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Interactive Fiction Annotated Bibliography (All Sections)

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25 Aug 2001; Dennis G. Jerz
This part of the Annotated IF Bibliography presents all four sections in one long file (about 100 items altogether). Jump down to...

§1) Academic/Professional Sources 
     1.1: Books, Articles and Theses 
     1.2: Conference Papers, Project Reports and Student Papers 
§2) General (Non-academic) Publications 
     2.1: Reportage (Journalism and Non-academic Books)
     2.2: Essays (Nostalgia and Reflection)
     2.3: Literature (References to IF in Other Genres) 
§3) Manifestos and Taxonomies 
§4) Archives and Meta-resources

§1) Academic/Professional Sources

§1.1: Articles, Books & Theses

Highlights from the introductory chapter:

• "The concept of cybertext focuses on the mechanical organization of the text, by positing the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the literary exchange. However, it also centers attention on the consumer, or user, of the text, as a more integrated figure than even reader-response theorists would claim" (1).
• "Since literary theorists are trained to uncover literary ambivalence in texts with linear expression, they evidently mistook texts with variable expression for texts with ambiguous meaning. When confronted with a forking text such as a hypertext, they claimed that all texts are produced as a linear sequence during reading. . . . [But] when you read from a cybertext, you are constantly reminded of inaccessible strategies and paths not taken, voices not heard. Each decision will make some parts of the text more, and others less, accessible, and you may never know the exact results of your choices; that is, exactly what you missed. This is very different from the ambiguities of a linear text" (3).
• To Aarseth, the reader of a linear text is "[l]ike a spectator at a soccer game," who "may speculate, conjecture, extrapolate, even shout abuse" but cannot influence the text. "The reader's pleasure is the pleasure of the voyeur. Safe, but impotent. The cybertext reader, on the other hand, is not safe, and therefore, it can be argued, she is not a reader. . . . The cybertext reader is a player, a gambler; the cybertext is a game-world or world-game; it is possible to explore, get lost, and discover secret paths in those texts, not metaphorically, but through the topological structures of the textual machinery" (4).
• Aarseth argues that science-fiction authors have a better theoretical grasp of cybertext than literary theorists, the latter of whom mistakenly apply metaphorical structures such as labyrinths and ambiguity (typically found in postmodern texts) with cybertexts that are, in form and content, inseparable from the textual mazes or variables within the structure of the document, rather than merely applied by the reader's interpretation. "Thus, the interpretations and misinterpretations of the digital media by literary theorists is a recurrent theme of this book" (14).

• "... the ergodic structures invented by Crowther and Woods twenty years ago are of course far from dead but instead persevere as the basic figure for the large and growing industrial entertainment genre, called, by a somewhat catachrestic pleonasm, 'interactive games.' . . . It is a paradox that, despite the lavish and quite expensive graphics of these productions, the player's creative options are still as primitive as they were in 1976" (102-103).
• Observes that Buckles, in her dissertation on "Adventure," "seems uninterested in placing her subject text at a specific point in history, and she mentions its creators, Crowther and Woods, only in footnotes. . . . Most commentators and critics of the adventure game genre (Bolter and Joyce 1987; Randall 1988; Ziegfeld 1989; Bolter 1991; Sloane 1991; Murray 1995) fail to mention the original Adventure at all, and those who do usually date it far off the mark (Niesz and Holland 1984; Lanestedt 1989; Aarseth 1994) and often neglect to mention its creators (Moulthrop and Kaplan 1991; Kelley 1993)" (107).
• Offers a detailed analysis of the writing, plot, characters, and even the software bugs which contribute to (or detract from) the effectiveness of Marc Blank's "Deadline" (Infocom, 1982) (115-127).

• Just as successful interaction with a computer application requires a clear difference between, for instance an arrow pointer (for selecting menus and pushing buttons) and an I-beam (for inserting and manipulating text), so too, the authors argue, should interactive media develop its own "idioms that exploit the characteristics of the computer based sign" (291).
• This kind of interactive storytelling involves tracking the internal emotions (loneliness, vulnerability, etc.) of various simulated characters, and playing out a scenario based upon these states, which fluctuate with the action. Unlike the profession of literary criticism, which takes a polished product and analyzes it for evidence of underlying structure, the AI method begins with the structure, and builds a rudimentary story upon it.

[Note: The AI method of computer storytelling focuses on simulating everyday human behavior; but good stories generally require unusual events of some kind - or at least an artistic presentation of everyday events. Many IF practitioners (e.g. §3: Granade, "Artificial Intelligence in IF") argue that full-blown AI is a red herring. Nevertheless, the programming of believable supporting characters remains a technical and aesthetic challenge in command-line IF (see §3: Short).]

• On the nature of language puzzles (as presented in legend, the Bible, and riddle anthologies) as a factor in traditional fiction. One such puzzle: "Brothers and sisters I have none; but this man's father is my father's son. Who am I?"
  • "Especially in the longer stories, the situations seem to be chosen not only because they express the logical relationships so well, but [also] because we can interpret them as moral or aesthetic problems" (47).
  • "In most of the stories the reader can identify with characters' wishes or needs. Since their goals make sense to us, there is a reason, a motivation for solving the problems, i.e. we fulfill our own needs vicariously by fulfilling the characters' needs. Often the problems are couched in a primitive psychology of reward and punishment: if the heroes answer the questions correctly they win something valuable, and if not, they die" (48).
• Applies Vladimir Propp's schema for the analysis of folktales, and concludes that "Adventure" bears only a surface resemblance to the structure of folktales (104).
• Offers thoughtful and interesting commentary on the significance of various passages for several volunteer players.
  • "[O]ne reader interpreted her adventure as entering a cave which all the creatures inhabited and [in which] she was an intruder. It was her duty not to disturb the creatures if possible. She therefore assumed that the purpose of the wicker cage was to catch and cage any cave creature she didn't want to kill outright" (127).
  • [This same player tried to cage] "every creature she met in Adventure, including the dwarf throwing axes and knives at her. . . . After it became apparent that she would try negotiating with the animals, avoiding them, appeasing them, feeding them - anything but kill them, even when they were attacking her - she and her playing partner had a philosophical argument as to the validity of her attitude" (128). (See §1.1: Sloane.)
  • Her partner then "insisted that she throw the axe at the dwarf, and she insisted variously that there is good in every creature," "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," and "of course it's justified in trying to kill us, we're enfringing [sic] on its territory." The dwarf then killed them, they were reincarnated, attacked by the dwarf again, she tried a few more non-violent tactics and was killed a second time. At this point she observed that she guessed the same thing happens to her in real life. She always tries to see only the good in people and then they dump on her. Whether she will draw any real-life consequences from this observation is another question, but she did modify her game-strategy. . . . There is, then an underlying set of conventions in Adventure that is analogous in some sense to the moral underpinings [sic] of folktales, but it is the process of decision-making based on self examination and motive analysis the reader undergoes while solving problems, not the depicted actions and events in the story" (129).
• "Somebody encountering a conventional story can pass his or her eyes over the entire text without filling in, or even perceiving, any of the textual gaps. IF is completely different, because the story stops until the 'reader' attempts to supply the missing action" (165).
• Gestures towards, but does not elaborate upon, the consideration of IF not as an outgrowth of fiction, but as a kind of lyrical poetry, in which the reader's interpretation of events makes meaning: "Many readers get intensely, emotionally involved in the fictional events because of their step-by-step activity in exploring the fictional world and mastering the fictional events. This can unlock strong feelings and memories of associated events from their own lives with they then build into the imaginary world they are creating. Finally, the fictional events in Adventure, for example, are only minimally explained, i.e. there is little context provided for the reader by the author. In this one sense, interactive fiction's quality of evoking emotionally charged and intellectually complete contexts for the text makes it more similar to the open textuality of lyrical poetry than the tightly woven textual fabric of fiction" (178).

Coleman, Douglas W. "Language Learning Through Computer Adventure Games" Simulation & Gaming 21 (1990): 433, 8p. Academic Search Elite full text database. 26 par. 30 May 2000. [link]
Although the title suggests an emphasis on adventure games, of classic text-only titles the article briefly mentions only Zork. Nevertheless, "some of the games available for home computers are designed around problem-solving activities and require methodical planning, thinking, and note taking" (¶4). Of possible interest to IF scholars is Coleman's list of attributes that affect whether a player perceives a computer gaming session as "fun" - and thus, presumably, contributes to the player's determination to continue playing.

Constanzo, William V. "Reading Interactive Fiction: Implications of a New Literary Genre." Educational Technology 26 (1986): 31-5. [link]
Most of the article is concerned with introducing the concept of IF to an unfamiliar audience, using transcripts from Douglas Adams's "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (Infocom, 1984, with Steve Meretzky), and James Paul's "Brimstone" (Synapse/Broderbund, 1985). Also features a brief description of Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" (Spinnaker, 1984). (See also §1.1: Packard.)

• "Are interactive texts shaping new attitudes towards reading? If they provide new contexts for learning about language, story-telling, and ideas, are they encouraging particular skills and values at the expense of others? What happens to the traditional elements of fiction when the reader enters the fictional world as a participant? Does interactive fiction constitute a genuinely new form of literature?" (31).
• While Constanzo does not attempt to answer all the questions he asks above, he does conclude thus: "When we turn the first pages of The Odyssey, Pride and Prejudice, or Brave New World, we gain admittance to a system, enclosed and complete. Each system has its physical and psychological premises, its codes of human interaction, its written and unwritten laws. Our ability to read a book successfully depends largely upon our understanding of the fictionalized world order. . . . Until now, readers have had no genuinely active way to learn the codes in context, as participants, no way to test their responses against a responsive text. Interactive fiction is changing the meaning of reader response. It is giving a new generation of readers unprecedented opportunities to encounter literature, and in the process it is redefining the relationship between the reader and the text. As educators, we would do well to watch closely as this relationship evolves" (35).

• Desilets presents his seventh-grade class encountering an unfamiliar word in "Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur" (Bob Bates, 1989), and discusses the opening scenes of "Planetfall" (Steve Meretzky, 1983) and the sleeping grue puzzle in "Wishbringer" (Brian Moriarty, 1985) for their value in challenging readers to conceptualize problems according to their experience of the text.
• He also refers to the plot ramifications connected with moral choices such as "killing a bellicose stranger" in "Zork III" (Infocom, 1978-81) and "deciding whether to respect the orders of Preelman" in "A Mind Forever Voyaging" (Steve Meretzky, 1985). Praises "A Mind Forever Voyaging" as "a work of serious science fiction that many readers regard as the finest piece of IF yet written" (¶15).
• Desilets describes methods of using IF to teach, including having a student seated at a single computer read the text for the rest of the class; using an LCD panel on an overhead projector; and having students assemble maps, hints and other supporting material in folders dedicated to each IF story.
• The classic Scott Adams adventures (circa 1979) "offer little in the way of theme and character development" (¶24), but in "Photopia" (Adam Cadre, 1998), "the thoughtful student reader, with the right kind of help, comes to see that the astronomical concepts that emerge from the a [sic] touching father-daughter dialogue illuminate another subplot of the story, one in which the daughter, some years later, weaves a tale of space travel for a younger girl who idolizes her" (¶25).
• Discusses the character of the knight who challenges the young Arthur to a joust in "Arthur," demonstrating that the text presents the knight as honorable, and that the game penalizes a player who suspects the knight of cheating during the contest.

