Text adventures (aka interactive fiction) provide for Player input in the form of verb-noun phrases. The earliest text adventures only allowed a single verb followed by a single noun (i.e. ‘open mailbox’). Over time, parsing strategies improved and Player input expanded to include whole paragraphs.
Text adventures were little more than an exercise in guessing an author’s vocabulary and way of thinking. Rather than playing the role of protagonist in the unfolding story, the Player played the protagonist in an entirely different story, namely “figure out what the author intended when she created the adventure.”
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The students at Saarland University might be interested to learn about Hugo (http://www.generalcoffee.com/hugo.html), TADS (http://www.tads.org/) and Inform (http://inform-fiction.org/I7/Welcome.html), all of which are more sophisticated than the screenshot of “Froz” makes it appear.
Mark, I agree with you that the screenshot fails to do te concept justice. That’s my failing, as I haven’t had FROZ running for some time and didn’t have another screenshot. Thankyou for the comment and going forward I’ll do more to ensure that people will get a sense of the significance, rhather than relying on additional resources as I didi in this case.
Hi Kenneth–A few days ago I finished writing a web app called MakeYourOwnAdventure that lets the reader choose from a number of actions to determine the next page. This has none of the linguistic sophistication of Froz, but it has an interesting twist to provide richness of choice: the reader can add new pages to the story, with a couple of clicks. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts: http://MakeYourOwnAdventure.ning.com