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DESIGN-DRIVEN APPROACHES TOWARD MORE EXPRESSIVE STORYGAMES a Dissertation Submitted in Partial Satisfaction of the Requirements for the Degree Of
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ CHANGEFUL TALES: DESIGN-DRIVEN APPROACHES TOWARD MORE EXPRESSIVE STORYGAMES A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in COMPUTER SCIENCE by Aaron A. Reed June 2017 The Dissertation of Aaron A. Reed is approved: Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Chair Michael Mateas Michael Chemers Dean Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright c by Aaron A. Reed 2017 Table of Contents List of Figures viii List of Tables xii Abstract xiii Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 1 Framework 15 1.1 Vocabulary . 15 1.1.1 Foundational terms . 15 1.1.2 Storygames . 18 1.1.2.1 Adventure as prototypical storygame . 19 1.1.2.2 What Isn't a Storygame? . 21 1.1.3 Expressive Input . 24 1.1.4 Why Fiction? . 27 1.2 A Framework for Storygame Discussion . 30 1.2.1 The Slipperiness of Genre . 30 1.2.2 Inputs, Events, and Actions . 31 1.2.3 Mechanics and Dynamics . 32 1.2.4 Operational Logics . 33 1.2.5 Narrative Mechanics . 34 1.2.6 Narrative Logics . 36 1.2.7 The Choice Graph: A Standard Narrative Logic . 38 2 The Adventure Game: An Existing Storygame Mode 44 2.1 Definition . 46 2.2 Eureka Stories . 56 2.3 The Adventure Triangle and its Flaws . 60 2.3.1 Instability . 65 iii 2.4 Blue Lacuna ................................. 66 2.5 Three Design Solutions . 69 2.5.1 The Witness ............................. 70 2.5.2 Firewatch ............................... 78 2.5.3 Her Story ............................... 86 2.6 A Technological Fix? . -
14. Riddle Machines: the History and Nature of Interactive Fiction
Nick Montfort Riddle Machines: The History and Nature of Interactive Fiction 14. Riddle Machines: The History and Nature of Interactive Fiction Nick Montfort Introduction The genre that has also been labeled "text adventure" and "text game" is stereotypically thought to offer dungeons, dragons, and the ability for readers to choose their own adventure. While there may be dragons here, interactive fiction (abbreviated "IF") also offers utopias, revenge plays, horrors, parables, intrigues, and codework, and pieces in this form resound with and rework Gilgamesh, Shakespeare, and Eliot as well as Tolkien. The reader types in phrases to participate in a dialogue with the system, commanding a character with writing. Beneath this surface conversation, and determining what the computer narrates, there is the machinery of a simulated world, capable of drawing the reader into imagining new perspectives and understanding strange systems. Interactive fiction works can be challenging for literary readers, even those interested in other sorts of electronic literature, because of the text-based interface and because of the way in which these works require detailed exploration, mapping, and solution. Works in this form are often less visually rewarding, and the rewards they do offer are only attained with time and effort. But text-based interactive fiction has provided some of the most the intricate and compelling literary simulations yet developed. Understanding how interactive fiction works, and how it has developed over the past three decades, is an essential part of the puzzle of literary computing. Characteristics of interactive fiction Formally, a work of interactive fiction (often called a "game," even if it does not exhibit the typical qualities of a game) is an interactive computer program. -
The Post Infocom Text Adventure Collection
The Post Infocom Text Adventure Collection Many of us played and loved the text adventures produced by Infocom in the 1980’s. They were rich in story and puzzles, and contained some excellent writing. In the years since Infocom’s demise in 1989, there have been a lot of good games produced using the Z-Machine - the game format that Infocom was using. This gives us a chance to make these modern-day games run on the computers of the 80’s, like the Commodore 64. I decided to create a collection of Z-machine games for the C64, and this is it. All in all, it’s 31 games, released in 1993-2015. Each game has been put into its own directory, in which is also an empty disk for game saves and a file called AUTOSWAP.LST to make life easier for people using the SD2IEC diskdrive substitute. If you haven’t played text adventures before, or feel that you never got the hang of it, you should read the chapter How to play a text adventure. If you want more of a background on Infocom and the game format they used, you should read the chapter about The Zork Machine at the end of this document. There is also a chapter about the process of porting Z-machine games to the C64 and, finally, a chapter about writing your own games. I created this documentation as a PDF, so that you could easily print it out and keep it nearby if you’re enjoying the collection on a real C64. -
With the 24Th Annual Ifcomp Just Around the Corner (July 1St) We Spoke to the New Organizer Jacqueline Ashwell to Get Some Histo
