I have spent most of the day looking at collaborative story creation and stumbled across Addventures (thanks Wikipedia). An Addventure is a search based drama and an interactive fiction and often the narrative is communicated through a text only command line interface, I lost a lot of my time this afternoon immersed in Anchorhead, a horror game created by by Michael S. Gentry (1998), where by the protagonist, the wife of a university professor is exploring her new town (there is more to it but I found it confusing at first and by the time I had worked it out I felt like I should do some work…I have sworn to revisit it tonight!)

As a fan of the matrix, I was instantly drawn to its green and black command line interface and once I had got to grips with the imperative sentences (‘walk south’ or ‘open window’) it was easily navigated. As mentioned earlier I had to play with it a lot before I fully mastered what I had to do and as a child of the digital revolution, the absence of images to illustrate my surroundings confused me at first as I skipped through the instructions (tut tut). However once I had realised the importance of the descriptive passages I was able to navigate myself around the mentally envisaged town of Anchorhead.

When using this game, I was reminded of Geoff Ryman’s hypertext novel ‘253‘, beacuse I felt that although my path through the game would be determinded by my own decisions I was inevitably being pointed in the direction of an ending, an ending which would become more apparent as I progressed through the game.

Possible applications of this style of game and user experience, could be the creation of a front end management system for a story like this, which would enable users to be authors and to have a say in the progression of the narrative. However, this idea made me question the validility of open ended immersive complexity in the formation of narative – you cannot rely on users inputting text that will make sence (as we found with After We Come and Go) and I am reticent to apply censorship to projects I create. A way of approaching this would be to allow users the right to be an administrator of sorts and perhaps have a voting system in place to allow the deletion of input.

Games such as Anchorhead can be coded in C and other such languages, there are object orientated programmes such as TADS, a freeware programming system that allows you to programme games like these.