Eric Eve is a Senior Research Fellow and Tutor in Theology at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, specializing in New Testament. His publications on the New Testament include and articles both on miracles and on aspects of the Synoptic Problem (see http://users.ox.ac.uk/~manc0049/).
He is the author of several works of Interactive Fiction, including
Authored for DHQ; migrated from original DHQauthor format
Among the alternative kinds of narrative opened up by computer technology, one of
earliest is interactive fiction (and specifically the text adventure
or
adventure game
), which first came into being in the 1970s. Text-based
interactive fiction enjoyed a brief period of commercial success in the 1980s until
it was overtaken by advances in computer graphics, but it continues to be read and
written by enthusiastic amateurs. Although interactive fiction clearly has roots in
computer gaming, it also has potential as a new form of literature.
Since interactive fiction may be a medium unfamiliar to some readers, this article will start by defining it, explaining some of its conventions, and outlining its origins. It will then describe how one recent piece of interactive fiction,
Experiments in textuality and literary form.
The term interactive fiction
(or IF) can have more than one meaning in the
context of computer-based storytelling. In this article, however, the term will be
used in the narrow sense of a turn-based program driven by textual input from the
player, responding with output that is principally or wholly textual, and involving a
parser and a world model (two terms which will explained shortly). For the sake of
brevity, the term game
will be used to denote a work of interactive fiction,
though not all such works are equally ludic, and the reader should not rush to equate
IF games
with the video-games more commonly associated with contemporary
recreational computing.
Such a work is
Part of the appeal of IF is the illusion that one has complete freedom to type
anything one likes at the game’s command prompt. It
The role of the Which ball do
you mean: the blue ball or the red ball?
).
A more sophisticated parser will also deal automatically with certain implicit actions needed to carry the player’s explicit command. For example if the player types N (the usual abbreviation for GO NORTH) when going north would take the PC through a closed door, a good parser will assume that the player wants the PC to open the door first, and will first attempt opening the door as an implicit action, only carrying out the main action if the required implicit action succeeds (it may not, since the door may be locked or jammed or inaccessible for some reason). Or if the PC needs to be holding the blue ball before he can put it in the brown box, then a courteous parser will carrying out an implicit TAKE BLUE BALL command when the player types PUT BLUE BALL IN BROWN BOX, rather than complaining that the PC needs to be holding the blue ball first. Unfortunately, not all parsers achieve this level of user-friendliness.
A modern IF parser works first by identifying what grammar productions
) contained in
the TADS 3 library and the game author’s own code: thus if the player types PUT BALL
IN BOX the parser first determines that this matches the pattern PUT <noun
phrase> IN <noun phrase>
and so decides that the current action is
of type logical
target
for such a command than a large stone ball fixed to the top of an ornamental
balustrade. Likewise, for a PUT IN action to succeed, its indirect object (occupying
the second noun slot) must be a container of some sort, so that, for example, a large
cardboard box is a more logical
target for a PUT IN command than a box girder.
If this object resolution phase results in one and only one most logical possibility
for each of the noun slots, then the parser will settle on these objects; otherwise
it will either request further clarification from the player (to select from a number
of possibilities) or complain that there is nothing in scope that matches the command
entered.
The second defining characteristic of interactive fiction is the room
in the IF
sense is just as likely to be a section of path through a forest, or one corner of a
large town square, or a section of meadow-bank overlooking a lake. Conceptually, a
room is that segment of physical space that is immediately accessible to the player
character. The notional size of a room can vary greatly, but is assumed that, with
certain qualifications, the PC can see and hear everything in the room in which he or
she is located unless it is purposely hidden; and can taste, touch or smell
everything in the room unless it is deliberately placed out of reach. The standard IF
convention is that, with one exception to be dealt with below, the movement of the
characters and objects within a room is not normally modelled. It may be that I would
in fact have to cross a large study to take a book off the shelf, but this detail is
generally ignored in IF; it is assumed that the PC (and any NPCs) will move around
within a room as necessary without being explicitly commanded to, and such internal
movements will not normally be reported, unless the game author explicitly wishes to
mention them for artistic effect. Thus few games bother to implement commands such as
WALK OVER TO THE TABLE or APPROACH THE BOOKCASE, since they would generally be
superfluous.
