indieorama.com has an interview with Jon Ingold about the fate and future of inkle, Jon’s feelings about parser IF, and commercial IF prospects in general.
Meanwhile, the Ice-Bound project (Aaron Reed and Jacob Garbe) has started posting blog entries about the combinatorial narrative design there.
My breasts were heaving, literally, like in a novel. (The Night I Wore a Mask, silkwords.com)
SilkWords is a new website for interactive romance and erotica — a commercial one, paying authors $500 and up. Unlike a lot of the other recent experiments in paid interactive fiction, it runs on a subscription model: pay for a month at a time, read as much as you’d like. It’s a model that presumably needs a steady stream of new content to keep readers engaged. There are currently nine stories available, and three more listed as coming soon; they are rated by hotness, from “mild” to “very hot” and “BDSM”.
Structurally, the pieces I tried are really straightforward CYOA: choice points typically give only two options (and occasionally only give one, a Continue choice). There’s no visible world-state tracking. My playthroughs were typically two to four choice points long, with very large amounts of text in between. When I asked about retained variables via twitter, the response was that the engine was capable of more, but that the site is initially focusing on story over gameness. This is of course a perfectly fair response, but I often felt these would have worked better as interactive stories (not, necessarily, games) if they had allowed a few more choice points, more carefully selected.
Some comments on specific stories follow.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 