Dewey, Patrick R. "Interactive Fiction: A Checklist." American Libraries 17 (1986): 132-7. [link]
General introduction to the IF genre, written by a supportive librarian and amateur IF author. Includes capsule reviews of such titles as Ray Bradbury's "Farenheit 451" (Spinnaker, 1984), Michael Crichton's "Amazon" (Trillium, 1984), Arthur C. Clarke's "Rendezvous with Rama" (Spinnaker, 1984), and Douglas Adams's "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (Infocom, 1984; with Steve Meretzky). Also, includes summaries of four IF authorship utilities.

• "All-text interactive fiction is also the best type of game for libraries to purchase and circulate because it requires lots of reading. Some libraries have encouraged it, playing host to adventure clubs. Others have allowed them to be counted as books read in the summer reading program" (133).
• "An all-text interactive fiction game is also an investment in longevity, since it can take weeks to complete. Some are so complex that they require 'mapping' (the representation of the landscape - or locations - on paper by the player) to solve" (133).
• "Aficionados can produce original adventure games by using any one of several authoring systems. . . . It's unlikely, however, that homemade games will be quite as spectacular as, say, Infocom's Zork series" (133).
• "My hope is that all-text games will not be replaced by the comic-book variety of graphics-intensive games" (133).

• Refers to IF adaptations (including "Fahrenheit 451," "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," "The Hobbit," "Treasure Island") that could be taught in conjunction with the source; also, original IF titles that fall into genre categories such as science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and adventure.
• "Whether or not interactive fiction represents an emerging literary art form is certainly open to debate, but if this should prove to be the case, what better place than the library to first experience it?" Playing IF requires students to practice such desirable classroom skills as accurate typing and spelling, recognizing basic parts of speech, reading instruction booklets and scene-setting pamphlets, taking notes, sharing resources, and interacting in small groups (40).

Howell, Gordon and Jane Yellowlees Douglas. "The Evolution of Interactive Fiction." Computer Assisted Language Learning: An International Journal 2: (1990). 93-109. [link]
Howell and Douglas make no reference to command-line IF, but rather discuss the canonical works of early hyperfiction (Joyce's "Afternoon"; Moulthrop's "Garden of Forking Paths") which Landow would later examine in his influential Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Nevertheless, this article begins with a useful analysis of Tristram Shandy, the experimental eighteenth-century novel which seems to have discovered postmodern narrative long before the twentieth century did.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. New York and London: Routledge, 1988. [link]
A very brief reference. Hutcheon, discussing the postmodern tradition of emphasizing the receiver's role in constructing a text, and who then offers interactive fiction as "the most extreme example I can think of" (77). Hutcheon quotes Niesz and Holland to claim that, in interactive fiction, "there is no fixed product or text, just the reader's activity as producer as well as receiver." (See §1.1: Aarseth, who calls this observation "clearly false; otherwise [IF texts] could hardly be discussed at all" [106], and observes that "Hutcheon's misrepresentation is understandable in light of the often self-contradictory Anthony Niesz and Norman N. Holland article she refers to." See also §1.1: Niesz and Norman.)

Kelley, Robert T. "A Maze of Twisty Little Passages, All Alike: Aesthetics and Teleology in Interactive Computer Fictional Environments." Science Fiction Studies 20 (1993): 52-68. [link]
The author treats IF in part as a launching point in order to examine the potential of virtual reality, but along the way he examines other issues as well. IF is not central to this paper, yet Kelley writes with a welcome awareness of earlier IF scholarship.

• He begins with a discussion of a short story by Stanislaw Lem, about a robot who created a simulated microminiature kingdom in order to pacify the power-lust of a brutal king, only to realize that the slavery of simulated citizens is an equal moral horror. The king's involvement with the simulated world is likened to an actualization of Barthes's "writerly text."
• Kelley notes that the interactivity that many theorists claim for hypertext is largely mythical, but rightly questions the tendency of Niesz and Holland to overlook the narrative limitations of IF.
• To stake out a middle ground, Kelley refers to Brenda Laurel's three levels of interactivity (see §1.1: Laurel 1993).
• With his brief but insightful assessment of the political storyline in "Trinity" (Infocom, 1986), Kelley offers one of very few extended critical readings of IF beyond the canonical "Colossal Cave Adventure" and "Zork." (See also §1.1: Aarseth; Campbell; Desilets; Randall.)
• Observes that IF seems to require a trade-off between the range of choices (as in the "Zork" games) and depth of story (as in "Trinity").

• "Whatever one may think of interactive fiction as literature, it does require students to read and in most cases, to write. It, therefore, has a place in school-supported recreational reading programs, on the school library shelves, and on recommended reading lists" (45-46).
• The authors conclude with their "impression that those students who are most often hardest to 'reach' in conventional literature and composition classes - those we have labeled reluctant readers - are often most enthusiastic about computers and the game-like qualities of interactive fiction" (46).

• Color Plate XI shows Star Trek: The Next Generation characters Data, LaForge, and Pulaski in Victorian costume. The caption reads "two members of the Starship Enterprise crew relax with an interactive Sherlock Holmes mystery." In fact, the photo shows three crewmembers - one of them dressed as Holmes.
• "Other kinds of failures in human-computer activity can also be seen as failures on the level of thought. One of my favorite examples is a parser used in several text adventure games. . . . . [A] person might read the sentence, 'Hargax slashed the dragon with his broadsword.' The person might then type, 'take the broadsword,' and the 'game' might respond, 'I DON'T KNOW THE WORD "BROADSWORD".' The inference that one would make is that the game 'agent' is severely brain-damaged, since the agent that produces language and the agent that comprehends it are assumed to be one in the same" (59).

• Laurel argues that computer programs have more "potential for action" than plays. Refers to Aristotelian formulation of plot as a progression from many possibilities to few, as the motives of the character are revealed; as the play reveals more information, it steadily excludes competing possibilities and directs the action of the play in a particular path. "At the final moment of a play. . . all of the competing lines of probability are eliminated except one, and that one is the final outcome" (69).
• "A program that reformulates the potential for action, creating new possibilities and new probabilities "on the fly" as a response to what has gone before, is equivalent to a playwright changing a plot in real time in collaboration with the actors and director, and communicating some new portions of script to them in real time through some automagical means" (72-73).
• Refers to Gustav Freytag's "visualization of dramatic anatomy" and "[t]he notion that the action of a play could be quantified" (82). Offers short samples of dialogue, which she then analyzes according to whether each bit of information communicated by the dialogue complicates or resolves action, and the degree of significance of each. "Given an informational analysis of the potential actions involved in human-computer activity, quantitative structural criteria could be used for orchestrating those incidents into the desired overall shape" (86). (See §1.2: Mateas; Sharp).
• In a discussion of the disruption experienced by users when computers won't accept their commands: "People are encouraged to use natural language to express their choices, and so they expect words to work. They have no clue to tell them which words are unknown to the system except the experience of failure. On the other hand, given the text-based nature of the game and the equipment that it is usually run on, people are never encouraged to attempt to express themselves through gestures or physical actions. The absence of visual and kinesthetic modes in the system is accepted as a given, and the resulting constraints are unobtrusive. Such constraints are extrinsic to the action but may be utilized effectively if they are presented simply and explicitly, or if they are integrated into the mimetic context (for example, 'this ship is not equipped for voice communication.')" (112).
• Applies Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief" to computer applications (arguing that the representation of an object, such as a manuscript or spreadsheet, on the computer screen is as pretend as the representation of objects in a game or actions on a stage (113).
• While much discussion of interactive narrative emphasizes the branching nature of plots (see §2.1: Herz), Laurel offers the "flying wedge" as a model for linear narrative: "A plot is a progression from the possible to the probable to the necessary." That is, at the beginning of a plot, many actions seem possible; for the plot to be effective, it must subsequently present probable actions, until ending with necessary actions (69-73).

Layton, Kent. "Interactive Text Adventures." Media & Methods (1987): [page numbers illegible in my copy]. [link]
Interactive fiction titles "may be one of the most underrated types of reading programs on the market." Describes branching prose fiction as "the less complete type of text adventure," and quotes a short transcript from "Zork" (Infocom, c. 1979). IF is "conversational in nature and definitively causes users to feel as though they are actively involved with the story." Offers a list of 15 "reading skills likely to be used" when students encounter IF. Advocates IF because students are excited about computers; they must read and express their own wishes textually; and because IF works well in small groups. "To the classroom teacher, the reading teacher, and the school library media specialist, interactive text adventures are much more than computer games. . . . More importantly, interactive text adventures help to foster a love for reading that may in turn foster a lifelong reading habit."

Lebling, David P., Marc S. Blank, Timothy A. Anderson. "Zork: A Computerized Fantasy Simulation Game." IEEE Computer 12:4 (1979): 51-59. 7 Jan, 2000. http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/ieee.html. [link]
With this article, the creators of "Zork" announced their contribution to the IF genre. These programmers, who would go on to create Infocom (which marketed most of the classic 80s IF) thought of the new genre as a platform for a "fantasy simulation game," very closely tied to the world of Dungeons and Dragons. Soon thereafter, thanks in large part to the efficiently-programmed works of Scott Adams, IF would expand into other genres (mystery, science fiction, etc.).

Montfort, Nicholas A. "Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star" Electronic Book Review 11 (2000). 8 Jan 2001. http://www.electronicbookreview.com/ebr11/11mon/index.html. [link]
[Review of §1.1: Aarseth]. Observes that "hypertext. . . includes only a subset of electronic literary efforts" ("the hypertext murder case" ¶4) and approves of Aarseth's accomplishment: "to erase the stifling hypertext boundary, and to redraw that boundary so that it demarcates a more interesting territory of reader-influenced texts. The cybertext terrain includes computational literary artifacts that are in some cases novel, although yet to be thoroughly explored" ("the hypertext murder case" ¶2). (See also §1.2: Montfort, especially his close reading of "Deadline.")

• Montfort expressively captures the friction between hypertext theorists and those who wish to examine other forms of electronic narrative: "The phrase 'interactive fiction' . . . can cause loud gnashing of teeth among hypertext authors. They ask, 'if these things is [sic] interactive fiction, what is my work -not interactive?' (This complaint usually comes from the people who brought you 'serious hypertext,' a phrase that clearly suggests everything else is not serious.) . . . The term 'interactive fiction' is not a claim that the form it describes is the only fiction that is interactive in any way. It was simply coined because interactivity and fiction are central features of this form, which also has other distinguishing characteristics that do not lend themselves to encapsulation in two words" ("text adventures and interactive fiction" ¶5).
• Montfort identifies the hapless protagonist of an IF game with the protagonist of Christopher Durang's Actor's Nightmare ("meeting deadline" ¶1), and defends "Deadline" for not complaining about Aarseth's effort to have his detective-character fingerprint himself. Aarseth finds it ridiculous that the game returns a stock phrase about how "fingerprinting the me" would be unproductive, yet Montfort argues that "The one who pokes at the interface to see what will happen is actually being playful" ("meeting deadline" ¶4).

Murray, Janet Horowitz. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Free Press, 1997. [link]
Murray takes "interactive fiction" to include hypertext and other forms of interaction, and thus has little to say about parser-based IF; yet her observations about the nature of electronic narrative are indispensable. Regarding command-line IF, the bibliography cites only "Adventure," "Deadline," "Planetfall" and "Zork."

• While she acknowledges the powerful effect that the death of Floyd has upon many players of "Planetfall" (52-53) and her annotated transcript from "Zork" is an excellent introduction to the genre (74-82 passim), Murray, like (§1) Buckles, does not articulate an awareness of interactive fiction as the creation of an author/programmer; this necessarily limits the kinds of insights this book offers. Nevertheless, Murray articulates an optimistic view of computers in the service of human creativity.
• "Whether or not we will one day be rewarded with the arrival of the cyberbard, we should hasten to place this new compositional tool as firmly as possible in the hands of the storytellers" (284).

