Interactive Fiction and You: A Newbie's Guide

Cafe Society
1

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

In the thread Good games in the Lovecraft Mythos? I suggested Anchorhead, a very well-written text adventure written in that theme. Given that the days of inserting a 5.25" floppy and booting into Zork I are far behind us, I’m taking MrVisible’s advice and opening a thread on the current resurgence of IF – Interactive Fiction.

(Current may be a misnomer - it never really died off, except commercially, and an amateur annual IF competition has been held every October since 1995.)

For those who wish to start quickly (such as those who downloaded anchor.z8 from the previous thread), here’s a quick introduction. There are many languages in which IF is written, but 95% of them are written in either Inform or TADS. Inform is the descendant of the language used by Infocom to create their games, and TADS (Text Adventure Development System) is another. Call it C++ to your Java, or Ronnie to your Nancy, or Sonny to your Cher. Inform files end in a .z5 or .z8, and TADS files end in a .gam. The IF Archive is available at http://www.ifarchive.org.

So you’ve got your .z8 file sitting in front of you and Windows has no clue what to do with it. Righto. You need an interpreter. The most common is WinFrotz, available here at the IF Archive. Install WinFrotz, open that, and you’ll see a blank screen. Select File->Open, select the .z5 or .z8 file, and you’re off to the races.

If you have a TADS file instead, you’ll need a TADS interpreter, also available at the IF Archive. (This is also a Windows version- if you need something else, it’s on the archive. The IF community is very good about multi-platform support.) Install the interpreter, open that, select the game file you wish to play, and zoom.

For those who need a bit of a refresher when it comes to IF, you may wish to read Stephen Granade’s excellent How To Play A Text Adventure or Adam Cadre’s general introduction to IF.

There are thousands of games in the IF Archive. They’re all freeware - download as you like, play as you like, but don’t you dare make a dime off of them. Many of the games are absolutely horrid. Some of the games are enjoyable. A few are stunningly remarkable, far superior to anything that Infocom ever produced in its heyday. You won’t find any of Infocom’s games still under copyright on the Archive, though.

If you’re interested in what some of the best games are, I recommend you look at the winners of the IF Comp from 1995 to present, pick some titles that look intriguing, download them from the archive (select the Games directory, and then the Competition subdirectory of your choice will have all the games, walkthroughs, and errata associated with the competition of any given year) and enjoy. Do note however that not all of the games were submitted to a competition, and some of the highest-quality ones (Anchorhead and Rematch come to mind as two that were released independently of competition) are only available in the appropriate language subdirectory on the archive. Poke around, it’ll make sense.

Any questions? Yes, you in the back?

…how do you pronounce ‘xyzzy’?

Well, just like it’s spelled.

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Raises a hand timidly

Er… how do you get out of Zork? I keep trapping myself at the bottom of the canyon… and there’s only endless forest in every other direction…

Then again, I’m playing the “Error 404” version on the Web (here). Is that wrong?

3

Hey, thanks. I’ve been wandering about the site for a while now, have Frotz, and have tried a couple of games. One of which caused a major traumatizing flashback to the frustrations of Wumpus-hunting.

I’m at a bit of a loss as to the games themselves; there are no reviews, no information about them, just arcane titles. Can you recommend a few for newbies?

I’m particularly interested in anything which struck you as having excellent prose.

Thanks for turning me on to this; I can see a lot of wasted time in my future.

4

Be aware also, (whether you approve or disapprove of said content) that there are more than a couple of IF games available with content that you just plain don’t want the kiddies to see.

A majority of these are, well, crap. There are a couple of standouts, either for thier humorous content, or actual gameplay. A couple of these are available at the archive site, or the gmd ftp. If (as a ferinstance) your kids have access to the computer, and specifically the interpreters/games under discussion, you don’t want to just download every .z* file in the Inform directory, and let 'em play willy nilly. Not all of the adult games are explicitly labelled as such. Be most wary of any Star Trek games you come across (absolutely no pun intended), as these are both a copyright violation and almost exclusively adult in subject matter.

That said, there’s a whole lotta good stuff to be played (yeah, including a couple of the naughty ones, too), and in addition to lno’s suggestions, I can’t recommend Jigsaw highly enough. Theater is also a decent Lovecraftian title, for those coming here from that particular thread.

