FREETWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES: AN APPROACH TO INTERACTIVE FICTION EBOOK Nick Montfort | 302 pages | 01 Apr 2005 | MIT Press Ltd | 9780262633185 | English | Cambridge, Mass., United States Twisty Little Passages Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook. Eight chapters, arranged in roughly-chronological order, detail the lineage of interactive fiction from its origins in Delphic riddles to its newest and most intriguing forms. Passion and precision Among Montfort's first statements is one that demonstrates a commitment to careful scholarship that recurs throughout the book: " Text adventure and interactive fiction do not mean exactly the same thing. These titles, among others, demonstrate that IF isn't just a delivery vehicle for the stereotyped themes of juvenile fiction with which it's often associated. Montfort proceeds to explain why he found it necessary to write Twisty Little Passages :. Naming the game Assuming the art of interactive fiction began with the riddle, what constitutes a work of IF today? After a brief excerpt from LookingGlass Technologies veteran Dan Schmidt 's For A Change gives us an example of description, interaction and puzzle-solving, Montfort goes on to establish four requisite aspects of IF:. A text-accepting, text-generating computer program ; A potential narrative a system that produces narrative during interaction ; A simulation of an environment or world ; and A structure of rules within which an outcome is sought, also known as a game. Works which do not include each of these elements are deliberately excluded, among them "hypertext fiction," most graphical computer games, and numerous experimental titles. In this respect, Montfort perhaps misses an opportunity to reflect upon the true extent of IF's influence over the rest of Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction entertainment software world. With a reported 30, lines of text in Deus Ex 2 - more than any Infocom game ever boasted - I'd argue that the historical text-only criterion is becoming more questionable all the time. The rise of the smart machines Much more than a theoretical treatise on IF, Twisty Little Passages is also the most complete chronicle of important IF titles, authors, and publishers assembled to date. Its middle four chapters focus largely on academic and commercial efforts at crafting and publishing interactive fiction. Chapter 3 begins with an introduction of the concept of generative literary machines "ergodic literature". Montfort cites the Turing machine-like nature of the I Chingfollowed by a mention of Jonathan Swift's satirical machine from Gulliver's Travels, "made of equal parts of irony, sarcasm, and mockery, that would automatically write books on all the arts and sciences. The mother of all computer games, in Montfort's view, was Spanish engineer Leonardo Quevedo's chess-playing robot. Devised to attack a particular endgame problem on a vertically-oriented chessboard, Quevedo's machine was unique in that it represented the first so-called "chess automaton" that operated by legitimate electromechanical means rather than by fraudulently-concealed midgets. A subsequent refinement of Quevedo's machine would later catch the eye of famed computer scientist and AI researcher Norbert Wiener, achieving recognition as the first genuine attempt at artificial intelligence. Mechanical curiosities aside, no discussion of human-computer interaction would be complete without inviting Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA to the party. As the first convincing conversation "bot", ELIZA accepted plain-English input from a human interlocutor, transforming it albeit with no semantic understanding into a sympathetic textual murmur geared to Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction further input:. Crowther is a contemporary of Zork co-author Dave Leblingwho, coincidentally, was a member of the same Dungeons and Dragons group in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In one of Montfort's many personal communications with IF luminaries, Lebling says:. Zork 's innovations over the state of the art established by Adventure are too numerous to count, although Montfort explicitly avoids the common mistake of canonizing Zork and Infocom games in general while giving short shrift to other important IF efforts. Alas, poor Infocom. In Montfort's words, Infocomwhich was founded June 22, by Lebling, Blank, Anderson, and seven other MIT alumni, "began work on the foundation of IF while the plot of ground that it was to be built upon had not been completely surveyed. Chapter 6 "Different Visions Worldwide" opens with a quick drive-by tour of Roberta Williams 's Mystery Houserecognized as the first graphical adventure game. Brief histories of British IF publishers Level 9 and Magnetic Scrolls round out the chapter, along with an even-briefer mention of Legend Entertainmentwritten before Legend's shutdown in early The latter constitutes one of the few weak spots in Twisty Little Passages 's coverage of the classics. Legend's integration of music, artwork, graphical navigation, and other interface enhancements in the Spellcasting series went far beyond Infocom's efforts to modernize their own IF engines, and the company deserves more than a single paragraph. At the end of Chapter 6, Montfort recounts the failure of former Infocom author Mike Berlyn 's Cascade Mountain Publishingone of the last commercial publishers of pure text-based IF. He proceeds to draw a sheet over the commercial market for interactive fiction in general, pronouncing it Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction dead as Graham Chapman's parrot:. Fortunately, as the last two chapters reveal, a healthy independent IF community has sprung up to take the place of the commercial publishers Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction are no longer with us. IF's independent authors: the once and future scene In Aprilat the culmination Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction a long reverse-engineering effort by "a group of programmers called Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction InfoTaskForce" pageGraham Nelson released an object-oriented programming language capable of creating story files for the Infocom Z-machine interpreter. Two tentacles up I can wholeheartedly recommend Twisty Little Passages not only to IF fans and amateur historians, but to anyone serious about the foundations and culture of computer gaming. Infocom and Legend Entertainment auteur Steve Meretzky's back-cover blurb says it all: " Twisty Little Passages is a thoroughly-researched history of interactive fiction, as well as a Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction analysis of the genre. Reading it makes me itch to fire up that old DEC and start writing interactive fiction again! As a fan of the IF art form as a whole, I'm indeed lucky to Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction run across Nick Montfort's excellent book. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelinesthen visit the submission page. It's a damn good thing I wasn't drinking anything right then, or I would be demanding compensation for my keyboard. To answer your very amusing question, though - yes. In fact, it's one of the best book reviews I've ever seen on slashdot. Perhaps a tad lengthy, but you can't have everything. There is also a command that can be used to make Zippy mode converse with doctor mode, but I can't find it after a few moments of searching. It is really more interesting to think about than to see it run All of the reviews I've seen, including my own [brasslantern. You can see some of those reviews listed on the author's page about the books [nickm. It's an extremely accessible book, which isn't easy to do, and the highest praise I can give it is that I wish I'd written it. Obviously, some of these games are better than others But, trying to rank them alongside legitimate literature seems mighty presumptuous. Legitimate authors struggle to perfect their reader's experience, and would never deliberately abandon it to dice-throws. If it happens that some interactive game is found to harbor a deep and worthwhile intellectual point, then a "real" author, rather than writing that game, will tell the story of a character who plays it. And frankly, I think the elitist insistence that the reader is not the author mirrors the chestnut that a bad reader is worse than no reader at all. The question is not, "who is a legitimate author? Instead, Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction questions are, "who is a legitimate reader? If you boil down all our readings to your ideas about literary forms and formats and ignore us, it'. It's been many years since I played Sorcerer, though -- I could be mis-remembering it entirely. You post a long-winded rant that calls interactive fiction the 'worst episode evar! You feel the might of thousands of negative comments weighing you down and the heat of flames licking your feet. You have fallen prey to the vicious Homonym! It's too late. The bloodthirsty Slashdotters have beaten you to -1 Troll, and the vicious Homonym has picked your bones clean! You're banned Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction the day! I discovered this game inand it took me until to get by the snake. I'm still not done. I load it up every few years and play actively for a month or two. What better technology than that between your ears? Alas, I tried showing some of my old text adventure games to some young cousins of mine, and of course, they just did NOT "get it. To continue your saved game, choose your game and type 'restore' after it starts. Wow, really? Good point! It's a shame no one seems to have noticed that error, except the reviewer and the author and most everyone else:.