Interactive fiction

Interactive Fiction in English is probably the most numerous. The first game in the genre of IF - Colossal Cave Adventure - was exactly English. To create English-language games, there are developed development platforms, among which Inform and TADS are usually distinguished.

Genres

Text simulators are games in which there is an economic system. Making money, the player moves through the story. For example, if you go through the life of the host company to create computer games, the player must earn money on new equipment, while ensuring that no one is fired, do not die of hunger, etc. Games are a combination of a simulator of economy and strategy.

Text RPG - in games of this genre, a player can develop characteristics of a character, receive spells, armor, weapons, and advance through the plot, choosing where to go. Everything takes place in the following form - the player is asked a question: “You have come to a fork in three roads in the forest. Where will you turn? ”The player must choose one of the answer options (“ left ”,“ right ”,“ forward ”). When confronted with an opponent, the player has a number of possible options for action.

Text quests - here you only need a choice of options for moving through the plot. For example, the player receives the following message: “The owner of the hotel invites you to eat”, and the answer options are “agree”, “refuse”. If he chose the option "agree", his character is poisoned in the refectory room. There, after poisoning, he finds himself in a dungeon, from which he will have to get out. If the player refused to eat, his character continues on his way, etc. Text quests exist both in the electronic version and in the book version. For fans of electronic options, there are entire communities and sites where there are various programs for creating text quests and downloading them with these programs. Moreover, in such games there are not only a choice of answer options, but there are also versions where you need to write words, for example, if a player writes obscenities , then the characters can be offended; if he writes an abstract version, they do not understand; and if you write the right word (which the player meets in the story and has to name it), it will advance in the story.

Sometimes visual novels are also referred to as a subquery of the text quest.

History

Colossal Cave Adventure

In 1975-1976, Will Crowther created the first text quest - Colossal Cave Adventure (also known as ADVENT ). It was written in Fortran for the PDP-10 computer. In 1976, Don Woods received permission from Crowther and perfected the game. The original version was more or less realistic; Woods, being a fan of the creative work of J. R. R. Tolkien , added some fantastic elements - elements such as elves , a troll and a volcano appeared in the game. The game has spread on ARPANET and lived to the present day. It has been ported to almost all operating systems. The popularity of Colossal Cave Adventure contributed to the success of the IF in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Commercial Era

In the USA, the most famous text-quest company was Infocom . The most famous Infocom games are the Zork , Trinity , Planetfall , The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series and A Mind Forever Voyaging . To ensure the availability of games on as many platforms as possible, Infocom developed the Z-machine , a virtual machine that allowed the use of standardized “story files”. The issue of text quests in Infocom stopped after it was acquired by Activision .

Infocom quests are considered classics of the genre and the period of Infocom activity is considered the “golden age” of Interactive Fiction.

In addition to Infocom, the production of text quests involved such companies as Adventure International , Legend Entertainment , Magnetic Scrolls , Level 9 , Topologika, and others.

New Era

After the collapse of the commercial market Interactive Fiction, the development of the genre passed into the hands of an online community. In 1987, the Usenet rec.arts.int-fiction group (for authors) and rec.games.int-fiction (for players) was created. One of the most important stages was the decoding of the Z-code format from Infocom and the Z-machine virtual machine in order to create an interpreter for it. As a result of the game, Infocom has become possible to run on modern computers.

For many years, the amateur community could only create games with very limited capabilities (using tools such as the Adventure Game Toolkit ). The development of Interactive Fiction has contributed to the creation of two powerful development systems. In 1987, Michael J. Roberts released TADS , a programming language for creating Interactive Fiction. In 1993, Graham Nelson released Inform , a programming language and compiler that creates a Z-code history file. Both of these systems allowed to create text quests of any complexity.

Now the games created by enthusiasts often surpass the creations of Infocom. Every year competitions are held to identify the best authors. The most popular of them, the Interactive Fiction Competition , has been held annually since 1995.

