The Pleasure of the Text Adventure

In order to get a better understanding of interactive narrative, I tried playing ZORK 1. I think this was my first time to play interactive narrative online by myself. To tell the truth, while playing the game, I became a bit irritated. This was probably because I felt that the game was somewhat restricting to me. Although it is true that I can type out anything I want to, and the narrative depends on me, I did not feel completely independent. Some of the simplest words that I typed was not understood by the computer, and in order to get through the game, I had to give up some movements, or follow the requirements that the computer will probably expect. Therefore, I partly feel that interactive fiction is deceiving us to think that the users have a chance to move around freely. Really, the narrative is already decided, and the user plays the game in some sense ‘interactively’, predicting the next movement we should take.

Hypertext reminds me of a Japanese novel called “なんとなく、クリスタル” (Somewhat, Crystal). This is a novel nominated as Bungei-shou. This novel is full of annotation – there are almost three annotations in one line!! I couldn’t believe that this novel was praised, because I felt that the annotations were useless, and bothers the story. (Many critics say that because of the annotation, the novel was given attention). The annotations in this book were not the general information, but moreover, the personal opinion of the author. I think that is why I felt they were unnecessary.
(This is just an example of one novel, so I know that hypertext is not always like this.)


To tell the truth, because I am not a technical person, I thought that interactive fiction and hypertext fiction is both just kind of comouter game. However, because their approach is quite different, overall I agree with Montfort’s opinion that they are different.
But at the same time, it also gives me a similar impression too. The narrative is already decided, and users move around in that limited space. The moving around action differs by pushing the buttons, or typing out the words.Although it is hard to decide whether the two are different or not, I think interactive fiction gives us an expectation that we have a possibility to choose by ourselves, more than hypertext fiction.