Interactive fiction

Definition

• What is Interactive Fiction? Just what it says: it's a story with which the reader can interact. Sometimes "interaction" means problem solving--bringing the story to its resolution by overcoming the roadblocks". (Suzanne Britton, in a now dead Web Page)

• Interactive fiction' is a broad term for any sort of story in which the reader takes a role more active than reading words and turning pages; the term has been applied to all sorts of fiction that doesn't fit the traditional mold of short stories, novels, and the like. Interactive fiction includes anything from "choose your own adventure" books to hypertext novels to text adventures, but it's this last form that has become the most widely recognized meaning of the term. (from an old version of the TADS introduction to IF

Interactive fiction is closely related to Adventure games, Role-Playing (RPG) games, etc.

See also: MUDs and MOOs. If they contain scenarios, they can be considered multi-user IF.

Interactive fiction in education

There is potential for:

• language learning
• historical simulations

Sidenote: IF is probably the only computer game medium in which an individual author can hope to create an entire work on his or her own.

Links

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_fiction