With the 24th annual IFComp just around the corner (July 1st) we spoke to the new organizer Jacqueline Ashwell to get some history on the event and what to expect from the overlooked niche. Q - What is IFComp and what is its purpose? IFComp, formally called The Annual Interactive Fiction Competition, is a game design competition that welcomes all kinds of text-driven digital stories and games, which are made freely available in order to encourage the creation, play, and discussion of interactive fiction. Q - For the sake of the competition what counts as IF? The IFComp defines interactive fiction in fairly broad terms as videogames whose player interactions center on text. We’ve watched interactive fiction evolve over the decades, and we’re not out to constrain that evolution. Q - The competition has been running since 1995, how do you feel it, and other competitions have affected the IF landscape? The competitions give authors two key things: structure and venue. Anyone at any time can write and release anything they want to. Some people need a deadline to make that passion project happen, and the comps provide that. Some people, left unchecked, will endlessly add to the scope of their game, possibly to the point that it would otherwise never see the light of day, and the comps can help constrain that sprawl. Some people don’t know how to promote their game to ensure people can find it or get the feedback to learn and grow, and the comps help with that. Q - The IFComp has an interesting prize pool system where donors can enter prizes ranging from cash to food to professional services. -
Electronic Literature” Was Going on at the Boston Public Library That Evening of April 25, 2001
one THE PLEASURE OF THE TEXT ADVENTURE It was strange enough that a reading of “electronic literature” was going on at the Boston Public Library that evening of April 25, 2001. About a hun- dred people were gathered in the main auditorium, lured by the publicity from sponsoring organizations—the Boston Cyberarts Festival and the Electronic Literature Organization—and clearly interested to see what new sorts of literary works people were creating for computers. The focus was not only on the author on stage, but also on the image being projected from a computer beside the author. But was something wrong with the screen as the first reader looked up to introduce his work? Instead of a Web browser or some sort of e-book interface, as one would expect from contemporary computers, there was an obsolete-looking command line.Was this going to be some homage to antiquated entertainment software of the 1980s? A nod to the influence of Pac-Man, or something, before the more serious stuff kicked in? It may have been hard to tell what it was, for Adam Cadre had only a few minutes to start in on a reading of Photopia, a work of interactive fic- tion in different segments, each of which is told in a different voice. The work, winner of the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition, used an inter- face that would be familiar to players of the famous early interactive fiction Zork, but Photopia was in many ways unlike anything that had been done in the 1980s or at any time before. -
A Sequence of Possibilities
A Sequence of Possibilities Constructive fictions, quantum authoring, and the search for an ideal story system A thesis paper submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Fine Arts in Digital Arts and New Media University of California Santa Cruz by Aaron A. Reed June 2011 [Edition 1: June 9, 2011] ABSTRACT The rise of the interactive story over the past few decades has presented the- orists and authors with a number of significant conceptual challenges, among the most foundational of which is the question of how to produce compelling experi- ences with nondeterministic and participatory narratives. While some preliminary attempts at creating taxonomies to catalogue the space of interactive stories have been advanced, there is still a confusion in both terminology and practice of what to call and how to understand the interactive story. I propose to define a particular subset of interactive story which I find most fascinating, the story system, a machine that enacts an ergodic multi-form story using procedures to both vary the narrative and encourage complete traversals. I profile several existing story systems, includ- ing 1893: A World’s Fair Mystery, Echo Bazaar, and Balance of Power: 21st Cen- tury. I then discuss a set of experimental interactive narratives I created or helped author content for as part of my MFA thesis work, discussing both how they func- tion in relation to existing paradigms such as interactive fiction and hypermedia, and how they relate to the new concept of the story system. Several insights arose out of these experiments, including the concept of quantum authoring, where au- thors must keep a number of possible story states superimposed in their heads while creating content, and the need for better tools and high-level systems for authoring and managing procedurally narrative stories. -
IF Theory Reader
