http://www2.hawaii.edu/~ztomasze/argax
©2013 by Z. Tomaszewski.
In the history of computer games, the text-based adventure game genre was significant but short-lived. It began in the late 1970s with Adventure, boomed during the 1980s, and largely disappeared in the 1990s. However, the genre remains intriguing. A small community of interactive fiction authors continue to produce independent text-based games to this day. With the rise of mobile devices, web-based interfaces, and a widening interest in digital games, interactive fiction is now within the reach of a broader audience. Interactive fiction platforms also allow for rapid prototyping of a well-defined virtual world that is useful in interactive narrative generation and related artificial intelligence research.
As a text-based medium, users of interactive fiction read descriptions of the world and the events in it and then reply by typing what they want to do next at a command line. Proponents of the genre claim that this command-line parsing of natural language input is a defining feature of interactive fiction. However, this interface is also a barrier to many modern users. In reading a description of the world, it is not always clear which of the described objects can be interacted with. It is also not always clear which verbs or commands the game supports.
Skald is a new web-based user interface for interactive fiction that uses contextual links and menus to clearly afford all of the currently-supported actions within an interactive fiction world. This approach prevents all possible syntactic and illogical user errors. By eliminating the need for a keyboard, Skald is also simpler to use on a mobile device.
This thesis presents a short background of interactive fiction and the Skald design. It then evaluates Skald's impact on users' experience of interactive fiction.
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Argax Project : Thesis :
A Rough Draft Node http://www2.hawaii.edu/~ztomasze/argax |
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Last Edited: 26 Jan 2015 ©2013 by Z. Tomaszewski. |