Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Interactive Fiction, Old and New

Interactive fiction has been around for a long time anywhere from make your own adventure stories to ancient chines games. 'However in this I will be talking about the more modern pieces, some may refer to them as video games! They are word based games where you as the character have to make decisions and explore a world by typing in order to find the ending and even discover different endings in some of these cases. They are fun and were the very start for example in the last blog we talked about Zork it was one the first works of this now there are hundreds maybe even thousands to choose from and a lot of them are available to play on infocon for free! The games I  Experienced were two different games one called a Z-Machine, and the other was an online version of an older game that was reformatted and given a graphical interface. From Info con I played was  “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”, if any of you have ever seen the movie or read the book or watched the British show you know that it is a very interesting and very almost seemingly random story line. It will jump around from place to place with the guide telling you random facts along the way. Well I found it very amusing I woke up (drunk I suppose) and had to find my aspirin in order to get around my house before it was bulldozed! The story then took me to a spaceship … I was a little confused but no matter the story continued from there. It had a more linear approach than deadline but was still very fun and amusing to play.In fact it was one of the first pieces to include and try to induce comedy into a piece. It would give you witty results and tell you not to panic and to put on a glasses you couldn't see out of to calm you down...My favorite part about this piece was the similarity to the movie and book because I loved the movie, and read a little of the book when I was younger. I have had video games make me laugh but usually its because of some interaction I do, this game makes you laugh because of the wording and wit put into the game. Which is an amazing factor and a huge draw to me. This piece is only a small amount of what actually is out there for interactive fiction, and it is only ever expanding, they are usually smart games that take a little bit of thinking to get through and are a nice breath of fresh air compared to today's shoot em up games. I believe that Interactive fiction pieces such as these should and will be persevered for years to come one for the nostalgia, but also because they are still so much fun to play and will be enjoyed for many years to come in the video game era.

By: Adam Feather

ZORK!

ZORK!


Zork is an interactive piece of fiction that was designed at MIT after the game ADVENTURE. It was made for entertainment purposes and was supposed to be a game for people who were familiar to the type of game (people who were dnd players). It puts you into a world where you cant see it but you are told how the world looks and where to go. It is like the best aspects of a book and a game combined together. Some may not like it because of no graphical interface but allowing for you to have to picture the world make it even better than any video could design. It is primitive in what you can say to the Pc and what the pc will respond to but compared to even some of our newer video games you can interact more deeply. This is because our games are restricted to only a few answers you can choose. This is because many of them are starting to become consol friendly and they dont usually have keyboards. I think that with todays speech technology it would be neat if you were able to  talk to the computer/ console and choose and create your own stories.Playing it was interesting I found it more challenging than adventure because of the commands they seemed different I couldn't figure out how to descend down the stairs. It turns out all you had to say was down... It also was much larger and more difficult to navigate. Zork also seemed that it had a more in depth story line where you actually had some task to complete while with adventure it seemed to be more open. In this aspect you are able to go in any direction, however you have a main goal to achieve in Zork.In Zork it seemed to have more lore behind things and meanings for what is in the world, like the canyon and the newspapers. I like the fact that the game would give you smart comments back to you, for example I tried eating my sword, my lamp, and both would not agree with me. However when I ate my lunch it said "Thank you!" very polite. In the game I encountered a troll, which I chopped the head off of, I also played in the leaves. I had a fantastic adventure especially after I figured out the command for going down stairs was down....  Finding this out I enjoyed playing Zork I appreciate what they were trying to do and it has influenced many of our modern video games we know and love today.