IF Theory Reader edited by Kevin Jackson-Mead J. Robinson Wheeler > Transcript On Press Boston, MA All authors of articles in this book retain their own copyrights. Neither the editors nor the publisher make any copyright claims. Version 1, March 2011. Version 2, April 2011. Please send corrections to [email protected]. Contents Preface Crimes Against Mimesis 1 Roger S. G. Sorolla Theory Toward a Theory of Interactive Fiction 25 Nick Montfort Characterizing, If Not Defining, Interactive Fiction 59 Andrew Plotkin not that you may remember time: Interactive Fiction, Stream-of-Consciousness Writing, and Free Will 67 Mark Silcox 2 Brief Dada Angels 89 Ryan Stevens, writing as Rybread Celsius Object Relations 91 Graham Nelson IF as Argument 101 Duncan Stevens The Success of Genre in Interactive Fiction 111 Neil Yorke-Smith Parser at the Threshold: Lovecraftian Horror in Interactive Fiction 129 Michael Gentry Distinguishing Between Game Design and Analysis: One View 135 Gareth Rees Natural Language, Semantic Analysis, and Interactive Fiction 141 Graham Nelson Afterword: Five Years Later 189 Graham Nelson Craft Challenges of a Broad Geography 203 Emily Short Thinking Into the Box: On the Use and Deployment of Puzzles 229 Jon Ingold PC Personality and Motivations 249 Duncan Stevens Landscape and Character in IF 261 Paul O’Brian Hint Development for IF 279 Lucian Smith Descriptions Constructed 291 Stephen Granade Mapping the Tale: Scene Description in IF 299 J. Robinson Wheeler Repetition of Text in Interactive Fiction 317 Jason Dyer NPC Dialogue Writing 325 Robb Sherwin NPC Conversation Systems 331 Emily Short History 10 Years of IF: 1994–2004 359 Duncan Stevens The Evolution of Short Works: From Sprawling Cave Crawls to Tiny Experiments 369 Stephen Granade History of Italian IF 379 Francesco Cordella Racontons une histoire ensemble: History and Characteristics of French IF 389 Hugo Labrande Preface This is a book for which people in the interactive fiction community have been waiting for quite some time. -
Z-Machine and Descendants
Glk! A universal user interface for IF! Andrew Plotkin — BangBangCon ’17 Glk! A universal user interface! for interactive fiction! Relatively universal, anyhow. Universal-ish. # 1 Glk! A universal user interface for IF! Andrew Plotkin — BangBangCon ’17 Andrew Plotkin [email protected] http://zarfhome.com/ https://github.com/erkyrath @zarfeblong on Twitter Glk, Glulx, Hadean Lands, System’s Twilight, Spider and Web, Capture the Flag with Stuff, Shade, this t-shirt I’m wearing, Seltani, The Dreamhold, Branches and Twigs and Thorns, quite a lot of adventure game reviews, Praser 5, Boodler, A Change in the Weather, an imperfect diagram of the Soul Reaver timeline, Dual Transform, Draco Concordans, and you know how that game Mafia is also called Werewolf? Ok, funny story there — # 2 Glk! A universal user interface for IF! Andrew Plotkin — BangBangCon ’17 Zork 1 (Infocom) # 3 GrueFacts™: A grue can eat doughnuts indefinitely. Glk! A universal user interface for IF! Andrew Plotkin — BangBangCon ’17 Z-machine and descendants 1979: Z-machine design 1980: Z-machine version 3 (Zork 1) 1985: Z-machine version 4 (A Mind Forever Voyaging) 1987: ITF (first open-source Z-interpreter) 1988: Z-machine version 6 (Zork Zero) 1989: Infocom shuts down 1993: Inform (Curses) 1994: Inform 5 1996: Inform 6 1997: Glk spec 1999: Glulx spec 2006: Inform 7 2008: Parchment (first Javascript Z-interpreter) # 4 GrueFacts™: The first grue to swim around the world was named Amelia Nosewig. Glk! A universal user interface for IF! Andrew Plotkin — BangBangCon ’17 XZip (Curses, Graham Nelson) # 5 GrueFacts™: Grues live an average of 67 years, after which they retire to Iceland. -
UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations
UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Increasing Authorial Leverage in Generative Narrative Systems Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4dq8w2g9 Author Garbe, Jacob Publication Date 2020 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ 4.0 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ INCREASING AUTHORIAL LEVERAGE IN GENERATIVE NARRATIVE SYSTEMS A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in COMPUTER SCIENCE by Jacob Garbe September 2020 The Dissertation of Jacob Garbe is approved: Professor Michael Mateas, Chair Professor Noah Wardrip-Fruin Professor Ian Horswill Quentin Williams Acting Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright c by Jacob Garbe 2020 Table of Contents List of Figures v Abstract xi Dedication xiii Acknowledgments xiv 1 Introduction 1 1.0.1 Traversability . 11 1.0.2 Authorability . 16 1.0.3 MDA Framework . 25 1.0.4 System, Process, Product . 26 1.0.5 Axes of Analysis . 27 1.0.6 PC3 Framework . 28 1.0.7 Progression Model . 29 1.1 Contributions . 31 1.2 Outline . 32 2 Ice-Bound 34 2.1 Experience Challenge . 35 2.2 Related Works . 41 2.2.1 Non-Digital Combinatorial Fiction . 41 2.2.2 Digital Combinatorial Fiction . 51 2.3 Relationship to Related Works . 65 2.4 System Description . 66 2.4.1 Summary . 66 2.5 The Question of Authorial Leverage . 78 2.5.1 Traversability . 78 2.5.2 Authorability . 85 2.6 System Summary . -
The Adventurers Club Ltd. 64C Menelik Road, London NW2 3RH
