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