Niesz, Anthony J. and Norman N. Holland. "Interactive Fiction." Critical Inquiry 11 (1984): 110-129. [link]
In their near-evangelistic praise of the emerging genre, Niesz and Holland sound not unlike George Landow or Stuart Moulthrop in the early 90s, writing about hypertext narrative. So far as I can tell, this article is the first to consider seriously how literary criticism (particularly reader-response theory) might handle IF. As the authors themselves admit, "Writing about interactive fiction in 1984 is like writing about the movies in 1900 or television in 1945." When they speculate on what shape interactive fiction will take in 2004, they immediately latch upon "[n]ationwide computer networks now connected by telephone" (126), and refer to technological methods to enact T. S. Eliot's dictum that the best response to a poem is another poem. The authors conclude: "Microcomputers will change our ideas and our practice of literature as much as Gutenberg did, deeply refining the humanities in the process."

The authors make several other notable observations about IF:

• The most "literate" IF draws heavily upon formulas such as those found in Sherlock Holmes or Horatio Hornblower stories. Further, "as of 1984, no interactive fiction. . . measures up even to these originals" (120).
• The fact that IF requires the mediation of a computer distances the reader from "the text" in unexpected ways:
  • Since the plot only advances when the reader issues commands, the reader cannot skim through boring sections or peek ahead.
  • Once text scrolls off the screen, the reader cannot review it. [Note: this desirable feature is readily available for recent IF, and can in many cases be retroactively applied to older titles.]
  • "Because the fiction is inseparable from the system that enables one to read it, one cannot, as it were, hold the whole novel in one's hand." For interactive fiction, "there is no text" (120). Now that technological advances have in fact brought us palmtop computers, the authors would need to rethink this portion of their argument, but the points they raise are still valid.
  • "A reader of an interactive mystery could take as long to solve it as Sherlock Holmes would in 'real life'" (120).
• The authors also observe that IF can be extremely nerve-wracking. The player-character (PC) can die frequently, without warning, and for what seems like no good reason; the player must therefore replay and attempt to muddle through difficult sections. "Nothing is quite as frustrating as knowing that you have just permitted yourself to fall into one of the author's traps and experiencing the unmistakable feeling that he is laughing at your expense" (121).
• "This kind of finite, puzzle-solving interactive fiction demands determination and persistence from a reader if she is to overcome the obstacles which confront her. At the same time, however, this finite kind of interactive fiction is fundamentally optimistic. Its fictional universe is completely knowable" (122).

• Sensibly, Packard observes that "interactive books are not interchangeable commodities," and lays out a deceptively simple, coherent, and useful criterion. A story which morally meaningless choices ("Do you open the door on the left or the door on the right?") is "an almost sure sign that the reader is being offered a mindless exercise in page turning. If these books are to be exercises in decision-making, as they profess to be, there should be motivation for each choice offered so that the reader is obliged to weigh the factors in favor of each, testing in some modest way his or her powers of analysis and comprehension of what has come before" (40-41).
• [We might ask whether Packard's observation extends to canonical literary hypertext, in which chunks of text are frequently linked by a character's name or a thematic keyword. Selecting these links do not involve moral choices; hence, when judged by Packard's criterion of meaningful story interaction, even the best literary hypertext would be "a mindless exercise in mouse clicking."]

• Quotes Will Crowther: "I had been involved in a non-computer role-playing game called Dungeons and Dragons at the time, and also I had been actively exploring in caves - Mammoth Cave in Kentucky in particular. Suddenly, I got involved in a divorce, and that left me a bit pulled apart in various ways. In particular I was missing my kids. Also the caving had stopped, because that had become awkward, so I decided I would fool around and write a program that was a re-creation in fantasy of my caving, and also would be a game for the kids, and perhaps had some aspects of the Dungeons and Dragons that I had been playing. My idea was that it would be a computer game that would not be intimidating to non-computer people, and that was one of the reasons why I made it so that the player directs the game with natural language input, instead of more standardized commands. My kids thought it was a lot of fun" (187-88).
• Quotes Don Woods: "I was a student at Stanford University. . . and I head through the grapevine that someone had found this game on the medical center computer. So I hauled it over, and started playing it a little. It had some bugs in it, but it was an interesting idea. So I tried to figure out how to improve it. Of course, all I got on the network was just the game: the source code for the program wasn't accessible. But it did mention Will Crowther, and I sent messages all over the ARPAnet addressed to him. I got in touch with him that way, and he sent the source code. I cleaned it up and began expanding it, adding some of the trickier treasures, and possibly tripling the size of the game - with the help of a few of my friends, roommates, and classmates. After that, I figured I might as well put it back out on the ARPAnet. I did, and sent out a few messages to various sites around the country to get people interested. Then I left for a couple of weeks' vacation. Well, when I came back, Stanford was irritated with me. Their computer had been swamped with people connecting via the network just to play the game! I accumulated the comments that people had about the game, and then fixed up some bugs and added features, and eventually came up with the version that got spread around" (188-89).
• Woods says that he add ten more treasures to the five that Crowther had already created. "Some of the rooms, such as Bedquilt and the Swiss Cheese Room, were in Will's version, but didn't really have anything and so were tagged as 'under construction.' There were indeed some bugs, such as rooms you could get into and couldn't get out of. Things like that. So all of the stuff beyond Bedquilt, pretty much, was that I added. The entire Troll Bridge section was mine. The Soft Room, the Vase, the Oriental Room, and the Chasm and Waterfall and Witt's End. Will's version had this sign hanging in midair, just before you got to Bedquilt, which said 'Cave under construction. Proceed at your own risk.' I thought that was a nice sign, so I moved it off to the entrance to Witt's End, and just left it there as an annoyance to anyone who wandered past. Anyway, after I had finished that, I sent out to MIT and various other places on the ARPAnet, and the requests for copies began pouring in. I offered people what help I could with that, and it just exploded from there" (189).

• "Mindwheel," based on Pinsky's own poetry, is "self-referential and dream-like" (187); it juxtaposes the synchronic and the diachronic.
• "Brimstone" is "the most literarily allusive" work of IF, and also "perhaps the most literary of all current interactive works" (187).
• "A Mind Forever Voyaging" dispenses with the "score" feature, and offers a "rhetorically powerful" story. "The novel's power stems from the reader's gradual understanding of the incessant decay of the societies of the future" (187).
• Brian Moriarty's "Trinity" "derives literariness from the combination of strangeness and familiarity.... Most recent, serious interactive fiction forces moral action upon the reader, thereby abandoning (in apparent disgust) the kill-and-steal mentality of the genre's early works" (188).
• Rob Swigart's "Portal" (1986) is "certainly the most unusual and arguably the most interesting interactive fiction work yet written." In it, the player interacts with an unreliable narrator, in the form of a computer database named Homer. The title is "ultimately, a metaphor for the writing process. We watch on the screen as the story's intertext is molded by the narrator into a psychologically valid myth of the heroic scope, and we watch too as the narrator questions the act of narration" (188-9).
• "Even if we grant Niesz and Holland's claim that interactive fiction 'simply pushes the role of the text back a stage' (1984, p. 124), forcing the reader to decipher the 'underlying nexus of puzzles or conundrums [that] is the creation of the author', the fact remains hat the reader of an interactive text must physically act if she is to complete, decipher, discover the text she is reading. . . . or the story simply will not continue" (189).
• "Just as it makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar, interactive fiction allows the reader to partake, first-hand, of a new literary world, and the unfolding of that world is continuous, even if the plot is not" (190).

• "Should I be moving into the fashion for interactive fiction? How can the novelist make creative use of the computer's possibilities, and I don't just mean word-processing? Never mind that many early experiments are of dubious merit. Is the potential there? Is it my job to explore it, or someone else's? Anyway isn't all fiction interactive? The story is a different experience for each reader" (187).
• [See §1.1: Aarseth for commentary on the important difference between the interpretive variability of linear text and the inherent variability of cybertext.]

Sloane studies interactive fiction because it provides her a convenient example with which to "contribute to our academy's working hypotheses about how language, legality, and subject in general relate," and sees it as "a tool with which to probe the composing models of social constructionists and cognitivists" and "a window into how texts constrain readers and even into how the world constraints interpretations."  Hence, the main thrust of her argument has little to say about interactive fiction per se, but rather supporting argument that "computer-based fictions. . . require researchers in Departments of English to reconfigure their critical theories and models of textual interpretation that are based on readings of paper texts" (2).

"It is the intent of this dissertation to examine reading and writing interactive fiction and to demonstrate how these electronic texts and a dimension to our critical understandings of the ethics of reading, the collaborations of composing, and rhetorical triangle, has traditionally conceived. In short, this dissertation intends to answer the following four questions: What is the experience of reading and writing interactive fiction? How is this experience different from traditional, paper based acts of reading and writing? What do interactive fiction and antecedent, virtual reality, tell us about the reading-writing relationship in general? And how must we adjust our rhetorical theories and models to account for this kind of electronic text?" (3-4).

This dissertation won The Hugh Burns Award for the best dissertation in Computers and Composition Studies.

• Describing an encounter with an interactive fiction text: "It is a scene that is postmodern: heteroglossic and fragmentary, occasionally nihilistic, disjointed. Within the scene, interactive fiction evokes sets o readerly and writerly activities whose new visibility makes clearer the rhetorical dimensions of electronic text in general" (3).
• "Existing models of reading and writing fail to encompass interactive fiction, I argue, because they are limited to either social constructionist or objectivist epistemologies. The phenomenon of interactive fiction, in contrast, currently requires a model the bridges these two epistemologies. As result, I suggest we revise our models of the rhetorical triangle to encompass the multiple reading paths, the layered collaborations, and the unstable texts characteristic of interactive fiction and virtual realities" (15).
• "Interactive fiction throws into confusion the boundaries between the inside and outside of text; the text and its readers and writers merge into a visually seamless collaboration that exposes the rhetorical triangle as a flawed model of the spatial transactions of the electronic text" (16).
• "The narrative technique of interactive fictions (and it is that technique, combined with computer presentation, I am claiming contribute primarily to the heightened reader involvement and related ethical culpability) is fairly constant across interactive fiction texts; Deadline, however, is anomalous in its contents because it doesn't involve the reader in nihilistic activities nor in a culturally male (as do, for example, the Zork trilogy, Leisuresuit Larry, or Leather Goddesses of Phobos [the latter of which incidentally permits the player to choose the gender of the PC]). By choosing Deadline, I am removing the effect an overtly misogynist content might have on my analysis of how readers resist the scripts of interactive fictions while at the same time they respond to textual invitations" (26-27). Deadline avoids "the misogyny and plunder mentality of other interactive fictions" (76). (See §1.1: Buckles.)
• "In contemporary interactive fictions, both male and female readers can feel trapped in a rigid, fatally-scripted text that silence dissent, force conformity, or compel other unpleasant textual collaborations for which he may feel culpable. Although the stories are uniformly advertised as participatory stories in which 'You, the reader, determine what happens,' a more critical reading reveals that in actuality in many of the stories the reader does nothing more than attempt to stay alive in the scripted microworld" (75).

Sloane's chapter on IF composition is weakened by the lack of availability (at that time) of published secondary material concerning the complex relationship between the programming and linguistic creative tasks undertaken by the author-programmer.  She turns instead to studies of the Oz Project and Interactive Fantasies -- electronic text projects that differ in important ways from the form and style of the classic text-adventure game.

