What is Interactive Fiction?

The genre that has also
been labeled "text adventure" and "text game" is
stereotypically thought to offer dungeons, dragons, and the ability for readers
to choose their own adventure. While there may be dragons here, interactive
fiction (abbreviated "IF") also offers utopias, revenge plays,
horrors, parables, intrigues, and codework, and pieces in this form resound
with and rework Gilgamesh, Shakespeare, and Eliot as well as Tolkien. The
reader types in phrases to participate in a dialogue with the system, commanding
a character with writing. Beneath this surface conversation, and determining
what the computer narrates, there is the machinery of a simulated world,
capable of drawing the reader into imagining new perspectives and understanding
strange systems. (Nick Montfort)

Just like hypertext, Interactive
Fiction allows the reader to create its own plot, but this time by asking
the questions they want. Galatea
is a work by Emily Short. The piece allows the reader to interact with an
animated statue created by Pygmalion. The reader is told that they are entering
an art gallery and that this art work is the only one under the spot light and that
they have to get the statue to turn around and look at them. By interacting
with the work and asking the statue questions, you are able to figure things
out about her and the reasons why she is not turning. The way in which each
reader interprets the answers in part of the blurring that Landow speaks about
in his article. Even though there are very limited commands in the form in which
you phrase your question, the reader is allowed to take the conversation
anywhere. The statues response could be positive or negative. Galatea does
refuse to answer question if they are not phrased correctly, but this allows
the reader to re-invent the question, thus becoming a co-author. The reader is
essentially re-writing Galatea every
time they read the work.

1. Non-Linear story telling (Hypertext)
2. Landow & Hypertext
3. Coover
4. Conclusion
5. Introduction
6. What is Digital Literature?
7. The reader turns into a collaborating author