My goal of bringing interactive fiction to Suite101 will slowly be realized. I’ve got two of the articles about interactive fiction I’d planned written and submitted now. One is just a basic overview of the various commands that are used to play IF. I figured a more general article was a good way to start before writing more detailed and specific articles. Maybe I should have written more about the actual gameplay itself, but that really depends on the individual game, I think. Different games have different sets of commands that they rely on to carry the action, and it takes trial and error and reading the responses carefully to figure out what a game wants sometimes. Knowing the standard commands allows some experimentation, and from there more possibilities will usually appear.
The second one describes the results of IFComp 2006, with brief reviews of the top seven games. I played all but one of the games myself in the process of judging for the competition, so it was easy to write, especially because I’d already written fairly detailed reviews of all the games I did play. The one I didn’t play that made it to the top seven was The Traveling Swordsman, which was written in Hugo, and I didn’t end up bothering to get a terp that would work on Hugo games until the comp was already over. I should probably play it eventually. It’s supposed to be quite good.
Spring Thing 2007 is the next competition that’s coming up fairly soon. I’m planning on playing and judging that one as well, and writing about it at the same time. It’s a more difficult competition to judge, I think, because the games aren’t time-restrained the way the IFComp games are. Some of them can end up being quite large, in fact. But, there’s also much less of a chance of getting poor games, deliberately or not, due to the entry fee, so each game is worth it to play. I’m looking forward to it.
