Curveship: An Interactive Fiction System for Interactive Narrating

Interactive fiction (often called “IF”) is a venerable thread of creative computing that includes Adventure, Zork, and the computer game The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as well as innovative recent work. These programs are usually known as “games,” appropriately, but they can also be rich forms of text-based computer simulation, dialog systems, and examples of computational literary art. Theorists of narrative have long distinguished between the level of underlying content or story (which can usefully be seen as corresponding to the simulated world in interactive fiction) and that of expression or discourse (corresponding to the textual exchange between computer and user). While IF development systems have offered a great deal of power and flexibility to author/programmers by providing a computational model of the fictional world, previous systems have not systematically distinguished between the telling and what is told. Developers were not able to control the content and expression levels independently so that they could, for instance, have a program relate events out of chronological order or have it relate events from the perspective of different characters. Curveship is an interactive fiction system which draws on narrative theory and computational linguistics to allow the transformation of the narrating in these ways. This talk will briefly describe interactive fiction, narrative variation, and how Curveship provides new capabilities for interactive fiction authors. 1 Curveship and Its Contexts This paper addresses those interested in aesthetic and computational, work with language, whether or not they are familiar with interactive fiction or narrative theory. I describe the twofold motivation behind Curveship, explaining why I find interactive fiction compelling and why I find narrative variation a worthwhile capability for a literary computer system. I then sketch the way that Curveship works, pointing to aspects of the system that will, I hope, interest interactive fiction authors and also have relevance beyond interactive fiction. Several histories of interactive fiction are available, including book-length (Montfort 2003) and briefer ones (Nelson 2001, Montfort 2007a). This paper focuses on how interactive fiction works, and on explaining its conventions, rather than on detailing the history of the first interactive fiction, Adventure (written in 1976 by Will Crowther and Don Woods), the “mainframe” games that followed, interactive fiction in the commercial marketplace (including the many notable contributions of Infocom), and the surge in development by individual, non-commercial interactive fiction authors. This paper also doesn’t provide any information about how to download or run interactive fiction, and very little about how to play it, although several FAQs and other resources are available online with that information (IFWiki 2009, Aiken 2008, Cadre n.d.). After offering some of the motivation for this work, this paper provides a high-level introduction to Curveship and its capabilities. The details on narrative variation and on how it has been implemented computationally are available in the