{"id":386,"date":"2004-05-27T15:33:35","date_gmt":"2004-05-27T19:33:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theoreti.ca\/?p=386"},"modified":"2004-05-27T15:33:35","modified_gmt":"2004-05-27T19:33:35","slug":"interactive-fiction-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=386","title":{"rendered":"Interactive Fiction Theory"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a title=\"Toward a Theory of Interactive Fiction\" href=\"http:\/\/nickm.com\/if\/toward.html\">Toward a Theory of Interactive Fiction<\/a> by Nick Monfort (2003) is an excellent and thorough paper on Interactive Fiction. A lot of what it does is define terms.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nSome of things I like are:<br \/>\n1. A discussion of the different types of players: the user, the player character, the narrator, and the voice of the system. Along with this is a discussion of world and rooms which makes useful distinctions and the point that in a game there can be multiple worlds.<br \/>\n2. A discussion of traversal, winning and losing.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Reaching a final reply that indicates the achievement of the IF work&#8217;s goal is <i>winning<\/i>, and a traversal that ends in such a reply is a <i>successful traversal<\/i>. Similarly, reaching a final reply that indicates failure is <i>losing<\/i>, which concludes an <i>unsuccessful traversal<\/i>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>3. A good discussion of the place of puzzles in IF. A puzzle has to have a goal (a solution) and has to be non-trivial. In this context he talks about scores, though to my mind scores have more to do with the player character.<\/p>\n<p>The reference is:<br \/>\nMontfort, Nick. 2003. &#8220;Toward a Theory of Interactive Fiction.&#8221; December 19. First published 8 January 2002. Available online at <a href=\"http:\/\/nickm.com\/if\/toward.html\">http:\/\/nickm.com\/if\/toward.html<\/a>. To appear in IF Theory, ed. Emily Short. St. Charles, Illinois: The Interactive Fiction Library. 2004.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Toward a Theory of Interactive Fiction by Nick Monfort (2003) is an excellent and thorough paper on Interactive Fiction. A lot of what it does is define terms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}