The Magic Candle
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Load more
Recommended publications
-
Alan Adventure System V3.0
The ALAN Adventure Language Reference Manual Version 3.0beta2 Alan Adventure System - Reference Manual This version of the manual was printed on September 26, 2011 - ii - Alan Adventure System - Reference Manual Table of Contents 1 INTRODUCTION.........................................................................11 1.1 Programmer’s Pitch........................................................................................................12 1.2 To the Reader.................................................................................................................12 2 CONCEPTS......................................................................................13 2.1 What Is An Adventure?................................................................................................13 2.2 Elements Of Adventures.................................................................................................15 2.3 Alan Fundamentals.......................................................................................................16 What Is A Language?....................................................................................................................................16 The Alan Idea..................................................................................................................................................18 What’s Happening?........................................................................................................................................18 The Map..........................................................................................................................................................19 -
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 Interpreters in the 1980S, Infocom Published About Three
By Hugo Labrande Issue #5 : Z-Machine interpreters In the 1980s, Infocom published about three dozen of text adventures on most platforms of the era, from the TRS-80 to the Atari ST. Their method to spend minimal time on portability was to create a virtual machine, the Z-Machine, and compile their games into bytecode that could be read by the Z-Machine. All was needed was some software that could read this bytecode and execute it on a target machine: an interpreter. To ensure that all interpreters behaved coherently, Infocom actually wrote specifications for the Z-Machine (version 3, 4, and 5 for text-only, and 6 for graphical adventures), which specified how the interpreter should behave; this was to make sure that the people tasked with writing a new interpreter would follow the same rules as the other ones. This specification was then reverse-engineered by amateurs as early as the end of the 1980s (Barry Boone on the TI-99/4A, the InfoTaskForce in Australia, etc.). In the 1990s, people added some features and fixed a few inconsistencies, and created version 8, which was basically the same as version 5 but allowed larger file sizes. This gave the Z-Machine standards, which are available online: http://inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point1/index.html This means that if you’d like to implement a Z-Machine interpreter, all you need to do is follow this specification. Over the years, literally hundreds of Z-Machine interpreters have been written, for sometimes very exotic platforms. They sometimes have their own quirks, can fall out of fashion, or get forgotten; I cannot begin to retrace all the Z-Machine interpreters that have been written. -
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. -
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, -
Riddle Machines: the History and Nature of Interactive Fiction
Riddle Machines: The History and Nature of Interactive Fiction The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Citation Montfort, Nick. "Riddle Machines: The History and Nature of Interactive Fiction." A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, edited by Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2013, 267-282. © 2013 Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman As Published http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781405177504.ch14 Publisher John Wiley & Sons, Ltd Version Author's final manuscript Citable link https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129076 Terms of Use Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Detailed Terms http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ 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. -
The Inform Designer's Manual
