intfiction.org

So every time I try to figure out "interactive fiction", I find that people often sell it by touting the interactivity. Okay, fair enough. If I just wanted to read a bunch of text, I'd probably pick up a book. If I just wanted a story that I could engage with visuals, I'd probably go to a movie. Those are the presumably less-interactive options.

So interactivity.

This past weekend I played the F.E.A.R games again. Very linear shooter, much like Half-Life 2. And, yet, while playing there are genuinely creepy moments and some outright jumps. There's an evolving story as you figure out what Armachem was up to, what Alma has to do with it all, and just whether or not Paxton Fettel (and Alma) are helping me or trying to kill me. I get a visual, auditory, and textual viewpoint of how an evil is spreading and what role I may have to play in that.

I also started playing Mass Effect 2. There I have an evolving story of a threat with a group called the Collectors (who may be working with aliens called the Reapers). I have to assemble a team to take on this threat, all the while not entirely trusting my employer or the people he has me working with (most of whom are mercenaries and thieves). While I don't trust my employer, he did raise me from the dead so I suppose I have to at least try to work with them. So good dialogue moments, good tension, and lots of building up of my motley crew, learning how to communicate with them so that they'll help me on what everyone already believes is a suicide mission.

Lots of interactivity, all of which encourages my participation in visual, audio, and reading aspects. And it's all continuous. Even if nothing immediate is happening on screen (talking to characters, bad guys shooting at me, etc), I can still interact with the world, run around, check out areas, etc. I can hear atmospheric sounds (some of which are really creepy in the F.E.A.R. games). But it's also constrained: there are limits to the interactivity so that the story does progress and at a fairly decent clip in both games mentioned above.

So then I play "interactive fiction". (A good comparison with F.E.A.R in some ways is "Slouching Towards Bedlam" or "Babel" -- both of which have you learning about events that have already taken place via tapes or memories. In F.E.A.R it's finding laptops and listening to phone messages.) Anyway: "interactive fiction". So I read some static text. Then I get a command prompt. I try to type a command. I get a new batch of static text. Maybe an NPC is encountered. I get a menu to list some text items to speak to them about. (Or I have to sit there trying "ASK CREEPY DUDE ABOUT {something} and hope that {something} works.) To get to a location I have to type a bunch of direction commands. Or maybe I can just say "GO TO {room}, which of course makes all the rooms just sort of blur by.

My point here is that it's all very mechanical. Text adventures can't help but expose their mechanics at each and every point. The same could be said of any game, of course, but those other games are busy engaging all of your senses in various ways and at various times. Text adventures are like reading a book where I have to turn the page after every paragraph (and where the pages are stapled together in some cases). I notice it most when I find a text adventure game that has what seems to be a really good story. I'm then frustrated that I can't just keep the story going because the game mechanics keep intruding. Again, wouldn't any game do that? Yes, but also again, those games are engaging my senses and thus are interactive at various levels without violating a convention. (I.e., I don't feel like I'm reading a book that just stopped on me until I do something or watching a movie that won't continue until I say the right thing.)

I don't see "interactive fiction" as being limited to text games so I still prefer "text adventures" because graphic games ARE fictional worlds that you interact with. "Text adventure" at least makes it clear that the emphasis is on text. And I actually see text games offering much more limited interactivity than other games. They do offer more interactivity than books and movies -- but so what? Unless the story is comparable to what I'd read in a book or see in a movie, I don't see the interactivity being all that much of a value add because it usually means I have to jump through numerous hoops -- all the while usually only having one sense engaged. Since it's purely textual, that means pacing and tension can be more difficult to sustain since you have no idea where the player will get stuck, so sometimes story suffers.

I'm not saying all this to bash text adventures. (I used to love text adventures back in the day. I remember playing Moonmist, Planetfall, Ballyhoo, etc.) But I'm really trying to understand the value add of the interactivity that text adventures bring over other formats since many of the most ardent supporters continually say that the interactivity is what sets text adventures apart.

Maybe a good question is the "elevator speech" you would use to convince someone to try text adventures. "You should totally try text adventures, because you ...." <--- what?

Can you answer the question of why I should play RPG games rather than first person shooters? It's the same kind of question, really.

Well, this is part of the reason why I think puzzles often are at war with stories; if your game gets the player stuck (let's say that a puzzle is something that's likely to get a player stuck for a little while) then it brings the story to a halt. But I'm not sure this is unique to text adventures; it's a question of how good you are at dealing with the mechanics. It disrupts my immersion in Cave Story's story just as much when I have to replay a boss fight for the twentieth time as it disrupts my immersion in Sparrow's Song when I can't get past the nymph.* And with IF, at least a well-designed hint system (or failing that a working walkthrough) will get you past the obstruction. In action games, if your reflexes aren't good enough you're SOL.

Not that I'm saying that this is an answer to your question, just that other games can do very well at recreating the "watching a movie that stopped on me" feeling.

