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Two words: Interactive Fiction

Interactive fiction hasn't died, and you can certainly play it on your PDA. Furthermore, it's generally acknowledged that the quality of modern works has surpassed that of Infocom. Baf's guide is probably a good place to dip your toes in, but there's resources all over the place and the annual competition has just finished.

An interactive novel, at least the kind you're probably thinking about with deeply implemented characters and so forth, is probably AI-complete. It's not about the disk space and processor speed, it's about the inherent trickiness.

Hi, I'm the competition organizer this year. In case you're wondering, all but a handful of the submitted games can be run on a myriad of OSes and platforms. You need the interpreters to run them, as most of the games run in various virtual machines; links to interpreters are available on the competition page.

Let me reiterate the request to use BitTorrent to ease our bandwith requirements. BitTorrent links are available for all of the games in a zip file, all of the games in a Windows installer, and all of the required interpreters for Windows in an installer.

If you want to download games individually, I'd request you use one of the bigger-bandwidth mirrors, like iBiblio.

Finally, these are short, often experimental games. Their quality can vary from great to not so great. If this whets your appetite for other text adventures, take a look at Baf's Guide to the IF Archive and the Interactive Fiction Ratings Site for ideas of other good games to play.

If you like Infocom adventures you should Download Frotz! 2.4.1. This interpreter installs into /usr/local/bin and runs in the Terminal. It would be nice to have a Cocoa front-end for this. Perhaps some cool Mac Geek will find the time....

Frotz! 2.4.3 is also available in source code form if you're into building from source. You just have to make sure you have the ncurses library installed (Fink helps). I had to rename the "init_process" function (in src/common/process.c and src/main.c) to "my_init_process" before it would build. Some kind of symbol conflict with libSystem....

You can play Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on the web but I don't think it allows you to save the game.

Fortunately you can download the HHGG data file (option-click) right off the web and play it in Frotz!

As for other Infocom and Z-engine games, here are some links to resources straight out of the Mac Frotz readme file:

• Interactive Fiction Archive
• Baf's Guide
• XYZZYnews
• Infocom (unofficial)
• Infocom (unofficial)
• Infocom Documentation Project
• Infocom Gallery
• InterData Development
• Ye Olde Infocomme Shoppe
• IF Database
• Doe's IF Page
• "Infocom Games"

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.

Personally, I think one key thing for most women is to have their minds engaged. If it has a good plot, or if you have the freedom to do anything (or at least try and get witty replies from the game), those earn it extra word-of-mouth advertising. Also, one key thing about most of the games women play is that there is a choice, if you are playing an avatar, in how you want him or her to deal with others. There is a measure of respect available in dealings with female /and/ male NPCs, even if it's only a multiple-choice dialogue. This isn't to say they're exalted, but merely treated as beings with minds and desires of their own instead of brainless eye-candy.

When the industry fails to provide games, the independant developers fill the void. Snood, for example. The last ten or so years of interactive fiction games from the IF Archive. Multi-player games like Dragon's Dusk and Kings of Chaos. The options are out there for anyone with the capability of using a search engine to investigate.

Probably the game that most changed the way I think is Lists and Lists. It's a text adventure game that teaches you Scheme, which is a dialect of Lisp. If you've never programmed in a language like Lisp, try it out! It is a totally different way of thinking about programming and this game is a great way to learn it. There's even an online version at the webpage.

Every year we get someone pontificating on the death of adventure games. It really gets tiresome. If only we could get some 'FACT: Adventure games are dying' trolls to liven things up...but they seem to all be scared away by the color scheme here.

Anyways, adventure games aren't dying. Text adventure games may be dead (commercially), but they live on thanks to the goodly number of tools that people can use to make their own (the most widely known being the Z-machine, which has interpreters on just about everything under the sun). In fact, I'd say that the best of the recent releases are far superior to anything that Infocom produced. Examples: Anchorhead (Lovecraftian), Christminster (Detective), and Spider and Web (Espionage). But, yes, commercially, text adventure is more or less dead.

