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The first interactive fiction (or “IntFic”) game was written around 1972 by an avid cave-explorer named William Crowther. Crowther intended the original game, named “Colossal Cave Adventure”, to be both a simulation of cave exploration and a way to share with his daughters, living with his estranged wife, his real-world cave-exploring experiences and his burgeoning interest in fantasy role-playing.

The game sparked a great deal of interest, as it seemed to offer the player more freedom than other popular computer games at that time, like “Star Trek” (http://www.cactus.org/~nystrom/startrek.html), which had a rigid menu structure, and “Hunt the Wumpus” (http://www.wurb.com/if/game/442), which was more like an adventure game but with a fixed map, a limited menu, and nondescript rooms. “Colossal Cave Adventure” started to pop up on other computers, installed by one person and left for others to discover and enjoy.

One person who found Crowther's program enjoyed it in a significant way. Don Woods, working at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford University, recalls:

“It was my first year as a grad student at Stanford. Another first-year student, John Gilbert, was doing some work for the Stanford Medical School, and he ran across Crowther's game on their computer. This was before the days of individual PCs, of course. The Med School computer was a time-sharing system. John showed the game to some other students, which is how I found out about it. I copied the program to the AI Lab machine and found that it would run there, so I played it for a while. I thought it was fun, but there wasn't enough to it. Exploring and seeing the descriptions was okay, but I wanted to have to think more. Crowther's version had very few puzzles: mostly just the bird, snake, and the wand, and the gold that was too heavy to take up the stairs. Plus there were some bugs, such as a room you could reach where there was no way to get
out again. Since the game mentioned "Willie Crowther", I sent mail to crowther@xxx for all machines xxx on the Arpanet (predecessor to today's Internet, sort of; there were only a few hundred machines involved) and found Will at Xerox. He sent me the source so I could fix the bugs and add more puzzles and stuff.”

Woods took his appreciation for Crowther’s original, applied his programming talent, and poured in his love for J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels. In an example of how liberal or non-existent (or at the very least not enforced) copyright protection inspires derivative work for the greater common good, Woods developed “Adventure”, the prototypical IntFic game: (Stop! If you have never played “Adventure”, treat yourself to it before you read on: http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/)

“My first version of ‘Adventure’ had 15 treasures, 10 more than Crowther's, and all of the new treasures required solving some sort of puzzle. I also roughly tripled the number of locations you could go. This in turn meant that the way Crowther had implemented the dwarves – following fixed paths until they encountered you -- didn't work, since you might spend long periods in other parts of the cave. So I changed the dwarves to make it possible for them to wander around anywhere underground. It took me a little while to get that to work without having all the dwarves getting stuck in the "maze of twisty little passages"! The pirate was another of my additions, as was the endgame.”

Woods’ “Adventure” became a style of game, and served as the inspiration for what is widely though incorrectly credited as the “first” IntFic game, “Zork” (http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/zork1.html). Two students at M.I.T., Dave Lebling and Marc Blank took Adventure and turned it into a game that was to be titled “Dungeon” as a nod to “Dungeons and Dragons”, but instead was given the name “Zork”, which is a made-up word hackers used to use, like “foobar”. Don Woods recalls “Zork”:

“There were several games inspired by ‘Adventure’ in the late 70's, and I played various of them, including ‘Zork’ and a haunted-house game called ‘Haunt’. I never quite finished ‘Zork’. When I was playing it, it was still being written by some students at M.I.T. (who would later found Infocom). One night I had solved all the puzzles except one, and on the way home from the lab I realized what I should do that would probably work for that last puzzle. But when I got back to the lab the next day, I found they'd added several more puzzles, and I decided I was never going to be able to finish the game, so I gave up on it. Some years later, I got a copy of the Infocom version for my Amiga, but I never got around to playing it much and eventually the Amiga stopped working. Very recently, I downloaded a copy for my PC, and I may try it again when I have some time.”

Lebling and Blank later founded the company Infocom and published many IntFic titles, including some games that eventually totaled over a million in sales on the various platforms on which they were offered. But, as it continues to do so today, computer hardware was increasing in sophistication and decreasing in price, giving home PC gamers the ability to see the adventure instead of just reading it. With the advancement of graphics, and bear in mind that in the early 1980’s we’re only looking at 4-color graphics at less than half of the resolution available on most systems today, Infocom and On-Line Systems (later and more commonly known as Sierra Online) added graphics to the mix. Now the gamer could see crude, pixilated vistas as they continue to type incomplete sentences in the hopes that the parser would recognize their intent. Later games switched from a first-person perspective to a third-person perspective. The player would see and guide their blocky avatar around each room, further advancing the feeling of immersion – no longer could you enter a room and look at or access every object in it; now, you must position your hero(ine) to be close to the object or area in question, just like in real life. Even Infocom, once proudly advertising its text-only games with the slogan "We unleash the world's most powerful graphics technology" over a drawing of a brain, started adding graphics to their games. The text-only gaming bandwagon was all but empty at this point.

