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3) Manifestos & Taxonomies by Fans

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25 Aug 2001; Dennis G. Jerz
This part of the Annotated IF Bibliography covers the manifestos of aficionados, theoretical analyses, fan and author publications, and other analytical material about interactive fiction not published in scholarly venues.

• 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.

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Dennis G. Jerz
03 Sep 2001 -- last modified
Dec 2006 -- minor HTML edits

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