Coleman, Douglas W



Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. [link]

5.0 Aarseth articulates a comprehensive theory of interactive literature that applies across technological and generic boundaries. "A cybertext is a machine for the production of a variety of expression" (3). According to Aarseth, "ergodic" literature is that in which "nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text" (1). The book includes chapters on hypertext literature, interactive fiction, and MUDs. Aarseth's interactive fiction chapter includes a call for better IF scholarship and criticism: "The adventure game is an artistic genre of its own, a unique aesthetic field of possibilities, which must be judged on its own terms" (107).Highlights from the introductory chapter:"The concept of cybertext focuses on the mechanical organization of the text, by positing the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the literary exchange. However, it also centers attention on the consumer, or user, of the text, as a more integrated figure than even reader-response theorists would claim" (1)."Since literary theorists are trained to uncover literary ambivalence in texts with linear expression, they evidently mistook texts with variable expression for texts with ambiguous meaning. When confronted with a forking text such as a hypertext, they claimed that all texts are produced as a linear sequence during reading. . . . [But] when you read from a cybertext, you are constantly reminded of inaccessible strategies and paths not taken, voices not heard. Each decision will make some parts of the text more, and others less, accessible, and you may never know the exact results of your choices; that is, exactly what you missed. This is very different from the ambiguities of a linear text" (3).To Aarseth, the reader of a linear text is "[l]ike a spectator at a soccer game," who "may speculate, conjecture, extrapolate, even shout abuse" but cannot influence the text. "The reader's pleasure is the pleasure of the voyeur. Safe, but impotent. The cybertext reader, on the other hand, is not safe, and therefore, it can be argued, she is not a reader. . . . The cybertext reader is a player, a gambler; the cybertext is a game-world or world-game; it is possible to explore, get lost, and discover secret paths in those texts, not metaphorically, but through the topological structures of the textual machinery" (4).Aarseth argues that science-fiction authors have a better theoretical grasp of cybertext than literary theorists, the latter of whom mistakenly apply metaphorical structures such as labyrinths and ambiguity (typically found in postmodern texts) with cybertexts that are, in form and content, inseparable from the textual mazes or variables within the structure of the document, rather than merely applied by the reader's interpretation. "Thus, the interpretations and misinterpretations of the digital media by literary theorists is a recurrent theme of this book" (14).In the chapter "Intrigue and Discourse in the Adventure Game," Aarseth opens with a brief history of the Internet, and offers Don Woods's description of his collaboration with Willie Crowther in the creation of "Colossal Cave Adventure." Aarseth agrees with Buckles's assessment of the "Adventure" phenomenon as a manifestation of Internet folk art."... the ergodic structures invented by Crowther and Woods twenty years ago are of course far from dead but instead persevere as the basic figure for the large and growing industrial entertainment genre, called, by a somewhat catachrestic pleonasm, 'interactive games.' . . . It is a paradox that, despite the lavish and quite expensive graphics of these productions, the player's creative options are still as primitive as they were in 1976" (102-103).Observes that Buckles, in her dissertation on "Adventure," "seems uninterested in placing her subject text at a specific point in history, and she mentions its creators, Crowther and Woods, only in footnotes. . . . Most commentators and critics of the adventure game genre (Bolter and Joyce 1987; Randall 1988; Ziegfeld 1989; Bolter 1991; Sloane 1991; Murray 1995) fail to mention the original Adventure at all, and those who do usually date it far off the mark (Niesz and Holland 1984; Lanestedt 1989; Aarseth 1994) and often neglect to mention its creators (Moulthrop and Kaplan 1991; Kelley 1993)" (107).Offers a detailed analysis of the writing, plot, characters, and even the software bugs which contribute to (or detract from) the effectiveness of Marc Blank's "Deadline" (Infocom, 1982) (115-127).

Adams, Rick. "The Colossal Cave Adventure Page." Tribute website. 1998. 30 May 2001. . (Unavailable as of 25 Aug 2001.) [link]

2.5 A tribute to the original text-based interactive narrative, including brief biographies of authors Will Crowther and Don Woods.

Adams, Scott. "Scott Adams Grand Adventure (S.A.G.A.)." Personal website. c.2000-01. 31 May 2001. . [link]

3.0 The personal home page of Scott Adams, author of the first commercial computer game ("Adventureland," sold via a tiny ad in a computer magazine in 1978). While Adams's games are textually minimalistic (due to memory restrictions on the earliest home PCs) and have therefore attracted little attention from literary critics, his non-violent brain puzzlers are fondly remembered by many who played computer games in the late 70s. Adams's website offers links to fan pages and interviews.

