Mute Cornett

The 2006 Interactive Fiction Competition's results are up!

I'm really pleased to see that my personal favorite, The Primrose Path, placed second. I was surprised because some of the other IF's were tighter narratives or better games, but there was a weird and surprising beauty to Primrose Path, so I'm glad.

By some coincidence, the few games I did play (so busy with schoolwork!) were the ones that placed. Floatpoint is fantastic, of course, but it's Emily Short, so it can hardly be anything but fantastic. Elysium Enigma is a solid sci-fi game with good puzzles.

I mean, you're probably safe downloading any game down to the twentieth place. Anything below that and you run the risk of the game being unplayable or incredibly, incredibly unfun.

The Interactive Fiction Competition 2006 entries are up!

Other awesome and surprising thing: a interpreter for Windows that can handle most types of IF files! There's one for the Mac, too.

> stay up all night playing interactive fiction games

I don't have as much experience with the creation end as I do with the playing end of interactive fiction, but I really like what I can see of the language Inform 7. I'm mostly really impressed by how easy it is to read and how intuitive it is to understand:

Colour is a kind of value. The colours are red, blue and green. A block is a kind of thing. A block has a colour. A block is usually blue. Before printing the name of a block: say "[colour] ". Before printing the plural name of a block: say "[colour] ". Understand the colour property as describing a block.

This is code. This is what the source code looks like.

I mean, sure, Adrift is probably more newbie-friendly, but I'm just really impressed by how smooth the language is and how powerful it is reputed to be. It even handles stuff like American/British spelling differences and serial commas. How awesome is that?

People interested in seeing more of the source code can go to the Inform 7 site and play the worked examples, then look at the source code for those.

I am so impressed by this. It's clean and helpful. It would be pretty neat to see fic as interactive fic, but if anyone in fandom were to get into this type of programming-writing and write anything at all, original, adaptation, fanfic--or even just try it out--I'd be ecstatic. If you still think the example code is too hard, give Adrift a try--it's considerably simpler and it's not like your first IF has to be complex and sprawling and huge.

Note to paper_tzipporah: you especially would probably like this game created with the Inform 7 language, Bronze, a reworking of Beauty and the Beast that is lovely both in gameplay and narrative (as Em Short's games always are). You can get the interpreter here.

Incidentally, Bronze also has a novice mode, so it's another excellent beginner game.

(EEE, I LOVE THIS LANGUAGE AND THIS PROGRAM AND EEEE IT'S SO COOL!)

You are sitting at your computer, browsing Livejournal and reading your friends list, when you come across an unusual entry in mutecornett's livejournal about interactive fiction.

> read entry

The entry reads: "I love interactive fiction and I'd really love to see more people getting interested in it." What's interactive fiction? you think, and read on. "If you recognize the general format, skip along. If you don't, this is the definition from Wikipedia:

Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, describes software containing simulated environments in which players use text commands to control characters. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives and as computer games.

"Personally," the entry continues, "I get a lot of the same thrills from IF and IF theory as I do from fandom and meta, so I thought this might interest some of you. Anyways, these are the games I remember off the top of my head that I would recommend for beginners. Keep in mind, these aren't always necessarily games--in some cases, they're just stories you interact with. And mazes are passe, so no worries about twisty little passages, all alike. Plus, they're tiny--usually only 300 kb tops."

There is an lj-cut here.

> click it

( You decide to read more. )