• More relevant resources for an academic exploration of the composition process of an IF author may be found in the author interviews regularly published in fan newsletters (§4 XYZZYNews and SPAG), in Graham Nelson's Inform Designer's Manual and Michael J. Roberts's TADS Authors Manual (each of which covers both programming and content), and in reflective and analytical essays written by contemporary and recent IF authors (§3 Short; Rees).
• Sloane's revision of the classical rhetorical triangle (expressor, receptor, and language signs) proposes three new categories: materials (the technological and organizational properties of the electronic text), processes ("the sequences of activities and mentations typical of users, programmers, authors, and participants"), and locations (accounting for differences between the world views of the author and each of the players).
• In her conclusion, Sloane applies her poststructrualist, post-authorial, and reader-centered observations to the greater world of literary study.

Tosca is the editor of what is billed as the first Spanish digital literary magazine; she published this article in English, for a German periodical; perhaps this is why the final text seems to suffer from numerous translation errors, editorial lapses, or some combination. If the article breaks little new critical ground, it does present a competent application of existing theory to this relatively unexamined literary form. To contextualize the close reading of the game, Tosca regularly refers to the literary and narrative qualities of interactive games - yet her bibliography is heavy on cybertext theorists, and light on those literary postmodernists and structuralists to whom the cybertheorists themselves turn in order to orient their theoretical inquiries.

• "Adventure games form a genre of their own, and are direct descendants of the first text-based adventures that can be said to have inaugurated digital narrative. The puzzle solving and plot development were afterwards combined with the powerful visual element evolved from action games and others, first incorporating moving images and then videos and 3D landscapes to the story-driven games. These games present a new challenge to literary studies, as their acknowledged aim is to let the user 'live' a story" ("Introduction" ¶2).
• Useful reflections on narrative and game as both springing from conflict with an opponent (concurring with §1.1: Murray, and §2.1: Costikyan).
• In a section called "Adventure Games," Tosca observes that "the last generation of tabletop roleplaying games, in the Whitewolf style, insist more on storytelling and less on dice rolling" ("Adventure Games" ¶1). She also writes that "Adventure" and "Zork" "established the basis of puzzle solving and mysterious plot that characterizes the genre, and are still regarded by many fans as superior to their graphic followers."
• Compares "the detective of Deadline, the mystery-writer. . . of the Gabriel Knight series, the curious traveler of Myst, the journalist of 11th Hour" and observes that, in the wake of some crime or disaster, the player has to "look for a plot behind the apparently meaningless terrible acts in order to reconstruct the story from clues" ("Adventure Games" ¶6).
• "Games don't give an elaborated finished plot that we can read about, instead they force the player to get involved in the process of making meaning out of the elements the designers have laid out. . . . there are other elements that can interest us, like the exploration of engaging 3D worlds or the solving of the puzzles, but the narrative component is the strongest force of motivation in adventure games, I suggest" ("Adventure Games" ¶7).
• The section "Blade Runner" is a close reading of the 1997 Westwood game, in which a limited number of key plot elements are randomized, so that the same actions bear different moral consequences each time you play the game.
• "As any 'shoot 'em up,' the game starts with the assignment of 'retiring' escaped replicants, but unlike in these narratively simple games, the player has the choice of hunting them, letting them [e]scape or even helping them. There is no 'right' thing to do to win the game, the final decision about what is best is left to the player. Indeed the player's decisions affect not only the behavior of the non-playing characters towards [the player-character] McCoy, but also bring out different endings to the game. This is a huge leap in adventure games, for even if the decision points are not many, they are so significant to the ethos of the story that it truly feels as [if it were?] multi-linear, something that literary hypertext hasn't yet achieved despite some critics['] claims (see A[a]rseth 76-97)" ("Blade Runner" ¶12-13).

A second class of e-texts "are fully accessible only in electronic format" (§4), comprising multimedia CD-ROMs; the canonical literary hypertext; multimedia hyperfiction that uses the interactive capabilities of the Internet (chat, message boards, etc.) to extend the boundaries of the text; the "interactive novel" (what this bibliography terms "command-line IF"); a kind of role-playing hyperfiction in which "the reader-protagonist enters a virtual scenario in which he has to solve problems, overcome obstacles and so on" (§4.5) [this is presumably something like the literary equivalent of the "How to Host a Murder" party games, in which party guests are assigned roles and expected to improvise conversations with other party guests who have taken on other roles, although van der Linde does not offer that analogy]; and collaborative hyperfiction, in which authors collaborate in series or in parallel, in which readers influence the story either indirectly (by communicating their preferences, offering suggestions, etc.), or by writing additional branches of the story themselves (which completely eliminates the boundary between author and reader). The article concludes with a discussion of the "e-book" as structure, content, object, and mechanism.

• While most scholars writing on interactive fiction are fairly certain, and at times apologetic, about the status of IF proper as a textual game not unlike a crossword puzzle, van der Linde sees only "a certain resemblance between interactive fiction and computer games in which the player as protagonist has to navigate a number of obstacles or solve certain problems" (§4.3, ¶3).
• "One of the most significant innovations of this form [i.e. interactive fiction] is that the distinction, theorised by Barthes and others, between a pre-determined 'work' and an indeterminate 'text' becomes redundant, as only an indeterminate, or at least a variable text remains (Ziegfield, 1989:364). The notion of the reader as co-producer of the text is concretised in the interactive novel" (§ 4.3, ¶4).
• "Information technology and advances in telecommunications. . . develop at a rate which would be unthinkable in academic literary studies. Developing a body of theory which would offer an informed response to electronic literary forms therefore is a considerable challenge. This is made even more problematic by the changeable and sometimes ephemeral nature of Internet literature, and by the traditionally adversarial relationship between technology and the humanities" (§7).

Ziegfeld, Richard. "Interactive Fiction: A New Literary Genre?" New Literary History 20:2 (1989): 341-372. [link]
This theoretical, rather free-ranging article describe the tools of electronic publishing to an unfamiliar audience, discusses the "literary applications" of this technology (e.g. Faulkner could have included maps the Yoknapatawpha area; for The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco could have helped readers visualize the detail of the abbey, etc.). A third section assesses the contemporary state of interactive literature.

• "For now, interactive fiction's reality is disappointing because it is often associated with adventure software. Some popular writers such as Michael Crichton and a few high-culture artisans such as Michael Newman have explored this possibility, but interactive fiction still awaits a major high-culture advocate whose software product wins coverage in the New York Times Book Review" (358-9) (but see §2.1: Rothstein; Pinsky).
• "The main cause is that as yet we lack the literary harbinger, with impeccable credentials and startling creative ability, who delivers a concrete application of the abstract possibilities I described above." Ziegfeld likens himself to Emerson, who "described the traits of the great American poet many years before Whitman published Leaves of Grass" (359).
• Offers criteria for whether a literary product can be considered "new." It must require a new production technique; require a new aesthetic criteria; require training for the user to evaluate it properly; lead to new experiences; and prompt "genuinely new questions about the nature of the literary discipline" (359).
• The average novel requires about six to eight hours of reading time, but a "Dungeons and Dragons" game takes up 40 to 70 hours of playing time (363). [Note: Ziegfeld attributes the extra time to the complicated, branching story, but multi-player gaming involves much conferring, waiting, interpreting, and debating. The social aspect of the multiplayer gaming supplies much value that is not apparent to a purely literary analysis of "narrative."]
• Paraphrases a comment from a teacher of six-year-olds: "even children who were sometimes indifferent students seemed to be drawn into the process" (366).
• Offers brief analyses of the potential effects of interactivity on drama, poetry, oral literature, and "film, TV, video and radio" (368-69).
• "[M]any people who have tried adventure games such as 'Zork' do not consider them literature. Language is not a high priority for adventure game developers; in fact, some appear to disdain the word" (370). [Note: Ziegfeld does not expound upon this pronouncement.]

§1.2: Conference Papers, Project Reports and Student Papers

Briceno, Hector, Wesley Chao, Andrew Glenn, Stanley Hu, Ashwin Krishnamurthy, and Bruce Tsuchida. "Down from the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc." [unpublished manuscript; MIT course project, "6.933J/STS.420J: The Structure of Engineering Revolutions"] 15 Dec 2000. 1 Feb 2001. http://mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2000/infocom/. [link]
This student project, for a course in engineering entrepreneurship, examines the origins and economic history of Infocom (the company that popularized interactive fiction in the early 80s). The authors challenge the widely-held assumption that Infocom failed as a direct result of an unwise internal towards the development of business products. The authors describe the origins of "Zork," the culture of the Infocom workplace, and the role of the "implementors" or "IMPs", the programmer-authors whose creativity fueled the company's efforts. They also briefly analyze the game packaging and distribution methods that led to Infocom's early success. (See also the archived material on Infocom, available at http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXinfocom.html.)

• Among the fans of Infocom's interactive fiction are "John McCarthy, the inventor of LISP," "science-fiction author Larry Nevin" [sic], "Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," and, of all people, "comedian and actor Robin Williams" (21).
• The authors examine how Infocom's reliance on text meant that last year's titles did not seem as out-of-date as last year's graphic titles. While the Infocom implementers continued to innovate, by way of making the textual worlds more realistic and independently life-like, "they created evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, innovations" that were not noticeable to the average user (27).
• Marc Blank reports that he "wanted to do something with graphics but... was told there was no money" (35).
• "Infocom's text-only games had to be churned out like clockwork just to keep the company afloat, and there was neither the time nor the resources to pursue a new path with graphical games." Dan Horn is quoted as follows: "The reason that text adventure isn't alive anymore is that the technology to present visual representations of a story advanced very quickly. Some companies picked upon on that but you'd notice that the reality of gaming is now EverQuest - massive multiplayer, real time, online, and graphically amazing. This is the market that Infocom was destined to own but let slip through their fingers because of bad business decisions. Imagine if you will Sorceror, Planetfall, and Deadline with the EverQuest engine, amazing... but lost forever" (44).
• The paper concludes with an excellent four-page summary covering "Why Infocom Succeeded," "Why Infocom Failed," and "Lessons from Infocom."

Mateas, Michael and Andrew Stern. "Towards Building a Fully-Realized Interactive Drama." Paper presented at Fourth International Digital Arts and Culture Conference (2001). 27 May 2001. http://www.stg.brown.edu/conferences/DAC/subs_in/Mateas.html. [link]
The authors describe the criteria for "Façade," a work-in-progress, designed to be "an interactive story integrating an interdisciplinary set of artistic processes and artificial intelligence technologies" (§1). The ambitious plan attempts to move from character-based interactive stories, in which the user simply pokes at pre-defined characters to see how they react, to a computer-generated storyline that aims to produce a meaningful Aristotelian plot arc. "We are interested in interactive experiences that appeal to the adult, non-computer geek, movie-and-theater-going public" (§2). [Note: "Façade" is not designed to appeal either to the mass-market gaming public, or the elitist book-reading public; the authors argue that would-be IF authors should not abandon the cultural middle ground.] While "Façade" is conceptualized as a 3D graphical environment, the user will interact through typed text; one component of the plan is to "build an AI [artificial intelligence] that can understand a natural language and gestural input within the context of the story" (§1).

Meehan, James Richard "The Metanovel: Writing Stories by Computer." Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University, 1976. [link]
An analytical presentation of an artificial intelligence programming theory for generating short stories. The textual product is a far cry from fiction - the settings and characters are shallow, and the dialogue is stilted (Meehan regularly "translates" the output into good English in order to discuss the capabilities of the program). Further, the process of generating the text is only minimally interactive - the user may be prompted to decide what characters or props shall appear in the story (a bear, a bee, a boy, and a river, for example). While TALE-SPIN does pause to invite the user to answer multiple-choice questions that describe the relationship between the characters ("DOES WILMA CANARY FEEL DECEPTIVE TOWARDS SAM ADAMS? 1:A LOT 2: A LITTLE 3: NOT MUCH 4: NOT AT ALL" [21]), the program can be set to supply those details randomly. The program does not require input from a player in order to generate its narrative, and thus can hardly be said to be interactive.

