"In 1987, an anonymous team of computer scientists from the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic wrote a series of children's books based on the popular
Choose Your Own Adventure series. The books were hastily translated into English and a small number were exported to America, but the CIA, fearing a possible Soviet mind control scheme, confiscated them all before they could be sold. Now declassified, the books have been lovingly
converted to a digital hypertext format and put online for the English-speaking world to enjoy."
posted by Iridic
on Feb 8, 2013 -
72 comments
> examine mourning dress
A black vintage gown trimmed with much lace and dripping with jet beads.
> wave U-remover at mourning dress
There is a flash of psychedelic colors, and the mourning dress turns into a morning dress. An outfit of striped trousers and fancy coat, such as men sometimes wear to fancy weddings in the morning...
Counterfeit Monkey: a game of word manipulation.
posted by Iridic
on Jan 7, 2013 -
53 comments
An Unknown Alien Being acquires a child's forgotten book and mistakenly believes that it depicts proper protocol for interaction with the human world.
The book is a collection of Peanuts comics.
Woodsnoopy 45 stares into your open heart. Her yellow head squirms and pukes up feathers.
It makes you uncomfortable when she looks at you. She makes a demand.
Her demands come often and always create uncomfortably simultaneous feelings of resentment and obedience.
ACQUIRE NICKELS
That is the territory of the Lucy faction. They are the ones who gather nickels. Woodsnoopy 45 is overstepping her boundaries.
Being a mere Woodsnoopy 799, however, you can do naught but obey."
MASTABA SNOOPY
posted by JHarris
on Jan 6, 2013 -
31 comments
Indoors
Two men sit in this room, spinning non-linear yarns about the creation of interactive fiction. One sits at a small table. Another stands by a shelf along the wall, which is filled with many grey, rectangular objects that you can't quite make out from here.
You can see a small door, a small table, a shelf,
Dave and Steve here.
posted by Malor
on Dec 22, 2012 -
15 comments
***You have connected to THE GUILD BBS*** Vorple version 2.4
Type
LOGIN to enter the
Adventurers' Lounge
posted by pravit
on Dec 14, 2012 -
34 comments
"The experiences of women may not be easy to portray in the aggressive world of videogames. If such a game is made - and I hope it is - it will be because its creators demanded to be heard. It will be created because women made it." (Source)
While the vast majority of video game titles are designed primarily by men, women have been a
part of video game development since the earliest arcades. Here are some of their games:
[more inside]
posted by subject_verb_remainder
on Dec 1, 2012 -
40 comments
"You sit down and pull the visor over your head. The visor interior is soft and enveloping. You squeeze the drip tube between your teeth and sickly sweet fluid floods your mouth. Pulses fire into your retinas."
howling dogs is a work of interactive fiction by game designer
Porpentine. It is a strange story about a person who lives in a cell and imagines strange scenes for a living. Endorsed by
Emily Short, and made with
Twine. Takes about 10 to 15 minutes with multiple endings.
Via.
posted by codacorolla
on Nov 9, 2012 -
17 comments
...
Buckaroo Banzai is paradoxically decades ahead of its time and yet completely of its time; it’s profoundly a movie by, for, and of geeks and nerds at a time before geek/nerd culture was mainstreamed, and a movie whose pre-CG special effects and pre-Computer Age production design were an essential part of its good-natured enthusiasm. What at the time was a hip, modern take on classic SF is now, almost thirty years later, almost indistinguishable from the SF cinema that inspired it in terms of the appeal to modern viewers: the charmingly old-fashioned special effects, and the comparatively innocent earnestness of its tone. -
Danny Bowes [more inside]
posted by Egg Shen
on Aug 19, 2012 -
119 comments
"You are a junior spelling champion. Your parents have been teaching you at home since you were four."
Bee: a choose-your-own-bittersweet-coming-of-age novella by
Emily Short.
[more inside]
posted by Iridic
on Jun 5, 2012 -
36 comments
Playfic is a community for writing, sharing, and playing interactive fiction games (aka “text adventures”) entirely from your browser.
[more inside]
posted by muckster
on Feb 15, 2012 -
15 comments
The Digital Antiquarian discusses
ludic narrative
and has been filling in by bits and pieces an amazing history of
recreational computing and adventure gaming.
The Rise of Experiential Games traces the development of Wargames from H.G. Wells' (!) wargame for toy soldiers,
Little Wars, to Avalon Hill's Squad Leader; he discusses the development of
Dungeons and Dragons (part
2,
3) led to
the first CRPGs on
PLATO. He'll tell you things you didn't know about
Oregon Trail (part
2,
3,
4,
5,
postscript, the
1975 source code!),
Hunt the Wumpus (
part 2),
Colossal Cave Adventure (part
2,
3,
4,
5),
Eliza (part
2,
3),
Scott Adams' games (part
2,
3,
4,
5), the
TRS-80 (part
2,
3), the
2 adventuring cultures of university minicomputers and home PCs, and their
unlikely bridging. [more inside]
posted by Zed
on Sep 11, 2011 -
18 comments
Finally, here you are. At the delcot of tondam, where doshes deave. But the doshery lutt is crenned with glauds.
