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I found this really useful page, look at the Prizes Chosen column. Each has a blurb and score of the top entries that year and if you click on it, you get reviews and links to the files.
http://ifwiki.org/index.php/Pr...
There are just so many entries from these years that I would love to see if there are any recommendations for best of in different categories! Well... googling for best interactive fiction gave me this very interesting page
Interactive Fiction Top 50 of all time (2015 edition)
It is awesome because each entry's page has a Play Online button so you don't even need to install it!

Simple answer to that question: To teach children how to break down a process. I learned programming concepts before I learned about other things. Coding CAN teach analytical skills if people don't just copy and paste. Of course when I learned programming from Logo, Basic and Pascal you couldn't use the Internet to look everything up. Just had to try and break down the problem. I've taught children as young as 6 programming concerts and others are trying to teach the basic concepts at a younger age, like a game, which I think is rather brilliant. you can teach programming through board games.

https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (yes. believe it or not it CAN teach pattern recognition which is good for programming and other things)
http://home.bloxelsbuilder.com...
http://codemonkeyplanet.com/ (this one I haven't tired but it looks FUN
A simple answer besides giving more ideas of how, is because you don't have to be a math wiz to be a great programming. It's about problem solving. I've always seen it as a a MacGyver type of affair: see the problem use what you have, make it work. Math can help, but not essential. Problem solving skills and being able to break a task down is THE most important part of programming, and that children should be developing as fast as they can for everyday life.

Oh, for video games that teach programming:

https://codecombat.com/
https://checkio.org/
https://vim-adventures.com/
http://www.cyber-dojo.org/
https://lightbot.com/
http://importantlittlegames.co...
https://www.gog.com/game/space...
https://www.gog.com/game/human...
http://www.machineers.com/#_=_
http://www.rpgmakerweb.com/pro... (this is more for making RPG games rather than a game, but students from 11+ seem to like it, I specifically link to the "XP" version because the others seemed less intuitive for students)

For aspiring writers to do their craft and do/learn programming:

https://renpy.org/ (specifically for graphic novels, the rest are all text only)
http://textadventures.co.uk/sq...
http://textadventures.co.uk/qu...
http://inform7.com/ (for zork fans especially)
http://www.tads.org/
https://twinery.org/

I've used many of these to help in teaching programming to children of various ages. Hope you all find this list useful.

Zork? Pffft. ADVENT tells Zork to get off its lawn, and to take its diapers with it.
But seriously, maybe your wife would like interactive fiction. IFDB has good tools for finding games, and there's a wide range of genres and styles; one of my recent favorites is Olivia's Orphanarium, best described as an orphanage sim.

Hard to do better than the 2011 XYZZY Finalists for interactive fiction!

Take a look here: http://xyzzyawards.org/historical.php?year=2011&round=1

Best Game
Cryptozookeeper (Robb Sherwin)
Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis (Adam Thornton)
Six (Wade Clarke)
Zombie Exodus (Jim Dattilo)

Best Writing
Cryptozookeeper (Robb Sherwin)
Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis (Adam Thornton)
Taco Fiction (Ryan Veeder)
Zombie Exodus (Jim Dattilo)

Best Story
Bonehead (Sean M. Shore)
Cryptozookeeper (Robb Sherwin)
The Life (and Deaths) of Doctor M (Michael D. Hilborn)
The Play (Deirdra Kiai)
Zombie Exodus (Jim Dattilo)

Games can all be found at the Interactive Fiction Database. I believe all of them are free to play, too.

The site is only responding intermittently here:

operator: Slashdotted..367 users, holy shit

Anyway, as abuses of HTTP go, it's pretty cool :) If the site starts working again, do yourself a favour and have a go at lostpig. It's a fun, well-written award-winning little text adventure. Info and link to flash version here.

Zork is somewhat overrated; it's from a time when adventure games were a grab-bag of fantasy cliches and "zany" objects. The past two decades have been spent retconning it into something grander than it actually was.

