Interactive Fiction and teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL/TESOL)
What is Interactive Fiction?
IF is a genre of computer game which is completely text-based . It is literature and it is a game, often quoted as being “a narrative at war with a crossword”. It is a narrative – one that is shaped by the player as she explores and interacts with the game world, and it is a series a logical puzzles within this world, which must be overcome in order for the narrative to advance. The narrative will only reveal itself with interaction from the player and unlike a traditional book, the narrative is not linear, but is brought to life and forks in whichever way the player decides to explore the game world. As such, IF is a unique form of non-linear and participatory story-telling.
Montfort (2003) describes IF as having 4 characteristics:
- it is a text accepting and text generating computer program, and thus can only be played on a digital device. Additionally, it understands natural language (to an extent) and replies to this input in a meaningful way
- it is a simulated world, which can be explored and interacted with and a player’s actions have an immediate effect on that world
- it is a potential narrative and as a form of new media, it allows for the discovery of new texts upon replay with different explorations
- it is a game, meaning that it has a specific goal, rules which must be followed and is played voluntarily
IF at its best, is a both a rewarding reading experience and a challenging game.
First screen of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Infocom
Exploring Interactive Fiction with IF author and scholar Nick Montfort
Next up: How to play IF
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Hi Kyle – that’s a really good question and one that I was hoping to talk about at some point (in addition to ‘text adventure’ or ‘IF’?). I mention at the very beginning of this blog that IF is completely text-based and in most cases this is true – but there are different opinions as to what constitutes IF and whether it needs to be graphics-free. In my humble opinion, I think that IF – as a narrative/game construct, should not have graphics – after all, do novels NEED pictures?. I prefer text-only IF If not only to continue the legacy left behind by Infocom and because I am nostalgic. On the other hand, why should we limit ourselves to pure text if multimedia can help us tell the story better? There are IF authoring tools (such as Vorple – http://vorple-if.com/ and Quest 5.0 – http://www.textadventures.co.uk/quest/) that allow for the implementation of multimedia in addition to text and this can only be a good thing to get more people into the genre. Then again, I believe that what makes IF so unique and magical is its textual presentation and need to use text to communicate with the game, and this is especially important when thinking about using IF for language learning. The need to add a pretty static picture to IF games died out with Magnetic Scrolls at the end of IF’s commercial era, but I will concede that if there is a parser and if there is literary quality to the game (as much as it is possible to do so in the genre), then having static graphics does not make the game NOT IF. If this were the case then Zork Zero, having graphics, couldn’t be considered IF, which it certainly is. With regards to games with animated graphics such as Myst (which I would define as an ‘adventure game’) or even point-and-click adventures like Beneath A Steel Sky, I would personally not consider them to be true IF. Sure, they tell a story (and good ones at that) and there is agency on the part of the player required to tell the story, but there are more graphics than text and the need to visualise the game-world in the mind’s eye is made redundant. There are surely game/new media scholars that will disagree with my definition but the IF I want to promote is pretty much text-based. I like text
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Joe Pereira teaches English as a foreign language and specialises in digital game-based learning with a specific focus on Interactive Fiction (text adventures). To learn more about me, visit: http://www.theswanstation.com
Great post Joe – I’d just like to know if IF can have graphics too (i.e. the animated kind) or does it then become something other than IF?