From Page to Screen - WRAP: Warwick Research Archive Portal ...

as follows:
!here are many forms of Interactive Fiction, but the one thing they have in common
1S that the reader is allowed some degree ofinteraction with the story. When we talk
about IF in this news group, we usually are talking about computer-based works of
fiction. A traditional book is not interactive -- you just read it from front to back, and
read the same text every time. {...] One goal ofIF developers is to take advantage of
the flexibility of the computer to facilitate the creation of new forms of
entertainment."
First developed in the late 1960s (such as Adventure, created in the Stanford University's
Artificial Intelligence Lab and located in a fantasy world inhabited by elves and wizards)"
these games were commercially distributed and made widely available for personal
computers in the late 1970s. Zork, for example, according to Charles Platt the first
commercially distributed interactive adventure game, originally written 1977 "by some
playful MIT {Massachusetts Institute of Technology] students using a US$400,000
mainframe">, was released commercially in 1980, came out on CD-ROM withgraphics in
1993 and is still available in many commercial and shareware versions.
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around
you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.
This is the beginning of Adventure, one of the first, and possibly best known of
traditional interactive fictions. Developed as early as 1970 and a decadent undertaking
when computing time on huge mainframe computers was rare and expensive, the
program understands a basic vocabulary of one or two word commands. The aim is to
finish the game by navigating through the landscape described and solve all the
problems and puzzles encountered. For this, it is often required to navigate the space in a
certain order to pick up necessary items or get certain information needed at a later
point) causality and linearity which stand in tension with the otherwise spatial nature of
the game.
37 FAQ of the Interactive Fiction Newsgroup at: http:\\www.if-infocom/FAQ.
38 Wooley, Virtual Worlds:, P.155.
39 Charles Platt, "Interactive Entertainment: Who writes it? Who Reads it? Who Need it?", Wired,
vol.j, nO.9 (September 1995), 145-149, 195-197(P.146).
For versions of both Adventure and Zork see: http:\\www.shareware.com.
Chapter 3 -page 104