Interactive fiction (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, graphical text adventure games, where the text is accompanied by graphics 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, but longer games are allowed entry. The competition has been described as the "Super Bowl" of interactive fiction.
In computing, Xyzzy is sometimes used as a metasyntactic variable or as a video game cheat code. Xyzzy comes from the Colossal Cave Adventure computer game, where it is the first "magic string" that most players encounter.
Text Adventure Development System (TADS) is a prototype-based domain-specific programming language and set of standard libraries for creating interactive fiction (IF) games.
Graham A. Nelson is a British mathematician, poet, and the creator of the Inform design system for creating interactive fiction (IF) games. He has authored several IF games, including Curses (1993) and Jigsaw (1995).
Adam Cadre is an American writer active in a number of forms—novels, screenplays, webcomics, essays—but best known for his work in interactive fiction.
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.
Andrew Plotkin, also known as Zarf, is an American programmer and writer. He is a central figure in the modern interactive fiction (IF) community. Having both written a number of award-winning games and developed a range of new file formats, interpreters, and other utilities for the design, production, and running of IF games, Plotkin is widely recognised for both his creative and his technical contributions to the homebrew IF scene.
The XYZZY Awards are the annual awards given to works of interactive fiction, serving a similar role to the Academy Awards for film. The awards were inaugurated in 1997 by Eileen Mullin, the editor of XYZZYnews. Any game released during the year prior to the award ceremony is eligible for nomination to receive an award. The decision process takes place in two stages: members of the interactive fiction community nominate works within specific categories and sufficiently supported nominations become finalists within those categories. Community members then vote among the finalists, and the game receiving a plurality of votes is given the award in an online ceremony.
Eric Zimmerman is an American game designer and the co-founder and CEO of Gamelab, a computer game development company based in Manhattan. GameLab is known for the game Diner Dash. Each year Zimmerman hosts the Game Design Challenge at the Game Developers Conference. He is also the co-author of four books including Rules of Play with Katie Salen, which was published in November 2004. Eric Zimmerman has written at least 24 essays and whitepapers since 1996, mostly pertaining to game development from an academic standpoint. He's currently a founding faculty at the NYU Game Center.
Slouching Towards Bedlam is an interactive fiction game that won the first place in the 2003 Interactive Fiction Competition. It is a collaboration between American authors Daniel Ravipinto and Star Foster. Slouching Towards Bedlam was finalist for eight 2003 XYZZY Awards, winning four: Best Game, Setting, Story, and Individual NPC. The game takes place in a steampunk Victorian era setting. Its title is inspired by a line from "The Second Coming", a poem by W. B. Yeats.
The Frenetic Five is a series of three text adventures about a band of superheroes, all made with TADS version 2 and distributed as freeware. The series was created by Neil deMause for the Interactive Fiction Competition.
Emily Short is an interactive fiction (IF) writer. From 2020 to 2023, she was creative director of Failbetter Games, the studio behind Fallen London and its spinoffs.
Jon Ingold is a British author of interactive fiction and co-founder of inkle, where he co-directed and co-wrote 80 Days, and wrote Heaven's Vault and Overboard!. His interactive fiction has frequently been nominated for XYZZY Awards and has won on multiple occasions, including Best Game, Best Story and Best Setting awards for All Roads in 2001. Ingold's works are notable for their attention to the levels of knowledge that the player and player character have of the in-game situation, with the effect often depending on a player who understands more than the character or vice versa. Ingold has also written a number of plays, short stories and novels.
Anchorhead is a Lovecraftian horror interactive fiction game, originally written and published by Michael S. Gentry in 1998. The game is heavily inspired by the works and writing style of H.P. Lovecraft, particularly the Cthulhu mythos.
Earth and Sky is an interactive fiction trilogy written and produced by American author Paul O'Brian about the adventures of a brother and sister who gain superpowers while searching for their lost parents. Games in the series have won awards in the annual Interactive Fiction Competition and received an XYZZY Award.
Ian Bogost is an American academic and video game designer, most known for the game Cow Clicker. He holds a joint professorship at Washington University as director and professor of the Film and Media Studies program in Arts & Sciences and the McKelvey School of Engineering. He previously held a joint professorship in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and in Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Chair in Media Studies.
Lost Pig is a comedic work of interactive fiction about an orc retrieving an escaped pig. It was created by Admiral Jota and released as freeware. It took first place in the 2007 Interactive Fiction Competition with an average score of 8.27. Lost Pig won best game, best writing, best individual non-player character, and best individual player character in the 2007 XYZZY Awards. Lost Pig finished with 18.7% of the votes for the Audience Award in the interactive fiction category in the 2008 Jay Is Games Best of Casual Gameplay awards, placing it second after Violet.
Eric Eve is an author, interactive fiction writer, and New Testament scholar at Harris Manchester College in Oxford. He is known in the interactive fiction community for his writings on TADS 3, including three tutorial/reference books and several articles for Brass Lantern, a site that hosts articles about and reviews of interactive fiction. He has also authored eleven interactive fiction games, several of which have won awards at various competitions. In the academic field, Eric Eve has also written two books relating to the New Testament, The Healer from Nazareth: Jesus' Miracles in Historical Context and The Jewish Context of Jesus' Miracles.
Porpentine Charity Heartscape is a video game designer, new media artist, writer and curator based in Oakland, California. They are primarily a developer of hypertext games and interactive fiction mainly built using Twine. They have been awarded a Creative Capital grant, a Rhizome.org commission, the Prix Net Art, and a Sundance Institute's New Frontier Story Lab Fellowship. Their work was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. They were an editor for freeindiegam.es, a curated collection of free, independently produced games. They were a columnist for online PC gaming magazine Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
