From the Publisher: 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.
Cited By
- Gonzalez D and Gordon A Comparing Speech and Text Input in Interactive Narratives Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, (141-145)
- Bernstein M Storyspace 3 Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, (201-206)
- Styles M, Jung S, Eto C and Draper G An approach to hypertext fiction for mobile devices Proceedings of the 2nd workshop on Narrative and hypertext, (1-6)
- Fernández-Vara C From "open mailbox" to context mechanics Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games, (131-138)
- Ward A and Crowley R Story assembly in the R2aft dyslexia fluency tutor Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, (130-135)
- Siddle J "Choose your own architecture" - interactive pattern storytelling Transactions on pattern languages of programming II, (16-33)
- Koenitz H Towards a theoretical framework for interactive digital narrative Proceedings of the Third joint conference on Interactive digital storytelling, (176-185)
- Palmer J Ficticious Proceedings of the ACM international conference companion on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications companion, (61-68)
- Bernstein M Criticism Proceedings of the 21st ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia, (235-244)
- Mitchell A and McGee K Designing hypertext tools to facilitate authoring multiple points-of-view stories Proceedings of the 20th ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia, (309-316)
- Bernstein M On hypertext narrative Proceedings of the 20th ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia, (5-14)
- Takhtamysheva A, Porzel R and Krause M Games for games Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Human Computation, (38-39)
- Montfort N Curveship Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity, (55-62)
- Swain C The augmented conversation engine Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, (213-218)
- Rettberg S Games/gaming/simulation in a new media(literature) classroom Beyond Fun, (96-102)
- Hutchison A Where are my legs? Proceedings of the 2006 international conference on Game research and development, (104-111)
- Ladd B (2006). The curse of Monkey Island, Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, 21:6, (162-174), Online publication date: 1-Jun-2006.
- Walker J Feral hypertext Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia, (46-53)
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