articles/IF_Guide.txt

A guide to Interactive Fiction for graphical game players

1) A history of If.

Years ago, in the days of the Orange Julious and the ZX Spectrum,
Interactive Fiction was Alive and well.

Many companies, such as Infocom and Level Nine ruled the scenes, but
others like the Larsoft games are now available for free.

In the 1990s, ACTIVISION began to acquire many of the companies, such as
Sierra on-line and even the famous Infocom.

In today's graphical game market, Activision is still king, with games
such as Call of Duty and Guitar Hero.

Ok, let's get back to the beginning.

When computers were first evolving, the terminals that were used to
display information did not allow graphics to be displayed. People still
wanted to play games that created scenes and allowed players to move
around in an environment where they could interact with it.

The only way that this could be done was by describing to the player
what was happening and then allowing them to type in some actions. The
first game was called "Adventure".

Later games, such as Infocom's Zork and Sierra's Dungeon master were
slightly based on Pen-&-paper Roleplaying Games such as DUNGEONS AND
DRAGONS, but most of them (like Zork) were based on Adventure.

Over the next 10 years many text adventures were made and sold to early
users of computers. But as graphics improved this type of game became
unpopular (and some say obsolete) and nearly ceased to exist. In the
late 90s a group of sentimental authors got together and recreated the
games.

Over the years IF has expanded to fill many genres other than
Fantasy/adventure, such as romance, puzzle and my personal favorite,
Sci-fi.

2) Experiencing IF.

If you decide to give IF a try, I'll say this.

Think of your keyboard as a large game controller, and the prose that
you read as graphics.

You type in commands, which in my opinion is the equivalent to pushing
several buttons and moving joysticks,. You use your "mind's eye" to see
your surroundings, just as you see graphics with your eyes.

Commands consist of verb noun combinations e.g. Get rod or kill troll.
Most modern parsers can understand more complex commands E.G Put piano
on stage or ask princess about wizard. Moving around is even simpler.
Here's an example: Walk East. Or: East. Or just: E. Moving faster
through games (often called command stacking) is possible with the
modern parser, for example: E.E.E.Get fish.E.N.Se.N. except (or BUT) is
another word that is capable of being understood: E.G. Drop all coins
except the quarter. Many other commands: Save saves a position in a
game. Restore restores a position in the game. Undo will undo the last
move. Restart restarts the current game. Quit quits the game. Score will
read your score and rank (if ranks are implemented). Fullscore will read
your score, rank and (sometimes) read what you did to get those points.
Help (or about, or info) will in most cases present a menu of
information and or will present a block of texthints.

3) Interpreters and multimedia. If you want to see real graphics and
hear sounds,many IF platforms allow this, such as Glulx, TADS 3 and
Quest.

So it's not all text.

A good place to start is the starters directory at the IF archive:
http://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXstarters.html.

Several games are tutorials in IF, such as the Dreamhold, A tutorial
game by Andrew Plotkin. If you want to play Z-machine and glulx games,
You can get filfre, an interpreter which has support for .z5, .z8, .zlb,
.zblorb, .ulx, .blb, and .gblorb files. Ulx, Blb and Gblorb are the only
supported formats with multimedia features. Grab filfre for windows at
maher.filfre.net/filfre/filfre111.msi (think of interpreters as a game
console and files as your game disk.) If I am correct, Filfre is also
for Mac and Linux. For Hugo, a text-only game platform, I recommend
Hugar, an interpreter for Windows. For AGT, the first modern IF
platform, which supports graphics as well, I recommend Windows Users try
AGiliTy for Windows. TADS 3 allows multimedia, but not TADS 2. The HTML
TADS Player's kit has support for both TADS 2 and TADS 3 games. Unlike
the previously stated interpreters, there are many versions of HTML TADS
for Mac and Linux. For Quest, you can play these games online at the
quest web site, http://textadventures.co.uk. The ADRIFT runner is
available at ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXprogrammingXADRIFT.html
(for windows only). For those running Mac or Linux, I recommend Zoom, a
multi-interpreter which supports all modern systems (Z-machine, Hugo,
AGT, Glulx and TADS 2/3). Interpreters for several platforms and IF
Systems can be found at the directory If-archive/Programming:
http://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXprogramming.html. Zoom, as well
as many other multi-interpreters, can be found in the directory
if-archive/interpreters-multi:
ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXinterpreters-multi.html.

4) Final conclusions.

I hope you have decided to enter the realm of IF, you will never forget
it. Endless possibilities are out there. Other than the If Archive,
there are other places to check out games, reviews and other stuff: The
Interactive Fiction Database (ifdb.tads.org), is a recommendation and
search engine for member reviews, download links and other games which
may be hard to find in the If Archive. Baf's guide (wurb.com/if) is
similar but allows browsing by genre, author and Company, as well as
rating, by competition/award winnings and other indices.

The brass lantern (brasslantern.org) is a great source of articles for
beginners, players and writers, and reviews of many graphical and text
games. Rec.Arts.Int-fiction is a newsgroup where you can talk about
writing games. Rec.Games.Int-fiction is another newsgroup, but for
discussion about playing If. IFiction.org is a site where you can play
several Z-machine games online. Goodbye, and happy gaming!

Regards, Alan Hooke alhooke@gmail.com Apr 26, 2012