FAQ

From IFWiki

The ifwiki Interactive Fiction FAQ offers succinct and current information for newcomers to IF and the IF community. It aims to answer those questions that do actually come up frequently, and to direct readers to the most important online resources. While it is meant to be a useful part of ifwiki, this FAQ also should serve well as a stand-alone document that someone might read offline or print out.


What is "interactive fiction"?

The term refers to programs (usually called "games" or, less often, "works") that let you type commands to a character. This character wanders around in a simulated world of some sort, typically one that is described in text. "Text adventure" and "text game" have been used to mean pretty much the same thing. Examples include Adventure, Zork, Deadline, Planetfall, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Hobbit, and Curses.

Some people include gamebooks, hypertext fiction, and graphical adventure games such as Myst when they use the term, but those sorts of works aren't the focus of this FAQ, nor the main concern of the IF community.

The ifwiki offers a formal definition of interactive fiction; there is a longer discussion of the topic in the rec.arts.int-fiction FAQ; and other definitions can be found in various works, such as the book Twisty Little Passages.


What happened to Infocom (Magnetic Scrolls, Level 9, etc.)?

None of the companies that produced IF during the 1980s are still around and producing IF. Infocom was acquired by Activision in 1986, for instance, and is now a (not very active) "label" of that company. Activision abandoned the Infocom trademark around 2002 (though not the copyright to the games); Pete Hottelet of Omni Consumer Products LLC acquired the trademark in 2007.

Interactive fiction from the Infocom era is often hard to find outside of abandonware sites and online auction sites, although some of it has been made available to the public by the company that produced it. Plenty of people are still creating IF, however, and there are hundreds - perhaps thousands - of new games, most of which are free, that have been developed since the "commercial era" of interactive fiction.


How can I download and play IF?

The Boston IF group The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction maintains a page of IF titles playable in your browser if you just want to get started quickly.

The Interactive Fiction Database is a community-edited IF catalog of thousands of free games, and includes ratings, reviews, and many other features to make finding and playing games easier.

In addition to the game itself (commonly called the 'story file') you usually will need to download an interpreter (just like you need a player for music or video files, most IF games require an interpreter to run). The IFDB can help you download the correct interpreter, or you can choose one yourself; Gargoyle works well on Windows, Linux, and Mac. Other popular interpreters are Zoom for Mac and Linux and Spatterlight for Mac. Some games written in Inform are playable on the web with interpreters such as Parchment and Quixe.

One of the conveniences of Gargoyle and Spatterlight is that they can play IF created in multiple authoring systems. However, to see all the features of some games you may want a system-specific player; QTads is an example of a player created for a specific authoring system, TADs, and many other interpreters are available for specific combinations of systems and platforms.

Most of the games in the IFDB are hosted by the IF Archive, the main repository for free interactive fiction. It includes not only many games, but walkthroughs, interpreters, authoring systems, and more. The original gateway to the IF Archive is Baf's Guide, and the Guide sometimes is a better search tool than the IFDB for more obscure titles.


Where can I find out what games I might enjoy?

In addition to the IFDB, we recommend:

What can I do when I get stuck?

Some games have in-game hints; try typing 'help', 'hint', 'hints', 'about', or 'think'. For others, hints or a walkthrough (a list of commands that will win the game, sometimes annotated) may be available on the IF Archive or elsewhere on the Web. You can also ask fellow players for a hint on rec.games.int-fiction. Just be sure to include a spoiler warning and spoiler space before you reveal any details of the game, so you don't ruin the game for others by giving away some of its surprises.


How can I post a review of a game I've finished?

If you like, you can simply post a review to one of the community forums (see below), as many people traditionally do with IF Comp games. You can also submit your review to SPAG, put it on the IFDB, or post it on your own site or blog.


What is this "IF Comp"?

The Annual IF Competition is an Internet-wide competition for short games (ones you can complete in less than two hours), started in 1996 and currently run by Stephen Granade. Anyone who is online can vote in the competition. Having played and rated five games is the only qualification necessary for judges. Recent years have seen dozens of entries and hundreds of judges: The 2008 Comp had 35 games voted on by 177 judges.


How can I write my own game?

Unless you have some sort of masochistic tendencies in which you think everything should be done from scratch, the easiest way to write an Interactive Fiction game is to use an Interactive Fiction System. This means you use a special language - a form of structured English - to describe what your game looks like, the messages it gives, the locations, and the actions that take place. The Interactive Fiction compiler translates your instructions into a data file for the game. The run-time system for the game then handles displaying output, taking commands, and moving the player around. You just describe the adventure, the run-time system does the work of handling the player's input and output.

If you were to start from scratch and do all of the work of handling the input and running the game, in addition to writing the actual adventure, you'd be essentially be writing the equivalent of a program compiler for this one IF game. You'd be reinventing the wheel for a one-shot game and wasting valuable time redoing what someone else has already done, instead of spending your time more productively by using it to enhance the quality of the actual adventure. If you already know a programming language, learning the language of an adventure game is trivial by comparison. If you don't know programming, the language an adventure game system uses is basically a structured form of English text and isn't difficult to use.

Although some people try to develop IF from scratch in general-purpose languages, winners of the IF Comp and developers of successful longer games have shown that it can be a good idea to use one of the highly capable and free interactive fiction development systems. Inform, TADS, and Hugo are the most powerful and cross-platform of the options, but there are others. You can seek help from fellow developers in the IF community as you work, and avail yourself of some of the extensive documentation, tutorial material, and sample code that is online.

