After reading Scott Rettberg’s description of interactive fiction in chapter four of “Electronic Literature”, I believe the subject is far more similar to video games than it is to text literature itself. This is because the reader is in control of what the character in the story gets to do, not the author. Yes, we almost all read the “choose your own adventure” stories in elementary school, but the difference between those and interactive fiction from the 1980s is that the majority of interactive fiction works were designed to be “‘won’ or ‘solved’” and contained elements such as puzzle solving, riddles, and placed a large emphasis on deductive reasoning. I found it particularly interesting that interactive fiction developed “largely independently of academic environments and formally organized groups”, because it made me envision these literary/gaming nerds huddled in a basement somewhere pouring over their work, like a forgotten AV club in a classic highschool film. Although this isn’t exactly how it all went down - it was a global network of emails and online competitions - It’s much more entertaining to envision it this way, and is partially true. As the world moved on to videogame formatting we’re more familiar with today, many passionate intellectuals continued to pursue interactive fiction.
I decided to investigate Photopia. I absolutely loved it’s opening which is a black screen with a white text box which reads: “‘Will you read me a story?’ ‘Read you a story? What fun would that be? I’ve got a better idea: let’s tell a story together’”. The pros of this story are that you get to decide what happens to the main character, however that is also the con. The story is entirely up to you, there are no multiple choice options. The program responds to exactly what you type, as long as it is a command it is familiar with, such as “look” or “go north”, however it doesn’t recognize phrases such as “walk around” or “continue traveling”. At first it’s discouraging when the coding doesn’t recognize what you want to do and you’re stuck in the same scene, but once you get the hang of it it’s very cool. At one point, the screen switched to an entirely new character, setting, time, everything and that was disappointing because I was really enjoying the story I was already working on. All in all, I really liked this format of e-lit once I got the hang of it.
Photopia by Adam Cadre
Sabrina Brown
I agree with you that it seems more like a video game than literature. I also imagine the demographic for Zork to be more "nerdier" types rather than people who are interested in literature. Although I think the fact that there is only text and no graphics makes it a little more similar literature compared to modern video games.
ReplyDelete