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Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives and as video games.〔Montfort, Nick & Urbano, Paulo (Tr.). ''(A quarta Era da Ficção Interactiva )''. Nada, Volume 8. October 2006.〕 In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text-only". Graphical text adventure games, where the text is accompanied by graphics (still images, animations or video) still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is text. Some users of the term distinguish between "interactive fiction" that focuses on narrative and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles. Meanwhile, more expansive definitions of "interactive fiction" may include all adventure games, including wholly graphical adventures such as ''Myst''. As a commercial product, interactive fiction reached its peak in popularity from 1979 to 1986, as a dominant software product marketed for home computers. Due to their text-only nature, they sidestepped the problem of writing for widely divergent graphics architectures. This meant that interactive fiction games were easily ported across all the popular platforms, including CP/M (not known for gaming or strong graphics capabilities). Today, a steady stream of new works is produced by an online interactive fiction community, using freely available development systems. The term can also be used to refer to literary works that are not read in a linear fashion, known as gamebooks, where the reader is instead given choices at different points in the text; these decisions determine the flow and outcome of the story. The most famous example of this form of interactive fiction is the ''Choose Your Own Adventure'' book series, and the collaborative "" format has also been described as a form of interactive fiction.〔Soultanis, Greg. Mullin, Eileen, ed. ''(XYZZY News - The Magazine for Interactive Fiction Enthusiasts )''. Issue #4. July/August 1995. 〕 Interactive fiction is sometimes used as a synonym for visual novel, a popular style of entertainment software in Japan.〔 ==Medium== Text adventures are one of the oldest types of computer games and form a subset of the adventure genre. The player uses text input to control the game, and the game state is relayed to the player via text output. Input is usually provided by the player in the form of simple sentences such as "get key" or "go east", which are interpreted by a text parser. Parsers may vary in sophistication; the first text adventure parsers could only handle two-word sentences in the form of verb-noun pairs. Later parsers, such as those built on Infocom's ZIL (Zork Implementation Language), could understand complete sentences.〔DeMaria, Rusel and Wilson, Johnny L. (2002) ''High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games'' McGraw-Hill/Osborne, Berkeley, Calif., p. 52, ISBN 0-07-222428-2〕 Later parsers could handle increasing levels of complexity parsing sentences such as "open the red box with the green key then go north". This level of complexity is the standard for works of interactive fiction today. Despite their lack of graphics, text adventures include a physical dimension where players move between rooms. Many text adventure games boasted their total number of rooms to indicate how much gameplay they offered.〔 These games are unique in that they may create an illogical space, where going north from area A takes you to area B, but going south from area B did not take you back to area A. This can create mazes that do not behave as players expect, and thus players must maintain their own map. These illogical spaces are much more rare in today's era of 3D gaming,〔 and the Interactive Fiction community in general decries the use of mazes entirely, claiming that mazes have become arbitrary 'puzzles for the sake of puzzles' and that they can, in the hands of inexperienced designers, become immensely frustrating for players to navigate. Interactive fiction shares much in common with Multi-User Dungeons ('MUDs'). MUDs, which became popular in the mid-1980s, rely on a textual exchange and accept similar commands from players as do works of IF; however, since interactive fiction is single player, and MUDs, by definition, have multiple players, they differ enormously in gameplay styles. MUDs often focus gameplay on activities that involve communities of players, simulated political systems, in-game trading, and other gameplay mechanics that aren't possible in a single player environment. Interactive fiction usually relies on reading from a screen and on typing input, although text-to-speech synthesizers allow blind and visually impaired users to play interactive fiction titles as audio games.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Interactive fiction」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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