• The TALE-SPIN story world does include such well-defined concepts as friendship, trust, lying, and kindness, but the implementation is simplistic. The program "just barely" ran in the 75k memory space of a PDP-10 (161), and so Meehan could afford to expend few computing resources on writing style.
• The chapter "Mis-Spun Tales" (93-99) is a thorough explication of the painstaking detail with which a computer must be taught about the simulated story world. For example:
  • Bill Bird stands nearby and watches his good friend Henry Ant drown -- because, being underwater, Henry is unable to request help. (Meehan added a new "noticing" subroutine, so that characters are more aware of behavior that happens in the vicinity.)
  • When Henry slips and falls into the water, gravity has no means of getting itself back to shore, so "gravity drowned".

Montfort, Nicholas A. "Interfacing with Computer Narratives: Literary Possibilities for Interactive Fiction." Unpublished B.A. Thesis, University of Texas at Austin. 1995. 06 Jan 2000 http://nickm.com/writing/bathesis/. [link]
Montfort's thesis includes a preface that examines the history of the genre in terms of the literary value of computer-aided narrative. His analysis of plot and co-authorship are interesting and valid for both text- and graphic-based games. Writing when "virtual reality" was the buzzword de rigueur, and before the impact of the Internet on the rejuvenation of the classic IF genre was fully apparent, Montfort nevertheless offers a thoughtful and persuasive assessment of the future of interactive narrative. (See also §1.1: Montfort.)

Sharp, Doug. "Story vs. Game: The Battle of Interactive Fiction" Paper presented at the Computer Game Developer's Convention 1989. 31 May 2001. http://www.channelzilch.com/doug/battle.htm. [link]
Author/programmer's discussion of the game "King of Chicago" (Cineware, 1986-88). A complex implementation of a multiple-choice narrative path, rather than a textual parser (and hence, only tangentially related to the subject of this bibliography). The article offers a detailed analysis of one programmer/author's focus on dialogue and action to tell a multiform story. (See also §2.1: Garrand.)

• Sharp wrote a large number of short scenes, and rated each according to several emotional qualifiers. A scene in which the mobster's girlfriend leaves him, for example, is more likely to be displayed when she is dissatisfied; the more dissatisfied, the more likely that scene will be selected.
• He describes his creation process as follows: "I had a mental image when I set out to put the King together as a work of Interactive Fiction. A guy in a projection both with hours and hours of film about a group of gangsters. The film is not on reels but in short clips of from a few seconds to a few minutes long. The clips hang all over the walls of the projection room. The projectionist knows exactly what's on each clip and can grab a new one and thread it into the projector instantly. The audience is out there in the theater shouting out suggestions and the projectionist is listening and taking the suggestions into account but also factoring in what clips he's already shown, because he wants to put together a real story with a beginning, middle, and end, subplots, introduction and development of characters and the whole narrative works. I wanted to minimize hard branches, to keep the cuts between clips as unpredictable as possible. Yet the story had to make sense, guys couldn't die and reappear later, you couldn't treat the gangster's moll like dirt and expect her to cover your back later."

§2) Non-academic Publications

§2.1: Reportage (Journalism and Non-academic Books)

Buckles, Mary Ann. "Interactive Fiction as Literature: Adventure games have a literary lineage." Byte 12.5 (1987): 135-138, 140, 142. [link]
A condensed, popular version of Buckles's thesis on "Colossal Cave Adventure." (See §1.1: Buckles.) The article describes IF's connections to detective fiction, adventure literature (such as Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth and Stevenson's Treasure Island) and the prose novels of chivalry (the target for Cervantes' satire Don Quixote). Buckles, whose byline credits her as "co-owner and writing consultant of Transgalactic Software," offers five suggestions for would-be IF authors, based on her observations of people playing and responding to "Adventure."

1. Game authors should make up a "supra-story" that contextualizes all the puzzles and isolated events that make up the gameplay, but since the player is on his or her own to solve the puzzles, the player should also be permitted to make up his or her own explanation for events, "just as each person arrives at a personal meaning for a poem."
2. "If you build up story tension, make sure something happens!" The buildup to the "Breathtaking View" room was "the aesthetic high point of Adventure" for many players; yet, once the player finds the source of the distant rumbling (an underground volcano) and has read a paragraph of purple prose (adapted by Don Woods from Tolkien's description of Mount Doom), there is nothing further to do, and players generally felt disappointed.
3. "Give the puzzles a moral quality. . . . For example, several people told me they thought the hungry bear bound with the golden chains was the most enticing problem because they were emotionally involved with it. They didn't want to hurt the bear, yet they were mildly afraid of it. When the puzzles have a moral dimension, it gives them emotional depth."
4. "Create a narrator with a unified personality and vision." Since the "Colossal Cave Adventure" narration is sometimes self-referential, and sometimes seems to know more about the cave than the player does, Buckles feels that the player's response to the narrative voice enhances the aesthetic effect.
5. "Test your story on other people." Buckles suggests that groups of two or three people tend to have discussions or arguments about the significance of events they have witnessed; observing their extra-textual reactions will help the programmer improve the game.

Economist [Editorial] "But Is It Story-telling?" Economist. 11 Nov 1995: 16. Academic Search Elite database, UWEC McIntyre Library, 15 May 2001. [link]
This curmudgeonly article dismisses the efforts of the computer industry to create - and the efforts of "interactive evangelists" to theorize - "interactive fiction." It refers only briefly to command-line IF, but sees CD-ROM games as a direct descendent, suffering from the same storytelling flaws. Argues that the computer's technical capabilities have not yet been successfully been put to use by someone with the creative talents to create something of literary value. (See also §1.1: Buckles; Murray; §2.1: Au.)

• "The multimedia industry is awash with attempts to reinvent story-telling with computers... But the enthusiasm of the industry - and the curiosity-driven purchases of new consumers - should not obscure the fact that interactive fiction is all too often a failure, if a story in any standard sense is expected" (¶2, 3).
• "Despite the millions of dollars that software companies and publishers are throwing at this much-hyped field, interactive fiction is still a technical novelty, attracting more programmers with literary ambitions than the reverse. Perhaps one day better writers, directors and actors will make interactive fiction work. So far the evidence points to deeper problems" (¶4).
• After a brief history of "Adventure" (partially confused with the history of "Zork"), the article accurately describes the basic plot of early IF as "Stay alive, collect the right stuff and an elementary story emerges" (¶6). While "[i]nteractive films" are more visually interesting, the story model is no more advanced. "You are given tasks; until you complete them, you cannot get to the next major part of the story" (¶7).
• "Adventure" games are like Advent calendars with little doors that open, one per day, to reveal a holiday scene during the four weeks before Christmas. [The command to start the first "Adventure" game was abbreviated as "advent." I still remember the pious delight on my mother's face when, as a young boy just learning computer programming, I announced that I was creating an "advent program." - DGJ]
• "The snag with most electronic stories is that they tamper with the foundation of narrative: structure. When stories wobble and change with our whim, they lose their believability, and with it our willingness to care. Multimedia entertainment works at the extremes: all-interactivity, minimal plot ('Doom'; Id Software and other games) and all-plot, minimal interactivity (books with hypertext additions, such as the conversion of 'Alice in Wonderland'), but between them is disaster" (¶12).
• The article complains of "interactive evangelists" who argue that there is no such thing as the "right path" (¶16), arguing that "the typical reader wants to know... 'Which path generates the closest thing to a satisfying linear story, the sort that life, experience and thousands of years of story-telling have taught us to expect?' " (¶13).
• Interactive stories, in which multiple outcomes are possible, are "amusing for a while" but unsatisfying because of the indeterminacy of the "'real' - the story-teller's - outcome" (¶17).

Gaiman, Neil. Don't Panic - Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion. Titan Books: London, 1992. [link]
Pages 150-156 describe the relationship between Adams's comic science fiction novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the Infocom version of the game, programmed with collaborator Steve Meretzky.

• A transcript of the IF-related portions of this book was once available at http://www.lysator.liu.se/infocom/articles/douglas.html, but the link was dead as of 24 Aug, 2000.
• The game is playable online at http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava.html.
• Douglas Adams also collaborated on "Bureaucracy" (Infocom, 1987), and more recently created the graphic game "Starship Titanic" (The Digital Village, 1998), which featured a text parser.

Goetz, Phil. "Interactive Fiction and Computers." Interactive Fantasy 1, Crashing Boar Books, 1994. 98-115. Reproduced on http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/ifan194.htm. [link]
While this article offers little in the way of literary analysis of interactive fiction, it does usefully summarize the pre-history of the genre. It includes sections on graphic adventures, multi-player environments, and artificial intelligence.

• An interactive version of Hamlet, in which the reader could force Hamlet to kill Claudius, would lead to a considerably shorter play: "This exhibits one problem with interactive fiction - sometimes the action which builds up to a more dramatic climax is not the action which a goal-oriented reader would take" (¶3).
• "Serious researchers are squeamish about the term 'player' because of its connotation of frivolity. Since reading fiction is entertainment, and interactive entertainment is a game, the term 'player' is justified. Please understand that this does not imply that all IF will be like adventure games, played to win" (¶54).
• "It is inevitable that future IF will have more real-world knowledge and realistic interfaces. It is not clear whether authors and players co-operating can communicate the same range of emotions and thoughts to the players as in traditional fiction, whether a theory of drama would enable the player to have an exploratory literary experience rather than a controlled one, or if IF will escape from genres" (¶80).

• Goetz offers a concise overview of pre-computer hypertextual literary experiments, including those described by Jorge Luis Borges and Kurt Vonnegut, and concludes that "interactivity is very low" in them (¶16). By contrast, classic IF, which uses a second-person, present-tense point of view, is far more immersive. Quotes IF author Brian Moriarty's surprise at "how many people were bothered" by a puzzle (in "Trinity" [Infocom, 1985]) in which the player is required to kill a small animal (¶25).
• Observes that Marc Blank's "Deadline" (Infocom, 1982) uses a hypertext-like plot tree, leading to about 30 possible endings. Notes that even a story with 30 endings is still necessarily finite, since "the author cannot provide a dramatic experience" if the player is completely unrestrained (¶40).
• Introduces Brenda Laurel's computational theory of drama, but argues that real-world implementations are not possible for the foreseeable future: "The systems these people advocate don't need full intelligence because they will be hack writers, at best able to churn out westerns, space opera and romances. Mysteries and sitcoms will remain beyond them. As for me, I will not abandon closed-ended, human-controlled fiction" (¶51).
• "We want to do in IF the things we do in traditional fiction: make readers care about the characters, create suspense and concern, and a feeling of dramatic completion" (¶53).
• Predicts that "truly tragic fiction might never work in IF. . . . I'm referring to such works as 1984, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, Heart of Darkness or Deliverance, in which it is dramatically necessary for the main character to be psychically crushed. The IF player might feel that giving them the freedom to choose how to act had been a cruel farce" (¶58).
• Observes that interactive fiction offers many opportunities to break the suspension of disbelief (¶60). If the game calls for a prop bottle, the bottle should be breakable; the broken shards of glass should be able to cut things, etc. [Goetz seems to mean that this level of simulation is necessary to involve the player with the story, even though these simulated objects may have nothing to do with the story the author wants to tell.]

Hafner, Katie and Matthew Lyon. When Wizards Stay Up Late: the Origins of the Internet. Simon & Schuster: New York, 1996. [link]
A good source for information on Will Crowther, an ARPA programmer and ardent caver who created the "Colossal Cave Adventure" (c. 1975) and Don Woods, who found an abandoned, unfinished copy of the game, and released an expanded version (with the approval of Crowther). (See also §2.1: Kidder; Levy. Also §2.1: Adams; Heller.)