[sub]And you thought your productivity was bad with just the SDMB to occupy you. Kiss it goodbye for a while[/sub]

:smiley:

5

Thanks Ino for the info, and Skeezix for the suggestions. I never have the patience for these things (I’ve never finished an Infocom game) but it’s a neat diversion.

So, has anybody in here tried writing one of these?

6

There are two newsgroups (or at least, there were, last time I had access to a decent usenet server) dedicated to modern IF.

rec.games.int-fic (for discussion of the games themselves)
and
rec.arts.int-fic (for discussion of writing same)

Disclaimer: the int-fic part of that may well be inaccurate (possibly it’s interactive-fiction), but a search of similar names (with wildcards, o’course) should let you find 'em without too much trouble. It’s been, sadly, years now, since I could read or post to newsgroups with any reliability.

Oh, and one more suggestion: Babel, written IIRC for TADS, is another great game.

[sub]Avoid walkthroughs or solutions at all costs, folks. Save that for a last hope, losing your mind, gotta know now, situation. Ask in the newsgroups, or I’d think here in CS would be appropriate, for little hints. You’ll thank me for it, really.[/sub]

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The newsgroups are rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction.

SolGrundy - I tried my hand at writing my very first. I came in tenth in the 2002 Comp. Coulda done worse - I’m in the design stage right now for my 2003 entry.

MrVisible, a good place to go for reviews of IF is baf’s guide to the IF Archive. He tries to stay current, and has reviews of many games. It’s an easily-navigated website.

If you want excellent prose and don’t want to be holding your head in your hands trying to figure out syntax, then I suggest Photopia and Spider and Web. Photopia is not very puzzle-based, but is highly regarded as one of the best pieces of IF written. If you want something more puzzle-oriented, I suggest The Edifice, the winner of the 1997 Comp. (Skeezix’s suggestion of Babel came in second in 1997.)

For a humorous puzzle game, David Dyte’s A Bear’s Night Out (5th place, 1997) puts you in the situation of a stuffed bear who awakens at night and must prepare the teddy bear’s picnic.

CougarFang, unless I’m mistaken, you can just go UP out of the canyon. You don’t need to go there until far far far later in the game, though. I suggest you go to the back of the house (from the first room, go NORTH, and then EAST) and see if you can’t get in through the back window.

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Photopia, that was the other one. I’ve gotta CD 'round here someplace with a good chunk of everything that was in the archives as of the 99 contest, or so.

Curse you, lno, now I’ve gotta find it, and go back and play 40 or 50 games again, in a fit of nostalgia! BTW, what was your entry? It’s a quick trip to gmd, and I’m all curious to play a Doper’s game. :smiley:

Oh yeah, just to keep the newcomers to the genre jumping, you might also try out Zero Sum Game. It’s a… unique approach to the classic Zorkian IF style of play. It’s similar, in its approach, to Spider and Web, another excellent game. Although I seem to recall there were one or two puzzles in that one that were of a “read the writer’s mind” difficulty. Play at your own risk.

[sub]>plugh
A hollow voice replies: “Nice try. No Dice.”
>Aw, hell
Real adventurers don’t use such language![/sub]

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My entry was Jane. I taught myself Inform as I went along, and it’s admittedly more linear than I would have liked, but I’m still happy with it for a first attempt. It’s also a less-traditional piece of IF, so don’t expect to find treasures or score points.

My problem now is sifting between the halfdozen ideas I now have so I can begin coding and have less of a time crunch before the competition this year.

10

I have notebooks full of games planned out at home somewhere from my wasted youth :slight_smile: I still love my IF, but don’t get a chance to play as much as I would like. I really want to get IF for hand computer and play on the bus. I will be back with questions when I get a hand computer…

I can strongly reccommend Klaustrophobia, it is a “real life” based game that involves trecking across the US to get to a gameshow. Been playing it on and off for years and years, and I still haven’t finished, but it cracks me up every time.

11

Can’t say i’ve played any IF games, but www.the-underdogs.org has a ton of IF games, as well as many other awesomely awesome old games…