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The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF) is a nonprofit charitable organization founded in June 2016 working to maintain, improve, and preserve tools and services used in the creation and distribution of interactive fiction. [1] [2] [3]
Since 2016, IFTF operates the Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp), an annual competition for new works from independent creators which has been running since 1995. [4] [5] [6]
Since 2017, IFTF operates the Interactive Fiction Archive (IF Archive), an archive preserving the history of interactive fiction which has been operating since 1992. The IF Archive contains websites and documents valuable to the IF community, including the "Inform 6" website and standards such as "the Treaty of Babel", [4] [7] the Z-machine, and its successor Glulx. [8]
Since 2019, IFTF supports the Interactive Fiction Community Forum (IntFiction) at intfiction.org, which has served as a center for interactive fiction community discussion since 2006. [4]
Since 2021, IFTF operates the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB), a database of metadata and reviews of interactive fiction which was founded by Michael J. Roberts in 2007. [4] [9]
Since 2022 IFTF supports the Interactive Fiction Wiki (IFWiki), a community-maintained resource for the history and culture of interactive fiction which was originally set up by David Cornelson in 2004. [4] [10]
IFTF supports and hosts the Twine software, initially created by Chris Klimas in 2009. [4] [11]
Among the members of the Board of Directors are Jason McIntosh (president), [12] Judith Pintar and Andrew Plotkin.
Among the members of the advisory board are Jon Ingold, Max Gladstone, Nick Montfort, Brian Moriarty, Jim Munroe, Graham Nelson and Emily Short.
Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of interactive narratives or interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text-only", however, graphic text adventures still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles.
The Interactive Fiction Competition is one of several annual competitions for works of interactive fiction. It has been held since 1995. It is intended for fairly short games, as judges are only allowed to spend two hours playing a game before deciding how many points to award it. The competition has been described as the "Super Bowl" of interactive fiction.
The Z-machine is a virtual machine that was developed by Joel Berez and Marc Blank in 1979 and used by Infocom for its text adventure games. Infocom compiled game code to files containing Z-machine instructions and could therefore port its text adventures to a new platform simply by writing a Z-machine implementation for that platform. With the large number of incompatible home computer systems in use at the time, this was an important advantage over using native code or developing a compiler for each system.
Inform is a programming language and design system for interactive fiction originally created in 1993 by Graham Nelson. Inform can generate programs designed for the Z-code or Glulx virtual machines. Versions 1 through 5 were released between 1993 and 1996. Around 1996, Nelson rewrote Inform from first principles to create version 6. Over the following decade, version 6 became reasonably stable and a popular language for writing interactive fiction. In 2006, Nelson released Inform 7, a completely new language based on principles of natural language and a new set of tools based around a book-publishing metaphor.
Photopia is a piece of literature by Adam Cadre rendered in the form of interactive fiction, and written in Inform. It has received both praise and criticism for its heavy focus on fiction rather than on interactivity. It won first place in the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition. Photopia has few puzzles and a linear structure, allowing the player no way to alter the eventual conclusion but maintaining the illusion of non-linearity.
Jason Scott Sadofsky, more commonly known as Jason Scott, is an American archivist, historian of technology, filmmaker, performer, and actor. Scott has been known by the online pseudonyms Sketch, SketchCow, The Slipped Disk, and textfiles. He has been called "the figurehead of the digital archiving world".
Emily Short is an interactive fiction (IF) writer and creative director of Failbetter Games, the studio behind Fallen London and its spinoffs.
IMDb is an online database of information related to films, television series, podcasts, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and personal biographies, plot summaries, trivia, ratings, and fan and critical reviews. IMDb began as a fan-operated movie database on the Usenet group "rec.arts.movies" in 1990, and moved to the Web in 1993. Since 1998, it has been owned and operated by IMDb.com, Inc., a subsidiary of Amazon.
Linux is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name "GNU/Linux" to emphasize the use and importance of GNU software in many distributions, causing some controversy.
A Change in the Weather is a 1995 interactive fiction (IF) video game.
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best known as the hosting platform for Wikipedia, a crowdsourced online encyclopedia, it also hosts other related projects and MediaWiki, a wiki software.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft terms, such as with its own GNU General Public License. The FSF was incorporated in Boston, Massachusetts, US, where it is also based.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. The foundation was formed on 10 July 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor to promote Internet civil liberties.
Couchbase Server, originally known as Membase, is an open-source, distributed multi-model NoSQL document-oriented database software package optimized for interactive applications. These applications may serve many concurrent users by creating, storing, retrieving, aggregating, manipulating and presenting data. In support of these kinds of application needs, Couchbase Server is designed to provide easy-to-scale key-value, or JSON document access, with low latency and high sustainability throughput. It is designed to be clustered from a single machine to very large-scale deployments spanning many machines.
LibreOffice is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. The LibreOffice suite consists of programs for word processing, creating and editing of spreadsheets, slideshows, diagrams and drawings, working with databases, and composing mathematical formulas. It is available in 115 languages. TDF does not provide support for LibreOffice, but enterprise-focused editions are available from companies in the ecosystem.
Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, with only minor exceptions. The community is supported institutionally by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation and its tax-paying subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation.
Twine is a free and open-source tool created by Chris Klimas for making interactive fiction and hypertext fiction in the form of web pages. It is available on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.
The Institute for the Future (IFTF) is a Palo Alto, California, US–based not-for-profit think tank. It was established, in 1968, as a spin-off from the RAND Corporation to help organizations plan for the long-term future, a subject known as futures studies.
Judith Pintar is a sociologist and author of interactive fiction. She is also a Celtic harp player and a composer of instrumental music.
Chalo Chatu translated as our world in the Zambian language is an English-language wiki-based free encyclopaedia project created by Jason Mulikita that is dedicated to documenting the Zambia and also try to preserve the history and pride of Zambia covering historical events and current events, notable public figures, companies, organizations, websites, national monuments and other notable key features of Zambia. The site uses MediaWiki software to maintain a user-created database of information. The site's content is under a Creative Commons license(CC BY-SA 3.0) which means that it is available free to the public, but cannot be used for commercial purposes and should not be modified by people who are not part of the community of the website. Chalo Chatu is a work-in-progress, with articles in various stages of completion.