It is perfectly possible for a complete work of IF to take place within a single room, and some do, but it is more normal for a game to contain multiple rooms and for the PC (and possibly the NPCs as well) to move around between them. By far the most normal convention is for movement commands to be given in terms of the eight principal compass directions together with UP, DOWN, IN and OUT. This should understood as a convention of the medium, not as a pretense that the PC in fact carries an infallible compass in his or her head; experience has shown that in practice this is generally the most convenient way for a player to communicate movement intentions to the parser, not least because movement commands can be abbreviated to N, SW and the like. But other styles of movement command such as GO THROUGH RED DOOR and ENTER THE BIG HOUSE are also common. Less common, but also possible are commands to go to a specific location, such as GO TO THE KITCHEN.
In the normal IF world model, rooms are populated with
Although most objects in a game are normally inanimate (as are most objects we commonly interact with in the real world), some may be designed to represent animate objects such as cats and cows or even people (or quasi-animate objects such as robots and talking computers). Clearly such objects – especially people – are a good deal more complicated to implement well.
The earliest game of this type was principally a simulation of the Bedquilt/Flint
Mammoth cave network created by Will Crowther, originally as an amusement for his
daughters (
text adventures(even when the plot may involve little that resembles adventuring in any conventional sense).
Adventure’s parser was originally written in FORTRAN, and was primitive by modern
standards: it was a two-word
parser since the most complex commands it could
understand were in the form of an imperative verb and a single noun. The game had
little narrative plot, being mainly a treasure hunt, but the fact that, unlike many
of its successors and imitators, it was based on a real cave system by an author who
knew it well gives it a certain enduring charm.
The most significant successor and imitator of
Infocom (and other companies like it) made a great success of interactive fiction in
the 1980s, but as home computers became more powerful and ever more capable of
displaying good graphics, text-based games fell out of favour with computer gamers
who could be offered much more visually appealing graphical video-games instead. But
while interactive fiction largely fell out of sight, it did not die, but continued to
develop in the hands of enthusiastic amateurs.
It is possible to write a work of interactive fiction from scratch in a general-purpose programming language such as Basic, C#, or Pascal, but it is extremely inadvisable to do so unless your primary aim is to practice programming in one of those languages. Implementing a robust parser and world model is a decidedly non-trivial task, and any case IF is best served by a domain-specific language. Systems for authoring IF had been available for some time, but amateur IF received a considerable boost in the early 1990s from the release first of Mike Roberts’s TADS (Text Adventure Design System), and then Inform, created by Oxford mathematician Graham Nelson.
These systems comprise special-purpose programming languages (TADS, for example, is
quite similar to C), together with a library (usually written in the same language)
providing a standard parser and world model (which can then be extended or modified
to a greater or lesser extent in the game author’s own code). They may also contain
additional tools such as an integrated development environment or a debugger. The
compilers for these languages typically output, not a native executable, but a
byte-code file designed for running in a virtual machine on a program called an
interpreter
(similar to the way a Java compiler produces byte-code to run
on a Java Virtual Machine).
Inform had two great advantages when it was first released: first, it was free, at a
time when Mike Roberts still charged for TADS (though it has now been available free
for many years),natural language
code into the Inform 6 programming
language, and then compiles the Inform 6 code into byte-code that will run on the
Z-machine (a virtual machine originally designed by Infocom for running games they
wrote in ZIL, which was short for
Amateurs writing for other amateurs have perhaps felt freer to innovate and
experiment, and one trend has been an increasing appreciation and ambition for
story-driven as opposed to puzzle-driven IF. That is not to say that well-made puzzle
games do not continue to be appreciated – they clearly areThe striped wallpaper is not important
if
the wallpaper is indeed pure scenery, but it looks very clumsy if, having told the
player that the room is decorated with striped wallpaper, the game responds with
You see no such thing
when the player
tries to examine it (as would all too often be the case in much old-school
IF
and all too much poorly-implemented modern IF). It is better still if a description
of the wallpaper is provided in response to X
WALLPAPER
(i.e. EXAMINE WALLPAPER), even if the not important
message is used in response to any other command involving the wallpaper; this kind
of detail can make the difference between immersion in the story world and the
feeling that, after all, you are merely interacting with a computer
program.
These modern expectations raise a further pair of issues, namely the roles of room
descriptions and puzzles. In conventional (or static
) fiction a description of
a location may be used,
It is possible to write IF that is virtually puzzleless, but puzzles can play an
important part even in IF that aims to be more literary than ludic.
