Interactive fiction

[Ajderniz]

Ugh. I posted the poll before the actual post, so it discarded my pretty wall of text. Here I go again.

So, I'm currently researching the Interactive Fiction/Text Adventure genre. By this, I'm referring strictly to the command-line interface program where you type in commands and get a textual response, optionally accompanied by an illustration. Early examples of this type of game are Colossal Cave Adventure (thought to be the first of the genre) and Zork (first game published by Infocom, the most influential company in the field during the 80s).

In the documentary Get Lamp, a few of the interviewed persons give differing points of view regarding the genre's classification as a real video game genre, approaching it more to an alternate narrative style than to a beep-boop pew-pew video game. Most of these are people who exercised during the evolution of personal computing and therefore their take on what a video game is, is different from our view.

The question is still relevant I think. It is true that what we got today blurs the lines between what is narrative and what is gameplay. More and more games come out today that focus extensively on telling a story rather than structuring a sport-like game. Yet with all of the developments that other mediums, like films against written books, we can form a distinction between them. Should we then, still be able to distinguish between a graphical and a text-based video-game?

Have you ever played an IF title? Have you liked it? The question boils down to the player's perception in the end. Does it feel more like reading a book, or like playing a point and click game?

 

[Yousef]

Incredible test. Changed my life.

 

[Ajderniz]

Incredible test. Changed my life.

Only bangers from me.

 

[DunkeyKong]

Does Doki Doki Literature Club counts? Because it's pretty "sick"

 

[Ajderniz]

Does Doki Doki Literature Club counts? Because it's pretty "sick"

Visual novels tend to follow more the Choose Your Own Adventure style. While you could say it certainly IS an interactive fiction thing, IF is sort of a marketing term coined by Infocom which in turn refers strictly to the command-line style. Usually, you type in a command with your keyboard, going like: "get the lantern. pull the rug then open the trap door", and the game evaluates whether the command is valid and tries to execute an action according to it. It's sort of like a computer-monitored tabletop roleplaying game.

 

[DunkeyKong]

Visual novels tend to follow more the Choose Your Own Adventure style. While you could say it certainly IS an interactive fiction thing, IF is sort of a marketing term coined by Infocom which in turn refers strictly to the command-line style. Usually, you type in a command with your keyboard, going like: "get the lantern. pull the rug then open the trap door", and the game evaluates whether the command is valid and tries to execute an action according to it. It's sort of like a computer-monitored tabletop roleplaying game.

Ah I see, I'll take a note of that

 

[Gorse]

It entirely depends on what piece of IF you’re referring to. I’ve always thought of IF as more of a medium than a genre — people certainly do build clearly non-game narrative experiences in it, and they use it to build all sorts of proper, recognizable games, too.

Something like Zork, for example, is undeniably a game — there are proper win and loss states, you make meaningful choices to finish the play experience, there are “stats” and “collectibles”, and it can be “beaten”. An IF title like Aisle, in contrast, is definitely not a video game at all, nor is it trying to be — it’s essentially just a table of contents that you navigate through by entering text. There’s no winning or losing, aside from either reading all the available text or not.

For the record, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with either of these approaches, and I love both pieces of IF I mentioned. I simply don’t think it’s proper to make a statement blanket on all IF content either way, because so much of it is radically different from one another. It’s a medium, like books are.

 

[Ajderniz]

It entirely depends on what piece of IF you’re referring to. I’ve always thought of IF as more of a medium than a genre — people certainly do build clearly non-game narrative experiences in it, and they use it to build all sorts of proper, recognizable games, too.

Something like Zork, for example, is undeniably a game — there are proper win and loss states, you make meaningful choices to finish the play experience, there are “stats” and “collectibles”, and it can be “beaten”. An IF title like Aisle, in contrast, is definitely not a video game at all, nor is it trying to be — it’s essentially just a table of contents that you navigate through by entering text. There’s no winning or losing, aside from either reading all the available text or not.

For the record, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with either of these approaches, and I love both pieces of IF I mentioned. I simply don’t think it’s proper to make a statement blanket on all IF content either way, because so much of it is radically different from one another. It’s a medium, like books are.

Yeah, that makes sense. Rather than a genre of video game, it's a medium.

 

[Naltic]

I have played a bit of Zork and I love it, I like the idea of using your imagination as the medium to explore the world in whatever means the game is describing, it's almost the same as reading a book but you are more in touch with what's going on and what the character is going to do. On the question of whether it's its own game or not, I would say that it's more of a dead genre that has influenced a part of what the gaming world is nowadays, now whether it's a big part or a small part is anyone guess but it most definitely played the role of creating/moulding the fantasy genre. It's great, it's a classic style of playing and from what I have experienced, it's very nostalgic and fun.