Hack63.Play Interactive Fiction in One Minute

Hack 63. Play Interactive Fiction in One Minute

Enjoy quality text adventures quickly and effortlessly, no assembly required .

One of the best things about interactive fiction the fancy-schmancy name for text adventures, but also a good catchall term for the type of game, since they don't always strictly rely upon textis how easy it is to get up and running with a game. Installing an interpreter (the "platform" for the games ) and getting some adventures for it [Hack #64] is much easier than poking around with MAME or emulating old operating systems.

For the moment, however, we'll set aside even operations as simple as those in favor of showing how you can get started with interactive fiction inside of a minute; no assembly required. All you need is a web browser, preferably one with Java enabled, and a capacity for lateral thinking.

6.2.1. Gameplay Basics of Text Adventures

Text adventures are the perfect videogames for people with poor hand-eye coordination: there's never anything rushing at you or any pressure to perform your next move, and the prompt will let you take all the time you need to enter your next command. If you can hunt and peck on a keyboard, you can play text adventures. The demands this sort of game makes are more mental than physical: it's a good thing that you'll usually have plenty of time and plenty of moves to find a solution, since puzzles in text adventures are usually more obscure than they might seem.

In fact, they can be surprisingly difficult when you consider how relatively limited your actions are within the game. Most text adventures recognize only very simple and fairly intuitive input; the hardest thing for the novice player to do might be to adapt to its unique grammatical structure, which is rarely similar to natural, everyday language. You can't, for example, tell the game you want to "scope out that girl over there." Leading articles are usually unnecessary (though often recognized if you can't help but include them), and the grammar you'll use is short and simple sentences like "look at girl," or "take sword."

Once you've got the basics down, it's best to start by using them to get a feel for your surroundings. Text adventure games are divided up into rooms, each one of which you can get a basic description of with the simple command "look." This initial, basic description will provide a number of hints and clues about objects in the room that might warrant further inspection, so you'll want to look closer by typing "look at [object]" or just "look [object]." It's only after you've thoroughly explored the room that you'll start to get an idea of what you should do there; every game has clues to its obstacles and puzzles, but they'll never announce themselves without a little digging.

When you've figured out what you need to do, it's helpful to remember a few commands that'll let you accomplish most of it. One especially important verb to remember is "take," which lets you pick something up (if it's portable, which not everything will be) and add it to your inventory. (If you forget what you're carrying, the "i" command will give a complete list of your inventory.) If you don't need it anymore or want to get rid of it for other reasons, use the verb "drop." If you're trying to put it somewhere specific, the syntax to use would go something like "put lotion in basket " or "put mickey into drink."

Once you've got that down, the rest should suggest itselfvarious other actions would be accomplished with syntax such as "glue hand to face" or " turn on doomsday device." One thing you would never do (at least in a well-written game), though, is "use doomsday device"the "use" command is judged by almost every text adventure author to be too vague and all-encompassing, and to avoid players trying to cheat with a "use" shortcut, you'll usually have to be more specific. (That said, if you're stuck, try it, just in case the author has resorted to itsuh, use).

Once you've exhausted the possibilities for interacting with objects in a roomor once you think you have, anywayit's time to move on to the next. The exits will always be noted in the room description, and to take one of them, you can type either "go [direction]" or simply "[direction]." If you wanted to climb a ladder, it would be either "go up" or "up," and to head through a north- facing door, the syntax would be "go north" or "north." (If you're really lazy, abbreviated versions of the cardinal directions such as "n," "w," "e," and "s" also work.)

The last major commands you're likely to need are related to conversation. Some games only support "talk to X," while others will allow you to "ask X about Y" as well as "tell X about Y."

More than any syntax or command lists, the main thing you need to know is that the solution is rarely obviouswhat fun would the puzzles be otherwise ?and only by trying absolutely everything you can think of, no matter how little sense it might seem to make, can you make any progress. You can save at any point in a text adventure by typing "save," so if you're worried that what you're about to try might end your game, just save your progress first and then try it anyway. No matter how bewildered you may become, remember that there's a finite number of objects in your inventory, commands you can use, and things to do in each room, so something has to work. Keep trying!

6.2.2. Getting Your Game On

It's not hard to play and install text adventures: the download times for both the software to run them and the individual game files are short, and there are only two or three formats that the games are commonly released in. You don't even need that much, though, and here I look at a few games you can play with no installation necessary.