Puzzles are not the only way to achieve some of these effects; for example, it would
be possible to present the player with a series of choices that were not so much
puzzles as dilemmas, or to write a puzzleless simulation,
What drives the narrative in most static fiction is the interaction between the (normally human) characters, but this is the hardest thing to do well in interactive fiction, particularly when it comes to representing the subtleties of human relationships. Many NPCs in IF turn out to be little more than elaborate puzzles or talking robots. Examples of the first category might be someone I have to get out of the way so I can see what’s in his desk or the bouncer who won’t let me past the door. The second category is part of the wider reason it is so difficult to produce lifelike NPCs in IF, namely the difficulty of producing realistic dialogue in the medium.
Authors of static fiction have complete control over what their characters say, with
all the nuances that may imply for the relationships between them. Authors of IF
surrender control of speech as well as action to their players, but whereas a good
modern IF parser can cope very well with interpreting commands directed at physical
action, the same is not so true of speech commands. The reason is quite
straightforward: whereas there is only a fairly limited range of physical actions a
PC might sensibly attempt at any one time, there is no such limit to what he or she
might sensibly say, but the technology to make sense of any textual input and provide
a good response simply does not exist, and would in any case be a move away from
interactive fiction to artificial intelligence (at least as things are now).
Attempting fake AI in NPC responses (for example, by getting the parser to look out
for certain keywords) is nearly always a bad idea, since it is almost bound to be
given away by incongruous responses sooner or later. The only practical solution with
existing IF parser technology is to put a drastic limit on the range and syntax of
conversational commands, and to program a finite range of suitable NPC responses,
together with a range of totally non-committal default
responses for topics
not otherwise catered for.
A number of approaches are possible within these limitations.
Perhaps the most commonly used conversation system, and that most frequently provided
as standard in many IF authoring system, is the ASK/TELL system. This allows players
to type commands of the form ASK BOB ABOUT THE LETTER or TELL JILL ABOUT JANE, where
what follows ABOUT
is a topic to which the
NPC may have a programmed response (the ASK/TELL system usually also allows SHOW
SOMETHING TO SOMEONE and GIVE SOMETHING TO SOMEONE and often ASK SOMEONE FOR
SOMETHING). The advantages of this system is that it allows a form of user input
congruent with the user interface used for all other commands, preserves the illusion
of player freedom, but makes it reasonably possible for the author to provide
suitable responses, at least to the most significant topics (the others can then be
fielded with a non-commital response such as Let’s
talk about that some other time
or Bob
pretends not to hear you
). The disadvantages are first that the NPC can
all too easily end up resembling a talking robot more than a believable human being
(for example if the command ASK BOB ABOUT LETTER repeatedly provokes the response,
), and second that the system allows little or no control over what precisely
is asked or told: if I issue the command ASK BOB ABOUT LETTER do I want to ask Bob
who the letter is from, or what it says, or when he received it? If I type the
command TELL JILL ABOUT JANE do I want to tell Jill that Jane is pregnant, or that
I’m in love with her, or that she’s emigrated to Australia? In particular, the only
dimension of human conversation it copes with is the exchange of information; it is
thus quite incapable of modelling, say, a developing relationship (whether of
affection or enmity) in any realistic way.It’s from Jill
; he tells you, she’s left me to run off with Jack!
One of the great achievements of TADS 3 is that it extends the ASK/TELL system in a
number of ways that greatly mitigate these limitations. For example, it provides
tools for varying NPCs’ responses in accordance with what has been said before, and
for threading conversations in a more realistic manner, allowing a greater range of
possible responses that just ASK or TELL at critical points in the dialogue. It also
encourages authors to write both halves of a conversational exchange, which generally
makes the dialogue read much better.
The difficulty of implementing life-like NPCs is perhaps one of the major differences
between IF and conventional static fiction; it can certainly restrict the kind of
story that can be told well in the medium, since it is far harder to produce a game
involving the emotional interaction of characters (such as a love story) than one
focusing mainly on the gathering and exchange of information (a detective story or
spy story, for example). That is not to say that IF necessarily lacks emotional
impact, but this must often be achieved by other means, and it would be fair to say
that the implementation of convincing NPCs is one area in which there is currently
vast scope for experimentation. But the more fundamental difference between static
and interactive fiction is that the latter is interactive, and requires a particular
kind of input from the reader to advance the story. This is not to say that the
reader of static fiction is wholly passive, as reader-response criticism in
particular emphasizes, but IF does raise reader participation to a greater level; it
also both operates under different constraints and offers different opportunities
from static fiction.