Cited Works of Interactive Fiction The following bibliography includes only those works cited in the text of this book: it makes no claim to completeness or even balance. An index entry is followed by designer's name, publisher or organisation (if any) and date of first substantial version. The following denote formats: ZM for Z-Machine, L9 for Level 9's A-code, AGT for the Adventure Game Toolkit run-time, TADS for TADS run-time and SA for Scott Adams's format. Games in each of these formats can be played on most modern computers. Scott Adams, ``Quill''-written and Cambridge University games can all be mechanically translated to Inform and then recompiled as ZM. The symbol marks that the game can be downloaded from ftp.gmd.de, though for early games} sometimes only in source code format. Sa1 and Sa2 indicate that a playable demonstration can be found on Infocom's first or second sampler game, each of which is . Most Infocom games are widely available in remarkably inexpensive packages} marketed by Activision. The `Zork' trilogy has often been freely downloadable from Activision web sites to promote the ``Infocom'' brand, as has `Zork: The Undiscovered Underground'. `Abenteuer', 264. German translation of `Advent' by Toni Arnold (1998). ZM } `Acheton', 3, 113 ex8, 348, 353, 399. David Seal, Jonathan Thackray with Jonathan Partington, Cambridge University and later Acornsoft, Topologika (1978--9). `Advent', 2, 47, 48, 62, 75, 86, 95, 99, 102, 105, 113 ex8, 114, 121, 124, 126, 142, 146, 147, 151, 159, 159, 179, 220, 221, 243, 264, 312 ex125, 344, 370, 377, 385, 386, 390, 393, 394, 396, 398, 403, 404, 509 an125. -
In This Issue
May 201 5 Volume 1 Issue 3 In this issue Alice doesn't look 1 50 Conversation with Carolyn VanEseltine The many ways of playing IF on your mobile device EDITOR'S NOTES Welcome back, everyone! BY MATT GOH t has been more than two months since the last issue of IFography. Many people in the Interactive Fiction Faction, the private Google+ community that works on this magazine, I got pulled away by real life. Now that most of our projects are completed, the group once again has a chance to continue on the magazine! School has pretty much bogged me with boring biology and physics during the day, while "Counter Strike" took up most of my evenings. Good thing to state: I'm actually getting better in games! But I did have some time for IF. With plenty of competitions held in the past few months, many players and judges have been busy with the large amount of games released. I took some time to play all of the Parsercomp games and vote on them. I was impressed by games like "Chlorophyll" and "Delphina's House." More of what I thought can be found in the reviews section. I hope to focus on Spring Thing games next issue. These past two months witnessed the release of commercial games for free online. One of them is Peter Nepstad's "1893: A World's Fair Mystery," which typically takes 10 hours to finish. And in less purely positive news, Textfyre's closing prompted it to release its two games, "Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter" and "The Shadow in the Cathedral" for free. -
Retromagazine 00 Eng.Pdf
EDITORIAL SUMMARY Welcome to our first international issue! RetroMagazine is a well underway project started in Page 3 ◊ The best version of BASIC October 2017 by a small group of Italian retrocomputing Page 6 enthusiasts. ◊ Don’t ever buy a Vectrex! Page 11 Yes, we know, there are many magazines dedicated to ◊ The .d64 format – part 1 retrogames and they are gorgeous; so why the need for an Page 16 additional homebrew fanzine? ◊ Interview with Gideon Zweijtzer How many times reading those publications have you felt Page 20 ◊ Sinclair QL: mistakes, misfortune and so that something was missing? There are lot of nice pictures and a good variety of games, but... where is the code? many regrets Where are the explanations of programming techniques? Page 30 ◊ Cyrus (ZX SPECTRUM) VS. Colossus Where is the real experience of the end users? (ATARI 800XL) The idea behind our project is to reproduce the same Page 33 ◊ HIBERNATED 1 (Amiga/C64) feeling as the glorious magazines back in the day. Page 34 Magazines like Amstrad Computer Users, Bit, Compute!'s ◊ CIVILIZATION (MS DOS) Gazette, Input... They all taught tons of pimply boys the Page 37 basis of coding on their home computers! Those magazines ◊ THE PAWN (All platforms) used to contain a good balance of programming examples, hardware insights and game reviews. People involved in the preparation of this issue In memory of those magazines we adopted the shape of a PDF fanzine, instead of a more modern blog or website, to fully revitalize the spirit of the good old times. • Robin Jubber • Gianluca Girelli Do you remember the feeling while awaiting for the next issue? We want to recreate that and also give a second • Francesco Fiorentini • Leonardo Giordani chance to anybody who missed out on learning these things as a kid. -