Interactive Fiction's Most Famous Works

• Colossal Cave Adventure ( Will Crowther , Don Woods ) - the first text quest.
• Zork trilogy and subsequent games in the world of Zork ( Infocom ).
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ( Douglas Adams , Steve Meretsky , 1984) - a game based on the eponymous novel by Douglas Adams and released by Infocom.
• Curses ( Graham Nelson , 1993) - the first game written in Inform . It is considered the first "modern" game, not inferior in quality to the works of Infocom.
• So Far ( Andrew Plotkin , 1996) - is considered an example of a combination of plot and mystery.
• Photopia ( Adam Cadre , 1998) - one of the first games, completely focused on the plot (puzzleless, no mystery).
• Tale (1999) - the first text role-playing game that runs in a regular browser. It implemented not only quests, but also fights. It has a continuation of the Legend.
• Galatea ( Emily Short , 2000) - one of the best implementations of the NPC (character, not controlled by the player).
• Façade (Michael Mateas , Andrew Stern, 2005) is one of the best implementations of interaction between NPCs.

Interactive Fiction Development Systems

• ADRIFT
• ALAN
• AXMA Story Maker
• Inform
• INSTEAD
• QSP
• URQ
• TADS
• Twine

This genre is also developing in Russian, but most of the quests in Russian are amateur.

Due to the fact that the Russian language is synthetic , it is somewhat more difficult for it to create platforms with text input than for English because of the presence of endings. Therefore, usually Russian platforms for creating IF use the interface in the form of a menu. One of the most famous platforms is URQ (Universal RipSoft Quest). Its original implementation is no longer supported, however, alternative implementations of URQ are being developed now. Among the interpreters can be noted URQ_DOS, AkURQ, FireURQ. There is also an interpreter written in Java - Overurka.

In addition, the QSP (Quest Soft Player) platform, which has existed since 2001, gained popularity. QSP is ported to many different platforms.

Also gaining popularity is the new visual platform AXMA Story Maker , which allows you to pack text games and interactive stories into a compact HTML file that can be opened in any modern browser, including mobile. There are versions of the program for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Despite the difficulties of implementation, there are also platforms with text input for the development of Russian-language text quests. First of all, it should be noted RTADS ^[3] , the localization of the TADS system, performed by Andrei Grankin. There is also localization Inform - RInform . In the Russian-speaking community, games are actively being created for both these platforms.

There are separate completed quests made without the help of specialized programming languages .

In the game " Space Rangers " 1 and 2 parts from the company Elemental Games part of the gameplay is implemented through the choice of one of the answers that answer the turns of the story - the so-called quests. Despite the fact that the stories of many quests were almost openly "borrowed" by the developers of popular science fiction works, according to some players, this is one of the most exciting parts of the game.

At present, the young cross-platform project INSTEAD is actively developing. The platform already has great potential for writing quests on it.

• Quest
• Visual novel
• Book game
• MUD
• Language game
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig

• Kevin Jackson-Mead, J. Robinson Wheeler. IF Theory Reader . - lulu.com, 2011. - 432 p.
• Suellentrop, Chris . Text Games in The New York Times (July 6, 2014). The appeal date is June 17, 2016.
• Urusikov D.S. Evolution of the “interactive fiction” genre: from a non-linear novel to a text quest // A collection of genres. - Yelets: EHU named after IA Bunin , 2004. - Vol. 1 . - pp . 132-138 . Archived March 4, 2016.
• Dmitry Reznikov. Interactive Fiction: Theory ... // Country of the Games. - 2001. - № 023 . - S. 54 . Archived August 23, 2009.

• iFiction.Ru is the central portal of the Russian-speaking community of interactive fiction, text adventure games and all that
• Opus & Lapsus: Interactive Fiction in Russian - the old site of the Russian-speaking community of fans of interactive literature
• URQ - a site dedicated to URQ. Contains a large number of text quests in Russian.
• AXMA Story Maker is a visual quest editor and compiler in HTML format.
• Site of the Russified TADS system