However, there's some amazing interactive fiction out there; atmospheric, tight writing. Totally immersive story. Brain-wrenching puzzles. It'd be great to read / play these on a Kindle. Some of my favourites:

• Spider and Web by Andrew Plotkin - possibly the most unreliable narrator ever. See how long it takes you to work out what's really happening.
• Varicella by Adam Cadre - renaissance period intrigue.
• Anchorhead by Michael S. Gentry - Lovecraftian horror.
• A Bear's Night Out by David Dyle - adorable kid's story

Other couple I like are A Day for Soft Food (have you ever wanted to roleplay as a cat?) and Trinity (a mix of high fantasy and nuclear history)

In the spirit of bringing up the huge amount of prior art disproving the summary's assertion, I'd just like to mention the interactive fiction title Mobius.

"warp into a system, take my ship that's in space 10,000 AU from the nearest planet, point it at that blue looking planet over yonder (all the while dealing with Newtonian physics)"

That might take some time... perhaps you want to handwave in some non-Newtonian (and non-Einsteinian) physics instead?

It's a shame these sort of interactive fictions passed away after the advent of the CD-ROM and Myst.

You should look into some of the newer, highly rated works at IFDB. There is a small but active community still developing these games, and each year sees one or two new gems that rival or surpass the most popular efforts of the Infocom era. The best days of the format may well be ahead of us.

I disagree strongly with this. Try playing Rendition. You'll probably find it difficult to not feel disgust at your own actions in the game.

The problem isn't the medium of videogames, it is the presentation of the subject matter within the game. But how are we to know whether the presentation in Six Days In Fallujah approached the subject matter effectively (or not), when outcry from people like you prevent such works from being created?

How many hours have you spent playing Infocom games like the "Zork" series and "The Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy"? No graphics, just text adventures with great stories and puzzles that required a good imagination.

I liked the ones with pictures - but then, I played them on an Apple II even before I knew how to go "east" in English. That was a bit of a problem.

I wonder how something like that would fare these days if you added something like a more complex language interpretation algorithm?

TADS 3's included parser seems capable of handling, say, "put everything from the bed except for the pillow, the threadbare sheets, and three of the counterfeit Mona Lisas in the suitcase that's on the tacky yin-yang table then leave", or to figure out what "either" or "any" refer to. But even that is still just the same old "verb, direct object, preposition, indirect object" kinda syntax that experienced players expect to be able to rely on most of the time.

It would certainly be keen to be able to enter just about anything: "Ask him why he wasn't at the party yesterday", maybe, or "use the cheese to wedge the door shut", or "throw a temper tantrum" or "offer comfort" -- but I'd not want to have to write the game/story that could anticipate and defend a meaningful plot against that much player freedom!

It's sad, though, that character interaction takes such a backseat to object manipulation. You unlock and examine and screw and dial and wear and smell and knock and drop -- but you don't, usually, console or chide or apologize or plead or threaten or tease. But then, characters are much harder to model than boxes, and messing with them might have much greater ramifications.

Hmmm.

All that said, interactive fiction isn't dead. Some of my own recommendations: "Anchorhead", by Mike Gentry; "Savoir-Faire" and "Metamorphosis", by Emily Short; "Hunter, in Darkness" and "Shade", by Andrew Plotkin; "Varicella", by Adam Cadre; ""Rameses", by Stephen Bond; "Winter Wonderland", by Laura Knauth; "My Angel", by Jon Ingold; "Kaged" and "Exhibition", by Ian Finley; "Whom The Telling Changed", by Aaron A. Reed; "Worlds Apart", by Suzanne Britton. IFDB is a good, IIDB-/Amazon-like place to start looking, if you're interested. It's all freeware, too. Mostly.

Or what if there were an "audio book" version of such games where the only way to interact would be to issue commands via microphone?

