Unofficial Ink Cookbook
Summary: In this chapter, you will learn about the connection between interactive fiction and choose-you-own-adventure books, how nonlinear stories work, and the rise of the term of “narrative games” to describe projects that are similar to text-only games but have more graphical elements.
Much of what we have come to know as “video games” today had its roots in a genre now called text-parsers. Playing these games consisted of entering and reading text. The player would enter a command, and the game would respond to them.
The first of what would become this genre was Colossal Cave (1977), a game about, as it name implies, exploring a large cave system. It was the first to use different directions for movement and to feature an inventory. The game most people think of when they consider this time in video games, however, is Zork I (1983), which was heavily inspired by Colossal Cave (1977) and classically used the most famous command of these types of games:
>get lamp
The term interactive fiction is often used to describe games like these because of their textual nature. Playing them was like reading a story where the reader (player) could direct the story along different paths. They could take a moment to explore an area, read more about something, or merely move around in the game.
All of the instructions to the game were also typed. When a player interacted with the fiction, they were reading and writing parts at the same time. They could take different actions and the game would respond accordingly based on how it was programmed.
Around the same time as Colossal Cave (1977), the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure (CYOA) series of books first started coming out. These books were not written to be read linear, page-by-page manner. Every few pages, the reader had to make a decision and then turn to a different page in the book where the story picked back up. Depending on the decisions made by the reader, they might even end up with an ending!
Through working through the story, the reader was making choices of where they wanted to go next. While not always thought of in this sense, they were “interactive” fiction as well. They presented a way for a reader decide what to do next and the story supported those choices! The player had to turn pages and make decisions.
As a more general term, nonlinear storytelling consists of these two different aspects: making decisions and reacting to the consequences. Both Colossal Cave (1977) and the CYOA series of books are examples of how different mediums present these two aspects. When a reader or player interacts with the product, they are presented with choices. Choosing one sends them down one path or another in a story. Making choices and seeing different parts of the story are what make them nonlinear. Unlike other books, reading straight through a CYOA book would be no fun! Neither would seeing all the text of a game like Colossal Cave (1977) without also being about to play it through giving it commands of what to do next as well.
Early computers worked through users typing commands. They would type something, the computer would try to understand it, and then it would respond in some way. Many of the games created in the 1980s up through the 1990s followed this same model: they used typing commands as the many source of player input in order to navigate digital worlds. Players would “play” through using a keyboard and typing out what they wanted to happen next.
The software Inform (1993) helped users create these projects. Building on the work to reverse engineer a commercial format, users could write in a language, inform, to create new games that could be played using the existing tools. This language allowed for building worlds and defining relationships between objects where simple commands go north would understand both a “north” and “south.”
As computer graphics improved, many games began to take the same nonlinear storytelling aspects of the earlier games and apply them in new ways. Decades after Colossal Cave (1977), large online games were possible through a number of different advances in graphical and communication technologies. Yet, at their root, many video games still have a heavier reliance on reading text and making choices, the central part of all nonlinear storytelling.
To help label games that may be more textual in nature, many people have used the term narrative games. These often refer to games that have deeper stories, ask players to read and understand aspects of the world in order to better engage with them, and then ask players to make choices based on what they have learned. They share in the same lineage of Zork I (1980), but use advanced graphics, online functionality, or even multiplayer systems to convey their messages.
With improvements to graphical technologies, videos game moved away from strictly text input and started to use more interactive forms. Players were given the ability to click on different elements and work with graphical interfaces. More narrative-based games moved from text-parsers to what became adventure games. These began by combining text commands with graphical elements such as backgrounds and characters, but quickly became a way of describing games that were more click-based. The player would click on something on the screen and the player would see short descriptions or ways to interact with more elements.
Adventure games borrowed from works like the earlier CYOA books, but used different interfaces. Famous games from this genre and period include Wizard and the Princess (1980), The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), and Myst (1993).
The rise of the world wide web changed how people accessed information and thought about interfaces. While some users had come to use graphical user interfaces in operating systems such as Windows or MacOS, the mouse quickly became the focus for interactions. In roughly the same time as more graphical adventure games, software such as Storyspace (1987) and Hypercard (1987) introduced more text-based interactions as a user clicked on links and parts and different parts were loaded as a response.
The introduction of hypertext, documents designed for reading in a web browser, also helped people develop games and other projects easier. Using HTML, links could be constructed to move between documents or even among them. This allowed for more text-based projects and the rise of many works such as afternoon, a story (1987) and Patchwork Girl (1995).
Twine 1 (2009) helped re-popularize using HTML for creating projects. Allowing users with little-to-no programming knowledge to quickly create projects, this type of choice-based games exploded within the independent development scene and opened a wider audience to personal essays and experimental projects that were often previously ignored. Many who were kept from creating games from a lack of access to the tools of creation were able to fully embrace Twine and build many projects that found an audience.
Introduced with and proceeding Twine 1 (2009) was a language called Twee that Twine 1 (2009) could read and write. Instead of writing within the editor itself, Twee allowed users to write in a text format that used special characters for marking sections and design links between what Twine called “passages,” parts of an overall story.
Parts of what became Ink were introduced in inklewriter (2012), a tool for creating interactive stories. Designed to help users create stories with no programming knowledge and has been re-introduced as open source in 2020. In the years building to that, Inkle Studios introduced Ink (2016), a scripting language design to create narrative games and projects.
Borrowing from previous tools, Ink allowed authors to write interactive, nonlinear stories. (It’s the subject of this book!)
ink. (2020). ink - inkle’s narrative scripting language. Retrieved from inklestudios