Interactive Fiction

I'm curious about writing interactive fiction, but there seem to be some problems with it. Most that I've read is extremely poorly put together: deus ex machinae, unexpected scene changes, all the possible actions leading to the same result, flat characterization, wandering plots, you get the idea.

Are these problems inherent, or is it possible to write good interactive fiction? The problem as I see it is that you're writing many stories at once, so to make the book good, every possible chain of events must fit together to tell a well-structured story.

And then there's characterization. Is it really plausible to give a wide range of behavior options to a well-developed character? It seems like, the more solid the character, the fewer possible actions he/she would take. But maybe you could write it like a moral choice video game: The character starts flatter, but takes on more traits as you make choices. Again, you'd have to arc this through every possible chain of events.

Anyone here have experience with interactive fiction and care to comment?

Yeah, I think it's possible to do it really well. But it's a lot of work. Think about it: for a regular story, you have one plotline to develop. For interactive fiction, you have new plotlines forming every single time you offer the reader a choice. Things get really complicated fast.

Yeah, Combinatorial Explosion definitely applies to IF.

The wiki would probably help a lot here, especially the cliches (which is very trope-y, I might add).

Emily Short has written a long list of IF games sorted by mechanics. For example Galatea is basically entirely about the characterization of one character. It has enough endings that the author doesn't know the total.

IFDB is a great place to look for IF titles.

I strongly recommend Blue Lacuna; I posted a review of it on my blog (which I really need to repost on IFDB sometime). Just about anything by Emily Short, Andrew Plotkin or Adam Cadre comes highly recommended. The author of Blue Lacuna also wrote Whom The Telling Changed, a cleverly interactive rendition of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is also well worth a look.

As far as titles that aren't in the public domain, I can recommend Wishbringer for pure fun, and A Mind Forever Voyaging for a more serious narrative.

Once you're to a point where you'd like to try actually writing your own IF, I recommend you point yourself to Inform 7. The following text is a complete, if sparse, game:

"Abandonia" by Ryusui

Abandonia is a room. "You are in an empty, dusty room with a monitor mounted on the wall."

A floppy disk is in Abandonia. "A floppy disk lies in the dust here." The description of the floppy disk is "It's a 3.5-inch diskette. The text on the label has been worn away, but the rest of the disk appears to be in working order."

A wall-mounted monitor is scenery in Abandonia. Understand "wall" and "mounted" as the monitor. The description is "The monitor is switched off. There is a disk slot underneath it."

A disk slot is scenery in Abandonia. The disk slot is a container. "It's a small slot in the wall, just the right size to accept a 3.5-inch diskette."

Instead of inserting the disk into the monitor: try inserting the disk into the disk slot.

After inserting the disk into the disk slot: say "The monitor comes to life, displaying the words..."; end the game in victory.

The code is slightly out-of-date as of the latest version, but should still compile. Enjoy!

You might check out this site: http://www.choiceofgames.com/category/our-games/

Personal recommendations are Zombie Exodus (in the "Make Your Own Games" tab) and Choice of Romance/Intrigues.

You might also try Blue Lacuna, as someone else suggested.

Oh! I did some of those games before! I didn't know that they're still doing them.

I love choice of Games, it's quite awesome. I also like searching for IF so I'll add this to my washlist... (blinks) uh, I mean Watchlist. (meek smile)

I've had a go at writing a few IF pieces but never finished them, although I'm working on one with some friends now so that has a better chance of seeing daylight. The main thing I learned was FLOWCHARTS. Flowcharts EVERYWHERE. That, and not to get carried away making a vast tree of possibilities. Instead, think about how best to provide a robust illusion of freedom with some kind of payoff for the choices the player makes, while minimising how much you need to write and keep track of.

I used Ren'Py and found it easy to use and flexible, but that's more designed for visual novels and takes a bit of programming to do anything fancy, and it doesn't come with inbuilt flowcharts which would have been an awesome feature.

Oh, and having played a few, I'd say the main danger for someone making interactive fiction is probably frustrating the player. Never make them hold the idiot ball. Try not to punish them for making reasonable choices. Reward them for insight and attention if you like but don't force them to comb through reams and reams of prose on pain of getting screwed over in the ending unless you've made it clear it's that kind of game.

That said, it's a bit subjective. I loved Fate/Stay night but my friend found it unplayable because it forces the protagonist's chauvinism on you and almost every decision is either trivial or has a 2/3 chance of resulting in gruesome death, with very little way to tell beforehand which is 'right'.

edited 1st Jul '12 9:19:36 AM by Kesteven

With Renpy, you can create a number of gameplay options. It might work if you want to create an interactive adventure game with a few standard actions (Open, Use, Go, etc) available to the player. But if you're trying to create interactive fiction with a complex text parser, then choose a freeware program such as Inform 7 or TADS 3. Here's a lengthy article that compares the two systems.

Yeah, I didn't realise that text-adventures were the main sense of interactive fiction, I was using it in the wider sense that includes things like multiple-choice and visual novels.

Personally I generally prefer multiple choice over text-input, to me the fact you can put anything into the input mostly just draws attention to the fact that most of your commands are pointless or meaningless, and it can upset the flow of the narrative, while multiple-choice lets the player get involved while still retaining most of the advantages of traditional written fiction. I'm sure there are advantages and disadvantages to both, though.

I guess one's preferences in that respect depend on whether you prefer a game or a story. I got introduced to the interactive fiction community (by which I mean text adventure games) with plot-light, puzzle-heavy adventure games like Colossal Cave, so I tend to approach interactive fiction from a gaming perspective, even the ones where the focus is on the story.