Author’s Statement: Austin College Hangover (Interactive Fiction)

15May10

Originally, my interactive fiction (IF) was going to be massive. I wanted to do an IF that would take you all over the Austin College campus. The premise was you partied too hard and drank too much. You have to go around campus to piece together your night. As you do move around campus, the campus police are after you and you have to figure out why. You then have to clear your name by finding the culprit who put the laundry detergent in the fountain. As you talked to friends in the morning and found different things, you could finally figure out what happened last night (and seeing how epic your night truly was). I had a bunch of different mini games planned in the IF to finally end the game. Although this was the case, my one downfall was the fact that i had never used the program Inform before.

The program that i made the If on, Inform, was not as simple as it looked. With over 25 chapters in the help menu, there is a lot more to Inform then you would originally think. You have to learn what works within Inform and what the program does not recognize. Working through the three chapters took me over an hour. Starting a week in advance did not give me enough time to do anything on the scale that i was looking at. If i had taken a class on Inform, I believe i could have accomplished this massive IF in about a week. The code that you write for inform is very logical and requires a lot of time to figure out.

Needless to say, the IF that i put together is much smaller. I used the buildings WCC (Couches area and Bookstore), Wynne Chapel, Caruth (Entrance and Lobby), Administration Building, Hopkins Social Science Center and Collin Fountain. The mini games within the IF are finding a shirt, crawling through the window, picking up a key and using it, turning on the lights and confiscating items from a student. Although these mini games were not as complicated as I had originally planned, I think they are good for the plot and help advance the ideas behind it.

Once again, one thing I was amazed about was the ability for someone like myself to create an IF, even on a somewhat basic level. I took on Inform almost entirely by myself and was still able to create a game with a plot I designed. I had no idea about Inform until I downloaded it on my computer. With only the help menu and a few tips from my professor I was able to figure out how to operate the program.

I hope my audience will see with some time and effort that any one can participate in our culture. Today things are so accessible to anyone, as long as you take the time and energy to learn them. With the internet and computers our culture is participatory to almost anyone. Also, I hope my audience who probably are not IF pros can somewhat easily access my IF without having to rack their brain over commands. There are also many hints within the IF about what to do.

In talking about IFs that we did earlier, Shade and Adventure, they were much more exploratory and commands were harder to figure out than I believe my IF is. For this reason, I am somewhat glad that I made my IF the way i did. When i played these two IFs I easily became upset and quit, and i am hoping that the same wont happen for my story.

One text that talks about IFs and that was assigned during class was by Nick Montfort titled Toward a Theory of Interactive Fiction. In it he gives four main components to a successful IF, which i believe that my IF includes. They are…

a text-accepting, text-generating computer program;

a potential narrative, that is, a system which produces narrative during interaction;

a simulation of an environment or world; and

a structure of rules within which an outcome is sought, also known as a game.

Another reading done for class by Nick Montfort is Interactive Fiction. In the first two paragraphs he talks about IF’s being a game or a story. Although he argues that the terms are interchangeable, I would argue that most IFs are a story. You are working your way through a story, to get to the end. There are game components but without the storyline there is no plot and no end product you would be working for.

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