Implementing the Player Character also presents its own challenges. In early works such as
but Bob is such an irritating character that I, while others will complain if they can make their PC act too obviously out of character (want to punch him on the jaw
my PC is meant to be a genteel elderly spinster who would); nevertheless, some kind of reasonable compromise seems to satisfy most players most of the time.never punch anyone on the jaw, however irritating she found him!
Less easy to negotiate is the discrepancy that can arise between what the player
knows and what the player character supposedly knows. This can work both ways.
Someone playing a game for the second or subsequent time almost certainly starts out
knowing more than the PC knows at the start of the game, and this can create problems
when the player wants to put that additional knowledge to use. Before the PC has been
introduced to Mrs. Prancealot he logically cannot know that she
Conversely, the PC may well know things the player (especially the first time player) does not. Such knowledge may be relatively trivial, such as the PC’s knowledge of his or her own locality, which the player has to discover by exploration (this can usually be handled by writing room descriptions that emphasize the PC’s familiarity with the locations visited). But it may be something rather more complex, such as the specialist knowledge the PC ought to possess in his or her persona as safe-cracker, starship captain, or (as in the example about to be discussed) scholar. This can be particularly tricky if it results in the player fumbling to perform tasks the PC ought to be able to manage in his or her sleep, or if the PC’s specialist knowledge is particularly relevant to understanding the puzzles and other plot elements, as turned out to be the case in
The particular example of IF to be discussed here is one of my own works,
The game opens with the protagonist, Dr. William Fisher, listening to a particularly dire lecture at a New Testament conference. Since our discussion of interactive fiction has been fairly abstract up to now, it may be helpful to show a sample transcript of the first few turns by way of illustration (lines beginning > show player commands):
The conference organizers must have been really scraping the barrel when they invited Professor Wortschlachter as a keynote speaker. Until you saw the conference programme you’d never heard of him, and from what the handout has to say about him you can see why. You’re subjecting yourself to his lecture through a general sense of obligation (or, at least, fear of appearing less enthusiastic than the other delegates), but your expectations are not high. So far, Wortschlachter has triumphantly fallen short of them.
Lecture Theatre (sitting on a plain wooden chair)
Facing you is the podium, from which the wretched Professor Wortschlachter is busily delivering his lecture. Facing the podium are row upon row of hard wooden chairs, about a dozen in front of you, and as many again behind. Over to your left a series of windows, partly obscured by blinds, look out on a relentlessly grey day, while the main exit is out of sight behind you. The walls have been covered with plain strips of pine that match the floor, but are otherwise undecorated except for the occasional fading poster.
Professor Wortschlachter is standing on the podium, delivering his lecture.
>X ME
You’re in your early thirties, but you firmly believe that you look younger. In your more honest moments, however, you have to admit that you’re not exactly as fit as you might be. You are dressed quite formally for the occasion, in a dark jacket and tie.
Professor Wortschlachter peers down at his notes, grasps the top of the lectern, and announces,
As you all know, our pericope, Mark 16.1-8 is one thatThe Acts of Jesus prints in heavy black type, indicating that the Jesus Seminar are quite clear that the account is utterly unhistorical. We can assume that a first-century Jesus Seminar would have voted the same way, at once recognizing the midrashic intertexture of this text and not for a moment is taking it for a putative historical report.You wonder briefly at this astonishing leap of logic, but Wortschlachter ploughs relentlessly on, leaving minimal time for critical assessment.
>I
You are carrying a conference handout, and you’re wearing a tie, a name badge, and a dark jacket.
Since we can assume that any literalist reading of the empty tomb story can be instantly deconstructed, Professor Wortschlachter drones on,we can progress to the correct identification of itsSitz im Leben in the properreligionsgeschichtlichen context.
Bullshit! you think, convinced even more than ever now that Wortschlachter is just throwing in a random mish-mash of technical language in order to disguise his total lack of methodological rigour.>READ HANDOUT
It reads:
14th Annual PANTS Conference Our Special Guest Speaker, Herr Doktor Doktor Professor Karlheinz Wortschlachter is delivering today’s keynote address on the exciting topic of
Rolling Away the Misconceived Stone: Structural Semiotic Signification in Mark 16:1-8 The organizers particularly request all Conference delegates to attend this afternoon’s plenary session at which this internationally renowned scholar will reveal his latest thinking on this exciting and vital topic.
