interactive fiction see also interactive narrative and interactive narration interactive fiction often abbreviated if is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment works in this form can be understood as literary narratives either in the form of interactive narratives or interactive narrations these works can also be understood as a form of video game however graphical text adventure games where the text is accompanied by graphics still images animations or video still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction known as puzzlefree that focuses on narrative and text adventures that focus on puzzles due to their textonly nature they sidestepped the problem of writing for widely divergent graphics architectures this feature meant that interactive fiction games were easily ported across all the popular platforms at the time including cpm not known for gaming or strong graphics capabilities the number of interactive fiction works is increasing steadily as new ones are produced by an online community using freely available development systems the term can also be used to refer to digital versions of literary works that are not read in a linear fashion known as gamebooks where the reader is instead given choices at different points in the text these decisions determine the flow and outcome of the story the most famous example of this form of printed fiction is the choose your own adventure book series and the collaborative addventure format has also been described as a form of interactive fiction the term interactive fiction is sometimes used also to refer to visual novels a type of interactive narrative software popular in japan medium zork i is one of the first interactive fiction games as well as being one of the first commercially sold it is one of the most famous interactive fiction games here it is portrayed running on gargoyle a modern interpreter text adventures are one of the oldest types of computer games and form a subset of the adventure genre the player uses text input to control the game and the game state is relayed to the player via text output interactive fiction usually relies on reading from a screen and on typing input although texttospeech synthesizers allow blind and visually impaired users to play interactive fiction titles as audio games input is usually provided by the player in the form of simple sentences such as get key or go east which are interpreted by a text parser parsers may vary in sophistication the first text adventure parsers could only handle twoword sentences in the form of verbnoun pairs later parsers such as those built on zil zork implementation language could understand complete sentences later parsers could handle increasing levels of complexity parsing sentences such as open the red box with the green key then go north this level of complexity is the standard for works of interactive fiction today despite their lack of graphics text adventures include a physical dimension where players move between rooms many text adventure games boasted their total number of rooms to indicate how much gameplay they offered and the interactive fiction community in general decries the use of mazes entirely claiming that mazes have become arbitrary puzzles for the sake of puzzles and that they can in the hands of inexperienced designers become immensely frustrating for players to navigate interactive fiction shares much in common with multiuser dungeons muds muds which became popular in the mid1980s rely on a textual exchange and accept similar commands from players as do works of if however since interactive fiction is single player and muds by definition have multiple players they differ enormously in gameplay styles muds often focus gameplay on activities that involve communities of players simulated political systems ingame trading and other gameplay mechanics that are not possible in a single player environment writing style interactive fiction features two distinct modes of writing the player input and the game output as described above player input is expected to be in simple command form imperative sentences a typical command may be pull lever the responses from the game are usually written from a secondperson point of view in present tense this is because unlike in most works of fiction the main character is closely associated with the player and the events are seen to be happening as the player plays while older text adventures often identified the protagonist with the player directly newer games tend to have specific welldefined protagonists with separate identities from the player the classic essay crimes against mimesis discusses among other if issues the nature of you in interactive fiction a typical response might look something like this the response to look in tea chest at the start of curses that was the first place you tried hours and hours ago now and theres nothing there but that boring old book you pick it up anyway bored as you are many text adventures particularly those designed for humour such as zork the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and leather goddesses of phobos address the player with an informal tone sometimes including sarcastic remarks see the transcript from curses above for an example the late douglas adams in designing the if version of his hitchhikers guide to the galaxy created a unique solution to the final puzzle of the game the game requires the one solitary