Search

The search found 4 results in 0.011 seconds.

Search results

1. Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original "Adventure" in Code and in Kentucky

   Because so little primary historical work has been done on the classic text computer game "Colossal Cave Adventure", academic and popular references to it frequently perpetuate inaccuracies. "Adventure" was the first in a series of text-based games ("interactive fiction") that emphasize exploring, puzzles, and story, typically in a fantasy setting; these games had a significant cultural impact in the late 1970s and a significant commercial presence in the early 1980s. Will Crowther based his program on a real cave in Kentucky; Don Woods expanded this version significantly. The expanded work has been examined as an occasion for narrative encounters [Buckles 1985] and as an aesthetic masterpiece of logic and utility [Knuth 1998]; however, previous attempts to assess the significance of "Adventure" remain incomplete without access to Crowther's original source code and Crowther's original source cave. Accordingly, this paper analyzes previously unpublished files recovered from a backup of Woods's student account at Stanford, and documents an excursion to the real Colossal Cave in Kentucky in 2005.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 18.02.2011 - 15:39

2. Command Lines: Aesthetics and Technique in Interactive Fiction and New Media

   The Interactive Fiction (IF) genre describes text-based narrative experiences in which a person interacts with a computer simulation by typing text phrases (usually commands in the imperative mood) and reading software-generated text responses (usually statements in the second person present tense). Re-examining historical and contemporary IF illuminates the larger fields of electronic literature and game studies. Intertwined aesthetic and technical developments in IF from 1977 to the present are analyzed in terms of language (person, tense, and mood), narrative theory (Iser's gaps, the fabula / sjuzet distinction), game studies / ludology (player apprehension of rules, evaluation of strategic advancement), and filmic representation (subjective POV, time-loops). Two general methodological concepts for digital humanities analyses are developed in relation to IF: implied code, which facilitates studying the interactor's mental model of an interactive work; and frustration aesthetics, which facilitates analysis of the constraints that structure interactive experiences.

   Patricia Tomaszek - 27.05.2011 - 15:41

3. Generating Narrative Variation in Interactiv Fiction

   A general method for the generation of natural language narrative is described. It allows the expression, or narrative discourse, to vary independently of the underlying events and existents that are the narrative’s content. Specifically, this variation is accomplished in an interactive fiction (IF) system which replies to typed input by narrating what has happened in a simulated world. IF works have existed for about 30 years as forms of text-based computer simulation, instances of dialog systems, and examples of literary art. Theorists of narrative have carefully distinguished between the level of underlying content (corresponding to the simulated world in interactive fiction) and that of expression (corresponding to the textual exchange between computer arnd user) since the mid-1960s, when the field of narratology began to develop, but IF systems have not yet made use of this distinction. The current project contributes new techniques for automatic narration by building on work done in computational linguistics, specifically natural language generation, and in narratology.

   Scott Rettberg - 13.12.2012 - 20:01

4. Enlightening Interactive Fiction: Andrew Plotkin's Shade

   Jeremy Douglass evaluates Shade within the history of interactive fiction, and considers how light is represented in the code structure of scene descriptions, arguing that "[w]ithout vision there is no agency."

   The source is the essay-review on www.electronicbookreview.com written by Jeremy Douglass

   Kristina Igliukaite - 14.05.2020 - 21:51