Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press)
Nick Montfort
Language: English
Pages: 302
ISBN: 0262633183
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Interactive fiction -- the best-known form of which is the text game or text adventure -- has not received as much critical attention as have such other forms of electronic literature as hypertext fiction and the conversational programs known as chatterbots. Twisty Little Passages (the title refers to a maze in Adventure, the first interactive fiction) is the first book-length consideration of this form, examining it from gaming and literary perspectives. Nick Montfort, an interactive fiction author himself, offers both aficionados and first-time users a way to approach interactive fiction that will lead to a more pleasurable and meaningful experience of it.
Twisty Little Passages looks at interactive fiction beginning with its most important literary ancestor, the riddle. Montfort then discusses Adventure and its precursors (including the I Ching and Dungeons and Dragons), and follows this with an examination of mainframe text games developed in response, focusing on the most influential work of that era, Zork. He then considers the introduction of commercial interactive fiction for home computers, particularly that produced by Infocom. Commercial works inspired an independent reaction, and Montfort describes the emergence of independent creators and the development of an online interactive fiction community in the 1990s. Finally, he considers the influence of interactive fiction on other literary and gaming forms. With Twisty Little Passages, Nick Montfort places interactive fiction in its computational and literary contexts, opening up this still-developing form to new consideration.
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fiction can benefit from institutional and cultural respect if it is to be a part of culture in the way that poetry is. This author is one of several people working to bring legitimacy to the concept of computer literature, also called electronic literature-which includes interactive fiction and other forms based on the computer's ability to present different media according to rules and user input. Today, it is easy to go into many public libraries and use a computer to look up a phone number
next year; these would quickly become typical computers in the United States. Moreover, the Spectrum ran programs from cassette tape rather than disk, which was the typical storage medium for a C64 or Apple Ile. Melbourne House, founded in 1977, catered to Spectrum users, first as a book publisher and then as a developer of software-and most notably, interactive fiction. In 1983 the company brought out Philip Mitchell's The Hobbit, which was a hit despite its many bugs. The Hobbit was one of the
player character was an agoraphobic. Hence it was natural that an isolated, depopulated area would make up the world of Robots of Dawn. The company Angelsoft adapted Stephen King's novella The Mist into an IF work with the same title, published in 1985perhaps a surprise for those who thought that King's first electronic publishing venture was The Plant. It incorporated the text of King's story in a straightforward and, at times, even effective way. Angelsoft's parser did not advance the state of
player character was an agoraphobic. Hence it was natural that an isolated, depopulated area would make up the world of Robots of Dawn. The company Angelsoft adapted Stephen King's novella The Mist into an IF work with the same title, published in 1985perhaps a surprise for those who thought that King's first electronic publishing venture was The Plant. It incorporated the text of King's story in a straightforward and, at times, even effective way. Angelsoft's parser did not advance the state of
household objects, into an instrument of existential terror. Writer and teacher Adam Cadre had played some interactive fiction when he was young, but what made him interested in actually writing and programming interactive fiction himself in the late 1990s was Plotkin's A Change in the Weather. This short and introspective work seemed to indicate that interactive fiction could take a different path. Still, Cadre said of A Change in the Weather that he "didn't actually like it much," finding
