Playing Interactive Fiction: Inform. A work of interactive fiction is more dynamic than a text file, or an image. To play it, you need an "interpreter". The "story files" created by Inform are not like text, or music files: since they need to interact with the player, they are programs. Rather than running directly on any one computer, they are programs for a virtual machine (eiher the "Z-machine" or "Glulx") designed specially for IF. The advantage of this is that the same story file can be used on any number of very different systems (Macs, PCs, Linux boxes), and that a story file is so isolated from the host computer that it is impossible for it to alter other files or do any damage, malicious or accidental.
So a player of IF will download one interpreter program - a typical-sized application, say a 10 MB download - and then as many story files as he likes, which will be much smaller: usually 256 KB up to 1 MB. The Z-machine was designed by the founders of Infocom, Inc., in 1979. To play IF, you need an interpreter. Brass Lantern Introducing Interactive Fiction.
It's been more than two decades since Will Crowther and Don Woods wrote Colossal Cave, the first computer adventure game. Things have gotten complicated since then, what with the proliferation of web sites and the growing number of people using computers. This article is a brief overview of the specific brand of interactive fiction covered by this site, namely, computer adventure games. If you're new to the adventure game scene or want a review of what resources are available for the adventure game player, then read on. Interactive fiction (IF) is a broad term. Strictly speaking, interactive fiction is anything in which you influence the outcome of a story, like continuous stories you can add to or those old "Choose Your Own Adventure" books with their branching stories. But there is a more specialized meaning of interactive fiction which I use on this site: computer adventure games.
In general, computer adventure games are computer programs which tell you a story. Twine / An open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. The Interactive Fiction Archive. Brass Lantern Downloading and Running Text Adventures: Z-Code and AGT. Z-Code Z-code games are, to some extent, the most complex of the ones discussed in this article. Z-code games are written for a virtual machine known as the z-machine, which was developed by Infocom. All of Infocom's text adventures ran on the z-machine, and the text adventure language Inform creates z-code games by default. Z-code game files come in several varieties: .z3, .z5, .z8, and sometimes .dat. The different filename extensions have to do with what specific flavor of the z-machine they are supposed to run on, but since z-code interpreters will run any of these without complaint, you don't have to worry about these details. Most z-machine interpreters are variants on one of two basic types, Frotz and Zip.
Once upon a time AGT bestrode the world of amateur interactive fiction like a Sauroposeidon. The AGT interpreter was originally only available for MS-DOS, but Robert Masenten wrote AGiliTy. Conversations With My Mother. An interesting anecdote., September 7, 2013 This Twine episode lets you manipulate words in a short speech by the author's mother...it sounds a bit like an answering machine message. After you do so, the game generates links to tweets made by the author in which she expresses responses to the words chosen. Kind of an interesting idea. I don't know if this is based on real life, or completely fabricated, but it's a nifty little interaction which reminds the reader how words might be interpreted.
I wish there were more to it. It's almost the same exact mechanic as FIRST DRAFT OF THE REVOLUTION. Related Games Other members recommend these games for people who like Conversations With My Mother, or gave both high ratings: Suggest a game. The Legend of the Missing Hat.