Blog: Games or literature?

    This week the textbook chapter and the article "Good literature can come in digital forms" better helped me understand interactive fiction as a combination of games and hypertext writing. What I love is how varied these games can be in their methods for conveying plots, emotions, characters, and tropes to interacts through different elements. While some rely on the classic adventure method like Zork and Colossal Cave Adventure traveling through tunnels and collecting objects, others are based more in dialogue or interactions with NPCs. Others simply have users unwind a story rather than finding the 'solution' to the work. My dad said he played Zork when it came out and he thought it was very cool, but I'm not a big video game person and I struggle with enjoying games that block off areas or make difficult challenges just for me to learn more about the world I'm in or my own character. My favorite game is Animal Crossing or Mario Kart, so I found Zork difficult at first. Eventually I made my way into a canyon. I did enjoy the witty responses Zork would give me though: 

    Something from the textbook that really caught my attention was Nick Montfort's Ad Verbum. I played this for a bit and enjoyed the alliteration puzzles, and that it was within a house that was easy to navigate, rather than the big whole world of Zork. Montfort also had funny responses, writing that reminded me a bit of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which seems to be a common theme in the popular IF games. I also wanted to look at Emily Short's Galatea. In this IF work you are interacting with an animate marble statue, asking her questions and telling her things. Short says eventually this will lead to a multitude of different endings, and Galatea will react differently based on previous interactions in the playing. I liked how I was stationary in this work, instead of moving around a world map I cannot see, but I also found it difficult to ask the right things. I didn't find an ending yet. But the game functioning as a conversation is really interesting, and the textbook describes it as "a story telling system more than a game". The prose was beautiful, and made me want to investigate further to understand Galatea more. 

    What I do like about these works is you can scroll up through your playing and see all actions and dialogue that has happened, but there's no saving. I accidentally closed Ad Verbum and lost all progress :(