Adventure is still going strong, though. You've still got classic adventures like The Longest Journey and Syberia, and you also have the "new" set of adventures (which tend to involve shooting things repeatedly in between the puzzles), such as the Resident Evil series, which, last I checked, seemed to be doing quite well. But even putting that aside, more and more games are now becoming adventure games mixed with something else. Every time you're playing a FPS and you encounter an obstacle that can't be overcome by force, they've taken a page from the adventure genre (many bosses fall into this category). Every time you're in an RPG, and you have to do deliver object A to point B, or convince NPC to agree with you...that's the adventure genre again. And you'll find that games that contain those sorts of puzzles tend to be much better received than games that don't (which would you rather play: Half-Life, or Quake II? Baldur's Gate or Pool of Radiance (the remake, not the original)).

Every year we get someone pontificating on the death of adventure games. It really gets tiresome. If only we could get some 'FACT: Adventure games are dying' trolls to liven things up...but they seem to all be scared away by the color scheme here.

Anyways, adventure games aren't dying. Text adventure games may be dead (commercially), but they live on thanks to the goodly number of tools that people can use to make their own (the most widely known being the Z-machine, which has interpreters on just about everything under the sun). In fact, I'd say that the best of the recent releases are far superior to anything that Infocom produced. Examples: Anchorhead (Lovecraftian), Christminster (Detective), and Spider and Web (Espionage). But, yes, commercially, text adventure is more or less dead.

Adventure is still going strong, though. You've still got classic adventures like The Longest Journey and Syberia, and you also have the "new" set of adventures (which tend to involve shooting things repeatedly in between the puzzles), such as the Resident Evil series, which, last I checked, seemed to be doing quite well. But even putting that aside, more and more games are now becoming adventure games mixed with something else. Every time you're playing a FPS and you encounter an obstacle that can't be overcome by force, they've taken a page from the adventure genre (many bosses fall into this category). Every time you're in an RPG, and you have to do deliver object A to point B, or convince NPC to agree with you...that's the adventure genre again. And you'll find that games that contain those sorts of puzzles tend to be much better received than games that don't (which would you rather play: Half-Life, or Quake II? Baldur's Gate or Pool of Radiance (the remake, not the original)).

Every year we get someone pontificating on the death of adventure games. It really gets tiresome. If only we could get some 'FACT: Adventure games are dying' trolls to liven things up...but they seem to all be scared away by the color scheme here.

Anyways, adventure games aren't dying. Text adventure games may be dead (commercially), but they live on thanks to the goodly number of tools that people can use to make their own (the most widely known being the Z-machine, which has interpreters on just about everything under the sun). In fact, I'd say that the best of the recent releases are far superior to anything that Infocom produced. Examples: Anchorhead (Lovecraftian), Christminster (Detective), and Spider and Web (Espionage). But, yes, commercially, text adventure is more or less dead.

Adventure is still going strong, though. You've still got classic adventures like The Longest Journey and Syberia, and you also have the "new" set of adventures (which tend to involve shooting things repeatedly in between the puzzles), such as the Resident Evil series, which, last I checked, seemed to be doing quite well. But even putting that aside, more and more games are now becoming adventure games mixed with something else. Every time you're playing a FPS and you encounter an obstacle that can't be overcome by force, they've taken a page from the adventure genre (many bosses fall into this category). Every time you're in an RPG, and you have to do deliver object A to point B, or convince NPC to agree with you...that's the adventure genre again. And you'll find that games that contain those sorts of puzzles tend to be much better received than games that don't (which would you rather play: Half-Life, or Quake II? Baldur's Gate or Pool of Radiance (the remake, not the original)).

...is a z-code VM, not a Java VM, so I can play the hundreds of games already available - some of very high quality. Might need a keyboard port too though.

