CONN 311 | Interactive Fiction

Technological innovations over the past several decades have greatly increased our ability to tell stories in which the reader's choices affect the narrative. These can range from text-based novels in electronic form that contain a couple of branching plot points, to episodes of television shows that require the viewer to select an option to advance the narrative, to sophisticated computer and video games featuring multiple alternative storylines. Historically, the term "interactive fiction" has tended to refer to computer-enabled stories that are text-based. This course focuses primarily on parser-based interactive fiction, in which the reader types commands indicating the action she wishes to perform. However, it also considers some choice-based works, in which the reader selects his action from a list of options. Students will learn some of the history of interactive fiction; read and analyze several works of interactive fiction; learn Inform 7, a programming language designed to create interactive fiction; and write their own works of interactive fiction using Inform 7.