Now that we have an idea of what IF is, we can start playing through an example.

In order to play an IF game, you’ll need 2 things: a game file and an interpreter.

The game file is a very small document, usually ending in a a .z5, .zblorb or .gblorb extension.

For the purpose of this tutorial, the example game I’m going to use is “9:05″ by Adam Cadre. You can get the .z5 file here.

This is a game I’ll be coming back to quite a bit in this blog, and it is a great start to IF (in and out of the classroom – for reasons I’ll explain in a future post).

 

An interpreter is the software than can play these game files and each one will have different presentation options. There are many interpreters available for pretty much every digital operating system.

For the most common operating systems, I recommend the following:

 

For other operating systems, this site, while outdated, may still be useful.

Many games are also playable online using the Parchment interpreter – http://parchment.toolness.com/ or http://iplayif.com/. However, in most cases I would recommend playing IF in an executable interpreter because of the extended presentation options. I’ll be coming back to browser-based IF in a future post.

Once you’ve installed your chosen interpreter, you’re ready to load up your game file.

This is done through the traditional FIle – Menu – Open dialog or dragging the game file onto the interpreter icon in the dock (on a Mac).

The story will open in a window, and you’re ready to play!

 

First screen of 9:05 by Adam Cadre

 

The screenshot of 9:05 shows the layout of a typical IF game. Depending on the game and its specific mechanisms, these elements may change.

Here is a breakdown of the information shown on screen at the beginning of 9:05:

 

  • The information bar at the top of the screen, known as the ‘Status Line’, usually shows the current location of the player-character on the left and some sort of game-specific counter on the right – often an indication of progress through points, moves or time. In this case, it displays a clock, moving on from 9:05 – the time at which you wake up. Playing through the game will show the relevance of the time counter.

 

  • The introductory narration serves to set the characters, place and tone of the story. Simpler games may give a straight-forward indication of the goal of the game, while other more experimental works, such as 9:05 require that you discover it though playing the game. In this case, the constantly ringing phone is clamoring for your attention and is the first barrier towards learning the plot.

 

  • You are then presented with the name of the room you are in (you, being the person in the bed), identical to what is shown in the top left-hand corner (any location in IF is called a ‘room’ so as to facilitate mapping the geography of a game – more on this later) and a description of the room, with all visible exits listed and potentially important objects that deserve closer examination.

 

  • The blinking cursor after the “>” symbol is the command prompt and indicates that the game is waiting for you to give it a command – either a meta-game command such as SAVE or RESTORE, or a command to the player-character such as ANSWER PHONE or GET UP.

 

The element of IF that understands player commands is called a parser. Most of the early text adventure games had a 2-word parser and would only understand verb-noun collections. The games made by Infocom, who would truly live up to their ‘Interactive Fiction’ marketing hype, boasted parsers capable of understanding complex sentences such as: “Pick up the book and the candle. Light the candle and drop it on the altar”. “Zork”, the most famous Infocom game, if not the most famous IF game ever, had a vocabulary of 600 words, although many of the words used in the descriptive text of the game is not actually recognized by the game’s parser – considered by modern IF authors to be a major design flaw. Most IF games created in the last decade have well implemented parsers. We’ll be looking at words understood by IF in the next post.

 

From the screenshot of 9:05 depicting the first few moves in the games, you should be able to deduce what the goal of the game is and we’re already finding out more about the people who live in this game-world and the player-character’s place in it. The ‘examine me’ command results in some back-story as to why we overslept in the first place. This is an example of great IF – your curiosity in finding out more about the player-character and the situation they are in is what drives you towards wanting to advance the narrative just as much as reaching the goal and finishing the game.

 

Next up: The IF lexicon