One of my hobbies is writing interactive fiction, which is a snooty way of saying text adventures (of which an early example was Zork). Here's a quick page with a couple of things on it that you may be interested in:

For A Change

"For A Change sings with an ee cummings-like lyricism... I was endlessly fascinated." -- Adam Cadre, author of Photopia and Varicella

"Wow. No, even 'wow' doesn't suffice. Call me an artsy, but I'm thoroughly enchanted by For A Change." -- Suzanne Britton, author of Worlds Apart

Winner, Best Writing, 1999 XYZZY Awards; also nominated for Best Individual Puzzle, Best Setting, and Best Game
For A Change was my entry in the fifth annual interactive fiction competition. It placed second out of 37 entries, and finished first in the Ms Congeniality voting (in which the authors ranked the games).

This is version 1.02, the version I submitted to the competition; there will be a post-competition release with some little bug fixes at some point. You'll need a zcode interpreter to run the .z5 file. There are interpreters for every imaginable operating system. If you run under Windows, I recommend WinFrotz, or you can browse around at ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/infocom/interpreters/.

I did an email interview about For A Change for SPAG, the Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games. It can be found in this issue.

Speed IF

Every once in a while, there's a little SpeedIF "contest" on ifMUD. A few constraints are chosen by the moderator, and then everyone has an hour or two to write a complete functional text adventure satifsying those constraints. I find them a lot of fun because in real life I usually take forever to tweak every last thing; it's nice to be forced to just write as fast as possible.

These aren't great works of art, obviously, but if you're looking to kill ten minutes on a simple fun game, you could do worse.

Other things


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Last updated 16 April 2001