That would be neat. Would that require new games, though, or rather a new interface? I've never really bothered with speech recognition. Since the vocabulary would be known in advance, it might be doable? But I imagine you'd have to have good voice-actors, too.

Freespace II Source Code Project: Maybe one of the "total conversions" that do not require the original game data. Not sure the hardware can handle it, though

Freedroid Classic: a remake of the addictive Commodore 64 classic Paradroid

Vega Strike: a game in the Elite/Frontier/Freelancer tradition

Oolite: Elite with textures, by the look of it

Nethack, Slash'EM, or Vulture's Eye/Claw for graphical versions. Curiosity and a full manual required: I can't imagine anyone trying to #rub, #dip or #force "intuitively", or realizing what else can be read, eaten, written with, thrown, cast spells at, turned to flesh, ...

Legerdemain: looks like an imaginative, even somewhat poetic roguelike RPG; needs Java

Gargoyle: a sparse but "typographically attractive" interactive fiction interpreter for most of the relevant modern and historical systems from TADS 3 and Z-Code/Infocom to Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9. Include some of the top-rated games from http://ifdb.tads.org/ or http://www.wurb.com/if/ (I would advise against the "include everything" approach). Not sure the Windows version has a file-selector or front-end, might be best to throw one together yourself or at least prepare the relevant filetype associations

Flight of the Amazon Queen, Beneath a Steel Sky, and other adventure games for the SCUMM VM

The Mana World: console-style RPG

Horror is foreboding, knowing that something bad is going to happen, just not knowing exactly how or when.

I'll make a reference to H.P.Lovecraft. Arguably the most famous horror author, and basically all his stories starts with telling you how awful everything went in the end. Then he starts describing exactly how it happened and why it couldn't be avoided.

Mostly agreed, except that I don't think you're giving enough latitude for what horror is and how it can be portrayed, and I think you're conflating horror and terror a bit.

Horror is based on knowledge and revulsion, usually after or during the fact and can be quite powerful, almost real (and also very difficult to effect convincingly with any medium). Horror is very existential and usually long-lasting, and also very subjective. Horror is how one might feel about telling an atrocious lie.

Terror is the actual dread before the fact, the adrenaline inducing paranoia leading up to something bad or while trying to avoid something bad, and this is easier to achieve in Interactive Media. Terror is very temporary, effervescent. Terror is what you might feel in the act of telling a lie.

The best, darkest works start with Terror that leads to Horror, though I have seen effective examples of terror contrasted with and/or leading to hope; horror without knowledge or understanding (this is usually achieved by surrealism, some of the best of which is by Robert Aickman); horror through comedy (don't think Army of Darkness, think Perfume, at some scenes, usually something very Sardonic, but earnestly dark and dreadful); and Horror through Mystery or mysteriousness (effectively done by Ray Bradbury, or more so. Edgar Allen Poe).

Lovecraft IS a great example of horror based on knowledge after the fact, but I find his works fall flat in the actual reading precisely because his works read like a tedious recounting, almost journalistic at times, of said events. He had great horrifying ideas, but was usually lacking in presentation ("The Music of Eric Zahn" and "The Rats in the Walls" being notable exceptions). Games, however have had great success playing off of Lovecraft's ideas, often better than the source material.

Since everyone is making horror game recommendations, and we're talking about Lovecraft, I want to recommend Anchorhead by Michael Gentry as an example of first-class interactive Lovecraftian horror. It's all text, but it is the most succesful and artful example of Interactive Horror that I have come across.

Conan agree.

It can be quite entertaining under the right circumstances.

Thanks for the insightful comment. Your intelligent remarks restore my confidence in /. I don't know why your post was moderated as funny.

I tried my hand at this by authoring a TADS game and entering it in the annual IF competition. It turned out to be a lot harder than I originally thought.