Dr. Wortschlachter is Professor of New Testament History and Exegesis at the Protestant Faculty of the University of Wirrstadt. He is the author of several important books, including the renowned
Deconstructing the Deconstruction of Structurally Symbolic Social-Scientific Semiotic Signification in Second Temple Judaeo-Christianity . This is the first time we have been fortunate enough to have him address a meeting of the Pan-Atlantic New Testament Society.
... but this must include,the professor grinds on.inter alia its thorough demythologization in line with the Bultmannian perspective,At this point your attention starts to wander as you find your eyes attracted to the blonde woman sitting three rows ahead.
The PC’s attention now wanders as he recalls a brief encounter he had with an attractive female delegate, Felicity Hope, at breakfast that morning. His attention soon returns to the lecture, but not long thereafter he suffers a heart attack, and the bulk of the game takes place in his subsequent near-death experience.
How exactly this experience is to be interpreted (for example, as an objective depiction of an after-life, or as a purely subjective dream-like experience) is left up to the player to decide. In creating this environment I thought of it as mythological, and as containing both subjective and objective elements. It is closely connected to the theme of the preceding lecture, in that the Empty Tomb story recurs in various guises as a leitmotiv, as does the PC’s attraction to Felicity Hope. On the other hand what the PC does in this segment of the game can have real world consequences, in particular whether he returns to life or ends up in ultimate frustration or oblivion.
This mythological section is structured in two main halves surrounded by a prologue
and epilogue. The prologue effectively allows players to start to get their bearings
in this strange environment. There they will discover that a great chasm separates
the PC from a distant golden glow that looks like it might be a city of the blessed.
On this side of the chasm is the gate of hell, bearing a sign saying that hell has
been closed for demythologization. A workdemon is busily chipping away at the
inscription over the gate, but has so far only manage to obliterate the final letter
of Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here
(thereby creating a nice double entendre for those who spot it). It turns out that
the only way to progress is to go through hell, via another entrance (the debts to
Dante’s
The first main section begins once the player has found out how to get into hell. The
PC soon arrives in a Victorian gallery with a choice of routes labelled Via Antiqua
and Via Moderna
. I originally intended to force the player to take the Via
Moderna, which pokes gentle (or not-so-gentle) fun at various aspects of
twentieth-century New Testament scholarship (appropriate to the PC’s profession). I
soon felt, however, that this left the Via Antiqua as a rather pointless digression,
so I decided to add an alternative route through that as well, in which the PC has to
overcome the temptations of an alluring female demoness (a sort of demonic
counterpart to Felicity Hope). Both routes eventually converge at the same barrier
(it would be too much of a spoiler to be more specific) that the PC has to overcome
to proceed to the second main section of his near-death experience.
This second section is intended to be a recapitulation of the main lines of New Testament eschatology. Symbolically speaking the PC must past through the crucifixion and the Empty Tomb and then play an apocalyptic game of chess against an opponent who starts out as Pontius Pilate but is soon replaced with a composite Roman emperor (representing an amalgam of all the emperors from Augustus to Domitian). The chess game is played out with somewhat unconventional pieces and is meant to reflect, first the events leading up to the Jewish war of 66-70 CE, and then aspects of the apocalyptic scenarios of Revelation and 4 Ezra. If the PC loses the game he loses his soul; if he wins he can pass on to the next stage. In neither case is the game played much like an ordinary game of chess.
Thereafter the player character finds a sort of reverse Eden, in which the serpent is
helpful and in fact prevents the PC from taking the forbidden fruit (the idea is to
represent an
In the most general terms, my design goals were to combine my interest in Biblical Studies with my interest in interactive fiction in a game that contained a substantial surreal (or at least, non-real-world) segment that would give some sense of what it might be like to inhabit one interpretation of the Christian symbolic/mythological universe. I also wanted to poke fun at some aspects of New Testament scholarship of the last hundred years, while unobtrusively informing players about it. The game also had to be entertaining and engaging to play, given that my target audience would be fellow IF-enthusiasts rather than fellow New Testament scholars. It therefore had to conform to the conventions and expectations of the medium, and it seemed advisable to include elements such as puzzles that would hopefully prove amusing and accessible to all players, regardless of their background knowledge, on the basis of information provided in the game. It was quite emphatically not meant to preach to the player.
