Mike Mulvey
Dr. Liu
Electronic Literature
April 14, 2010
Interacting With Interactive Fiction
When I first began creating my interactive fiction work "Institution", I noticed many of the similarities between writing IF and other types of literature. The process of constructing the basic framework of the story was in many ways the same. The task of creating interactive elements within the world of "Institution" on the other hand was drastically different than anything I have ever written before. In order for me to properly explain how I went about assembling this piece, I feel it is necessary to elaborate a bit on the theme of my story and some of the interactive elements I tried to incorporate.
The piece "Institution", opens with the player in a chair inside a cell in a mental institution. My goal was to give the player a sense of being trapped, in an effort to foster a feeling of wanting to escape. The story follows the player's character "Jack", in his attempt to escape from a mental institution aided by his mysterious friend "Sam". The character Sam claims to be Jack's best friend of years, and provides valuable advice to the player throughout the game. The tips provided by Sam are critical to discovering how to escape. Along the way, the player encounters other patients and "Dr. Landau", the chief psychiatrist of the institution. As the player continues to weave through the maze of rooms in the Institution, following Sam, it becomes obvious that no one else can see Sam, other than the player. By the end of the story the player is forced to kill Sam, at which point the game ends and Dr. Landau's dialogue reveals that Jack is actually a paranoid schizophrenic who was incarcerated for killing his best friend Sam over five years ago. After Sam is killed the game starts over again. For this reason, I found the prologue feature to be particularly useful, but the inter actor will only appreciate its meaning after playing through once.

The interactive elements helped me create a world in which the player was trapped by creating simple interactive objects like locked doors. I found it very easy to create simple inter-actable objects such as doors.

While I found creating objects with detailed descriptions to be very easy, much to my chagrin, creating other elements of the story was very difficult.
I can attribute most of my criticisms to the Inform 7, program itself. While I found the software to be interesting and useful, there were several problems that ultimately derailed the creative process. For example, every time I wrote a line of the story that Inform 7 could not understand I was shown an error prompt.
The error prompt was helpful in that it identified what line the program couldn't understand, and the manual reference, it didn't help me in any way repair the mistake. The instructions in the manual were far too basic and didn't elaborate on any of the more complex actions such as dialogue. After numerous error messages and consulting the Inform 7 Handbook repeatedly, I was still confused and had no solutions. I was only able to discover the solution through the process of trial and error. I freely admit that trial and error is a tried and true method that will eventually lead to success, but coupled with the frustrations of writing a piece of literature, I found it was more than I could take. I did eventually discover the solutions to the problems I faced while constructing dialogue with a little help from the manual.
The trial and error method, in many ways detracted from the whole experience as a whole. I don't wish to be too quick to criticize interactive fiction because of my inexperience as a user, but I feel that help system within the Inform 7 could have been better. In most cases, my errors were grammatical in nature. The manual was helpful in that it provided a few basic examples, but I believe that I would have been notably less frustrated, had Inform 7 been able to identify missing punctuation such as periods and semi-colons. In short my criticisms are more technical and nature and can primarily be attributed to my own lack of understanding of the intricacies of the program.
All criticisms aside, I found the software to be very useful in the creative process. To its credit, writing IF was unlike any other writing experience I had before. As I stated early, the ability to create interactive elements in my story kept me interested throughout the whole process. My initial fear was that I would have to alter elements of the story to make it work as an IF piece. I was surprised to find that as I was writing, I was actually adapting interactive elements to fit with the story. I also feel that the functions of the program helped me construct plot elements. As I mentioned above, at the end the player learns that he or she must kill Sam to finish the game. After Sam dies the whole piece starts from the beginning. I felt that this was appropriate as the theme is about repeating the same behaviors and actions and expecting different results. For this reason, I am willing to make that argument that IF allows the writer to create a world of fiction that would be impossible with other forms of literature. I actually found myself more inspired to continue writing each time I corrected one of the errors in my text. While my IF piece "Institution", is far from done, I feel that this work in progress is superior many of my other writings, including my short story "Institution". In summation, I found writing interactive fiction to be a rewarding experience. I would certainly recommend that anyone looking for a creative outlet explore interactive fiction as potential venue.