item that the player didnt choose at the outset of play some if works dispense with secondperson narrative entirely opting for a firstperson perspective i or even placing the player in the position of an observer rather than a direct participant in some experimental if the concept of selfidentification is eliminated entirely and the player instead takes the role of an inanimate object a force of nature or an abstract concept experimental if usually pushes the limits of the concept and challenges many assumptions about the medium history 1960s and 70s natural language processing though neither program was developed as a narrative work the software programs eliza 19641966 and shrdlu 19681970 can formally be considered early examples of interactive fiction as both programs used natural language processing to take input from their user and respond in a virtual and conversational manner eliza simulated a psychotherapist that appeared to provide humanlike responses to the users input while shrdlu employed an artificial intelligence that could move virtual objects around an environment and respond to questions asked about the environments shape the development of effective natural language processing would become an essential part of interactive fiction development adventure around 1975 will crowther a programmer and an amateur caver wrote the first text adventure game adventure originally called advent because a filename could only be six characters long in the operating system he was using and later named colossal cave adventure having just gone through a divorce he was looking for a way to connect with his two young children over the course of a few weekends he wrote a text based cave exploration game that featured a sort of guidenarrator who talked in full sentences and who understood simple two word commands that came close to natural english adventure was programmed in fortran for the pdp10 crowthers original version was an accurate simulation of part of the real colossal cave but also included fantasy elements such as axewielding dwarves and a magic bridge stanford university graduate student don woods discovered adventure while working at the stanford artificial intelligence laboratory and in 1977 obtained and expanded crowthers source code with crowthers permission woodss changes were reminiscent of the writings of jrr tolkien and included a troll elves and a volcano some claim is based on mount doom but woods says was not in early 1977 adventure spread across arpanet and has survived on the internet to this day the game has since been ported to many other operating systems and was included with the floppydisk distribution of microsofts msdos 10 os adventure is a cornerstone of the online if community there currently exist dozens of different independentlyprogrammed versions with additional elements such as new rooms or puzzles and various scoring systems the popularity of adventure led to the wide success of interactive fiction during the late 1970s when home computers had little if any graphics capability many elements of the original game have survived into the present such as the command xyzzy which is now included as an easter egg in modern games such as microsoft minesweeper adventure was also directly responsible for the founding of sierra online later sierra entertainment ken and roberta williams played the game and decided to design one of their own but with graphics commercial era adventure international was founded by scott adams not to be confused with the creator of dilbert in 1978 adams wrote adventureland which was loosely patterned after the original colossal cave adventure he took out a small ad in a computer magazine in order to promote and sell adventureland thus creating the first commercial adventure game in 1979 he founded adventure international the first commercial publisher of interactive fiction that same year dog star adventure was published in source code form in softside spawning legions of similar games in basic the largest company producing works of interactive fiction was infocom which created the zork series and many other titles among them trinity the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and a mind forever voyaging in june 1977 marc blank bruce k daniels tim anderson and dave lebling began writing the mainframe version of zork also known as dungeon at the mit laboratory for computer science the game was programmed in a computer language called mdl a variant of lisp the term implementer was the selfgiven name of the creators of the text adventure series zork it is for this reason that game designers and programmers can be referred to as an implementer often shortened to imp rather than a writer in early 1979 the game was completed ten members of the mit dynamics modelling group went on to join infocom when it was incorporated later that year in order to make its games as portable as possible infocom developed the zmachine a custom virtual machine that could be implemented on a large number of platforms and took standardized story files as input in a nontechnical sense infocom was responsible for developing the interactive style that would be emulated by many later interpreters the infocom parser was widely regarded as the best of its era it accepted complex complete sentence commands like put the blue book on the writing desk at a time when most of its competitors parsers were restricted to simple two word verbnoun