Illustration: a “feelie” for the winning entry of 2004, Paul O’Brian’s “Luminous Horizons”. Image by J. Robinson Wheeler.
Every year in October and November I lock the door, take the receiver out of its cradle and put up a note saying I am not in; I am judging in the annual interactive fiction competition, IFComp. Interactive Fiction is the fancy name that a long time ago (in computer years) Infocom gave to its text adventures, a game type in which players explore fictional worlds using text commands. Infocom has long since ceased to be, but a large group of amateur authors still produces a vast body of text games.
Programmer-authors enter the competition to write the games, and all others can enter as a judge. Judges are required to play at least five games for at most two hours, after which they have to rate the game. The competition starts around October 1.
OK, so October is still a long(ish) way ahead, and as I write this, authors and beta testers are still polishing their games; but that will give you, dear reader, a chance to (re)acquaint yourself with the genre. It’s where literature and the computer had a love-child. (The not so gross and more popular description is: a crossword puzzle at war with a narrative.)
The IF Comp, as it’s known, is organized every year by the denizens of the Usenet-newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction. As that name suggests, these people do not think they are creating “mere” games; Literature is the name of their art. And so, perhaps, it is not strange that published authors are drawn to the form. Douglas Adams (co-)wrote the “Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” game and “Bureaucracy”, and … there are more, dangit!, I am sure (answers in the Comments, please). The opposite also happens; Adam Cadre and Graham Nelson, some of the foremost names in interactive fiction authoring, have also published p-books.
Last year’s winner was Paul O’Brian, with the third installment in the Earth and Sky series, Luminous Horizons. The series is about a brother and sister who go and look for their missing parents. In their parents’ laboratory they discover two suits that give them superpowers.
What follows is a short transcript of the game. I have tried to edit it so that you have as little spoilers as possible, but if you still want to play the game and be sure that you will be discovering it all on your own, don’t read on.
>c
[now controlling Austin]High Plains
Scrub bushes and sparse grasses provide a little ground cover for the otherwise rocky, sandy soil of this area. Other than the jagged mountains looming a few miles to the east, this spot seems entirely barren.Emily stands here, looking around.
>u
You leap straight up to get a higher perspective on your surroundings. At the zenith of your leap, you can see a black, winding stripe of road some distance to the west. The mountains to the east are craggy and forbidding, and the rest of the landscape is desolate. Then gravity pulls you back down to where you started.What the–? For a second there you could swear you saw the air shimmer in the heat, except that there’s no heat.
>c
[now controlling Emily]>u
Easily, you soar upward.Above the Plains
From up here, you can see that the landscape really is just as empty as it looked from the ground. A road meanders nearby to the west, and craggy mountain peaks thrust upwards to the east like skeletal fingers. Otherwise, it’s just more bushes, grasses, and rocks, spreading out in all directions. Oh, and Austin, who stands on the ground below you.>d
With a mental command, you descend.>talk to austin
“You doing okay?” you ask your brother.“Okay? I’m incredible! I can’t believe the adventures we’ve had since finding these suits!”
“Maybe you have. All I’ve gotten to do was fight a gigantic, terrifying monster that I was sure was going to kill me, then get locked in a prison cell for a long time, then get manhandled by some overgrown housecat. Some adventure.”
Austin looks so dumbfounded at this rant that you take pity on him. “Well, I have enjoyed the flying and fogging and zapping stuff. Anyway, so we’re now in the middle of the desert. Now what?”
“I’m not sure,” replies Austin. “I can’t think this is simply a random location. I don’t see anything out of the ordinary, but there may be more here than what we can see. We should probably explore as much as we can.”
I don’t have a lot of experience with IF, but recently I blogged about it .
One of the most interesting things to me about IF is that most of the games are free and most have interpreters that allow them to be run on portable devices. (The only issue is dealing with PDA keyboards, but I use a bluetooth-enabled keyboard for my pda).
They are not for users seeking graphical immersion, but the platform is relatively simple to program for. I really like that “crossword puzzle at war with a narrative” description.
They are for users who seek mental immersion. The mind’s eye provides much higher resolution than any monitor manufacturer could wish for. 🙂
I don’t like playing text adventures on my Palm, regardless that Frobnitz makes it easier to enter commands. I could imagine that dialog based games could be fun to play. With that I mean games where you have to pick one from several options, that is, where the decision tree is pruned for the player based on the context.
Currently I have only got Plotkin’s The Space Under the Window on my Palm (which satisfies the pruned decision tree demand).