<!--
	Book Title: Digital Deli
	Book Subtitle: The comprehensive, user-lovable menu of computer lore, culture, lifestyles and fancy.
	Book Editor: Steve Ditlea
	Publisher: Workman Publishing Company, Inc., New York
	Date: 1984
	Transcription by Steve Derby
	Excerpt: (Word Salad) Interactive Fiction and the Future of the Novel, pp. 174-76
	Article Authors: Michael Berlyn and Marc Blank
-->

---

This is an excerpt from:

Berlyn, Michael and Marc Blank. "Interactive Fiction and the Future of the Novel."
	<em>Digital Deli: The comprehensive, user-lovable menu of computer lore,
	culture, lifestyles and fancy</em>, edited by Steve Ditlea, Workman Publishing Company, Inc.,
	1984, pp. 174-76.

---

<img class="float-right" src="/public/img/articles/digital-deli-interactive-fiction/book-with-disks.png" alt="Cartoon of a book with diskettes as pages">

The novel of the future is here. Exclusively on personal computers.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to be an adventurer —
not just someone you read about, but someone you can truly become —
there are worlds waiting to unfold their mysteries. Fictional worlds,
where you are no longer limited to reading about characters. Worlds of
words, where you participate far beyond turning a page to see what
happens next.

Picture this: You slip a floppy disk into your home computer and are
greeted by a brief text describing who and where you are. When you're
done reading, you are transported to that place where anything you want
to have happen can happen — in a fictional universe with which you can
interact.

Say you find yourself in a room with a balcony. You might type in a simple
instruction like <span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps;">go to the balcony</span>
and the story will go to its next setting. If you encounter another character
in the story or find some object that may be critical to your progress, you
might type something like <span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps;">ask
mr. robner about mrs. robner</span> and the story will respond to your commands.
The computer tells you what happens as a result, and waits for you to decide what
you'd like to do next.

## The Interactive Reader

Interactive fiction is similar to ordinary novels in only two ways:
both communicate with you through prose and both are fiction. But
that's where the similarity ends. The experience of reading a book
or watching a movie, play or television program is passive. Interactive
fiction is never passive.

The concept of "story" or "plot" in interactive fiction differs from
that in novels or screenplays. You don't watch or read about someone
doing something. You do it yourself. The "story" is not waiting for you
to walk through it; instead it grows dynamically with each decision you make.

Interactive fiction could only be written on and experienced through a
computer. Primitive distant relations exist in book form — "decision
novels" — but their relationship to true interactive fiction is as close
as a calculator's might be to a computer. Reading a decision novel is much
like walking along a path: when you come to a fork in the path, you must decide
on the left path or the right path. You cannot leave the path. Decision books
look a lot more like novels than interactive fiction. They are cleverly woven
stories that overlap at certain points and they are a far cry from being
interactive. They do allow you a choice, a "decision," but what happens if you
want to do something that is not one of the preconceived choices?

Only a computer can create a world where, at each turn, you can make thousands
of decisions. Decision books pale in comparison. The computer produces interactions
between yourself (as the main character in the story), other characters, objects
and changing situations. Your current location, whether it's a small shack, a tent
in the desert or a magical castle, is a small part of the computer-mediated
environment. You can move around this world and explore. Each new place offers new
things to be done.

Characters other than your own can also walk around through this environment.
They may have their own goals and can follow their own machinations. They can walk
around independently (if you are not in a location when a character walks through
it, you might not even know of his existence). If a character walks through a room
in which you are standing, you can choose to ignore him or interact with him.

Objects sitting on tables — even the very tables themselves — can be manipulated
by your character if you so direct. Want your character to look under the table?
Simple. Just type <span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps;">look under the table</span>.

<img style="display: block; margin: auto; max-width: 100%;" src="/public/img/articles/digital-deli-interactive-fiction/computer-with-books.jpg" alt="A computer surrounded by books">

Writers of interactive fiction create a small universe in which there is
consistency, even to the smallest detail. A simple example would be a container.
Let's say you're in the wilderness and you're thirsty. There's a stream nearby,
so you go over and take a drink. But what happens in a few hours, when you've
wandered away from the stream and get thirsty again? You can't carry water around
in your hands. In fact, the computer might object:
<span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps;">you try to pick up the water, but
it leaks through your fingers</span>. So you need something in which to keep the
water. You might run across an old tin can sitting by the side of the road. You
might also find a canteen. Which one should you use?

