Talk:Wiki Based Interactive Fiction System

When I searched on the web for similar ideas, the closest I found was something like An Interactive Story which is pretty neat, but except for "branching links" lacks interactivity.

To the best of my knowledge there is no system out there like the one described in the article.

Any feedback on these ideas is greatly welcome.

--Thomas Strohmann 14:58, 12 Feb 2005 (Central Standard Time)

This link isn't wiki IF either, but it's still an interesting experiment: LexiconWiki: The Orbital Wars. It's kinda difficult to describe, but in each round of play, players are adding entries about a fictional universe within strict guidelines on what they can link to, and yet maintain continuity. -- David Welbourn 15:15, 12 Feb 2005 (Central Standard Time)

Tricky to implement

A friend and I kicked around an idea like this for a while, and dropped it. It's a neat concept, but I think it would be very difficult to execute satisfactorily. Although editing via Wiki is more accessible in a lot ways than coding in something like Inform, it would still be necessary for contributors to have at least some knowledge of programming concepts if the collaborative story is going to have any interactivity beyond "Go N", "Go S", and so on; object logic for puzzles, or interaction with NPCs still has to be represented somehow.

• I agree, some contributors will need programming skills to define the logic for interactive gameplay. But nevertheless anyone without programming skills can add contents to the game and try it out immediately. (and I think contents is really the main part of an IF game)

The "Compile" button would be hard to implement, too; what happens when somebody adds a page with broken code, or when their page links to Rooms or Objects that haven't been implemented yet? Although I suppose cases like that could be handled with stub code.

• Yes, I've also been thinking about the "broken code" issue. In addition to generating stub code for undefined things, we could have "Administrators" that periodically check the integrity/compilability of the code and produce "stable releases" that we can revert to in case something bad happens. In any case (and I know that this will be very hard to implement) the syntax for "Wiki-code" should be as robust as possible to minimize broken code (and as mentioned in the paragraph before, people with good programming skills should be the only ones messing with sensitive code that could potentially break the game)

A related idea I had is the use of a Wiki as an IF prototyping tool - instead of trying to implement a full-blown game within the wiki, one could build out a map using conventions very much like you described (Rooms with descriptions and links to other rooms), objects as they should be placed initially. Then there would be a separate program to spider the Wiki pages (or tap into its database) and parse the Wiki markup into stub Inform code (or TADS/Adrift/Hugo code).

• Very interesting idea. Yes, that's definitely an order of magnitude easier to manage than doing pure "Wiki-code" IF stories (yet I still think having everything integrated into one easy to use Wiki is a very appealing idea and could attract a lot of authors)

--Andy 10:17, 13 Feb 2005 (Central Standard Time)

• --Thomas Strohmann 13:42, 13 Feb 2005 (Central Standard Time)

I can't really see this working at all, unless you set out a very rigid framework and theme for people to work within. Otherwise, you end up with one person trying to write a new Photopia, another making a Scott Adams tribute, and the result being an unplayable game.--MockTurtle 05:06, 14 Feb 2005 (Central Standard Time)

Yeah I agree with MockTurtle. It really only works if you have folks on the same page with each other (hence, a limited number of people, so why make it public?), or you have iron-fisted admins that guide and direct the thing. Neither one of those options brings in a wide audience. Either one produces the small, isolated communities that you see in places like alt.pave.the.earth or alt.dystopia. --Aurora

Good points. I think it is important that we clearly distinguish framework and theme. The framework (Wiki created IF) should be "rigid"/standardized so that code can be autogenerated, but more importantly that people can work more smoothly together given a common methodology. A theme, as I understand it, belongs to a particular IF story and you're probably right that too many cooks can spoil the broth. Yet, I think it's perfectly fine when only a few dedicated people work on a Wiki story (see for example Wikibooks where a textbook is usually written by a small number of people which are particulary interested in that subject). Likewise, with Wiki IF authors would contribute just to the type of stories they want to write. The issue of creating isolated communities is of course there, but IMHO can be addressed with "Community Portals" or similar initiatives.

--Thomas Strohmann 01:09, 15 Feb 2005 (Central Standard Time)