The Adventurers Club Ltd. 64c Menelik Road, London NW2 3RH. Telephone: 01-794 1261 MEMBER'S DOSSIERS Nos 35 & 36 - NOVEMBER 1988/DECEMBER 1988 *********************************************************** REVIEWS: INGRID'S BACK! SHADOWGATE SCOTT ADAM'S SCOOPS THE INHERITANCE POLICE QUEST BARD' S TALE II CLOUD 99 BUGSY HAUNTED HOUSE THE ALIEN FROM OUTER SPACE DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE ARTICLES BY: RICHARD BARTLE TONY BRIDGE KEITH CAMPBELL MIKE GERRARD HUGH WALKER LATEST NEWS ON THE ADVENTURING SCENE BASIC ADVENTURING DISCOUNTED SOFTWARE AND MUCH MORE!!! 12 Help-Line Details #3 ***************** EDITORIAL ********* Members have access to our extensive databank of hints and solutions Dear Fellow Adventurer, for most of the popular adventure games. Help can be obtained as follows: Welcome to MDs Nos 35-36, our Christmas issue! * By Mail: We have been very active during the past few weeks, and the most Please enclose a Stamped Addressed Envelope. Give us the title and important item of news this month is the announcement of the version of the game(s), and detail the query(ies) which you have. We "Golden Chalice Awards Presentation Ceremony". Please refer to the shall usually reply to you on the day of receipt of your letter. enclosed leaflet for full details about this important occasion, and Overseas Members using the Mail Help-Line should enclose an I.R.C. for do make sure you that you pencil 25.02.89 in your diary! a speedy reply, otherwise the answers to their queries will be sent Owing to popular demand, we have now produced specially-designed together with their next Member's Dossier. -
IF XML Metadata Format
**Draft** Interactive Fiction XML metadata format Version 1.0 (Draft) August 3, 2005 by Andrew Hunter Contents 1 Introduction 2 1.1 Who should use this format? ................................ 2 2 The format 3 2.1 The root element: ifindex .................................. 3 2.2 The story tag: story ..................................... 3 2.3 The story identification tag: identification ......................... 3 2.3.1 Example ...................................... 4 2.3.2 Z-Code identification tag: zcode .......................... 4 2.3.3 Glulx identification ................................. 4 2.3.4 MD5 identification ................................. 5 2.4 The metadata tags ...................................... 5 3 Optional modules 7 3.1 The feelies module ..................................... 7 3.2 The comments module ................................... 7 3.3 The resources module .................................... 7 3.4 The review module ..................................... 8 4 Parsing notes 9 5 Attaching metadata 10 5.1 To z-code games ...................................... 10 5.2 In filesystem metadata ................................... 10 5.3 To archive sites ....................................... 10 5.4 To review sites ....................................... 10 1 1 Introduction The original inspiration of this format is an improvement on the existing interactive fiction cataloguing system in Zoom. The original design for this used a text file with an arbitrary format, mainly designed for storing interpreter settings. It was also capable of storing some limited metadata along with stories, in particular a full title for the story, which was used in the interpreter’s title bar, and also to provide a simple menu of stories. This format is intended to provide a more advanced indexing system for stories. It deals specifically with metadata aspects of stories, leaving interpreter configuration issues up to specific interpreters. This release (1.0) will be implemented in the 1.0.2 release of Zoom. -
Interactive Fiction Communities from Preservation Through Promotion and Beyond
www.dichtung-digital.org/2012/41/montfort-short.htm Interactive Fiction Communities From Preservation through Promotion and Beyond by Nick Montfort and Emily Short The interactive fiction (IF) community has for decades been involved with the authorship, sharing, reading, and discussion of one type of electronic literature and computer game. Creating interactive fiction is a game-making and world-building activity, one that involves programming as well as writing. Playing interactive fiction typically involves typing input and receiving a textual response explaining the current situation. From the first canonical interactive fiction, the minicomputer game Adventure, the form has lived through a very successful commercial phase and is now being actively developed by individuals, worldwide, who usually share their work for free online. Although it is typical to speak of "the IF community", there have actually been several communities representing different interests, different types of authoring systems, and various natural languages. Until around 2005, online archives, discussions, newsletters, and competitions focused the energies of IF community members. But since the middle of the 21st century's first decade, interest in IF has broadened beyond its earlier boundaries and academics, students, and players of indie games who are not IF community members have become active as IF players. Groups have met in person in different cities to play games and discuss work in progress. We consider the IF community's early formation and the way it,