Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media is a remarkably rich book, covering amateur and commercial projects in a number of media and forms. It contains four essays explicitly about text-based interactive fiction: Jeremy Douglass’ reading of Andrew Plotkin’s “Shade”; Steve Meretzky’s account of the creation of the robot Floyd in “Planetfall”; … Continue reading “Second Person”
This is a somewhat opinionated piece that I originally put together to clarify my own thinking on a couple of things; the opinions expressed should probably be toned down. Nonetheless… I’ve come to think that one of the jobs of a work of IF is to teach its player — constantly, in every kind of … Continue reading “Action and Interaction”
If you’re enjoying IF and would like to get more involved in the community of authors and players, here are some things you can do. Play games with other players It’s easy to get stuck on interactive fiction, as you may already have discovered, especially if the work is a challenging puzzle game. IF players … Continue reading “The IF Community”
Choosing a Tool One of the first decisions you’ll need to make before you do serious work on your own piece of interactive fiction is what tools you will use to create it. While you could create IF in a general purpose programming language, most people choose to use a language or design system specially … Continue reading “Writing IF”
I have to make a couple of observations about this year’s crop. One, there were fewer games, and two, there were fewer games that were really foully buggy. These two facts suggest to me (ever the optimist, I) that people are catching on to the fact that it’s just really not worth submitting a completely … Continue reading “Comp 2002 Reviews”
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 