combinations such as put book the parser was actively upgraded with new features like undo and error correction and later games would understand multiple sentence input pick up the gem and put it in my bag take the newspaper clipping out of my bag then burn it with the book of matches several companies offered optional commercial feelies physical props associated with a game the tradition of feelies and the term itself is believed to have originated with deadline 1982 the third infocom title after zork i and ii when writing this game it was not possible to include all of the information in the limited 80kb disk space so infocom created the first feelies for this game extra items that gave more information than could be included within the digital game itself these included police interviews the coroners findings letters crime scene evidence and photos of the murder scene these materials were very difficult for others to copy or otherwise reproduce and many included information that was essential to completing the game seeing the potential benefits of both aiding gameplay immersion and providing a measure of creative copyprotection in addition to acting as a deterrent to software piracy infocom and later other companies began creating feelies for numerous titles in 1987 infocom released a special version of the first three zork titles together with plotspecific coins and other trinkets this concept would be expanded as time went on such that later game feelies would contain passwords coded instructions page numbers or other information that would be required to successfully complete the game 1980s united states interactive fiction became a standard product for many software companies by 1982 softline wrote that the demands of the market are weighted heavily toward hires graphics in games like sierras the wizard and the princess and its imitators such graphic adventures became the dominant form of the genre on computers with graphics like the apple ii the company was bought by activision in 1986 after the failure of cornerstone infocoms database software program and stopped producing text adventures a few years later soon after telaiumtrillium also closed outside the united states probably the first commercial work of interactive fiction produced outside the us was the dungeon crawl game of acheton produced in cambridge england and first commercially released by acornsoft later expanded and reissued by topologika other leading companies in the uk were magnetic scrolls and level 9 computing also worthy of mention are delta 4 melbourne house and the homebrew company zenobi in the early 1980s eduware also produced interactive fiction for the apple ii as designated by the if graphic that was displayed on startup their titles included the prisoner and empire series empire i world builders empire ii interstellar sharks empire iii armageddon in 1981 ce software published swordthrust as a commercial successor to the eamon gaming system for the apple ii swordthrust and eamon were simple twoword parser games with many roleplaying elements not available in other interactive fiction while swordthrust published seven different titles it was vastly overshadowed by the noncommercial eamon system which allowed private authors to publish their own titles in the series by march 1984 there were 48 titles published for the eamon system and over 270 titles in total as of march 2013 in italy interactive fiction games were mainly published and distributed through various magazines in included tapes the largest number of games were published in the two magazines viking and explorer who produced 70 games in the italian language the wave of interactive fiction in italy lasted for a couple of years thanks to the various magazines promoting the genre then faded and remains still today a topic of interest for a small group of fans and less known developers celebrated on web sites and in related newsgroups in spain interactive fiction was considered a minority genre and was not very successful the first spanish interactive fiction commercially released was yenght in 1983 by dinamic software for the zx spectrum later on in 1987 the same company produced an interactive fiction about don quijote after several other attempts the company aventuras ad emerged from dinamic became the main interactive fiction publisher in spain including titles like a spanish adaptation of colossal cave adventure an adaptation of the spanish comic el jabato and mainly the ciuthan trilogy composed by la diosa de cozumel 1990 los templos sagrados 1991 and chichen itz 1992 during this period the club de aventuras ad caad the main spanish speaking community around interactive fiction in the world was founded and after the end of aventuras ad in 1992 the caad continued on its own first with their own magazine and then with the advent of internet with the launch of an active internet community that still produces interactive non commercial fiction nowadays during the 1990s legend entertainment was founded by bob bates and mike verdu in 1989 it started out from the ashes of infocom the text adventures produced by legend entertainment used highresolution graphics as well as sound some of their titles include eric the unready the spellcasting series and gateway based on frederik pohls novels the last text adventure created by legend entertainment was gateway ii 1992 while the last game ever created by legend was unreal ii the awakening 