jmac.org Interactive Fiction page
Generally speaking, "interactive fiction" describes the broad genre of computer games in which the player is told a story by becoming its main character. It includes everything from the earliest cave-crawl text adventures from the 1970s to the immersive, 3D, surround-sound works one can buy for modern computers or game consoles. In the 1980s, software publisher Infocom (now long-defunct) used the term to describe its line of text-based adventure games, such as Zork and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. While very popular for several years, these sorts of games faded as a staple of computer-store shelves once personal computers gained the ability to inexpensively generate impressive graphics and sound.
However, the world of text-based interactive fiction lives on, thanks to a community of hobbyists who, via the Internet, still create, play and discuss these games. Indeed, the better examples of the last few years' text adventures far surpasses Infocom's efforts in terms of quality, since IF (as the community tends to call it) continues to mature and develop its potential as a rather unusual, but very legitimate, storytelling medium.
As far as you're concerned, this basically means lots of cool games you can play right now, which may be like nothing you've played before (or perhaps like nothing you've played in 20 years). Nearly all the software generated by the IF community is free for download (though few are open source, if you're a stickler about that sort of thing), and will run on any reasonably modern operating system (as well as a few obsolete ones). Dive into the links below for more details.
Resources
The global IF community is centered around four points on the Internet. Foremost among them lies The Interactive Fiction Archive, the community's shared software repository. (Note that the archive is popular enough to warrant the use of mirrors, and since you came this far, you might as well use mine.)
For a guided (and opinionated) tour through the archive, I recommend Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive, its unofficial review site, which also offers a user-friendly categorizations of the games according to various criteria, such as genre, date added, or review rating.
The community's other three focal points include the newsgroups rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction, in which is discussed the design and play of text games, respectively, and IFMud: A MUD Forever Voyaging, sort of a collision between a chat room and an adventure game (but really more of a chat room).
I sometimes hang out on the MUD as jmac (and tend to lurk silently on the newsgroups). Feel free to say hi, if you spot me there.
Those interested in text IF game design should read Graham Nelson's Inform Designer's Manual, available as free PDF files for download, as well as a handsome and inexpensive bound volume.
My Favorite Authors
All my favorite modern IF authors also maintain their own web pages on the topic. I refer the curious to these, as they all tend to burrow far deeper into both the theory and implementation of IF than I do here, and give the newcomer a lot of starting-out advice, as well as very obvious links to their own games (any of which I'd highly recommend).
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Andrew Plotkin has been contributing to the community with his vast range of innovative (and only sometimes cruel) games since 1995. (One of which, Shade, starts out as a parody of my own Calliope, whether or not he admits it.) Make sure you explore the rest of his website, too; he's an all-around incandescent, really.
Adam Cadre introduced himself to the scene with the delightfully naughty Interstate Zero, and a year later nonchalantly redefined the medium's possibilities with the gut-punching Phototopia. (It's no surprise to learn that he alone of this top-tier crowd is a professional novelist for a day job.) He has a very friendly first-timer's guide IF on his site.
Emily Short is perhaps best known for her work programming highly complex non-player characters (see Galatea) and games rich with highly clever object-modification puzzles (Metamorphoses and Savoir-Faire), and offers design documents explaining how she does it.
My own efforts
I have completed only one work of modern IF: Calliope, my entry into the 1999 Interactive Fiction Competition. It is a short, gimmicky game, written mostly to teach myself Inform, which it did, more or less. I look forward to writing longer, better games in the future, but for now, we must make do with this.
If you'd like to play it, you can just grab a copy from me. If you'd like to play it and and also a whole lot of other short text adventures, some of which are quite outstanding, please visit the competition site and grab the whole package.
Or you can just play it right in your web browser, if you're Java-enabled.
Really, I strongly recommend against playing Calliope unless you have played lots of other text adventures and are feeling especially bored or curious, because it's horribly gimmicky and self-referential, and will strike you as nonsensical and boring otherwise.
I have the source code online.
Calliope is a semi-OK game, says world, sorta
Calliope ranked <fnord>23rd</fnord> of the 37 contenders in this year's comp. I am quite happy with how everything turned out, particularly with my game's reviews, even the crankiest of which encourage me, some directly, some less so, to start work on my next game. Paul O'Brian wrote my favorite review.
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