Escape Room TV Shows (split from The Future of Interactive Fiction)

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That kind of gets into the “PR problem” issue IMHO. I haven’t touched Inform 7 myself in years; the “english-like” syntax turned me right off. So I wasn’t aware the IDE functioned in that way. As someone just looking around, trying to get a feel of the IF landscape, it would not be so obvious that there is more support but only after one installs the Inform 7 IDE. I wasn’t aware of Elm Story Engine, so thank you for that.

I kind of liked that Escape Room movie. It was dumb, but a fun-kind-of-dumb.

@pbparjeter
Myst probably contains more “story” than Zork. And I don’t really see any reason why Myst couldn’t be done as a text adventure, and Zork in the Myst style (which I guess they were trying to do with Return to Zork and Zork Nemesis). It becomes a kind of “the novel” vs. “the film adaptation of the novel” difference. Both media types have their strengths, but at the end of the day both are interactive and both are telling the same work of fiction. It does feel, to me at least, like a very blurry line.

If pushing buttons as user input in a Twine game is considered “within the realm of IF” then that line blurs even more, IMHO, because then it seems to boil down to “is the world itself being presented to the player as text or not?” Which of course I enjoy a lot; I love to read! But it is also a little hard for me to draw any firm line in the sand that says, “People who don’t want to read all that text are excluded from the world of interactive fiction.” just because they preferred a movie over a book. But this is, perhaps, being overly pedantic about the meanings of the individual words “interactive” and “fiction.”

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As we generally speak of IF here I believe many people equate IF with “text adventures” and the line seems to be “reading text is the primary form of communication.” A movie and a book can tell the same story and can both be “fiction” but each is a different experience - some people like movies but not books and vice-versa and never will the two be confused with each other. You can re-create Zork in 3D VR, but that has more in common with a movie experience than a book experience. If you remove the text from a text adventure game it’s an adventure game - which is necessarily several steps further away from IF (as we in our tiny niche consider it). And that’s not a bad thing.

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That is precisely the point I was trying to make in the last line I wrote,

"But this is, perhaps, being overly pedantic about the meanings of the individual words “interactive” and “fiction.”

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I read, like…some of this thread, not all of it, but from a quick skim it looks like nobody’s mentioned what I’m gonna just call, like, CYOA-y Stuff. Stuff like Choice of Games and high-quality Twine stuff.

To be honest I’m fairly convinced that, by mass, they’re easily the present of interactive fiction, it’s just that they’re pretty different than what we here are, well, here for. As an example, look at the numbers difference between Hadean Lands reviews on Steam and Wayhaven Chronicles - and Wayhaven Chronicles has two books AND a pretty cracking Patreon; if you look at the forum activity of the Choice of Games forums, they’re pretty lively. Obviously “does it sell” isn’t a perfect way to measure, like, popularity, but…it does seem like the CoG fanbase alone is significantly bigger than, like, us.

As a point of interest, I’ve seen the Vampire: The Masquerade games from Choice of Games referenced in totally unrelated gaming contexts, which is wild! Obviously, like, that’s the franchise doing all the heavy lifting there. Anyways, I think while commercial success doesn’t necessarily indicate quality or longevity it does seem like it indicates demand.

So, uh, hmm, it kinda comes off like I’m dropping in here and roasting y’all but that ain’t my intention, it’s just, there’s a ton of people playing IF that haven’t even been name checked and there’s no sign that they won’t be the dominant strain in the future.

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If pushing buttons as user input in a Twine game is considered “within the realm of IF” then that line blurs even more, IMHO, because then it seems to boil down to “is the world itself being presented to the player as text or not?”

The catch as I understand it is that by accepting Twine as IF, you are (the generic you) also implicitly accepting choose-your-own-adventure stories as IF.

Which opens the door to CYOA multimedia like Bandersnatch as others have noted, which does not use text. Is it listed on IFDB just because the creator used Twine in the creative process? I don’t think so, I think it really does work the same way as a lot of Twine games.

Opposite this, I look at Sunless Sea and I don’t see interactive fiction, I see a RPG game primarily. I know there are some IF conventions but those seem minor to me.

Which to me would mean that games become more IF-ish the more fixed the interface is, and more adventure-ish the less fixed the interface is. Or at least that is one big part of it.

I think there is a Wittgenstein thing about games that applies here. Eg. chess and ring around the rosie have nothing in common but are both games.

I am not too familiar with his full argument but I think the idea is that terms are defined by family attributes (ie. each game shares a quality with one other game) rather than definite attributes (all games must have a certain attribute).

So there is room for edge cases of multimedia games that are heavily based on IF conventions, while there are IF games that everyone knows are IF through convention/tradition.

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The future of IF is writing IF on you phone, publishing it in under an hour, consuming it in under 10 minutes and sharing it with friends as a “shared cultural background” that you can talk about at the coffee machine / in the bus / etc.

The world universe of fanfiction writers is largely untapped when it comes to making those fiction interactive. Would it make for interesting IF ? In 95% of the case, probably not. Would it open the mind of the wannabe writers out there so that a few very good works of IF come out of it ? Most certainly yes.

So this is my vision for the future of IF : a whole lot more of shitty but more easily accessible shorter fiction.