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 29 , 30 - FEBRUARY 1988/MARCH 1988 ******************************************************** REVIEWS: BEYOND ZORK JINXTER SHERLOCK WITCH HUNT THE THREE MUSKETEERS BLACK FOUNTAIN THE PROSPECTOR THE LABOURS OF HERCULES THE HOLLOW PASSENGERS ON THE WIND ARTICLES BY: RICHARD BARTLE TONY BRIDGE KEITH CAMPBELL HUGH WALKER LATEST NEWS ON THE ADVENTURING SCENE BASIC ADVENTURING DISCOUNTED SOFTWARE 1987 GOLDEN CHALICE AWARDS AND MUCH MORE 111 12 Help-Line Details (13 .********* ••• ***. EDITORIAL ********* Members have access to our extensive databank of hints and solutions for most of the popular adventure games. Help can be obtained as Dear Fellow Adventurer, follows: Welcome to MDs Nos 29-30! • By Mall: Please enclose a Stamped Addressed Envelope. Give us the title and We are very pleased to announce the 1987 "Golden Chalice Awards", so version of the game(s), and detail the query(ies) which you have. We turn to page 11 to find out which game you have voted "Best Adventure shall usually reply to you on the day of receipt of your letter. of 1987", and which Software Companies have won the much coveted Overseas Members using the Mail Help-Line should enclose an I.R.C. for Chalices. a speedy reply, otherwise the answers to their queries will be sent together with their next Member's Dossier. We welcome Tony Bridge as a regular contributor to the Dossier. Yes, the Grand Elf himself has kindly agreed to write in every issue, and • By Telephone: Tony's first column starts on page 17. -
The Inform Designer's Manual
Chapter VIII: The Craft of Adventure Designing is a craft as much as an art. Standards of workmanship, of ``finish'', are valued and appreciated by players, and the craft of the adventure game has developed as it has been handed down. The embryonic `Zork' (Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, Dave Lebling, 1977) ± shambolic, improvised, frequently unfair ± was thrown together in a fortnight of spare time. `Trinity' (Brian Moriarty, 1986), plotted in synopsis in 1984, required thirteen months to design and test. `Spellbreaker' (Dave Lebling, 1985) is a case in point. A first-rate game, it advanced the state of the art by allowing the player to name items. It brought a trilogy to a satisfying conclusion, while standing on its own merits. A dense game, with more content per location than ever before, it had a structure which succeeded both in being inexplicable at first yet inevitable later. With sly references to string theory and to Aristophanes' The Frogs, it was cleverer than it looked. But it was also difficult and, at first, bewildering, with the rewards some way off. What kept players at it were the ``cyclopean blocks of stone'', the ``voice of honey and ashes'', the characters who would unexpectedly say things like ``You insult me, you insult even my dog!''. Polished, spare text is almost always more effective than a discursive ramble, and many of the room descriptions in `Spellbreaker' are nicely judged: Packed Earth This is a small room crudely constructed of packed earth, mud, and sod. Crudely framed openings of wood tied with leather thongs lead off in each of the four cardinal directions, and a muddy hole leads down. -
Magnetic Scrolls Colecovision AMSTRAD | ARCADE | ATARI | COMMODORE | MSX | NEO GEO | NINTENDO | SEGA | SINCLAIR | SONY Wir Sind Alt, Nicht »NEU«
! DER GUIDE FÜR KLASSISCHE SPIELE ALT 1/2012 Sep/Okt/Nov 2012 Deutschland @ 12,90 Österreich @ 14,20 Klassiker-Check: URIDIUM Schweiz SFR 25,80 INTERVIEWS MIT ENTWICKLERN David Crane David Braben Geoff Crammond AMSTRAD ARCADE lese- ATARI COMMODORE probe MSX PC , Konsolen & NEO GEO Home-Computer NINTENDO SEGA ASTEROIDS, SINCLAIR SONY ELITE, AXELAY, SHENMUE, KLASSIKER FÜR HOME-COMPUTER, KONSOLEN & PC MEGA MAN, TOMB RAIDER, eiten SABREMAN, SUPER MARIO WORLD … U. V. M 256S SCHWERPUNKTE PLATTFORM-CHECKS MS-DOS-Spiele, Atari 7800, MSX, Dynamix, DMA, PSX, Apple II, Magnetic Scrolls ColecoVision AMSTRAD | ARCADE | ATARI | COMMODORE | MSX | NEO GEO | NINTENDO | SEGA | SINCLAIR | SONY Wir sind alt, nicht »NEU«. Und stolz darauf! illkommen in der Zeit der Classic Games, als Computer- und Videospiele noch keine Automaps, Achievements, Savepoints oder anderen Tand boten, dafür aber Spielspaß satt und Kreativität im Überfluss. Retro Gamer stellt euch Wdie Spiele von damals vor, aber auch die Plattformen, auf denen sie liefen, und die Entwickler, die sie schufen. Unsere Rubrik »PIXEL-PERFEKT« gibt den aus wenigen farbigen Punkten bestehenden Helden-Sprites von einst einen großen Auftritt. Wir stellen Spiele-Automaten ebenso vor wie obskure Importspiele, die es nie offiziell nach Deutsch- land geschafft haben. Vor allem findet ihr viele Screenshots, Fakten, Tipps und mehr zu den Hits von damals. In meinem fünften Lebensjahrzehnt (ich bin Anfang 40) gehöre ich nicht unbedingt zur Hauptzielgruppe heutiger Spiele, bei denen viel zu oft Bombastgrafik an erster und der Spielwitz an zweiter Stelle kommen. Vor 30 Jahren war das noch anders: Damalige Com- puter und Konsolen waren schlicht nicht in der Lage, mehr als nur ein paar grobe, im Ideal- fall farbige Pixel auf den Bildschirm zu bringen.