Interactive Fiction: More than just Retro or Nostalgia

I'm sure many people have heard of Interactive Fiction, right?  Interactive Fiction some people might just call a relic of the very early days of computing, with popular games back then being the Colossal Cave Adventure, and of course the Zork series of games.  They are what some call Text Adventures, and while that is what they were once called, I don't really see many modern people using this specific phrasing anymore.  Modern Interface Fiction could to some be much more than a simple Text Adventure.  The only other thing I can think of which would allow someone to separate the two, would to consider the Choose-your-own-Adeventure series of books, pretty much the only fiction books I've actually ever read in my life.  It's those books, that felt more like a text-only video game were incredibly fun, and even had some game mechanics in some of the versions, like if you picked up a torch earlier, turn to page 50, otherwise turn to page 37.  This is what made these sort of fiction books to me to compelling to read, and escape into.  I was reading about this other character, but rather, I was that character I was reading about in the book, and when you consider these sort of books from that point of view, it's pretty mindblowing at what just a simple novel could instill.

Going Online

Not long after the first text adventure games were released on big mainframe computers did somebody wonder how a text adventure could translate to a multiplayer online game, and so the MUD, or Multi-User-Dungeon was born.  Unfortunately I never had the chance to ever experience these original general MUD services, as I wasn't even born when they were booming, and I was never made aware of them until my early 20s, just after the first graphical MMO released, Ultima Online.  There weren't that many active servers online by this time, but there were a lot of servers which I was able to check out briefly when first learning Debian, such as PennMUSH, among a few others.  A MUD felt more like an online Dungeons & Dragons session at the time, rather than a text adventure in some cases.  From what I've heard, is a lot of MUDs were really feature rich in the role-playing department, with either turn-based or active battle systems, and even Player-vs-Player.  Whereas text adventures usually focused on some sort of puzzle and story to follow, the MUD wasn't really built for that.  While you could definitely build such an experience in a MUD server, it is definitely built more around exploration, light puzzles, and combat.  There were also MUD servers built entirely for role-playing, think of LARPing, but inside a video game server.  The actual game world itself was just like a stage is to an actor, a place for all your characters in your group to act in character along to some sort of story.  One thing I wish I could actually do in No Man's Sky is find a fun group to LARP with in-game, I know it's a brief off-topic, but I thought I'd make a quick nod to this, is that in most graphical online games, nobody seems to ever use their imagination, as they just let the game and world do it all for them, which when I think too deeply into it, it's sad.  With No Man's Sky, it's very open and freeform, the actual game story, even more so in it's Creative mode is very background and 100% option, even a setting lets you skip the entire intro.  I think Hello Games actually has this intention from players.  Their upcoming game Light No Fire, there has been zero story, at least from what I've seen, and if there is, I feel that it might just be background.  With Light No Fire, Hello Games seems to be trying to encourage more imagination and creativity with player's telling their own stories.  It's like how Breath of the Wild refined Open World games at the time, with you see that in the distance, you can go there, and I feel that this will be that sort of feeling, but just not alone, as in Light No Fire, you'll be doing everything together, and being a part of larger story together.  At least this is what I believe the main intention Hello Games is trying to have with Light No Fire based on what's been revealed about it.

Accessible Video Games

Yesterday I decided to take another look at the Evennia MU* server, which is a server to build and host such online interactive fiction games, very advanced and modern MUD if you will.  I occasionally played around with the odd MUD server, and during my more intense Python days, I briefly looked at Evennia as well.  I never made any sort of public server using them, as I didn't have the skills, or even the idea of what I really wanted to build.  A few local servers I have are just fooling around with the game engines to better understand how they work, and one of my local servers is a replica of the Ocarina of Time world, but not populated or much more than just the room descriptions.  It was a way to learn more about map building, was to put together a memorable map from my memory, and it turned out fairly well.  Anyway, when looking at Evennia again today, I noticed something about it's screen reader capabilities, and then it hit me like a brick!  I began to wonder if people whom are visual impaired would be drawn to this sort of video game format due to it's overall format, and after a quick Google search, it was confirmed.  I'm not sure why I never really thought about this more before, I feel a bit bad now consider, it's like not noticing an entire minority, but I don't think that visual impaired people are brought up very often I guess, so I just don't think about it, it's not that I'm not trying to think of visual impaired people, or people with a visual impairment, it's just not predominately shown to me everyday.  I am in some ways visual impaired as I do need glasses to see far distances, and I know as I age, I'm not going to be keeping my same eyesight, but that really isn't the point I'm trying to make.