2003 the wellknown firstperson shooter action game using the unreal engine for both impressive graphics and realistic physics in 2004 legend entertainment was acquired by atari who published unreal ii and released for both microsoft windows and microsofts xbox many other companies such as level 9 computing magnetic scrolls delta 4 and zenobi had closed by 1992 in 1991 and 1992 activision released the lost treasures of infocom in two volumes a collection containing most of infocoms games followed in 1996 by classic text adventure masterpieces of infocom modern era after the decline of the commercial interactive fiction market in the 1990s an online community eventually formed around the medium in 1987 the usenet newsgroup recartsintfiction was created and was soon followed by recgamesintfiction by custom the topic of recartsintfiction is interactive fiction authorship and programming while recgamesintfiction encompasses topics related to playing interactive fiction games such as hint requests and game reviews as of late 2011 discussions between writers have mostly moved from recartsintfiction to the interactive fiction community forum one of the most important early developments was the reverseengineering of infocoms zcode format and zmachine virtual machine in 1987 by a group of enthusiasts called the infotaskforce and the subsequent development of an interpreter for zcode story files as a result it became possible to play infocoms work on modern computers for years amateurs with the if community produced interactive fiction works of relatively limited scope using the adventure game toolkit and similar tools the breakthrough that allowed the interactive fiction community to truly prosper however was the creation and distribution of two sophisticated development systems in 1987 michael j roberts released tads a programming language designed to produce works of interactive fiction in 1993 graham nelson released inform a programming language and set of libraries which compiled to a zcode story file each of these systems allowed anyone with sufficient time and dedication to create a game and caused a growth boom in the online interactive fiction community despite the lack of commercial support the availability of high quality tools allowed enthusiasts of the genre to develop new high quality games competitions such as the annual interactive fiction competition for short works the spring thing for longer works and the xyzzy awards further helped to improve the quality and complexity of the games modern games go much further than the original adventure style improving upon infocom games which relied extensively on puzzle solving and to a lesser extent on communication with non player characters to include experimentation with writing and storytelling techniques while the majority of modern interactive fiction that is developed is distributed for free there are some commercial endeavors in 1998 michael berlyn a former an implementor at infocom started a new game company cascade mountain publishing whose goals were to publish interactive fiction despite the interactive fiction community providing social and financial backing cascade mountain publishing went out of business in 2000 other commercial endeavours include peter nepstads 1893 a worlds fair mystery several games by howard sherman published as malinche entertainment the general coffee companys future boy cypher a graphically enhanced cyberpunk game and various titles by textfyre to learn more about the history of interactive fiction see the get lamp documentary notable works colossal cave adventure by will crowther and don woods was the first text adventure ever made adventureland by scott adams is considered one of the defining works of interactive fiction the zork series by infocom 1979 onwards was the first text adventure to see widespread commercial release softporn adventure by chuck benton a popular adult game that inspired the leisure suit larry video game series the hobbit by philip mitchell and veronika megler of beam software 1982 was an early reinterpretation of an existing novel into interactive fiction with several independent nonplayer characters planetfall by steve meretzky of infocom 1983 featured floyd the robot which allen varney claimed to be the first game character who evoked a strong emotional commitment from players suspended by michael berlyn was an infocom game with a large vocabulary and unique character personalities the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy by douglas adams and steve meretzky of infocom 1984 involved the author of the original work in the reinterpretation a mind forever voyaging by steve meretzky of infocom 1985 a storyheavy puzzlelight game often touted as infocoms first serious work of science fiction silicon dreams by level 9 computing 1986 a trilogy of interactive science fiction games leather goddesses of phobos by steve meretzky a risqu scifi parody from infocom amnesia 1987 by hugo award and nebula award winning science fiction and fantasy author thomas m disch a textonly adventure published by electronic arts curses by graham nelson 1993 the first game written in the inform programming language considered one of the first modern games to meet the high standards set by infocoms best titles dunnet by ron schnell 1992 elisp port from the 1983 maclisp original surreal text adventure that has shipped with gnu emacs since 1994 and thus comes with mac os