I mean you don't see any text based adventures anymore except with MUDs.

I respectfully beg to differ.

There are many excellent single-player scrolling text based adventure games and they are still being developed. However, you are unlikely to appeal to the masses with a text or character based interface as most people expect games to have fast-moving graphics. Also, developing a good text interface can be at least as difficult as developing a graphics engine.

Good examples are Graham Nelson's Curses and anything by Magnetic Scrolls, although the latter are a little tricky to find and get running on modern OSs.

Interesting idea. Could you expand on it a bit? What, specifically, are the changes you would make to bash/tcsh/zsh in order to take advantage of these improvements? Which specific improvements were you talking about? Links to academic research on the subject of command-line usability, or columns by half-trained experts on the same subject, or crazed rants by experienced curmudgeons would be appreciated. (Yes, the syntax for doing reasonably complex programming in bash feels totally weird, but Perl exists for doing more complex junk.)

If you say anything about "natural language parsing", I'm going to laugh and point you to an interactive fiction guide since those games' parsers show the state of command-line natural language parsing pretty well--and they can't come close to reacting intelligently to everything the user of a (simple) game can do, much less everything the user of a (complex) modern OS can do!

was when the text-parser was axed.

Luckily, we still have this, where if you select games by rating, you'll see that modern text adventures have pretty much surpassed anything that was written when they were still commercial.

Spider and Web definitely doesn't contain this kind of thing.

Worlds Apart is a big game, but as far as I remember, it doesn't contain sex either -- at one point you control a young player-character, though.

Babel doesn't involve any minor, but contains violence -- nothing gratuitous, mind you, and most of it happened in the past.

Glowgrass is short, rather easy game, well suited for beginners. It involves a teenage girl (again!) as a non-player character but no sex anywere.

Savoir Faire is promising, given the review in the Baf's Guide to IF, and sex with minors just doesn't seem to fit in there, especially given that the author is a woman. Good old puzzles and locks, this might be the next game I play, when I have the time.

Hi, I'm the competition organizer. A few words of instruction and explanation. The basic idea is that you're to download and play at least five of the forty games, and then rate them on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the best. Full instructions are in the competition readme file.

Most of the games run in a virtual machine, so you'll need to download interpreters for those machines. For the TADS 2 and 3 games, grab the unified TADS 2 and 3 source tarball for Unix. For the z-code games, try Nitfol or Unix Frotz. For the Glulx game, try Linux Glulxe or Solaris Glulxe. For the ALAN games, grab GlkALAN for Linux.

You've got until November 15th to vote. Even if you don't want to vote, feel free to play the games anyway. And if this really gets you jonesing to play more of the recently-released interactive fiction, stop by Baf's Guide to the IF Archive for reviews of many of the games on the IF Archive. Oh, and a minor plug for my IF site, Brass Lantern.

Stephen

Text-based interactive fiction contains some of the most amazing games ever made, and most are free.

There are several different IF environments -- TADS and Inform are the most popular, playable by TADS and Frotz, respectively.

There are many incredible games for both, but two of my favorites are Babel and Toonesia. This type of game loses most of its value if you cheat -- most of the value of the game is in gameplay.

Give it a shot, and rack your brains...and don't get eaten by a grue.

Text-based interactive fiction contains some of the most amazing games ever made, and most are free.

There are several different IF environments -- TADS and Inform are the most popular, playable by TADS and Frotz, respectively.

There are many incredible games for both, but two of my favorites are Babel and Toonesia. This type of game loses most of its value if you cheat -- most of the value of the game is in gameplay.

Give it a shot, and rack your brains...and don't get eaten by a grue.

I just went and played Little Blue Men for the first time. Of course that one's a little older - its three years old. I don't think it would run on anything less than an XT with 64K of RAM. Yeah, that's not really a fair comparison.

I suppose I should talk about a more modern game, like All Roads. Oh wait - that one has about the same memory requirements. I guess nothing has changed in three years.