Anderson, Peter Bøgh and Berit Holmqvist. "Interactive Fiction: Artificial Intelligence as a Mode of Sign Production." AI and Society 4 (1990): 291-313. [link]

1.5 The authors advocate artificial intelligence (AI) as a means of manipulating character behavior within the interactive space wherein the reader and program together create a story, much as a stage actor employs the script and fellow actors in order to generate a performance. Anderson and Holmqvist invoke hypertext theorists and the virtual reality analytics of Brenda Laurel, for the purpose of presenting a barroom scenario in which the reader/player interacts with several simulated characters with distinct agendas. A "good" couple (dressed in white) and a "bad" couple (dressed in black) interact via signified actions (hackneyed "film noir" motifs such as buying a drink or lighting a cigarette). Their work, from a project at the Institute of Information and Media Science, University of Aarhus (Denmark), bears much resemblance the "virtual theater" work of the Oz Project at Carnegie Mellon (see also §1.2: Bates; Mateas; Mateas and Stern).Just as successful interaction with a computer application requires a clear difference between, for instance an arrow pointer (for selecting menus and pushing buttons) and an I-beam (for inserting and manipulating text), so too, the authors argue, should interactive media develop its own "idioms that exploit the characteristics of the computer based sign" (291). This kind of interactive storytelling involves tracking the internal emotions (loneliness, vulnerability, etc.) of various simulated characters, and playing out a scenario based upon these states, which fluctuate with the action. Unlike the profession of literary criticism, which takes a polished product and analyzes it for evidence of underlying structure, the AI method begins with the structure, and builds a rudimentary story upon it. [Note: The AI method of computer storytelling focuses on simulating everyday human behavior; but good stories generally require unusual events of some kind – or at least an artistic presentation of everyday events. Many IF practitioners (e.g. §3: Granade, "Artificial Intelligence in IF") argue that full-blown AI is a red herring. Nevertheless, the programming of believable supporting characters remains a technical and aesthetic challenge in command-line IF (see §3: Short).]

Au, Wagner James. "Will you tell me a story — please?" Salon 16 May 2000. 16 May 2000. . [link]

2.0 This article is not about command-line IF, but rather a review of Electronic Entertainment Expo 2000, lamenting the commercialization of electronic narrative. "But if the massive E3 exhibit floors sum up the current state of gaming, I think it's safe to say today's developers aren't pushing the narrative envelope. Lured by the siren song of ever-improving graphics power, terrified by the risks involved with truly unique ideas in gaming, the industry is collectively stumbling along a path well-worn by Hollywood; the unfortunate truth to be taken away from a weekend in gamers' paradise is that the mindless summer-blockbuster season promises to last all year" (7).

Barger, Jorn. "IF, AI, and the confabulating-arranger model of interactive fiction." 1994. 8 Jan 2001. . [link]

2.0 Barger approaches the topic of interactive storytelling as a monumental computational and data-retrieval task. Barger approvingly cites Chris Crawford's discussion of the "topology" of interactive fiction, in which Crawford observed that, since humans cannot account for an infinite number of player actions, "storytrees must either be folded back on themselves in a very limiting way, or have most of their branches trimmed to (violent) dead-ends" (1).Without help from a database, a storyteller could never script all the narrative possibilities in an infinitely-branching storyline. To share some of the load, Barger suggests the codification of a large number of "meta-stories" about objects and human relationships that populate the storyline. Using as his model Polti's The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations (an exhaustive taxonomy of dramatic conflict), Barger theorizes a computer program that "knows" basic details about what makes a story interesting, and that "continually, unobtrusively revis[es] the virtual world behind the scenes, so as to open up as many interesting plotlines as possible" ("The confabulating-arranger model of IF" 2).The computer can not only improvise the fictional future, but also rewrite the fictionalized, unrevealed past on the fly, so long as the generation of new data to explain and contextualize current story events is not inconsistent with what has been previously revealed."I like to imagine a sort of SimCity-like environment where a community of little NPC's go through their daily routine of life, in a completely rote fashion, with no emergent behavior expected or desired. ("SimNormal" 3). [Note: The highly successful 1999 creation "The Sims" is very nearly what Barger describes, although the software is not a component of an interactive story engine that permits you, the person sitting at the computer, to participate in a narrative. Instead, playing "The Sims" is more like tormenting ants.]

Bates, J. "The Nature of Character in Interactive Worlds and the Oz Project." Technical Report CMU-CS-92-200, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. October 1992. Postscript file. 24 May 2001. . [link]

3.0 A useful discrete example of the goals of Carnegie Mellon University's "Oz Project," an effort at using artificial intelligence to generate interactive stories. This article describes the programming of a simulated housecat, "Lyotard," whose behavior (purring, hissing, running away, etc.) is governed by a series of emotional variables (fear, happiness, gratitude, etc.). (See also §1.2: Garrand.)

Bennahum, David S. "Dungeon" Extra Life: Coming of Age in Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books, 1998. 99-115. [link]

Nick Motfort writes: "...makes mention of the relationship between exploring the setting of "Dungeon" (Zork) and learning about computers and computing." (E-mail to Dennis G. Jerz, 23 Oct, 2001.)

