Interactive fiction is what you get when you combine a game and a book. Some 25 years ago, with the launch of the game Zork, this was how you played games on what are now considered primitive home computers.
"We have the elements of a computer game - random chances, non-linear nature - fused with the written word, where we have a computer game without any kind of graphics, no video sequences, no music or sound effects," Howard Sherman of Malinche Entertainment said. "We have the written word on a computer screen, and the keyboard acting as an interface letting the reader become the main character in the story. Interactive fiction leaves the reader to actually talk to the story in full English sentences, such as they can ask the other characters questions and get answers, and they can be followed by characters and follow them."
If you search for interactive fiction online, you'll easily find thousands of titles and tools for writing interactive fiction, and often it's free. Sherman is trying to bring the genre back to the mainstream by using more sophisticated tools to make more sophisticated interactive fiction games.
He's charging anywhere from $10 to $30, but that includes making the story/games playable not just on computers or PDAs, but iPods as well.
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Interactive fiction
Malinche Entertainment uses sophisticated tools to make better interactive fiction games.
 
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"The difference is we've take four of our existing titles from the Malinche library and put it on an iPod, so all the quality writing is there," he said. "But with the iPod having no keyboard, we had some challenges with that. So with the click wheel people scroll down, they can look at objects and go anywhere in the story, and the click wheel acts as their interface into the story."
But can interactive fiction move beyond just a small, niche audience, especially in a time when it's competing with devices like the PSP?
"I would be surprised. I would be very surprised," Jeremy Kaplan of Digital Life Magazine said. "I think kids are into a very different mindset these days. But that said, maybe they're not looking to attract kids, maybe they're looking for the people that did play games like Zork. Gaming has gotten more interactive and yet less interactive - there's more to do but you're thinking about a lot less. So one of the neat things about these is you're sitting there reading and you're thinking in a different sort of way."
Which is what could help the genre's return. If parent's are looking for any way to get their kids to just read more, could this be that way?