One problem that I ran into was subject verb agreement between what the gaming system provides and what you provide. Another problem was in the combinatorial explosion of the interactive nature of the media. In non-interactive fiction, you know what has already happened in the story so you can reference those things while writing. In interactive fiction, the user may not have navigated to a particular room so you have to be careful when you need to refer to another place or event. I have blogged on this elsewhere.

That's actually already happened, in a way. After Infocom went out of business the fan community reverse-engineered their VM (the Z-Machine) and Graham Nelson designed a new language and compiler for it (Inform). That, along with other interactive fiction languages/toolkits that compile to their own VMs (TADS, Hugo, AGT, ALAN, and many more) and a small but dedicated community has ensured that interactive fiction hasn't died out.

Every year dozens of new games come out, usually for the two major annual competitions (the IF Comp and the Spring Thing). Most of them are shorter than "commercial-era" games, mainly because they're written by hobbyists who don't have the time and resources to commit to building large games. They run the gamut from puzzle-focused games in the style of Infocom to story-focused games that eschew large numbers of elaborate puzzles to focus on story, and there are also more experimental and artistic games that try to push the medium in new directions. The IF Archive has an extensive collection of these games, and there are several review sites that attempt to catalog and organize the archive. The IF community has long had rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction at their center, though with the rise of blogs and web forums it has started to fragment some.

That's actually already happened, in a way. After Infocom went out of business the fan community reverse-engineered their VM (the Z-Machine) and Graham Nelson designed a new language and compiler for it (Inform). That, along with other interactive fiction languages/toolkits that compile to their own VMs (TADS, Hugo, AGT, ALAN, and many more) and a small but dedicated community has ensured that interactive fiction hasn't died out.

Every year dozens of new games come out, usually for the two major annual competitions (the IF Comp and the Spring Thing). Most of them are shorter than "commercial-era" games, mainly because they're written by hobbyists who don't have the time and resources to commit to building large games. They run the gamut from puzzle-focused games in the style of Infocom to story-focused games that eschew large numbers of elaborate puzzles to focus on story, and there are also more experimental and artistic games that try to push the medium in new directions. The IF Archive has an extensive collection of these games, and there are several review sites that attempt to catalog and organize the archive. The IF community has long had rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction at their center, though with the rise of blogs and web forums it has started to fragment some.

There is actually a fairly large community for games similar to this in the English-speaking world, where it is known as interactive fiction (or by it's old-fashioned name, text adventure). Infocom produced some of the most famous games in this genre, including Zork and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but there's now a very active community of (mostly) amateurs creating these games just for fun and to explore the artistic possibilities of interactivity in storytelling.

Most interactive fiction these days is purely text based, as that can be easily created by one or two people who have more experience with writing and programming than graphics and multimedia, and doesn't require a large budget or time investment, though you do occasionally see games with graphics. It has become common to write these games to run on a virtual machine, so that they can be run on all kinds of different platforms. The two most common virtual machines are the Z-machine, which has actually been reverse-engineered from Infocom's virtual machine and thus is compatible with most of their old games and tons of old computers, and the TADS VM. Likewise, there are two common authoring environments, which target these machines; Inform targets the Z-machine, and TADS targets, well, the TADS VM. Both have recently released innovative new systems; Inform 7 uses a natural language syntax (similar to the natural language input that controls the game), and TADS 3 is designed to be aggressively object-oriented.

For anyone who is new to these sorts of games, there are a few games that have been designed specifically for beginners. I would recommend Andrew Plotkin's Dreamhold or Emily Short's City of Secrets. You can find lots more games, along with capsule reviews of some of them, at Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive. In order to play these games, you'll need an interpreter for the virtual machine. On Windows or Unix/Linux I would recommend Gargoyle, as it's an interpreter that has nice typography and supports many different virtual machines. On the Mac, I would recommend either Zoom (for Z-machine, with support for some other interpreters in beta) or Spatterlight (which supports many different machines).