• "Crowther seemed to concentrate best while hanging from door frames by his fingertips, doing chin-ups. While others passed the time at lengthy meetings by drawing squiggles and curlicues, Crowther filled his page with a thicket of differential equations" (98).
• Will Crowther's "Adventure" is "[o]ne of the most stunning examples" of how the early Internet "was opening wider to new uses [besides the sharing of scientific data] and creating new connections among people" (205).
• Crowther's hobbies included cave exploring (he was cartographer for the Cave Research Foundation; see The Longest Cave, by Richard Brucker and Richard A. Watson) and the role-playing board game "Dungeons and Dragons" (206).
• "In early 1976 Will and Pat divorced. Looking for something to do with his two children, he hit upon an idea that united Will the programmer with [his D&D character] Willie the imaginary thief: a simplified, computer version of Dungeons and Dragons called Adventure.... Crowther finished the program over the course of three or four weekends. His kids - ages seven and five - loved it, and Crowther began showing it to friends. But the breakup of his marriage had sapped Crowther's spirit, and he never got around to refining the game" (206). [Note: Other sources place Crowther's creation of the game in 1972 or 73.]
• When Crowther left his employer, for another job, he abandoned the program on the company computer, but it continued to circulate on the network. Don Woods, a Stanford grad student, heard about the game, and downloaded a copy. "But Woods had difficulty getting Adventure to run at first, and when he did he found it riddled with bugs. Still, he was hooked. 'Adventure made users feel like they were interacting more with the computer,' said Woods. 'It seemed to be responding more to what you typed, rather than just making its own moves like a silent opponent. I think this attracted a lot of players who might otherwise have been turned off by the idea of playing "against" a computer. This was playing "with" a computer'" (207).
• "Both Crowther and Woods encouraged programmers to pirate the game and included their e-mail addresses for anyone looking for help installing, playing, or copying the game" (207).
• "'I've long ago lost count of the programmers who've told me that the experience that got them started using computers was playing Adventure,' Woods said" (208).

• Presents seven "Principles for character-based interactive story" (13).
• Lewis Carroll must have co-created his "Alice" stories by improvising responses to the queries of Alice and her sisters, who were the first audience for the emerging tales (13).
• Carroll "invented and magnificently executed our Seven Principles for character-based interactive story" and would surely have created effective computer narrative if the technology had existed in his day (15).

• On "Adventure" (Crowther, c.1975; Crowther and Woods, 1976): "Charting out subterranean caverns and dead ends is pretty much analogous to mapping out a circuit or debugging a piece of code. So a combination of computers and dragon-slashing games was begging to happen. Adventure not only took care of the scorekeeping and referee chores, but its bone-dry humor and exploratory conventions influenced a generation of game programmers. In Adventure and its descendants, the emphasis was on puzzle solving and getting to some mysterious end at a slow, novelistic pace. In terms of genre and gameplay, it was a straight shot to Myst" (11).
• Interview with Eugene Jarvis (creator of the video game "Defender"): "These days when we do a videogame, it's almost like a Hollywood team. We have a guy just writing musical scores for the game, four or five guys doing the artwork, a couple guys designing the cabinets, and three to four programmers. It=s a huge, huge thing. It's a different era. The games are much more cinematic and much more visually oriented. Whereas back, if you look at Defender, technology didn't give you much to work with. You couldn't really razzle-dazzle them with what graphics you had... So a lot of the work just went into the play of the game. You had to figure out what your game was about" (78).
• On "Zork" (Marc Blank and David P. Lebling, 1977): "Because much of the game takes place in unlit caves, you could almost believe that darkness corresponded to the blackness of the screen. The naturally low visibility of a subterranean environment grooved perfectly with the claustrophobic architecture of Zork's underground maze, where descriptive passages illuminated only one step in any given direction, forcing you to grope through a world shrouded in fog. You never knew what kind of puzzle or twist or surprise attack lay around the next dark corner. And so you kept turning corners, just like you would turn the pages of a book. And you kept turning them obsessively for the weeks or months it took to reach the end. Unlike twitch games, which repeated the same half-hour game ad infinitum, computer text adventures were one long string of game play conducted over forty to sixty hours. You didn't start a game like Zork, you embarked upon it. You made progress, and you saved your place. And you knew you were going to be on this ride for a long, long time. It was less like picking up a comic book and more like cracking War and Peace" (148-49).
• "To make a traditional story truly interactive, a game designer would have to create a branching plot that forks any time the main character has to make a decision. Stay in Hannibal or light out for the territories. Be loyal to Jim or sell him down the river. Act by yourself or team up with Tom Sawyer. At each branching point, the story diverges, creating another set of fictions. The mathematics of this quickly become nightmarish for the designer, who now has the delightful job of writing 256 versions of the same novel. Even if someone tried to do it (and God knows what kind of masochistic soul would undertake this Dickensian task), he'd end up with a narrative sandcastle whose towers and turrets were continually toppling over. Some choices make better stories than others, and constructing a compelling narrative is not a particularly carefree enterprise. It involves a lot of ditchdigging and bridge building and sign posting. And most people [i.e. game designers?] don't want to work that hard. That's why they pay authors" (149-150).

Chapter 5 begins with an indispensable four-page account of the culture in which interactive fiction -- in this case, "Adventure" (Crowther, c.1975; Crowther and Woods, 1976) was being played c. 1979 - after business hours in basement computer rooms. Easily the best account of how the environment contributed to the effects of these early games: simply getting into the basement computing facilities where the off-duty mainframes could be commandeered for entertainment purposes was something of an adventure in itself. (See also §2.1: Levy; Hafner and Lyon.)

• A description of the techno-fetishistic environment at MIT: "Wandering around the labyrinth of laboratories and storerooms, searching for the secrets of telephone switching in machine rooms, tracing paths of wires or relays in subterranean steam tunnels. . . for some, it was common behavior, and there was no need to justify the impulse, when confronted with a closed door with an unbearably intriguing noise behind it, to open the door uninvited. And then, if there was no one to physically bar access to whatever was making that intriguing noise, to touch the machine, start flicking switches and noting responses, and eventually to loosen a screw, unhook a template, jiggle some diodes and tweak a few connections. Peter Samson and his friends had grown up with a specific relationship to the world, wherein things had meaning only if you found out how they worked. And how would you go about that if not by getting your hands on them?" (3).
• "In a sense, Adventure was a metaphor for computer programming itself - the deep recesses you explored in the Adventure world were akin to the basic, most obscure levels of the machine that you'd be traveling in when you hacked in assembly code. You could get dizzy trying to remember where you were in both activities. Indeed, Adventure proved as addicting as programming - Woods put the program on the SAIL PDP-10 on a Friday, and some hackers (and Real World "tourists") spent the entire weekend trying to solve it" (132-33).
• "[L]ike any significant program, Adventure was expressive of the personality and environment of the authors. For instance, Woods's vision of a mist-covered Toll Bridge protected by a stubborn troll came during a break in hacking one night, when Woods and some other hackers decided to watch the sun rise at a mist-shrouded Mount Diablo, a substantial drive away. They didn't make it in time, and Woods remembered what that misty dawn looked like, and wrote it into the description of that scene in the game, which he conceived of over breakfast that morning" (133).

• Turning a chronicle of events into a compelling plot requires "dramatic compression - the technique of abstracting complicated patterns of human experience into sharply focused moments" (18).
• Murray offers some suggestions for a cross-disciplinary program of study, drawing from simulation, political science, theatre, and engineering, to prepare students to work in this emerging field. Murray describes her own effort, PAINT ("Program in Advanced Interactive Narrative"): "a research and teaching project aimed at furthering the practice of digital narrative as a creative art form and framework for information" (19).

• Quotes a successful artist who found solace in computer games during a psychologically trying time: "Zork kept me alive" (26).
• You don't just read a poem, you live with it - reading, reciting, studying. You work hard in order to see more in it. "This is the opposite of cant about the 'freedom' readers have when dealing with interactive texts: it is the freedom of the detective trying to solve a crime, or the captive trying to escape, a kind of authorial tyranny compared with the welcoming, available pages of a book" (27). (See §1.1: Aarseth for commentary on the difference between the interpretive variability of linear text and the inherent variability of cybertext.)
• When composing "Mindwheel," one of the first things he learned from his "programmer-collaborators" was the difference between a "scene" (which depicts events that take place in time) and a "room" (which depicts objects situated in space) (see §3: Nelson 2001, §53 "The room descripton").
• Quotes the programmers' reaction to reviews of their collaborative work: "I've got to read this Dante's 'Inferno.' Everybody is comparing it to 'Mindwheel.'"

Stern, Andrew. "Interactive Fiction: The Story is Just Beginning." IEEE Intelligent Systems and Their Applications 13.6 (1998): 16-18. [link]
An independent virtual reality (VR) artist describes the commercial product "Virtual Petz," cartoonish animals that "play" on the user's computer screen. (See §1.2: Bates; §2.1: Hayes Roth; Murray; also "Babyz" www.babyz.net.) Article contains only the briefest allusion to command-based IF.

• "Contemporary storytelling mediums such as the written novel, theater, cinema, and television lack two key capabilities that the computer can offer: autonomy, or the ability to act and change on its own, and interactivity, or the ability to listen, think, and react intelligently to the audience (the user)" (16).
• Distinguishes between artificial intelligence (which is beyond our technological grasp at the moment) and "believable" or "life-like" characterization (which is more attainable) (16).
• Technology and characterization must be united by a plot. Current attempts at interactive fiction simply place puzzles at the junctions where users ought to be able to make decisions; hyperfiction removes the puzzles and simply supplies additional textual choices. "But in either system, a user ultimately cannot move the plot in any directions that were not predefined and prescripted by the programmers. Users quickly bump up against the limits and feel they have no real choices" (17).
• Industry and academia should co-operate to create "plot-generation systems." Industry shies away from the problem because it is so daunting, and academia is reluctant perhaps because it doesn't know how to integrate artists into scientific research" (17).

§2.2: Essays (Nostalgia and Reflection)

Adams, Scott. "Scott Adams Grand Adventure (S.A.G.A.)." Personal website. c.2000-01. 31 May 2001. http://www.msadams.com. [link]
The personal home page of Scott Adams, author of the first commercial computer game ("Adventureland," sold via a tiny ad in a computer magazine in 1978). While Adams's games are textually minimalistic (due to memory restrictions on the earliest home PCs) and have therefore attracted little attention from literary critics, his non-violent brain puzzlers are fondly remembered by many who played computer games in the late 70s. Adams's website offers links to fan pages and interviews.

Carr, Charles. "IF: The End of an Error?" ComptuerEdge Magazine (June 1997): 4 Apr 2000. http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/articles/ComputorEdge.txt. [link]
One of several "the day I first saw IF" narratives presented here. "I often wonder where IF might be now had the same amount of money and energy been thrown at it as graphic adventures. . . . Room for graphics notwithstanding, imagine the plot depth, character development, and worlds-within-worlds a text-only game could have with that much code."

Heller, Martin. "Adventure." Boston Review (1990); Windows Magazine (1998). 10 Jan 2000. http://www.mheller.com/Adventure.html. [link]
Postmodern biographical essay about Will Crowther, creator of "Colossal Cave Adventure." Interspersed with transcripts from "Colossal Cave," Heller offers his own personal reflections about Crowther, a man of many talents (caver, mountain climber, programmer, and lover of puzzles). [Crowther's design choices (placing most of the game underground; interspersing geographic puzzles and brain teasers; using a Tolkeinesque fantasy motif) had a tremendous effect on the computer gaming industry. --DGJ] (See also §2.1: Hafner and Lyon; Kidder; Levy.)

