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"Interactive fiction" generally refers to a specific style of game along the lines of the original Adventure, Zork series, etc. Generally it supports navigation
by svachalek 7y ago
"Interactive fiction" generally refers to a specific style of game along the lines of the original Adventure, Zork series, etc. Generally it supports navigation, inventory management, and full sentence interactions, so while it's "lite" programming it's still more than multiple-choice questions.
- egypturnash 7y agoCompare the source of a game in Dialog: http://www.linusakesson.net/dialog/cloak/cloak-rel1.dg http://www.linusakesson.net/dialog/cloak/cloak-rel1.dg With the source of a game in Inform 7: http://inform7.com/learn/eg/bronze/source.html http://inform7.com/learn/eg/bronze/source.html One of these looks much more like a programming language than the other; both compile to the Infocom virtual machine (or a direct descendant of it), both create Infocom-style Interactive Fiction rather than the choose-your-own-adventure style of Twine or ChoiceScript.
- thrower123 7y agoDialog looks much more like a LISPy version of Inform 6
- WorldMaker 7y agoWhich is interestingly appropriate given the original Zork Implementation Language (ZIL) and its LISPiness (forked from MDL). Dialog doesn't look that far off from ZIL.
- Zanni 7y agoPeople use the term in different ways, but my understanding is that "interactive fiction" was intentionally created as a broader term to encompass the games you're talking about (commonly called adventure games or text adventures) plus more literary efforts that can't really be called games at all. Choice-based games fall somewhere on that spectrum between puzzle heavy, parser games and fiction with interactive elements. "Among the Seasons," which tied for Best in Show at this year's Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction, is essentially a short story with some limited choices. It's written in Twine but could probably be done in something like ChoiceScript.