Interactive fiction

Draft

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 by playing or (better) writing games (Vilmi, 1996).
• 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.

Examples (more needed)

• Stranded. An educational interactive fiction game that teaches cconomics and the use of the library

Links

Introductions

• Interactive fiction (Wikipedia)

• Hypertext fiction (Wikipedia).

The Interactive Fiction wiki

• Interactive Fiction Wiki (Good website for engines, games and tutorials).

References

• Montfort, Nick (2005). Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-63318-5.

• Keller, Daniel. "Reading and playing: what makes interactive fiction unique" p.276-298. in Williams, J. P., & Smith, J. H. (2007). The players' realm: studies on the culture of video games and gaming. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co. ISBN 9780786428328

• Seegert, Alf. (2009), "'Doing there' vs. 'being there': performing presence in interactive fiction", Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds 1: 1, pp. 23–37, doi: 10.1386/jgvw.1.1.23/1

• Vilmi,Ruth, Malmi,Lauri (1996). Learning english by creating, writing and playing WWW adventure games, Educational Technology Research and Development, 44, 3, 9/18/1996, Pages 109-118, DOI 10.1007/BF02300432 (Access restricted)