Briceno, Hector, Wesley Chao, Andrew Glenn, Stanley Hu, Ashwin Krishnamurthy, and Bruce Tsuchida. "Down from the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc." [unpublished manuscript; MIT course project, "6.933J/STS.420J: The Structure of Engineering Revolutions"] 15 Dec 2000. 1 Feb 2001. . [link]

4.0 This student project, for a course in engineering entrepreneurship, examines the origins and economic history of Infocom (the company that popularized interactive fiction in the early 80s). The authors challenge the widely-held assumption that Infocom failed as a direct result of an unwise internal towards the development of business products. The authors describe the origins of "Zork," the culture of the Infocom workplace, and the role of the "implementors" or "IMPs", the programmer-authors whose creativity fueled the company's efforts. They also briefly analyze the game packaging and distribution methods that led to Infocom's early success. (See also the archived material on Infocom, available at .)Among the fans of Infocom's interactive fiction are "John McCarthy, the inventor of LISP," "science-fiction author Larry Nevin" [sic], "Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," and, of all people, "comedian and actor Robin Williams" (21).The authors examine how Infocom's reliance on text meant that last year's titles did not seem as out-of-date as last year's graphic titles. While the Infocom implementers continued to innovate, by way of making the textual worlds more realistic and independently life-like, "they created evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, innovations" that were not noticeable to the average user (27).Marc Blank reports that he "wanted to do something with graphics but... was told there was no money" (35)."Infocom's text-only games had to be churned out like clockwork just to keep the company afloat, and there was neither the time nor the resources to pursue a new path with graphical games." Dan Horn is quoted as follows: "The reason that text adventure isn't alive anymore is that the technology to present visual representations of a story advanced very quickly. Some companies picked upon on that but you'd notice that the reality of gaming is now EverQuest — massive multiplayer, real time, online, and graphically amazing. This is the market that Infocom was destined to own but let slip through their fingers because of bad business decisions. Imagine if you will Sorceror, Planetfall, and Deadline with the EverQuest engine, amazing... but lost forever" (44).The paper concludes with an excellent four-page summary covering "Why Infocom Succeeded," "Why Infocom Failed," and "Lessons from Infocom."

Buckles, Mary Ann. "Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame 'Adventure'." Ph.D. Thesis. U. Cal at San Diego, 1985. [link]

5.0 In a New Critical approach rarely seen in academic discussions of IF, Buckles de-emphasizes the role of the programmer/author, taking "Colossal Cave Adventure" (Crowther, c.1975; Crowther and Woods, 1976) as a "given," and examining instead the reader/player's efforts to make meaning out of the experience. As an immature medium, IF has not yet produced great literature: "I do not believe that the literary limitations of Adventure means that computer story games are of necessity a sub-literary genre, or that there is something about the computer medium itself which pre-destines interactive fiction always to be frivolous in nature. The development of film can be taken as an analogy."On the nature of language puzzles (as presented in legend, the Bible, and riddle anthologies) as a factor in traditional fiction. One such puzzle: "Brothers and sisters I have none; but this man's father is my father's son. Who am I?""Especially in the longer stories, the situations seem to be chosen not only because they express the logical relationships so well, but [also] because we can interpret them as moral or aesthetic problems" (47)."In most of the stories the reader can identify with characters' wishes or needs. Since their goals make sense to us, there is a reason, a motivation for solving the problems, i.e. we fulfill our own needs vicariously by fulfilling the characters' needs. Often the problems are couched in a primitive psychology of reward and punishment: if the heroes answer the questions correctly they win something valuable, and if not, they die" (48).Applies Vladimir Propp's schema for the analysis of folktales, and concludes that "Adventure" bears only a surface resemblance to the structure of folktales (104).Offers thoughtful and interesting commentary on the significance of various passages for several volunteer players."[O]ne reader interpreted her adventure as entering a cave which all the creatures inhabited and [in which] she was an intruder. It was her duty not to disturb the creatures if possible. She therefore assumed that the purpose of the wicker cage was to catch and cage any cave creature she didn't want to kill outright" (127).[This same player tried to cage] "every creature she met in Adventure, including the dwarf throwing axes and knives at her. . . . After it became apparent that she would try negotiating with the animals, avoiding them, appeasing them, feeding them — anything but kill them, even when they were attacking her — she and her playing partner had a philosophical argument as to the validity of her attitude" (128). (See §1.1: Sloane.) Her partner then "insisted that she throw the axe at the dwarf, and she insisted variously that there is good in every creature," "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," and "of course it's justified in trying to kill us, we're enfringing [sic] on its territory." The dwarf then killed them, they were reincarnated, attacked by the dwarf again, she tried a few more non-violent tactics and was killed a second time. At this point she observed that she guessed the same thing happens to her in real life. She always tries to see only the good in people and then they dump on her. Whether she will draw any real-life consequences from this observation is another question, but she did modify her game-strategy. . . . There is, then an underlying set of conventions in Adventure that is analogous in some sense to the moral underpinings [sic] of folktales, but it is the process of decision-making based on self examination and motive analysis the reader undergoes while solving problems, not the depicted actions and events in the story" (129)."Somebody encountering a conventional story can pass his or her eyes over the entire text without filling in, or even perceiving, any of the textual gaps. IF is completely different, because the story stops until the 'reader' attempts to supply the missing action" (165).Gestures towards, but does not elaborate upon, the consideration of IF not as an outgrowth of fiction, but as a kind of lyrical poetry, in which the reader's interpretation of events makes meaning: "Many readers get intensely, emotionally involved in the fictional events because of their step-by-step activity in exploring the fictional world and mastering the fictional events. This can unlock strong feelings and memories of associated events from their own lives with they then build into the imaginary world they are creating. Finally, the fictional events in Adventure, for example, are only minimally explained, i.e. there is little context provided for the reader by the author. In this one sense, interactive fiction's quality of evoking emotionally charged and intellectually complete contexts for the text makes it more similar to the open textuality of lyrical poetry than the tightly woven textual fabric of fiction" (178).

