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The annual Interactive Fiction Competition is an institution that has endured for almost 20 years, with the goal of discovering each year’s best and brightest works in the world of text-based gaming. The genre is surprisingly broad and complex – and this year’s entries show how much text games have to offer modern audiences, even those who don’t ordinarily play computer games.
The age of free and intuitive creation tools, combined with the explosion of mobile platforms, e-reader devices and an audience that’s comfortable reading screens, means a brand-new opportunity for fresh narrative experiences that stand to attract new types of players.
Veteran gamers may remember the text-based adventures of history – titles like Adventureland, Zork and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Arriving in the late 1970s and early 80s, they were taut, forbidding puzzles of logic and language; proceeding the age of graphics on home computers, they made the most of constraints, using brief, carefully chosen prose and a limited list of terse commands to create the experience.
A room or situation would be described to the player, perhaps with objects or obstacles therein, and the player could type directions to navigate, or, say, “tie rope” or “light lamp” to interact. One of the earliest of these vintage text adventures, Colossal Cave, had a filesize not much bigger than a modern Word document, and was considered sprawling for its time.
A lot has changed since those days, of course; the early 1980s saw the rise of graphical adventures like Heavy on the Magick and King’s Quest, and “point-and-click” quests from developers like LucasArts and Revolution Software. The arcane art of wrangling with a text parser fell out of popular favour.
However, a dedicated community has kept the format alive, with hundreds of talented writers and players supporting the medium. It takes a certain degree of familiarity to master the general rules of textual space, or to learn what terms and constructions text parsers commonly do and don’t understand – players who prize practice and skill in other types of games don’t often seem as willing to see command language as a similarly worthy challenge.
There’s something appealing about those limitations, though, about being able to “speak the language” of a design form that has endured for decades. The best interactive fiction designers know that a wellplaced word in a room description should act as a clue to the player, and experienced fans of IF can often weigh their risks and possibilities from just a single paragraph of text.
Spreading the word
But the annual Interactive Fiction Competition, or IFComp, has existed since 1995 in the hopes of democratising the creation of independent text-based experiences, and to explore best practices for keeping the form and its community broad, vibrant and alive.
The judging is open to anyone who wants to play along, and every year, the competition brings great communal writing and reviewing of each entry. Outstanding among these is always the criticism work of Emily Short, veteran creator of numerous successful interactive fiction works, who examines authorial intent, the sophistication of designs, and why she feels the games do or do not execute successfully.
Although the IF community first formed around Inform, a tool for creating parser-based games of the popular sort released by Infocom (Zork, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game, and A Mind Forever Voyaging), tools today are numerous, and many of them bypass the compelling but fricative parser language entirely.
For example, in recent years, a free text tool called Twine has exploded onto the creative scene, offering entry-level designers the chance to create their first text and hyperlink-based games with no coding required. Some of these games are as accessible as choose-your-own-adventure books, and others can be more sophisticated, implementing mappable space, objects that can change states, or graphics, sound and visual effects.
And Twine’s just one popular new tool – there are many other ways to build readable, touchable experiences for the wide, wide world. Most modern text games, whether parser-based or hyperlink-driven, can now be played in a browser tab, which means these competition entries can welcome any sort of player.
This degree of accessibility means that in many ways, text-based games lead among other kinds of computer games in terms of creative democracy, sophisticated subject matter, and even political themes – while plenty of the competition games are traditional or humorous, modern text games bring new perspectives to bear from creators who might have been restricted from access to the traditional, privileged computer-education background, whose tone still dominates mainstream gaming.
Some 2015 competition entries you shouldn’t miss
AlethiCorp (Simon Christiansen)
This simulation of a corporate training and remote working website is so real it hurts, from the obtuse, jargon-jangling training exercises to the awkward inter-office social event invitations. The twist is you work as a snitch, surveilling and rumbling (probably) harmless citizens for supposed revolutionary behavior. Can you do the right thing, or will you just nod, smile, and volunteer to bring a spatula to the office potluck?
With Those We Love Alive (Porpentine and Brenda Neotomie)
Prolific Twine creator Porpentine’s distinctive word palette often creates vivid yet alien spaces, with imagery alternately vulgar and beautiful in turns, but this particular game asks of the player a particularly-intimate task: to draw symbols on your own skin while playing. It’s inventive and off-putting all at once.
Creatures Such As We (Lynnea Glasser)
You’re a dutiful tour guide on the moon – and a fan of computer dating games. This is a computer dating game, which provides landscape for brilliant meta-commentary on popular games and the challenges of delivering emotional narratives in the commercial video game industry. While niche gaming fans are sure to appreciate the in-jokes and the nuanced look at the work of narrative game development, this is also an incredibly engrossing tale of labour, life and loneliness in the future.
Hunger Daemon (Sean M. Shore)
This is a great example of how a parser-driven text game can be made relatively accessible – the game is smart enough to know what you want to do and to tell you a bit about how to do it, and solving the puzzles feels rewarding. Its sense of humor is excellent – your quest for a little lunch leads you to try to solve a mystery on behalf of your Uncle Stu’s utterly-normalised black-magic cult. The finale is staged in a synagogue on Yom Kippur, but you won’t get there until you return your ex’s Breaking Bad DVDs.
Krypteia (Kateri)
Although this game is hypertext-based, it has all the familiar signposts of a more traditional game: A map, an inventory and graphics, a surreal sort of glitchville that combines luridly colored forbidden woods with oilslick rainbows and sparkles – and even the occasional stiletto heel. It’s about escape from oppression, but it’s charming and funny about it.
