My friends: IF Comp 2016 is now open.
If you’re new to interactive fiction, you may not be familiar with the IF community calendar, so let me quickly explain why you’ve arrived at the best time of year.
RPS Feature Biggest festival of the IF year
Posts Tagged ‘midnight swordfight’
RPS Feature Parsers Verbed
IF Only: Text Adventures For People Who Hate Guessing The Verb
Emily Short is one of the world’s leading gurus on Interactive Fiction. We’re delighted to tell you that IF Only will be a regular column about the myriad world of IF gaming.
Back in the late 90s, the name “interactive fiction” was applied mostly to parser-based text adventures descended from Zork, where all output was in text and the player had to type commands to proceed. The genre has opened up enormously in recent years, with Twine and other choice-based fiction now often included in IF competitions and databases, and with some players and journalists applying the term “interactive fiction” even to graphical games with 3D environments if they have enough of a focus on story. Contrary to common report, though, this doesn’t mean that text adventures have either gone away or stopped innovating.
