Early Interactive Fiction: Ambiguity & Personalized Narrative Okay. So, typing the command “KILL THIEF WITH KNIFE” in Zork because some shady, muttering bastard is trying to kipe your bejeweled egg might not have been as enriching an experience as reading about Alice in Wonderland facing off with a giant, hookah-smoking caterpillar who’s asking her THE philosophical question. Alice in Wonderland (as it was and is for many) was the first novel I read and has never been demoted from its spot as My Favorite Book. Still, Zork’s text-based adventure had something Lewis Carroll’s book lacked: interactive narrative engagement. Sure, I…
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Early Interactive Fiction Part 3: The First Interactive Fiction Game: Colossal Cave Adventure The very first interactive fiction game was called Advent or Adventure, and later was widely known as Colossal Cave Adventure. The game was written in 1975 by Will Crowther, a cave diver and programmer, who wanted to enjoy it with his two young daughters. (The game is based on a cave that Crowther knew well, Bedquilt Cave in Kentucky. Apparently, there’s a cave called Colossal Cave nearby; however, the details of the game are based on Bedquilt.) Colossal Cave Adventure (entirely text-based) quickly spread across ARPAnet in…
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I wandered upon this site the other day and think it is a fun example of an immersive online experience. The site offers visitors the experience of a fly along on the original July 20th, 1969 lunar landing. It does so by giving the visitor simple controls to experience computer generated photo-realistic animated sequences of what the various stages of the voyage would have looked like (to the accompanying aliens in saucers anyway). I love it! As I flew along I got more and more wrapped up in what was happening. I felt I learned a bit more about just…
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Early Interactive Fiction Part 2: Narrative, Collaboration & Immersion When I was ten, my reader’s imagination helped to immerse me in the text-driven Mystery House (Sierra On-Line, 1980). In spite of Roberta Williams’s masterful stick drawings, her words helped me to visualize richly rendered graphics of my own. As a result, I felt more connected to this interactive fiction game than to graphical action games. All I needed was that blip of glowing, command line text that shot up from the bottom of my screen telling me that I’d just accidentally started a fire in the dining room, that the…
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Early Interactive Fiction Part 1: Striving for Literary Narrative For me, the small, silly terrors that early, home-console games like Atari’s Kaboom relied upon couldn’t hope to compete with the deftly-crafted plot of a good book. Not surprisingly, the interactive graphical adventure game Mystery House was inspired by a mystery novel—Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. (The book was more directly adapted into an interactive graphical adventure game recently in 2005). When a game has a narrative like a novel, the player’s situation is slowly revealed, the story unfolds and changes occur as if in real time. The player…
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Early Video Games: Immersion and Critical Thought The kind of gameplay that Roberta and Ken Williams’s interactive fiction game Mystery House offered me as a kid felt oddly familiar and deeply intriguing. The sense that I was there, in that spooky house exploring and discovering things—and that it would be by my wit that I would survive—offered an immersive feel that Atari’s action games lacked. Even though the game was fantasy, it engaged a skill, the use and honing of which mattered in the real world: critical thought. The skills developed in Pac Man or Adventure or Space Invaders weren’t…
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Atari Graphical Action ADVENTURE vs. Early Interactive Fiction In the early eighties, just after the Pac Man arcade game had chomped its way into the pizza place around the corner from my house, my next door neighbor’s parents got her an Atari 2600 console. Pac Man. In the home. Yes! For a ten-year-old, this—was progress. I. Loved. Atari. But my parents wouldn’t let me watch TV, much less play video games. So, I played Pac Man and Space Invaders in my neighbor’s basement whenever I could. My favorite of all those little fat black Atari cartridges was Adventure. Adventure was…
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