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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).