Buckles, Mary Ann. "Interactive Fiction as Literature: Adventure games have a literary lineage." Byte 12.5 (1987): 135-138, 140, 142. [link]

2.5 A condensed, popular version of Buckles's thesis on "Colossal Cave Adventure." (See §1.1: Buckles.) The article describes IF's connections to detective fiction, adventure literature (such as Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth and Stevenson's Treasure Island) and the prose novels of chivalry (the target for Cervantes' satire Don Quixote). Buckles, whose byline credits her as "co-owner and writing consultant of Transgalactic Software," offers five suggestions for would-be IF authors, based on her observations of people playing and responding to "Adventure."Game authors should make up a "supra-story" that contextualizes all the puzzles and isolated events that make up the gameplay, but since the player is on his or her own to solve the puzzles, the player should also be permitted to make up his or her own explanation for events, "just as each person arrives at a personal meaning for a poem.""If you build up story tension, make sure something happens!" The buildup to the "Breathtaking View" room was "the aesthetic high point of Adventure" for many players; yet, once the player finds the source of the distant rumbling (an underground volcano) and has read a paragraph of purple prose (adapted by Don Woods from Tolkien's description of Mount Doom), there is nothing further to do, and players generally felt disappointed."Give the puzzles a moral quality. . . . For example, several people told me they thought the hungry bear bound with the golden chains was the most enticing problem because they were emotionally involved with it. They didn't want to hurt the bear, yet they were mildly afraid of it. When the puzzles have a moral dimension, it gives them emotional depth.""Create a narrator with a unified personality and vision." Since the "Colossal Cave Adventure" narration is sometimes self-referential, and sometimes seems to know more about the cave than the player does, Buckles feels that the player's response to the narrative voice enhances the aesthetic effect."Test your story on other people." Buckles suggests that groups of two or three people tend to have discussions or arguments about the significance of events they have witnessed; observing their extra-textual reactions will help the programmer improve the game.A brief conclusion observes that the artistic quality of early movies was pathetically limited, until D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin brought their artistic talents to the new medium. "Perhaps it will take someone who is both a programmer and an author to explore the artistic promise of IF and create works of literature that rank with the classics of traditional literature." [Note: §1.1: Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck will later echo this sentiment, announcing a vigil for the "cyberbard."]

Campbell, P. Michael. "Interactive Fiction and Narrative Theory: Towards an Anti-Theory." New England Journal and Bread Loaf Quarterly 10 (1987): 76-84. [link]

2.0 A reading of Robert Pinsky's "Mindwheel" (Synapse/Broderbund, 1984). Pinsky was the U.S. Poet Laureate from 1997-2000. Campbell spends so much time describing the form of the "computerized novel") that he has little time to analyze the content. (See also §1.1: Packard.) Since "Mindwheel" is extremely difficult to find (except via morally ambiguous "abandon­ware" websites), this article (along with §1.1: Randall) is useful as a fossilized record of early cyberliterature.

Carr, Charles. "IF: The End of an Error?" ComptuerEdge Magazine (June 1997): 4 Apr 2000. . [link]

3.0 One of several "the day I first saw IF" narratives presented here. "I often wonder where IF might be now had the same amount of money and energy been thrown at it as graphic adventures. . . . Room for graphics notwithstanding, imagine the plot depth, character development, and worlds-within-worlds a text-only game could have with that much code."

Clarvoe, Anthony. PICK UP AX. New York Broadway Play Pub, 1991. [link]

3.0 PICK UP AX is a three-character stage play, set in Silicon Valley around 1980, in which the characters play an "Adventure" clone. For reviews, see:Jerz, Dennis G. "PICK UP AX (review)." Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games 22 (2000): n.p. 15 Sep 2000. . "Much as Shakespeare might allude to mythology or appeal to floral symbolism in order to make a point about human nature, playwright Anthony Clarvoe uses IF as a vehicle to show the audience who his characters are and what they want out of life."Stone, Dudley. "Revenge of the Cybernauts" [Review of PICK UP AX.] (1996). 31 May 2001. ."It's a simple story but director James Abar moved it at a frenetic pace throughout, with very short scenes (bytes?) interspersed with some very well-chosen music including the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Jimmi Hendrix and Sinatra. In fact the sound design in this play was excellent."