As gaming goes, the inclusion of graphics essentially supplanted Interactive Fiction with this new genre dubbed ‘Adventure’, a reference to the Woods game. The replacement of text descriptions with graphical ones, facilitated by the popularity and rapid adoption of the CD-ROM medium in the early to mid 90s, eliminated the need for the player to read. Eventually, games would eliminate the need to type too, opting instead to use the mouse to highlight in-game items, or select actions from a menu. All in all, this made these types of games more passive, allowing the player to just sit back, observe, and interact with minimal effort. But this passive or minimally-interactive experience works against the concept and allure of gaming – that of ‘world immersion’. As graphics advanced, the feeling of realism, of being there, was pursued mainly through the gamer’s eye, and this philosophy is still prevalent today.

Yet the mere use of high resolution graphics, speedy frame rates and realistic in-game physics does not make a game interesting or even entertaining. The beauty of Interactive Fiction lies in its ability to spark the imagination of the player, the same qualities that make reading a beloved pastime.

So what is the current state of Interactive Fiction? Well, for those involved in the Interactive Fiction Competition (“IFCOMP”), it remains an entertaining and highly-accessible gaming genre bordering on art form. The IFCOMP began in 1995, born out of the interest and passion of those who frequent the rec.arts.int-fiction and organized by Kevin Wilson, a Berkeley undergrad. Wilson ran the competition for three years, eventually handing control over to David Dyte due to time constraints.

In 1999, Stephen Granade took over the role of competition organizer. In recent years, the contest averages about 50 completed entries and 200 voters, though the number of people who later enjoy the finished games is far greater than these modest figures. Granade’s involvement with IntFic started around 1997, while he was writing “guides” for the company that would later become About.com. You see, before web searching was reliable and long before Google made searching fast and easy, it was difficult to find things on the web. To that end, About.com sought out experts in different areas to write new content and organize related links to attract surfers. Granade leapt at the chance to get paid to write about something he loves, Interactive Fiction.

To Granade, the allure of IntFic is multi-faceted:

“[As an author,] Interactive Fiction is a style of game that I can create by
myself, and do so in a limited amount of time. I'm a writer, but I'm not an artist or a composer. IF plays to those strengths. In addition, because it's uncoupled from commercial concerns, I'm freer to write an experimental game, and the audience is more likely to be interested in such a game.”

“As a player, IF provides certain pleasures that "modern" commercial games don't. They provide story-driven experiences coupled with puzzle solving.”

Did Adventure gaming disappear, or did it merely wait out the graphics revolution and is now ready to merge its best elements into modern gaming? Granade opines:

“If you look at commercial games, adventure games as a genre are dying. You see some elements of adventure games appearing in cross-genre titles – ‘Deus Ex’ did a wonderful job of marrying story, puzzle, and exploration to an action game. But most of those games emphasize action, or statistics-driven role playing, rather than the elements of adventure games that I enjoy.”

“Deus Ex”, a best-selling title from Ion Storm and Eidos with a sequel planned later this year, was on the surface a first person shooter or adventure title. As the lead character, you worked your way through a vast game world and interacted with various non-player characters. Though most of this interaction involved combat, some exchanges were dialogue-based, where the player selected their statements from a short list of options. What the player chose to say influenced the non-player characters’ responses and, ostensibly, the path of the game, or which of four ‘game endings’ the player would achieve. Perhaps this represents the path bending back towards the elements of Interactive Fiction that make it so appealing, that of interaction, immersion and exploration. As Granade eloquently states:

“There is a certain charm about being able to create a world in your head. You can get that from a book; you can also get it from IF. IF is wonderful at creating a sense of exploration and new worlds, and that's strengthened by it being text-based”

To create some new worlds in your head, visit www.ifcomp.org to sample some of the newest interactive fiction available.

Ideas to begin a second age of IntFic:
1. More sophisticated parsers: Though quite evolved, most parsers provide generic rejects (like “You can’t do that” or “It doesn’t work”) to any command that doesn’t match a short list of keywords. Imagine instead a parser with a very sophisticated dialogue that can process any command and, as much as possible, apply the changes to the in-game environment. Granted, one might not get any closer to solving the game after “throw garlic at troll”, but if the troll’s in-game description gets updated to include “…smelling of garlic…”, the level of immersion increases, and this is the hook of any game.

2. Partnership with traditional authors
Most of the tools available for creating IntFic games are geared towards developers. It would be difficult but not impossible for a fiction write with no programming experience to create a detailed and highly-interactive world as is found in top-notch IntFic. Since simpler tools may only yield simple games, a better approach might be for traditional authors to partner with developers to marry the best writing with the best implementation, yielding world-class interactive fiction.

3. Online multiplayer
Up until now, all IntFic games are single-player offline affairs: just you and your computer. Though not a huge fan of the incredibly popular Massive Multiplayer Online Games like EverQuest and Star Wars Online, I posit that the allure is in the vastness of the world and the interaction with other humans. To that end, perhaps a MMO IntFic game could be developed, with persistent rooms created by each player.

4. Viability on ‘small’ platforms like PDAs and cell phones
The sheer power of the hardware available on desktop and laptop systems make them almost inappropriate platforms for simple text games. But there are many smaller, less-powerful platforms on which gaming is enjoyed.