There is also a large community interested in developing, playing, criticizing, and discussing these games. Some of the best places to go for discussion are the interactive fiction newsgroups, rec.arts.int-fiction (for discussion of interactive fiction programming, game design, and topics about the field as a whole) and rec.games.int-fiction (for announcement and discussion of particular games). There is also an interactive fiction MUD (mostly a fancy chat-room), several contests for developing the best interactive fiction, plenty of reviews and other articles online. There are several good beginner's guides to the format as well.

Anyhow, I thought that since this review made it sounds like interactive novels were mostly a Japanese thing, I thought I'd point out a bit of what is available in the English speaking world. As I mentioned, these are mostly text based, both due to the preferences of the authors and lack of budget, unlike the graphical Jap

Hmm. I may be missing something, but I think you're confusing Choose Your Own Adventure type multiple choice games with the more simulationist, finer-grained parser-based text adventures; the grand-parent post quoted the very first of the latter - the venerable (if primitive) Adventure/Colossal Cave from 1975 (or one of its various, er, mods.)

Popular companies were Infocom, Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9, among others; these days, the form is kept alive by enthusiasts and frequently taken into directions more experimental and/or literary than throw the axe at the dwarf then pick up the gold.

Baf's Guide to the IF-Archive is a good place to start searching; as is the IF Review Conspiracy. Poke around and you'll notice most good games require either a "Z-Code" or "TADS" interpreter (VM); refer to the Inform homepage for a list of UNIX Z-Code interpreters or just go with Zoom right away (link has pretty picture). As for TADS games, here're the Linux TADS 2/3 Playkit and, alternatively, a QT-based TADS 2/3 interpreter.

TADS and Inform, incidentally, are the two most widely used Interactive Fiction programming languages. And although that's not their intended purpose, both have also been used for multiple choice games on occasion.

If you're interested, Brass Lantern has a collection of articles for beginners. If you're not, oh well ;)

Hmm. I may be missing something, but I think you're confusing Choose Your Own Adventure type multiple choice games with the more simulationist, finer-grained parser-based text adventures; the grand-parent post quoted the very first of the latter - the venerable (if primitive) Adventure/Colossal Cave from 1975 (or one of its various, er, mods.)

Popular companies were Infocom, Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9, among others; these days, the form is kept alive by enthusiasts and frequently taken into directions more experimental and/or literary than throw the axe at the dwarf then pick up the gold.

Baf's Guide to the IF-Archive is a good place to start searching; as is the IF Review Conspiracy. Poke around and you'll notice most good games require either a "Z-Code" or "TADS" interpreter (VM); refer to the Inform homepage for a list of UNIX Z-Code interpreters or just go with Zoom right away (link has pretty picture). As for TADS games, here're the Linux TADS 2/3 Playkit and, alternatively, a QT-based TADS 2/3 interpreter.

TADS and Inform, incidentally, are the two most widely used Interactive Fiction programming languages. And although that's not their intended purpose, both have also been used for multiple choice games on occasion.

If you're interested, Brass Lantern has a collection of articles for beginners. If you're not, oh well ;)

There are more text adventures out there than you could probably play in a lifetime!
The really nice thing is, the vast majority of them are developed on either of two system - TADS, the Text Adventure Development System or Inform, Infocom's system. Both are free for anyone to develop their own games with, and there are interpreters for these systems (especially Inform) on just about any platform you care to use.

A good central 'hub' to start from is the IF archive with some beginners guides on how to get started, and a massive collection of games to download and play. and googling for 'interactive fiction' will turn up lots more sites.
Have fun :)

There are plenty of text adventures still being made, just not commercially. The engines have gotten pretty sophisticated these days (in the sense that there's a lot less of the 'okay, exactly what grammar does it want me to use to tell it to do this thing I have in mind' as well as having a lot of the small details be taken care of by reasonable default object behaviors).

Check out http://www.ifarchive.org/ for a bunch of games and
http://www.tads.org/ for a particularly good IF engine.