Coleman, Douglas W. "Language Learning Through Computer Adventure Games" Simulation & Gaming 21 (1990): 433, 8p. Academic Search Elite full text database. 26 par. 30 May 2000. [link]

2.0 Although the title suggests an emphasis on adventure games, of classic text-only titles the article briefly mentions only Zork. Nevertheless, "some of the games available for home computers are designed around problem-solving activities and require methodical planning, thinking, and note taking" (4). Of possible interest to IF scholars is Coleman's list of attributes that affect whether a player perceives a computer gaming session as "fun" — and thus, presumably, contributes to the player's determination to continue playing.

Constanzo, William V. "Reading Interactive Fiction: Implications of a New Literary Genre." Educational Technology 26 (1986): 31-5. [link]

2.5 Most of the article is concerned with introducing the concept of IF to an unfamiliar audience, using transcripts from Douglas Adams's "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (Infocom, 1984, with Steve Meretzky), and James Paul's "Brimstone" (Synapse/Broderbund, 1985). Also features a brief description of Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" (Spinnaker, 1984). (See also §1.1: Packard.)"Are interactive texts shaping new attitudes towards reading? If they provide new contexts for learning about language, story-telling, and ideas, are they encouraging particular skills and values at the expense of others? What happens to the traditional elements of fiction when the reader enters the fictional world as a participant? Does interactive fiction constitute a genuinely new form of literature?" (31).While Constanzo does not attempt to answer all the questions he asks above, he does conclude thus: "When we turn the first pages of The Odyssey, Pride and Prejudice, or Brave New World, we gain admittance to a system, enclosed and complete. Each system has its physical and psychological premises, its codes of human interaction, its written and unwritten laws. Our ability to read a book successfully depends largely upon our understanding of the fictionalized world order. . . . Until now, readers have had no genuinely active way to learn the codes in context, as participants, no way to test their responses against a responsive text. Interactive fiction is changing the meaning of reader response. It is giving a new generation of readers unprece­dented opportunities to encounter literature, and in the process it is redefining the relationship between the reader and the text. As educators, we would do well to watch closely as this relationship evolves" (35).

Costikyan, Greg. "I Have No Words & I Must Design." Interactive Fantasy 2 (1994). 31 May 2001. Archived at . [link]

2.0 No specific reference to interactive fiction. The article applies equally to dice-rolling board games. Argues that a game is not a puzzle, toy, or a story. "A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal. . . A light switch is interactive. You flick it up, the light turns on. You flick it down, the light turns off. That's interaction. But it's not a lot of fun. All games are interactive: The game state changes with the players' actions. If it didn't, it wouldn't be a game: It would be a puzzle. But interaction has no value in itself. Interaction must have purpose."

Desilets, Brendan. "Reading, Thinking, and Interactive Fiction." English Journal 78 (1989): 75-77. [link]

2.0 An embryonic version of his 1999 article, also describing scenes from "Planetfall" and "Wishbringer," and evaluates the problem-solving strategies of middle-school students playing IF in class. Perhaps most notable in this article is a brief passage addressing resistance from adults who dislike IF: "What's wrong with this picture? If you're one of the many adults who has tried interactive fiction and hated it, you think you may know. Actually, IF aversion is easily understandable, in that many of us get the worst possible advice [from students who present it as a kind of novel] as we get started with the genre. . . . And twenty cryptic error messages later, we've had enough of interactive fiction, because, in truth, even the most sophisticated IF program can deal with only a tiny portion of the kinds of English sentences that any speaker of the language uses" (77). Desilets' advice is simple: "all we need to do is read the clear and witty documentation that comes with each of the programs."

Desilets, Brendan. "Interactive Fiction vs. the Pause that Distresses: How Computer-Based Literature Interrupts the Reading Process Without Stopping the Fun." Currents in Electronic Literacy 1 (1999). 19 Sep, 2000. . [link]

