TADS

[Ronald Hale-Evans]

Stuart Moulthrop writes:
>TADS, as best I recall, is an authoring system for creating adventure-style
>fictions: narratives that unfold as you explore and manipulate a virtual
>space.  A friend and former student of mine, Ron Hale-Evans, has been
>working with this system.  He's evans at binah.cc.brandeis.edu.  He can tell
>you more.

That's me. TADS stands for "Text Adventure Development System" and is,
to my mind, the best software available for creating "text
adventure"-style interactive fiction. It is well-supported by the
publisher, High Energy Software, reasonably priced, extremely well
documented (once you pay the shareware fee), and has a large library
of functions that obviate the IF author's need to write code for
opening doors, picking up and dropping objects, movement, and so on.
It's very easy to use if you're familiar with object-oriented
programming, and it's very flexible. In fact, it's so flexible that I
think it fair to say one could implement a sort of hypertext system
with TADS code. It's also one of the few programs for which I've ever
thought it worth paying the shareware fee. You can download what you
need to get started with TADS by ftp from ftp.gmd.de, directory
/int-fiction or /pub/int-fiction or something like that (look around).

For those of you not familiar with this form, it began with Crowther
and Woods, who wrote the game _Adventure_ in the late 70s (hence the
moniker "text adventure"), was improved upon by _Zork_/_Dungeon_ in
the early 80s, and was commercially successful when the hackers who
wrote _Zork_ started a company called Infocom to publish text
adventures. What's most interesting about this sort of fiction is that
you "play" the protagonist; in other words, the fictions are written
in the second person, and you must give the program commands that
manipulate a sort of virtual puppet representing "you" inside the
virtual world of the text adventure.

Some people think the form reached its apex with Infocom's fictions,
in particular _A Mind Forever Voyaging_, a science fiction piece in
which you play an artificial intelligence inhabiting a virtual
reality, and _Trinity_, a fantasy piece in which you narrowly escape
World War III and travel throughout spacetime, eventually trying to
stop the Trinity Test in 1945 New Mexico. (In my opinion? The former's
prose is not as successful as the latter's (too sentimental, crummy
characterisation), but while I haven't finished _Trinity_, I'm rather
more impressed with the structure of _AMFV_ because it for the most
part goes beyond the typical puzzle-solving plot motivation of text
adventures.) 

Since Infocom tried to branch out with a "straight" database product
and went under in the late 80s, there's been a bit of a vacuum of text
adventures. Most of the "adventures" now available are largely iconic
point-and-click things that do not challenge the participant.
Nevertheless, due largely to TADS, there has been a recent upswing in
the number of new text adventures available. One company that uses
TADS, Adventions, has been rather successful with their "Unnkulian"
series, which have been written up in glossy gaming mags, unusual for
shareware. People are experimenting with new genres; one TADS game
recently released, first of a trilogy, is called _Enhanced_ and is
probably the first "cyberpunk" text adventure. If you can read source
code, you'd probably be fascinated by a game developed for a contest
at MIT, called _GC: A Thrashing Parity Bit of the Mind._ It's very
abstruse, with computer-science-oriented puzzles, but what's most
interesting about it to me is the code for "non-player characters," of
which there is a large cast. (I've snarfed some of the game's code for
these for my own fiction; I'm hoping the authors will give me
permission to release it.)

My own piece, _Mad Venture_, is "interactive autobiography": a lightly
fictionalised account of my experiences with schizophrenia during my
junior year at Yale. So far most of the work has gone into
infrastructure, that is, code for the varied states of consciousness
of the protagonist, and so on. I foresee one more major coding push
until the point where writing the fiction becomes comparable in
complexity to writing other kinds of fiction.

I'm eager to hear from other people who are working with IF, whether
of the hypertextual or the text adventure kind. Let me refer
interested parties again to ftp.gmd.de, where there's a large archive
of about a year's worth of dicussions of IF, and the Usenet newsgroup
rec.arts.int-fiction, where discussion rages daily, and where I will
be cross-posting this message.

Ron Hale-Evans

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 
"The Sea refuses no river; remember that when a beggar buys a round."
--Pete Townshend * * * * * Ron Hale-Evans, evans at logos.cc.brandeis.edu
PGP 2 public key: finger evans at logos.cc.brandeis.edu