If what you were looking for in games was imagination and inspiration, then you wouldn't need a new machine for it. Obviously that's not what is desired - people want better and better graphics. The gamers drive the game market.

If this were not the case, then gamers would not buy faster computers, or better graphics cards. They would simply play the games that worked on their system, content to settle for fun instead of pretty and fun. After all, its not like there is a shortage of games, no matter how old your system is (and the examples I gave are case in point).

I just went and played Little Blue Men for the first time. Of course that one's a little older - its three years old. I don't think it would run on anything less than an XT with 64K of RAM. Yeah, that's not really a fair comparison.

I suppose I should talk about a more modern game, like All Roads. Oh wait - that one has about the same memory requirements. I guess nothing has changed in three years.

If what you were looking for in games was imagination and inspiration, then you wouldn't need a new machine for it. Obviously that's not what is desired - people want better and better graphics. The gamers drive the game market.

If this were not the case, then gamers would not buy faster computers, or better graphics cards. They would simply play the games that worked on their system, content to settle for fun instead of pretty and fun. After all, its not like there is a shortage of games, no matter how old your system is (and the examples I gave are case in point).

• Curses!, a zork-like puzzle romp;
• Jugsaw, a chase through the 20th century;
• Photopia, an interactive bedtime story;
• Spider and Web, a spy thriller;
• Anchorhead, a Lovecraft hommage.

• Curses!, a zork-like puzzle romp;
• Jugsaw, a chase through the 20th century;
• Photopia, an interactive bedtime story;
• Spider and Web, a spy thriller;
• Anchorhead, a Lovecraft hommage.

• Curses!, a zork-like puzzle romp;
• Jugsaw, a chase through the 20th century;
• Photopia, an interactive bedtime story;
• Spider and Web, a spy thriller;
• Anchorhead, a Lovecraft hommage.

• Curses!, a zork-like puzzle romp;
• Jugsaw, a chase through the 20th century;
• Photopia, an interactive bedtime story;
• Spider and Web, a spy thriller;
• Anchorhead, a Lovecraft hommage.

• Curses!, a zork-like puzzle romp;
• Jugsaw, a chase through the 20th century;
• Photopia, an interactive bedtime story;
• Spider and Web, a spy thriller;
• Anchorhead, a Lovecraft hommage.

• Curses!, a zork-like puzzle romp;
• Jugsaw, a chase through the 20th century;
• Photopia, an interactive bedtime story;
• Spider and Web, a spy thriller;
• Anchorhead, a Lovecraft hommage.

• Curses!, a zork-like puzzle romp;
• Jugsaw, a chase through the 20th century;
• Photopia, an interactive bedtime story;
• Spider and Web, a spy thriller;
• Anchorhead, a Lovecraft hommage.

• Curses!, a zork-like puzzle romp;
• Jugsaw, a chase through the 20th century;
• Photopia, an interactive bedtime story;
• Spider and Web, a spy thriller;
• Anchorhead, a Lovecraft hommage.

Yes, definitely, try IF.

The IF archive is a bit unruly, if comprehensive.

Some links I like are

Baf's guide to the IF archive A nice site with reviews of games in the IF archive.

SPAG SPAG is an online zine about IF. It's got a a scoreboard that sadly isn't updated anymore, but gives a rough guide to better IF games out there. SPAG has a numerous reviews of IF games that are generally more thorough than Baf's guide, but are therefore not always good for a quick read.

XYZZY News is probably the best site for up to date news, reviews, and links about IF. If you want a good starting place for IF, this is it.

iFiction is a good site to get IF games. It's not as comprehensive as the IF archives, and it's getting a little out of date, but it's generally well organized and is a good place to go if you want to filter out some of the less polished games.

I didn't care for Varicella, I will admit it is well written. My favorite work so far is probably Anchorhead. It's a horror piece with a sort of Lovecraftian-Northeast Atlantic-Jamesian feel. But there's plenty of great stuff out there.

