Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling | Essays and reviews on narrative in games and new media. Interactive Fiction. Interactive fiction was the first great computer-game craze. Through the early 1980s, the most sophisticated, complex, involving games available were the text adventures. Everyone agreed. Go look up up old videogame rating charts; Infocom was always on the list — with several games.
Of course, advancing graphics eventually washed away IF’s supremacy. By 1990, all the text game companies were closed, or about to be. I’ve been part of that community for a decade and a half. You can play my games freely (and for free). (Okay, except for Hadean Lands. If you’ve never played IF before... Everyone’s heard that IF is hard to play. Furthermore, most situations in every game are amenable to a handful of common commands. (Click for PDF version, HTML version, print-quality bitmap, or others.
If you still feel overwhelmed, I recommend you start with The Dreamhold, listed below. Hadean Lands An interactive alchemical interplanetary thriller. This is my next game. Bigger Than You Think Cold Iron Shade. The Interactive Fiction Database - IF and Text Adventures. In-depth: Is it time for a text game revival? For years, the traditional publishing industry has been telling us that nobody wants story-driven adventures or game forms oriented around interactive storytelling. But the Kickstarter age has been showing us something a little bit different, amid successful fundraising for developers of renowned adventure games of yore.
But there's more than just nostalgia contributing to a potential revival for interactive stories. A broader gaming audience means appetites for game forms we might have once called "casual" in another time -- and furthermore, the popularity of tablets and e-readers means there's a real appetite for game forms that take advantage of a culture now habituated to reading on luminous screens in ways prior generations were widely not. In a market where books and games are close rivals for the most popular category on app stores, what happens when today's new gamers are hungry for something more than word puzzles? Text gaming: Back to the roots Playing with books, too.
Index page. The 18th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. Interactive Fiction: Playing, Studying and Writing Text Adventure Games (Dennis G. Jerz, Seton Hill University)