A dark volume, curried from the surrounding stone, fills your eyes and ears. To the north a passing opens into dimness; from further inside, to the east, a slight glow weakly straggles into the room.
>e
This subsection of the inset brightens and flickers. The shadows belong to the air more than you do, it seems. They walk the cordstone walls; they move and excite. The shadows look to a wall, to bars in the wall, and the songlantern behind them. Further in is east, further out is west, and a slope obtains up to the south.
>exarnine the songlantern
The songlantern hums and burbles, circled by brightening words, evading the bars and piercing the silence and darkness.
>take it
The bars divide any possible touch between you and the lantern.
>rnove the bars
One bar is loose, and looser, and then free.
>inventory
In hand:
an iron bar (forthright and content)
a guidebook (loquacious and proud)
a small stone (humble and true)
>take the songlantern
The songlantern is wider than the gap.
The songlantern murmurs and sings.
The player character has acquired an iron bar, but is still unable to get the caged songlantern, which is almost certain to be of use where there are caves to explore. The command inventory (which can be abbreviated i) instructs the player character to take stock of what he or she currently holds.
>consult the guidebook about the songlantern
`The SONGLANTERN brightens without intervention; its tones enlighten its words, as all tones do.'
>s
The walls and light contract as this space leads up and westward. The light and song from the north weaken with distance.
>u,
You are surrounded by the lack of thought and light.
The song of the lantern dances in and out of your hearing, faint with distance.
The stereotypical adventure-game puzzle would involve acquiring the lantern, which doesn't seen possible, as things stand. If the interactor couldn't figure out what to do here, it could also be useful to explore the parts of the IF world that are, as yet, unseen, to see if they holds objects that can be directly used to solve this dilemma-or if they hold clues that help reveal the nature of the IF world in a way that leads to a solution to this puzzle.
In fact, what has been learned about the world so far provides enough information to allow the player character to light the way, even without the songlantern.
>sinEr
Words tumble and float from you, and brighten your eyes.
D E A D E N D
The passage ends without foreshadowing, as if the end came without warning.
A worn anchisel rests on the roughened floor.
>takc the anchisel
Taken.
The song of the lantern dances in and out of your hearing, faint with distance.
>save
Enter a file name.
Default is "change.sav": anchisel.sav
Ok.
>quit
Are you sure you want to quit? yes
Hit any key to exit.]
For a Change is not typical in all ways, but it functions the same way most interactive fiction does: it simulates a world that the interactor is supposed to figure out (see figure 1.1). In this case, understanding an aspect of the IF world (that it is singing, not a particular object, that produces light) allows an additional room to be explored and a new object to be discovered.
At the end of this session, the interactor typed save so that this particular situation could be restored in a later session, and then typed quit, terminating the program. The commands given here do a good job of suggesting what actions are usually possible for a player character in an IF work, although they certainly do not exhaust the possibilities. This transcript also explains how some of these commands can be communicated effectively to a typical parser. With this introduction out of the way, it is helpful to describe the nature of these commands and other sorts of inputs, and how exactly the IF world relates to a transcript like this.
FIGURE 1 . 1
A hand-drawn, partial map of For a Change. This naap, drawn by an interactor, represents the part of the world that is discovered during this session.
Later in this book, I examine many IF works; some, such as Zork, are discussed extensively. It would have been a hopeless task to try, at this point, to treat any work of interactive fiction as thoroughly as is conventionally done in a book about a single literary work, for example, as thoroughly as the Odyssey was treated in Erwin Cook's The Odyssey in Athens. Cook was able to assume that his readers had at least read the Odyssey in translation, whereas many who are interested in computer literature have not spent much time with interactive fiction. Furthermore, literary theory existed before that work of scholarship was written, and a new approach to the Odyssey could build upon or overturn what had been written before.
Simply put, there is no theory to help us understand works in the interactive fiction form directly. Several applicable theories and concepts exist, such as Espen Aarseth's formulation of ergodic literature and the Oulipo's concept of potential literature, both of which help to explain how narratology can be used to understand these objects that are not, in fact, narratives, but that produce narratives when a person interacts with them. But there is still much to do to develop a strong theory that is specific to the form of interactive fiction.
In this section a possible starting point for such a theory is sketched. This discussion is adapted from a more detailed article on the topic that is intended for a readership conversant with many different IF works (Montfort 2002b). The theory envisioned is sensitive to the nature of an interactive fiction work as
a text-accepting, text-generating computer program;
a potential narrative, that is, a system that produces narrative during interaction;
a simulation of an environment or world; and
a structure of rules within which an outcome is sought, also known as a game.
