Congratulations to all the entrants in this year’s Interactive Fiction Competition, the 25th year it has been run (which also deserves congratulations). No matter where people placed, finishing and entering a game into a competition is laudable. So many hard drives and cloud drives are littered with unfinished games (my own included). There were 82 […]

“Someone make sure Eeyore there has herself a nice long gulp!” You’re not sure who said it. It could be any one of your friends. It could even be you! -Cryptozookeeper Sometimes, the moments that stick with you from a game—for years, even decades—are not significant moments in the game itself. Instead, they’re the off-hand […]

Every four years, Victor Gijsbers compiles votes for the Top 50 interactive fiction games of all time. The aggregate is certainly compelling reading—if nothing else, to get a baseline for what might be considered “canon” (however loose) for a field that is, especially in recent years, coming from wildly disparate sources. Moreover, it’s worth noting […]

I wanted to talk a bit about a singular and peculiar pre-Twine, choice-based game that came out in 2006 called Age of Fable. Even now there’s not anything (that I’ve found!) particularly like it.   The FAQ for the game also points to this indeterminate, fluid history. The text describes the game as an “RPG” but […]

Aisle by Sam Barlow is one of the foundations of post-Infocom interactive fiction. This isn’t just from the impact on other one-move games, such as Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle (played for laughs), or Rematch (played for puzzles), or even more recent games like Midnight. Swordfight. that take the one-move conceit and expand […]

Welcome to 2019! I’m thrilled to have a regular column in sub-Q and get the chance to write about interactive fiction. For my previous essays at the site, I’ve largely written about games from a slightly earlier period of the development of interactive fiction, from the late 90s to the mid-2000s, a period in which […]

Released in 1997, Andrew Plotkin’s “The Space Under the Window” (“Space”) was a groundbreaking, unclassifiable work of interactive fiction, the impact of which is still felt today. Many consider it a work of “poetic” IF, or poetry outright, but what does that mean? Is poetry a quality of language, interaction, or both? The work itself […]

Interactive fiction’s history both intersects and acts as an alternative space to modern game development—even indie, narrative-based development—with its own unique traditions and community standards. One of the most prominent is “comp,” which could also be a “mini-comp” or a “speed comp.” Most were small, one-shot affairs with perhaps a few games entered, while others […]

“I think that one day Rybread is going to successfully get what’s churning around in his mind written & compiled and present us with an absolutely stellar adventure game. And after giving us three weeks to play it, I predict he’ll then blow up the earth.” –Robb Sherwin on L.U.D.I.T.E.   When I first became […]