The Interactive Fiction Page

I am no longer a student, making regular maintenance of this page difficult. I am currently working for Zoesis Studios, a spin-off from the Oz Project I was involved in at CMU. We are working to create believable, interactive characters in realtime, animated, 3D environments. A bit removed from traditional IF, but still sharing many of the same interactivity, character, and storytelling goals. If you'd like to see some of what we do, check out OttoAndIris.com and Mr. Bubb in Space for family-oriented fare and The Pearl Demon for something a bit more sinister. (Sorry, they only run under Windows for now.)

I will continue to do what I can to keep this site current, though turnaround time on new links might be slower than it used to be.

• What's new on the Interactive Fiction Page

• General Information about IF [These items are general in scope. That is, they are not specific to either playing or developing games.]
  • ftp.gmd.de (The FTP site for Interactive Fiction) and the Master Index
    • wuarchive.wustl.edu and index (ftp.gmd.de mirror site)
    • An excellent hypertext guide to the games on ftp.gmd.de
  • Brass Lantern (This excellent page is run by Stephen Granade and should be of interest to IF players and developers alike. It covers both graphical and text-based IF.)
  • Doe's Interactive Fiction Page (A collection of games, essays, and more)
  • IF Newsletters
    • SPAG (Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games)
    • XYZZYnews

• Playing Interactive Fiction
  • rec.games.int-fiction and it's FAQ
  • FTP Sites for Games
    • ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/games/
      • Reviews of the games on ftp.gmd.de
    • Mac archive with index
    • Mac archive with index(via AFS)
    • MS-DOS archive
    • MS-DOS archive (via AFS)
    • Atari archive with index
    • Atari archive with index (via AFS)
  • IF Starter Kits
  • Interpreters
    • Magnetic Scrolls interpreters (misc. platforms)
    • Magnetic Scrolls interpreter (PalmOS)
  • Interactive Fiction on the Web (Some of these games are traditional text-adventures. Others are rather different, but still interesting.)
    • OttoAndIris.com (a graphical world with a focus on interactive characters; Windows only)
    • Help solve a crime.
    • Help write a Mystery Novel.
    • Choose-you-own adventure games
      • Solve the "Jack the Ripper" mystery
      • The CyberMUD (This isn't a MUD, despite its name.)
        • HTTP access
        • Access via AFS (may be faster if you have AFS)
  • BBS
    [I have never tried any of these systems and they are (supposedly) more like on-line role-playing games than IF. Nonetheless, if this is the kind of thing you are looking for, try them out. Note: They are most likely long-distance calls.]
    • Ahendah: 707-585-0475
    • Dimensional Vortex: 707-837-8607

• Developing Interactive Fiction
  • rec.arts.int-fiction
    • The rec.arts.int-fiction FAQ
  • How to write quality IF
    • Kevin Wilson's IF Authoring Guide (the guide, supplement 1, supplement 2)
    • Graham Nelson's "The Craft of the Adventure" (including the Player's Bill of Rights)
    • "Bringing Characters to Life" by David Graves (from The Journal of Computer Game Design)
    • "Plot Automation" by David Graves (from The Journal of Computer Game Design)
  • IF Authoring Tools
    • Hans Persson's Overview of IF Authoring Systems
    • Authoring Systems FAQ (maintained by Nathan Torkington)
    • TADS vs. Inform FAQ (maintained by Bob Newell)
    • TADS
    • Inform
    • The JACL Adventure Creation Language
    • The Creative Adventure Toolkit (CAT) for Windows
    • Fiction Script (PC only)
  • Web Resources devoted to IF Programming
    • Stephen Granade's IF Authoring Resource
    • The IF Theory and Practice Page (including an archive of rec.arts.int-fiction)
  • The RedBlue Games Webcrafters Guild (a list of resources for creating web-based games from design to building traffic)
  • Mailing Lists
    • The Erasmatazz Mailing List: A discussion of Chris Crawford's Erasmatron system and other IF topics. To subscribe send email to majordomo@digitalnoir.com with the body:
      subscribe erasmateers@digitalnoir.com
  • Miscellaneous
    • Vladimir Krstulja (CyberDaemon)'s "How to write IF in C" and "How to Make a Good Design for an IF Game"
    • ART COM Article on Interactive Fiction (part 1 and 2)
    • "Second Generation Computer Games" by David Graves (from The Journal of Computer Game Design)
    • Phil Goetz's Overview of Interactive Fiction (postscript)
    • Phil Goetz's "Notes on Using SNePS for Interactive Fiction" (postscript and gzipped text)
    • Thoughts from Jorn Barger (including many related to AI, interactive storytelling, and more)
    • The Oz Project papers

• Miscellany
  • Infocom Information
    • The Infocom Page
    • Paul David Doherty's Infocom Fact Sheet
    • Paul Smith's Overview of Infocom Games
    • Enclyclopedia Frobozzica (An encyclopedia from the world of Zork compiled by Nino Ruffini)
      • text
  • Adventureland (an overview of IF games, companies, and more)
    • hypertext
    • text
  • Academic Research Projects
  • The Oz Project, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Interactive Media Theory Seminar, Stanford University
  • IF Bibliographies
    • Books about IF in general
  • The Eamon Games Page
  • The Tolkien Games Page

• Graphical Interactive Fiction
  There are some in the IF community who don't feel that graphical adventures are real IF. Real IF is text based only. My take is that graphical adventures are to text adventures what movies are to novels. They are neither a better nor worse medium--just different. They are both interactive and fictional, making them both IF. In fact, however, it often seems that companies that create graphical adventures spend too much time on the graphics and sound and not enough time on the story and characters. Despite the huge budgets, I don't think there is a graphical adventure that is as good as, say, "A Mind Forever Voyaging" in terms of story and characters.

  I am including this section as I feel that graphical adventures are a form of IF. Some of them are even pretty good IF. They are not, however, the main focus of this page, simply because I do not have the time to focus on traditional text adventures and graphical adventures.

  Here are a number of interesting pages related to graphical adventures that are also (somehow) related to text adventures.

  • Zoesis Studios (My company; a spin-off of the Oz Project at CMU)
    • OttoAndIris.com (the first interactive web-based world from Zoesis)
    • Mr. Bubb in Space (play a game of space ball with Zoesis's most advanced character yet)
    • Pearl Demon (try to steal a valuable pearl from the meanest, scariest character to come out of Zoesis Studios)
  • Boffo Games (Steve Meretzky's Company)
  • Activision (The company that bought Infocom and is still doing spinoffs of Infocom games)
  • Brass Lantern (This excellent page is run by Stephen Granade and should be of interest to IF players and developers alike. It covers both graphical and text-based IF.)