A History of Interactive Fiction (2006) | Hacker News Reader

A History of Interactive Fiction (2006)

maher.filfre.net

79 pointsTomte23 comments

There's an interactive fiction meetup in the SF bay area.[1] And for online meetings there's IfMud.[2]

[1] - https://www.meetup.com/sf-bay-area-interactive-fiction/

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IfMUD

You may enjoy the Interactive Fiction Archive -- including thousands of text adventures, tools, articles, essays, hints, jokes, and more.

http://www.ifarchive.org/

I had played various Infocom games as a kid, simply amazing. Then recently "discovered" that there is this exciting corner of the Multiverse know as Interactive Fiction, which has been flourishing quite well for a long time. Just finished "Beautiful Dreamer" by Woodson, enjoyed that very much.

Related: there's a few versions of "get lamp" documentary online (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhbcDzbGSU) or you can get the movie directly from getlamp.com.

These histories (the maher link above, the getlamp doc, etc) bring back a lot of great memories.

EDIT: the youtube link above looks like it's actually the getlamp movie being shown at a google event, with an audience (audience sounds in there now and then).

A really good documentary. Infocom's game division sounds like it was a magical place to work. The Google before Google.

There are two "official" versions of the documentary. One is a general documentary on interactive text adventures and then there's one that's cut to be more specifically about Infocom. (The latter was particularly interesting to me because I knew a lot of the people involved then and now and actually did some game testing at one point.)

Would love to read some of your testing experiences re: infocom. Have you posted on this before?

Not a lot to relate. I wasn't an official tester. I just knew a number of the guys--including one of their main designers--from undergrad. So he would sometimes send me a pre-release disk and I'd make notes about things I found confusing or where I got stuck. (And would call him for hints now and then.)

I think I was officially credited as a beta tester for Legend later on but that was just the same sort of thing.

Ahh... sounds cool to have been part of it, even in a small way (early copies and all that)!

I didn't know that, but will look.

Why isn't there a digital version of this doc?

WTF am I going to do with DVDs?

http://www.getlamp.com/order/

IF is amazing...particularly the works of Emily Short. Some great story telling.

Speaking of Emily Short, she compiled a more recent overview/bibliography of IF history that I found useful: https://emshort.blog/2016/04/02/brief-bibliography-about-if-...

I'll have to check it out. I find when i do get the chance to game these days, I go for IF over fancy PS4 titles.

Emily Short gave a really interesting talk about collaborative, storytelling games.[1] Anyone interested in gaming who isn't aware of these kinds of games should really check it out.

She also recently gave a talk on IF's past, present, and future.[2]

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xefWN5qEY3A

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx5ZLGBZAWs

Not quite IF, but reading Ulysses and retracing the protagonist's steps around Dublin is surprisingly common. Interactive but deterministic...

I remember really enjoying "Photopia", but that was more novel than game. It actually had a big affect on me much like a good book does.

I'm absolutely terrible at real, game-like IF with puzzles etc. Not sure what mindset you need to solve them.

You might like Blue Lacuna.

I had a big IF phase back in high school. I still don't think anything has topped Curses for me. There's still tons of good content coming out of that community but they seem to have shifted away from the puzzle-heavy paradigm, which I find a little disappointing. I still enjoy the Photopia-type games, but big sprawling puzzlers like Curses or The Muldoon Legacy are tops for me.

As much as I loved text adventures back in the day, I've found the real-life version of interactive fiction -- "immersive" fiction -- more intoxicating and memorable. I still think about "The Jejune Institute" in San Francisco frequently, and that ended years ago.

i really wish i had a reason to spend some time programming in inform7. That language is so much like nothing else out there, too bad there seems to be no uses of it outside of IF, yet. Just imagine:

  A ping is a kind of icmp packet.

Some years ago I spent a good amount of hours playing "A Mind Forever Voyaging" with Dave Brubeck's "Jazz Impressions of New York" running on infinite repeat in the background.

Highly recommended combination.

I was into this about the time that was written. I successfully ported a random haiku generator from JavaScript to Inform 6.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com