• http://www.tads.org/
• http://brasslantern.org/
• http://www.xyzzynews.com/
• http://www.ifcomp.org/
• http://www.ifarchive.org/

• http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/
• http://www.adventuredevelopers.com/

There aren't many Wal-Mart-shelf style open source games out there for a couple of reasons:

1) Most of the effort in developing such games comes from producing content (audio, artwork, models, etc). There aren't lots of people producing this in the OSS world.

2) Most current closed source games have very minimal replay value -- a good deal of the enjoyment comes from one-off events, like watching animations in the game, or plot twists. People that write open source software almost universally are writing something that they themselves can use. Since game elements that only work once or a few times (animations, etc) don't enhance their enjoyment of the game much, they don't happen.

As a result, you find many games in the "a lifetime to master" sort of class. Most of these have minimal graphics and art content, gameplay that either relies on randomly-generated gameplay/levels or human competition (to keep the game fun for the authors as well).

If you look at some of the open source games that diverge from the conventional closed-source world, you will find games of a sort that you cannot find elsewhere, and in many ways are much stronger than their closed-source brethren.

*) Text-based interactive fiction. TADS or one of the many other interactive fiction systems provide years of plotlines that are deeper, richer, and better-written than commercial games out there. There is a learning curve to get into text-based interactive fiction -- once you're over it, you have a vast, excellent library of games available to you.

*) Rogue/Moria/Angband/Nethack games. There is a whole genre of "dungeon crawler" games like this. They traditionally have limited graphics or just text (though there are exceptions, such as Falcon's Eye and Egoboo). If you have played Diablo or the console versions of the Baldur's Gate games, you've played a game inspired by these (but with far more simplistic gameplay, if more graphics). Dungeon crawlers involve you moving a character deeper and deeper into increasingly dangerous dungeons underground. Most levels are randomly generated, so that each play is different. In general, there are two families of dungeon crawlers -- Nethack, which is in the "sit down and play a quick game" category, and Moria, which is in the "a single game may last for a week and you probably still won't win" category. Nethack, which has many years of people hacking on and improving and extending the game code, is mostly oriented towards figuring out the staggering number of interactions between game elements. A few examples: if it's a full moon outside in real life, werecreatures in the game will be affected. And then there's the Kosiak example:

"Eat a floating eye corpse and you'll get ESP, which will allow you to see enemies anywhere on the map, but only while blinded. To take advantage of it, you may want to drink a potion of blindness, or preferably, find and wear a blindfold. Of course, while blindfolded, even with ESP you won't be able to see inanimate objects on the floor--when you find piles of items, your character will have to "feel" for them. Oh, and you won't be able to read scrolls. Whoops! In that pile of items you just felt is a cockatrice corpse--fortunately you were wearing gloves, otherwise you would've been turned to stone just by touching it. But now, blind and protected, you can pick up the cockatrice corpse and use it to attack monsters--now your enemies will turn to stone when you strike them! Unfortunately, their inventory turns to stone as well. Hey, no problem--you've

Yah, enough of proving my dorky love of text based worlds.

There is no shortage of free MUDs out there, as well as extremely-well written and free games in the mature text-based interactive fiction genre.

Try downloading TADS, and taking a shot at one of the vast library of games for it. Works on just about every platform ever, and has enough hours of gameplay represented in free games to keep you entertained for the rest of your life.

I'm rather partial to Babel, if you're looking for a nice game to start with. Not the easiest game out there, but I love the mood.

Huh. I was about to suggest the major text adventure languages (Inform, TADS, or Hugo), but Flash is a much, much better solution. Easier to learn and (though, as an interactive-fiction fetishist, it pains me to say this) a less esoteric end product.

On the other hand, this is Slashdot - what the hell do you think you're doing posting useful information?

(Quick primer for people unfamiliar with these: TADS is an authoring system and playing system for text adventure games. Z-Code is a platform independent bytecode for text adventure games. Z-Code games were originally produced by Infocom using proprietary tools. Inform is a modern authoring system that also outputs Z-Code.)