x and most linux distributions often mistaken for an easter egg anchorhead by michael s gentry 1998 is a highly rated horror story inspired by h p lovecrafts cthulhu mythos photopia by adam cadre 1998 one of the first almost entirely puzzlefree games spider and web by andrew plotkin 1998 an awardwinning varicella by adam cadre 1999 it won four xyzzy awards in 1999 including the xyzzy award for best game and had a scholarly essay written about it galatea by emily short 2000 galatea is focused entirely on interaction with the animated statue of the same name galatea has one of the most complex interaction systems for a nonplayer character in an interactive fiction game adam cadre called galatea the best npc ever slouching towards bedlam by star c foster and daniel ravipinto 2003 set in a steampunk setting the game integrates metagame functionality saving restoring restarting into the game world itself the game won four xyzzy awards the dreamhold by andrew plotkin 2004 designed for those new to if it provides an extensive help section and tutorials although the puzzles are not too difficult it can be a challenge for both novice and experienced players faade by michael mateas andrew stern and john grieve 2005 an interactive drama using natural language processing lost pig by admiral jota 2007 a comedic interactive fiction about an orc finding a pig that escaped from his farm it won best game best writing best individual nonplayer character and best individual player character in the 2007 xyzzy awards 80 days by inkle 2014 an interactive adventure based on the novel by jules verne it was nominated by time as their game of the year for 2014 905 by adam cadre it is commonly seen as an easy gateway for people to get involved with interactive fiction software development systems the original interactive fiction colossal cave adventure was programmed in fortran originally developed by ibm adventures parsers could only handle twoword sentences in the form of verbnoun pairs infocoms games of 197988 such as zork were written using a lisplike programming language called zil zork implementation language or zork interactive language it was referred to as both that compiled into a byte code able to run on a standardized virtual machine called the zmachine as the games were text based and used variants of the same zmachine interpreter the interpreter only had to be ported to a computer once rather than once each game each game file included a sophisticated parser which allowed the user to type complex instructions to the game unlike earlier works of interactive fiction which only understood commands of the form verb noun infocoms parser could understand a wider variety of sentences for instance one might type open the large door then go west or go to the hall with the zmachine infocom was able to release most of their games for most popular home computers of the time simultaneously including apple ii family atari 800 ibm pc compatibles amstrad cpcpcw one disc worked on both machines commodore 64 commodore plus4 commodore 128 kaypro cpm texas instruments ti994a the mac atari st the commodore amiga and the radio shack trs80 infocom was also known for shipping creative props or feelies and even smellies with its games during the 1990s interactive fiction was mainly written with clike languages such as tads 2 and inform 6 a number of systems for writing interactive fiction now exist the most popular remain inform tads or adrift but they diverged in their approach to ifwriting during the 2000s giving todays if writers an objective choice by 2006 ifcomp most games were written for inform with a strong minority of games for tads and adrift followed by a small number of games for other systems while familiarity with a programming language leads many new authors to attempt to produce their own complete if application most established if authors recommend use of a specialised if language arguing that such systems allow authors to avoid the technicalities of producing a full featured parser while allowing broad community support the choice of authoring system usually depends on the authors desired balance of ease of use versus power and the portability of the final product other development systems include david malmbergs adventure game toolkit agt incentive softwares graphic adventure creator gac hugo professional adventure writer gilsofts the quill twine interpreters and virtual machines interpreters are the software used to play the works of interactive fiction created with a development system since they need to interact with the player the story files created by development systems are programs in their own right rather than running directly on any one computer they are programs run by interpreters or virtual machines which are designed specially for if they may be part of the development system or can be compiled together with the work of fiction as a standalone executable file the zmachine was designed by the founders of infocom in 1979 they were influenced by the thennew idea of a virtual pascal computer but replaced p with z for zork the celebrated adventure game of 197779 the zmachine evolved during the 1980s but over 30 years later it remains in use essentially unchanged glulx was designed by andrew plotkin in the late 1990s as a newgeneration if virtual machine it overcomes the technical constraint on the zmachine by being a 32bit rather than 16bit processor frotz is a modern zmachine