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So, you type fast and read slow? I like your ideal, BTW. Here’s hoping that it will come to pass. I long for the days that we can write IF at the speed of speaking it. That’s basically real-time IF.

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I’m sure a lot of interesting hybrids can be developed, and I’m also quite intrigued by the ideas which Graham Nelson hinted at (combining Inform 7 with game engines like Unity, for example), or which were mentioned upthread.

Having said that, I consider IF to be a form of game (or work of interactive literature) where the primary means of communication and interaction with the players is text. The players get a textual description of a situation, and they interact by typing in commands (in parser-based IF) or by choosing one of several options expressed in words (in choice-based/CYOA-style IF). The medium is essentially prose (or rather, written language, since it could also be poetry, but you know what I mean).
There might be graphics for embellishment, but they are not essential.

I think characterizing verbs (which ones?) as “redundant” already presupposes some of the positions which are actually at issue. But okay, for the sake of the argument.

After that first step, it’s still IF in my view, as it’s still a story told in prose and interacted with in prose.
(Though I’d say – as a side remark, because not germane to the terminology question – the author needs to think carefully how to make the puzzles and gameplay interesting lest it turns into a use-everything-on-everything exercise.)

At that point (step 2), I’d say.
If you cut out the textual description and the player gets the gameplay information via graphics and not via prose, i.e. if the environment is essentially depicted rather than described, it’s not really IF any more.

To be clear, and echoing what Hanon said above: that doesn’t make such a game less worthwhile or less interesting, just not IF. Not everything needs to be IF to be fun, engaging, and narratively engrossing. (See graphical point-and-click adventures, for example. Though unfortunately, the point when those were the future already seems to lie in the past, too.)

And I think there’s an important meta-argument that hasn’t really been mentioned yet:
The more all-encompassing the term becomes, the less useful it will be for purposes of discussion, taxonomy, and just finding games. Similar to how nearly everything on Steam seems to be tagged “adventure”, making that tag basically useless.

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CoG is a good example of how IF can be commercially successful. The Vampire franchise is also popular across genres - I’ve heard V:tM mentioned outside of roleplaying circles by people who would crinkle their nose if offered multi-sided dice, so there are going to be fans who will seek out every experience available with their chosen IP. CoG probably produces the most book-like and text-heavy choice-narratives there are with word counts rivaling and exceeding that of novels.

The other one that I don’t remember has been mentioned is Inkle’s 80 Days. That was a hugely successful game that got a writeup in Time magazine. That is definitely IF since it contains essential text and choices, only “game-ifying” it with randomization and QBN conventions. The crossover here is it represents navigation visually with the globe and travel routes which is exactly right for the story, but the main gameplay is reading the text and making decisions to enable navigation in the most efficient manner possible. It has a lot in common with storytelling boardgames. The other accessibility win is it was available on every app store, was playable in short bursts on mobile devices and re-playable with a natural hook of beating your best time, and it was based on an existing source material so people immediately could comprehend how the game would work. I’d venture there are people who never even heard of IF or Zork or CYOA novels who may have bought and/or played 80 Days based on its wide appeal.

Bandersnatch was an interactive television show which was a unique thing only enabled by Netflix modifying their streaming service controls to enable interaction.

Perhaps the stumbling block is the term “interactive fiction” when people often consider the word “fiction” as a synonym for “fictional material” when I and likely many others regard it meaning “textual fiction” like a book.

The main definition that googles from Oxford starts off:

literature in the form of prose, especially short stories and novels, that describes imaginary events and people.

That implies prose but Dictionary dot com muddies it

the class of literature comprising works of imaginative narration, especially in prose form.

works of this class, as novels or short stories: detective fiction.

something feigned, invented, or imagined; a made-up story:

So especially prose, but TV shows, games and movies can be fiction as well… so all you have to do is interact somehow and that makes it IF, right?

The more common term “text adventure” is probably more descriptive of the genre we’re usually discussing than the perhaps more high-minded “interactive fiction” moniker since any type of game with a plot could be argued as “fiction that is interactive” and therefore “IF”.

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Never take a genre label literally.

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Just to point out, these tools are also available to IF developers :slight_smile:

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Not literally. Just liberally. Life is shades of gray. Different people have different levels of what they consider “IF”.

I still remember the time when Harlan Ellison differentiated between “science fiction” and “sci-fi”.

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I have a couple of thoughts here.

I like some of the recommendation regarding chatbots, I played lifeline, it was very cool to have the realtime aspect to it. That added quite a bit to it.

Also, I have been writing a textually-immersive view of London, around the time of the great fire, 1066. This would be to allow our visually challenged friends to just explore, no goal but to make as factually accurate description of a place/time as is possible, and have it screen readable.

Which leads me to my last topic, I understand that amazon has some sort of IF skill on Alexa, but I would really like for one to appear on Apple HomePods, a z5 machine, where one could just interact with ones speaker/phone/iPad, etc verbally. One would think the limited vocabulary in IF would lend itself wonderfully to this, and would provide a great interface to text stuff. Spoken word!

(Also, if Apple would allow Inform7 on the iPad I would be happy as a clam). Unsure when I went from old school Unix guy to Apple fanboy, oh well.

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I will disagree a bit, the natural language parser of inform7 opens this all up to non-programmers a lot (sys the long time IT guy)

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