## The Adventure Begins

The roots of interactive fiction can be traced to Adventure, first written as
an experiment on a mainframe and later a popular game when translated for personal
computers. Adventure allowed players to type in two words at a time — almost always
a verb and a noun. This sentence structure severely limited interaction. The parser,
the part of the computer program that was trying to understand what was being typed
in, was a very primitive beast; it was looking for a verb/noun pair —
<span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps;">fill canteen</span> — and that was the
only thing it accepted. The limitation of interacting with a complex world by using
simple commands became a problem.

Many people attempted to imitate the original Adventure. Indeed, so many programmers
were fascinated by this type of interaction that they were responsible for the birth
of an entire genre of software known as adventure games, in which the player
communicates with the computer by typing in simple commands; the computer then
responds with whatever results seem appropriate.

How are interactive fiction and the old adventure games different? After all, they
are both interactive — the computer does respond to your input — and they both
expect your input to be in the form of a sentence. One difference is that in an
adventure-type game you might type <span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps;">open
trunk</span>, while in interactive fiction you might instruct the program:
<span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps;">break the lock with the rock, then open
up the trunk</span>.

Zork was the first game to include a sophisticated full-sentence parser that
allowed for fairly complex input. It also introduced the concept of having things
happen at a preset time, whether the player liked it or not. Unfortunately, Zork
did little with these concepts, but its progeny have done wonders in making these
games into interactive fiction.

## Of Time and Words

Interactive fiction goes beyond adventure games with two important elements: a
time stream and autonomous characters. When you read a story or a novel, a sense
of time is created by the author. It's as if you are plunged into a moving stream
and carried along by the current. There is a feeling of moving inexorably toward
an ending, of situations unfolding as a direct result of the passage of time. In
some fiction pieces the invisible clock ticks slowly, while in others the clock
seems to speed along. While the character you are reading about is out shopping at
the store, his house could be robbed. Or the store could be robbed while he was
there, making him an eyewitness.

<figure class="float-left">
<img src="/public/img/articles/digital-deli-interactive-fiction/deadline-packaging.jpg" alt="Deadline packaging">
	<figcaption><em>Deadline, a locked-door mystery complete with coroner’s
		report and evidence, was the first work of interactive fiction to
		feature characters independently following a time stream.</em></figcaption>
</figure>

Without this sense of time, of movement, a piece of prose would not be fiction —
it would simply be prose. There would be little if any driving force to get us to
turn the pages and finish reading. The same holds true in interactive fiction. This
driving force, this time stream that carries us along, is in one sense the story's
plot.

Without a sense of time, the game may be interactive, but it is certainly not
fiction. In some interactive fiction, as day gradually becomes night, the character
you portray can experience hunger, thirst or fatigue. In some cases looking under a
bed takes less time than does walking across a large wooded area. The time stream
becomes more obvious and more significant when autonomous characters are introduced.
If you are the main character in a mystery story, then who are the suspects? Aren’t
they characters, too? If you ask an upsetting question, shouldn’t they react
accordingly? If one of them realizes you're following him, shouldn't he change his
course of action?

Once secondary characters in the stories stood up and walked around the environment,
something strange happened to the program writers. They realized they had something
more than just a "nice feature" for another game: what they were working on was, at
least on one level, much more than a game.

Picture this: You're stranded on a desert island, doing your best to survive. You
decide to explore the island completely, making a map of virtually every square inch
of the place. You encounter obstacles — cliffs to be scaled, lagoons to be crossed —
and you fashion makeshift ropes and fish hooks. The problems are all solvable.

When characters who move about the environment were introduced in interactive
fiction, people stopped playing the programs as games or puzzles and started
feeling and experiencing them as stories. Deadline, the breakthrough game that
offered this feature, is still one of the most popular pieces of interactive fiction
software. And there have been others, each a little more intelligent in how the person
playing the protagonist interacts with the rest of the characters in the story. The
complexity of interaction continues to deepen, but we will eventually reach a point
beyond which more complete interactions would be impossible with the current generation
of personal computers.

Parser technology, teaching the computer to understand what the player types at the
keyboard, is rapidly improving. At present, to elicit information from a character,
a player might type: <span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps;">mrs. robner, tell
me about george</span>. In the near future, the same player should be able to type
more complex sentences: <span style="font-variant-caps: small-caps;">mrs. robner,
tell me if george likes to eat peaches</span>.

The medium of interactive fiction is still in its infancy, but it is growing by
leaps and bounds. There are mysteries, juveniles, science fiction, adventures and
fantasies. Other genres may follow, but for now there's something for everyone who
likes to read a good book. And for people who like to be in a good book, the future
is just starting.