The game seems to have achieved mixed success in relation to those goals. On the positive side
This underlines the main design challenge I faced: the huge gap between PC and player knowledge. Although this can be an issue in any work of IF, in this case the problem was acute: my PC was a New Testament scholar who could be expected to have a thorough knowledge not only of the biblical text and related ancient texts, but also of the contemporary scholarly debate surrounding them. My target audience might have none of this knowledge, and it became apparent in the course of beta-testing and subsequent player feedback that many players did not possess even the most elementary knowledge of the biblical stories presupposed and alluded to in the game.
My first attempt at meeting this problem was to add footnotes to responses I thought
might be a little obscure.
I therefore decided to scrap the footnotes and employ a different approach:
implementing a THINK ABOUT command. If the game mentioned something that might be
obscure to the player, such as the Synoptic Problem or Q, or even Moses or the Empty
Tomb, the player could simply type, say, THINK ABOUT Q, to tap into the player
character’s specialist knowledge (and opinions). The advantage of this approach is
that it never thrusts itself on players’ attention; there is seldom any need to think
about anything in the game,
Many of the other challenges and design decisions affecting
gatingpuzzles, obstacles that need to be overcome in order to advance to the next set of map locations. All this was part of the design from the beginning. A subsidiary aspect of this design included making the gating puzzles irreversible at crucial points, limiting the ability of the PC to backtrack and so driving the narrative forwards. Linked to this were puzzles that forced the PC to part with all of his inventory (the items carried) at various points, thus preventing an accumulation of an ever-growing stack of objects that were no longer useful.
Apart from a number of purely technical issues, the other main design challenge was the implementation of the NPCs. Here, the setting of the main part of the game in a mythological landscape greatly helped; since the setting was clearly not a real-world one, and many of the NPCs were so strange (they included a demon, a demoness, a talking crow and a talking serpent) that it would not be particularly jarring if some of their responses were a little odd; on the contrary, oddity is only to be expected.
At first sight interactive fiction, which began life as a species of computer game, would seem to be a world apart from Biblical Studies (or any other humanities discipline). It may nevertheless be interesting to reflect on how a work such as
The first point to make is that
That said, there are a number of ways in which
A less incidental link between IF and biblical text lies in their common relation to
the riddle. Nick Montfort argues that the riddle is one of the main literary
precursors to interactive fiction in that it is both textual (or at least verbal) and
challenges the reader/hearer to find a solution
thrown alongside) means some form of comparison; the corresponding Hebrew and Aramaic terms
riddleamong their possible meanings.
in parablesso that
seeing they may see and not perceive, and hearing they may hear and not understandMark 4.10-12, alluding to Isa. 6.9-10
for nothing is hidden except in order to be made known, nor does it become hidden but that it might come into the open(Mark 4.22).
if anyone has ears to hear, let them hear(Mark 4.23). The careful reader of Mark’s Gospel may easily come to the conclusion that this applies, not just to the parables in Mark, but to the entire narrative: there is clearly much more going on in this gospel than appears on the surface.
Hiding something in order that it may come to light is (both literally and
figuratively) a common strategy in writing IF; it is the essence of puzzles that the
player/reader is meant to solve them in order to advance the plot, and perhaps also
the player’s understanding of the work as a whole.
Although a modern reader cannot affect either the course of events or even the style
of narration in a static text like a gospel, the situation may have been a little
different when the gospels were first written. Like most texts in antiquity (when
literacy was restricted to a small fraction of the population), they would have been
written as scripts for oral performance, not books for private perusal, and some
proportion of the material now incorporated in the gospels probably enjoyed oral
circulation for some time before being committed to writing. Mark’s Gospel is
particularly close to oral storytelling, both in its folksy narrative style (such as
the frequent use of the historic present, parataxis, the word immediately
, and
otherwise non-literary Greek), and in its overall structure.
Finally, IF provides an interesting analogy in the age-old problem of divine
sovereignty and human free will. One obvious place where this surfaces in the
biblical text being used for comparison here is where the Markan Jesus declares that
his betrayer is performing a preordained role in the divine plan, but must
nevertheless bear full responsibility for his actions (Mark 14.21), but the problem
is clearly much wider than that one instance. If the universe has been made by an
omnipotent and omniscient creator, what space is left for human free will? One useful
analogy is that between the author of a novel and the characters within the novel.
