Formal Models and Interactive Fiction

Presentation

“You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.” This is the opening line of Zork, one of the earliest interactive fiction computer games (or “text adventures”). Interactive fiction confronts players with a simulated (real or fictional) environment they have to explore and interact with by issuing natural language commands, such as “open door,” “drink water,” or “walk around the house.” What does this have to do with formal models (and your thesis)? Well, despite its game-like and literary appearance, a work of interactive fiction is effectively a formal model that can be manipulated by and through the computer, i.e., a computational model. Writing interactive fiction thus essentially poses the same challenges as the creation of other computational models: What am I modeling? What is the purpose of this model? What aspects of the original does the model need to capture, and how should they be represented in the computer? And so on. Plus

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The course is taught in English.