Papers › Interactive Fiction Games: A Colossal Adventure

Interactive Fiction Games: A Colossal Adventure

11 Sep 2019arXiv:1909.05398archive 2025-07-28

Matthew Hausknecht, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Marc-Alexandre Côté, Xingdi Yuan

A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to understand and communicate with language. Interactive Fiction games are fully text-based simulation environments where a player issues text commands to effect change in the environment and progress through the story. We argue that IF games are an excellent testbed for studying language-based autonomous agents. In particular, IF games combine challenges of combinatorial action spaces, language understanding, and commonsense reasoning. To facilitate rapid development of language-based agents, we introduce Jericho, a learning environment for man-made IF games and conduct a comprehensive study of text-agents across a rich set of games, highlighting directions in which agents can improve.

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