TADS has its advantages (a friend of mine who wrote the above mentioned "Magocracy" used it to great effect), but it also has serious disadvantages that must be weighed. Perhaps its most serious disadvantage is that it simply isn't as portable as Z-Code. TADS pretty much has a single interpreter and iffy specs. The only real specs for TADS games is the TADS interpreter itself. Z-Code is well documented at this point with many interpreters being available. TADS interpreters require relatively modern processor and memory while Z-Code was designed to run on home machines from the early 1980s.

All of this boils down to: my old Palm III happily plays very recent Z-Code games but has no hope of running any TADS game. Thanks to Frobnitz I've got 9 games sitting on my Palm right now. Z-Code is so stable that I'm happily running a 4 year old version of Frobnitz

While the interpreter support for graphics is but a pale shadow of TADS, graphics are really the point, are they? Yes, some games greatly benefit from them (I do like the "Earth and Sky" games), they're hardly a requirement for most games. Beyond that the Z-Code spec is quite flexible.

As for the development language, while Inform does have some strange quirks, it's a fine language that reasonably expresses intent. And while I'm a C++ and Perl coder at heart, I'm not so attached to a particular syntax that I'll pick a language based on it.

Ultimately it's telling that TADS games rarely come up in lists of "great interactive fiction you should play." It's dominated by Z-Code games. Apparently Z-Code isn't that limiting.

Don't get me wrong, TADS does have advantages. It shines in graphics integration. The author of Inform has said, "This author at least has long admired the elegance of Mike Roberts's Text Adventure Development System (TADS)," in his own book on Inform and goes on to mention some specific features he likes. Personally I disagree with enough of the library design that I'm tempted to replace it with the Platypus library. But since I'm personally interested in maximizing the number people who can play what I write and I don't have any truly serious problems with Inform or Z-Code, I'll be using that.

(For anyone sold on my little spiel, check out the excellent and free Inform Beginner's Guide and Designer's Manual , the free development software, and an interpreter. Of course, TADS is just as free, so check TADS out yourself.)

You should check out The end result has got a much more flexible syntax than Z-code interpreters, and writing the code should be pretty familiar to C++ -style coders. You can even use the Pascal-style assignment operator if you like, with a compilation switch. If you like that kind of thing.

TADS: http://www.tads.org/
Glulx: http://www.eblong.com/zarf/glulx/ (looks like a 32-bit Z-Machine)
Inform: http://www.inform-fiction.org/ (this is the infocom virtual machine)
Hugo: http://www.generalcoffee.com/hugo.html

The best languages for text adventures are probably Inform and TADS, two languages specifically designed for that purpose.

Their advantages are a good runtime system including the parser, large development communities (well, as large as interactive fiction gets), lots of sample code to help learn, good documentation. The runtime is the key. Each has interpreters on lots and lots of platforms, and they take care of things so you don't have to. Things like undo, parsing commands, formatting, etc.

. The TADS (or Target Acquisition and Designation System) follows his head motion

I'm glad you qualified that acronym, because for a moment I wondered what they were doing with the Text Adventure Development System

"Enemy sighted, twelve o'clock"
"Quick! Activate the TADS!"
"Okay... it says we're in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.. a fierce green snake bars the way"

I like TADS a lot better than Inform, at least if I'm going to write some IF. I don't particularly love C, which may also be revealing. TADS is relatively easy to program in, has good documentation, and best of all, is still being actively maintained and extended.

The parent was completely right in his sentiment, though, that you're a fool to try to write your own parser if all you want to do is make your own bit of IF. Writing a parser is a decidedly non-trivial exercise. Best to just use one

-Erwos

• inform

I was just looking into text only games [Interactive Fiction] recently for the first time in a looooong time. I found some fun ones that were done in the TADS language which is apparently made just for that. The site I downloaded the runtime environment from also had a compiler. Check out tads.org For some background. I think an IF game is a perfect starter for a kid.