interpreter originally written in c programming language by stefan jokisch in 1995 for dos over time it was ported to other platforms such as unix risc os mac os and most recently ios modern glulx interpreters are based on glulxe by andrew plotkin and git by iain merrick other interpreters include zoom for mac os x or for unix or linux maintained by andrew hunter and spatterlight for mac os x maintained by tor andersson distribution in addition to commercial distribution venues and individual websites many works of free interactive fiction are distributed through community websites these include the interactive fiction database ifdb the interactive fiction reviews organization ifro a game catalog and recommendation engine and the interactive fiction archive works may be distributed for playing with in a separate interpreter in which case they are often made available in the blorb package format that many interpreters support a filename ending zblorb is a story file intended for a zmachine in a blorb wrapper while a filename ending gblorb is a story file intended for a glulx in a blorb wrapper it is not common but if files are sometimes also seen without a blorb wrapping though this usually means cover art help files and so forth are missing like a book with the covers torn off zmachine story files usually have names ending z5 or z8 the number being a version number and glulx story files usually end ulx alternatively works may be distributed for playing in a web browser for example the parchment project is for web browserbased if interpreter for both zmachine and glulx files some software such as twine publishes directly to html the standard language used to create web pages reducing the requirement for an interpreter or virtual machine hypertext fiction visual novel interactive fiction with graphics addventure gamebook graphic adventures adventure games with roots in interactive fiction multiuser dungeon mud which may be considered as a kind of multiplayer or collaborative interactive fiction roleplaying games which are occasionally described as another form of interactive fiction interactive storytelling get lamp a documentary about interactive fiction notes montfort nick 2005 twisty little passages an approach to interactive fiction the mit press isbn9780262633185 keller daniel reading and playing what makes interactive fiction unique p276298 in williams j p smith j h 2007 the players realm studies on the culture of video games and gaming jefferson nc mcfarland co isbn9780786428328 reed aaron 2010 creating interactive fiction with inform 7 delmar cengage learning isbn9781435455061 seegert alf 2009 doing there vs being there performing presence in interactive fiction journal of gaming and virtual worlds 1 1 pp2337 doi101386jgvw11231 robinson wheeler j kevin jacksonmead 2014 if theory reader jrw digital media bafs guide to the interactive fiction archive a more userfriendly interface for the if archive a brief history of interactive fiction a timeline of events in interactive fiction history at the brass lantern website the interactive fiction reviews organization ifro huge repository for text adventure game reviews written and rated by interactive fiction community players and members since 2004 the interactive fiction archive a large archive of freetodownload and play interactive fiction random mirror interactive fiction database ifdb a community site where one can find personalized recommendations for if games to play interactive fiction more than retro fun a beginners introduction and setup guide to interactive fiction games and interpreters the interactive fiction wiki a mediawiki wiki specific to interactive fiction parchment a zmachine interpreter written in javascript and playable in any browser links to many playable games something about interactive fiction mobygames examines the history and future of this gaming genre spag a quarterly ezine discussing all things if text adventures at curlie webadventures an online zmachine interpreter vtevideo game genres listaction beat em up hack and slash fighting maze pacman clone platform shooter firstperson thirdperson light gun shoot em up tactical survival battle royale actionadventure grand theft auto clone immersive sim metroidvania stealth survival horror psychological horror adventure escape the room interactive fiction interactive movie visual novel mmo mmofps mmorpg mmorts mud roleplaying action roleplaying dungeon crawl roguelike tactical roleplaying simulation construction and management business city government life simulation dating sim digital pet god social simulation sports strategy 4x multiplayer online battle arena realtime strategy tower defense time management realtime tactics turnbased strategy turnbased tactics wargame vehicle simulation flight simulator amateur combat space racing kart racing sim racing submarine simulator train simulator vehicular combat other genres artillery breakout clone digital collectible card game eroge exergame incremental music rhythm nongame party programming puzzle sokoban tilematching related concepts aaa game advertising arcade game art game audio game casual game christian game crossover game educational game fmv gamification indie game multiplayer video game nonlinear gameplay open world nonviolent video game online game browser game multiplayer online game online gambling socialnetwork game pervasive game serious game toystolife twitch gameplay video game clone 