Interactive Fiction Competition Enters Its Third Decade (thenewstack.io)

An anonymous reader writes: Voting is concluding this week for the 21st Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. All the games are available free online, and on November 15th the contest's organizers will announce the game that's received the highest average ratings. "This year's contestants entered 55 original text adventures – a new record," notes one technology blog, which argues that the annual competition provides a link to the history of both gaming and computers. New game-creating tools have "democratized" the field, and the contest may also ultimately lead game creators to explore even more forms of digital media.

Comments

Re:So what are the best tools?

[phantomfive]

I played "Five Minutes to Burn" for a while, and reminded me of everything I don't like about interactive fiction. Commands that don't quite work right, needing to build up a map in your head based entirely on "N, S, E, W," (easier to draw the map on paper, for bigger worlds), and lots of text that hides important points (seriously, who needs to look at a magnet to figure out how to start a fire?)

"Cape" was a more intuitive presentation, where your options are always obvious. The options were good enough that I made it through to the end of one story. I don't think your choices make much difference to where you end up though, it's mostly a click-through story. Worth a read.

"Laid off from a Synesthesia Factory" has an interesting premise, but has too many words, and the words don't always make sense. For example, this sentence: "the kitchen is like all kitchens are; the shelves, you are certain, were literally cubicles once." A kitchen with cubicle shelves is not like all kitchens are. A little buggy because the "help" command completely ruins everything. Maybe that's on purpose. It's never clear if a particular command had effect or not.

"Midnight Swordfight." Interesting concept. It is helpful because it tells you what commands can be used at any given point. Unhelpful because not only can you travel through time in the forward and backward direction, also clockwise and counter-clockwise. I didn't want to break out paper to draw a map, so I gave up.

Not sure what other of the games might be good.