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Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame 'Adventure'
In a New Critical approach rarely seen in academic discussions of IF, Buckles de-emphasizes the role of the programmer/author, taking "Colossal Cave Adventure" (Crowther, c.1975; Crowther and Woods, 1976) as a "given," and examining instead the reader/player's efforts to make meaning out of the experience. As an immature medium, IF has not yet produced great literature: "I do not believe that the literary limitations of Adventure means that computer story games are of necessity a sub-literary genre, or that there is something about the computer medium itself which pre-destines interactive fiction always to be frivolous in nature. The development of film can be taken as an analogy."
(Source: Dennis G. Jerz, Interactive Fiction Annotated Bibliography http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/bibliography/all.htm#Buckles_1985)
Scott Rettberg - 14.12.2012 - 09:54
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Hors-Categorie: An Embodied, Affective Approach to Interactive Fiction
The interactive fiction work "Hors-Categorie" stages a virtual encounter between bodies in a hotel room along the Tour de France bicycle race.
In the story, the player is confronted with a number of decisions regarding his or her body, which, in the game state exists virtually. Various bodily choices—blood doping, shaving one's legs, peeing in a cup—lead to the generation of affects that alter the game state. My effort in writing this work—concerning doping, cyclists, bodies, and ethics—is to think through the potentialities for engaging, designing, and theorizing new media with an emphasis on the embodied nature of affect.
Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 16:21
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Blending the Crossword with the Narrative: An Examination of the Storygame
Interactive narrative cannot be understood as only literature or as only game, nor even as a combative relationship between the two. Narrative-oriented "games" are neither novel nor movie, but they are likewise significantly different beasts than conventional, competitive games. They rather draw elements from both. We will come to terms with the concept of the storygame by examining the historical role of games in stories and stories in games to come to understand how the two forms combined into the modern storygame, focusing on the key traits of interactivity and immersion.
Scott Rettberg - 07.01.2013 - 22:47
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Original Chat: Exploring the Origins of the Turing Test
The chatbot, or conversational agent, is a new media art object that has been around since Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA (1966), which is included in ELO's directory of e-lit. These programs have since been adapted for electronic narratives and interactive dramas. Instigating this area of research, Alan Turing's thought experiment/dare, the Turing Test (1950), claimed that computers would soon be able to perform conversational exchange convincingly as humans. While many use the Turing Test to contextualize a discussion about chatbots, few have examined the origins of the Turing Test itself. Crossing the history of technology in this vision of a chatbot legacy, I will outline one new theory of the origins of the Turing Test, suggesting a lineage from the military-industrial complex that helps us to re-examine our interaction with artificial agents in electronic literature from IF works such as Emily Short's "Galatea" to Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas' "Facade."
Scott Rettberg - 08.01.2013 - 10:45
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Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7
CREATING INTERACTIVE FICTION WITH INFORM 7 is a jargon-free, step-by-step guide to mastering the basics of creating dynamic, text-based story worlds. Inform 7 is a free multiplatform interactive fiction authoring environment that uses an intuitive natural language syntax. A tool focused on writers, not programmers, Inform allows users construct complex, rich storytelling worlds by writing sentences as simple as "Tom is a person," or as complicated as "Instead of attacking Tom when something lethal is held, now every nearby watchdog owned by Tom hates the player." No prior programming experience is required. Throughout the book, readers develop a full-length, release-quality example game, exploring the real-world issues involved in authoring participatory narratives and gaining skills that can be applied to the creation of future games and stories.
(Publisher's copy)
Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 00:14
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The Gothic in Contemporary Interactive Fictions
This study examines how themes, conventions and concepts in Gothic discourses are remediated or developed in selected works of contemporary interactive fiction. These works, which are wholly text-based and proceed via command line input from a player, include Nevermore, by Nate Cull (2000), Anchorhead, by Michael S. Gentry (1998), Madam Spider’s Web, by Sara Dee (2006) and Slouching Towards Bedlam, by Star C. Foster and Daniel Ravipinto (2003). The interactive fictions are examined using a media-specific, in-depth analytical approach.
Scott Rettberg - 23.01.2013 - 23:37
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Creating: Adventure in Style and The Marble Index in Curveship
I describe the process of writing and programming the first two full-scale interactive fiction pieces in the new system I have been developing, Curveship. These two pieces, Adventure in Style and The Marble Index, are meant, in part, to serve as examples for authors using this system. More importantly, though, they are initial explorations of the potential of Curveship and of the automation of narrative variation. They were also undertaken to help provide concrete system-building guidance as development of Curveship progressed toward a release. Adventure in Style is a port of the first interactive fiction, the 1976 Adventure by Will Crowther and Don Woods, which adds parametric variations in style that are inspired by Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style. The Marble Index simulates the experiences of a woman who, strangely disjointed in time and reality, finds herself visiting ordinary moments in the late twentieth century; the narration accentuates this character's disorientation and contributes to the literary effect of incidents.
Audun Andreassen - 03.04.2013 - 15:56
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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
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Process-Intensive Fiction
Unlike digital poetry, which has pursued process-intensive directions throughout its history, the dominant directions of digital fiction make relatively light use of computational processes. Whether one looks at the traditions of hypertext fiction, interactive fiction, or video games, the primary model is a set of connections (traveled in different manners) between largely static chunks of language. This panel explores a set of alternatives to this model. The suggested potential panelists include the author of the first book on this topic, published in 2009 (Wardrip-Fruin); one of the authors of Facade, the first fully realized interactive drama (Mateas); the creator of Curveship, a new interactive fiction tool that introduces discourse-level variation as a first-class parameter (Montfort); a prominent author, commentator, and tool builder (Short); the author of Blue Lacunae, a vast, highly variable interactive fiction (Reed); the creator of new algorithms for literary variability based on conceptual blending (Harrell); and the author of the mainstream game industry's most ambitious project in this space, Far Cry 2 (Redding).
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:39
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Determining Literariness in Interactive Fiction
Questions whether the world presented in interactive fiction is a "literary one." Defines "literariness" as quality of "making strange" that which is linguistically familiar. Randall presents study of: "Mindwheel,""Brimstone,""Breakers,""A Mind Forever Voyaging,""Portal," and "Trinity." Suggests that the literariness of interactive fiction comes out of its concern for "making strange" what is familiar and vice versa.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 29.06.2013 - 09:42
