One of the amazing things to me is that the Internet has enabled the development of very far-flung communities. Social, media, music or other interests that might be of interest to only a handful of people can now attact a global audience and foster greater partcipation than ever before.
One of these odd-ball communities that I happen to be interested in is Interactive Fiction. (Or for those who have been around for a long time, think of old-school text adventure games.) Somehow the likes of old games like Infocom's Deadline or The Witness fill me with nostalgic memories from the 1980s.
And oddly enough, there continues to be a thriving community developing new Interactive Fiction games. This is largely due to open source efforts that reverse engineered and ported Infocom's Z-Machine interpreter architecture to modern machines. Games written in the 1980s now run perfectly fine on the latest interpreters for Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad and Android platforms. And this in turn begat the development of newer virtual machines and domain specific programming languages like Inform and Tads, Adrift and Alan that enable the development of new games.
If you're at all curious, I encourage you to check out some of the games that are available at IFDB. There's also a thriving community several annual game competitions. IntroComp kicked off this week and there are more than a dozen games published there, including my own Infocom-tribute mystery story, The Z-Machine Matter.
- Wikipedia: Colossal Cave, Infocom, Zork, Interactive Fiction
- Infocom Gallery: Main Site, Grey Box Releases
- Frotz Interpreters: SourceForge, Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone / iPad
Not all interactive fiction is based on programming languages. The rise of fictional blogs and social networks is making the art of interactive storytelling a whole new genre.
Posted by: RolePages | September 14, 2011 at 06:01 PM