Lileks, James. "The other day..." Bleats. [Weblog.] 06 Feb 2001. 06 Feb 2001. http://www.lileks.com/writings/bleats/01/0101/01014.html. [link]
Another IF nostalgia article, significant because it focuses on a Scott Adams game, rather than "Colossal Cave" or "Zork".

O'Brian, Paul. "Editorial." SPAG 18 (1999). 07 Feb 2001. http://sparkynet.com/spag/backissues/SPAG18. [link]
The new editor of the Society for Promotion of Adventure Games newsletter writes: "Interactive fiction has been a part of my life for over 15 years. It's hard for me to believe it's been that long since my Dad brought home a copy of Zork I for the brand-new disk drive of our sleek Atari 400, but it's true. For me, just playing a game that didn't take a half-hour to load from a cassette tape was pretty cool, but this new program that understood what I typed, that challenged the agility of my mind rather than of my fingers, and that transported me into a breathtaking new imaginative vista. . . well that was downright *magical*."

Park, Mel. "Colossal Cave Revisited." TidBITS 8 (1994). 10 April, 2000. http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-229.html#lnk4. [link]
A brief article describing the real geographical origins of the landscape Crothwer incorporated into his "Colossal Cave Adventure" (c.1975). "'According to legend' - Hah! ADVENTURE is based on a real cave, one that is, indeed, now part of the Mammoth Cave System in Kentucky. The cave is not Colossal, however, but Bedquilt Cave. In our small circle, Willie Crowther is a famous, as was his wife then, cave explorer..." "Computer types who grew up exploring ADVENTURE don't realize how accurately the game represents passages in Bedquilt Cave. Yes, there is a Hall of the Mountain King and a Two-Pit Room. The entrance is indeed a strong steel grate at the bottom of a twenty-foot depression."

Watson, Blake. "Welcome to the Well House." The Well House [column]. Adventuregamer.com. 21 Apr 2000. 25 Aug 2001. http://www.adventuregamer.com/features/columns/wellhouse-1.shtml. (Unavailable as of 25 Aug 2001). [link]
This article, which announces a new column on the adventuregamer.com website, is here treated as IF nostalgia.

• "If you play Adventure games, you should know where they come from - and if you've played very many Adventure games, you may be surprised at how many conventions (good and bad) came from that first one."
• "Unfortunately none of the easily available modern versions of Advent that I have found are exact duplicates - even those which use Fortran code, the language in which the original was written. One thing you'll notice if you quit right away is that you already have 30+ points. In the original, you started at zero and got points for finding your way into the cave. For reasons I don't entirely fathom, the modern clones don't duplicate that."

§2.3: Literature (References to IF in Other Genres)

• Jerz, Dennis G. "PICK UP AX (review)." Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games 22 (2000): n.p. 15 Sep 2000. http://sparkynet.com/spag/backissues/SPAG22.
  "Much as Shakespeare might allude to mythology or appeal to floral symbolism in order to make a point about human nature, playwright Anthony Clarvoe uses IF as a vehicle to show the audience who his characters are and what they want out of life."
• Stone, Dudley. "Revenge of the Cybernauts" [Review of PICK UP AX.] (1996). 31 May 2001. http://www.oobr.com/top/volThree/two/OOBR-Ax.html.
  "It's a simple story but director James Abar moved it at a frenetic pace throughout, with very short scenes (bytes?) interspersed with some very well-chosen music including the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Jimmi Hendrix and Sinatra. In fact the sound design in this play was excellent."

Powers, Richard. "Escapes." Esquire 131.7 (1999): 86. [Excerpt from Powers's novel Plowing the Dark.] [link]
The short story "Escape," told in a second-person format, presents the thoughts of a political prisoner in a one-room cell, whose isolation is so severe that his flashbacks border on hallucinations. The short story published in Esquire contains no obvious references to command-line IF, but the novel from which it is excerpted deals with virtual reality, and many reviews (e.g. NY Times Book Review, Salon, The Village Voice) made the connection explicit. A short segment of the story: "You pace about, astonished. From the once-mythical far side of this cube, you look back across the ocean of air. Seeing your corner like this, from a distance - your mattress, radiator, chain; the grubby country that swallowed you entire - it looks bounded, known, livable."

Ross, Gary and Anne Spielberg [screenwriters]. Big. 20th Century Fox. 1988. [link]
The opening sequence of this Tom Hanks comedy shows a boy playing a graphics-and-text video game. The young Josh is frustrated by a puzzle involving a character frozen in ice. He types "melt ice" but is stumped when the computer replies, "What do you want to melt the ice with?" Later, Josh makes a wish in front of a coin-operated mechanical fortune teller, and is transformed into an adult (played by Hanks). After leaving home and finding work at a toy company, he makes a successful boardroom pitch for his concept of "electronic comics" - book-sized video screens with buttons that can control the action. Now that the computer game has become a business proposition embroiled in office politics, Josh is nostalgic for his lost childhood. He returns to the same computer game he had been playing at the start of the movie, and solves the puzzle by melting the ice "with thermal pod." The ice puzzle seems to be a metaphor for Josh's childhood, and the mechanical fortune-telling game is a bridge between childhood and adulthood.

§3) Manifestos and Taxonomies

• Without help from a database, a storyteller could never script all the narrative possibilities in an infinitely-branching storyline. To share some of the load, Barger suggests the codification of a large number of "meta-stories" about objects and human relationships that populate the storyline. Using as his model Polti's The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations (an exhaustive taxonomy of dramatic conflict), Barger theorizes a computer program that "knows" basic details about what makes a story interesting, and that "continually, unobtrusively revis[es] the virtual world behind the scenes, so as to open up as many interesting plotlines as possible" ("The confabulating-arranger model of IF" ¶2).
• The computer can not only improvise the fictional future, but also rewrite the fictionalized, unrevealed past on the fly, so long as the generation of new data to explain and contextualize current story events is not inconsistent with what has been previously revealed.
• "I like to imagine a sort of SimCity-like environment where a community of little NPC's go through their daily routine of life, in a completely rote fashion, with no emergent behavior expected or desired. ("SimNormal" ¶3).

Firth, Roger. "Inform FAQ." 2001. http://homepages.tesco.net/~roger.firth/informfaq/. [link]
A well-designed resource introducing the IF programming language Inform. (See §3: Nelson, Inform Designers' Manual.)

Galley, Stu. "The Implementor's Creed" [Internal Infocom document]. Undated. [1984?] 18 Dec 2000. http://infocom.gerf.org/Articles/creed.html. [link]
A short, eight-point summary of the mission of the "implementor" (or author-programmer), as articulated by one of Infocom's founders. Selected points include:

• "My readers should become immersed in the story and forget where they are. They should forget about the keyboard and the screen, forget everything but the experience. My goal is to make the computer invisible" (¶3).
• "I know what an artist means by saying, 'I hope I can finish this work before I ruin it.' Each work-in-progress reaches a point of diminishing returns, where any change is as likely to make it worse as to make it better. My goal is to nurture each work to that point. And to make my best estimate of when it will reach that point" (¶6).

Granade, Stephen. "Artificial Intelligence in IF." About.com. 2 Jun 1997. 31 May 2001. http://interactfiction.about.com/library/weekly/aa060297.htm. [link]
"To be honest, we don't need AI in IF. What we need are better ways of distracting the player from the fact that, in the end, a game can only react in so many ways." (See also §4: Interactive Fiction. Stephen Granade, ed.]).

Granade, Stephen. "Plenty Annoyed." About.com. 16 Feb 1998. 31 May 2001. http://interactfiction.about.com/ library/weekly/aa021698.htm. [link]
"It's not a great leap of logic to move from "players like challenging puzzles" to "players love difficult puzzles." It is, however, a small leap to an unwarranted conclusion. The result of such a jump? Designers add puzzles which are difficult simply to be difficult."

Granade, Stephen. "Being a Literate Gamer." About.com. 30 Mar 1998. 31 May 2001. http://interactfiction.about.com/library/weekly/aa033098.htm. [link]
"I think that IF can be more than entertainment. It is an art form, and at its best it does what all good art does: it sheds light on the human condition. But for IF to be art, IF must have its cadre of literate critics and creators."

Nelson, Graham. Inform Designer's Manual, 4th ed. (release 4/2). The Interactive Fiction Library, St. Charles, Ill. 2001. Minor revisions to the Adobe PDF e-text, released 1 May 2001 and available at http://www.gnelson.demon.co.uk/inform/DM4.pdf. [link]
A tutorial and reference guide to the Inform programming language, featuring a chapter on "The Craft of Adventure" (339-407). Existing solely in electronic form since 1994, the manual was first published as a print book in the summer of 2001. Nelson, who created the Inform programming language (which has featured strongly in the IF revival), has also produced two epic-length works of IF (the genealogical romp "Curses," 1993; and the time-travel romance "Jigsaw," 1995). His "A Meteor, a Stone, and a Long Glass of Sherbet" (written under a pseudonym) won the 1996 Interactive Fiction Contest. His various contributions have inarguably defined contemporary IF. Even when describing dry technical material, Nelson's writing is unrelentingly witty and literate, as in the following example: "Animate objects representing people with proper names, like 'Mark Antony', need to be given the proper attribute, and those with feminine names, such as 'Cleopatra', need to be both female and proper, though of course history would have been very different if . . . " (136).

• "In books like this one the word 'player' is overused. There are at least three identities involved in play: the person typing and reading ('player'), the main character within the story ('protagonist'), and the voice speaking about what this character sees and feels ('narrator'). There is a triangle of relationships between them, and it's a triangle with very different proportions in different games" (368).
• "In an interactive medium, the beliefs and abilities of the protagonist are more than simply a painted backcloth, because the player participates in them. These special abilities might be called the 'magic' in the game's model world, in the broadest sense: 'For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of man.' (C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man.)" (369).
• "In a recent radio broadcast (1999), Douglas Adams said that the great enjoyability of working on his games with Infocom was having fun with a new medium before it became an art form and had serious articles written about it. (Which pretty much puts this chapter in its place.) But that original fascination dies hard, and the first and happiest discovery of anyone researching into interactive fiction is that designers past are only too pleased to be rediscovered, and willing to go to great trouble - hunting through archives, attics and obsolete equipment - to see that their games can be trodden again. An adventure game can be one of the most satisfying of works to have written: perhaps because one can always polish it a little further, perhaps because it has hidden and secret possibilities. But perhaps too because something is made as well as written: and once made can never be unmade, so that there will always be a small brick building by the end of the road, and in it there will always be keys, food, a bottle and the lamp" (407).

Nelson, Graham. Inform Home Page. [Personal website.] 1996-1999. 31 May 2001. http://www.gnelson.demon.co.uk/inform/index.html. [link]
Inform is a computer language for programming interactive fiction. Nelson created it and released it as freeware in 1993. Since then, the language has been expanded by other contributors, and continues to develop. This site offers a clear overview of the effort involved in creating a work of interactive fiction.

Parker, Marnie "Doe." "[An Iffy Theory] Version 2.25: The Meta-Puzzle of Interactive Fiction: Why We Like What We Like: Interactivity Is The Message." [Personal website.] 2000. 31 May 2001. http://members.aol.com/doepage/theory.html. [link]
Parker's document, written for a non-academic audience, is a diamond in the rough of interactive fiction analysis. Identifying herself as a dyslexic who sees text differently than others, Parker offers compelling observations about the diverse reader responses to several recent IF works. In the process, she gestures towards a sensory-feedback critical theory of IF, and offers an underdeveloped but nonetheless interesting analysis of IF aesthetics.