It is useful to begin with form in trying to understand interactive fiction. In this unfamiliar territory, matters of interpretation and questions of how an interactor learns to interact will be much harder to address without a basic understanding of form. Since an IF work can be implemented in different ways and function identically, definitions of the formal elements of an IF work from a theoretical perspective should be done without making reference to a program's specific data structures, functions, objects, and so forth, considering the program instead (for the purposes of this analysis) as a black box that accepts input and generates output. The clearest justification for this is seen in cases where two programs that are the identical IF work, from the standpoint of the interactor, are implemented in radically different ways-for instance, first using a functional programming language and then using a procedural one. Different objects can of course also be used in two different object-oriented implementations. It may happen that sensible programmers developing IF works have found it convenient to encapsulate certain fundamental elements as discrete entities in code. Those studying interactive fiction formally should not need to rely on or refer to the internals of a program in order to describe the important elements of interactive fiction as experienced in interaction, however.
In any consideration of the elements of interactive fiction, the nature of works in this form as programs, potential narratives, worlds, and games are important to attend to.This discussion also describes how the perspective of the person interacting can be distinguished from what is computed and displayed by the program.
How does the transcript presented earlier relate to the actual work of interactive fiction For a Change? It is a transcript of a session, which is what happens during the execution of an IF program. The session begins when an IF program starts running. It ends when the program terminates. The text that results (both text typed by the interactor and text produc
ed by the program) can be called a transcript or (to emphasize that it corresponds to a single session) a session text.
An interaction describes a series of continuous exchanges of texts between the program and the interactor. "Continuous" does not have a formal meaning, nor is it a property of the text or program. The interactor's sense of continuity and unity is what makes a certain experience a single interaction, and different interactors may have different opinions of what an interaction is. The text (from both interactor and program) that corresponds to an interaction is an interaction text.
The experience of interaction belongs to the interactor (or interactors), while the session is a property of the program and its execution. Still, interactions and sessions often correspond, as we can easily imagine they did in this case. If the interactor had left on vacation halfway through the session, then returned after a week away to interact further, it would probably be more appropriate to consider that this single session spanned two interactions.
The astute reader will notice that the last two things typed by the interactor at the prompt are different from the others. They control how the program works but do not influence the IF world. The different types of input that can be provided, and the different outputs that the program generates, are discussed next.
Anything the interactor contributed, from a press of the space bar to a long typed text, is an input. Whatever texts are produced by the program are output, even if these include things previously typed by the interactor. A cycle is one input and all the output that follows it until the next input. The initial output is whatever output is produced before the first opportunity for input; this is before the first cycle. All of this is defined formally with regard to an IF work's nature as a computer program, without regard to how important or unimportant such inputs and outputs are. Pressing the space bar in response to "[MORE]" is an input, for instance, even though it normally provides the interactor no opportunity to influence the course of the narrative that is being produced.
A work of IF is not itself a narrative; it is an interactive computer program. A narrative is "the representation of real or fictive events and situations in a time sequence" (Prince 1980, 180); this can result from an interactive session but does not describe any IF work itself. Similarly, interactive fiction is not a story in the sense of the things that happen in a narrative, or more precisely, "the content plane of narrative as opposed to its expression or discourse; the `what' of a narrative as opposed to its `how"' (Prince 1987, 91). In everyday speech, of course, "story" also refers to a particular genre, the type of thing people expect to hear when they say in conversation "so, tell me the story" or that which a child expects to hear after asking to be read a story. Interactive fiction is not precisely this sort of story, either, although there may be a "frame story" provided in the documentation or there may be a certain type of story that is always generated in successfully traversing the work. An IF work is always related to story and narrative since these terms are used together in narratology, even if a particular work does not have a "story" in this ordinary sense.
A distinction between story and narrative has been noted in various ways since Aristotle, who distinguished the argument, or locos, and how it was arranged into plot, or mythos; the Russian formalists also distinguished the material of the story or Tabula from how it was told in the sjuzet (Chatman 1975, 295). Interactive fiction has the potential to produce narratives, usually as a result of the interactor typing things to effect action in the IF world. In fact IF works are potential literature in the sense of the Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature, abbreviated Oulipo) (Mathews and Brotchie 1998; Motte 1986), and specifically they are potential narratives.
Works of interactive fiction also present simulated worlds: These are not merely the setting of the literature that is realized; they also, among other things, serve to constrain and define the operation of the narrativegenerating program. IF worlds are reflected in, but not equivalent to, maps, object trees, and descriptive texts. The IF world is no less than the content plane of interactive fiction, just as story is the content plane of a narrative.
