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World

The world is the fictional universe which the parser effects and the player inhabits through his character. The more advanced the parser, the greater the media richness. Extremely advanced parsers could theoretically be inseparable from the world.

As in computer games, the computer program serves as referee or game master. Because the virtual world in which IF takes place is controlled by the computer, there is no need for a Dungeon Master. However, this didn’t keep developers from including a Dungeon Master as the nemesis in Zork III (Montfort 2003:132).

Participant Roles

We will cover player roles in more detail in the computer role-playing game chapter.

Player

In gamebooks, the player takes the role of reader, with limited ability to influence the world. We cover the reader role in the first chapter. In interactive fiction, the player role is similar to the CRPG player, which we cover in Chapter 7.

Character Roles

In gamebooks, the reader and main character are often the same, making each player character completely unique to that reader’s experience because he or she is formed through the player’s decisions (Newman 2007:100).

Although some gamebooks indicated that they were compatible with the Dungeons & Dragons system (a statement that would later be challenged in court), gamebooks generally cast the character in a role and expected him to stick with it. While the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks could conceivably be played by a random adventurer, most of the other variants could not. This is a necessity, if only because a character with unique powers like spells could not be accounted for in the span of a single gamebook.

The one-on-one adventure gamebook series published by TSR featured two books as part of a boxed set, designed for players. Each player takes a different book and controls different characters. They were generally set in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign worlds. Players took turns reading passages, occasionally fighting when they ended up in the same location within the shared game world. In addition to fighting each other, participants frequently acted as the game master in a role-playing session, controlling their opponents’ enemies. None of the books required dice, as the players would randomly shout out numbers and then cross-reference them on a chart. Some used rock-paper-scissors in a fashion similar to live action role-playing games. I purchased The Amber Sword of World’s End with the intent of playing against one of my friends, giving him one book (he was Uthract, Barbarian Warrior) and I kept the other (I was Garth, Master of the North). Unfortunately, we never got to play.

IF generally did not distinguish between the player and the character he played, keeping textual clues intentionally vague. This player representation, or avatar, is anonymous precisely because the player fills in the blank, making liberal use of the second person (Douglass 2007:129). In graphical worlds, this anonymity becomes increasingly less feasible because the media-rich environments are a barrier to casting the player-as-avatar (Castronova 2005:296).

Gender

The gender of the character in the early IF games was largely undetermined. This was probably as much to keep the game open-ended for either gender as it was a convenience for the programmers, who had to accommodate more descriptors as a result of the player character’s difference in gender. Even in those games that did allow gender, it wasn’t a major factor in the game itself (Montfort 2003:156).

One exception is Montfort’s own Book and Volume, which interprets gender from the name the player enters. By weighting the name against an algorithm, the game then changes its language to match the interpreted gender (2007:144).

Race

Generally speaking, the race of the character was as unimportant as the character’s gender. However, one form of IF stands out: The Knight Orc, published in 1987. The player took on the role of an orc named Grindleguts. Unlike other interactive fiction, The