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Shakespeare in Simlish? Responsive Systems and Literary Language
There is a moment that can happen when reading/playing an interactive fiction. The system just presented some text, perhaps quite engaging or even beautiful. And then one tries to reply, using some of the same language, only to receive an error. The underlying system doesn't can't hear the language with which it speaks. The language it displays is written ahead of time, while the language it receives must be parsed and acted upon at runtime.
There is something uneasy about this disjuncture, and one response is to try to avoid all such problems. Will Wright's Sims speak only in gibberish sounds and visual icons, so that the surface representation of language matches the very simple internal representation of what they can discuss. Chris Crawford currently plans for his new storytelling system to avoid the construction of English-like sentences found in Storytron — instead moving to an icon language intended to help players better understand the internal representations (much more complex than those in The Sims) on which his story system will operate.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 22.06.2012 - 16:55
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Blue Lacuna: Lessons Learned Writing the World's Longest Interactive Fiction
Blue Lacuna is an ambitious new long form interactive fiction comprising nearly 400,000 words of prose and natural language source code. The longest work yet produced in the Inform 7 language, it is also among the most substantial text-based story games in existence, an interactive novel with an average play time of fifteen to twenty hours. In development between 2006 and 2009, Blue Lacuna features several experiments of interest to creators of long-form interactive stories. This paper describes these experiments and performs an anecdotal post-mortem on what succeeded and failed in the project's realization. I focus on how successful I was at achieving my three principal goals: 1) simplifying the IF interface so those unfamiliar with the medium can easily participate, 2) telling a story which revolves around the player's ability to make choices with real dramatic repercussions, and 3) creating a character able to form a complex relationship with the player across the span of a novel-length story.
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 11:24
