Interactive Fiction Foundations of Interactive Game Design Professor Jim Whitehead March 12, 2008 Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0

Game Demo Night This Friday ► March 14, 5pm-9pm ► E2 180 (Simularium) Come to this event if you want to demo your game ► Bring laptop and/or game on CDROM/USB Drive ► RPG Maker and C#/XNA: best if you can bring your own laptop

Final Class Game Demonstrations The best 6-7 student games created this quarter will demo their games in front of the entire class Monday, March 17, normal class time Judges from the games industry will be present Selected teams will have 5 minutes each to demo their game The best game team will win a Nintendo DS for each team member (limit 2) A fun, intense event

Final Exam Wednesday, March 19, 4pm-7pm ► In Media Theater Before exam ► Create a non-computer game Board game Puzzle game Role playing game Children’s game Card game ► Bring typed, printed rules to exam, plus everything needed to play the game During exam ► Play the game with others in exam ► Write essay reflecting on the design of your game

Final Exam – Game Details The game must have a name The rules must be typed, and fit on no more that 3 pages (10pt or larger, multi-column is OK) Game elements (game pieces, boards, cards, dice, etc.) are not part of the 2 pages No restrictions on game media (cardboard, plastic, leather, latex, it's all OK) The game must be playable inside the Media Theater while many other students are also playing their games A complete game should take less than 30 minutes The game must not be a drinking game. Game must be original. No minor variants on existing games. Major variants of existing games are OK. Game play must not involve breaking laws or campus regulations (the "Don't get your professor in trouble" rule) No flames, uncontrolled liquids, knives, swords, whips, or functional weapons of any kind

What is interactive fiction? A story where the reader/player can interact with the storyworld, and where substantial portions of the information presented to the player are in the form of prose. ► Text adventure: an interactive fiction where the reader/player controls a player character who sets out on out-of-the-ordinary undertakings involving risk or danger. Stories progress: ► Story presents prose ► Reader/player enters a sentence to interact with system ► Story reacts to player utterance with more prose (or an error)

Gameplay elements of IF Exploration ► Traveling through a new, and unknown world Mazes ► Successfully navigating through non-standard level geometries Puzzles/riddles ► Solving the puzzle allows player to continue in the game Acquiring items ► Gaining treasure, picking up items used to solve puzzles Guessing correct verbs/keywords ► Learning how to express intent is part of gameplay

Adventure: First Text Adventure Adventure (1975) ► Some variants called Colossal Cave ► First text adventure, precursor to modern role-playing games ► Will Crowther Explored caves as a hobby, also played Dungeons & Dragons ► Decided to “write a program that was a re-creation in fantasy of my caving, and also would be a game for the kids, and perhaps [have] some aspects of the Dungeons and Dragons I had been playing.” p. 87, Twisty Little Passages, Nick Montfort

Heyday of Interactive Fiction Early computers frequently lacked graphics ► Interactive Fiction is well suited to this limitation Early computers also typically slow ► Interactive Fiction doesn’t require much processing power to play Due to this, substantial early interest in interactive fiction ► Peak of popularity in mid-1980’s

Major Publishers Adventure International ► Scott Adams ► The Adams Adventures series Infocom ► Zork series ► Deadline ► Hitchiker’s Guide to Galaxy James Willing, (1982)

Today No commercial activity A golden age of interactive fiction ► Active non-commercial community ► IF is generally of higher quality than at peak ► More IF being created now than at commercial peak Yearly interactive fiction contest Substantial scholarly interest ► Nick Montfort, Twisty Little Passages, MIT Press, 2003 Good tools ► Inform (Graham Nelson)

Interactive Fiction: Pro and Con Pro ► Gameworld described using text Permits greater expressiveness about internal mental states of characters Can permit better control over the mood of a scene ► Low computational resources, easy to implement Well suited to early computers Con ► Gameworld described using text Games that use graphics are more visually interesting Have pretty screenshots ► No real-time action More deliberative, turn-based gameplay ► Natural language interface impoverished Permits much broader range of expression that game understands Can be very frustrating