Term: "Interactive Fiction"


26 Sep 1995 22:43:12 GMT

ORIGINS OF "INTERACTIVE FICTION"

I'm selling off my old BYTEs. I was looking through them, and I found
the following article, which points to Adventure International as the
source of the term "Interactive Fiction":

Software Review
Interactive Fiction: Six Micro Stories
by Bob Liddil, The Programmer's Guild, POB 66, Peterborough NH 03458
BYTE Sep 1981, p. 436
Reproduced without permission. Hope this is fair use.

Adventure International has a new concept in computer simulation called
Interactive Fiction. The product I'm reviewing is a sampler of six
Interactive Fiction stories. The sampler is, of course, designed to whet
your curiosity about the full-length titles offered by the company.

Defined in its simplest terms, an Interactive Fiction episode is a story
that needs your responses to achieve its outcome. It goes far beyond
Adventure's two-word responses by encouraging you to input complete
sentences. I must confess that, at first, I was uncomfortable with the
new format. Gradually, though, I became accustomed to bantering with
the computer.

[snip...]

Interactive Fiction seems to be a stylized Eliza or Dr. Chips, both of
which are programs that cause the computer to act as if it understands
your input. While giving the illusion of intelligence, these scenarios
actually have a smaller vocabulary than the most basic Adventures. For
example, there's a story about a chance encounter in San Francisco.
You're in a park and you stumble upon a pretty girl who has dropped her books.
Her monosyllabic replies not only break the mood of the story, but sadly
attest to the lack of intelligence in the program. Don't misunderstand me;
these stories do have some redeeming qualities.

As in Eliza, the computer "psychiatrist," it is obvious that the program
zeros in on individual words, ignoring most of the input. The rest of the
stories in the sampler are similarly disappointing in their lack of
versatility; there are only a couple of ways each story can be played.

I suspect that Six Micro Stories is not an adequate showcase of the
Interactive Fiction concept. The stories fall far short of what the computer
community expects from Scott Adams.
[snip...]