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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

• 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/

They died? Oh no! You mean no more updates to some of my favourite websites?

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"

And I would say that I have failed to find any game that satisfies me the way that a good text adventure does

Amen to that. My girlfriend recently discovered Xemacs' built-in text adventure, so I introduced her to Graham Nelson's excellent Curses and she was hooked for days.

By comparison, Vice City entertained her for about half an hour.

Personally I find that only text adventures (and Nethack :-) are capable of holding my attention for more than a couple of days.

As was pointed out in an exchange highlighted on XYZZY News, you shouldn't confuse "noncommercial" with "dying". Just because game producers aren't putting millions of dollars into a genre, and aren't making millions of dollars, doesn't mean the genre is dying.

This is an important point that seems to be missed by most of the corporate gaming media. In fact, the fact that the gaming media doesn't seem to recognize that there's more to gaming than what corporate game producers are putting out is symptomatic of everything that's wrong with the gaming industry.

Gamespy sort of highlights this when they're talking about puzzle games: why pay $50 for a puzzle game when you can download something for free? Well, that doesn't mean puzzle games are dying--far from it. It means that so many people are coding puzzle games for fun, and people are downloading them, that there's no need for a commercial industry. But plenty of people continue to play them.

The same thing is true of text adventures. It's true that text adventures maybe don't capture the same amount of attention from adolescent males that they once did. But to say that the genre is "dying" is ridiculous and, once again, based on the assumption that "living" means corporate profits. There are tons of text adventure sites, competitions, etc., out there, and plenty of games, both free and independently produced.

I would go so far as to argue that the health of a gaming genre is partially reflected in the extent to which the genre is able to transcend corporate commercial interests. That's not to say what corporations are releasing is all bad, just that in my mind, the gaming community would be better if there was more independent development of games. If that means more of the demand going into open, free, or independently produced games, and less into corporate developed games, and if that, in turn, means a genre is "dying", I'll go for the "dying" genre any day.

• 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.

This year's competition had a pretty pathetic group of entrys. Nothing like last year's competition. It seems like most of the reviewers would only recommend you play one five or six of these games.
However If you are a first time player or looking for something with an amazing story check out this winner from the '99 xyzzy awards.

Worlds Apart

We figured games like Death Maze and Asylum were flukes. That they'd never catch on. We also figured the Infocom games -- Zork I and Deadline and Suspect -- would be the games that, over time, would last.

They were. I don't see any entire communities dedicated to keeping Death Maze and Asylum alive.

The good stuff endures. Unfortunately, it's been years since there was any "good stuff" available commercially in the interactive-fiction world.

At some point, that's likely to change.

It is here. Also check out this place for more cool z-machine and other interactive adventure stuff.

There's still a thriving community turning out quality text adventures. They're just not commercially viable any more, which is why you never see them mentioned in the 'mainstream' computer games press, who only care about advertising revenue from computer games manufacturers and hence will never look at 'free' games.

For those who want to relive the infocom experience with new (and some might say, even better!) games, check out ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive, the newsgroups rec.games.int-fiction, rec.arts.int-fiction and wesites like XYZZYnews

Enjoy!

If anyone is interrested in interactive fiction I can recommend the online fanzine xyzzy news http://www.xyzzynews.com/

And to those complaining of the lack of graphics and 3D, I suppose you never read books either! To paraphrase an old quote,"Interactive Fiction has the best graphics in the world, your own imagination."