The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [67]
Roles
Unlike other fantasy games, IF interacts with a role very differently. Montfort makes it clear that the normal forms of interaction don’t apply; not in the gaming sense, dramatic sense, or typical multiparty role-playing elements (2007:139). The “interactor,” as he calls the player/character relationship, isn’t played by the player—the character steers the player.
Creator Roles
The creator roles are confined primarily to the role of author. The computer also has a say in interactive fiction, including the parser and the game world itself.
Author
In IF, the character’s personality and even dialogue is restricted as appropriate to the plot. The author is in control, with the player picking a path from limited choices. In Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, the dice decide the outcome, which might be contrary to the narrative of the book. For example, a player could be told that his character nimbly runs through a hallway full of traps because he chose the right path as per the gamebook’s success/fail proposition, or he could fail a check involving a die roll tested against his character’s statistics. In some gamebooks, this might contradict the outcome; a character who nimbly avoided traps through narration could be too slow to avoid a single damaging attack later. Generally speaking, since the rules were entirely adjudicated by the player, it didn’t matter very much. A player could “cheat” at any time.
Some gamebooks had “paradise” pages whose sole purpose was to provide an interesting placeholder should a player flip through the book without following the rules. There were even traps to catch players who jumped ahead and made decisions that would be impossible if they read the book properly. These traps punished the player with failure. It seemed gamebook authors were divided as to whether or not a player should stick strictly to the letter of the law when it came to the gamebook’s structure.
Parser
Montfort breaks IF down specifically into two components, parser and world. The parser interprets natural language and filters it so that it affects the world— it is the arms and legs, eyes and ears for the player. A major factor of early IF is the loss of vision; in Zork, darkness meant death by Grue (Douglass 2007:131).
The parser is the vehicle through which the player interacts with IF, but it is not a personality unto itself. The traditional narrative of protagonist, reader, and narrator found in fiction, and the role of game master and player found in tabletop role-playing games, is reflected in IF through player, protagonist and narrator (Montfort 2003:30).
Text-based parsers acclimate players to a certain style of play that carried over to MUDs:
It is probably due to Zork that I actually tried RetroMUD. Further, interactive fiction is similar enough in its setup that it helped me transition to RetroMUD smoothly. While the text is much more vast in MUDs due to channels and new things occurring constantly, the idea felt basically the same and the interface felt familiar. Further, understanding the importance of proper syntax is a huge step in both IFs and MUDs. I also enjoyed the problem solving of gamebooks, and would read them over and over again.... Yes, there is an all or nothing mentality, I love puzzles and therefore that style of play was fun for me. I somewhat viewed them as a book I could interact with, and that idea appealed to me on many levels [Simes 2010].
These levels of frame help shape the player’s involvement in the game by creating agency—IF that communicates too frequently with the player instead of the protagonist switches the player out of the frame of the fantasy universe and reminds him he is playing a game. Thus the parser, while not actually a character, acts as a filter between the player and the other frames. Clunky, ineffective parsers can make achieving agency difficult