<!--
	Title: Computers: Stepping into the Story
	Author: Jamie Murphy
	Source: Time Magazine
	Date: May 13, 1985
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

In his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, Author Ray Bradbury foresaw the day when
books would be replaced by various forms of high-tech entertainment,
including soap operas in which the viewer could participate. Books are still
very much with us, but in a twist of fate that even the prophetic Bradbury did
not anticipate, a new computer game named for his book allows players to
take part in -- and influence the outcome of -- a drama set in the police-state
world of Fahrenheit 451.

Bradbury is only one of several well-known authors who are collaborating with
computer software companies inadapting their novels to "interactive fiction,"
an electronic form of literature that transforms the reader into an
active participant in the plot. A version of Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous
with Rama is available in interactive form on a floppy disk (Telarium;
$39.95). Michael Crichton (The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man) has actually
created a software work from scratch: Amazon (Telarium; $39.95), which
transports the player and a sidekick parrot named Paco into the jungles of
South America in search of a lost city and hidden emeralds. Infocom, the
Cambridge-based software company that pioneered interactive fiction, has
released an electronic version of Douglas Adams' popular novel The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ($39.95), which last week jumped to No. 1 on
Billboard's list of top computer software.

While the characters and situations in most of the games are taken directly
from the books on which they are based, players of interactive fiction respond
to, and actually create, variances in the plot line by typing commands on the
computer screen. For example, when Fahrenheit 451 is loaded into the computer,
the following words appear on thes creen: "You are in a clearing in dense
woods in the southeast corner of Central Park. A pond is to the west. An arrow
 path leads north along the shore of the pond and to the north you can hear
occasional low growls. Near you is a pile of dead leaves." If the player
should then type, "Examine the leaves," the program responds, "Under the
leaves you see an old rusted grating set into a patch of broken concrete."
And the adventure begins.

Such verbal interplay is made possible by a parser, the part of the computer
program that interprets players' commands. The first adventure-style programs
contained parsers capable only of responding to simple noun-verb combinations
such as Go north, Take sword, or Kill troll. In the late 1970s, however, Marc
Blank, who is now a vice-president at Infocom, and a colleague at M.I.T.'s lab
for computer science, devised more sophisticated parsers withthe aid of an
artificial intelligence language called MDL (pronounced mud-dle). Then, in
1979, Blank and newly-formed Infocom released Zork I, the first of the Zork
trilogy of interactive fiction games, with a parser that recognizes
adjectives, prepositions and pronouns as well as nouns and verbs. The improved
parser permits players to display their literary bent by using more complex
commands. Zork I, for instance, will respond to more expansive instructions
(example: pick up the rusty knife and put it in the sack). Partly as a result,
Zork I became the best-selling disk-based game of all time (500,000 copies).

Infocom's sophisticated parsers have vocabularies of 600 to 1,200 words per
game. In fact, the games are so talkative that the company refuses to illustrate
the text of its adventures. Says Blank: "The pictures that your mind can make
are better than any computer can create." While most other publishers
provide computer-generated images that appear on the screen along with the
written story, their games, for the most part, can accommodate only simple commands.

Pictures or no pictures, writing interactive fiction is not an easy task.
Crichton and two associates labored for more than a year and a half to create
Amazon; most of the time was spent developing the flow charts needed to provide
the variations in the complex plot structure. For Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury
supplied programmers with more than 100 possible responses to questions that
players are able to pose to "Ray," an intelligent computer that figures
heavily in the story line.

Does the participation of big-name novelists qualify interactive games as a
true literary form? This question was addressed last month at a meeting of the
Popular Culture Association in Louisville. Asked Peter Jordan, professor
of English at Tennessee State University and chairman of one of two panel
discussions on the subject: "Are these games just electronic Hula-Hoops? Or
will they last and evolve into a significant new form of human expression?
"Infocom's Blank hedged, defining adventure games as "a new medium that has
its roots in the literary tradition, in the same way movies, plays and operas
are based on literature." Panelist Susan Spence, an editor of Data Decisions,
a computer magazine, was more direct. "The games are great," she said, "but I
wouldn't call them literature."

Still, the games might help Americans become more literate. Bradbury is
confident that he and his fellow authors can inject "strength, wit and magic"
into the form. Then, he says, "by playing a literary game, people find out about
literature along the way. When they're all done with the game, I hope their
next stop will be the library."