4.0 Writing mostly for an audience unfamiliar with IF, Desilets presents his experience using interactive fiction to teach literary concepts (plot, setting, point of view) to children ages 11 through 14. He reports that about 70% of the students preferred to study IF texts, in part because "it challenges them to recognize and solve problems in ways that no textbook seems to be able to match" (8). (See also §1.1: Packard.)Desilets presents his seventh-grade class encountering an unfamiliar word in "Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur" (Bob Bates, 1989), and discusses the opening scenes of "Planetfall" (Steve Meretzky, 1983) and the sleeping grue puzzle in "Wishbringer" (Brian Moriarty, 1985) for their value in challenging readers to conceptualize problems according to their experience of the text.He also refers to the plot ramifications connected with moral choices such as "killing a bellicose stranger" in "Zork III" (Infocom, 1978-81) and "deciding whether to respect the orders of Preelman" in "A Mind Forever Voyaging" (Steve Meretzky, 1985). Praises "A Mind Forever Voyaging" as "a work of serious science fiction that many readers regard as the finest piece of IF yet written" (15).Desilets describes methods of using IF to teach, including having a student seated at a single computer read the text for the rest of the class; using an LCD panel on an overhead projector; and having students assemble maps, hints and other supporting material in folders dedicated to each IF story.The classic Scott Adams adventures (circa 1979) "offer little in the way of theme and character development" (24), but in "Photopia" (Adam Cadre, 1998), "the thoughtful student reader, with the right kind of help, comes to see that the astronomical concepts that emerge from the a [sic] touching father-daughter dialogue illuminate another subplot of the story, one in which the daughter, some years later, weaves a tale of space travel for a younger girl who idolizes her" (25).Discusses the character of the knight who challenges the young Arthur to a joust in "Arthur," demonstrating that the text presents the knight as honorable, and that the game penalizes a player who suspects the knight of cheating during the contest.

Dewey, Patrick Adventure Games for Microcomputers: An Annotated Directory of Interactive Fiction Westport, Conn: Meckler, 1991. [link]

Does not focus specifically on command-line IF, and thus not directly relevant to the focus of this bibliography.

Dewey, Patrick R. "Interactive Fiction: A Checklist." American Libraries 17 (1986): 132-7. [link]

3.0 General introduction to the IF genre, written by a supportive librarian and amateur IF author. Includes capsule reviews of such titles as Ray Bradbury's "Farenheit 451" (Spinnaker, 1984), Michael Crichton's "Amazon" (Trillium, 1984), Arthur C. Clarke's "Rendezvous with Rama" (Spinnaker, 1984), and Douglas Adams's "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (Infocom, 1984; with Steve Meretzky). Also, includes summaries of four IF authorship utilities."All-text interactive fiction is also the best type of game for libraries to purchase and circulate because it requires lots of reading. Some libraries have encouraged it, playing host to adventure clubs. Others have allowed them to be counted as books read in the summer reading program" (133)."An all-text interactive fiction game is also an investment in longevity, since it can take weeks to complete. Some are so complex that they require 'mapping' (the representation of the landscape – or locations – on paper by the player) to solve" (133)."Aficionados can produce original adventure games by using any one of several authoring systems. . . . It's unlikely, however, that homemade games will be quite as spectacular as, say, Infocom's Zork series" (133)."My hope is that all-text games will not be replaced by the comic-book variety of graphics-intensive games" (133).

Dunman, Susan K. "Judging the Book By a New Cover: Interactive Fiction." Media and Methods 23 (1987): 12-13+. [link]

2.5 A reference librarian laments that computers placed in the middle of libraries tend to draw attention away from books. "The increasingly popular form of software known as 'interactive fiction' provides an opportunity to combine the power of the computer with the power of the written word" (12). . (See also §1.1: Packard.)Refers to IF adaptations (including "Fahrenheit 451," "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," "The Hobbit," "Treasure Island") that could be taught in conjunction with the source; also, original IF titles that fall into genre categories such as science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and adventure."Whether or not interactive fiction represents an emerging literary art form is certainly open to debate, but if this should prove to be the case, what better place than the library to first experience it?" Playing IF requires students to practice such desirable classroom skills as accurate typing and spelling, recognizing basic parts of speech, reading instruction booklets and scene-setting pamphlets, taking notes, sharing resources, and interacting in small groups (40).

Economist [Editorial] "But Is It Story-telling?" Economist. 11 Nov 1995: 16. Academic Search Elite database, UWEC McIntyre Library, 15 May 2001. [link]

