Search
The search found 20 results in 0.011 seconds.
Search results
-
Colossal Cave Adventure
The first work of interactive fiction was Colossal Cave Adventure. Its first iteration was developed in 1975-76 by Will Crowther, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based programmer who was part of the team that developed ARPANET, the original network infrastructure on which the Internet is based (Montfort, 1997, p. 86), and subsequently expanded by Don Woods (1977). Crowther turned his programming skills towards a game about cave exploration after his divorce in order to entertain his children when they visited him (Nelson, 2001, p. 343). Crowther had been a spelunker in his past, helping to map a network of caverns in Kentucky (Jerz, 2007). He used that experience as the basis for the network of caves described in Adventure. The game itself provided a relatively simple experience of navigation and puzzle solving. Players attempted to retrieve objects from within the cave environments, and to win by completing their collection—a kind of textual geocaching.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 18.02.2011 - 15:06
-
Book and Volume
An interactive fiction written in Inform and running on the Z-Machine, Book and Volumes simulates an eventful day in a near-present factory town. The interactor is not offered adventure, monsters to defeat, or treasures to find, but a chance to perform the routine tasks of an information-technology worker. As Brian Kerr wrote, "It's about a sysadmin in the weird, charming cyber-Gotham of nTopia who spends the last working day of his/her/its life rebooting servers and reacting to frantic pages from an unseen supervisor. ('Net extremely hoseled. Engine team being hideously masticated by this outage. Demo rapidly approaching. Get to the cages. Reboot the servers. Hasten. Do not rest. Please. All five of them.') What’s the game really about? Knut, a resident of nTopia, pegs it: 'Reality. Illusion. Theme is reality versus illusion. Must discern reality. And illusion.
(Source: Author's description from the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2)
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 08.03.2011 - 14:45
-
Ad Verbum
Ad Verbum is a Oulipo-inspired wordplay-based game.
Scott Rettberg - 20.05.2011 - 12:00
-
Portal
Portal is a mix between a computer novel and an interactive game. It was published for the Amiga in 1986 byActivision, written by Rob Swigart, produced by Brad Fregger and programmed by Nexa Corporation.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 27.07.2011 - 16:00
-
Deadline
Deadline is a traditional detective mystery adpated to adventure game format: a mansion, a murder, and the usual suspects. It differs from the episodic paradigm of treasuer hund, bewildering maze, and tough monsters introduced by Adventure and instead confines the action to a limited space . . . with almost no hidden rooms, no mazes, less then fifteen, all human, characters (if human is the right word), and an intratextual time span of twelve hours.
(Source: Espen Aarseth, Cybertext)
Scott Rettberg - 06.09.2011 - 14:30
-
Zork 1: The Great Underground Empire
The first part of the bestselling Zork trilogy, and a close descendant of Adventure, the first work of interactive fiction or text adventure game as the genre was known at the time. Zork I was Infocom's first game, and sold 378,987 copies by 1986. Similarly to Adventure, the game unfolds in a maze-like dungeon, where the user (or adventurer) must battle trolls and solve puzzles in order to find twenty trophies to bring back to the house outside which the game begins.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 26.03.2012 - 10:09
-
Hors Catégorie
Hors Catégorie is an interactive fiction by Chris Calabro and David Benin developed in 2007.
It is possible to play it on almost every system, even on Smartphone.
The used Software is a z-machine Interpreter, which is a game’s requirement as the player needs it in order to emulate an Infocom machine.
It takes place entirely in a single hotel room, with several subrooms. Unlike many adventure-like interactive fictions, location, possessions, and strength are not the main obstacles of this game, but rather player knowledge and moral choices. The point is to explore the inner conflict of the protagonist and shape his character. This is why the typical presence of interactive fictions’ obstacles makes Hors Catégorie innovative and different because here they are the player moral choices.
The title of the game comes from the 'out of category' classification of difficult climbs in the Tour de France, where the game is set. The protagonist is a rider in the Tour, just waking, getting ready to take on the day's current stage.
How to play:
Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 16:24
-
Common Ground: One Night in a Three-story House
Common Ground: One Night in a Three-story House is the story of a poor suburban family told interactively through text.
(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)
A three-chapter game (with an epilogue) in which you're a different character in each chapter. The twist is that each chapter covers roughly the same space of time, and you interact with the other two characters, to varying degrees, when you're in each pair of shoes. The gameplay is a bit restrictive--the game doesn't allow for a lot of variation--but the characters themselves are well developed and the interactions feel reasonably realistic. The game even does a passable job of recording the actions you take when you're one character and playing them back when you're a different character, observing the antics of the first. Very short--20-30 minutes to play through at most--but worth playing; it largely eschews puzzles in favor of character interaction in a way that little IF attempts.
(Source: Review by Duncan Stevens, BAF's guide to the IF Archive)
Scott Rettberg - 17.01.2013 - 13:26
-
Aisle
A work of interactive fiction.
From IFwiki:
- The original "one move" game. After the results of the player's command are displayed, the game pauses for a keypress, then returns the game back to the beginning so the player can make another choice.
- Multiple endings. Although some endings are better than others, there is no best winning ending; the player is not playing to win or lose. Also, the endings, taken together, imply inconsistent past histories for the PC.
- Puzzleless. The player is expected to explore the possibilities offered by the set-up. There is some emphasis on calling each variant a story, or part of a story.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 29.06.2013 - 09:31
-
Metamorphoses
Metamorphoses is a game about transformation and aspiration, set somewhere between our own reality and the world of forms. An exercise in simulationist IF, it offers multiple solutions to most puzzles and attempts to model interactions between objects of different sizes, shapes, and materials in a realistic way, including burning and the breakage of fragile objects.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 29.06.2013 - 09:46
