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Janet Murray uses the term “cyberdrama” in From Game Story to Cyberdrama (2004:4) to clarify how linear storylines have evolved over computerbased mediums to accommodate multiple approaches to contests and puzzles. A perhaps less limiting title for gamebooks and interactive fiction, coined by Espen Aarseth, is “ergodic literature,” which he defines as dynamic texts where the reader must perform specific actions to generate a sequence that can vary with each reading.

Interactive fiction eventually made the leap to graphics with mixed results. Although there were some notable achievements, the flexibility of a text-based medium largely dominated the IF field. One memorable exception is Dragon’s Lair, a graphical hypertext arcade game that featured Don Bluth’s animation controlled by precise movements of the joystick. The player directed the protagonist, Dirk the Daring, when certain hints appeared on the screen. The events were always pre-scripted. There was never any uncertainty as to whether Dirk would live or die as a result of the player’s actions, only whether or not the player would select the right path quickly enough in response to the game’s cues. As a result, Dragon’s Lair was considerably more thrilling to watch than to play (Costikyan 2007:8).

Dragon’s Lair’s linear style of play is a common complaint levied against IF games. Although there is the illusion of total freedom, characters are actually bound by the parser. Players might consider a wide variety of solutions, but only the ones determined by the parser’s filter are possible choices (Barton 2008:27).

History

The predecessor to IF can be found in “literary machines,” vehicles through which text could be created in a nonlinear fashion. The very first examples of these sorts of literary machines were used for divination, the I Ching being one example (Montfort 2003:66). In Western culture, alchemist Ramon Lull created a physical text-generating machine that created three-letter combinations. For much of history, literary machines were largely limited to religious purposes until the early 20th century, when artists took up the mantle.

In 1958, the nonfiction instructional series TutorText’s first volume, The Arithmetic of Computers, was printed (Douglass 2007:134). In 1961, Marc Saporta published Composition No. 1. It was actually a box of 150 loose pages, meant to be shuffled and read in any order. The text implied enough to let the reader fill in the blanks, thus crafting a story. A similar shuffled story would be created in 1999 by Eric Zimmerman and Nancy Nowacek, Life in the Garden (Zimmerman 2007:81).

The gamebook format was used by Julio Cortazar in 1964 for Rayuela. Raymond Queneau, a Frenchman, concocted several devices, most notably 1967’s A Story As You Like It. Corgi publishers continued the tradition in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s with a series titled Trackers.

The variant best known to readers in America is probably the Choose Your Own Adventure series. This was introduced with The Cave of Time in 1979 by Edward Packard, the first entry in the series. It was turned into a graphical adventure game by Bantam Software in 1985 (Montfort 2003:71).

The “Dark Age” of computer role-playing game development, including the surge in IF games, began in the early 1970s. It was so named by Matt Barton (2008:28) because many of the games are lost to history.

Hunt the Wumpus, written in 1972 by Gregory Yob, established a mazelike fantasy game wherein an archer hunted for the mysterious wumpus. The game was noteworthy in several respects. It was a map-based game that used a three-dimensional space—a dodecahedron, which just happens to be the same dimensions of a twelve-sided die in Dungeons & Dragons.

A subsequent entry into IF was named, appropriately enough, DND (Glenday 2008:166). It was coded in the TUTOR language for the PLATO system by Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood (Glenday 2008:156). Created in 1974, DND was the third dungeon crawl of its kind for PLATO. It contained custom characters,