Glauds! How rorm it would be to pell back to the bewl and distunk them, distunk the whole delcot, let the drokes uncren them. But you are the gostak.
The gostak distims the doshes. And no glaud will vorl them from you.
Delcot
This is the delcot of tondam, where gitches frike and duscats glake. Across from a tophthed curple, a gomway deaves to kiloff and kirf, gombing a samilen to its hoff. Crenned in the loff lutt are five glauds.
>
[more inside]
posted by JHarris
on Apr 30, 2011 -
65 comments
Andrew Plotkin (
Website,
Twitter), a much renowned author of
interactive fiction (works include
Spider and Web,
The Dreamhold), is quitting his day job, and
going to try and create text adventures full time, starting with
Hadean Lands: An Interactive Alchemical Interplanetary Thriller (teaser scene), for iOS devices. He's using
Kickstarter to help fund it, and
has already raised over $11,000, $3000 over his goal, in less than a day's time. (via
jscott)
[more inside]
posted by zabuni
on Nov 1, 2010 -
42 comments
Choice of Broadsides is a choose-your-own-adventure game set in an alternate 19th Century world that is much like our own, where Albion and Gaul fight for naval supremacy. You can choose to be a gentleman in a standard patriarchal society, or a gentlewoman in a matriarchal one. Later on in the game you can choose your sexual orientation. Originally there were no options for a same-sex relationship, but after demands from players,
it was added in. Spoilers below the cut.
[more inside]
posted by Kattullus
on Jul 14, 2010 -
42 comments
Blueful. Web-dispersed storytelling reminiscent of the some of the stuff in
We Tell Stories to promote the free interactive fiction game
Blue Lacuna from
Aaron A. Reed, the creator of the excellent interactive fiction title
Whom the Telling Changed. Caveat: the ending is only available (afaik) on a (free) postcard so if you don't feel comfortable giving up a mailing address, you won't see the ending.
posted by juv3nal
on Jan 30, 2009 -
8 comments
The Wager: "I'll bet you that video games will never become a significant form of cultural discourse the way that novels and film have. I'll bet you that fifty years from now they'll be just as mature and well-respected as comic books are today," posits game designer Steve Gaynor.
Responses and rebuttals.
[more inside]
posted by Pastabagel
on Feb 19, 2008 -
140 comments
"
GET LAMP is a documentary about Text Adventures (later
Interactive Fiction), the storytellers who created them, and their unique place in the history of computer games." Although not completed yet (it will be soon, as filming was completed in October), this documentary will contain
76 interviews with people involved in the industry at the time, including Scott Adams (not the cartoonist), Marc Blanc and Tim Anderson (who both worked on
Zork, one of the best known examples of the medium) . Here's a
teaser trailer. And here are some
fun representatives of the genre to play online.
posted by SpacemanStix
on Jan 2, 2008 -
55 comments
Inform 7 Released. Inform is a language used for creating
interactive fiction, and is one of the most widely used languages for this task. After several years of effort,
Graham Nelson has
released a new version of Inform, and is seeking to create a new way of creating IF, with natural language instead of traditional programming code. [more inside]
posted by zabuni
on Apr 30, 2006 -
38 comments
"Massively Multiplayer Online Entertainment." Our own AdrianHon has posted an interesting article to his weblog, dealing with this budding genre. Last year's AI movie web game tie-in was the first of a new breed of online interactive fiction, attracting thousands of players world-wide. Mr. Hon takes a look at the genre and puts forth some interesting ideas about where it could go. (more inside)
posted by SpaceBass
on May 19, 2002 -
7 comments
9:05 Remember back in the heyday of
Infocom when you would routinely spend four or five days straight (subsisting on RC cola and beef jerky, only taking breaks to visit the john) trying to crack all the puzzles in Zork II or Suspended? Yeah, those were the days. Now, of course, you're a busy guy -- you can no longer devote entire weekends to the joys of text adventuring. That's why, today on your coffee break, you should play Adam Cadre's
9:05. Playing the entire game, from start to finish, should take you no longer than 10 minutes. But set aside a bit more time, because you'll probably want to play it again.
posted by Shadowkeeper
on Apr 3, 2002 -
28 comments
Remember Zork, Planetfall, and the other creations of late game company Infocom? Well, "interactive fiction," as the format is called, is still alive and well. Every year the IF community -- which is known for releasing work of quality far surpassing even Infocom's masterpieces -- holds a competition for short works, and
this year's contestants have been released! Read this post's comments for more info...
posted by tweebiscuit
on Sep 30, 2001 -
13 comments