Which development system is best?

That's like asking what kind of car is best. It depends on what you want to do. It's also sort of a "religious question" like asking what's the best word processor to use or which computer programming language is best (or asking what is the best formatting convention for that specific language.) I kid you not, like the wars described in Gulliver's Travels over whether the correct way to open a hard-boiled egg is the large end or the small end, people can become downright heated to the point of throwing insults or obscenities at those with whom they disagree, claiming that their programming language or method of formatting code in that programming language is the one and only correct way.

The same could logically be said about Interactive Fiction development systems. So there really isn't a way to say which IF system you should use; what you should do is take a look at all of them and see which one you find fits you best. Some you might like and some you might find too limiting, or too complicated, or too easy, or you don't like the flavor, or it's the wrong color, or ...

So, basically, one knows for sure which one is best as that is a personal decision, but a safe way for you to decide for yourself is to review all of them at Roger Firth's Cloak of Darkness page. You should also consider the development communities for different systems, what sample code and tutorial and reference information is available for each, the whole range of these systems' capabilities (including multimedia capabilities, if these are important to you), and whether interpreters are available on the platforms you care about.

Why not create my own IF development system?

While almost all IF authors use some existing system such as Inform, TADS, or Hugo, there are many other less used authoring systems, in addition to information and advice on how to create new ones. The usual advice against creating a new system is that most new systems don't add to the existing menu of choices, but just duplicate, sometimes poorly, features already found in other authoring systems.

If you're developing a new system, it will help to be very familiar with how all of these existing systems work, and what choices developers before you, such as Graham Nelson (creator of Inform) and Mike Roberts (creator of TADS), have made, so you can imitate their systems' better features and avoid imitating anything you think is a mistake.

Another important consideration is what computer platforms your games will target and who their audience will be. With the dominance of Inform and TADS, many IF players will be less likely to play games written in other, less-popular languages. At the same time, players completely new to IF may have different conceptions of what they consider 'good' IF. Before you begin you should have a firm understanding of the goals of your project and its intended outcome -- a decent IF system requires more work than you might think!

Figure that you're talking about developing

  • a parser to understand the user's commands
  • a processor to interpret the commands and translate them into actions
  • a set of objects to handle all the different things that operate in the game
  • a manager to move Non Player Characters (NPCs) if present in the game, activating fuses or events, and so on.
  • a display manager to handle writing out responses

Just figure you're looking at writing a 5,000 line program just to run your adventure. Then you have to write the code to design the adventure.

Most adventure writing tools allow you to code what the adventure is supposed to do, describe the locations and things, and a few other things. The adventure system handles the grunt details of interpreting commands. Plus, if the system doesn't do exactly what you want, you can usually add handlers or override the default behavior either globally or for a single location.

Basically, an adventure design system will save upwards of 95% or better of the "grunt work" that is needed to handle your adventure. It also will permit you to declare locations in a structured format as opposed to using data structures or programming code. Typically, you name a location (a room), give any descriptions, tell where someone can go (by direction) from that room, plus any special information about the room, and you're done unless the room has special features.

How do I get people to test my game?

The site if.game-testing.org provides a convenient means to find testers, includes valuable information on the testing process, and allows you to sign up to test other author's games as well. You can also ask for testers on one of the community sites (see below). Often you'll have an easier time finding testers if you test a few games yourself.

How do I get people to play my game?

Releasing it in the IF Comp can be a very effective way, if it fits the bill by being a two-hour game that is not based on previous copyrighted work. There are other IF competitions at other points in the year which are less popular but still provide good ways to release a game. If you don't release your game as part of a competition, you should announce your game on the IF community sites (see below).

You may also want to publicize your game outside the IF community, if there are other groups who might be interested in it. For example, the Electronic Literature Organization, if your work is written for a literary audience, or TIGSource, if your IF might appeal to the general indie games community. Outside the IF community there are increasingly more competition venues and forums for games such as IF, and the ELO and TIGSource are good places to start looking.


Where can I talk with other people who are into IF?

The IF community started in the early 1990s on two Usenet newsgroups: "raif", for authoring, programming, craft, and theory (raif on Google Groups, and see the raif FAQ and past raif topics), and "rgif", devoted to playing games (rgif on Google Groups). The term r*if refers to both raif and rgif.

For real-time interaction, IFers founded the ifmud in 1997 and it's still actively used today. There is an annual awards ceremony on ifMUD for the XYZZY Awards, the Oscars of interactive fiction (see the transcript from the 2009 XYZZY Awards here).

IFers created Intfiction.org in 2007, another web-based forum whose community overlaps with raif, and in 2008 Planet IF, a blog aggregator that follows many IF-related blogs and RSS feeds.

2009 saw the formation of the first IF meetup group, the Boston-based People's Republic of Interactive Fiction, and since then more groups have formed in Seattle, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay area. The PR-IF hosted the first 'IF summit' at the games expo PAX EAST in 2010.


How can I keep up with IF news and events?

Besides following Planet IF and community forums, Brass Lantern, IF URLs, and the current events page on ifwiki are sources of news, and there is increasingly more IF discussion outside the community proper on social sites such as Twitter.


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