*Well, in Cave Story I get the hint of a bit of progress and in Sparrow's Song I don't. But Sparrow's Song may be out on the extreme of unclued puzzles.

For me personally, I haven't player the Fear or Mass Effect games because the gameplay is too difficult for me. (I did try the ME2 demo, and got hopelessly killed quickly.) I do play and enjoy some graphical games, the turn-based nature of text adventures (to use your terminology) and usually slower pace is one of the things that appeal to me. (And should I get stuck - hints and walkthroughs can help.)

Another thing is the parser. I love the idea of the parser, not in a Sleep-is-death kind of way, but the way it exists in current IF systems.

When compared to most hobbyist-created graphical adventure games I like that most IF is less fuelled by nostalgia.

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I'm fairly new to the genre, so I'm still getting my bearings straight, but be that as it may, the term interactivity springs two things in mind. The degree the player interacts with his environment, and the way he does so, which for text adventures is in a sense the parser. I'm guessing a common example is that text games are to books what graphical games are to movies, which may not be exactly the case, but has some truth in it.

Having said that, with my limited experience and historical knowledge of the genre, I can't see the value of a “more/less interactive” argument. Certainly, older text adventure games let you interact with the world in ways that were impossible for graphical games of that era, but nowadays things have changed a lot for graphical games, so that is not necessarily the case.

The way I see it, both text and graphical games have plenty to offer, and without delving any deeper, a couple of the best arguments I could offer someone to convince him to try text adventures have nothing to do with interactivity. One is the part your imagination plays and at the same time(even though at first glance it seems like the opposite) the way that you get a full sense of what the creator/writer wanted you to(for lack of a better description).

True ... except that those are questions that get answered regularly by wide audiences that usually talk about the strategy aspects of one versus the immediacy of combat of the others. Both will often be talked about in terms of to what extent they are a bit of both. Mass Effect, for example, is a bit of both shooter and RPG. As is Fallout 3. Combined with story elements, discussions will usually center on how much or how little you want to micromanage aspects of a party, or how much you have to search for items versus just interacting with the world, or the nature of the weapons you can use, etc. People life Half-Life 2 not just because of the story but also because of certain elements, like the gravity gun, giving you a good way to puzzle out solutions to environmental problems. Call of Duty is a good example where people often tout the story but also the cool situational elements, combined with the squad-based mechanics that are getting much better. Even Hitman is like this, where people often bring up the stealth aspects combined with the need to figure out the layout of an environment, ambush your target, get out alive. Deus Ex was another game in that category, although that was much more shooter than not, but you could still choose a wide variety of ways to deal with situations, often having to avoid making sounds that tipped off the enemy you were around.

I never see text adventures discussed in this same context. Maybe they are. I just haven't seen it. I don't see the level of interactivity that I just described.

Right, I agree. But in graphical games, you can cue the player in numerous ways. Have a sound near where they should go. (In F.E.A.R, if you get stuck in an area, the ghost of Alma will often appear quickly showing you where you probably want to look. Or lights will flicker indicating something you haven't looked at. Dead Space was also good at this. Even turn-based RPGs can still have elements going on around you to a certain extent.

The only mechanic that text adventures have is the command prompt: everything is static until the player does something. Not true in other games. Stuff can be going on around you that can observe, either with sound or sight. So, again, the very nature of text adventures limits the options for interactivity as I see it.

This totally makes sense to me. I can easily see how text adventures would cater to a more sedate gaming experience.



Which is interesting because I find text adventure creation to be largely fueled by nostalgia, largely because if I load up a game today (created with the latest and greatest system), I can still see basically the same interface from twenty or more years ago. I still see people worrying about accomodating a z-machine. (I realize that not all of this is truly fueled by nostalgia but to an outsider it can definitely seem that way.) But I concede this is an area where I'm biased.

But books and movies require my imagination as well. Books are the closest parallel to text adventures I guess. So I don't see "using your imagination" as being all that much of an argument since just about anything can ask you to do that. The "get a full sense of what that creator/writer wanted you to" could apply to books, movies or graphical games. So, again, I'm not seeing an argument that's really unique or compelling to text adventures.

A poster above did mention the more sedate gaming experience, certainly one that doesn't require hand/eye coordination to any great degree and usually not too many aspects of timing related challenges. Those at least do suggest text adventures. Another, obviously, is the desire to read text. But, again, it's the interactivity people often tout: interacting with the world and thus the story. Those interactions tend to be puzzle-based. So I guess that starts to get at the elevator speech.

Having real-time stuff going on in turn based games is very uncanny valley to me, actually, kind of like when the newspaper comic "For Better or For Worse" starting adding blinking eyes to the characters in the online archives. This is why I generally dislike sounds in IF, too.

Anyway, like mattw, I can't for the life of me make progress in real-time games. The frustration I get from playing the same darn tutorial level repeatedly to try to get to the meat of a platformer or FPS makes those genres a lot less interactive than IF for me, personally.