Text Based Interactive Fiction and Computational Linguistics

Interactive ction (IF) or text adventures are text-based computer games. After a short introduction I will explain some details of an IF authoring system. As an illustration I will give an outline of my own project. I will conclude by discussing some scientiic attempts to improve the genre using theories of artiicial intelligence and computational linguistics. 1 What is interactive ction (IF) ? \IF means a lot of diierent things to diierent people. (...) IF is an artform, a work of love. I use the term to refer to text adventures exclusively. So, IF is to graphic games what books are to Network television. They are geared towards a more cerebral audience. The people that write IF usually have a deep-set love for language and its nuances. We are not satissed with a few little mouse icons as a user interface. Instead we try to harness as much natural language as we can." Wilson 94: 2] A text adventure consists of a parser that understands the input typed by the player and a considerable amount of text output which tells the player about the story, gives descriptions of places and objects and the eeects of his/her actions. The input usually has the form of imperative sentences which cause an actor in the story to change the state of a model world. In many games it is possible to communicate with other actors. The player usually achieves the goal of the game by solving puzzles; this often takes much time. For that reason the current state of the game can be saved to disc and later restored. Like most human inventions IF was developed by simulating nature. A physicist, Patricia Crowther, found a hidden way into the Mammoth Cave, a huge cave in the Kentucky karst. \Patricia's husband, Willie Crowther, wrote a computer simulation of his favourite region, Bedquilt Cave, in FORTRAN in the early 1970s. (...) A colleague of the Crowthers (at a Massachusetts computing rm), Don Woods, stocked up the caves with magical items and puzzles, inspired by a role-playing game." Nelson 95: 3] The result, the rst text adventure named \Colossal Cave", can still be played. It is available at the if-archive (for the URL see the references). In the 80s, the two biggest companies, Magnetic Scrolls (UK) and Infocom (USA) had some commercial success, but in the 90s the genre disappeared from the software stores-it was not …