Clearly the novelist has full control over the story world he or she creates and the
actions of everyone with it, yet if the characters are not to appear mere puppets,
they must have a certain authenticity and vitality of their own; from the
inner-narrative perspective of the story world they act as free agents. It would not
be appropriate, for example, for a criminal collared by Sherlock Holmes to plead,
It wasn’t my fault, it was that scoundrel Conan
Doyle who made me do it; he’s writing this story after all.
Such an excuse
would involve a confusion of levels, since at the story-level the villain is free and
responsible for his actions.
But useful though that analogy is, it breaks down if pressed too far, for, after all, novelists do control all the thoughts and actions of all their characters, so that their characters enjoy no real independence. Interactive fiction provides a more satisfactory analogy, since here the protagonist is genuinely guided by an intelligence distinct from that of his or her creator, namely that of the player. The story-world is still the creation of the author, but the player is genuinely free to direct the actions of the PC. It is up to the author what difference that makes; a work of IF can be so structured that the outcome is the same regardless, or so that the PC’s choices make a real difference. Both design options are intriguing in this context, the one modelling freedom of action leading to a predetermined conclusion, and the other a created world in which the author allows choice to influence outcome.
It is true that the actions open to a player character in a work of interactive fiction are generally circumscribed, but this is often if not mostly true of real life as well; in practice we all operate under a number of constraints that limit our practical options to a finite and frequently quite small number. Reflecting on the relation of author, player and player character will not solve any age-old theological problems, but it may provide some new insights for thinking about human free will in relation to the powers of a creator.
Interactive fiction is a distinct medium. In many important respects it is unlike static fiction, film, drama, opera, poetry or any such more conventional medium; in certain respects it perhaps most closely resembles the give-and-take of oral narrative performed in the presence of a participatory audience. Its distinctiveness means that it is unlikely to shed much light on, say, the kind of traditional historical-critical questions that still occupy much of contemporary biblical scholarship. But it may help to generate fresh insights in other areas, such as how readers and listeners interact with texts, and how the puzzling nature of a text like Mark’s gospel helps draw readers into the narrative and take ownership of their interpretations. That virtually all interactive fiction has an element of play does not of itself disqualify it from serious consideration; there can be a playfulness about static texts as well, including the way some biblical texts play with other biblical texts.
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A term that is used almost as loosely within biblical scholarship as outside
it; etymologically the word is derived from the Greek for revelation
or
unveiling
and some scholars would wish to restrict its use to a type
of literature in which heavenly secrets are revealed to the seer by a vision, a
heavenly journey, or the words of an angel (or some combination of all three).
All too often, however, the term is used as if it meant eschatological, and for
want of a better term it is often used to describe a particular type of
eschatology in which ordinary human history is expected to be interrupted by a
catastrophic divine intervention in the near future (the reason being that such
eschatology is frequently expressed through the medium of apocalyptic in the
first sense).
The name often given to the intermediate product of compilation; a byte code file can typically be run on an interpreter or virtual machine rather than directly by a computer’s operating system.
Without further qualification this normally refers to Source Code
, the
set of instructions the author/programmer writes in whichever programming
language he or she is writing to tell his or her program (in this case, work of
IF) how to behave.
A piece of software to translate human readable source code into machine readable form. Compilation may be to a native executable (a file that can be executed by a particular operating system without further ado) or, more usually with Interactive Fiction, to some intermediate (byte code) form that can be run by different interpreters on different operating systems.
The system of containment that determines which objects are within which other
objects. In this context within
includes inside, on top of, underneath
or behind. At the top of the containment hierarchy stand the rooms; rooms are
regarded as not being contained by anything but as directly or indirectly
containing everything else (except for objects temporarily out of play and so
outside the map althogether).
A tool which helps a programmer (or in this case, game author) track down
programming errors or bugs
. For example TADS 3 Workbench for Windows
incorporates a highly sophisticated debugger that allows the programmer to step
through his code line by line to see what it is doing each step of the way (and
so determine where something is going wrong if it is going wrong).
A computer programming language (such as Inform or TADS) specifically tailored to a particular type of task (such as writing Interactive Fiction).
Anything that deals with the last things, the end of the age or the
consummation of history (from the Greek eschatos, meaning last
). In
Christian theology eschatology traditionally deals with matters such as Heaven,
Hell, the Second Coming and the Last Judgement; in a first-century context it
is better thought of in terms of the coming of the kingdom of God, the age to
come in which the evils of the present age would be overcome.