6.2.2.1. 9:05.

There are plenty of warnings surrounding this Java implementation of Adam Cadre's game 9:05, mostly due to the buggy nature of the interpreter. It's true that you wouldn't want to play many games in this format, but the online version of 9:05 (available at http://adamcadre.ac/905.html) makes a great starting point for a few reasons.

First, it's easy to jump right in and try a few moves. In fact, that's the stated purpose of the exerciseas Cadre says, "This page is here to serve as a preview of what interactive fiction looks like, for the uninitiated." If you're short on time, using someone else's computer, or just want to get a free preview before you devote any real effort to playing text adventures, a web-based trial game isn't a bad one.

Second, it's short. 9:05 is light on puzzles, and the whole game shouldn't take more than a few minutes, start to finish, even if you've never played any text adventures before at all. The tasks at hand aren't anything more complicated than removing your clothes and cleaning up before getting out of the house, and this is a good opportunity to learn the ropes of how to handle simple actions without having to worry about complex machinery or tricky commands.

Third, it's good. It's not deep, but the impact of 9:05's punchline comes across quite effectively, despite its brief length. This is your chance not only to see how to play text adventures, but also why to play them. Given a brief taste of what the text adventure format is capable of, you might be immediately hookedand if you are, a good place to start is by replaying 9:05 again, which could result in a very different experience.

6.2.2.2. Galatea.

Another good place to start for people new to the text adventure format would be Galatea, Emily Short's free-form piece based around conversation rather than puzzle-solving. It's not as no- nonsense as 9:05, but it's potentially more rewarding , and there are plenty of conversational paths and trees to explore, which lends itself to multiple replays.

The online version of Galatea, available at http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/gallery/galatea/index.html, is attractively presented: the game itself, in a Java interpreter called ZPlet, takes up one frame, with the other frame devoted to supplemental information such as an explanation of the concept, suggested alternate conversation scripts to try once you've run out of ideas, and annotations and essays on the making of the game.

Once you've had your fill of Galatea, there are a few other online games hosted on the same server, all linked from http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/gallery/index.html. The other text adventures in the gallery are Fine-Tuned: An Auto-Mated Romance, Metamorphoses, and of special interest to anyone curious about the format's history, Colossal Cave Adventure, the very first piece of interactive fiction ever written.

6.2.2.3. Mystery House Taken Over.

Though it was the first of its kind to add simple graphics, Ken and Roberta Williams' Mystery House is still a text adventure at heart. Its interface consists of a parser that understands nothing more than simple two-word syntax for all commands, and though it has graphics of a sort, they're so sparse and abstract that it's just as easy to imagine what things really look like as it would be with pure text descriptions.

You can play the original Mystery Housealbeit a version strangely stripped of its graphical complementon the Web, but better still is the new collection of reinterpretations and reimaginings of the seminal adventure game available alongside it. The Mystery House Taken Over project (at http://turbulence.org/Works/mystery/index.php) uses the original 1980 game as a foundation upon which several of the most interesting creators of modern-day text adventures build new, strangely familiar edifices.

Like 9:05, you're free to download any and all of the Mystery House remixes available as part of the project; unlike 9:05, there's no drawback to playing them online using the Java interpreter. It's much more stable and easily used to play any or all of the projects anytime you feel like it. If you have to take a break during some of the more difficult versions, the Mystery House Java interpreter even lets you save your game.

The actual reworkings of Mystery House are many and varied; the Taken Over projects range from the silly and puzzleless (Adam Cadre's Mystery House Makeover) to the unsettling (Michael Gentry's You Wake Up Itching), from the faithful (Guy Minor's Mystery House: Occluded Vengeance) to the demented (Art Destroyer's Mystery House Nightmared). It's suggested that you play the original Mystery House first, with the included walkthrough if necessary, to get the most out of each successive mutation. Like 60-Second Shakespeare, the better you know the original, the funnier it gets.

6.2.3. Hacking the Hack

One of the best things about the Mystery House Taken Over project isn't just the wealth of interesting experimental versions of the original game, but the toolkit available from the same site. Once you become familiar with programming your own text adventures [Hack #67] , download the Mystery House Taken Over Occupation Kit and take a stab at contributing your own reimagining of the Sierra classic. Who knows , future readers of this book might even see your effort up there along with all the rest!

Nich Maragos