Parker uses the terminology of psychology, but she is actually exploring the cultural issues of literary taste - a well-traveled field of criticism theory, but especially visible in 18th-century aesthetics. An extended section on emotive responses to textual experiences fails to apply the term "willing suspension of disbelief," and thus belabors points well-established by Coleridge (1772-1834). Despite the gaps in her knowledge of literary analysis, Parker - unlike many cybertheorists who have never actually invested the time to read command-line IF for pleasure and appreciate the special merits of the genre - bases her observations on careful study of a wide range of recent texts. Further, because she writes for a non-academic audience of amateur critics, Parker rightly introduces a deep awareness of the metadiscourse on the USENET newsgroups which both reflects and shapes contemporary opinions about IF. (See also §4: Parker, IF Art Show).

• "Introduction": In McLuhan's terms, IF is a "cool" medium, because the textual information supplied is so sparse, and the brain of the perceiver must fill in many gaps: "computer interactivity is so cool it borders on the cold" (¶8). To illustrate the player's emotional investment in the text, Parker quotes a posting from a gamer who describes himself as "trapped in a cold, pitch-black, water-filled crawl hole, and I was shit-freaking scared" (¶23).
• "Evolution": Describes the IF community's enthusiastic reception of the literary and nearly puzzle-free "Photopia" (Adam Cadre, 1998), and describes feeling shut out of the excitement.
• "Compendium": Reproduces postings by various authors, including one who describes what it is like having no sense of smell; an application of Chisholm's speckled chicken visualization problem; the effect of American vs. English pronunciation on the experience of a game; the value of puzzles to an IF work.
• "Conclusion": Offers a taxonomy of interactive modes (linguistic, visual, kinesthetic, etc.); briefly catalogues the interactive components of the Infocom games, including the identity of the genderless, often motiveless main character, and the "feelies" (real items packaged into the game box that enhanced the text-only play); along these same lines, briefly analyzes the reception of more recent games: "Photopia" (Adam Cadre, 1998), "The Edifice" (Lucian P. Smith, 1997), "Muse: An Autumn Romance" (Christopher Huang, 1998), "Exhibition" (Ian Finley, 1999), "For a Change" (Daniel Schmidt, 1999), "Hunter in Darkness" (Andrew Plotkin, 1999), and "Halothane" (Quentin D. Thompson, 1999). Parker also suggests terminology, akin to that of the Meyers-Briggs personality types, to describe interactive fiction fans who respond differently to the different elements (puzzles, prose, emotions, etc.) of interactive fiction.

1. Rees sees the plot as the outermost level, which describes how events unfold and how characters change as the story progresses.
2. On a more local level is the scene, which can be extremely tightly scripted (for instance, as a character overhears a conversation in the next room).
3. Next, puzzles mostly exist in order to prevent the character from ignoring important scenes, or from experiencing them in the wrong order.
4. Code and text involves determining what commands the user will be able to type in order to interact with a given set of objects, and then writing the code to create the desired effect.

Roberts, Michael J. "Better Adventures." TADS Authors' Manual. 1987, 1998. 8 Jan 2001. http://www.tela.bc.ca/tela/tads-manual/tads-b.html. [link]
An appendix to the "Text Adventure Development System" manual. Roberts advises the would-be game author: "TADS makes it possible to write games that are technically polished with little programming. However, it's up to you, the author, to provide the creativity and storytelling skill needed to make the game fun to play" (¶1).

Roberts, Michael J. "Getting Started with TADS." TADS Authors' Manual. 1987, 1998. 8 Jan 2001. http://www.tela.bc.ca/tela/tads-manual/tads-9.html. [link]
One chapter from the manual for the "Text Adventure Development System," which is intended to help author-programmers create their own IF works. A useful introduction to the complex relationship between developing the story and creating the code.

Short, Emily. "NPC Characterization: Being a Compendious Guide to the Asstd. Tricks of the Trade, as Far as the Author has been able to Identify Them or to Devise Them Anew" [Personal website.] 2001. 31 May 2001. http://emshort.home.mindspring.com/NPC3.htm. [link]
The acclaimed author of "Galatea" (featuring an extremely well-implemented NPC) and the simulationist "Metamorphoses" describes the characteristics of a successful NPC. Her main audience is other IF authors, but her criteria are clear and thorough. She concludes: "[T]he better you are at the craft of writing dialogue, the more convincing and effective your NPCs will be, and the more they will stick in people's minds. Adam Cadre is justly known for his non-player characters, not because he relies uniformly on techniques like these, but because he crafts them with distinctive and memorable voices" ("Writing" ¶1). (Short's other articles on simulation, multiform storytelling, settings, and IF in general are also well worth reading; see .)

Silcox, Mark. "The IF Lover's Bookshelf" Interactive Fiction [Suite101.com]. 1999. 31 May 2001. http://suite101.com/article.cfm/interactive_fiction/34117. [link]
"If one relaxes one's criteria just a bit, though, it becomes easier to bring to mind at least a few works that should probably belong on the bookshelf of any legitimate fan of interactivity in fiction. Here's a small, open-ended catalogue - hope this at least manages to plant some seeds."

Silcox, Mark. "Slices O'Life." Interactive Fiction [Suite101.com]. 2000. 31 May 2001. http://suite101.com/article.cfm/interactive_fiction/34117. [link]
A brief commentary upon the escapist/fantasy quality of most interactive fiction: "After all, how much novelty is there really in stepping into the shoes of yet another armor wearing, sword carryin' whiteboy who's [sic] simulated task it is to swing the chopper, kill the trolls and grab the treasure?"

Tangray, David Adrien. "Adventure Game Properties and Discussion." Undated. 13 Oct 2000. http://www.thinkage.on.ca/~dat/games/Adventure_Games.html. [link]
A useful, concise critical taxonomy, which Tangray provides in order to explain the terminology he uses in reviews elsewhere on his site.

• "An adventure game is primarily deterministic, although most will have some minor random elements. The puzzle is intellectual, not physical: neither reflexes nor dexterity are required. The game might still include some real-time aspects, but the time limit should be ample to perform the required action, once you determine that action" (¶2).
• "Most adventure games will also have a story. There are two aspects to story: a background story, describing and justifying the world and the character; and a plot, which is built by the game player as the game is played. The world, the character(s), and the background story collectively define a setting for the game" (¶3).

• "IF is to graphic games what books are to Network television. They are geared towards a more cerebral audience. The people that write IF usually have a deep-set love for language and its nuances" (3).
• Other sections include advice about plot, atmosphere, and character development.
• Supplement 1: http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/info/authorship-guide.sup1
• Supplement 2: http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/info/authorship-guide.sup2
• Wilson's most significant contribution to interactive fiction is his creation of the annual Interactive Fiction Competition (see §4), first held in 1995, and now the central event of the IF community calendar.

§4) Archives and Meta-resources

Firth, Roger. "Ifaq (IF Frequently Asked Questions)." Maintained by Stephen Griffiths. 2001. 30 May 2001. http://www.textfire.com/raiffaq/ifaq. [link]
An incredibly efficient introduction to IF, presenting brief answers to dozens of questions regarding the history of IF, how to play it, and how to write it. Links point the reader to more detailed answers.

Freebern, Ryan N., ed. "ifFinder: Interactive Fiction Search Engine." 2000. 30 May 2001. http://www.corknut.org/ifFinder/. [link]
A portal-style site, with IF content divided up into categories such as game theory, news, and programming languages.

Granade, Stephen, ed. Interactive Fiction [About.com]. 1997-2001. 30 May 2001. http://interactfiction.about.com/games/interactfiction/blnews.htm. [link]
A tremendous guide to current events in the IF community, updated almost daily. He also regularly writes short, informal articles on such topics as using IF to teach ESL, women and computer games, IF and traditional genres, and "literate" IF . (See also §3: Granade.)

Granade, Stephen, organizer. Interactive Fiction Competition 2001. 2000. 30 May 2001. http://www.textfire.com/ifcomp/ [link]
The IF competition was created by Kevin Wilson, and has recently been organized by Stephen Granade. The number of entries has been going steadily up, with 37 in 1999, and 53 in 2000. One good historical overview of the competition is available at http://www.igs.net/~tril/if/competition/.

Kinder, David and Granade, Stephen, eds. Interactive Fiction Archive. 1992-2001. http://ifarchive.org/ [link]
A comprehensive -- but at times overwhelming -- archive of downloadable games,hints, maps, programming tools, and articles that are (or are at least presumed to be) in the public domain. Created by Volker Blasius and formerly maintained by Blasius and David M. Baggett.

Mullen, Eileen, ed. XYZZYnews. 1995-2001. 31 May 2001. http://www.xyzzynews.com. [link]
Fanzine named for a spell in the original "Colossal Cave Adventure." Edited by Eileen Mullen. Features IF articles organized by category. Includes interviews with noted IF authors, as well as essays on character gender, previews and reviews of IF offerings, humor, and other community-building tidbits. Hosts an annual virtual awards ceremony.

Musante, Mark, ed. "IF Review: The Online Interactive Fiction Review Site." 2001. 30 May 2001. http://www.ministryofpeace.com/if-review. [link]
A growing collection of thoughtful and literate reviews of IF.

O'Brian, Paul, Wilson, G. Kevin and Olson, Magnus, eds. Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games (SPAG). 1994-2001. 31 May 2001. http://www.sparkynet.com/spag. [link]
In 1997, this publication changed its name from the "Society for the Preservation of Adventure Games." This gamer-friendly site focuses almost exclusively on reader-submitted, spoiler-free capsule reviews. Not as many in-depth, stand-alone essays as XYZZYNews.

Parker, Marnie "Doe," curator. Interactive Fiction Art Show. 1999-2001. 30 May 2001. http://members.aol.com/iffyart/gallery.htm [link]
Created by an IF author and critic who has dyslexia, the "Iffy Art" contest attempts to separate interactive textuality from the "narrative" elements favored by the literati, and the "game" elements favored by the programmers. "What is left? Art. Experience for experience's sake. Interactivity for interactivity's sake. Non-goal (basically) directed interactivity" .

raif group members. rec.arts.int-fiction (raif) USENET news group. [link]
Online discussion group for IF programmers and designers. Before posting there, check the raif FAQ http://www.davidglasser.net/raiffaq or search an archive such as http://groups.google.com. The archives are a good source for quotes from authors explaining their own work, describing their design choices, or discussing highly technical issues.

rgif group members. rec.games.int-fiction (rgif) USENET newsgroup. [link]
Discussion group for IF players. Before posting there, check the rgif FAQ http://bang.dhs.org/faq or search an archive such as http://groups.google.com. Researchers will find plenty of thoughtful comments from critics and gamers who liked or disliked a particular element of the story or implementation, as well as frequent desperate postings of the "I'm stuck, how do I get past the snake" variety.

Silcox, Mark, ed. Interactive Fiction [Suite101.com]. 1999-2001. 31 May 2001. http://suite101.com/welcome.cfm/interactive_fiction. [link]
This site duplicates the function of Granade's better-maintained version on About.com, but Silcox does offer several worthwhile original articles about IF from the perspective of the gamer/player. (See §3: Silcox.)

van Egmond, Stephen, ed. "Interactive Fiction Research Library." Undated. 04 Jun 2001. http://bang.dhs.org/if/library/. [link]
"This library brings together some of the current body of thought on IF: history, criticism, design, and so on. Many issues have been debated on our Usenet newsgroup, and those discussions are reproduced and summarized here." Includes pages devoted to the history of IF; design and aesthetics; reviews and criticism; and IF programming issues.

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by Dennis G. Jerz
03 Sep 2001 -- last modified

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