Z-Code, along with TADS and a couple other formats, is still used by enthusiasts today via the Inform compiler.

Check out some of the five-star games at Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive if you're curious! A few of these are at least as good as Infocom's best efforts.

What I've found frustrating is the lack of adventure games available for Linux

Really? I've found that adventure game support for Linux is actually quite good relative to other genres.

There's an entire commercial seven-episode line in the LadyStar series.

Hopkins FBI was, I believe, the first commercial SDL-using game available for Linux.

Want to play older adventure games in Linux? ScummVM can run older Lucasarts adventure games. AGIL lets you play old AGI Sierra games, and FreeSCI old SCI Sierra games. TADS can run on Linux to let you play TADS-based text adventure games (it *is* true that there isn't an HTML-enabled runtime for Linux, but that hasn't turned to be much of a big deal), and Frotz lets you play text-based Z-Machine games on Linux. Both of these have massive libraries of games, some of which are very good (I dearly love Tower of Babel for TADS). There are runtimes for numerous other, less widely-used systems listed on ifarchive.

Finally, I realize it's not a fantastic solution, but adventure games that use DirectX are more likely to work with WINE than the latest 3d shooter because they tend to use fewer features. Riven, for instance, works this way.

But I wonder if the Linux gaming market isn't somewhat different than the Windows gaming market. Many of the people who run Linux are older professionals. We're often not runnng the latest and greatest equipment. Perhaps one explanation for the lackluster sales of Linux games is that they're targeting the wrong population.

I agree -- the best selling games for Linux have been Civilization, SimCity 3, Kohan...the games without high end system requirements on 3d cards or CPU. They tend to be less twitch games.

I wish adventure game developers would return to the VM-based approach that Sierra and Lucasarts used to great success. The portability and ease of debugging is well worth it.

It reminds me a lot of the programming languages used for creating "interactive fiction" or "text adventure" games. Specifically Inform and TADS.

Game and simulation programming lends itself perfectly to aspect oriented design because it's full of objects and events which must be responded to. For example a "banana" object might have a "before eating" action which checks that the banana has been peeled and an "after eating" action in which it removes itself from the player's possessions and places a "banana peel" object there instead. A "monkey" object, might have an "after player enters room" action in which it attempts to steal the banana from the player. Since there are an unlimited number of possible events, it is impractical have a virtual function for each of them, so aspect-oriented programming is the only viable solution (especially if you want to create extensible libraries).

I'm guessing so. TADS is indeed the language he developed. It's still being developed, in fact, though these days it's available for free.

The original C source for TADS used 8-character variable and subroutine names, in order to compile on an old and restrictive C compiler. (Watcom, perhaps?) So maybe Mike learned more from Chuck's Power Koding than you mentioned.

http://tads.org/

People have written object-oriented world-simulation languages, just not in exactly the way you describe; they're languages designed for writing "interactive fiction", and the two best known are Inform and TADS (with Inform being my personal preference; kind of like C, only comprehensible and with a free Designer's Manual available for download).

The only problem is, even with these, it's very very hard to write a consistent and bug-free model of the world, simply because there are so many states for a text adventure game to get itself into. Then you have players who do crazy things in them, deliberately looking for bugs. Still, they're very flexible and it can be a lot of fun to use them.

Inform (and its standard libraries) is currently on something like release 6.10, so it's very stable and likely won't be changed at all in the coming years. TADS is currently on version 2, but work on TADS 3 is advancing well.

Oh, well, if you're going to mention Inform, I'll have to respond with links to TADS and Hugo.

No, not Inform, TADS! TADS rules! Inform sucks!

(Work with me here and we can drum up a lot of interest for IF. The Slashdot crowd loves a good holy war between two pieces of software which are more-or-less equivalent.)