After realizing this, I began to really think about all the video games I personally enjoyed throughout the years that a visually impaired person might not have been able to enjoy.  I'm not sure how many video games are actually accessible, I have read that there are some ways for an image to be described, allowing some games to be spoken.  Which would mean that there would be some ways to experience titles that would have these sort of accessibly options.  However, when it comes to games in the Interactive Fiction or MUD format, it can definitely be a bit more natural.  As these games are more akin to reading a novel, or even how Skyrim was ported to Alexa, which I think allowed a lot of people to experience an Elder Scrolls game for the first time.  I think there should be more such ports of video games, like what they did for Skyrim.  There are now a lot of very capable game engines built that allow for the quick and easy building of vast interconnected game worlds like the one's featured in the Elder Scrolls games.  I think of a proper version were made for the upcoming Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel, that they should also consider building it into a fully functional Interactive Fiction.  Rather than choosing compass directions for example, it would be more like reading a novelization of the game, but also being able to interact with the medium along the way, making choices that will ultimately effect the overall narrative.  The potential of what could be done in such a format would be limitless, as Interactive Fiction can tell stories in any way that makes sense for the story itself.

Early Announcement

So, now that you've read all of that, do Interactive Fiction or MUDs spark an interest?  I could see an AI bot being able to help someone play a modern MUD, by reading the room's description to the player, and then allowing the player to say what they want to do in game, in which the AI could then translate those requested actions into MUD commands, and then the cycle repeats.  This could increase the overall accessibility of a MUD.  Anyway, that isn't even the announcement, just a random thought as I was writing this that I thought I'd mention.  The actual announcement is that soon IAmKevin.CA will have it's own MUD server!  This means that eager MUD players can engage together in a world that I am in the process of designing.  For anyone that knows me, I have developed some Interactive Fiction worlds, as with my Adventure Kernel, and one thought was to even add multi-player to the Adventure Kernel, but then I never did...  But, here comes Evennia falling back on my lap again, and now I think is the perfect time to try actually sitting down and trying to develop something that I think people will actually want to play.  I'm not much of an artist, so when it comes to graphic design in games, it's either stock, or unfortunately ripped in some cases, sorry Richard, but I really loved Ultima VI, if it makes you feel any better, it was a huge pain to fix every single tile, as the engine I was using uses a 20 square tile size, and Ultima VI used a 16 square tile size, so I had to awkwardly and painstakingly fix so many pixels until it looked as good as it did...  It was... exhausting to say the least.  Anyway, with Evennia, I don't need to worry about drawing any art assets, and all I need to focus on is building a world, and writing some sort of narrative for that world.  I actually have a rather interesting idea, but won't be spoiling anything here.  One thing I am definitely planning on adding into the MUD server is the Original Zelda map, with each of it's sections described, so that someone who may never have played the original Zelda, can now play it, with friends, on a MUD server.  I ported Zelda to AGT a couple years ago, but the descriptions weren't that great I admit, I sort of rushed it, but in this new MUDified version, I'll be polishing it all up to make it a really amazing Zelda experience for everyone to enjoy.  And the best part?  It'll be free, and use absolutely zero Nintendo graphical assets.  Once the map for the first game has been completed, I might even consider building out the rest of the series in a text-accessible way so that anyone can enjoy the video game series I grew up and fell in love with from the very first game.  I feel like I'm giving myself too much of all tall order here, as I wasn't even able to complete Zelda in AGT...  Perhaps I should finish that one first, I'll ponder more.

This yet to be fully announced MUD project isn't just the original Zelda map though, so stay tuned for when that releases hopefully soon.  I am still playing around with the Evennia engine at this time, trying to understand how I'll be putting together everything, and seeing which contribs can work, and how they are used.