puzzle

A work of interactive fiction.

Pieces is a puzzle story. To read the work, you assemble the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, each piece yielding a portion of narrative. Under your hands, several lives take shape in earnest if sometimes wobbly and unprepossessing assemblages. The manner in which you put the pieces together affects the course of the characters’ lives, different configurations resulting in different outcomes.

(Source: Author's description at Wordcircuits)

Howe’s new piece, “Automatype,” which can be seen as either ambient text art, a weird game of solitaire for the computer, or an absorbing ongoing puzzle for a human viewer, is an apt demonstration of some of the powers of “RiTa,” as it uses algorithms to find the bridges between English words, Six-Degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-style — not bridges of garbled nonsense but composed of normative English. You will spend either 10 seconds or 5 minutes staring at this thing; you will also see either a bunch of random words, or occasionally, if not always, engaging samples of minimalist poetry.

(Source: The ELO 2012 Media Art Show.)

The first part of the bestselling Zork trilogy, and a close descendant of Adventure, the first work of interactive fiction or text adventure game as the genre was known at the time. Zork I was Infocom's first game, and sold 378,987 copies by 1986. Similarly to Adventure, the game unfolds in a maze-like dungeon, where the user (or adventurer) must battle trolls and solve puzzles in order to find twenty trophies to bring back to the house outside which the game begins. 

Portal is a mix between a computer novel and an interactive game. It was published for the Amiga in 1986 byActivision, written by Rob Swigart, produced by Brad Fregger and programmed by Nexa Corporation. Versions for the Macintosh, Commodore 64, Apple II, and the IBM PC were later released. A unique game for its time,Portal was one part text-driven adventure (à la Zork or Planetfall) but with a graphical interface.

The player, taking on the role of the unnamed astronaut protagonist, returns from a failed 100 year voyage to 61 Cygni to find the Earth devoid of humans. Cars are rusted and covered with moss, the streets are completely barren and everything appears as though the entire human race had just vanished suddenly. The player happens upon a barely functioning computer terminal that is tied into a storytelling mainframe, Homer. Through this interface, the player, assisted by Homer who attempts to weave the information into a coherent narrative, discovers information in order to piece together the occurrences leading to the disappearance of the human race. For instance, spending some time in the Medical Records section may unlock a piece of data in the Science section, and through these links the player can finish the game.

A hardcover novel, titled Portal: A Dataspace Retrieval and composed mostly of the text from the interactive novel with some new additions, was written by the same author, Rob Swigart and first published by St. Martin's Press in 1988. It takes the form of a series of notes on different subjects, in an order that the player would encounter them through Homer. A softcover edition was released by Backinprint.com in 2001.</p>

Now an ebook version has been released "under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND Unported license 3.0" It has been authorized to be uploaded here by the author himself. http://67.205.70.12/forums/showthread.php?t=37197

(Source: Wikipedia entry)