Interactive Fiction

Interactive Fiction (often abbreviated IF, English for interactive fiction or interactive fiction) is a type of computer program that tells stories in text form, in which the player can intervene by typed text.

The best known and most widely used type of interactive fiction are text adventures. In addition, however, there are also programs in which stories are told, are not feasible in book form, in which, however, does not occur adventure elements.

A high similarity with the very text-heavy Japanese Adventures in general and the ( digital ) Novel Subgenre ( digital novels ) in particular, however, in which the interaction takes place with the mouse.

History

After 1976, the game Adventure was published as the first text adventure, this triggered a wedding of the genre, which a decade later, its downfall in the commercial sector followed in favor of graphical adventures like Maniac Mansion. Users of the ARPANET established newsgroups, in which first the existing games were saved for posterity. Here, a similar interpreter source code of the zMachine, the Interpreter of Infocom, was to reverse engineer cracked and wrote that was released into the public domain. In 1987, the shareware program TADS, could be produced by the own text adventures and achieves the power of the zMachine in the third version in 1990. Inform was released in 1993, which allowed as freeware to create your own Text Adventures. The two programs were so popular that since 1995 an annual competition called IF Comp takes place, in which the best interactive story is honored among the followers of Interactive Fiction. The text programs without commercial constraints experienced then a second wedding, in addition to text adventures and unusual narrative of the stories were important. As directed many IF programs to adults and are artistic, but no commercial claim is no longer present.

Examples

• The Corruption Game published in 1988 dealt with a criminal history, in which the player is innocent appended an insider trading and in which he has only twenty-four hours to finish the game. Each turn it counted as one minute.
• The Infocom Suspended Game: A Cryogenetic Nightmare was a literary experiment, in which the player controlled three robots, but had limited capabilities. So could hear and see another only one of the robots. The third robot could perceive electromagnetic impulses, but his perceptions packaged poetic, so that the player had to understand this.
• Even with IF competitions unusual ideas were implemented. Photopia by Adam Cadre contained no riddle, but confined himself to portray the story from multiple perspectives. Galatea by Emily Short, however, let the user hold a conversation with the statue of a goddess, and this had to learn as much as possible and had to ensure that the statue was not disinterested.