Description of Session: Explore legacy text adventures, look at free TA development software, and collaborate on an example text adventure
We worked through the website textadventures.co.uk to play legacy text adventures, most popularly Zork I so we could develop an understanding of how interactive fiction works. Most TA begin with the player (you) being dropped into a world where the rules are not always apparent and you build an understanding of the rules and the world through your interactions with it. After we got a basic understanding of text adventures from a user’s perspective, we talked briefly about how the interactivity and the users complicity were important in the immersive experience and how this might relate to narrative history or creative writing. Then, we took a look at Quest, a free interactive fiction development tool that allows novices to publish text adventures. We worked with Quest to create a THATCamp text adventure, creating the rooms, items within the rooms, and exploring how we use conditional constructs (if/else/else if) to interact with the rooms, objects, and players.
