Tag Archives: Interactive Fiction

This reading spent an enormous amount of time defining as well as distincting one thing from another, and I have managed to walk out of this being thoroughly confused as to what this reading was trying to express. I think a diagram showing how all the terms (Interactive fiction, hyperlink fiction, text adventure) were related and different would have been much more easily understood.
Montfort did express a desire for works of Interactive fiction to be studied more critically, however in the effort to define the form, he did little to motivate the reader the IF’s are worthy of being examined. I have gained a better understanding of what interactive fiction is, but have not been moved to think it warrants academic study.
When defining hypertext fiction he writes, “A hypertext fiction is a system of fictional interconnect texts traversed using links. Hypertext fiction also does not maintain an intermediate, programmatic representation of the narrated world, as interactive fiction does.” Maybe I’m not understanding fully what he means by intermediate programmatic representation. Does he mean something visual portraying the world of the work of fiction? If not, I don’t see how a body of descriptive text can’t present a vision of a world.
Throughout this reading I kept on thinking of the Legend of Zelda games. Some of them have intricate storylines, many of the riddles and puzzles Montfort mentioned, as well as the idea of “gaurd fields” in our previous reading? So does that game count as interactive fiction, or does the absence of the player inputting text disqualify it?
Lastly I was intrigued when he quoted Nelson and the idea of multiple voices being present. I tend to equate my own voice with that of the character in the game, and never bothered to really pay attention to the narrative voice being different from one that gives an error message.