IF
On Interactive Fiction
- What are the features of Interactive Fiction (IF) that define it as a unique medium of expression?
- What are the ways in which the author and the player are complementary participants in the experience of telling and playing a story in the medium?
- What are the strengths of the medium?
- Where is there room for exploration, expansion, and growth?
The basics of interactive fiction.
In its basic form, IF is a simulation of rooms and objects. The player controls a character who is able to interact with this virtual environment. Objects can be more closely inspected. Locations can be entered and exited. The player is able to travel, then, inspect items, and perform basic manipulations such as taking and dropping and putting, opening and closing.
The basic verb commands have remained constant since the beginning of IF. Modern authors still rely to a great extent on a fairly small, specialized vocabulary. There has been a resistance to adding vocabulary that the average player will be unable to guess. The medium’s maturing and growth has been in the area of anticipating uses of these basic verbs, of a more detailed degree of implementation.
The basic form of IF play is that the player reads some text, enters a command, and is rewarded with a new piece of text. Modern IF languages and their parsers come equipped to deal with generic responses to most commands. What delights the player is to see a new bit of text, a special message they have never seen before, for each command they enter. When the messages are generic or repeat themselves, there is a sense of stagnancy. The game is not changing, and the player gropes for a way to make something new appear. When the player cannot make anything new appear despite best efforts, the player feels that he is “stuck.”
One feature of IF is that there is a strong desire in the player to effect changes in the environment, which creates a sense of progress. The oldest IF had no narrative, but there was a sense of progression created by the use of obstacles. The player had to effect some manipulation of item and environment in order to progress past the obstacle. In narrative IF, the concept is the same, but the obstacles are integrated into the story; the progression that follows a surpassed obstacle is an advancement in the story.
The most basic obstacle is an impediment to free movement from location to location, such as a closed door. The simplest solution to the obstacle is for the player to open the door. If the door is locked, the player will need some way of opening the lock, or perhaps contrive some means to open the door despite the lock, using only what is available in the game.
The dance with the author begins. Has the author provided the means necessary for the player to surpass the obstacle? Are the means obvious to the player, such as a key in the player’s inventory, or sitting in an adjoining location? If the player visits every location and turns up no such means, he will feel frustration, and may turn to the use of specialized verbs instead of specialized objects. The player will try to kick, hit, batter, shove, push, and break the door. Or the less violent player will try to knock on the door. If none of these options bear fruit, the player will look for more clues, perhaps examining the door in detail — inspecting the knob, the lock, the jamb, the hinges, the wood, the space under the door, looking through the keyhole, etc. Has the author provided a solution to this avenue of exploration? Or has the player simply not found the means that the author has provided? If not, has the author provided any clues or hints?
The early IF made full use of such obstacles, often doubling or tripling the obstacles. In this way, they became puzzles. For the locked door, there is provided a key, but it is guarded by a dog, who can be distracted by a tennis ball, that is found only by close inspection of a pile of leaves. Each piece of the puzzle is spread out over the landscape, requiring exploration before the full solution is possible for the player to enact.
It is possible in this way to break up a game’s total landscape into sections, each of which can be seen, rudimentarily, as a chapter in the game’s plot. In the above example, the player may travel anywhere in the location’s map except beyond the locked door. There may indeed be nothing else to do at this stage except collect the items, in order, that will eventually allow the player to unlock the door. Beyond the door may be a whole new landscape, containing three more locked doors and the multiple items that can be used to open them. There is now no need for the player to retrace his steps and wander the map of the prologue, for the game has progressed to a new stage.
In the prologue, progress consisted only of following the linear steps that led to the opening of the single door. At the same time, the player was free to wander at will, investigating every location and inspecting every visible item, in no particular order. In the second stage of the game, the player has his choice of three doors. It is probable that the player will be able to progress to the final stage of the game only after opening all three doors and fully exploring what is beyond them. It is up to the player to choose in what order to open the three doors, at least as far as the player knows. Has the author provided the means of opening all three, or is there an enforced order here as well? The key for door number three may be hidden beyond door number two, for example. But the means of acquiring the key for door number three might depend on the player having taken an item found behind door number one. Thus, the player must open the first door, then the second, and finally the third. This is a design choice that the IF author may make.
There is a view that the better design choice is to allow the player free movement during the larger, second act of a game, rather than continuing to enforce a linear progression. It is possible to spread out the elements of each locked-door puzzle (the chains of object acquisition, as outlined in the tennis ball-to-key sequence above) so that a good deal of free exploration is allowed, such that the player might exult in this freedom until he learns, through trial and error, that he is going to have to open the three doors in order.
It is good design to give the player a sense of purpose, a clear goal. At the beginning of most games, the player will probably not know what their purpose in playing is going to be. Some amount of exploration should probably reveal at least an intermediate goal. The discovery of a door which is locked establishes such a goal.
Puzzle IF is distinguished mainly by the arbitrariness of such goals. A locked door with a difficult-to-acquire key is just a puzzle to be solved. In narrative IF, the player’s sense of purpose can be augmented by a surrounding story, a motivation beyond mere progress for the sake of progress.
Suppose the player is confronted by a locked door, but this time the message generated when trying to open it is not simply, “It’s locked.” Suppose there is another character in the story, who says, “You mustn’t go in there! That’s the closet where Grandma kept her secret diaries!” Perhaps the situation is that Grandma has vanished recently. Perhaps the diaries contain some clue as to what happened to her. Now there is a natural and very real curiosity at work in the player’s head, a real sense of mission — get into the closet and find the diaries. There is also a trust here, that the author has put these diaries in the locked closet, and that reading the diaries will indeed give the player a further sense of direction. Seeded in the player’s mind is also the idea of the overarching purpose of the game: to find Grandma.
Except this is still within the realm of the puzzle game. Story IF has now gotten to the point where character studies may be the entire point of the game. Perhaps all that the player will achieve is a complete mental portrait of the fictional Grandma character, by poring over her left-behind possessions. There tends to be desire to find the same fulfillment of a cleanly drawn narrative, something that traditional obstacles and purposes can be put into the service of.