Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(p. 28) Emily Short’s essay “What’s IF?” makes several points of interest, although it does not define interactive fiction well enough to distinguish it from chatterbots and other programs.

(The full essay “What’s IF?” is here.)

I’ll grant the essay is digressive. I’d argue it’s simply taking the question of defining IF as the starting point to examine more general issues.

There’s a footnote that is highly relevant to nn:

In doing this, I developed a theory, which is: good simulation of a complex system often requires several layers of prose. The substrate is that which is pieced together from relatively generic bits; then over that there may be a level of additional customization; and, finally, the Unique Items. Enough variation in the way the prose comes about, and the player may be lulled, if not into thinking that you wrote every variation in advance yourself, at least into ignoring the fact that you didn’t.

The nn system (at least in the alpha version) is not concerned about unique prose, but in approach it seems to match the wish outlined above. I believe the greatest potential of nn is as a subsytem of a work made with unique prose. I have no desire to replace for the crafting of unique text, but I do want a way of making the spaces between unique texts more livable.

Narrative variation would allow authors to try new tricks, like including 30+ people in a room. This has been attempted before, in The Battle of Walcot Keep. With so many characters moving around, it is highly difficult to keep track of what is going on. If the text was condensed and included narrative variation the descriptions would flow naturally.

I could also see narrative variation working with the “object highlighting” system of Nothing More, Nothing Less. (Essentially, the game only describes objects when they become important, giving the impression of a house that is not as barren as your typical work of IF.) Perhaps every object can be modelled, and the narrative variation generator can automatically generate a hierarchy of importance based on the action of the game (so “some appliances” only needs to specify a “blender” when a blender is genuinely needed).

(p. 29) Rather than state, as Short does, that “IF *tends* to represent, in some form, an environment or imagined world whose physical space we can explore,” it seems better to say that a simulated world, the IF world, is essential to interactive fiction. The only counterexample Short advanced was Andrew Plotkin’s 1997 The Space Under The Window. This is a word of hypertext implemented in Inform; instead of clicking on a word as would be typical on the Web, typing one of the words displayed causes the appearance of a new lexia, in George Landow’s sense, indicating a section of hypertext.

I would like to present an alternative to The Space Under the Window: Astronomy Without a Telescope, by George Jenner. The interactor here is a psychologist who is having a conversation with a patient, forming questions in natural language.

Glancing back at my model of interactive fiction types, Astronomy Without a Telescope defines as a “chatterbot”. However, there ends up being both a story and puzzles, so it skirts close to what we tend to call “interactive fiction”.

Continuing with the dissertation, there’s an interesting section in 3.3 on the Oz Project, but I’m skimming ahead to “Steps toward a Potential Narratology”.

(p. 26) Well-known text-based interactive fiction includes Adventure (1977), Zork (1977-78), A Mind Forever Voyaging (1985), Knight Orc (1987), and Curses (1993).

I am curious how many readers have actually played Knight Orc. I hadn’t heard of it until the late 90s. Even though Level 9 games went over well in Europe, they (from my vantage point, at least) missed the US entirely.

This raises questions of canon — specifically, it seems like the only works before 1990 that get referred to (when making theory arguments or otherwise) are Infocom games. (The dissertation does make the Knight Orc reference and a few others.) This is in a way understandable — the availability of commercial games other than Infocom is very low. On the other hand, it seems tragic to skip them entirely, for innovation came from other quarters. At the very least lessons can be learned from their failures. (For instance, the rampant randomization of puzzles in Angelsoft games.)

(p. 27) Roger Carbol’s “Locational Puzzle Theory” is interesting in that it attempts a strict definition of certain elements of interactive fiction. Unfortunately there are numerous difficulties with the approach. To begin with, Carbol defines a game only as “a collection of objects, in the object-oriented programming sense,” which does not distinguish games from non-games, as any definition should. Furthermore, “object” is not defined by Carbol as it is in any thorough discussion of object-oriented programming, but as simply “a collection of properties.”

(The original essay is here.)

I’d call this criticism partly unfair — from context it is clear to me Roger was using “the object-oriented programming sense” to mean he was referring to objects as discrete, exact entities (as opposed to real-life philosophically nebulous blobs).

Where I believe Roger’s argument has more difficulty is that his definitions narrow down to “in a puzzle, something changes that moves the game to a desired state”. For the definition to work it really needs to distinguish puzzles from non-puzzles. As the excerpt above points out, Roger’s paper also doesn’t distinguish games from non-games.

Roger separates “corporeal” (in-game objects) and “memetic” (pieces of information) elements, but treats them equivalently. However, they don’t work the same, because real-world information can be manipulated in ways where a property-based model doesn’t make sense (making deductions in a mystery, for example). Still, I see some promise in an approach to puzzle theory that separates these elements and distinguishes what is possible in each. (Dan Shiovitz has a review of Act of Murder which considers this; note while the link jumps to the review in question the rest of the page is a complete review list of 2007 IF Competition games with spoilers. Link)