...aka "text adventures".

Go to the Interactive Fiction Archive and look around. My personal favorites include Spider and Web (a really excellent game -- starts out beginner-friendly but with a healthy but not impossible challenging bit near the end), Photopia (more of a story than a game), Varicella (beautifully written, and hard to get right within the allowed time -- but short, so replaying is possible, and even intended), and The Meteor, The Stone And A Long Glass of Sherbet.

Most of these are written for Infocom's Z-Machine (remember them?) so they'll run on any platform which has a Z-Code interpreter available (which is darned near anything, down to almost every major palmtop). For that matter, if you're willing to deviate from the "free" thing, many of Infocom's originals (remember the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy computer game?) are also still available.

Have fun!

...aka "text adventures".

Go to the Interactive Fiction Archive and look around. My personal favorites include Spider and Web (a really excellent game -- starts out beginner-friendly but with a healthy but not impossible challenging bit near the end), Photopia (more of a story than a game), Varicella (beautifully written, and hard to get right within the allowed time -- but short, so replaying is possible, and even intended), and The Meteor, The Stone And A Long Glass of Sherbet.

Most of these are written for Infocom's Z-Machine (remember them?) so they'll run on any platform which has a Z-Code interpreter available (which is darned near anything, down to almost every major palmtop). For that matter, if you're willing to deviate from the "free" thing, many of Infocom's originals (remember the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy computer game?) are also still available.

Have fun!

...aka "text adventures".

Go to the Interactive Fiction Archive and look around. My personal favorites include Spider and Web (a really excellent game -- starts out beginner-friendly but with a healthy but not impossible challenging bit near the end), Photopia (more of a story than a game), Varicella (beautifully written, and hard to get right within the allowed time -- but short, so replaying is possible, and even intended), and The Meteor, The Stone And A Long Glass of Sherbet.

Most of these are written for Infocom's Z-Machine (remember them?) so they'll run on any platform which has a Z-Code interpreter available (which is darned near anything, down to almost every major palmtop). For that matter, if you're willing to deviate from the "free" thing, many of Infocom's originals (remember the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy computer game?) are also still available.

Have fun!

...aka "text adventures".

Go to the Interactive Fiction Archive and look around. My personal favorites include Spider and Web (a really excellent game -- starts out beginner-friendly but with a healthy but not impossible challenging bit near the end), Photopia (more of a story than a game), Varicella (beautifully written, and hard to get right within the allowed time -- but short, so replaying is possible, and even intended), and The Meteor, The Stone And A Long Glass of Sherbet.

Most of these are written for Infocom's Z-Machine (remember them?) so they'll run on any platform which has a Z-Code interpreter available (which is darned near anything, down to almost every major palmtop). For that matter, if you're willing to deviate from the "free" thing, many of Infocom's originals (remember the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy computer game?) are also still available.

Have fun!

People not think Andrew Plotkin good need read/play 'The Meteor, The Stone And A Long Glass of Sherbet' or other award-winning interactive fiction written by Andrew Plotkin.

I think you'll find that that particular game was written by Graham Nelson (under the alias of Angela M. Horns), in fact. It was the winner of the 1996 IF competition. See here for more information.

You can see the list of IF written by Plotkin here. Most notable (IMHO) are "Spider and Web" (5 XYZZYnews awards including Best Game, 1998), "A Change in the Weather" (winner of the first IF competition in 1995 (Inform division)) and "So Far" (4 XYZZYnews awards including Best Game, 1996).

Pete.

People not think Andrew Plotkin good need read/play 'The Meteor, The Stone And A Long Glass of Sherbet' or other award-winning interactive fiction written by Andrew Plotkin.

I think you'll find that that particular game was written by Graham Nelson (under the alias of Angela M. Horns), in fact. It was the winner of the 1996 IF competition. See here for more information.