A single piece of software containing all (or at least) most of the tools a game author needs in order to write a game, including an editor, a compiler, a debugger and an interpreter on which the game may be tested.
The most popular language/system for authoring Interactive Fiction, written
and maintained by Graham Nelson. Two versions of Inform are currently in use.
Inform 6 (the older version) resembles a conventional programming language.
Inform 7 adopts a more natural language
style of programming with the
aim of making the process of writing Interactive Fiction more like writing
prose and less like conventional programming.
An action automatically carried out by the parser in order to facilitate the command the player actually typed; for example if the player types GO THROUGH RED DOOR when the red door is locked but the player has the key, a well-behaved parser would carry out implicit UNLOCK RED DOOR and OPEN RED DOOR actions rather than forcing the player to type these commands explicitly.
The items currently carried by the Player Character.
A piece of software that (typically) implements a Virtual Machine and so allows a game compiled to byte code to be run on the player’s computer; one generally needs an interpreter to run a work of Interactive Fiction in the same way that would need a copy of MS-Word to read a Word file, or a program such as Windows Media Player to watch a DVD on a computer. The advantage is that an interpreter needs to be written only once for each operating system (Windows, MAC-OS, Linux, etc.) and can then play all the games written for that interpreter.
A set of supporting routines supplied with an IF authoring system such as TADS or Inform that handles most of the tasks common to most works of Interactive Fiction; a library will typically implement a parser and at least a basic world model, and will generally be written in the same language as that supplied with the authoring system to allow ready customization by game authors.
The totality of rooms within a particular work of Interactive Fiction, together with the interconnections between them.
A set of options presented to a computer user from which he or she is meant to select one.
Any animate character (human, animal, alien or robotic) that appears in a work of Interactive Fiction apart from the Player Character; characters whose actions are not controlled by the Player Character. Usually, the term is restricted to characters who are actually implemented and can be interacted with rather than characters who are only mentioned or who never remain on stage long enough for the Player Character to interact with.
Something physical that the Player Character can interact with (or at least
examine) in the course of the game, such as a table, chair, pen, or book (or,
indeed, another character). Some objects may be quasi-physical (such as smoke
or sunlight). In many IF authoring systems based on OOP (object-oriented
programming) design, object
may also refer to a programming object; in
such systems a game object (in the first sense) will usually be represented by
a programming object (the second sense), but programming objects may also be
used for other purposes (if you don’t know anything about OOP, this second
sense of object
is probably irrelevant to you).
That part of the software in a work in the Interactive Fiction that interprets the player’s command and translates it into an action that the program can perform (or else complain if translation is impossible or ambiguous).
The flesh-and-blood human being typing the commands at a keyboard and reading the game’s responses on screen.
The protagonist of a work of Interactive Fiction, whose actions are controlled (or at least guided) by the player, and through whose eyes and ears the fictional world is described to the player.
A (normally discrete) unit of space within the game’s map. The usual convention is that the Player Character can interact with anything that is in the same room as himself or herself (unless it is deliberately concealed), and so a room is effectively that volume of space that is immediately present to the Player Character. A room may be a room in the ordinary sense of a room within a building, but it may also be a section of space outdoors, such as a meadow, the top of a hill, or a section of street.
Roughly speaking, the set of objects with which the Player Character can currently interact, given the nature of the action he or she is meant to be carrying out. Normally this will be restricted to the objects the PC can see or touch, but this is not always the case. If the action is conversational, e.g. ASK ACTOR ABOUT TOPIC, then any object (or topic) is potentially in scope. If the author has implemented a GO TO ROOM command to take the Player Character to anywhere on the map, then any (known) room will be in scope.
A piece of information (typically in a review) which reveals too much to someone who has yet to play the game, and so spoils the experience of playing it for the first time.
An acronym for Text Adventure Development System, one of the two major languages/systems in which amateur Interactive Fiction is currently written. TADS 2 is still in use, but the latest incarnation (in which
technically, a computing device implemented in software rather than as a piece
of hardware (hence virtual
); a piece of software that can execute byte
code written for it, usually implemented as an interpreter for Interactive
Fiction.
That part of a work of an IF that defines the behaviour of the story-world in which the action takes place (such as movement around the map, the containment hierarchy, and some basic physics); typically, much of a game’s world model is supplied by the library of the authoring system used.
The Virtual Machine for which the Infocom games were written, and to which games written in Inform compile.