More on automatic writing by computers. Back in the day, people played computer games that were more like novels than video games. In fact, one of these games, Zork, became the first game to sell more than a million copies.

Now someone has turned Quake, a 3D shooting/horror game, into a text adventure game. Kudos. The result is IFQuake.

Although no mainstream publisher sells text adventure games, there is still a vibrant ‘interactive fiction‘ community online.

From a writing perspective, this kind of work is among the hardest to do. When I ran my games company, I used to employ a full-time writer to do so-called branching story lines and dialogue for games. The challenge is making sure that the story, characters and narrative flow remains consistent despite (indeed, because) of the player’s decisions.

I remember going to seminars at the Game Developers’ Conference about this but I don’t suppose anyone does this kind of work, apart from the IF underground. It’s almost like an entire genre of writing came and went in a decade or two. Imagine if novels were as short-lived as a genre.

What would be really cool is a meta-game where a computer program writes interactive adventures according to the parameters laid down by the player. Like a Star Trek holodeck but in prose. Who owns the copyright on creative output created by computers? If memory serves, under English law, the copyright is assigned to the creator of the original program. Now I know why robots always rebel in sci-fi movies.

Anyhow, you can read my musings on the history of computer games and download my graphical article for Wired in which I try to prove that Pong invented the internet. Enjoy!