It was created by famous IF writer and personality Andrew Plotkin, and it explains the basic concept of commands, possible indicators, command abbreviations and more in a single image. If you already got curious and want to start playing IF games, please take a look at this mind-map first. Just like in “traditional” fiction published as books, the possibilities are endless. Or perhaps you need to fight monsters and zombies to get to a precious treasure.
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Maybe you need to solve mazes and puzzles to free a loved one. An old rope lies left to the hole, as if someone dropped it there for you.īy introducing many different locations, objects, monsters, and sometimes even other multi-layered characters with distinct personalities, you progressively dive into the story and get to know the end goal of your journey. You stand in front of an approximately 10 feet deep hole dug into the earth. Looking to the west, you can see a slightly lighter area of the forest. To the north, a narrow path leads through high trees. “>“ characters mark the end of the already-told parts of the story and the need for your input to proceed to the next part of the storyline these are the points where you interact with the story and define how it goes on by taking actions by yourself: To give you an idea of how the command line of an IF game interpreter looks like when you’re playing and IF game, I wrote a short IF story sample transcript with possible input commands and following output formats that push the story forward. He is confronted with a start setting from which he conquers the story by moving around, taking objects, and executing actions. The story is written by the game’s author, and, starting somewhere in its storyline, the player enters it. They are commonly played using a plain-text version of a command line as the game file interpreter (for all non-nerds: command lines connected to a keyboard were the main way of entering data into a computer before the invention of the graphical user interface in the early ’80s).Īs the name suggests, Interactive Fiction games enable the player to interactively take part in a (written) fictional story (most of the time as the main character of the story). Interactive Fiction is the overall term for all kinds of text-based adventure games, one the earliest forms of video games.
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The following paragraphs will be full of external links leading you to download resources, information wikis about IF, interesting essays and blog posts about the community, and all kinds of software you could use to play and write IF.
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In this post, I will discuss all these topics: the history of IF, the community and its current state, and how to play and develop IF - with a focus on IF and Apple’s operating systems – Mac OS X and iOS. There are even modern development tools and languages available to write your own IF games. IF has a vibrant and very active community of gamers, journalists, story writers, and modern implementations of any kind to emulate and play IF games on any imaginable platform. I googled the title, and just a few minutes later I was lost in the world of Interactive Fiction (hence abbreviated as IF) which is the official genre description of games commonly known as text-based adventure games.Īfter hours of research, I found out that although the first IF games were released in the early ’80s and quickly decreased in popularity due to the rise of graphics-based games in the middle-80s, the genre is not dead at all. A few episodes later, the title of the game is revealed: ZORK.Īt that point, I was curious. “Oh yes that worked!”, Sheldon yells with a wide smile on his face. Suddenly, he starts yelling at Leonard, his roommate: “It says there’s a troll!” Leonard answers: “Type ‘Hit troll with axe’”. Sheldon Cooper sits in front of his laptop, his face distorted by heavy concentration. It all started with an episode of “The Big Bang Theory”.
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