Devine Lu Linvega – Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling

The 21st annual Interactive Fiction Competition is currently on, through mid-November. Voting is open to the general public; the only prerequisite is that you not be an author, not vote on games that you tested, and submit votes on at least five games. (You emphatically do not have to have played them all! In a year with 55 entrants, it is very unlikely that most judges will get through anywhere near all of them.)

Paradise describes itself in its comp blurb as a procedural interactive fiction and multiplayer novel. Neither of those are terms I would use to describe it: there’s not much you’d call plot progression. And when I hear “procedural interactive fiction” I usually assume that there’s going to be some text generation or some procedural narrative structuring or some AI-driven characters or something along those lines. What’s here, I’d be inclined more to call something like “a platform for collaborative textual landscapes”.