An input that refers to an action in the IF world is a command; this input is diccEetic (Genette 1980, 227-234; Cadre 2002b). This command is usually in the form of an imperative to the player character and does not have to refer to a physical action. Commands include drink, any input directing the player character to speak, and any input directing the player character to examine something or otherwise sense something about the IF world. Commands that do not succeed but that are understood by the parser are still considered commands. The input given to clarify a command (e.g., kill the troll What do you want to kill the troll with? the sw)rd) is considered part of the command being clarified. An input that refers to several actions (e.g., take all) consists of the several commands into which it is decomposed by the parser.
All other inputs, such as those that save, restore, quit, restart, change the level of detail in the room descriptions, or address some entity that is not part of the IF world-for instance, to ask for hints-are directives. A directive is extradiepetic (Genette 1980, 227-231). Commands and directives are two distinct sets; all inputs are one or the other. Directives include what Graham Nelson (2001b) refers to as "meta" actions in Inform (90). Based on this, the term pieta-command has been previously suggested to refer to such inputs that are outside the IF world (Olsson 1997), but it confuses the matter somewhat that "meta" has already been used by Genette in the opposite direction-to refer to narratives within narratives rather than to refer to the level of narration itself. To avoid confusion "meta-command" is left for its specific meaning within Inform programming; "directive" is used, instead, for all inputs that do not refer to the IF world. (Also, the level that is within the diegetic is called "hypodiegetic" in this book.) There are actually certain directives that are not meta-commands; any input that is unrecognized-a typo, or the use of a word not in the work's vocabulary-provides an example. It may seem surprising, at first, that a typo is considered a directive, but this follows directly from the definition of a directive as any input that is not a command. In fact, all inputs, not just text that is entered at the prompt, can be easily classified into directives and commands. Pressing the space bar when "[MORE]" is displayed is a directive, for instance, while typing a number to select one of several conversation options is a command. Some borderline cases from a famous IF work, Zork, illustrate this distinction. Wliat is a true? appears to be a directive, since there is no one within the IF world to whom this question is addressed; the information is apparently related to the interactor outside the IF world. On the other hand, plu~h is a command, because it refers to the player character speaking the word "plugh"; it results in a hollow voice within the IF world saying "Cretin" in reply.
Outputs that follow input from the interactor and describe anything about the IF world and events in it (including the inability of the player character to enact a particular action as commanded) are replies. Whether the text is a direct result of what the interactor typed or whether the event it describes occurred because of a timed or random event, it is considered a reply, as long as it describes the IF world. All other outputs-that is, all outputs that do not describe the IF world-are reports. "[MORE]"and" [press space to continue]" as they usually appear are reports, as are "Are you sure you want to quit?" "Your score is 0 out of a possible 100, in 2 moves," and "Brief descriptions."The two types of inputs and outputs, and the relationship between them and the roles of interactor and player character, are described in table I.I.
An exchange is one command and the reply that follows it; the reply in this case includes all references to the IF world in all the output, up until the next command is entered. As command and reply correspond to input and output, so exchange corresponds to cycle. The session text from For a Chatwe consists of an initial output (which contains the prologue as well as some text, like the author's name and email address, which is not descri
ptive of the IF world) followed by twenty-two exchanges; at the very end the interactor provided five inputs that were directives: save, the filename anchisel.sav, quit, the word yes to confirm quitting the program, and a press of the space bar (not shown) to end the program after "[Hit any key to exit.]" was output.
TABLE 1.1
The two simplest levels of diegesis and their relationship to input and output in interactive fiction
The following excerpt from a session text of Zork presents two exchanges, in bold:
>open the mailbox
Opening the small mailbox reveals:
A leaflet.
>ear the leaflet
I don't know the word "ear".
>eat the leaflet
Taken.
I don't think that the leaflet would agree with you.
In the first exchange, the player character is ordered to open a mailbox.This is accomplished and the result, that a leaflet is now visible, is narrated. Next is an input that is not a command, since it is not understood to refer to the IF world. This is a directive that produces a report, "I don't know the word `ear"'-revealing the limited vocabulary and brittle nature of interaction in early interactive fiction, problems that have only been mitigated in part.That cycle does not constitute an exchange. Finally there is a command for the player character to eat the leaflet. This results in the player character taking possession of it but not actually eating it. The reply seems bizarre in context; an understanding of the distinction between the diegetic and the extradiegetic, and between the command and directive, helps to explain why. "I don't think that the leaflet would agree with you," coming at this point in this session text, makes it seem as if the extradiegetic "I" in the previous report (the "I" who cannot understand certain words and translate them into actions) is now somehow within the IF world, counseling the player character not to eat a piece of direct mail.
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