You can see the list of IF written by Plotkin here. Most notable (IMHO) are "Spider and Web" (5 XYZZYnews awards including Best Game, 1998), "A Change in the Weather" (winner of the first IF competition in 1995 (Inform division)) and "So Far" (4 XYZZYnews awards including Best Game, 1996).

Pete.

People not think Andrew Plotkin good need read/play 'The Meteor, The Stone And A Long Glass of Sherbet' or other award-winning interactive fiction written by Andrew Plotkin.

I think you'll find that that particular game was written by Graham Nelson (under the alias of Angela M. Horns), in fact. It was the winner of the 1996 IF competition. See here for more information.

You can see the list of IF written by Plotkin here. Most notable (IMHO) are "Spider and Web" (5 XYZZYnews awards including Best Game, 1998), "A Change in the Weather" (winner of the first IF competition in 1995 (Inform division)) and "So Far" (4 XYZZYnews awards including Best Game, 1996).

Pete.

People not think Andrew Plotkin good need read/play 'The Meteor, The Stone And A Long Glass of Sherbet' or other award-winning interactive fiction written by Andrew Plotkin.

I think you'll find that that particular game was written by Graham Nelson (under the alias of Angela M. Horns), in fact. It was the winner of the 1996 IF competition. See here for more information.

You can see the list of IF written by Plotkin here. Most notable (IMHO) are "Spider and Web" (5 XYZZYnews awards including Best Game, 1998), "A Change in the Weather" (winner of the first IF competition in 1995 (Inform division)) and "So Far" (4 XYZZYnews awards including Best Game, 1996).

Pete.

I loved Sierra games as a kid. Now there are hardly any adventure games. All we got are Real Time Strategy and Action titles. No good adventure games.

Not so, young Applejacks. There's many, many fine adventure games around these days, and they have ratings and everything.

Most of them are text; but then again, the first three SQs were essentially text as well.

Actually, there are plenty of "Infocom-like" games still being made, though the games I'm talking about range from the traditional to the not so traditional.

If you're interested in finding out more, I'd suggest reading reviews of recent text adventures from a site or two and then downloading the games from the Interactive Fiction Archive.

People with the motivation to create their own games can do that -- budget or no. Maybe not full-time, and maybe not with a big team, unless there's a market -- but that makes sense. If something isn't of enough value that enough individuals are willing to pay for it to cover its development costs, then as kewl as it may be, perhaps it shouldn't exist.

My major objection is that government funding of game development equates to having a game that I either purchase (ie. help pay for) or guys with guns come and put me in jail for tax evasion. Personally, I find that morally objectionable.

Look at the Interactive Fiction Archive to see how games which are truly works of art really do get created without either corporate or governmental support. Sure, you may not like them -- sure, they're not flashy -- but that's the point; if they were flashy, and had wide appeal, then they'd be developed corporately, right? :)

First John Malkovich, then Andrew Plotkin, now this. Aren't things getting a little out of hand?

-- MarkusQ

Here are a few modern, independently-written Interactive Fiction games that match or beat anything Infocom has produced:

Photopia (scroll down)
Metamorphoses
For a Change
Babel
Worlds Apart

For lots more, head over to The Best of IF.

> TELL TOLAN ABOUT IF

Actually, interactive fiction is still developing. It depends on good writing skills, clever puzzles and good plots. Some of the more feature-enhanced interpreters out there let you use color, images and music, but they games themselves still have to be good in order to rank well in one of these contests. There's a good list of modern IF games at Bals guide to IF. Inform, Hugo, and TADS are great game engines that are still going strong today. Get yourself an interpreter and download some games!
--

There are several mirrors of the ftp.gmd.de archive in the US -- you might try http://ifarchive.org for a nice web-based mirror.

Also, there are a variety of review sites for IF to help you choose a game you'd like. My favorite is Baf's Guide, which has nice capsule reviews and good subject indexes.