Varicella is a 1999 work of interactive fiction

Interactive fiction

Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, describes software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives and as video games. In common usage, the term refers to text...

 by Adam Cadre

Adam Cadre

Adam Cadre is a U.S. writer. He gained prominence in the world of interactive fiction with works like I-0 , Photopia and Varicella , for which he has won several XYZZY Awards and been the subject of academic study . Photopia additionally won the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition...

, distributed in z-code

Z-machine

The Z-machine is a virtual machine that was developed by Joel Berez and Marc Blank in 1979 and used by Infocom for its text adventure games. Infocom compiled game code to files containing Z-machine instructions , and could therefore port all its text adventures to a new platform simply by writing a...

 format as freeware

Freeware

Freeware is computer software that is available for use at no cost or for an optional fee, but usually with one or more restricted usage rights. Freeware is in contrast to commercial software, which is typically sold for profit, but might be distributed for a business or commercial purpose in the...

. It is set in an alternate history which features roughly modern technology mixed with Renaissance

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

-style principalities and court politics. The player character

Player character

A player character or playable character is a character in a video game or role playing game who is controlled or controllable by a player, and is typically a protagonist of the story told in the course of the game. A player character is a persona of the player who controls it. Player characters...

 is Primo Varicella, palace minister in Piedmont, who has to get rid of several rivals for the regency following the death of the king. The international situation in the game is described in passing: Piedmont is part of a loose confederation of kingdoms that make up a Carolingian

Carolingian

The Carolingian dynasty was a Frankish noble family with origins in the Arnulfing and Pippinid clans of the 7th century AD. The name "Carolingian", Medieval Latin karolingi, an altered form of an unattested Old High German *karling, kerling The Carolingian dynasty (known variously as the...

 League and is engaged in a war against the Republic of Venice

Republic of Venice

The Republic of Venice or Venetian Republic was a state originating from the city of Venice in Northeastern Italy. It existed for over a millennium, from the late 7th century until 1797. It was formally known as the Most Serene Republic of Venice and is often referred to as La Serenissima, in...

.

It won four XYZZY Awards in 1999 including the XYZZY Award for Best Game

XYZZY Award for Best Game

This is a list of XYZZY Awards results, grouped by award rather than year. The XYZZY Awards are the annual awards given by the publication "XYZZYnews" to works of interactive fiction, serving a similar role to the Academy Awards for film...

, and was nominated for another four. The game was discussed academically by Nick Montfort

Nick Montfort

Nick Montfort is an associate professor of digital media at MIT in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. He is also a poet, computer scientist, and author of interactive fiction. Montfort has collaborated on the blog Grand Text Auto, the sticker novel Implementation, and the contemporary...

 and Stuart Moulthrop

Stuart Moulthrop

Stuart Moulthrop is an innovator of electronic literature and hypertext fiction, both as a theoretician and as a writer. He is author of the hypertext fiction works Victory Garden , which was on the front-page of the New York Times Book Review in 1993, Reagan Library , and Hegirascope , amongst...

 in their 2003 paper Face It, Tiger, You Just Hit the Jackpot: Reading and Playing Cadre's Varicella, and by Dr. Wendy Morgan in her 2003 paper Touching (on) Character: New Engagements in New Media Narratives. Cadre himself claimed in a January 2002 interview that it was the best game he had written up to that point:

"Photopia

Photopia

Photopia is a piece of literature by Adam Cadre rendered in the form of interactive fiction, and written in Inform. It is regarded as a pioneer in narrative-driven, rather than puzzle- or challenge-driven, interactive fiction...

has made more of a mark, I suppose, but Photopia is a short story; Varicella is a world. There are so many things to see and do… it's definitely the game of mine that I'm hoping that future pieces I might create will most resemble, in structure if not in content."

External links

• Adam Cadre Interactive Fiction - download page