2003 Interactive Fiction Competition Announced

Andrew Plotkin writes "The Ninth Annual Interactive Fiction competition is underway. Thirty short text adventures are available for download. (BitTorrent preferred.) Anyone may vote, as long as you play at least five games by Nov 15th." Notably out-there names for the text adventures entered in this year's competition include "The Fat Lardo And The Rubber Ducky" and "Slouching Towards Bedlam."

Comments

Slouching Towards Bedlam

[Henry V .009]

"Slouching Towards Bedlam" is, I believe a reference to this poem by Yeats:

The Second Coming

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

And, of course, the word Bedlam comes from the colloquial pronunciation of "Hospital of Saint Mary of Bethlehem" founded in 1247 as a priory, and converted to a lunatic hospital sometime before 1402. It was converted to a state lunatic asylum on the dissolution of the monasteries in 1547. (From The Online Etymological Dictionary).

I just thought all that was neat.

Notes from the Comp Organizer

[Sargent1]

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.