Tag: interactive fiction

• I read Unnatural Ends (August 5, 2023)

  While planning this post, I remembered that I had, in fact, written about a Christopher Huang work before. Back in 2013, I was invited to review all the nominees for the previous year’s XYZZY award in the “best implementation category. The list included Huang’s delightful parser adventure Sunday Afternoon, about a bored little boy stuck in his family’s stuffy Victorian mansion, unaware of the grown-up drama unfolding around him.

• My Hadean Lands links and endnotes (March 27, 2022)

  Links to my completed Hadean Lands play-stream, as well as to some key supplementary material, and some reflection on my experiences with it all.

• Stuff I did (and stopped doing) in 2021 (January 3, 2022)

  My 2021 was less about accomplishment than revision. Most of it was good, and none of it was easy.

• OBS is pretty great (December 26, 2021)

  I've been having a lot of fun streaming weird text games via OBS.

• Regarding “Rooms as UX Metaphor” (November 15, 2020)

  A few thoughts on the November 13, 2020 episode of Jay Springett’s excellent weekly podcast Permanently Moved, titled “Rooms as UX Metaphor” :

• Subcutanean, a procgen horror novel (August 7, 2020)

  Owning a copy of this novel means possessing one vertex of a vast textual sculpture of that encompasses its entire print run, past and future.

• IFTF has some paid-project requests for proposals (April 3, 2020)

  Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation, the digital arts nonprofit I help run, has paid opportunities for software engineers interested in leading two specific IF infrastructure projects:

• Support great new text games with Colossal Fund (August 31, 2019)

  The Annual Interactive Fiction Competition celebrates its 25th year in 2019, and for the third year running it offers the Colossal Fund, a special cash prize pool that gets shared among the authors of the top two-thirds of the year’s IFComp entries. It seems I’ve never promoted this here on Fogknife, even though the Fund began life during my own IFComp organizational tenure — so allow me to correct that! The Fund has proven one of the most popular changes to IFComp that I helped introduce, and I’m excited to see it pushing new boundaries this year under its current leadership.

• On unconsciously ripping off Lars von Trier (June 23, 2019)

  Imagine my surprise when I saw a scene from a game I wrote in 2010 appear in a movie I'd never watched before from 2009.

• I played Curse of the Garden Isle (May 31, 2019)

  Thoughts on Ryan Veeder's aloha-fueled and highly accessible text adventure from 2018.

• How open source plays interactive fiction (July 24, 2018)

  A study of how open-source software has fostered the growth and development of interactive fiction. (Originally published at Opensource.com.)

• I played John’s Fire Witch (September 1, 2017)

  My thoughts on a short and charming text adventure game from 1995, and one of the catalysts for the first IFComp.