3.0 This curmudgeonly article dismisses the efforts of the computer industry to create — and the efforts of "interactive evangelists" to theorize — "interactive fiction." It refers only briefly to command-line IF, but sees CD-ROM games as a direct descendent, suffering from the same storytelling flaws. Argues that the computer's technical capabilities have not yet been successfully been put to use by someone with the creative talents to create something of literary value. (See also §1.1: Buckles; Murray; §2.1: Au.)"The multimedia industry is awash with attempts to reinvent story-telling with computers... But the enthusiasm of the industry — and the curiosity-driven purchases of new consumers — should not obscure the fact that interactive fiction is all too often a failure, if a story in any standard sense is expected" (2, 3)."Despite the millions of dollars that software companies and publishers are throwing at this much-hyped field, interactive fiction is still a technical novelty, attracting more programmers with literary ambitions than the reverse. Perhaps one day better writers, directors and actors will make interactive fiction work. So far the evidence points to deeper problems" (4).After a brief history of "Adventure" (partially confused with the history of "Zork"), the article accurately describes the basic plot of early IF as "Stay alive, collect the right stuff and an elementary story emerges" (6). While "[i]nteractive films" are more visually interesting, the story model is no more advanced. "You are given tasks; until you complete them, you cannot get to the next major part of the story" (7)."Adventure" games are like Advent calendars with little doors that open, one per day, to reveal a holiday scene during the four weeks before Christmas. [The command to start the first "Adventure" game was abbreviated as "advent." I still remember the pious delight on my mother's face when, as a young boy just learning computer programming, I announced that I was creating an "advent program." — DGJ]"The snag with most electronic stories is that they tamper with the foundation of narrative: structure. When stories wobble and change with our whim, they lose their believability, and with it our willingness to care. Multimedia entertainment works at the extremes: all-interactivity, minimal plot ('Doom'; Id Software and other games) and all-plot, minimal interactivity (books with hypertext additions, such as the conversion of 'Alice in Wonderland'), but between them is disaster" (12).The article complains of "interactive evangelists" who argue that there is no such thing as the "right path" (16), arguing that "the typical reader wants to know... 'Which path generates the closest thing to a satisfying linear story, the sort that life, experience and thousands of years of story-telling have taught us to expect?' " (13).Interactive stories, in which multiple outcomes are possible, are "amusing for a while" but unsatisfying because of the indeterminacy of the "'real' — the story-teller's — outcome" (17).

Ferrell, K. and G. Keizer. "Quiet on the Set: Interaction" Omni 14 (Nov 1991). Academic Search Elite database. 31 May 2001. [link]

1.0 Subtitle: "Omni looks at emerging technologies, the potential offered by increasingly ambitious game designs, and the future of interactive electronic entertainment." Abstract: "Presents a special 'Omni' report on the world of electronic games, dateline 1999. Interactive fiction and interactive works of art; Tales on television you can change to suit yourself; Using remote control to bash heads, bop through mazes, and barrel down racetracks; Turning politics into a real entertainment form; Simulations, recreations, historical replicas and America's most wanted." In the spirit of one of those old black-and-white films that predicts what life will be like in the future, and shows a button-pushing housewife who wears an apron under her spacesuit, this collection of short, fluffy articles reveals more about the time it was written than it does about the time it supposedly predicts.

Firth, Roger and Sonia Kesserich Inform Beginner's Guide The Interactive Fiction Library, St. Charles, Ill.: 2002. . [link]

4.0

Firth, Roger, ed. "PARSIFAL: Interactive Fiction Links." 2000-01. 30 May 2001. . [link]

2.5 An attempt to "pack as many items as possible into a small space." Useful for locating the homepages of IF authors or reviewers, or virtually any other online source having to do with IF (present or past). No commentary or evaluation, because, as Firth wrote in a post to rec.arts.int-fiction (12 Feb 2000): "I'm assuming that you know who or what you're looking for, and just need reminding of its current URL."

Firth, Roger. "Inform FAQ." 2001. . [link]

3.0 A well-designed resource introducing the IF programming language Inform. (See §3: Nelson, Inform Designers' Manual.)

Firth, Roger. "Ifaq (IF Frequently Asked Questions)." Maintained by Stephen Griffiths. 2001. 30 May 2001. . [link]

4.0 An incredibly efficient introduction to IF, presenting brief answers to dozens of questions regarding the history of IF, how to play it, and how to write it. Links point the reader to more detailed answers.

Freebern, Ryan N., ed. "ifFinder: Interactive Fiction Search Engine." 2000. 30 May 2001. . [link]

4.0 A portal-style site, with IF content divided up into categories such as game theory, news, and programming languages.

Gaiman, Neil. Don't Panic — Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion. Titan Books: London, 1992. [link]

2.0 Pages 150-156 describe the relationship between Adams's comic science fiction novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the Infocom version of the game, programmed with collaborator Steve Meretzky.A transcript of the IF-related portions of this book was once available at , but the link was dead as of 24 Aug, 2000.The game is playable online at Adams also collaborated on "Bureaucracy" (Infocom, 1987), and more recently created the graphic game "Starship Titanic" (The Digital Village, 1998), which featured a text parser.

Galley, Stu. "The Implementor's Creed" [Internal Infocom document]. Undated. [1984?] 18 Dec 2000. . [link]

3.0 A short, eight-point summary of the mission of the "implementor" (or author-programmer), as articulated by one of Infocom's founders. Selected points include:"My readers should become immersed in the story and forget where they are. They should forget about the keyboard and the screen, forget everything but the experience. My goal is to make the computer invisible" (3)."I know what an artist means by saying, 'I hope I can finish this work before I ruin it.' Each work-in-progress reaches a point of diminishing returns, where any change is as likely to make it worse as to make it better. My goal is to nurture each work to that point. And to make my best estimate of when it will reach that point" (6).

