In his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, Author Ray Bradbury foresaw the day when books would be replaced by various forms of high-tech entertainment, including soap operas in which the viewer could participate. Books are still very much with us, but in a twist of fate that even the prophetic Bradbury did not anticipate, a new computer game named for his book allows players to take part in--and influence the outcome of--a drama set in the police-state world of Fahrenheit 451.
Bradbury is only one of several well-known authors who are collaborating with computer software companies in adapting their novels to "interactive fiction," an electronic form of literature that transforms the reader into an active participant in the plot. A version of Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama is available in interactive form on a floppy disk (Telarium; $39.95). Michael Crichton (The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man) has actually created a software work from scratch: Amazon (Telarium; $39.95), which transports the player and a sidekick parrot named Paco into the jungles of South America in search of a lost city and hidden emeralds. Infocom, the Cambridge-based software company that pioneered interactive fiction, has released an electronic version of Douglas Adams' popular novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ($39.95), which last week jumped to No. 1 on Billboard's list of top computer software.
While the characters and situations in most of the games are taken directly from the books on which they are based, players of interactive fiction respond to, and actually create, variances in the plot line by typing commands on the computer screen. For example, when Fahrenheit 451 is loaded into the computer, the following words appear on the screen: "You are in a clearing in dense woods in the southeast corner of Central Park. A pond is to the west. A narrow path leads north along the shore of the pond and to the north you can hear occasional low growls. Near you is a pile of dead leaves." If the player should then type, "Examine the leaves," the program responds, "Under the leaves you see an old rusted grating set into a patch of broken concrete." And the adventure begins.
Such verbal interplay is made possible by a parser, the part of the computer program that interprets players' commands. The first adventure-style programs contained parsers capable only of responding to simple noun-verb combinations such as Go north, Take sword, or Kill troll. In the late 1970s, however, Marc Blank, who is now a vice president at Infocom, and a colleague at M.I.T.'s lab for computer science, devised more sophisticated parsers with the aid of an artificialintelligence language called MDL (pronounced mud-dle). Then, in 1979, Blank and newly formed Infocom released Zork I, the first of the Zork trilogy of interactive fiction games, with a parser that recognizes adjectives, prepositions and pronouns as well as nouns and verbs. The improved parser permits players to display their literary bent by using more complex commands. Zork I, for instance, will respond to more expansive instructions (example: pick up the rusty knife and put it in the sack). Partly as a result, Zork I became the best-selling disk-based game of all time (500,000 copies).