Garrand, Timothy. "Dust: A Tale of the Wired West: Creating a Narrative with Maximum Interactivity." Creative Screenwriting 4:1 (1997): 60-69. [link]

2.0 Although "Dust" is a commercial graphic adventure game, Garrand describes in detail the process of scripting dialogue trees and crafting conversation menus. While the game was not a huge success, reviews praised the richness of detail and depth of interactivity (some 30 characters that can move in and out of 20 locations) and the loving attention to the Western genre. The article describes, from a writer's point of view, the requirements of writing a script for an interactive, multipath story.

Giner-Sorolla, Roger. "Crimes Against Mimesis." Usenet posting. 1996. HTML edition by Stephen van Egmond, 1998. 4 Apr 2000. . [link]

4.0 A fine taxonomy of IF conventions. While his foundational claim that IF should aim for realistic simulation is debatable, and he is almost certainly wrong when he says puzzle-free IF is automatically boring, Giner-Sorolla makes an excellent plea for puzzles that fit naturally into the storyline: "Well-written fiction leads the reader to temporarily enter and believe in the reality of that world. A crime against mimesis is any aspect of an IF game that breaks the coherence of its fictional world as a representation of reality. . . . Mystery and adventure fiction, from Poe's 'The Gold Bug' on, can capably integrate set-piece puzzles into the overall mimetic goals of the story."

Goetz, Phil. "Interactive Fiction and Computers." Interactive Fantasy 1, Crashing Boar Books, 1994. 98-115. Reproduced on . [link]

3.0 While this article offers little in the way of literary analysis of interactive fiction, it does usefully summarize the pre-history of the genre. It includes sections on graphic adventures, multi-player environments, and artificial intelligence.An interactive version of Hamlet, in which the reader could force Hamlet to kill Claudius, would lead to a considerably shorter play: "This exhibits one problem with interactive fiction — sometimes the action which builds up to a more dramatic climax is not the action which a goal-oriented reader would take" (3)."Serious researchers are squeamish about the term 'player' because of its connotation of frivolity. Since reading fiction is entertainment, and interactive entertainment is a game, the term 'player' is justified. Please understand that this does not imply that all IF will be like adventure games, played to win" (54)."It is inevitable that future IF will have more real-world knowledge and realistic interfaces. It is not clear whether authors and players co-operating can communicate the same range of emotions and thoughts to the players as in traditional fiction, whether a theory of drama would enable the player to have an exploratory literary experience rather than a controlled one, or if IF will escape from genres" (80).Additional features of this article:Goetz offers a concise overview of pre-computer hypertextual literary experiments, including those described by Jorge Luis Borges and Kurt Vonnegut, and concludes that "interactivity is very low" in them (16). By contrast, classic IF, which uses a second-person, present-tense point of view, is far more immersive. Quotes IF author Brian Moriarty's surprise at "how many people were bothered" by a puzzle (in "Trinity" [Infocom, 1985]) in which the player is required to kill a small animal (25).Observes that Marc Blank's "Deadline" (Infocom, 1982) uses a hypertext-like plot tree, leading to about 30 possible endings. Notes that even a story with 30 endings is still necessarily finite, since "the author cannot provide a dramatic experience" if the player is completely unrestrained (40).Introduces Brenda Laurel's computational theory of drama, but argues that real-world implementations are not possible for the foreseeable future: "The systems these people advocate don't need full intelligence because they will be hack writers, at best able to churn out westerns, space opera and romances. Mysteries and sitcoms will remain beyond them. As for me, I will not abandon closed-ended, human-controlled fiction" (51)."We want to do in IF the things we do in traditional fiction: make readers care about the characters, create suspense and concern, and a feeling of dramatic completion" (53).Predicts that "truly tragic fiction might never work in IF. . . . I'm referring to such works as 1984, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, Heart of Darkness or Deliverance, in which it is dramatically necessary for the main character to be psychically crushed. The IF player might feel that giving them the freedom to choose how to act had been a cruel farce" (58).Observes that interactive fiction offers many opportunities to break the suspension of disbelief (60). If the game calls for a prop bottle, the bottle should be breakable; the broken shards of glass should be able to cut things, etc. [Goetz seems to mean that this level of simulation is necessary to involve the player with the story, even though these simulated objects may have nothing to do with the story the author wants to tell.]On the coming of virtual reality: "Textual IF will survive, just as text novels haven't been entirely replaced by movies. It is a matter of time involvement. A graphical representation takes longer to 'play', just as a two-hour movie can't communicate as much as two hours of reading. It also takes much longer to create. Individual authors simply don't have the time to stop every time they write a scene, and create every object in the scene as a 3D object, as well as the background" (74).

Granade, Stephen, ed. Interactive Fiction []. 1997-2001. 30 May 2001. . [link]

5.0 A tremendous guide to current events in the IF community, updated almost daily. He also regularly writes short, informal articles on such topics as using IF to teach ESL, women and computer games, IF and traditional genres, and "literate" IF . (See also §3: Granade.)

Granade, Stephen, organizer. Interactive Fiction Competition 2001. 2000. 30 May 2001. ................
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